PER-OLOF ERIXON
5. THE PRIVATE AND THE PUBLIC
It became clear that the students were very positive about The Garden of Thought project, even if some were more enthusiastic than others. This is also the case when it comes to the issue of privacy. Superficially, students seem to think that it is a good thing to introduce private things into schooling, but after some thought it becomes evident that students are not unconditional about this.
Tamora describes the relation between students and teachers today as quite
“tight”. Students and teachers have a close relationship with each other in today’s Swedish upper secondary school. This is positive, she maintain:
Man måste ju kunna diskutera med en lärare och lärare måste samtidigt kunna ha förstå- else för en elev när han kanske inte har lyckats så bra. Jag tycker det är bra med en tight relation. Det är positivt.
[You must be able to discuss with a teacher and the teacher must at the same time be able to understand when a student perhaps does not manage that well. I think it is a good thing having a tight relationship. It is positive.]
As a student, she continues, you are prepared to give of your best if you get a re- sponse. If not, you withdraw into yourself. The student’s attitude appears to depend much on the teacher. If the aim is to elicit emotional poems, teachers need to be more intimate themselves. If a teacher just “stands there”, as Tamora expresses it, there will be no “deep” poems. There are certainly differences between poems, and this depends much on the teacher, Tamora claims.
According to Tamora most students seem not to be aware of how “serious” many poems are. Since poems within the project are sent in anonymously, neither school friends nor teachers know or seem to care. It sounds quite mean, she says, but that is the way it is.
Tamora also considers that certain themes are taboo, for example suicide poems or poems about homosexuality or racist poems. Where poems about suicide and ho- mosexuality are concerned, self-censorship is active. In regard to racist poems, teachers censor what should be published or not.
Thaisa thinks that students feel the same whether poems are written at school or in free time. Perhaps, she says, students are more careful when they write in school;
they are more aware of how and what they write. They work harder with the poems;
they think more about what words to choose etc.
Hemma kan man skriva och om man inte tycker om dikten kan man slänga den. I skolan ska man själv tycka om det också. Jag tror man kan vara lika ärlig och privat i skolan som på fritiden.
[At home you can write and if you don’t like the poem you can throw it away. In school you should also like it. I think you can be as honest and private in school as in your free time.]
Therefore, she finds it positive to incorporate some parts of her private life in ordi- nary school activities. She finds this more interesting than, as she expresses it, “do- ing grammar all the time”. Students get to know themselves better as well as their school friends.
Emotions, Thaisa suggests, should indeed be incorporated into school activities.
Privacy and school are “intertwined”. It is, however, not necessarily so that a good relationship with a teacher automatically leads to an honest poem. It depends on the person who writes the poem as well, Thaisa says.
When Titania writes a poem, she wants other people to read it. She wants to share it with others in order to know how they perceive different things. It is a natu- ral thing for her to do, she explains. She argues, however, that students do not write poems at school as private as those written at home.
Jag tror inte det handlar om vad man skriver om, utan det är väl mer hur du skriver och vad du säger. För det är ju mycket du kan säga om det mesta. Och det är ju bara hur per- sonlig prägel man sätter på det egentligen och hur utelämnande man är. Det är ju som lättare, de flesta dikter, det som är skönt när man har skrivit, men man kan låta dom lig- ga ett tag. Så kan man läsa igenom den sen och okej, det var så och så då. Då är det som lugnt. Då kanske det inte alls är så längre. /.../ En personlig dikt är lättare att lämna ifrån sig om man har distans till den. Innan man har fått distans känns det som fortfa- rande att det ligger för nära och säger för mycket om en själv.
[I don’t think it is a matter of what you write about, rather how you write and what you say. Because, there are a lot of things you could say about many things. And it is just a matter of how personal you are and what you leave out. It is like easier, most poems, it is good when you have written, but you can leave them for a while. So you can read it through later and ok, it was like that then. It is cool. Then it is perhaps not like that anymore./.../ A personal poem is easier to hand over if you have a distance. Before you have distance there is still a feeling that it is too close and that it says too much about you.]
Titania claims that she feels more sensitive when she has just finished a poem. After a while, it matters less. Therefore it is not a matter of what you write about in your poem, but rather how, she says. The crucial thing is the personal mark that is set on the poem.
It is easier to hand over a personal poem, according to Titania if students are able to see the poem in perspective. Otherwise, it is too close and it reveals too much.
There has to be a period of time between writing a poem and its publication. It is only after a couple of months, Titania suggests, that a poem is “ready” to be pub- lished.
One of the girls studying on a vocational program, Valeria, expresses enjoyment at writing poems in school. Then you learn how people feel, she says. There is a
“chance” that you feel less alone when you get the opportunity to read other peo- ple’s poems. In addition to giving students the opportunity to express themselves, poetry writing in school also gives the teachers an image of how students think.
Valeria claims that there are certain differences between writing poems at home and school. At school, students tend to write more generally; they are happy or sad, in love or not in love etc. At home, students might write about certain experiences, such as their experience of bullying. Apart from bullying, she says, writing about serious issues such as racism and phobia, homosexuality, is not very appealing.
When it comes to content and form, Volumnia, another girl on a vocational pro- gram, does not think that there are differences between poems written in school and poems written in free time. You can always be anonymous, she says. Her best friends have already read her poems, as have people that she does not know or who do not know her, she says.
Violenta claims that she is never satisfied with poems that have been selected for publications. She finds those poems too personal. “You certainly do not want to re- veal things to people you do not know”. In that respect The Garden of Thought was terrible for her. She argued that if students write good poems from their hearts and manage to get them accepted for a poetry collection, it is “hard”. In school she would rather not write ‘mean’ poems or “suicidal” poems, or even love poems. ‘It is to leave out too much’, she says. Violenta continues:
När man skriver för nöjes skull, privat, tänker man inte på om det är rätt till exempel.
