Figure 1: A multilingual community film-making project celebrating Deptford’s rich history and diverse community

Deptford Storytelling Project was launched in 2020 and brought together people of different ages, languages, and backgrounds to make films about people’s lives in Deptford. Film workshops were run from January-March 2020 resulting in 10 films and two screenings in March 2020 at Deptford Cinema in Deptford, South London. Details of the project can be accessed on the Language Acts and Worldmaking site. The films can be seen on the Critical Connections website with film details in the Film Booklet 2020.

This community-based filmmaking project celebrated Deptford’s rich history and vibrant and diverse community through stories of those living here. Set up in collaboration with Deptford Cinema and Goldsmiths, University of London it offered a creative space for exploring lifeworlds, asserting cultural alternatives, and developing a shared community. Making participant agency and collaboration central concerns, it expanded on our successful work in the Critical Connections project (2012-ongoing) and took filmmaking into the community for all ages. The public and private screenings at Deptford Cinema were wonderful celebratory events and Lucy Rogers, one of the directors of the project and a Deptford Cinema volunteer reflected: ‘the films make a great argument for the value of true grassroots cinema as a platform for creativity and self-expression’. The project was reported in Goldsmiths news.

Deptford Cinema had to close its doors a week after the screening due to the pandemic and the start of the first lockdown. The project directors wanted time to reflect on the filmmaking process with participants and talk to the filmmakers about their experiences of the project. As community events were put on hold, we set up online recorded conversations with participants to talk about their own films and other films in the project; the languages included; understandings of community; and their experiences of Deptford Cinema. Michael and Vanessa made the film Walk with Me and Michael reflected upon the experience.

‘The more I do this, the more I will learn about multiculturalism … Well, I believe that’s the way the world really is, people with different languages … that shows the true nature of the world … everyone’s got a different culture’.

Figure 2: Walk With Me (Michael Williams and Vanessa Crouch)

Walk With Me shows a snapshot of a week in Michael’s life. Michael sadly died in August 2020 and this film stands as a timely testament to his ideas about friendship and community.

As project directors we decided to reach out to the filmmakers in 2021 and see if they wanted to get together for the project’s one-year anniversary. We met with the project participants online and planned a virtual screening of the films on the Deptford Cinema online platform, DC @ Home. We held a celebratory launch of the online screening on Friday 26 March with 9 of the 10 original films and an extended version of My Bad Sister which has been shown at film festivals.

The 2^nd edition of the Film Booklet 2021 can be accessed here.

The online screening of the films included pre-recorded introductions by the filmmakers reflecting on their films a year later in March 2021.

Deptford Storytelling Virtual Screening from Critical Connections on Vimeo.

The filmmakers also reflected on the project, ‘Deptford Storytelling Project: Celebrating One Year’ through creating short written pieces, photographs, artwork, poetry and recordings for the online Journal for Deptford Cinema.

The Deptford Storytelling project was funded by Language Acts and Worldmaking (a flagship AHRC Open World Research Initiative project aiming to transform language learning by foregrounding language’s power to shape how we live and make our worlds) and two of the project directors, Lucy Rogers and Vicky Macleroy, presented the project at the final online conference, ‘Languages Acts and Worldmaking Conference: Languages Future’ in April 2021. The online screening of the films hosted by Deptford Cinema @ Home became part of the international conference and shared with all conference participants. The conference presentation can be seen here.

The Deptford Storytelling Project has become a vital part of our multilingual digital storytelling work and research and became part of the larger international digital storytelling community when one of the project directors, Vicky Macleroy, presented the project at the online International Digital Storytelling Conference (June 2021), ‘Story Work For A Just Future Exploring Diverse Experiences And Methods Within An International Community Of Practice’. In the presentation ‘Cultural Webs of Deptford: Multilingual Digital Stories of Friendship and Belonging’ research was discussed that showed how the storytellers’ language repertoires were drawn upon and extended in their films. In the Deptford Storytelling Project (2020-21), we moved beyond school settings and worked across generations to see whether filmmaking could bring people together and play a vital part in multilingual activism and understanding our local communities.

As the Critical Connections project moves into its tenth year, we hope to build on the collaboration with Deptford Cinema. Deptford Cinema volunteers, Lucy Rogers and Louis Holder supported the online screening of ‘Our Planet Festival 2021’ with 20 films including 20 languages. Read about the ‘Our Planet Festival’.

