Members from London and Norwich Writing Teachers Groups meet for a long overdue catch up… and cake to celebrate 15 years of NWP in the UK.

Despite the brutalism of London’s Barbican Centre with its grey facades and squared lines, our long-overdue meet up in London was relaxed and easy. I have to admit that even though I’ve been an NWP/WT member for over a decade and have people send things through for the website from across the country, I was still a little nervous about meeting people from other groups for the first time. Members from as far afield as Coventry and Kent gradually joined Jeni Smith and me, who had been the first to arrive in the central Barbican Kitchen. It wasn’t long before we were talking about shared experiences in education, of NWP and Writing, of government and Ofsted machinations and all of the usual things that writing teachers talk about. It wasn't long before a discussion began on a recent OECD report into the ‘Three Paradigms of Childhood,’ and not long before Jeni introduced us to Tony Hoagland’s book The Art of Voice.

The OECD report had instilled in our minds a philosophy of a child-centred approach to teaching, a sense of the child becoming and the child having been (i.e. their sense of self, learning and writing from their own experiences). A lot of this already seemed at odds with the previous discussions on government and Ofsted and again I felt comfort and familiarity in the sense of reoccurring themes in our Norwich group: that quite often, as Writing Teachers and Teachers in general, we feel as if we are swimming against the tide and various agendas in order to do our best for those who we educate.

With all of this in mind, and a will and a hope for things to change in favour of child-centricity, we began to write words to get us going; Jeni instructing us towards a rough theme of childhood or foreign words.Proper nouns, brands and short phrases were also encouraged. Immediately I thought of growing up in rural Norfolk and spending part of my childhood in South Wales visiting relatives on my father’s side and, again comfortingly, the words came easily: cwtch, Penarth, Renault 5, Zigzag, LEGO, Little Snoring, amongst others that were entirely unrelated.

A slightly less easy and less comforting task came next: to write continually in spurts of three minutes. Jeni encouraged us with some words and inspiration from NWP favourite Natalie Goldberg: first about breakfast, then a memory of sound, and finally a time when we were in trouble in class. A memory of sound was probably the hardest, or most abstract, for me to write about in these three-minute stints. Instinctively, I reverted to writing about breakfast and, more specifically, Saturday mornings as a child, eating cereal in front of Live and Kicking.

As there was quite a few of us, we didn’t do the usual round of sharing together, but broke off in twos: my partner had recently lost a family member and had found writing about childhood memories difficult. Sharing, therefore, could have been more difficult, especially with a stranger from deepest darkest Norfolk, but somehow the two of us quickly found some common ground and catharsis for my partner in listening to my experiences whilst I tried hard not to drone on.

After that, we were given the freedom to write in longer stints about specific childhood memories within the parameters of primary or secondary schools. Easy enough to write about and share in smaller groups. Meeting outside of our usual Norwich group with people of a broader age range and cultural diversity enabled wider perspectives to be shared and learned from.

Finally, Jeni read us the poem “Let’s Meet Somewhere (Outside of Time and Space)” by Diane Seuss, and we were invited to come up with our own versions of this abstract piece. Having already written about my home town, childhood, food and a few other relatable things made this non-literal task easier. With more confidence and camaraderie in the group, we shared a few lines in front of everyone (if we wanted to), before conversation returned to the day-to-days of teaching and education and our reluctance to conform to schemes and ‘teaching by numbers.’ It’s comforting to know that WT groups up and down the country are as free-thinking and easy going as each other.

-Stephen Pearson-Jacklin.

Pictures to follow (hopefully).