Nurturing Creativity
Nurturing Creativity
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Now, write a story yourself. (oh… and make it less than 1200 words)
Creative Responses
Rethinking the Creative task
We wanted to
● improve student results on the creative task,
● shift the balance of content (knowledge) and skill development,
● Incorporate more direct teaching and application of the skills for creative writing.
ACTIONS
● explicitly teach creative writing skills
● provide with peer and teacher feedback prior to
assessment
● set the creative task to the end of semester
● task specifically aimed at students demonstrating
an ability to use and analyse the techniques
explored in the texts studied
Findings and future decisions
Mean increased on previous year by 1.31.
(A +6% B + 3% C +7%)
Non submission rates reduced.
Qualitatively, there was a noticeable improvement in the quality of the creative pieces.
As a faculty we decided to continue this focus, but expand to include a visual task in semester 2.
The Rubric
POWER and PROPAGANDA(Unit 1: Communication of Meaning)
Propaganda techniques - visuals and language
Harrison Bergeron (Kurt Vonnegut, 1961)
The Fly (Katherine Mansfield, 1922)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1948)
V For Vendetta ( James McTeigue, 2006)
V for Vendetta, 2006Directed by James McTeigue
Based on the comic by David Lloyd and Alan Moore
Lloyd is quoted as saying:"The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny – and I'm happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way…V for Vendetta is a story about one person against the system.”
The film has been seen by many political groups as an allegory of oppression by government; libertarians and anarchists have used it to promote their beliefs.
Waites, R. (2011) ‘V for Vendetta masks: Who's behind them?’, BBC News Magazine, 20 October. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15359735, (Accessed: 1 July 2020).
Themes
What themes are explored in V for Vendetta?
How is a theme developed? ● The events of the narrative - literal and symbolic● Stylistic elements in a film - mise en scène, cinematography,
editing, sound (setting, plot, symbolism characterisation in a written text)
● Characters and character development ● Style - mood & atmosphere ● Motifs ● References to other films or art forms
Literary Techniques
AllusionsSymbolsMotifs
WHAT THEMES ARE YOU GOING TO EXPLORE IN YOUR CREATIVE
RESPONSE? THINK ABOUT THE TOPICS AND IDEAS WE HAVE LOOKED AT IN CLASS...
Ideas from ‘V’Freedom & AnarchyBigotry The power of symbolsPower & Control PropagandaVendetta & Revenge
Pick four of these ideas and find a symbol to represent it:
● Peace● Freedom● Imprisonment● Power● propaganda● deception● betrayal● control● knowledge ● ignorance
Thinking about symbol and motif to support theme development.
Elements of a narrative
Learning Intention: identify the basic parts of a narrative
GENERATE A NARRATIVE In groups of 4, each student writes a list numbered from 1 -10
Student 1: 10 jobs (eg nurse, policeman etc)
Student 2: 10 problems, fears or anxieties that a person can have (eg fear of heights, low self esteem)
Student 3: 10 things that can go wrong (eg car crash, relationship break up)
Student 4: 10 ways to solve a problem (eg make a plan, work together, obtain large sum of money)
Randomly select 4 numbers to generate a narrative.
Ticking Mind Educational Publishing, 2013, How to Teach Creative Writing - from the how to teach series. Viewed 1 July, 2020.
GENERATE A NARRATIVE Discuss and share your narratives.
1. What happens when you combine these elements?
2. What makes them interesting, funny, thought provoking?
3. What parts must a narrative have?
ThinkWhat parts should a narrative have?
PARTS OF THE NARRATIVE
ORIENTATIONCOMPLICATION
CRISISRESOLUTION
EVALUATIONCODA
How did we get to this end?
Learning intention: understand the importance of using complications in a narrative
What was the chain of events between the beginning and the end of this story?
He sat her down and held her close before telling her the terrible news
She stared at all the money on the table, There there must be hundreds and thousands of dollars in cash. She didn’t know how it had gotten to this point.
Writing Exercises and Prompts. 2020. Writing Exercises and Prompts. [ONLINE] Available at: https://writingexercises.co.uk/index.php. [Accessed 07 July 2020].
Idea #1
Build on a narrative you know already...
What was the worst film you have ever seen?
Ticking Mind Educational Publishing, 2013, How to Teach Creative Writing - from the how to teach series. Viewed 1 July, 2020.
*Bigger, better, badder
*Add something new
*Replace, remove, reorder
*SUBSTITUTE
*COMBINE
*ADAPT
*MODIFY
*PUT to another use
*ELIMINATE
*REVERSE
What else does a narrative need?
Learning Intention: think about ways to make three dimensional characters
Kerin, R., (2018). Developing Writers ACTATE Workshop, Canberra, 1.3.2018.
Write
Share
Write
Share
SHOW DON’T TELL
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. -Anton Chekhov
Text Innovations
Students take sentences form a text and rewrite them, replacing particular parts of speech and
maintaining the structure of the sentence. This can be used to teach noun groups (adjective, noun,
adjectival phrases and clauses) and adverbials (verb, adverb, adverbial phrases) and simple,
compound and complex sentences, nominalisation, active and passive voice and tense as well as
many other grammatical features.
Model a text innovation in context and then students practise it.
They then apply it when creating their own texts.
New Learning Online. 2020. Learning by Design. [ONLINE] Available at: https://newlearningonline.com/learning-by-design/the-knowledge-processes/analysing. [Accessed 1 July 2020].
Describe the character’s personality using their appearance
‘I could picture the smooth oval of Laura’s face, her neatly pinned chignon, the dress she would have been wearing: a shirtwaist with a small rounded collar, in a sober colour – navy blue or steel grey or hospital-corridor green. Penitential colours – less like something she’d chosen to put on than like something she’d been locked up in.’