We are in the process of planning next year’s festival and waiting to hear about further funding for our work in the field of multilingual learning, environmental activism and the arts. Margaret Jennings (in collaboration with Jun Koya) created a film for the Deptford Storytelling Project’, Urban Wildway Rooutes. Margaret set up the Eco Haven at Goldsmiths and the film explored the shift from human centredness to wildlife centredness. Margaret and other participants in the Deptford Storytelling Project are keen to be part of future filmmaking projects.

Figure 3: Urban Wildway Rooutes (Margaret Jennings and Jun Koya)

Please get in contact if you are interested in participating in future projects.

Project Directors: Lucy Rogers, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy

Blog by Vicky Macleroy

Centre for Language, Culture and Learning Online Event –  21 May 2021

5.30 pm – Welcome from Head of Centre for Language, Culture and Learning – Vicky Macleroy

5.35 pm – Introduction by Head of MA Children’s Literature programme – Julia Hope

5.40 pm – 6.40 pm – Philip Pullman in conversation with Michael Rosen

6.40 – 7.00 pm – Questions from panel of MA /PhD Children’s Literature students – Alice Penfold, Mette Lindahl-Wise, Seraphina Simmons-Bah, Louis Garratt

What happens when you bring together two leading figures in the field of children’s literature?

We share some reflections and highlights from this brilliant event which was first planned between these two long-time friends and prolific well-known writers over a year ago. Originally planned as a live event (the week we went into lockdown and before Michael nearly died from COVID-19), the event was then transformed into an online conversation.

Michael Rosen is Professor of Children’s Literature and in the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths. Julia Hope, Head of the MA Children’s Literature programme at Goldsmiths, introduced Michael Rosen and Philip Pullman in a warm, witty, political way that set the tone for this special event giving us a glimpse into the lives of these highly esteemed writers in the field of children’s literature.

Michael framed the conversation with his questions and the ebb and flow of the discussion was a real pleasure. Philip spent much of his childhood at sea and remembers being on the water and the movement of the sea and this sense of impermanence and ‘nowhere that I can really call home’. We heard that his mother used to write poetry and he had loved the rhythm of Hiawatha as a child and read ‘with enormous glee’ the Just So Stories and How the Camel got its Hump’. Philip shared his enjoyment of comics – swift and quick moving – Superman, Batman, The Eagle and Michael remembered becoming an ‘aficionado’ of comics but with his father’s running ideological commentary in his ear.

Philip and Michael reminisced about their time at Oxford and the odd disjuncture with figures in academia at that time and obstacles put in the way of success. Philip thoughtfully remarked that: ‘If I had my time again, I would have been a furniture maker’.

Michael moved onto talking to Philip about his earlier books and the influence of children’s writers on him such as Leon Garfield, Owl Service. Philip talked about reading Paradise Lost and words in poetry and how his ‘skin bristled’ and he was ‘intoxicated, spellbound by these words, what words, what phrases, how do you find words like that?’. He also talked about loving ballads and folk music.

We were given a rare treat into Philip’s current writing on the last book in the trilogy of The Book of Dust. In this book, Philip wanted to send Lyra, to Central Asia, to near Aleppo, but Aleppo one hundred years ago when it was a happy, thriving, bustling, busy, joyful place. Pantalaimon has decided Lyra has lost her imagination (because of certain books she has been reading) and has to leave Lyra to find her imagination and go east (to the Tian Shan Mountains in Western China). Lyra is following him and she is now in Syria, meeting strange events and strange people. Philip sees this novel turning into a romance, smaller scale than an epic, and about an individual questing for lost love. He was on p. 132 of writing the book at the time of talking and we eagerly await its publication.

Panellist reflections

 The event was then opened up for the 4 panellists to ask their questions and they reflect here on the questions and Philip’s responses.

Strong female characters (Mette Lindahl-Wise)

My question to Phillip stemmed from my interest in girlhood, feminism and children’s literature and I asked Phillip where his strong female characters came from – was he inspired by particular people or literary characters? Philip explained that he never sets out to create strong female characters for ideological purposes or to prove a particular political point, they just ‘turn up like that’. However, never having been a girl himself he is interested in examining female characters through the omniscient narrator, a non-human ‘spright’ ‘whose voice it is a privilege to inhabit’. Drawing on his many years as a teacher and observing classroom dynamics to create his many fabulous female characters like Lyra, Alice, Sally, Lila the fire-maker’s daughter he said there had been a ‘Lyra’ in every class he taught. Fascinating!

