Let us begin with kindness. The world we live in just now is filled with anger and fear. It’s a volatile mix. Fear, especially, seems to make us clamp down, to generate rules and restrictions, to threaten dire consequences. It is not good for our children. It is not good for us. In a recent Instagram post, NO THEM, ONLY US, Oliver Jeffers reminds us of our duty of care ‘to our children and grandchildren to break these sickening cycles of violence and vengeance in both thought and action that distract and divide us.’
‘The answer to this,’ he believes, ‘lies in human decency. In kindness, tolerance, humility and ingenuity. Re-evaluating what it is we actually have with this life on earth, and what we actually want from it.’
‘As ever, we have work to do.’
What we do in school cannot help but be touched by the world around us. Although the world of school is very different from the acts of physical violence and hatred that surround us, I think that current expectations of teachers and the curriculum are in themselves a kind of violence. Teachers do their best to provide a rich and fertile environment where children may grow. It is not always easy. We could do with fewer barriers and constraints. We have a duty to our children to nurture them in ways that help them find a path through the scariness with courage and imagination, and to have at their fingertips a whole raft of knowledge and skills which them help them grow and understand, and upon which they will draw in good times and bad. Writing is one of those things. Writing is intimately wrapped up with story and poetry and thinking and remembering, appreciating and wondering and imagining. Writing sits alongside drawing and painting and making, dancing and acting, singing and making music.
Writing thrives on and fosters community. It can open up our thinking, cultivate awareness, help us grow. It can be a way of solving problems and of affirming who we are and imagining who we might become. I have worried a great deal about the new Writing Framework. As I write this and look back at ‘why writing matters’, I think that maybe the Framework writers would agree with me. But I am not sure. And as I reread more of the framework, it feels so locked down, so distant from a real experience of what writing can be, I wonder whether its authors fear writing; loathe it, even. If that is the case it is great pity. Far too many of us hold a fear of writing. Far too many teachers fear writing. They may have been told at some time in their schooling that they are bad writers; or they have struggled to write about things they were not interested in in ways that didn’t make sense to them. Very often writing failure is experienced as a failure of self, also. We keep pushing writing away from us and we need to take hold of it and find what it can do for us and what we can do if we write.
One of the ways to do that, especially if you are a teacher, is to write with others. Find a group. See if there is a teachers’ writing group near you. If that is not possible or attractive to you, then write for yourself, quietly, each day. Look on this website. You will find many ideas of how to start. As you write, relax into it. Write for yourself. As you write, begin to notice what you are learning. Be prepared to share that with those you teach. Show them real writing. Know that you learn to write not by writing sentences, but simply by writing. Write for yourself; write for someone else.
Write with love.