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Explorative Writing About Interior Spaces Location: Pearsontown Elementary School, Durham, North Carolina Teacher: Cathy Fine Artist: Virginia Holman Grade: Fifth Writer Virginia Holman worked with teacher Cathy Fine’s class of twenty-five fifth-graders for two weeks, visiting the class every day for an hour and a half. In this project the students wrote about their lives through the interior spaces they inhabited, particularly their homes. They talked about perspective, point of view, emotional perception, and the translation of words into images and vice versa. Photography and painting were also used as tools in the act of “seeing” their lives and feelings. Virginia Holman: As a writer, I have always had a deep fascination with houses and the spaces inside them. This project allowed the students and myself to explore their experiences of different interior spaces. I found inspiration for this project in the work of Dr. Françoise Minkowska, who, after World War II, organized a traveling exhibit of Polish and Jewish children’s drawing of the exterior of houses. The children wrote about their own homes and the homes of others, about their favorite rooms and least favorite rooms, and about interior spaces apart from their homes that they liked and disliked. We did exercises examining how state of mind affects our perceptions. For instance, having a character describe the same interior setting in different emotional states. The students quickly learned how mood and attitude affect their and others’ vision of the world, an awareness in adolescence of great importance. The writing showed a remarkable level of originality. Through the theme of interior spaces the students forsook the homogeneous, clichéd stories of television and began to explore the value of their own narratives. In the context of a group the children noticed and were comforted by the similarities in their lives and began to appreciate and respect their differences. In conjunction with the writing we also worked on reading comprehension using art. A successful exercise involved reading poems inspired by paintings of houses. The students then painted their own responses to a poem. After they finished their paintings they looked at the original art that inspired the poem. This led to revealing discussions of what we “see” in writing and how to create what we see with words. Cathy Fine: This project introduced radical new ways of learning to my class and pushed the students in directions they are rarely encouraged to go. In addition, collaborating with Virginia gave me a fresh perspective on methods and intent of instruction. By clearly introducing the day’s lesson and giving a model of our expectations, we were able to let the class loose on the assignment. This led to amazing linguistic agility in the students. When asked to describe red to a blind person, Stephen wrote, “Red sounds like fire, smells like roses, tastes like apples, and feels like paint.” By the end of the two-week project my folder was stuffed with two hundred pieces of work. The success of this project hinged on the relationship Virginia and I were able to establish. I shared with Virginia my experience with the class and provided student assessments so she would be better able to modify her ideas to suit the needs of the class. She brought an expertise to the writing and a fresh vision to the room. When I was exasperated with a student, she was able to step in, seize the moment, and draw incredible writing from him or her. Brandon wrote, ”My hands are kind of like broken. I try, but they think I’m lying.” Shamecka didn’t want to write, but Virginia turned her recalcitrance into a subject, a reason to write. I hate poetry It stinks and it’s weird. Sometime it is hard to write Long pages about nothing. I am not scared of poetry I just don’t like to write it. Sometimes it’s boring, and I just don’t know if there is a reason why. Once Virginia had earned their trust by unconditionally accepting what they had to offer, they were ready to take risks with some of the exercises. Later Shamecka wrote a haiku describing her car: The car is so warm It smells like ripe strawberries And sounds like the ocean This project instilled a sense of purpose in the children. By focusing on interior spaces the students were freed to explore portions of their lives through the impartiality of inanimate spaces. Without judgments or precedents, the theme offered a conduit for intense introspection. The students were able to lay claim to their lives through a medium they often perceive as a barrier to expression and independence. Writing had become a portal. In the Classroom • Use a neutral subject as the writing theme, one which is universal to all the students and which is relatively free of active preconceptions. Virginia introduced interior spaces to her class as something they all had deep feelings about, and which functioned as an unspoken symbols in their lives, but which they may have paid little attention to. • Have the students paint their responses to a piece of writing. Virginia used poems written about artists and the cityscapes they painted as a stimulus for “seeing.” In one exercise, she read Edward Hirsch’s poem “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad Tracks.” She then had the students make paintings from the description in the poem. Concentrating on both the details and the overall tone, the students translated the poem back into an image. • Ask the students to write poems in a variety of forms. In this project, numerous poetic forms were taught: pantoums, villanelles, haiku, and grab-bag poems. Grab-bag or found poems can be particularly successful. Write descriptive words or phrases on individual pieces of paper and place them in a bag. Have the students draw, unseen, a specific number of them. A poem is then made from these words with simple verbs, articles, and prepositions added as needed for proper syntax. This gives students all the emotion or action they need to create a unique pattern. For example, Sean, one of Ms. Fine’s fifth-graders, put his words together like this: “The hushed silence was broken by his television singing about lightning bugs.” • Have the students take photographs of special rooms or spaces to use as a starting point for the writing. The images serve as confirmation of memory and also frame the feelings contained in a place. Purple tastes like grapes on a hot summer day, grape soda watering your mouth as you sweat in a lawn chair, like grape Gatorade after you’ve played a baseball game. Purple smells like cranberries for Thanksgiving dinner, silk in the winter, and the back of a book cover. Purple feels smooth like skin, cold like a tile floor, flat like a wall. Purple sounds like kids laughing and playing, like the purring of a cat, talking seriously about very important parent stuff. —Jeffery Smith Other Ideas Ask the students to imagine their response to a contemporary event or situation. For instance, have the students read a short story about genocide in Rwanda and then ask them to write a play, script a film, or freestyle a rap about it. Encourage the students to try speaking in another voice, but to draw heavily on their own experiences. Their own lives are what they know best and what will both infuse the piece with energy and involve the children in its creation.  banner image: Photograph by Wendy Ewald. From Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children, 1969–1999 by Wendy Ewald. top |
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