Fantasy genre (Alice Penfold)

My PhD research is focused on representations of mental health in young adult fantasy fiction. Due to my interest in genre, I asked Philip why he had chosen the fantasy genre for many of his novels and what unique possibilities he believes that the genre offers. Philip offered a very thoughtful and honest response and outlined how the ideas for his novels came to him before choosing a specific genre. I was particularly interested in his comment on the possibilities of fantasy to escape everyday reality and also for using fantasy to represent growing up, as shown in His Dark Materials through the fact that the daemons of young people (such as Lyra) can change, whereas those of the adults stay the same. It was such a pleasure to hear Philip’s answers and his conversation with Michael and to be reminded of the power that fiction has to help adult and young adult readers alike to make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

Anthropomorphism (Seraphina Simmons-Bah)

As I have been exploring the use of anthropomorphism as part of my research into societal power structures and children’s literature, I asked Philip about his use of the device through the daemons in His Dark Materials. Philip built on his answers to Mette and Alice’s questions, explaining that there was no deliberate ideological rationale for how he used the daemons, but fondly recalled the moment that he had had the idea to make it possible for children’s daemons to change whilst adult daemons cannot. When listening to Philip’s responses, what struck me the most was just how inspired he is by children and the resilience and adaptability they can have.

Writing prose (Louis Garratt)

 As a writer who aspires to the swiftness and clarity of Philip’s works, my question was if there is a rule, or set of rules or practices, that Philip adheres to when writing prose to capture the reader and instil a swiftness to the text. Philip’s response was to emphasise the importance of good habits, commenting that ‘habit has written far more books than inspiration has’. It is more beneficial and realistic to have an accomplishable routine when setting out on the task of writing. Philip also commented on my admiration for nonsense literature, naming The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster as well as the Alice books of Lewis Carrol, as examples of texts that are stitched together in a logical manner that aids the reader’s immersion.

Returning to Michael Rosen and Philip Pullman at the end of the panel discussion, Michael talked about how Philip had taken us on a roundabout route through story and posed the question:

What does story give us?

You can watch a recording of the event here.

Afterword

 Philip Pullman shared some pages with us afterwards of his work in progress.

These words are not for reproduction or publication outside of this blog (and not to be posted on social media).

Work in progress

Lyra listened. The silence was vast. It was the sort of night when you might hear the planets moving among the stars. She found herself comparing it with the silence in the world of the dead, but that was a closed silence, where nothing was alive, and that world was stale and stuffy, for all its immensity. But the silence in Al-Khan al-Azraq was open, and not quite silence either; there were little scratches, little susurrations and clicks and rasps, none of them louder than a pinch of sand dropped on the skin of a snare drum, and they all meant … Nothing. She remembered a night some years before, in Oxford, when she had thought that everything had a meaning, and had seen how she might understand it. But that was before she’d read Gottfried Brande and Simon Talbot, at a time when Pan was still happy with her.

“You can’t hear them?” said Nur Huda.

She spoke tentatively, anxious that Lyra should believe her, and Lyra saw how young the girl was, and how much she’d suffered, and felt how tightly Nur Huda was still gripping her arm.

“Yes, I can a bit, but I don’t know what they’re saying. Is this the best place to listen to them?”

“It’s better in the market place. This way.”

They had to clamber over the fallen stones and make their way around the broken walls of a basilica before they came to an open area that did look like a market place, a public space to hold meetings: a forum.

The sand underfoot was so fine and white that it might have been newly-milled flour. In the centre of the forum there was a plinth where a statue had once stood. The statue itself lay in three pieces beside it, toppled by an earthquake, perhaps: a bearded god whose sightless eyes glared up at the moon. Lyra and Nur Huda sat on his muscular chest. There was nothing moving in the forum, not a sign of life anywhere, and everything around was drenched in moonlight and frozen in stillness.

Lyra gradually became more aware of the scratchy little susurrus, the scraping of insect claws, the clicks and rustlings like dry leaves in a porcelain bowl being stirred by a breeze. The girl’s arm pressing against hers, her flesh warm in the cold air, made Lyra realise a little of what their dæmons must be feeling, so bare and vulnerable away from the solid comfort of a human body.

