Context

Kelmscott School is a secondary school in Walthamstow, East London. It has specialist status in humanities with business and enterprise.

Aims & principles

• To teach Year 10 children about performance poetry
• To inspire and encourage pupils to write creatively and to experience their writing’s dramatic potential
• To challenge pupils’ preconceptions of creative writing
• To boost children’s confidence in their own writing and performance skills

In Practice

Performance poetry organisation Apples and Snakes provided six spoken word artists (Malika Booker, Francesca Beard, Roger Robinson, Aoife Mannix, Nii Parkes and Breis) to work with Year 10 pupils on a series of workshops and performances. Each of the poets worked with an English set from one half of the year group, focusing on the theme of “Growing Up”.

Malika worked intensively with one mixed-ability set for four workshops of two hours, spread over the course of two weeks, and culminating in a student performance to the rest of the year. Malika had an informal, ‘loose’ approach to her workshops. For example, she introduced each new exercise as a tool used by writers, so that a writer-to-writer dynamic was established from the outset. Each student produced either a poem or a monologue.

Roger, Francesca, Nii and Aoife each worked with a mixed-ability English set for two workshops of two hours, with Nii and Aoife facilitating one workshop each for their allocated set.

Breis, Francesca, Roger and Nii gave the other half of the year group a taster of performance poetry by putting on a show of their own work. This was intended to inspire the students to produce their own work and to give them a fresh perspective on the possibilities of their own writing.

Outcomes

Apples and Snakes produced a booklet of all the student’s work, as well as a DVD of the pupils’ and artists’ performances, for each of the participating students to take home.

Attitudes and attainment after the project

The pupils’ feedback on the project was extremely positive, with 91 percent agreeing that the workshops had made them more confident in their ability to write in a way that would interest others.

Their increased confidence is made clear by the difference between the feedback data gathered at the start of Malika’s residency and at the end. Initially, 44 percent of pupils strongly agreed that working with Malika had increased their confidence yet after the performance, this had risen to 76 percent. By the end of the project, 100 percent of pupils in Malika’s class were surprised by the quality of their work and 73 percent strongly considered creative writing as something that they could do - as opposed to 11 percent at the start. The feeling of achievement was reflected across the project with 94 percent of pupils and all four teachers agreeing that their time with an artist had improved the pupils’ writing.

Direct response from the students included:

‘We could all be relaxed and everyone felt a part of the lesson’
‘I liked the workshop because it improved my writing skills’
‘The free-writing helped me find new ways of coming up with ideas’
‘I am really proud and happy’
‘I’ve reached new levels of creativity’
‘I think the work I’ve produced was better than what I could do before we did this workshop.’

Legacy

To help the school build on the success of the project, Apples and Snakes put together a teachers’ resource pack of the workshop plans of the artists, extracts from both the artists’ and pupils’ work and a DVD of the artists’ and pupils’ performances. They also compiled a booklet of the pupils’ work as a reminder of their achievements to accompany the DVD.

Final thought

Due to timetabling difficulties, only half of the students saw the artists’ performance, and only half took part in a workshop- it would have been preferable if all students had had the opportunity to participate in both.

The pupils’ enjoyment of the performances could have been enhanced by setting-up the performance space as a real spoken word gig. The lack of raked seating and lighting in the hall meant that whilst the pupils enjoyed the performances themselves, they didn’t have the opportunity to “escape” into the event.

Apples and Snakes would also have liked to organise an INSET to ensure that the creativity in the classroom established by the artist continued, but this was not possible due to constraints on staff time.

Overall, the project was successful against its aims: the creativity of staff and pupils was stretched in a way that fulfilled national curriculum criteria whilst offering new ways of realising pupils’ imaginative potential. Both staff and pupils agreed that the pupils’ writing and confidence had improved, making the project a worthwhile and inspirational experience for all involved.

‘Quiet students were engaged, work was produced by all students and all were proud of it’ — Class Teacher

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