Anthony Wilson

Creativity in primary education

Introduction Part 1: Setting the scene Changes in the landscape for creativity in education Thinking about creativity: developing ideas, making things happen Creative teachers and creative teaching Play and playfulness in the Early Years Foundation Stage Creativity and spiritual, moral, social and cultural development Part 2: Creativity in the core primary curriculum Creativity and literacy What is creativity in science education? Creative mathematics Part 3: Creativity in the foundation primary curriculum Children, creativity and PE Creative and imaginative primary art and design Creativity in the music curriculum What has creativity got to do with citizenship education? Creativity in primary design and technology Creativity in primary history Creativity in primary geography References Index

Ways with Words: Teachers' Personal Epistemologies of the Role of Metalanguage in the Teaching of Poetry Writing.

This paper investigates the personal epistemologies of teachers in relation to the place of linguistic and literary metalanguage in the teaching of poetry writing. The data draw on 93 interviews with 31 secondary English teachers in the UK, following lesson observations, and the data are a subset of a larger study investigating the impact of contextualised grammar teaching on writing attainment. The analysis indicates that teachers’ personal epistemologies relating to metalanguage are ambivalent and, at times, contradictory. Teachers tend to view literary metalanguage as linked to the creative freedom of writing poetry, whereas linguistic metalanguage is constructed as associated with rules and restrictions. At the same time, teachers reveal a lack of confidence with subject knowledge in both literary and linguistic metalanguage, which may be shaping their epistemological beliefs. Teachers’ comments on the place of literary and linguistic metalanguage in poetry writing are paradoxical, but do appear to be strongly connected with their personal epistemologies. They subscribe to a literate epistemology which values literary metalanguage as part of the knowledge base of a creative, expressive subject, but linguistic metalanguage is not included within this literate epistemology.

Writing Conversations: Fostering Metalinguistic Discussion about Writing.

Abstract This article draws on data from a national study, involving an experimental intervention with 54 schools across the country, in which teachers were mentored in a pedagogical approach involving explicit attention to grammatical choices and which advocated high-level metalinguistic discussion about textual choices. The research focused upon primary children aged 10–11, and in addition to statistical analysis of outcome measures, 53 lesson observations were undertaken to investigate the nature of the metalinguistic discussion. The data were analysed inductively, following the constant comparison method, with an initial stage of open coding, followed by axial coding which clustered the data into thematic groups. The analysis demonstrates the potential of metalinguistic talk in supporting young writers’ understanding of how to shape meaning in texts and the decision-making choices available to them. It signals the importance of teachers’ management of metalinguistic conversations, but also the role that teachers’ grammatical subject knowledge plays in enabling or constraining metalinguistic talk. The study highlights the importance of dialogic classroom talk if students are to develop knowledge about language, to become metalinguistically aware, and to take ownership of metalinguistic decision-making when writing.

A joyous lifeline in a target-driven job: teachers’ metaphors of teaching poetry writing

Drawing on Vygotsky’s notion, developed by Bruner, of learners growing into ‘the intellectual life of those around them’, this paper reports on a small-scale questionnaire survey of teachers’ thinking about poetry writing and their instructional practices of teaching it. Thirty-three teachers, with a range of teaching experience and service, took part in the study. This paper presents, analyses and evaluates the central metaphor of ‘freedom’ used by teachers. This presents poetry writing instruction in four contrasting ways: as freedom to explore personal creativity; as a site of integrated thinking; as a rejection of ‘formulaic writing’; and as freedom from curricular ‘directives’. The paper argues that these metaphors indicate considerable personal investment by teachers of poetry and that they consider the teaching of poetry writing to have impact as much on themselves as on pupils.

‘Signs of progress’: reconceptualising response to children's poetry writing

Poetry writing is felt by many primary teachers to be an important part of childrens early language and literary development. It is also considered by many teachers to be very difficult to assess, due in part to the subjective nature of much poetry. Therefore poetry writing in schools enjoys both high and low status. If practice of teaching this genre is to develop it is necessary for teachers to have a clear view of what children are able to achieve within it. By looking at examples of childrens poetry writing, my aim in this paper is to demonstrate how it is possible for primary school teachers to identify features of childrens poetry writing which they consider to be of value. I shall argue, from the basis of an empirical research study, that teachers can, therefore, promote and encourage progression in poetry writing by their classes; but that to do so is to challenge views of poetry writing by children promoted in current orders and recommendations.

The best forms in the best order? Current poetry writing pedagogy at KS2

Abstract This article considers the pedagogic assumptions of four writers in the post-war period who have contributed significantly in the UK to the teaching of poetry writing to children (Hughes, 1967; Brownjohn, 1980, 1982 and 1990, collected in 1994; Pirrie, 1987, republished in 1994; Rosen, 1989). This article critiques the approaches of these writers, and the assumptions underlying their practice, in the light of recent writing theory (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987; Sharples, 1999), which introduces the concepts of ‘content’ and ‘rhetorical’ space in writing. I argue that current recommendations (DfEE, 1998) are also flawed in that they provide teachers with a limited view of what poetry is, taking little account of the interrelationship between form and content in creating meaning. The article takes the form of an analysis of the intersection of these recommendations and the core literature described above arguing that their differing emphases place teachers at a disadvantage when thinking about pedagogy in this area.

Ted Hughes's Poetry for Children

This article considers the poetry written for children by the late Ted Hughes, the British Poet Laureate. Looking at work that spans the length of his career, this article examines Hughess individual collections for children, both in their own terms as poetry and in terms of their intended audience. I suggest that Ted Hughess poetry for children was an attempt, with varying degrees of success, to create a body of work that remained true to his gift of ‘caging’ the minute within real and imaginary worlds, and that he expended considerable energy in staying faithful, not only to the world as he saw it, but also to the way his work appeared in, and took its place within, that world.