I held a lovely songwriting workshop at the Mitchell Library last week, funded by the Scottish Book Trust. The event was to mark Glasgow's 850th birthday, and we had an hour to cobble together an appropriate song. It occurred to me that some folk might be interested in my approach, since it's a good one which renders a potentially stressful, ludicrously time-limited session into a total joy with near 100% guarantee of a song at the end. I've arrived at it partly in reaction to fifteen years of being asked to teach in an effective and inspiring way to prescribed Learning Intentions, with absurdly limited Success Criteria, and coming to the conclusion that it can't be done. Not by me, at least.
There may be some conscientious teachers reading, shaking their heads at this cavalier attitude: can I reassure them that I recognise the value of the LI/SC approach in certain aspects of the curriculum, and that some children respond very well to such predictable structure in lessons, but I believe it should constitute maybe 10% of the working week (perhaps a little more the further up the school you go) and should be entirely absent from things like poetry, art and music. We're hideously cash-strapped and under-resourced and classrooms, even Primary ones, have become more febrile since covid, and falling back on a tried-and-tested pedagogic approach is understandable, not least because it seems to be the only approach that some Head Teachers and Inspectors understand: but what I learned as a teacher is that the single greatest, most reliable resource at our disposal is the young folk we are teaching, and not just as contributors to the tidiness of the classroom or to spreadsheets of dubious attainment data. When I mustered the nerve to fully trust the kids in guiding a learning sequence, I was literally never disappointed. Everything I could hope to cover would be covered, but with so much more besides: so many unexpected, creative ways to apply new skills, so many unexpected questions the answers to which we needed to find out together. But most importantly, the genuine fizz of enjoyment in the classroom, the embrace of a communal approach where everyone is working towards the same goal, and the chance to know the kids as engaged wee people whose position on the obedience scale is rendered largely irrelevant. The fact is, when kids know we've already decided what they're going to learn in a lesson and how we expect them to express that learning, we remove two essential components of effective learning: namely, agency and discovery.
Kids do not need to be forced to learn: they can't help learning, they are learning machines, and every new experience is an opportunity for new revelations. Schools do need to provide the basic tools of literacy, numeracy, critical thinking and so on, but it needs to be clear that we're doing it in order that kids may fully enjoy what life has to offer and not because you need to pass a test in open competition with all your classmates. If learning is framed not as a chore but as an opportunity to better enjoy the excellent environment we're creating together it happens organically. The means by which one can assess this become less standardised, certainly: but since we do not teach standardised children, perhaps this makes sense.
Anyway - what's this got to do with songwriting? Well, when I arrived at the library I had absolutely no pre-arranged plan for the song. I'd done a wee bit of reading on Glasgow, not being a native, and I'd brought my guitar, but beyond that I expected the song to come entirely from the young Glaswegians themselves. Five young lads came along (without doubt an easier group to freewheel with than a class of 33!) and we were joined by Sarah from the Library. The boys were all between 8 and 12 and at least two of them were already interested in music: one lad brought along a song he'd already written with his dad, which was super! I asked if we could pinch the chorus if we needed to, and he happily agreed, but in the end there was no need.
We started with a blether about Glasgow, me professing my ignorance but noting that, actually, there are as many Glasgows as there are people to see them and what I really wanted to know about was their Glasgows. We chatted about favourite places, favourite Glaswegians, and the landscape and nature to be found in the city. I asked what history they knew, which introduced St. Mungo to the conversation - this led us to the poem on the city's coat of arms:
Here is the tree that never grew
Here is the bird that never flew
Here is the fish that never swam
Here is the bell that never rang
We toyed with combinations of people, places and wildlife, and someone spotted that the poem above contains some animals - could we use them? Well, why not write four verses, one for each line of the poem?
Great!
With a lot of laughter, we arrived at the following magnum opus:
Lewis Capaldi was climbing a tree
on Glasgow Green one day
He bumped into a squirrel
and he heard the beastie say,
“It’s Glasgow’s birthday, Lewis,
perhaps you never knew?
A present for its birthday
is the tree that never grew!
St Enoch and St Mungo
took a stroll across George Square
Hoping for to chase
the manky pigeons that were there!
They wouldn’t fly – they asked them why –
they answered with a coo:
“Because it’s Glasgow’s birthday
we’re the birds that never flew!”
Elaine C. Smith performed her tricks
around the skateboard park
When suddenly, from out the Clyde
she saw a great-white shark!
“Nou whit d’ye think you’re daein here,
ye toothy little bam?”
“I’ve brought a birthday present –
It’s the fish that never swam!”
All the weans of Glasgow
were heading out to school
Waiting for the ding-a-ling
that was the normal rule
But when it didn’t happen,
the children danced and sang,
“The greatest present Glasgow gets –
the bell that never rang!”
This is obviously not a song I'd have written, but I know enough about songwriting to be able to tweak lines to improve scan and rhythm ("Hoping for to chase..." is obviously not an eight-year-old's turn of phrase, but chasing pigeons in George Square was one lad's favourite thing about Glasgow!): I also suggested that we try the song in the key of G for Glasgow, which everyone was happy with. And that was the full extent of my contribution. Other than that the job entailed chatting to five funny, creative wee lads, listening to their ideas, reaching consensus and finishing off with a brand new song. Nobody was told what to do, nobody was ignored, and everyone appreciated everyone else's contributions. With a bit of luck, there are now five wee Glaswegians who've seen songwriting to be fun, collaborative and relatively effortless. I await their debut albums with eagerness!
If anyone reading this thinks they'd like to join a similar event themselves (and it's as fun and effective with adults, by the way!), I can be booked through the Scottish Book Trust's Live Literature programme - don't be shy, this is my job now!
No comments:
Post a Comment