Create to learn: creative writing in the classroom

When one thinks of creative writing in the educational field, Gianni Rodari and his Fantasy Grammar (Booket, 2002) automatically come to mind, a book that, beyond prescribing recipes or writing techniques, contains a whole philosophy of work around creativity: any teacher is aware of the fantastic pairing or the creative error and has used them on occasion.

Those activities that are not the usual ones also come to mind, others that the boys and girls do not perceive in the same way and end up coming home saying that they have not taught class; they played today Those tasks that are prepared for special days, events such as World Book Day or simply to fill in dead times.

There are many teachers who enthusiastically prepare a creative writing workshop for their class or center in a more organized and sequenced way. Even from the educational administration, more than decent initiatives are proposed in which teachers are encouraged to participate, such as the Literary Creativity in Andalusia program, now inserted in ComunicA, a broader program, or Writing as Readers, which has launched this course the Ministry of Education of the Canary Islands, to give a few examples, in addition to the occasional creative writing workshops that are offered occasionally, especially in the area of ​​some teacher training centers (CEP).

But an inevitable feeling ends up coming to light: the activities are very good, but there is no time. You have to give the agenda and these other activities —many times conceived as transversal— are difficult to link. In addition to the lack of time, perhaps the teacher also perceives them as activities outside the curriculum. Perhaps, they are also too open tasks in which it is difficult to have control of the class. In that case, why not really fit them into the schedules, so that they really are part of it? Nor are there few references in current legislation to the writing or rewriting of texts by students, based on texts that are seen in class. And this is where the question arises: “Okay, yes, but how?”, as Meirieu would say, in another totally recommendable book: Learn, yes, but how? (Octahedron, 2009). If we start, as an example, from the poem by Raquel Lanseros titled Self-love, asking students how they see themselves in 10 or 20 years can be the start of a learning situation. You can start from the analysis of this poem, what is the subject it deals with, who is the speaker or the lyrical object. Carry out a reading comprehension that can be enriching (why are you talking about holograms?); declaim the poem, thus working on aspects of orality such as tone, volume or diction. Also, of course, work on grammar and spelling, but from the text: what tenses are used in the poem, use of commas, types of sentences…

All this, which could be carried out for a week, would end with the creation, by the students, of their own poem. Here another image arises that, perhaps due to prejudices, is usually held of creative writing: that of the blank page, that these activities are only for a lucky few; that is, a selective and even discriminatory activity. But if you know how to provide an adequate scaffolding for any student (provide different forms of presentation or articulation, for example), all students will be able to make their own poem with greater or lesser solvency, so we will be doing an inclusive rethinking of the activity, following the principles of Universal Design. In this specific case, we can, for example, use the structure of the second stanza so that the students have a starting point and answer the question of the learning situation that we posed at the end of the previous paragraph. Odd verses: while I + verb + noun. Verse pairs: he/she + verb + noun. Final verses: reflection/conclusion to which you arrive or purpose that you consider.

With all this, the intention is that the students, in their diversity, participate in tasks of the type low ground y high ceiling, accessible to all, but with ample possibilities to deepen. Open enough so that they have to make decisions and we promote, incidentally, their personal autonomy, not without the appropriate scaffolding that helps them to sustain themselves and encourages them to push themselves. It is, therefore, a question of reviewing the didactics of language and literature, for which it is necessary to transcend the approaches that start from the historicist perspective where memorization is abused, sometimes without meaning, or that of the contents so that these are means and end at the same time. In techniques such as the one presented or in others such as the creation of calligrams from other avant-garde texts, the elaboration of greguerías or the design of the literary collagein cooperative techniques or through individual proposals, we will be exploring the pleasure of the students to elaborate original artistic messages and, according to each one of their singularities, so that they feel the motivation to write, which after all is a priority objective in the compulsory education.

The axis now is, in short, to make literary training an exclusively active process, for the construction of a personal identity corpus in which experimentation with language is the object and objective, with full didactic consequences in the process of cultural construction. and emotional of each person. And, for this, the previous step is to create with words to be able to learn from our present and future “I”, that “I” that Raquel Lanseros talks about in her poem: a broad formula for constructing the world that surrounds us and that every student has within himself.

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