Drafting and Assessing Poetry

A Guide for Teachers

Sue Dymoke

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781446227015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

`This excellent book provides the reader with comprehensive coverage of all aspect of poetry teaching. The book does more than inform us - it inspires profound reflection on the best ways it support poetry writing and draws us into the debate about assessment-driven curriculum? - School Librarian

`A must for trainee teachers and English departments? - Booktrusted News

` Drafting and Assessing Poetry is thoroughly researched and shows how attitudes towards teaching of poetry and indeed the place of poetry on the syllabus, has changed with political fashion over the years, but more importantly, Sue Dymoke shows how a handful of contemporary poets go about drafting their work and sees this process as an essential tool in the classroom, advocating that students should keep drafting notebooks, just like real writers.

Getting students, or indeed members of writing groups, to understand that one draft of a poem may not be the final or best work they can produce will never be a problem again!? - Writing in Education

`Sue Dymoke?s book is a much needed antidote to the ubiquitous guides to poetry analysis…. This book is well worth reading for its clarity and wealth of ideas? - Bethan Marshall, TES Teacher Magazine

`Every English department should buy this remarkably comprehensive book. Inspiring approaches for teaching children to write poetry are clearly described. Sue Dymoke draws upon her extensive experience as a poet, English teacher and researcher to explore the place of writing poetry in English lessons and examinations. Her unique insights into both the writing and teaching of poetry should prove invaluable to English teachers? - Dr Mark Pike, Lecturer in English Education and Head of PGCE English, University of Leeds

`It is a useful book: a theoretical text, but with a practical focus, which makes it very readable and interesting, to teachers of young people particularly, but also, to teachers of adults and indeed in parts to poetry writers themselves, particularly those interested in working in schools, or simply curious about the general process of drafting and evaluating poetry? - County Lit, Nottinghamshire County Council Literature Newsletter

Drafting and Assessing Poetry offers a range of teaching strategies for developing students? poetry writing skills, and guidance about assessment approaches. Critical commentaries combine with illustrations of successful classroom practice to consider this essential but under-explored aspect of English teaching. Based on theory but with a practical dimension, the book engages readers in current critical debates about poetry teaching and its place in an assessment- driven curriculum.

This book is for reflective practitioners, including trainee teachers, who want to develop their understanding of poetry teaching and to gain insights, which will inform classroom practice. It will also be useful for literacy co-ordinators, teacher educators and other advisory staff in the field of English teaching.

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The Place of Poetry within the National Curriculum Orders for English

In the advent of the National Curriculum poetry was in an uncertain position, heralded by some teachers and critics as central to the English curriculum and treated with suspicion by others whose own educational experiences of poetry had not made them favourably disposed towards the genre. The National Curriculum was first introduced into England and Wales in 1990 and revised over the next decade. This chapter explores the place of poetry (especially writing poetry) within this overarching framework and the subsequently developed National Literacy Strategy.

The Cox report

The Cox report’s proposals for a new assessment driven curriculum in English and Welsh schools with five attainment targets for: Speaking and Listening; Reading; Writing; Spelling; Handwriting and Presentation underpinned the development of the National Curriculum for English. This report attempted to impose a linear model of development on the subject of English. According to the proposals, students would move through four Key Stages during their compulsory 5–16 education and 10 assessment levels.

The report contained a number of references to poetry. Cox acknowledged that one of an English teacher’s greatest joys could be to foster a love of literature in one’s students. There was also a recognition of the need for constant nurturing of a young child’s ‘instinctive pleasure in rhythm, pattern and rhyme’ if this was to be developed into an appreciation of the ‘richness of poetry’ (DES, 1989: 7.1). Cox recommended the crucial link between language and literature should be consolidated by activities such as writing in different poetic forms.

Wade and Sidaway perceived a ‘crisis of confidence’ (Wade and Sidaway, 1990: 75) about poetry in the curriculum at this time. However they remained optimistic that the proposals of the Cox committee would ‘foreground poetry’ (Wade and Sidaway, 1990: 83). In their investigation into the attitudes of middle school students to poetry, and a subsequent comparison with teachers’ views, they established that ‘a chasm’ existed between interested and receptive students and teachers who ‘revealed concern for poetry allied to lack of confidence’ (ibid.). They identified a need for further work on curriculum guidelines and examples of good practice.

The National Curriculum

The practical implementation of the National Curriculum Orders (1990) found favour with many English teachers. The main reason for this was the way it built on heavily supported models of English teaching which were learner centred and based on personal growth (including those models which had been discussed at the 1966 Dartmouth conference and are described in Chapter 7) together with a focus on cultural analysis and the study and recognition of a literary heritage (Protherough and King, 1995). The Orders adopted the five attainment targets and Key Stage structure suggested by Cox. The attainment targets were supported by Programmes of Study (PoS) which indicated both ‘general’ and ‘detailed’ provision required for compliance with the Orders. The PoS included very specific references to listening to, performing, reading and writing poetry.

