Taking 30 City Kids On A Creative Forest Retreat Was An Invigorating Experience
…And it wasn't just because I fell in a bog – pupils who were shy and reluctant to contribute in the classroom were overflowing with dazzling similes and inventive turns of phrase
- by Jonny Walker
Never in the field of health and safety has so much been owed by so many to so few. Namely, to me.
By this, I mean to say that I fell in a bog during the risk assessment, and duly noted this hazard.
As I heaved my foul-smelling self from the swamp in the New Forest, I thought dutifully of how fortunate it was that I didn’t bring my nine-year-olds down into this experimental quagmire. Thankfully, this pre-visit swamp foible was the only thing to go wrong on our poetry retreat.
On the visit, in which we brought 30 children from four east London schools down to the New Forest for four days of creative wandering, we came to recognise the joy of an authentically rustic residential. Too often, even visits that take you out of the city see you following a set rota of high-ropes, orienteering and raft-building in activity centres. I love each of these activities, but the purpose of our most recent jaunt was different.
Having worked previously with Adisa – a poet who exudes so much creative energy you can charge your iPhone just by leaning it against him – he and I discussed how amazing it would be to take kids out of the city and to set up an actual retreat; some time away to replenish the soul and recuperate the mind by using it well.
We would go back to basics. We would need pencils, paper, antibacterial gel and unbridled curiosity. We would build confidence, friendships, deep thought and an unrelenting output of poetry for four days. We would experiment with the freedoms such a trip could afford us, without whiteboards, PowerPoints and vocabulary lists.
I contacted local schools in Newham until we had four, including my own, that were interested enough to commit. We booked out the whole of the youth hostel in the village of Burley and I spent an enjoyable weekend exploring the nearby forests, making maps, identifying unusual trees and falling in the aforementioned bog.
Now, there are very few primary teachers who do not value creativity at all, but only the most Dadaist among us would give complete creative freedom to an effervescent group of city kids armed with street smarts but very little field logic. With the prospect of pupils getting lost, nettled or attacked by marauding wild pigs, there was much to organise.
Adisa and I planned for almost every waking second of the week, to such an extent that – funnily enough – everything seemed very free and open. We could all just focus on the learning. As far as the kids were concerned, we were walking aimlessly through the ferns and gorse, but actually, the whole thing was being quietly steered from the sides.
The children responded unbelievably well to the visit. Despite it being the first time away from home for many of them, these young poets donned their thermals, sharpened their pencils and forged new friendships. We spent hours out and about in the breath-taking landscapes, dodging darkness and drizzle, telling stories and sharing ideas.
Us teachers had cause to marvel at what the children were able to produce in this strange learning context. Pupils who were shy and reluctant to contribute in the classroom were overflowing with dazzling similes and inventive turns of phrase. As the group gelled, we came to know each other’s personalities through our poetry; one girl amused us with her refusal to eschew the topic of the presidential election:
‘Place your hands on the soil; feel the sorrow of sad Hillary, who failed’.
With almost annoying ease, Adisa’s approach supported pupils to come up with genuinely good poetry. I have spent weeks in class labouring over the precise functions of figurative language with a politely disinterested literacy group, the output of which is either something formulaic and uninspiring, or some nonsense that nearly rhymes (sorry). The magic in the forest wasn’t one of trolls and pixies, but this poet’s ability to share his own work, point at a tree and suddenly cause 30 pencils to begin scribbling meaningful stanzas.
Pupils were selected for the visit based on the combination of pupil premium eligibility and an existing proclivity towards writing. We had introverted diarists, fervent MCs, bum-joke enthusiasts, grandiose thespians, young beatniks and those kids whose minds are so complex they often feel burdened by their thoughts.
I teach two twins, both with brilliant minds that work in different ways. The girl has an astounding sensibility for language; not only a wide vocabulary but a really intricate understanding of the difference between words with similar meanings. The poetry she created on the retreat was in turn visceral, well-crafted and moving.
Her brother has an imagination that, in class, seems harder to tame. If you ask what’s on his mind, he narrates a maelstrom of ideas swirling around his head; the meaning of life, strange dreams and scientific questions all merge into an indecipherable fog of curiosity. Over the course of the week, in his joyfully idiosyncratic way, he committed his thoughts to the page with a new-found clarity.
There was an esoteric and unburdened feeling to our learning. We spent four days without written learning objectives, and I am pleased to report that nobody died as a consequence. The visit cast light on some of our classroom hypocrisies, whereby we encourage pupils to be inventive, yet often mark them punitively when they steer away from the narrow track that we have implicitly planned for them.
We spent our final evening sitting by the log fire, contemplating ways in which we had changed during the retreat, casting our regrets into the flames and sharing our favourite fragments from our notepads.
For me, this is the kind of learning experience that I became a teacher in the hope of finding. Adisa said, ‘Time and time again they would come up with lines that would leave me thinking, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’ I have returned invigorated with a new lease of creative life flowing through my veins.’ And for the pupils? They are still talking about it now, and are pining for a reunion.
Extract from The Life of a Bird by Abia, Y5
I am just a few bird bones And I have hardly any feathers So I don’t want to be this way. I dream back to when I was a chick. I came face to face with a giant, snapping crocodile! A bigger chick distracted it. I don’t want to be this way. So I dream back to when I was inside my egg. I was safe there, protected by my mother. Not knowing that the world was so dangerous. I love being this way. I dream on and on and on about this.
Jonny Walker teaches Y5 and is geography co-ordinator at Elmhurst Primary School, Forest Gate. Check out his blog at jonnywalkerteaching.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter at @jonnywalker_edu.
