The Write Rhythm

The Write Rhythm

Gilly Smith

University of Brighton

Dancers dance because of the unique energies that dance reveals within them, above and below the neckline. Dance puts them in touch with vital aspects of their own intelligence and connects them with themselves.

Robinson, K. (2001) Out of Our Minds. Learning to be Creative. Oxford: Capstone

Introduction

In this ongoing action research, Gilly Smith explores how kinaesthetic learning might inspire confidence in creative writing among young people. She looks at what encourages exciting, expressive and original ideas onto the page, and coherence, clarity and persuasion in the written language of young teenagers.

This article looks at the journey so far. It explores the use of automatic writing that she already uses with her own broadcast media students at The University of Brighton, and the dynamics of dance. It will take another year to conclude, crossing continents to experiment with dancers and dance students of different ages and cultures the power of automatic writing and storytelling through dance. In the meantime, this article looks at how young people might loosen ideas and inhabit abstract concepts to see their own originality in a highly prescriptive British curriculum.

Introduction

Students at Hastings where I teach Broadcast Media as part of The University of Brighton’s widening participation programme, do not alwayscome to tertiary education with a good understanding of grammar. Yet my responsibility is to help them turn their film, TV or radio ideas into powerful pitches, and to develop narratives in a clear and engaging way.

It’s a difficult task; without the grasp of confident language, their ideas look unformed, uninspiring and often incomprehensible. Punctuation is a crucial player; without the correct use of a comma, their sentences are often badly structured, too long and lacking in the rhythm that can give ideas their power.

I began to explore the purpose of writing in schools to try to find the root of the problem and found many educationalists doing the same. Eve Bearne (1998) had already found something in the Bullock Report on Education of 1975 whichsuggested that the Latin ‘Educere’, meaning ‘to draw out’ had been – until recently - an important principle in modern education. Bullock’s ‘Language for Life’ urged teachers to ‘bring what is known’ alive. The idea that in every person’s imagination lies a reservoir of ‘knowing’ just waiting to be scooped up and poured onto the page resonates with me as a writer, and I tell my students it is where I will take them over the 15 weeks they’ll spend with me in their first year.

My students are part of a new generation using mobile phones and social networks to develop a new written language. It’s fast and effective, designed to organise a social life in as few words – letters even – as possible. From texting to Tweeting, life has become too short for a comma. But there are an increasing number of studieswhich see this as no bad thing. Plester et al (2008) are interested in the bilingual fluency of the instant messenger and the creativity of the language - the use of emoticons for example to nuance even the shortest sentence. David Crystal(2006) callsthis use of language ‘ludic’, ‘rich from a playful use of words.’It is this playfulness that I wanted to explore to see how we mightuse it to set ideas free.

These studies are set against a landscape of educational research (the many books and articles by Jonathan Barnes and Ken Robinson, for example)which suggests that creativity in cross curricular approaches to learning is essential if young people are to find freedom of expression in the written word. Ray Land (2008) warned that the 21st century academic must find new ways of encouraging young people into a liminal space where creativity is found, continuing a debate about this intriguing threshold between the neurological and the metaphysical which has crossed popular cultures and academic disciplines. Liminality, the conscious or unconscious state of being on the "threshold" between two existential planes,has influenced the work of writers exploringthe power of rituals and rites of passagefor decades. The psychedelic work of William Burroughs and the beat poets have been endlessly analysed within this framework. Coleridgewas said to have written his poem ‘Kubla Khan’ ‘automatically’ in theliminal space of a dream, albeit inspired by opium.

How to access this rich imagination – without resorting to opium - is the holy grail for most teachers.My attempts to tap into this liminal space begin with the five minutes of ‘automatic’ writing at the beginning of each lecture; they simply put pen to paper and write without editing, without conscious thinking. I call it the ‘bleeding of the cranial radiator’. After three years of reflective final essays in which the students tell me how it works, I’ve concluded that it can provide a bridge that takes us out of the mechanics of the sentence into our imagination and abstract ideas before they find the words that land on the page. Perhaps this bridge leads to the ‘liminal space’ of Land and Meyers (2003), the place where anything is possible. Accessing this space seemed to me to be the key not just to teaching young people how to write, but why to write. One of my students summed up this ‘threshold concept,’ where nothing ever looks the same again.

Every week, we took part in automatic writing. For me, this was an extremely helpful exercise, academically and emotionally. The brief pressure I was under to write continuously for five minutes helped me write things I never would have written or spoken otherwise, and not once did I struggle for something to write about. The continuous flow of writing I had to maintain helped keep my mind creative, and the task allowed me to connect on a greater level to the material I write, making it more emotive, personal and potentially more engaging. I found myself using this exercise on several occasions out of lesson to help me engage creatively, concentrate on work and even as an emotional outlet. (Dan, 19)

Compare this to Ken Robinson in ‘Out of our Minds’ (2001); ‘The reason why creativity often proceeds by intuitive leaps is precisely that it draws from areas of mind and consciousness that are not wholly regulated by rational thought. In the creative state, we can access these different areas of our minds. This is why ideas often come to mind without our thinking about them.’

