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Red Riding Hood rap (W10.2)

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The Tsunami project: writing narrative poetry (W10.3)

The reading landscape of the twenty-first century includes many forms of text that combine print and image as well as sound and movement. In terms of writing, new forms like blogs, wikis, emails and texts have all combined to transform communications. Young people have grown up in a culture of multimodality, many of them with access to digital technology and aware that they operate in a global culture with television, radio and films in different languages. In the following case study, Sukhvinder Bhoday, the class teacher, and Jane Bednall, a visiting consultant, developed an extended project with 8 and 9 year olds in Elmhurst primary school in the London borough of Newham, which not only took account of the many dimensions of multimodal texts but supported the language development of children whose first language is not English. They were joined by Mrs Hirani, a support teacher for two of the children who have special educational needs. They began by choosing a text that would reflect Newham’s criteria for planning culturally inclusive units of work (see Figure W10.3.1).

The project was based on the scroll book Tsunami (Tara Books) designed by Patua scroll painters Joydeb and Moyna Chitrakar from West Bengal, telling of the terrible tsunami that overtook the region in 2004 and dedicated to those who suffered from it.1 The story of the tragedy is depicted through wood block pictures and a narrative poem. Sukhvinder and Jane aimed to teach explicitly about how different modes work by considering the messages conveyed by the pictures and what the words contribute to the meaning. Through drama activities and the spoken word they also wanted to explore how sound, movement and gesture add to what is being communicated. Sukhvinder and Jane wanted the children to begin to read ‘beyond the literal’, seeking the deeper meanings of texts to develop the sophisticated inference and deduction skills involved in reading the multi-layers of a text like Tsunami.

The Tsunami project

In order to develop children’s language skills, reading and writing, the school has developed and embedded multimodal, culturally inclusive projects or units of work in every year group. In this way it is developing a ‘mainstream model’ of working with bilingual children using and refining inclusive practices that aim to raise achievements in oral and written language. The school feels it is important to recognise the children’s developing bilingualism as a positive force not a ‘problem’ and that creative projects are proven rich areas for language development (Anderson and Chung, 2009). There is also a strong commitment to inclusion so that all school projects are designed to benefit all learners, not only those who speak more than one language.

All the cross-curricular multimodal projects developed in the school are built on key teaching and learning processes of visual literacy, critical literacy, enquiry-based learning and emotional literacy, with creativity at the heart of each project. When starting to plan a project like this, teachers can be anxious that they will not have the time to do all the creative activities but the school has found that cross-curricular projects release more time for learning, which produces work of high quality. In this case, the project allowed Sukhvinder and Jane to develop the skills and content of Literacy, Art and Geography. The children would develop their reading skills through visual and word based texts, their writing, layout and art skills by making a class scroll and Geography skills by learning about earthquakes, tsunamis and the areas hit by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that caused devastation in parts of SE Asia. The work was planned for nine afternoon sessions.

Beginning the project

To make an impact, the Tsunami scroll and an intricately designed Bengali embroidery were hung at the front of the room so that the children would see them as they came in. Sukhvinder explained that the children would be making their own class scroll and poem about a tsunami, using the scroll as a model and inspiration. She asked the children what they thought the purpose of the scrolls might be and they suggested that they might ‘tell you about something that has happened’. Using diagrams and photographs, Sukhvinder told the children that earthquakes are natural disasters that affect people’s lives and explained why they happen. She asked the children what they thought a tsunami is, establishing that it is an underwater earthquake.

Using four pairs of images of the day of the disaster alongside pictures taken five years later when the area had recovered somewhat, Sukhvinder asked the children what was the same or different in the photographs. As part of planning for emotional literacy, she had chosen the later images to give the children a sense of hope in the face of having to confront information about a terrible disaster.

As a drama activity, the whole class recreated the movement of a huge tsunami wave making suggestions about how they could show movement by the way they arranged their bodies. After this, they discussed how they might use group freeze framing to show how tsunamis affect people’s lives. Each group/table was asked to create tableaux body sculpting an underwater earthquake, a giant moving tsunami, people on the beach seeing a wave coming, people trying to get away from the tsunami and drowning people, broken houses and trees. To draw the session to a close, the groups showed their tableaux to the rest of the class, discussing what was happening. Sukhvinder and Jane asked them to bring their sculptures alive and say what the people might be thinking or saying.

