The Sound and the Sense: Exploring the Collaborative Construction of Free-Form Poetry in the Six-Year-Old Group

Abstract

An exploratory study into the collaborative activity of creating a poem in early years education is reported. A group of 6-year-old children and their teacher making free-form poetry are followed for three consecutive lessons. The analytical interest is wide in scope, from looking at the process in terms of the verbal actions of the children and the teacher, which reveal what difficulties they face and struggle with, to what poetic aspects they cover and try to master. A number of issues and tensions fundamental to learning to make poetry are reported. Finally, some more specific questions for further research are proposed. 157 process empirically. The same could be said about the influential work of Georgia Heard (1987), a practising poet herself working with children and poetry. Still, the influence of Heard will be evident in the present study as well (as will be clarified in the methods section, below). In contrast to the work by these authors, there are voices raised against viewing children's word-creations as poetry (see Sloan, 2001, for an overview of this debate). However, I will not enter into this debate. Instead, I will make an empirical study of what children and teachers do (consider, negotiate, struggle with) when trying to make a collaborative poem (see further, below, in the methods section). This article is structured in the following way. In the next section, I first look at two early views on children and poetic discourse, and then review some more recent research on this issue. This review leads to the present study and why it needs a particular methodological approach, in the form of exploratory research. The methods section of the article consists of three parts. First, I report the background of the present study in terms of the participants, data, and the larger research project on the arts and teachers' in-service education, including Heard's model. Second, I present the theoretical framework for analysing how the activity of poetry-making develops in situ. Third, what is meant by exploratory research is clarified. Then, in the main section of the article, the results are presented in the form of an analysis of excerpts from the empirical data. Finally, in the discussion part, the findings are recapitulated and elaborated, and some questions for further research are suggested. Children and the Poetic Before reviewing recent work on children and poetic discourse, I will discuss the writings of two early scholars with this interest, as a background to this domain of study. Two Early Views on Children and Poetry In his highly influential work on 'Imagination and Creativity in Childhood', Vygotsky ([1930] 2004) considered, among other things, the development of poetic skills. 'Of all the types of creative activity', he argues, 'literary, or verbal, creativity is the most characteristic of school-age children. … Drawing is the typical creative activity in early childhood, especially the preschool period' (p. 42). As the child gets older, drawing is left behind, and its place begins to be take...