Gumbrecht (2011) calls it ‘stimmung’, which, translated from the German, means ‘ voiceness’, the momentary grasping of dream-like thoughts which, however flighty, leave their mark on our consciousness. Toni Morrison in her novel, Jazz (1993), describes it as ‘being touched from inside’. So often young people, particularly young teenagers seem to have nothing to say, but once they have found these nuggets of gold tucked away in the liminal space of the sub-conscious, they are touched from inside. They see their own originality, creativity, voice and know that it is theirs. Random, free, spontaneous, it is a contradiction of everything they have been told to write at school. No-one marks it; no-one owns it but the writer. With permission to prise open the door to their own treasure chest of ideas, they can begin to paint pictures with their words and discover the alchemical process of writing. With it come the ideas, the voice and the power of persuasion, the communication of what they feel passionate about, what they really want to say. It is perhaps this sense of ownership and purpose that starts the wheels chugging, the rhythm of writing that is all about being heard. The fire in the belly is something we all recognise and have experienced, and comes with a fluency that commands attention from the listener. What would it take to capture this universal skill and put it on the page?

James Webb Young (2003) suggests that to create a new idea of value, you merely take two disciplines that do not appear to belong together and force them through a blender.’WhilePhil Beadle,in a work in progress provisionally called ‘The Little Book of Ideas’ ‘considers the mindto be ‘at its best, a pattern-making machine, engaged in a perpetual attempt to impose order onto chaos; making links between disparate entities or ideas in order better to understand either or both. They both join Ken Robinson (2001) in arguing that it is the ability to spot the potential in the product of connecting things that don’t ordinarily go together that marks out the Creative.’

Jonothan Neelands (2008) finds this can happen through the use of drama in the classroom; ‘Most of what young people know of the world, they know through representations of it. Drama provides students with a way of reconstructing the experience that is represented’. Drama is something that this study will explore in its second stage next year, but for now, I wanted to see what we could learn from dance.I was struck by the psychologist Vygotsky (1962) who saw the complex interaction of language and the development of knowledge as‘a tool for thinking…a continual movement back and forth, from thought to word and from word to thought. In that process, the relation of thought to word undergoes change...thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them. Every thought needs to connect something with something else, to establish a relation between them’.

Fiona Smith is the principle lecturer in Dance at the University of Brighton and writes about the teaching of Dance in schools; ‘it provides both intrinsic and extrinsic benefits to pupils. The intrinsic, learning in dance, is concerned with the implicit value of learning to dance and about dance…The extrinsic, learning through dance, is concerned with the transferable knowledge, skills and understanding learnt whilst studying dance. In this sense, dance is the vehicle through which learning takes place.’

Smithexplained that as early as Year 7 (age 11-12), students of Dance would be taught how ‘dynamics’ can bring form and meaning to a work. She told me how dynamics are broken down into three elements in year 7; speed (acceleration and deceleration), weight (light and heavy) and tension (push and pull). Smith teaches quality of movement and how to refine it into something that might be more expressive, the sudden acceleration of the dancer followed by a slow walk, the floaty leap segueing into a leaden thud, a robotic move relaxing into a gentle sway.

I wondered if this could offerpossibilities for cross curricular collaboration between Danceand English in secondary education, if the process of adding richness through phrasing in the dance class was something that could be taken into the English class. Even the onomatopoeic quality of dance descriptions might encourage expression in young writers; the ‘slice’, the ‘shudder’ or the ‘swing’ of an arm would be called ‘Wow Words’ in KS2 English. In schools where Dance is taught as part of the KS3 curriculum, I wondered if concepts like pause, speed, strength and tension could be replicated in creative writing. If the task of exploring ideas such as ‘masculinity’ or ‘frustration’ were set in KS3 Dance and English classes, would the memory of how it felt in Dance fall onto the page in the English class? And would it flow and halt, speed up and slow down as it shifted gear, the imagination naturally using the toolkit of grammar to find form and painting vivid pictures for the reader?

If creativity is to be the most important tool of the 21st century student (Land, 2009), teachers need to find a way to access the liminal space of their students. Its paradoxical elements mean that, like dance, liminality itself is about tension and release, about letting go and being lost only to find a new part of yourself. For children exploring a new world of secondary school, greater freedoms and wider knowledge, the key to their own liminal spaces could be in words; with words come the pictures, and with pictures comes the context, and with the context come the personal boundaries, the threshold concept described by Land and Meyers (2003). From autumn 2011, we shall begin to measure the impact of automatic writing on choreography students at Texas Women’s University, and on dance students as part of a collaboration with University of the State of California. A bold adventure too with Nu Century Arts in storytelling and dance as part of the Cultural Olympiad may see if creativity can be liberated and literacy improved through inhabiting idea in dance. We don’t know yet if it will work, but

according to Land (2009), an adventure in liminality necessarily involves the risk of failure, the exposure of weakness and instability, and from this baptism of fire, emerges a 'new conceptual terrain'.

References

• Bearne, E., 1998. Use of English across the Primary Curriculum. London: Routledge

• Plester, B; Wood, C and Bell, V., 2008. Txt msg n school literacy: does texting and knowledge of text abbreviations adversely affect children’s literacy attainment? Literacy: Volume 42, Number 3

• Crystal, D., 1984. Who Cares About the English Language? London: Penguin

• Crystal, D., 2006. Language and the Internet. Cambridge University Press

• Webb Young, J., 2003. A Technique for Producing Ideas (McGraw-Hill Advertising Classic)

• Neelands, J (2008) Drama, The Subject That Dare Not Speak its Name. ITE English: Readings for Discussion.

• Land, R and Meyers, J., 2003. Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines. ETL Project: Universities of Edinburgh, Coventry and Durham

• Robinson, K. (2001) Out of Our Minds. Learning to be Creative. Oxford: Capstone

• Smith, F., Spring 2000: Great Dancing; Shame About the Choreography. Article in The British Journal of Teaching Physical Education.