Det blir lätt att man blir lite manisk när man ska skriva för skolan, men i skolan sätts ju betyg och därför vill man att det ska se bra ut! Man kan därför sitta och jobba länge med en och samma dikt.
[When you write for pleasure, you are not aware if the content and form are right. You can easily get “manic” from writing poems in school. In school you get grades and therefore you want it to look all right. You therefore work harder with a poem in school.]
One of the three boys, Benvolio, has a more neutral attitude to the project. He says that he cannot write about love because he is not on the “front line” when it comes to girls. “You must have experienced it before you write about it”, he claims. Even if he was lucky enough to be in the front line, he thinks that he would probably not write love poems in school. His strategy is to be “partly serious” about the project.
His only poem is therefore about a motor scooter.
Brandon occasionally writes poems in his free time. Poetry writing is a means of self-expression. The project, he suggests, could help students to see that poetry writ- ing is not difficult. It is just a matter of practice. It is clear, he suggests, “that you are more private in those poems you write in your free time.” At the same time he places restrictions on himself when he writes poems in school.
Jag försöker inte att vara så djup som möjligt. Man kan få intrycket av dikter att de ska vara väldigt djupa och känslomässiga.
[I try not to be too deep as is possible. You easily get the impression that poems should be deep and sensitive.]
Both Brandon and Benvolio imply that they are not attracted to writing “deep” or serious poems. The best thing about the project, according to Benvolio, is that stu- dents get an opportunity to practise writing, not that they share their thoughts and feelings with other people.
To Bates, however, it is clear that poem writing is deeply personal. He argues that it is up to each individual how “deep” he/she wants to go. He finds anonymity helpful. It is then possible for students to write better poems and perhaps more hon- est poems. “There are certain things that you do not write about when you write po- ems in school”. He suggests that someone who is a little bit more retiring than he is, may find it hard to express himself or herself in the form of a poem.
6. SUMMARY
Students’ experiences from a project in the north of Sweden, The Garden of Thought, provide the basis for this chapter. A key issue is what attitudes students take to writing poems, in their free time as compared to in school.
The study confirms that love is an important subject for poetry. The girls are in general more positive about the project. The boys are more expectant. The more academic girls tend to focus on the formal side of poetry. Girls with a vocational orientation, in contrast, tend to focus on poetry and its expressiveness.
The students generally indicate that there is a difference between writing poetry in school and in their free time, and in particular that there are subjects which are not acceptable when writing poetry in school, such as suicide, sexuality and racism.
Writing poetry in school also involves more effort.
Nevertheless, both girls and boys seem positive about introducing private issues into school life, but they have different perspectives and stress different things. Aca- demic girls stress the relationship between teachers and students, and place the re- sponsibility on teachers for the quality of student poetry. According to the students’, their openness implies that teachers are also prepared to draw on their private ex- periences. Lack of intimacy in school, according to this point of view, is dependant not primarily on the students’, but rather on the teachers’ lack of will.
Girls on vocational programs draw more on their own experiences such as if they are “in love” or if they are sorry about something etc. Poetry writing in school tends to be more private for these girls. Boys distance themselves from poetry projects such as The Garden of Thought. They seem less willing to expose their inner feel- ings in poetry and not being “serious” is one aspect of this.
What conclusions can be drawn from these findings? Are poetry projects like The Garden of Thought a potential for teaching about writing in school? It is clear that schools could become an arena where writing poetry is a common part of mother-tongue teaching. At the same time there are evident differences between writing in the privacy of the home and in school. Students, it seems, develop a range of strategies to deal with this.
We have seen that students already when they start at upper secondary school, or even earlier, are socialized into a culture that we may call the culture of The Garden of Thought. The students know well before they become involved into the project in
their second year what they are expected to do; what types of themes are available, what they are expected to write about and not least what they are not supposed to write about.
There are consequently “presuppositions” in those themes that are presented to the students each year. As members of a communicative community they are ex- pected to agree to them. If students do not accept these “presuppositions”, they do not participate in the activity.
Participation in the project should partly be regarded as a ritual activity. Sisters, brothers and friends have participated and therefore certain individuals are expected to participate. There is no other way. Students simultaneously perform ritual action and strategic actions. They know that the project is a part of a course, which affects their grades. From another perspective the students also perform a communicative action – they want to communicate.
Students thus participate in different actions when they participate in The Garden of Though. They communicate not only with their classmates and teachers. Some of the poems are published in a book. Therefore the students also strive to communi- cate with an anonymous audience.
The Garden of Thought is oriented towards communication. Students are ex- pected to communicate with other students, teachers and an audience outside the school. Participation also involves other sorts of actions, ritual as well as strategic.
Generally these are the circumstances in which students participate in the project, even if they are not totally aware of this.
The students make it clear that they each have a special place of their own, to which nobody has access, least of all the teachers. Despite this they seem willing, to some extent, to tear down existing divisions between the private and the public, of which school is a part.
Similar projects in other schools might therefore use expressive writing as a po- tential for teaching writing in school. We have, however, to accept that genuine communication between students may be less easy to establish. As a result of pro- jects like The Garden of Thought ritual activities are expressed alongside elements of communication. That is certainly a step in the right direction.
AUTHOR’ S NOTE
Thanks to the students interviewed: Brandon, Bates, Benvolio, Tamora, Thaisa, Ti- tania, Valeria, Viola, Violenta, Virgilia, and Volumnia.