(The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood p. 4)
Describe the character’s personality using their appearance
‘I could picture the rough square of John’s jaw, his hair slicked down and combed over to one side, stuck down to his head. I could imagine the suit he was wearing: a grey wool double breasted suit, with an official look about it - with a red tie. The tie was a deep red colour, a powerful, rich colour much like the blood of his victims.
(Rachael Radvanyi done with the class)
Describe the character using multiple viewpoints
‘[Mrs. Ramsay] looked at him. He was such a miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He couldn’t play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said. They knew what he liked best – to be forever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr. Ramsay, saying who had won this, who had won that …’
(To the LIghthouse, Virginia Woolf p. 11)
Describe the character using multiple viewpoints
‘Sarah looked at him. He had such an unnerving presence, her mother had said, all melancholy and brooding. He couldn’t converse with the others; he grunted; he mumbled. He was a bland entity, the others had said. They knew what he liked best – to be forever in the background, lurking behind, watching you go about your day.
(Ethan Y 11)
Describe the characters using action
‘I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deep down, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”
(Jazz, Toni Morrison p. 3)
Describe the characters using action
‘I know that man. He used to work at the Woolworths in Chisholm. I know his family too. He used to pack meat in the freezer section. He was fixated on the girl who worked in the bakery, she went to Melbourne when her parents split up. The man, his name is John, followed her to declare his undying love. She laughed at him, leaving him alone on a cold St Kilda street. He came back to Canberra, abandoned his job, pinned up his photographs of her and made his plan for revenge.
(Claire Y 11 )
*Speech - what is distinctive about the character’s speech
*Thinks - what does the character think about?
*Effects on others - how do people respond to this character
*Actions - what is distinctive about this character’s actions?
*Looks - what does this character look like?
Read Write Think. 2020. Characterisation. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson800/Characterization.pdf. [Accessed 1 July 2020].
Using Sensory Language
Learning Intention: Identify ways to incorporate sensory language into your writing
Example #1: Gustatory ImageryOn rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she
would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate
when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had
pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and
rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to
eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste
would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in
her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she
was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled
satisfaction of what was the original food.
(One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez)
Example #2: Auditory Imagery“The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled
along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief
suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the
sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip
into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the
opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of
the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the
wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails,
like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.”
Moby Dick, Herman Mellville (1851).
Example #3: Visual ImageryOutside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street
little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was
shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the
posters that were plastered everywhere. The black mustachioed face gazed down from
every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG
BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into
Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in
the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a
helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and
darted away again with a curving flight.
(1984 by George Orwell)
Example #4: Olfactory Imagery In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to
us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the
stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and
mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp
featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose
from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the
slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed
clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of
onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid
cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.
(Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind)
Example #5: Tactile Imagery “I heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire.” Descriptions of temperature and moisture are tactile imagery. In this case, the rain and Jane’s physical discomfort mirror her dark mood.
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847)
Combining the senses ‘He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white
label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese
rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock,
and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff
was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of
being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment,
however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look
more cheerful.’
(1984 by George Orwell)
Use sensory language in your story...Write your story’s orientation or or a
paragraph describing the setting or action
in your story using sensory language.
Use sensory language in your story...I strode down the dimly lit street taking lengthy paces in sync with the constant
thrumming coming from my headphones. The cool wind slicing right through my thin
cotton shirt causing a shiver to wrack my body. I fastened my pace after taking a quick
glance at my watch, but suddenly something caught my eye. I came to a halt, turning to
face the warm light that filtered through the window of a small cosy shop. The window
mirrored my long dark hair mussed by the wind and a crumpled school shirt and skirt. I
slowly pushed the door open, the faint scent of vanilla hitting my nose. A quiet chiming
filled the store as a small fragile girl flitted out from the shadows. Taking small cautious
steps towards me, her eyes scanned my body hovering over the tattoos that littered
my skin. Her small round face was framed by waist length feathery hair and a long blue
dress which stuck to her body as the wind gushed through the door. She had a worn
out name tag pinned to her dress that read ‘Gracie’.
Alyssa, Year 11
Use sensory language in your story...Tilting the top of her frame, Ava examined the water flowing into her bottle. The bottle
wasn’t anywhere near full, yet the tap had started to lose its force. Slow flowing water
soon became droplets. There was more water flowing out of the bottle than out of the
tap. She panicked and enclosed her hands around the leak feeling and she felt the
liquid seeping through the gaps of her grubby fingers. Using some of the scarce
amounts of water for hygiene would make Ava feel selfish. She let out a deep sigh and
dragged herself to the piece of paper hanging above her bed frame. She drew an
angled line across the four other vertical lines. The days were adding up fast and she
could start to smell the rancid sharpness of her body.
Andrea, Year 11
Use sensory language in your story...They didn’t come in peace, that much was clear. The first creature who emerged was
accompanied by an eruption of lights and noise. They moved rapidly through the mass
of gathered spectators, snatching and cutting people before they could comprehend
what was taking place. The melody of their screams accompanied the rhythm of the
chaos. As bodies hit the floor we came to our senses, dashing inside the houses. To
them, there was no such thing as an obstacle. I watched them darting around at
tremendous speeds scooping up anyone they came into close contact with. It was a
scene from a war film. The seemingly normal street had turned to the scene of a
massacre in a matter of minutes.
Kaleyah, Year 11
Ways to get students to share their workThink pair share
Paired reviews
Collaborative writing tasks
Chat charts
Table group sharing
Speed dating
Did we nurture creativity?Improved student confidence in completing the task
Improved submission rates
Improved quality of writing
Built an ongoing collaborative class culture