For example for Writing at Key Stage 2 (pupils aged 7–11):

Pupils should:

… have opportunities to create, polish and produce individually or together, by hand or on a word processor, extended written texts, appropriately laid out and illustrated, e.g. class newspapers, anthologies of stories or poems, guidebooks etc. (DES, 1990: 37)

For Writing at Key Stage 3 (pupils aged 11–14):

Pupils should have opportunities to:

… build on their experience of reading and hearing a wide range of poetry, and write both individually and in groups, using poetic features such as rhythm, rhyme and alliteration in verse forms such as jingles, ballads, haiku etc;

… organise and express their meaning appropriately for different specified audiences, e.g. their peers, their teacher, known adults … a road safety officer, a novelist or a poet. (ibid.: 39)

And for Writing at Key Stage 4 (pupils aged 14–16)

Pupils should have opportunities to:

… select verse forms appropriate for their own choice of subject matter and purposes through experience of a wider range of poetry. (Ibid.: 41)

It is interesting to compare these references to providing opportunities for writing poetry with later revisions of National Curriculum. Subsequent documents offer less detail on this aspect and non statutory illustrative examples are pared down. It not until the emergence of the National Literacy Strategy in 1998 that this level of detail (couched in much more prescriptive language) returns.

Discussions about pedagogy

The period surrounding the development and inception of the National Curriculum was a fertile time for discussion about the nature of English and many aspects of pedagogy including those directly pertaining to poetry teaching. One focus was on the purpose and nature of literature teaching (particularly on ways of responding to poetry). Marsh (1988) was concerned about the current state of literature teaching. He portrayed teachers as being faced with a muddle of analytical, humanist, aesthetic, cultural and purely practical purposes when teaching literature. He considered that the system of practical criticism used in examinations led to a focus on passing judgements on or extracting meanings from poetry. In adopting this inappropriate approach, the experience of immersion in reading the texts was bypassed (Marsh, 1988). Michael Benton had also long been concerned about the ways in which literature, and particularly poetry, was taught in schools: ‘far too often we imply that poems are riddles with single solutions which we, the teachers, happen to know rather than objects crafted in a medium of riddling wordplay, yielding a range of meanings’ (Benton and Fox, 1985: 19).

The notion of poetry as a puzzle is, sadly in my experience, a common perception among students (and their teachers) who engage in a hunt for the missing clue which will help them solve the poem. Too often the students believe that the teacher is keeping the clue from them which causes discussion about poetry to turn into a closed guessing game when it should be a shared exploration of the words on the page.

For Benton, literature teaching needed to be grounded in a coherent methodology centred on the reader and the notion of a plurality of meanings. He was hopeful that the development of a methodology based on reading and response rather than ‘conventional narrowly conceived ideas of comprehension and criticism [was beginning to] give poetry back to its readers’ (Benton, 1990: 31). He urged this process to continue, citing as good practice examples of a student’s annotations from a ‘mental walk’ around a poem (Benton, 1990: 32).

The metaphor of a journey of meaning making was a central focus in Developing Response to Poetry (Dias and Hayhoe, 1988) which explored the potential use of reader response theories, including those of Riffaterre, Iser and Rosenblatt (1978), to inform classroom practice. Rosenblatt argued that the same text could be read both efferently and aesthetically. With efferent reading, a summary of text would suffice whereas with aesthetic reading the text itself was of central importance. In her view a paraphrase of a poem did not equate to reading the original. ‘Accepting an account of someone else’s reading or experience of a poem is analgous to seeking nourishment through having someone else eat your dinner for you and recite the menu’ (Rosenblatt, 1978: 86). She considered that readers, respecting the limitations set by verbal clues within a text, drew on their own resources to fill in the gaps and thus ‘realise[d] the blueprint provided by the text’. In her view, the key role of poetry, or any other literary text, was to serve as ‘a stimulus to the creativity of the reader’ (Rosenblatt, 1978: 88). Rosenblatt’s work in particular was considered to have implications for the teaching of poetry in schools which ‘unwittingly demand that pupils adopt an efferent stance’ (Dias and Hayhoe, 1988: 22). The writers also suggested that if students were continually taken on ‘packaged tours’ of poems, conducted by their teachers (masters of texts who will enlighten them en route) then they were ‘unlikely to learn to travel on their own’ (ibid.: 7) or to make sense of a poem for themselves. Such imagery marked a move away from the focus of the reading as the poem/product and towards an investigation of the processes involved in reading/making meaning. Michael Benton described this shift as being ‘not the discovering of meaning (like some sort of archaeological dig) but the creation of it.’ (Benton, 1995: 334).

Dias and Hayhoe wrote with an urgency about the need to ‘present a coherent basis for response-centred teaching’ (Dias and Hayhoe, 1988: 7). The impact of critical theory on poetry teaching was, for them and their four contributors, the main cause of the unpopularity of poetry in the classroom. Their analysis of new criticism, structuralism and post-structuralism concluded that the role of the teacher had not been sufficiently addressed by these movements. While some knowledge of theories might have been helpful, these needed to be adapted ‘pragmatically in the constantly slippery context of the classroom’ (Hirst in Dias and Hayhoe, 1988: 115). In the reading of any poem and the development of one’s attitudes to poetry a person’s ‘reading history’ (Dias and Hayhoe, 1988: 35) should be considered to play a vital part.

