CapeUK is a contributor to Sheffield Local Authority’s programme, ‘Every Sheffield Child Articulate and Literate’ (ESCAL) which is running during the Year of Communication, April 2010-April 2011.
Last June, we organised and facilitated a ‘creative conversation’ to enable Sheffield’s Director of Children and Young People’s Services to meet with creative education practitioners and generate ideas for strategies and events.
Our focuses for enquiry were:
• What can adults do that really works in taking young people’s oracy and literacy way beyond functionality to transform their abilities in self-expression and communication?
• What is the combination of inspiration and rigour that is required?
• How could effective practice be developed across the city? What are the principles and practicalities that need to be borne in mind?
The principles that emerged from the conversation included:
• Give skills in the early years – especially encourage adults including parents to talk to and listen to children.
• Encourage children to talk about their lives and express themselves the way they want to, even if it’s uncomfortable. Listen well.
• Embrace language and culture issues positively throughout. Teach versatility in registers – don’t undermine their home language.
• Grapple positively with the low-esteem culture (e.g. ‘Don’t give my kids big ideas’.) Celebrate small successes.
• Encourage young people to explore high quality texts including the classics – these can be spiritual maps.
• Have surprises every day in the classroom. Know how to create moments of intrigue.
• Ensure that language enrichment activities have a sense of purpose. Give children real reasons to write – ‘build a Cathedral’ not just hew stone.
• Give young people a focus or task but allow it to be open-ended. Allow them to experiment and push the boundaries of what they think they are capable of.
• Oracy and literacy can be stimulated and developed through a variety of art forms. Creative practitioners need not only be writers.
• Use or create new environments to stimulate children’s interest and language use.
• Creative inspiration needs to be complemented by rigour. The rigour is in attention to detail and the rehearsal/redrafting/refinement process that leads to a high quality ‘performance’. Parents, teachers and creative practitioners are the audience whose attention is the pay off for young people’s effort.
• Teachers and creative practitioners can learn to document the learning process creatively so that it can be fed back to children, parents, other teachers, governors. They need to ‘get beneath the levels’.
• Role models are important. Adults should practise what they preach.
• Teachers can be ‘guardians of eloquence’ (Pie Corbett). We need to help teachers and parents to be storytellers.
• Many teachers know what to do – they need time and support to do it. Help them to build their confidence too.
A list of practical ideas was brainstormed which are now being fed into the ‘Articulate’ strand of the ESCAL programme.
CapeUK staff also co-delivered workshops on Philosophy for Children to teachers and local education authority (LEA) staff as part of the ESCAL launch conference in April 2010.
