Just found my old Blog and I am going to try to BLOG again if I can remember how. Like writing from the self, journals, diaries, even tweets, it's such an easy habit to lose and hard to get back into. As my old tutor at Manchester recommended what is required is 'a firm application of the arse to the chair and the pen to the paper'. Just substitute two fingers to the Keyboard- yes still only two , though I am trying- and I'm off. Is anyone out there still?
For my own information here is my first Wiki contribution to an ESRC Poetry Research group:
Hi
I didn't pay proper attention to the demonstration of how to get going on the Wiki, too cocky, thought I knew, so I am feeling a little out of things and would like someone who has time to write a brief set of instructions I can follow and keep by me.
I am trying to use a reply from Morag's last post. Like her I should be finalising two new sessions for Thursday and Friday. Hope this does get through to someone- perhaps only Morag?
I completely agree with everything i have read so far. Exeter was very energising a most numinous sharing of experience and research and creativity which will be one of the greatest highlights of my working life (and I have had a long time of it). Suddenly sometime on Saturday, it came to me, and I think perhaps to everyone else in the room, that together we could forge a new pedagogy and engage teachers and perhaps especially our pre-service ones, in what for me is the quintessential modality for engaging with literacy and culture, poetry . I had a momentous image of a way of teaching both various and possible.
In my salad days, when I taught in the sixth form college I would always start my introduction to A level with poetry. You can see it was so very long ago that we were allowed to take a month to look at writing in general before beginning a 'set text', although these too were always books and authors I had chosen and wanted to teach (again such a long time ago). I would ask them to make a collage showing how they encountered poetry in their own lives and when it was important to them. At first they would claim they didn't but after an exploration of where poetry might be seen or heard, they began to bring scraps from cards, lyrics, obituaries, copied out images and lines,verses from the many poetry books I invited them to bring into class alongside some of my own. Listening to Janine's presentation and taking time to look through her packed ppt I hoped I was awakening their sense of poetry as being a choice both desired and personal but which could be shared and sometimes outside of the classroom in very moving circumstances. I got them to 'taste poetry on the tongue', a phrase I had taken over from Bernard Harrison, but I think he may have himself borrowed the phrase.
I'll do a search before Greenwich. Sadly I didn't have the confidence to move on to writing poetry or recreating literature in the wonderful way Jane has shown us. In the next two days I will be working with two groups of PGCE groups, one secondary in Durham, one primary in Birmingham. I hope to be able to bring that experience to share next time. My quest is to find students who have been as well taught poetry as Jane's and Cliff's classes, maybe tone of their past pupils may be present at one of them, serendipity happens.
I agreed and planned with Julie to ask them to devise a metaphor for encountering a poem , thanks, Julie for finding the apt quote. I'll use it after with one of Jane's distracted pieces- I like a Private Place too. Will go down well in Durham.
Ok an hour's passed so I'd better get back to the PGCE planning, then I can look at my 'rather be doing poem' and perhaps risk a creative contribution next.
Donne's busy old foole beckons from the Norman motte outside the window, but I'll keep at my desk for the morning at least.
Elaine
Will let myself know how the research task goes.