Michael Benton’s endorsement of this developing ‘response centred methodology’ (Benton et al., 1988: 202) and observations from Marsh (1988) on the importance of understanding a writer’s craft were included in Cox (DES, 1989). It is interesting to note that by 1995 Benton was becoming more sceptical about the ill-defined nature of reading and response which he saw as often leading to very open ended tasks in the classroom (Benton, 1995).

Revisions: 1993

The Conservative government also had concerns about Literature. Their proposed revisions to the Orders in 1993 were ‘grounded in quite a different philosophy’ from that of Cox (Protherough and King, 1995: 1). Driven by a desire to define ‘basic skills’ (DfE, 1993: 71) and to reassert the place of what the government perceived as the English ‘literary heritage’, the proposals recommended the insertion of lists of ‘suitable’ poetry and fiction which, it claimed, would give students access to the ‘richness of great literature’ (DfE 1993: 72–3). The lists caused controversy even among 17 of those writers who appeared on them (Harrison, 1994a). A reading anthology of poems and extracts of ‘high quality’ texts for use in standard tests at Key Stage 3 was introduced and greeted with ‘despondency’ (Berliner, 1992: 4) by secondary English teachers. For Frater, writing from the standpoint of a retired member of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI), the anthology was: ‘part of the price which pupils and schools must pay for an unedifying concoction of blind dogma and contingent, quick-fit decision making’ (Frater, 1993: 51).

During the establishment of a National Curriculum in 1990 many English teachers became politicised and saw ‘the control of the subject was at stake’ (Ball, Kenny and Gardiner, 1990: 83). This power struggle was taken one stage further with the dispute over the Statutory Assessment Tests (SATs) which pupils were to sit at the end of Key Stages 1–3. The 1993 Key Stage 3 English SATs were boycotted by the majority of state secondary schools and the proposed use of an anthology at Key Stage 3 was eventually abandoned.

Revisions: 1995

Following the intervention of the Dearing committee in 1993–94, the number of attainment targets was slimmed down from five to three: Speaking and Listening, Reading and Writing. Assessment levels were reduced to eight (plus exceptional performance). The Key Stage 3 tests (taken by pupils aged 14) were modified to include teacher assessments and opportunities for students with special educational needs to complete alternative classroom tasks. However other changes, namely the reduction of coursework limits at GCSE and A-level and the inclusion of pre-twentieth-century and twentieth-century reading lists, were to have a real impact on poetry teaching.

Positive reactions to the 1995 Orders were limited. Protherough and King considered the new Orders approached the flexibility teachers desired in that they ‘abandoned any pretence of being a syllabus and simply offers a basis or broad checklist for departments’ own schemes of work’ (Protherough and King, 1995: 14). Within the attainment target for Writing, use of poetic models was still recommended in the revised curriculum (together with writing of poetry based on the student’s own experience) although the written outcomes were to be in each student’s ‘own distinctive style’ (DfE, 1995: 23). This phrase was, at the very least, an ambiguous one as a ‘distinctive style’ was more unlikely to be found in imitation than in any other kind of writing (Knight, 1995). The phrasing used here did however appear to echo an earlier DES document which encouraged teachers to distinguish between students’ individual voices and those which had been ‘rented for the occasion’ (DES 1987: 29). Many of the detailed references to forms (such as haiku and sonnet) and specific literary techniques found in the 1990 Orders were replaced by a broader instruction to give students opportunities to write in ‘a range of forms’. While arguably this might have made the curriculum more flexible for teachers, one could, pace Andrews (1991), question whether the vagueness of this instruction lessened the guarantee that poetry would be taught in depth and by all teachers.

The impact of the 1995 Orders on poetry teaching was most keenly felt in the Reading attainment target (En2). Here poetry was written about in terms of ‘quality’ (DfE, 1995: 19). Poets were selected in the light of their ‘established critical reputations’ and teachers were forcefully told that their students’ reading ‘should include’ writers from specific lists (ibid.). Texts from other cultures and traditions formed a major element of the reading programmes of study. Teachers, who had previously chosen to use pre-twentieth century poetry where they considered it appropriate, were now obliged to include it at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 (Atkinson, 1995). The National Curriculum Programmes of Study stressed that, in engaging with these listed works, teachers need to use activities which emphasised the pleasure and interest of the texts for their students ‘rather than necessitating a detailed line by line study’ (DfE, 1995: 20). As these texts were shortly to feature in revised GCSE terminal examination papers, this recommendation would present t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Place of Poetry within the National Curriculum Orders for English
• 2 Drafting Poetry
• 3 Using Poets’ drafts
• 4 Poetry and ICT
• 5 The Visiting Poet and Poetry Workshops
• 6 Assessing Poetry
• 7 The Context: Forty Years of Poetry Teaching
• Appendix 1: The Ghazal
• Appendix 2: Some Recommended Poetry Books for Key Stage 3 Readers
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index