She gathered her breath to say something, but Nur Huda whispered “Sssh …”

Lyra could hear no difference in the tiny scratchings and scrapes. She strained to hear better, and tried to focus her ears on whatever was there, and then remembered Giorgio Brabandt telling her how to see the secret commonwealth: You got to look at it sideways, he’d said. Out the corner of your eye. So you gotta think about it out the corner of your mind. It’s there and it en’t, both at the same time.

Of course. She shouldn’t strain at it. She relaxed her mind and her eyes and her ears, and let the night flow in and out of her body. A nimbus of perception spread out around her as if her senses themselves were slowly merging with the city of the moon.

And in the clicks and rasps and scratches she began to hear words:

… you alone … we will talk only to you … what we have to say is not for the world to know …

Then she said into the dark “Who are you? Are you angels?”

… we are beings of another kind …

“Are you part of the secret commonwealth?”

… deeper by far than that … we come from the gulfs between the good numbers …

“The gulfs between … Did I hear you properly?”

No reply.

Philip Pullman

From The Book of Dust, Part 3

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REPRODUCTION OUTSIDE OF THIS BLOG

Many thanks to Philip for this rare glimpse into a ‘work in progress’.

         The Book of Dust, Part 3   

You can find information about the MA Children’s Literature programme at Goldsmiths which has 3 pathways: MA Children’s Literature: Issues and Debates; MA Children’s Literature: Creative Writing Pathway; MA Children’s Literature: Children’s Book Illustration.

Blog by Vicky Macleroy (with panellist reflections by Mette Lindahl-Wise, Alice Penfold, Seraphina Simmons-Bah, Louis Garratt)

At present I am writing a chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, to be published imminently.  It is entitled: ‘Fostering empathy, or presenting refugees as victims, in need of “white saviours”? Reviewing recent middle grade/ young adult children’s literature about refugees.’

For the past 15 years I have been researching children’s literature about the refugee experience, identifying early on the exponential growth in books about this controversial subject as an “emergent genre” (Hope, 2008, pg.296).  By the time of the publication of my book “Children’s Literature about Refugees: A Catalyst in the Classroom” (Hope, 2017) I could include an appendix of 250 titles on the subject published in English in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and since then more titles are continually appearing, with several books achieving considerable notoriety in recent years.  Obviously, the theme is topical, particularly since 2015 with the escalation of conflict in Syria contributing to “the world’s largest refugee crisis in decades” (UNHCR, 2021), but children’s literature does not always reflect reality so closely.

I have looked at how these books are authored, studied in the classroom, mediated by teachers, and read by refugee and non-refugee children alike, and over the years, I have come to recognise that, although not a homogeneous category, much middle grade/ young adult literature of this kind (targeted at 8 – 18 year olds) could well be described as “docu-novels … whose priority is to narrate a social circumstance, or which have a message to tell” (Wilkie- Stibbs, 2008, Pg.12) following an almost formulaic representation of the refugee experience.  More recently, I have begun to notice a trend towards increasingly grim and explicit depictions of the suffering of refugee children, especially when trapped in refugee or detainment camps.

This chapter, therefore, questions the motivations of authors, the messages of such stories, and the images of refugees proffered by the books.  I will be examining in depth three middle grade (8-12)/ young adult (12-18) texts all of which are set mainly or partly in refugee and detainment camps, and been published since 2016, receiving public acclaim – Zana Fraillon’s “The Bone Sparrow” (2016), Elizabeth Laird’s “Welcome to Nowhere” (2017) and Ele Fontain’s “Boy ‘87” (2018).  Drawing on close textual analysis I will ask, controversially, how far should we go in exposing the horrors that children may be experiencing in the current global setting?  Does this foster empathy and a humane response, or do some of these narratives depict refugee children as victims of politically sanitised global disasters, without background explanation of the causes (Vassiloudi, 2019) and in need of “white saviours” to bring them to safety.  I will argue instead that we need a new framework of RefugeeCrit (Strekalova-Hughes, 2019) that promotes criticism and discussion, avoids pity and “othering”, and does not take war, violence and persecution for granted, but examines more closely the complex contexts about conflict leading to flight.

Dr Julia Hope is Head of the MA Children’s Literature programme. You can find information about the MA Children’s Literature programme at Goldsmiths which has 3 pathways:

MA Children’s Literature: Issues and Debates

MA Children’s Literature: Creative Writing Pathway

MA Children’s Literature: Children’s Book Illustration.

