Writing is difficult. So much goes into the process. So pardon me for my heavy reliance on Calvin and his friend Hobbes!

I needed ideas. I needed to express myself. I needed to communicate something significant. My writing had a purpose. And I had to make it compelling! After all, this is the concluding piece of the theme Children’s writing.

In this piece, I will summarise what all the blog pieces under the theme were trying to draw our attention to.

Though I set out to work on this piece as another ‘task’ to complete, I realised as I wrote that the many nuances I’d picked up over the past three months stand out starkly. Now, I would not only declare that the act of writing helps us express ourselves and narrate experiences but also that it helps crystalize thoughts and ideas and gives us clarity. This is not just one of those ‘incidental’ benefits of writing. It is at the very heart of writing. Research backs this up. Writing also gives you the satisfaction of communicating what you know or have learnt with people who matter to you.

We have, in the last three months, tried to debunk some of the commonly held misconceptions about Children’s Writing. We have tried to not only reflect on some of the practices we see in our classrooms but have also come to an understanding that writing is a process and not a mere product. It is not about using readily available strategies in the classroom but a way of engaging with the writer and his/her ideas, about re-visiting them, refining them and coming up with the best version of what one could bring about.

Revisiting the blogs helped me realise afresh how insightful each piece is, and you take in all of them as a whole, the learning only gets deeper.

Let us now touch upon some key aspects that were discussed -

• Writing – Skills and/or Tools.
• The ideas of Orality, Literacy and Emergent writing.
• The real purpose of assessments.

Writing – A Set of Skills, A Tool, or Both?

Writing is both - a set of skills that can be taught to any child, with attention to detail and thoughtful planning, and a tool for anybody who wishes to use this medium to express, communicate and make one’s voice heard.

As Jane Sahi points out, the mastery of writing (or ‘copying’) has a symbolic significance: it is recognised as a skill identified with power and status. But when we lose sight of its ability to also function as a tool for empowerment, we risk making writing a more distant ‘dream’. A dream that is somewhere out there and out of reach of most children. It is here that we emphasise that writing is a process which has to be purposeful. We have to go beyond developing it not only as a skill or set of skills. It has become a form of expression with which one has the power to articulate one’s thoughts, ideas and imagination in a coherent and compelling manner.

Orality and Literacy; Emergent writing - they each count –

As Shailaja Menon suggests, it is important that children are given opportunities to listen to, discuss and narrate stories. Orality is necessary but not sufficient for developing writing in children. Children need adequate space to express narratives and stories in writing, and the teacher turns a scribe to aid this process.

And like Jane suggests, young children are sometimes surprised by the magic of hearing their own spoken words when their stories are first written and then shared aloud. The need and right to express fearlessly should never be snatched away from the child by making writing a dreary, tedious exercise.

Squiggles, dots, lines and scribbles need to recognised as children’s ways of ‘writing’. Sneha and Sajitha (LiRIL) showed us how children go through different developmental stages as they learn how to write. Thus, any attempt at putting down ideas on paper should be encouraged. At the same time, guided practice through a well-thought through writing programme is key. Writing should be something every child wants to do: they should be assured of their voice being valued and they should be allowed to write about what resonates with them.

Assessments to Strengthen Writing –

As we’ve observed with Diksha’s reporting of her experience at the schools, teacher beliefs and how they approach a child’s experiment with the act of writing has implications to how it is taught and/or supported/thwarted. We also recognise these are not isolated instances. Rather than placing the blame on the teacher alone, we could turn to studies like LiRIL and its findings which recommend ways in which we could bring about systematic changes to our approach to encourage and assess children’s writing, and to strengthen it.

We also have examples of good practices in the classroom, for instance, as shown by Divi Singh, a teacher. One of the strategies she used in her classroom to teach poetry as a genre of writing, where she introduced the class to the poet and his many books and poems before the specific poem is an idea worth borrowing! She shows us how careful thought and planning can go a long way in encouraging children to write and strengthen it.

The traits approach, as elucidated by Shailaja, takes us beyond teaching conventions of writing a language. It gives us specific descriptors and helps us gauge where a child stands on each of the traits – Ideas, Organisation, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Grammar and Presentation. A careful understanding of this will help encourage children to become effective, persuasive writers, no matter what genre they choose to explore. The fact that the rubrics present specific descriptors suited for Indian languages is a welcome value addition!

Having said this, there are some aspects we did not delve on as much as we’d have liked to. For instance, how do you support writing for children with learning disabilities? How do you support other genres of writing apart from that of a narrative? How do you support writing in a multilingual classroom? I’m sure you would want some issues to be addressed too. Please do write to us and raise these questions. We would also urge you to contribute in ways that you deem fit – you could share your success stories, your thoughts and experiences and samples of your children’s writing you want others to see and get inspired from.

We would like to thank all our contributors – Jane Sahi, Divi Singh, Sneha Subramaniam, Sajitha S (LiRIL) and our team – Shuchi Sinha, Diksha Kharbanda and Dr. Shailaja Menon – for their insights into the world of Children’s Writing. We hope it has been an enriching experience to all of you, just as it has been for us.