Activating our Students Creative Voices

Screeds have been written on this fascinating topic so here is some more........

In working with teenagers, I have found that transitioning from writing plays for students to writing collaboratively with them can animate their own creative process and mine in very substantial and enjoyable ways. The dialogue between ourselves and the characters we create forges trust, lots of humour and sensitises us to how we can know human beings, so attuning us to the murmurs and whispers that every creative soul has burbling away underground. Through the active rhythm of working hands on, creating and developing something for performance, or a particular practical use, we are stimulating an appreciation of the activity and outcome of crafting, potentially sparking both the inspiration and discipline that are required in what the poets call ' a shaping joy'. Quality becomes for our young students a tangible aesthetic and not a mere abstract concept or the name of a type of chocolate.

There are numerous ways to spark the creative and make our teenagers more aware of the creativity within themselves and how generative we can be. Our thoughts are shaped through metaphor, so images and stories of creative lives offer them great inspiration. For example, I use the lightning rod image, the invention of one of the most prolific creative minds ever, that great First American, Benjamin Franklin. After we had studied his life I drew an image of the lightning rod and frequently alluded to it in our writing classes, as an example of how thought and the creative can be grounded and stewarded. Clouds gather in the heavens, analogous to random ideas. Dense thunder clouds collide, producing thunder and lightning, the Sturm and Drang of potent and combustible fire. The rod, as in real life, catches the electricity and directs it to the ground where no harm is done. We too, as creative minds, can channel Promethean Fire and bring it to Earth where body based skills enable our dexterity, our inventive minds and hearts, to find means and modes for our human ingenuity.

The 18c offers a very rich period for this crossing over from a rhythm of life where a world fuelled by wood, wind and water, of cottage industry, the homespun and the homemade, was increasingly replaced by a the world of coal, steam and iron, a modern world of manufacturing. The crucible of the late 18c where James Watt and Benjamin Franklin showed their constant inventive genius helped to change the world. While in the same period, William Blake sang his songs of prophetic poetry, fulfilling the role of another true creative voice, warning us what revolutions were being unleashed upon our world at the possible expense of our humanity. We can ask where the creative ingenuity of women is in this time and where their inventiveness was channelled. In literature a woman might show her insights, private thoughts and imagination. Not long after Mary Wollstencraft was to bring her own explorations of our human machinations and our obsessions with progress in the story of Frankenstein

Benjamin Franklin remains a remarkable and heroic character for our time, an example of a human being concerned with the common good and equality for all human brethren. All his inventions served a practical need and a simple aesthetic. By contrast, across the Atlantic in England, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, patents and monopolies became a political issue and pirating and industrial espionage was rife. James Watt is instructive on what militates against the creative for him. There is nothing more foolish than inventing! he expostulated, so stressful was this stealing of ideas and the cut throat world of patenting. Franklin who was already wealthy, thanks to the success of his printing press, eschewed patents for his inventions placing them in the public domain. These gifts included bifocals, improved street lamps, the Franklin stove, flippers and the glass harmonica, to name a few. Generosity of spirit which he embodied so fully, is often a characteristic of true creativity. For we discover in the creative freely given and received, a sense of abundance in how ideas and inventions arrive and can be shared. Our own age mirrors this in open source aspects of the net and the patronage of current day inventors such as Dyson offering grants and scholarships to young, aspiring, inventive minds.

The creative can reclaim our humanity. It puts us in touch with our feeling life, our mental and spiritual life and, potentially, the moral where the laws of nature teach us about both boundary and the infinite. No more than the arts are a decoration or an ornament, so the creative is not just useful as another job skill for our CV. but rather, vital for connecting us to ourselves and each other. The field of drama shows this very clearly, in the cultivation of give and take, the listening ear for what works like music, transitions, rising and falling, contrasts, climaxes and resolutions of narrative and the empathy and eye involved in reading and sharing human foibles and strengths.

True education happens an environment where teachers can work cooperatively to foster the creative in their students. Political manipulation and prescription rather than safeguarding our students, erodes the spirit of the teachers and in turn the potential of their students' learning. Blake again has much to say about the binding with briars, the joys and desires of young people, threatened then as they are today, by the deadening manacles of a stillborn and oppressive authority. The recovery of what makes us human and the connection to our creative that in turn, connects us to the wider Creation itself is discovered and celebrated through humour, language, metaphor, ideas, fallow time, ref James Watt and Archimedes, risk taking, a sense of freedom, in failing and above all the sense of wonder.

Here is a short extract from a play collaboratively written with fourteen year olds, based on a true tale of industrial espionage and the life of James Watt, inventor of the modern steam engine.

            (France 1779 in the tavern Les Trois Cochons Ivres)

Monsieur Gaspar Prony: a French engineer
Jacques: a manservant to the Mayor of Chaillot

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Prony: Please, tell the mayor that in order to secure his water works at Chaillot, the first and foremost of their kind, mark you, I will need to undertake a little trip to scout out, you understand, the new inventions of Watt.

Jacques: (slight pause) What Monsieur Prony?

Prony: Precisely! Watt!

Jacques: Precisely what Monsieur Prony?

Prony: James Watt! He is a Scot! He now resides in the heart of England in the town of Smeth..wick near Bir-ming-'am. where he dabbles in...... (looks around surreptitiously)...steam machines.  (puffing up) Your master, the Mayor of Chaillot, understands of course that we French with our magnificent (pompous gesture) heritage of reason, science and natural philosophy may have more than a few things to teach this Scot who lives and trades in England. 

Jacques: Yes, Monsieur Prony, I understand perfectly. It does sound very interesting. I know my master the Mayor is indeed very enthusiastic to have a waterworks powered by steam in Chaillot.

Prony: (nervous and then enthusiastic) This project is more than interesting! It is literally ground breaking my friend. It is both.....cutting edge and visionary! We would be making a mark for notre patrie, pour toute la France! Why to combine this with the French genius for both engineering and science (clasps his hands in joy and proud triumph) well.....how far could it go? But first, we need to take this little trip across La Manche.

Jacques: Yes M'sieu Prony. Undercover M'sieu Prony? We have just gone to war with England have we not Monsieur?

Prony: S'il vous plait! (sshing and spraying Jacques as looking around nervously despite his own recent volume) Not so vulgar! Under cover? No! No! My good friend this will merely be a discreet affair. A little investigation. All above board.

Jacques: Discreet quite, quite so. (ironically) My master says Monsieur would you please come to his house in Chaillot tomorrow morning at ten? He has some important contacts he wishes you to meet.

Prony: Important? Are we perchance talking patronage? L' Academe des Sciences de Paris perhaps? Or are we talking.....his Majesty... King Louis? He has patronised my work before you know and thought very highly of it.

Jacques: I am not privy to the details Monsieur Prony regarding patronage or where or how he project may be funded but there are two brothers he wishes you to meet.

Prony: What?

Jacques: No, not Watt! Perrier! Les freres Perrier. Can I tell the mayor you will be there?....
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