Blog by Julia Hope

We are a group of researchers based at the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, at Goldsmiths and UCL BiLingo. We are passionate about multilingualism and language education and want to share our passion with language educators from formal and non-formal educational settings, parents, researchers, policy makers and other interested parties.

The pandemic has brought about unprecedented change and we wish to collectively reflect on how it has affected language education in the UK and beyond. With this objective in mind, we launched a new virtual events series called ‘Re-imagining language education during and after Covid-19: opportunities, challenges and possible futures’.

For our inaugural event, we explored the impact of the pandemic on community/heritage language learning. Community/heritage language learning is at the heart of sustaining the languages, cultures and histories of inheritance of minority ethnic communities for the next generation. It plays a central role in cultivating children’s multilingual capabilities and strengthening their linguistic and cultural identities. Community/heritage schools are thus, important sites for language and culture learning and socialisation.

They are also hubs for communication and social interaction between different generations. These schools are frequently grass-roots initiatives organised and led by ethnolinguistic communities themselves. Because they are a community-based organisation, they may struggle with funding and material resources, but at the same time they are more resourceful, flexible and creative. Social distancing restrictions and school closures has meant that many schools have been forced to suspend their operation or adapt overnight and with little preparation to different forms of online instruction:

• How have schools responded to the shift to online teaching and learning?
• What forms of online provision have they developed?
• In what ways has the digital mediation of teaching and learning transformed pedagogic practices?
• What new roles, relationships and networks has it fostered?
• How has it sustained a sense of community, belonging and wellbeing despite not being able to meet in person?
• What are the gains and what are the losses of online teaching and learning and for whom?
• What issues of inclusivity and social justice do these issues raise?
• What new visions of community languages education are emerging during and after the pandemic?

To address these questions, we invited Ms Cátia Ribeiro Verguete (Deputy Director at Instituto Camões UK for the promotion of Portuguese worldwide and PhD candidate in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London), Ms Marianne Siegfried-Brookes (Deputy Chair at VDSS, the Association of German Saturday Schools UK, Director at the German Academy UK, and German language educator) and Ms Pascale Vassie, OBE (Executive Director at the National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education) to share their personal and professional experiences.

To set the context of the panel discussion, Dr Vally Lytra (Goldsmiths) shared findings from her ongoing research project ‘Making sense of teachers and parents’ experiences with online teaching and learning in the Covid-19 pandemic’ which investigates to what extent and in what ways the pandemic has transformed Greek community language education in Switzerland. The webinar was moderated by Dr Froso Argyri (UCL BiLingo).

Watch the webinar and join the conversation:

Community Heritage Language Learning from Critical Connections on Vimeo.

Group members: Dr Froso Argyri (UCL BiLingo), Dr Jim Andrerson (Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, Goldsmiths), Dr Vally Lytra (Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, Goldsmiths), Dr Merle Mahon (UCL BiLingo), Dr Vicky Macleroy (Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, Goldsmiths), Dr Dina Mehmedbegovic-Smith (UCL BiLingo and hld) and Dr Cristina Ros i Sole (Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, Goldsmiths).

Blog by Vally Lytra

The best Universities are looking for the most academically able students; our school community is full of exceptionally bright students, and our job is to empower them to achieve their potential, knowing that if they do this, nothing will stop them from reaching the highest of heights.

Sam Dobin, 2021

The aim of this study is to uncover the stories of three generations of four White British families who have lived for most of the twentieth century in the same streets in the East London Borough of Newham; to learn about life and how it has changed across the generations, how people have forged their own destiny within challenging circumstances and how they view their future in the area. The study is showcased through an interactive website which highlights the changing nature of work, skills, knowledge, traditions and ways of speaking. The website is designed and illustrated by the artist Zahir Rafiq and photographs are by Chris Kelly. It has been funded by a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship (2017-20).

Like most Londoners, I have been inspired to learn about the extraordinary success of students attending school in one of the poorest and most diverse Boroughs in the capital. In 2021, fifty-five students at Brampton Manor Academy in Newham, East London, have been offered provisional places at Oxford and Cambridge – more than from Eton, Britain’s most famous fee-paying school. I join the Director of their Sixth Form, Sam Dobin, in applauding his students when he says:

This achievement is even more impressive when we learn that only two per cent of the school’s students are of monolingual White British origin. The students are from many countries of the world and for most, English is not their first language.