The second session was devoted to reading the poem. Sukhvinder had copied three verses of the poem with their accompanying illustrations for each table, one copy per child. She read the whole poem to the class and asked for their thoughts. As they commented, she noted key vocabulary on the digital flipchart. In groups of three the children then read the three verses on their table and annotated them with questions or comments that were shared with the class, supported by the vocabulary available on the flipchart. Sukhvinder and Jane asked them to think about the pictures alongside the verses and to consider whether the images make the words any easier to understand or whether they pose more questions. The session closed by taking suggestions from each table about the meaning of particular verses/ images/ lines/ and the poem as a whole now that the children had been able to look more deeply. As the children offered their questions, Sukhvinder wrote them under headings Vocabulary questions, Meaning questions and Thoughts:

Rich descriptive language

The third session focused on language, aiming to develop rich description and to encourage children to listen attentively to how the words of a poem make meaning. As a starting point, Jane told the class about a previous project, which had used the Bengali poet Jasim Uddin’s saga poem ‘The Field of the Embroidered Quilt’ and images from quilts to create their own poems and artwork. This complex and challenging poem is the story of two young people, Rupa and Shaju, who live in adjacent villages. They fall in love and marry but one day Rupa is involved in a serious fight defending his village against rice thieves. He is unjustly arrested, taken to jail and never returns to his wife. Shaju pines for him and becomes ill. She decides to make a quilt as a tribute to the love for her husband. Shortly after completing the quilt she dies. Rupa is released from prison and when he sees the quilt near Shaju’s grave he dies of grief. Jane and Pavanbir Sarkaria, another teacher from the school, had used this poem, and images of Bengali quilts with a previous class of 8 and 9 year olds who wrote and illustrated poems based on the story. Jane and Sukhvinder shared parts of Jasim Uddin’s poem and some of the poems that the class had written (see Figure W10.3.6) and she and Sukhvinder modelled commenting on examples of rich description they had liked, then asked the children to do the same.

The focus then shifted to children examining artwork carefully. Each table had three artwork images from The Art of Mithila by Yves Vequaud2 and after Jane and Sukhvinder had modelled the kinds of comment that might be made about the use of pattern, colour, and the story/ message the artist might be trying to get across, they discussed a chosen image with their partners, considering:

• What do you see?
• What do you find interesting?
• What colour has the artist used?
• Has the artist shown you how the people are feeling?
• How has the artist used pattern?
• What inspiration will you take for your drawings?
• How can this picture help me create my picture for the tsunami poem?

Some pairs showed their chosen image and shared their thoughts with the rest of the class. In commenting on the image of the man being swallowed by a big fish, Asim said that it reminded him of the story of Yunus in the Koran and he also knew about the story of Jonah and the whale in the Bible. The teachers were very impressed with this link but also found it interesting because the images looked more like Hindu art than Muslim art, then Mrs Hirani explained that there is a story of Vishnu being eaten by a fish in Hindu lore:

The children worked in pairs, reading three chosen verses from Rupa and Shanju  and annotating the poem, guided by prompt questions:

• Pick a sentence that you like and tell your partner why you like it.
• Underline the sentences that tell you about Rupa, Shanju, the village or the wedding.
• What do you notice?
• What pictures are created in your mind?
• Why did the children use questions?
• What do you notice about the descriptive language?

The session ended with the children sharing their thoughts about the language and imagery used and Sukhvinder recorded these comments on the flipchart to return to later.

Developing expression

To consolidate the work on poetic language, the next session concentrated in more detail on the words of the Tsunami poem. Sukhvinder and Jane wanted the children to practise reading aloud with expression and began the session with the children gathered on the carpet listening to them reading the poem aloud. Back in their groups, the children discussed how the adults helped them understand the poem through the use of their voices. In twos and threes, the children took turns to read a verse aloud to each other with expression and two children read their verses to the class, with the teachers praising good aspects of their expressive reading.

