Much of our Key Stage 3 curriculum centres on Debra Myhill’s ‘Skills for Writing’ textbooks, specifically the Spy Fiction, Dystopian Fiction and News Writing units. For those not familiar with the series, it aims to ‘embed the principles of the Grammar for Writing pedagogy’ and the resources are based on an ‘evidence-based approach to accelerating progress in writing at KS3 and beyond’.[1] Thus, some elements of stylistics (such as cognitive grammar) are inherent part of Myhill’s pedagogical approach and therefore provide a sound basis for exploring what more we could offer to the students in the sole area of the English secondary curriculum where we have some scope to design what we want to teach, unconstrained by national criteria. These were my main motivations for exploring what working with Aston University’s stylistics experts to see what we could learn about our practice.
Of particular interest to me was how our team could build on our existing knowledge to explore how elements of stylistics – specifically cognitive grammar and text world theory – might be developed when writing about texts, as well as creating them: a less obviously explicit way to link stylistics and our current curriculum. For an initially small scale project, poetry seemed an obvious way in.
With a relatively academic and literate cohort in a mixed grammar school, it was naturally tempting to experiment with challenging and/or classic poems. However, following our first workshop, I decided to take this in another direction, particularly in light of how much we collectively gleaned from our stylistic analysis of the opening of Mark Haddon’s short story ‘The Pier Falls’. This is how we decided on using ‘He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven’ by W.B. Yeats followed by ‘The Wasps’ by Mona Arshi.
First lesson
I taught the first lesson twice to two unfamiliar Year 7 groups. Wanting to keep everything small scale at the start, I decided to focus on verbs – but not initially, because I didn’t want this to feel like “another Skills for Writing lesson”. I wanted it to feel different somehow, to get the students thinking more about collections of words which evoke responses, and then to explore how stylistics could be applied to these responses, rather than imposing an external [grammatical] framework on their reading. So I got the classes to rewrite the story of the poem in 2-3 sentences, focusing on key information (rather than detailed description).
After discussion, students created a tense timeline in an attempt to explore text world theory (without putting a label on it as such) and then they chose one of these text worlds from any point in the poem and continued the story down their own timeline. Tense and mood weren’t as familiar to our students as I anticipated, so I used this to aid their understanding:
The student work was astonishing in its variety. They collectively seemed liberated (and surprised at this feeling) from the constraints of “what was needed for exams”. This sense of liberty was variously described as unexpected and empowering – and the mood of the room felt lifted, too. I would have loved to have bottled that moment.
Second lesson
For the second lesson of two, I used a poem from our Edexcel A Level Unseen Poetry Anthology. I think sometimes we choose poems because they’re “Key Stage 3 poems” and I wanted to buck the trend with this new approach to teaching to see what happened – after all, no-one “knows” a poem will be chosen for a particular year group when it’s written. The second poem was ‘The Wasps’ by Mona Arshi. I love it because of the extreme experiences and emotions to which it alludes.
I started by asking the class to reflect on what they were trying to do last lesson – however, I don’t know if this was necessary. I found myself doing it due to my habitual awareness of teaching a “scheme of work” where each lesson builds on the previous one(s) to an endpoint. Why, I now ask myself, can’t these simply be standalone lessons where we explore English? Why do they have to be part of a scheme if we are trying to be more experimental with our approach? I think questioning such conventional approaches could be liberating over time, but I haven’t yet concluded the process of thinking about this on a larger scale.
In this second lesson we started again by looking at the verbs and how students might group them together. Although I told the class to arrange the verbs in whatever groups they liked, the majority chose to go for grouping via tense, on the basis that this was the grouping from the last lesson. I also didn’t feel the need to check the accuracy of their categorisation of verbs – although one’s student’s categorisation (verbs which are “being” was, were and verbs which are “doing” all others) located a common omission of forms of stative verbs from the category ‘verb’. I found some of the other grouping choices fascinating, such as grouping via phonology, pace, ‘ing’ or non-’ing’, ‘ed’. The students had certainly never spoken quite like this before in my experience. After this, they took their creative writing in whichever direction they liked, some diverging far away from the poem because they “wanted” to – and, typically in English, students can’t generally do what they want. In general, they preferred this lesson, they said, because of the freedom to experiment with their writing.
Reflections
As a result, twelve months on from the initial workshop, the whole team of 9 teachers uses these two lessons plus five more in the summer time to explore a different approach to English with Key Stage 3 classes. We are building a bank of resources to share with our partner schools, particularly through the Shires Alliance. We have also been experimenting with a verbal approach in which we don’t look at the poems for the whole first lesson in the series – this has worked incredibly well with variously ‘Name Journeys’ by Raman Mundair, ‘A Portable Paradise’ by Roger Robinson and ‘Like an Heiress’ by Grace Nichols, in which the messages each individual takes or the emotions they experience from readings of the poem have allowed that scope for individuality which they prize. I think the next steps are to use what I learned from my very first experience of cognitive stylistics at Aston: our exploration of the opening of the short story ‘The Pier Falls’ by Mark Haddon.
The team have much to say on their experiences, including:
“I didn’t know English could make me think like this” – a teacher with 20 years’ experience
“I always assumed that grammar study was dry and boring. It opened my eyes and – more importantly – the students’” – a teacher with 4 years’ experience
“It took a lot of getting used to. There’s plenty enough change in teaching without having to think about additional texts and approaches. But I think I might be warming to it…we’ll see” – a teacher with 10 years’ experience
“I’m not sure. I like it one day, but I don’t the next. It varies so much with each class, and from year to year. I’m on the fence at the moment” – a teacher with 8 years’ experience
“I like how different this makes lessons – they’re much more discursive and interactive” – a recent trainee
A particular question, however, remains (amongst others): can students and teachers ever be free of the pre-defined academic constraints of an English lesson, is this a desirable outcome, and on whose terms?
I like how this project has got all of us to think differently, individually and collectively. I don’t think I appreciated how much it would make the teachers think differently, because our focus is predominantly on the students’ experience. In these terms, it has been revelatory and seems to complement our desire to diversify our curriculum in a general sense, particularly in terms of equality, diversity and inclusion, but more of all, in terms of freedom.
[1] https://www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/secondary/subjects/english-and-media/skills-for-writing-1
appliedstylistics.com 