But what of those not lucky enough to get a place in this school?  Sitting in one of the small terraced houses in the middle of the school’s catchment area is sixteen-year-old Emma. Her mum is looking for a good sixth form College for her daughter, since her secondary school, near Tilbury, doesn’t have one. In fact, the school doesn’t even have a steady supply of excellent teachers or indeed teachers at all; nor reliable heating or other essential equipment like books and computers. When I ask her mum why she doesn’t try to get her daughter a place at the highly successful school around the corner, her reply is telling:

Oh, that school isn’t for the white children around here. It’s only for the black children. The Head doesn’t want our children. It’s not for the likes of us.

What is going on?  Paradoxically, White British families such as Emma’s have been variously accused of being racist or displaying ‘white privilege’ by some academics and politicians. Yet for this small community of White British families remaining in East London, nothing could be further from the truth. Squeezed between suggestions of racism and privilege and accusations of lethargy and violence, the families in the website reveal a tenacity to keep high standards of behaviour as well as mental and technical skills in spite of the current tide being strongly against them.

Blog by Eve Gregory

What is touch? How is touch linked to our sense of identity? How can we use film(making) to explore these ideas?

Film(making) opens up personal, sensuous and collaborative space(s) and horizon(s) for a playful encounter with being of and in this world. That is, a safe space to engage with that which excites us, makes us happy but also with that which scares us, unsettles us, upsets us and helps us explore our multiplicitous selves.

In German we call the act of watching television “fernsehen”. “Fern” means “far” and “sehen”, “to see”. Inspired by film phenomenological, feminist theories and critical pedagogy, I am passionate about the way in which an engagement with film allows us to see further than our own eyes, towards that which we can learn about if we are open to the possibilities, to listen attentively and not be afraid to ask questions. But it also lets us to look inwards, towards ourselves, to explore our own assumptions, misconceptions, prejudices, feelings and thoughts, including those that we might not be able to put into words (yet).

Minto Felix writes about how “to decolonise the curriculum, we have to decolonise ourselves” (2019: n.a.). In the past years, film(making) has become a focal point for me in my work as languages teacher, lecturer in initial teacher education, researcher and filmmaker. My audio-visual filmmaking practice A caressing dialogical encounter (2019) led me on my own personal quest to critically engage with these ideas.

Earlier in 2021, together with some former Goldsmiths PGCE Secondary Languages students, now NQTs, and partnership schools, we published an article in the Association for Language Learning (ALL) Languages Today Magazine (Issue 37) entitled Seven Starting Points to Decolonise the Curriculum, featuring amongst other resources, films to inspire and engage young people. Last year we had made stop-motion films together. Students on this year’s programme learned about the use of film in the languages classroom in a webinar with the educational charity Into Film.

It is our joint responsibility as educators to continuously reflect upon the questions: Who is represented? Who is speaking? Who is silenced? Which stories are explored or silenced? (Kramsch, 2011)? It is also, I feel on us to think about how we can educate our students who perceive today’s world as one in which the digital and the material are deeply interwoven (Pink, Ardèvol and Lanzini, 2016), to responsibly use digital tools and to use them to make our world more inclusive, more just, more equitable, more peaceful. Film(making) helps me critically engage with these ideas. In my work here at Goldsmiths but also as ALL Deputy Honorary Membership Officer, I see it as my responsibility to support languages teachers and students in whichever educational setting they work and learn to engage with these questions and issues. We must tackle the challenges we face collaboratively, together, as a community.

Blog by Dr Judith Rifeser (PGCE, FHEA)

If you have not done so, I highly recommend you read Inspire: Exciting Ways of Teaching Creative Writing published by the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning in November 2020. You can download your free copy here or buy the paperback on Amazon. The anthology was followed by a conference, Inspire (15-16 April 2021) in which some of contributors presented their work. In the anthology, you will find a series of essays, creative responses and meditations on the teaching of creative writing – and much else besides. The aim was to inspire the reader to write imaginatively, and to learn more about creative writing and how to teach it. The editors of this anthology (myself, Emma Brankin and Carinya Sharples) are practising creative writers and teachers of this familiar but possibly contentious subject. Creative writing is seen as a controversial subject for lots of different reasons: in academia because it’s viewed as lacking rigour, in schools because it might facilitate unsavoury views and images, in society as a whole because it’s perceived as a ‘soft’ subject. Watch this hilarious SNL sketch on YouTube which pokes fun at attitudes towards it:

Proud Parents

But people’s attitudes towards it need to change. This is, in part, what we aimed to do by publishing the anthology. The contributors to the anthology have a great deal of ‘real world’ experience of trying to impart our enthusiasm for reading and writing poetry, fiction, drama and creative non-fiction in diverse settings. We see this as an important social and pedagogical mission. We first discussed devising such an anthology in order to showcase some of the great work that the postgraduate students on the MA in Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths have done as part of this programme during the 2019-2020 sessions. Some of their work is in the anthology. What follows are the highlights of their work; an invitation, if you like, to read more!