Sukhvinder then read through the verses that describe the reporters arriving at the disaster site and modelled how to make a list of the events that happen in these two verses, drawing on both the words and the images. With the extracts they had on their tables, the children made their own lists of events shown in the words and the pictures. Working with one group, and building on the children’s experience of the drama work in the earlier session, the teachers showed how to make a group tableau of the events listed. To end the session, each group made their own tableaux from their lists.

Sukhvinder began the following session with the question: What is the purpose of a poem? Jit suggested: ‘Poems are about feelings’ and Aryan thought that ‘Poems catch the meaning of something’. Sukhvinder showed the children an example of one of the refrains from the poem ‘Tsunami! The swallowing sea!’ and read a few verses aloud, asking the children to listen for the refrain at the end of each verse. Each refrain was different but followed the same structure. In pairs the children created their own refrains:

In order to create the verses for the final scroll, this session was devoted to the children improving their verses. Sukhvinder explained the concept of originality, asking the children if they thought their refrains were original, since some had used either the teachers’ examples or those from the poem. She also wanted the children to recall the work they had done on descriptive language, asking them if their refrains showed the power and destruction of the tsunami. After an opportunity to review what they had written, some children offered:

Guided by examples on the flipchart, the children were asked to consider if they had asked thoughtful questions in the same way that the original poem does, if their poem would move the reader and make the reader understand, and feel for the people affected by the tsunami. Sukhvinder asked: ‘Have you stepped into the shoes of the people in the tsunami?’

With support where needed, the children improved their poems, with early finishers writing a second verse. After the teachers had responded to these, using guide lines each child copied their verse on plain paper. The session ended with children reading their poems aloud to the class with the teachers praising expressive reading and effective imagery.

In the final session the teachers and class assembled the children’s verses and art work on to long scrolls placed on the classroom floor. As children finished their verses or artwork, gradually the collage for the scroll was built up.

Once the children had placed their work on one of the scrolls, they returned to their poems to practise reading aloud so that to end the session children from each group would contribute to a reading of the whole poem whilst the others made tableaux to match the meaning.

Extracts show how the children drew on the original poem to make their own moving narrative poems:

The project ended on a high note celebrating the collective effort of the children in contributing to the class discussions and the artwork and poetry for the scrolls.

A few weeks later, the class presented their work to the whole school and parents to great acclaim for the depth of feeling expressed in the poems, the impressive language of the descriptions and the imaginative artwork.

Notes

1. Patua scrolls are a form of narrative graphic art. Traditionally they would be taken from home to home and presented accompanied by song. As they travelled, the singers would pick up news and carry it on to their next destination. See http://www.tarabooks.com/books/books/adults/picture-books--visual-arts/tsunami/ for a description of how the scrolls are made and the words of the English version scroll accompanied song in Bengali. Founded in 1994, Tara Books is an independent publisher of picture books for adults and children based in Chennai, South India. A collective of dedicated writers, designers and artists who strive for a union of fine form with rich content who publish a select list that straddles diverse genres, offering readers unusual and rare voices in art and literature.
2. Mithila is in North East India. The Mithila women paint scenes from the Ramayana in vivid colours. The pictures form part of family ceremonies and village festivals.

References

Anderson, J. and Chung, Y-C (2010) Community languages, the arts and transformative pedagogy, Race Equality Teaching. 28 (3) pp. 17–20. Available on: http://research.gold.ac.uk/4909/1/ED_Anderson_2010a.pdf

Bednall, J., Culora, N. and Fell, S. (2008) Developing a Culturally Inclusive Curriculum. Mantra Lingua. ISBN 9781846113383.

Chitrakar,J. and Chitrakar,M. (2008) Tsunami. Chennai: Tara Books.

Vequaud, Y. (1977) The Art of Mithila. London: Thames Hudson.

An account of this project, written by Sukhvinder Bhoday and Jane Bednall, was published in English 4–11 (59) Spring, 2017 pp.13–16.