Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda reflects on her experience of participating in this year’s UKLA conference at Exeter University, 23rd -25th June 2023
I feel the need to put pen to paper - or fingers to keyboard - before too much time passes and I forget about just how powerful the 2023 UKLA conference really was. Because I returned recharged, reinvigorated and feeling as if I had acquired reinforcements to help me keep fighting the good writing fight.
But the trouble is, the relentlessness of the battle against policy and curriculum pressure that currently denigrates authentic writing and celebrates ‘performing’ of writing means that, just as when I go on holiday and return relaxed and revived, some of the goodness wears off quickly with the stresses and strains of daily life. So, this opportunity to revisit ideas a couple of weeks after the event is as much for my own benefit as it is for anyone else who might read it.
The conference was entitled Writing Matters. Before a word was uttered I liked the duality in inviting ‘matters’ to operate as both verb and noun. Because it matters very much indeed and there were plenty of associated matters to discuss. I can't possibly share them all, because that would incorporate, well, too much writing. So I shall identify a handful of highlights and reflections amidst what I found to be a beautiful plurality of voices drawing similar conclusions: that narrow, exam-focused writing was harming both teacher and writer identities; and engaged in a collaborative search for new methods of harnessing agency for all.
I was delighted that NWP UK were amongst those voices and intend to write a separate, more detailed blogpost about our contribution to the writing conversation.
In the first symposium I attended, the research showed that pedagogy and assessment impact significantly on writer identity. Not rocket science. But it was a theme that echoed throughout the conference.
I was saddened to hear, for example, of Australian pre-service primary teachers who saw their own writing as flawed and therefore operated within a deficit schema around writing and therefore experienced high levels of anxiety around the teaching of writing as well as the act of writing. When this is harnessed to the idea that highly apprehensive teachers tend to focus on grammar and punctuation, at the expense of things like form and creativity, (Daly et al.,1988), it is easy to see how a cycle of problematic principles about writing might emerge.
Lessons from the pandemic were interesting to ponder, and ways that teachers might validate and utilise student experience of writing during lockdown. I know that I was very conscious of this in the immediate aftermath, but have tended to quickly forget as curriculum demands returned to ‘normal’ post-pandemic.
Charlotte Hacking, of CLPE gave a keynote address reminding of the importance of visual literacy. She also presented writing as four stages - ideation, creation, reflection and publication - and, whilst they are by no means distinct or discrete, she argued that teachers tended to move directly from creation to publication when all four are equal and iterative. It certainly gave pause for reflection on some of my own classroom practice around writing. I was also heartened to see the work of Barrs & Cork (2002), and Graves (1983), with approaches that have been hugely influential in my own teaching career, cited anew.
Hacking shared a video of Ed Vere creating characters from shapes. It was one of those things that I took straight back into the classroom, with Year 7, where I used the interaction between pairs of characters that the students created to introduce a unit on script-writing alongside the reading of a play.
Poignantly, Hacking pointed to the numbers of teachers in the profession who are simply not enjoying what they are doing due to lack of autonomy. I am, of late, one of those teachers. Hacking reminded me of some of the possibilities for teachers of writing, arguing passionately for licence, volition and validity in classroom writing practice.
Given the principles of NWP, it's unsurprising that my selections of workshops tended towards those which involved plenty of participant writing.
The session from the British Library team was a wonderful example. We are no strangers to the affordances of writing within concertina and miniature books at NWP, as our making pages attest, but it was fun to revisit and play with these once more in fresh contexts. I came away with an idea for an introductory A-Level English Literature lesson where I will encourage the students to create a concertina book to explore their reading identities.
There was so much else. There was the joy of the UKLA book awards, and Manjeet Man’s wonderful acceptance speech in which she identified school as her ‘safe place’ and celebrating the kindness of teachers. There were the off-the-record conversations that offered so much food for thought. Like the colleague who recounted over dinner the shocking treatment of her institution at the hands of OFSTED, where inspectors demonstrated an almost unbelievable disregard for the welfare of trainee teachers on their PGCE course.
So, I have come away with new ideas for research of my own, inspired by areas of research that were presented at the conference. I have valued the privilege of being able to meet up with like-minded colleagues, old and new. But, most of all, I am grateful for the reminder that I'm not alone. That there is a national, nay an international, movement determined that writing in an educational context should be so much more than the restrictive (and punitive?) practices that macro and micro political factors have attempted to push it to in recent times. The call to creative subversion, of finding ways of working within the confines of curriculum to get at the heart of writing matters, a heart that goes way beyond the formula for passing examinations.
It’s easy to feel a little lost as an English teacher at the moment, compounded by the devaluation resulting from the impasse over pay and conditions, and the lack of autonomy created through homogenisation and academisation. Now, more than ever, students, and teachers, need the affordances of writing to harness their voices. Together we can create a choir to sing the song of writing, and I returned from the conference hopeful and recharged.
Here's to all the playful classroom writing encounters yet to come!