Lexi Allen offers a concise, original piece based on more detailed research here. She writes of overcoming many barriers – both physical and psychological – to leave excerpts of her creative writing in a number of public settings – trains, libraries, bars and some virtual spaces too. Her work is inspirational because it illustrates how a writer can find a public voice and new resources of confidence in very surprising ways and places. Matilda Rostant shares her important findings for her research, focusing on the sometimes secret writing of fantasy fiction. She shows how there is an unjustified snobbery about genre fiction in many educational settings, and uses ‘autoethnography’ – a research-informed version of autobiography – to unearth some important findings about the connections with genre fiction and one’s own life.

Tanya Royer demonstrates how creative writers can research their unconscious using a series of mindful strategies such as meditation and free writing. Her findings are startling and moving, and reveal how creative writers can guide themselves to pen original pieces and find out about their own unconscious desires if they follow a strict research methodology. In his piece, James Ward admits to being intimidated by what he perceived to be his lack of subject knowledge in the field of creative writing. And so, setting out in a similar way to Tanya, he devised a regime of writing and reading exercises, which built up his confidence and unlocked his creativity. Anyone who has similar issues should read his article. Both James and Tanya (and many other writers here) show the power of what Peter Elbow, the acknowledged champion of this often-criticised way of writing, calls ‘free writing’. Elbow wrote in the 1980s (the edition I quote from is a later edition):

The most effective way I know to improve your writing is to do freewriting exercises regularly. At least three times a week. They are sometimes called ‘automatic writing’, ‘babbling’, or ‘jabbering’ exercises. The idea is to write for 10 minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen-twenty). Don’t stop for anything. Go quickly without rushing.

Never stop to look back, to cross something out, to wonder how to spell something, to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you’re doing. If you can’t think of a word or a spelling, just a squiggle or else write ‘I can’t think of it’. Just put something down. The easiest thing to do is put down whatever is in your mind.

(Elbow, 1998: 3)

Free writing plays an important role as a pedagogical strategy in a number of pieces, but most particularly in James and Tanya’s.

Moving into the modern age, Emma Brankin explores how social media can be used to nurture students’ creative writing. The article is bursting with fascinating and very workable ideas, including the brilliant idea of the ‘auto-complete’ poem, which is a sort of modern day update of Elbow’s free writing concept. Teacher and writer Sara Carroll shows how teenage girls could be guided to be more critical and feminist in their perspectives. She uses free writing as one of many strategies to encourage her female pupils to think about the ways in which girls are conditioned in oppressive ways by a patriarchal society. Juwairiah Mussa shows how free writing and poetry can be used as a form of healing during extremely stressful times. Her pieces about living through lockdown are not only powerful examples of creative writing in themselves but also great models to share with creative writing students. Her reflections on the process of writing the pieces are pedagogical in that they guide the reader into thinking about the ways in which free writing can be healing and also help develop a greater awareness of the social, psychological and economic factors that shape who we are.

Carinya Sharples shares with Juwairiah a similar quest to find new ways of expression in her search to find a ‘third space’ where mixed-race writers can feel free to express themselves and explore their identities. Using various strategies such as ‘heritage objects’ ‘rivers of reading’ and the devising of mixed-race characters – all explained in her article – she reveals how creative writing can liberate and enlighten, and also challenge and disturb. Jake Smith draws upon a rich tradition of experimental writing in order to devise a series of learning activities and lessons that create astounding and thought-provoking writing. He uses experimental reading material as prompts to generate creative writing and offers his own free writing as a possible model to inspire his students.

So to sum up about the pieces by postgraduates on our MA, we could say that there are some common threads: there is a zest to experiment and to use both well-worn and unusual literary forms, from genre fiction to the most esoteric devices; there’s a deep commitment to giving both research and learning activities a serious theoretical underpinning; and, above all, there’s a profound commitment to nurturing playfulness around creative writing.

Blog by Dr Francis Gilbert