Robert Hull was invited by Salt Kids to talk about his latest book

Poetry — From Reading to Writing

A Classroom Guide for Ages 7-11

By Robert Hull

Price: £16.99
ISBN: 978-0-415-55408-4
Publish Date: 12th November 2009
Imprint: Routledge
Pages: 104 pages


The background to my recent book Poetry, from Reading to Writing (Routledge / Fulton 2009) is simply, on one level, many years of teaching, and many years of working with poems, in classrooms for 7- to 17-year-olds. And for that matter, 17- to 70-year-olds too.

More broadly, it derives from a chronic interest in trying to understand ‘creativity’ — a term I take in a sense than goes beyond the aesthetic to the fundamental capacities of the learning mind.

That interest led first to a book called The Language Gap (Routledge 1985) — subtitled by a thoughtful editor ‘How classroom dialogue fails’. What was evident to me from my early teaching days, and later in a school where I researched my hunches, was how much of the intellectual potential of young learners’ minds seemed to be left uncovered and unexplored by the routines of schooling and teaching.

In my own school, I found students confronted by academic GCSE texts bizarrely but routinely misinterpreting what they read. In one geography text ‘The rainfall is light’ (in Australia’s Great Artesian Basin’) was read as meaning it glittered in the sun, or fell gently to earth. One student asked me: ‘Is glucose a plant?’ Others thought that ‘Animals harbour insects’ meant they ate them.

And many first-year secondary maths pupils, all confident they knew the meaning of terms like ‘divide’ and ‘subtract’ — and the maths signs for them — provided examples of their use which showed how difficult they found them: ‘Six divide twelve is two’; ‘Six minus 12 = six 2 – 4 = 2’ ; ‘3-2 = 1 Three taken from two is one’; ‘Five shared between fifteen is three.’

These reading problems derived as much, in my view, from the carelessness of the writer of text as from the inadequacy of the young reader. Wherever I looked, in history, science, maths, there seemed to be a similar failure of the writer (or speaker) to reach the reader (or listener).

This routine stifling of creative potential in academic work contrasted acutely with the capacities that children demonstrated, enabled by the exploratory freedoms they found there, in art and music and creative writing, Why couldn’t a history ‘essay’ be equally creative?

I argued out of all this that ‘academic’ capacity often remains hidden because of the shortcomings both of academic text, and of teaching that takes such text at face value, not stopping to consider whether it ‘gets through’ to the learner. Which is why for me ‘creativity’ became shorthand for that unknown but releasable potential that schooling with its formulaic academic languages and interrogatory questioning keeps hidden.

And of course, given that the text of tests and exams were those of ‘the writer’, such testing was — I’d say mostly is — unrevealing. It reveals what the learner can’t say but not what they could. All testing runs the risk of simply not seeing the student if it doesn’t — as it were — also test itself. The consequence of such narrow, imperceptive testing is the pedagogically disastrous assumption that we ‘know’ what learners are capable of. We don’t, ultimately. As we don’t know the future. ‘Standards’ are a bureaucrat’s fantasy.

I tried to develop further the idea of the hidden but central nature of the creative in book called Behind the Poem (Routledge 1988), which was devoted to showing in detail how children of 7 to 13, given space, time and encouragement, routinely made the most remarkable and compelling aesthetic judgements and decisions in their writing of poems. I wanted, that is, to write not a ‘how to do it’ book about writing poems, but one that showed that children were by and large, given the chance to be, natural artists with words.

‘Given the chance to be.’ Over 30 years I haven’t changed my mind about either the centrality of the creative, or of course about the capacity of children to write poems in free classrooms. But the two books I’ve referred to were written during a time of true freedom for the classroom teacher. Since the descent of the National Curriculum, and the Literacy Hour, and SATs, the picture has changed beyond recognition.

This malign change has made the ‘teaching’ of the reading and writing of poems by children a scary, risky, arcane specialty. Children love writing poems, when they’re allowed to and encouraged to frequently. It’s not difficult, the business of ‘teaching poetry’, and getting children to write. All you have to do is read lots of poems, aloud, and make sure they do, and when you read a cat poem say why don’t we write one about a cat too. Or a dog.

But poetry in junior school has become obscenely cerebral. Children of 8 and 9 have had to understand a writer’s ‘intentions’. They have had to ‘read a number of poems by significant poets and identify what is distinctive about the style or content of their poems’; and to ‘respond to shades of meaning; explain and justify personal tastes; consider the impact of full rhymes, half rhymes, internal rhymes and other sound patterns …’

I’ve written elsewhere (in Books for Keeps, Carousel and Teach Primary for instance) about the devastatingly anti-creative effects and implications of the regimen that has developed over the last 15 years or so.

And it was that recent disabling philistinism more than anything that made me want to write a book for teachers in which I might offer up, in some practical, straightforward detail, a large selection of the lessons I’ve devised over the years to encourage children (and adults) to write poems — and some examples of those poems. To teachers the book also says, in effect, ‘Despite what you may have been told over and over by the state, reading poems with children and encouraging them to write their own is neither difficult, nor a specialty.’

In short, Poetry, from reading to writing is a teacher’s attempt to clean off the recent off-putting dismal accretions of academicism from the wonderfully simple and life-enhancing project of working with children reading and writing poems.

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