Teacher Diary 3

A defining moment in my teaching occurred in my second term at the school.

It was just after morning play. A stranger, an old, long-haired, bearded man on a black bike, container in hand, pushed his cycle on to the school property and up the drive to the school fountain to get some water, then cycled away. I noted this without concern, but two boys were concerned, and interrupted the class to inform them. The class immediately broke into a hubbub. I appreciate now that some of the hubbub was in response to their lack of interest in the lesson, a way of getting out from under. I wondered at the time if I could muster the children back into the lesson on the variations and interpretations of the verb ‘to see’.

‘What did he look like?’ someone in the class called out.

It was all on. Various descriptions were given and disputed. The children took over proceedings and gave their views to those around them. They had their say about his appearance, his reasons for being in the area, and whether they had seen him before. The planned lesson on ‘to see’ was history.

I had been reading Hemingway’s ‘Old Man and the Sea’ so I read again to the children the pages giving a detailed description of the old man.

Many of the children wrote a story about the man. In the afternoon most of the children continued with their story and description. A boy paused from this to take a book out of his desk to look at descriptions of characters; two girls looked through library books for the same reason; one went through to the computer room.

A boy said he found writing a bit difficult, ‘Could I do my description in clay?’

I hesitated; he responded quickly by saying he would do his written description after the clay work. When I allowed him to do his clay work, without insisting on any later obligation to write, it was the defining moment referred to.

A very simple exchange, but one that was highly significant to me.

Why insist on the writing being finished first and, by implication, accede that it was something to be considered irksome by the children; more important, why not allow children to have a significant say in the nature and organisation of their learning.

This boy rolled a ball of red clay into a good consistency and fingered out a good-sized head. This led others to start their heads (in their case, when they had finished their writing.) The stories produced were of reasonable quality. The children asked me to read their writing to them as they worked on their clay heads. On looking back, I realise that already the children were picking up the signal about the degree of control they could have about what they did at school.

Soon twenty or so busts and figures lay drying. I puzzled over how to fire clay work that was solid and therefore liable to cracking. The children settled on gouging out the inside of the heads – I wondered at my failure to come up with such a simple solution. I noted that the clay expressions of the man were very different from their written ones, but this was to be expected, even encouraged.

Some weeks later, on an enervating Friday afternoon, the children’s clay work on heads (they had several goes at them) was lacking in inspiration. That seemed the end of the run. The next week, though, a boy became interested in tribal heads and decided to do one in clay, and the children were away again. This made me appreciate that creative expression needs continual extension to be successfully maintained. After that, some children wanted to do very large tribal heads and decided coiled clay would be better than sculptured ones.

A significant amount of artistic creative work followed. I took some microscopes and hand lenses from the science storage area and gave them to the children to extend the range of artistic possibilities they could take from nature. The children were excited by the beauties of small seeds and insects. These designs were to become regular features on fabric using a variety of forms: screen; cut-paper stencil; large lino blocks; and cut-paper stencil. I was pleased to see that as the children were introduced to a range of art forms, they developed a better context for their central figures – no longer were birds displayed without some sort of environment being included like trees; or caterpillars without, say, grass.

Oil painting was introduced so that texture could be expressed better, for instance, colour could be put on other colour, and many of the things they had done with clay could be used, such as scraping through the colour to the base, or combing and scratching the surface.

Clay pressings were done using a number of objects from nature, as well as ones that were manufactured. Children’s awareness of the quality of textural surfaces developed markedly. Printing lino blocks on to clay surfaces was another development, then interest shifted to bas relief plaque and tile making.

I encouraged the children to transfer techniques from one form to another. The main way I did this was not by direction or even by suggestion, but by providing the children with time to experiment and time to share their discoveries. They found that clay relief work could be decorated with coloured slips; lino blocks could be decorated by hand with coloured inks and printed; dry prints could be tinted with water dyes; crayon, chalk, pastel, sand, and glue could be added to oil paintings. A later development was press mouldings of masks using plaster.

The direction for my teaching and the children’s learning now seemed set. The journey promised to be exciting for us all.