THE PETER EFFECT: ENCOURAGING THE WRITING HABITS

THE PETER EFFECT: ENCOURAGING THE WRITING HABITS

AND ATTITUDES OF PRESERVICE TEACHERS

Joan Oldford

Faculty of Education

Preservice teachers need to be enthusiastic, writers so that their engagement in writing may be passed on to their students.

Introduction

In our first week of classes during Fall Semester in Education 3312, a course for preservice teachers of language arts, we engaged in writing poems and publishing them through a literacy practice of 'author's chair' in which students orally shared their poems with the class. A description of the process we followed in composing and publishing our poems 'Where I Come From@ is found in Reading, Writing and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word by Linda Christiansen (2000) and is described more fully in a previous volume of The Morning Watch (Oldford 2003). The second poem written was a haiku. As the prewriting activity for composing haiku poetry, a summary was prepared based on a discussion of its history, mood and form from A. Watts in The Way of Zen (1957). This summary was discussed and the students then composed their poems. A week after the prewriting phase, the students shared their poems in class. The poems were then photocopied and compiled into an anthology entitled Where I Come From and Other Haiku Poetry. To enlarge the reading audience for the poetry writing, we have chosen to present the haiku selections in this volume of The Morning Watch.

One of the objectives of the writing activity was to illustrate how personal and imaginative language purposes can be included for writing in the classroom. As mentioned previously (Oldford, 2003), language use in the classroom needs to provide a balance of purposes that includes personal and imaginative language, if children are to become competent communicators and develop positive concepts of themselves as writers. As well, teachers seeking to teach writing must be concerned with students' attitudes toward writing. When students are intrinsically motivated to engage in writing for its own sake, they write more often and, consequently, attain higher levels of achievement.

The challenge for teachers is to create classroom environments that promote engaged writing. One important way to accomplish this is for the teacher to be a writing model. Teachers become writing models when they share their own writing experiences with students, emphasizing how writing enhances and enriches their lives. Teachers who are engaged and enthusiastic writers themselves are likely to use teaching strategies that foster a love of writing. In summary, teachers= beliefs about writing, their writing attitudes and demonstrations may have a significant effect upon the motivation, self-concepts, attitudes, and engagement levels of their students. In the literature on reading, this kind of influence has been referred to as 'The Peter Effect' (Applegate and Applegate, 2004). >The Peter Effect= in reading refers to the story of the Apostle Peter, who, when asked for money by a beggar, stated that he could not give what he himself did not have (Acts 3:5). When applied to writing, >The Peter Effect= refers to the condition characterizing teachers who are expected to convey an enthusiasm for writing that they do not possess themselves. Studies of 'The Peter Effect' in reading have shown that 54.3% of 195 prospective teachers were classified as unenthusiastic about reading, with only 25.2% reporting unqualified enjoyment of reading (Applegate and Applegate, 2004).

Although we have not conducted a research study, a show of hands in our classrooms indicates that our preservice teachers' liking for writing is much less than it is for reading. Writing may be less popular because it is most often experienced in the context of fulfilling academic and evaluative purposes for learning, a purpose often fraught with dislike, rather than with the enjoyment that often accompanies personal and imaginative writing for wider audiences. To foster a positive attitude towards writing and to provide a context that encourages persistence and success, we engaged in some classroom practices that help us conceive of the classroom as >a community of readers and writers=. Writing poetry, sharing author=s chair and conducting a classroom bookclub are activities that contribute to collaboration among us as students and teacher to help us develop an intrinsic interest in the language arts. Where such classroom contexts can be created, students are more likely to persist, take risks and achieve more than in classrooms where individual achievement is a competitive focus.

Writing Haiku Poetry

The following paragraph contains information about haiku that was discussed in our class during the prewriting phase of the process. It is presented here with our students= and teacher=s attempts to compose haiku poetry.

According to A. Watts in The Way of Zen (1957), by the seventeenth century, Japanese poets had brought Awordless poetry@ to perfection in the poetic form of the haiku. The haiku poem comprises just seventeen syllables, and three lines, commonly displaying five, seven and five syllables, respectively.

The development of the haiku was largely the work of Basho, a Japanese poet, who wrote in the mid-to-late seventeenth century. To write haiku, he said, we need a child=s expression of wonder that returns us to the feeling of seeing our world for the first time. Basho wrote his haiku in the simplest type of Japanese speech, creating a style which, he believed, made it possible for ordinary people to be poets (Watts, 1957).

The haiku poem drops its subject almost as soon as it takes it up, and, to readers unfamiliar with its form, it appears to be more like the beginning or title of a poem than a poem itself. According to Watts, the effect of a good haiku is like a pebble

thrown into the pool of a reader=s or listener=s mind; it can create associations out of the richness of the reader=s or listener's memories, which complement the few words of the poem.

The haiku attempts to see things in their fulness or Asuchness@, without any need for comment; hence, the few words are surrounded by silence. The Japanese refer to this as >sonoBmama= (just as it is or just so). The effect of the empty space or surrounding silence of haiku poetry produces a silence of the mind in which one does not so much 'think about' the poem as 'feel the sensation' which the words evoke, an effect brought about because the poem has said so little.

According to Watts, haiku poems reflect four differing moods: (I) sabi, (ii) wabi, (iii) aware and (iv) yugen. Sabi expresses loneliness in its sense of seeing things happen spontaneously. The quiet thrilling loneliness of sabi is conveyed by the following poems composed in our class.