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'Read
for your life', 'joy of writing', 'teacher as
demonstrator' . . . these are
emerging themes in recent
research on literacy development and language education.
What they aim is to change the notion of reading-writing
as classroom 'tasks', make
it a spontaneous activity
with adults and children in it together. The McGill
University
in Canada has a project in which Diploma in
Education students actually experience
this new
approach.
Each
student writes-illustrates
a children's book, which is launched along with
everyone
else's in formal style — complete with guests, music,
refreshments, the
|works, authors glowing with a sense of
achievement. In the second part of the project
the
student is placed as teacher, and repeats the event.
This time each child-student
writes and publishes a
book, which
is launched with the same fanfare, drinks and
cake,
proud parents watching.
What
happens in the process? Claudia Mitchell, Associate
Professor in the
Faculty of Education at McGill
University, writes: "The new teachers who shared
their published works (at the first launch) took away
with them a belief in the 'joy of
writing', and a sense
of where pre-writing revision, editing, and 'making
public' fit into
the writing process — their own as
well as that of their students."
Meaning,
one can communicate only if one has experienced; inspire
children through demonstration of a very personal
feeling. "When teachers are
authors, it is a way to
break down the barrier of teacher-as-editor towering
above the
student-as-struggling-author," one
Diploma student comments. Another, Rina Singh,
had
conducted writer's workshops before, but not worked with
children in a regular
classroom. She says: "Some
years ago when I had nothing to do with children, I
used
to believe that it would be easier to teach adults to
write. I was surprised; a
nine-year old may love to get
his work published even though he may have no serious
commitment to literature.
If a teacher can motivate, I
believe a child can write."
And
enjoy it, too, if their spontaneity is left unfettered.
"I have found that I
hardly ever tell students what
to write about. It doesn't work. I tell them to go
crazy," she says. "This helps them stumble
into a world where 'an orange is a sun in
the fridge',
'death is like sleeping on a water bed', 'a smile is
like a banana', 'Mom is
like a bomb always exploding'
and 'spaghetti is like stretched fingers'. Writing in
such a way helps bring out strange images, often the
most beautiful. Writing in
such a way, my students move
from describing something that is 'blue as the sky',
where the reader will neither see blue, nor the sky. It
is another story when he writes,
"A bumpy mattress
is like my brother's head.' The reader would see a bumpy
mattress, see the brother's head, and see a lot beyond.
The images that come out
of a child's mind are often so
fresh. In one of my workshops, a seven-year old wrote on
blood:
Blood is when a cherry is stabbed
Blood is when a tomato hurts itself.
I
get goose bumps. They were like lines out of Pablo
Neruda's poetry."
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