What a privilege to present and listen to a plethora of thought provoking humans at yesterdays International English Education Symposium at Monash University. Gathering academics and progressive teachers in the field of writing and English Education, the symposium titled ‘Write Now: teaching writing in high stakes times’ promoted focused, active dialogue among English educators from across Australia and internationally about the teaching of writing.

I spoke to my abstract ‘Ethical Hedonism: vitalising pleasure in writing processes’ and my work as both a writer and educator. Please see below:

ABSTRACT:

Pleasure is a dirty word; particularly if you gift wrap it the way modern consumerism does or deliver it with an assessment rubric as in the case of the Australian Education System. As teachers, we know the pained expressions our students give us when they turn the pages of their unit booklet to see their ‘end point’ – the boxes they must come to tick; and we too hunch our shoulders in this moment, recognising under fluorescent lights and amongst dead furniture that we will need to mark, grade and throw back to our students a ‘value’ for their ‘efforts’ over the ten-week course.

Though research states that a great deal of English teachers are not writers nor have participated in any creative writing workshops since they themselves were in High School, there is a necessity for us to consider what circumstances bring about pleasure if we are to get our students to find an appreciation for writing. Pleasure enough for instance, to incite in our students the same level of entertainment they delight in through cinema, gaming, books and the theatre for their own storytelling processes.

Pleasure here can become about elongated experiences of time… that curiously disappear simultaneously. The aforementioned ‘dead’ aesthetics of the very classroom we are asking our students to create in …can become a rich source of stimulus akin to Umberto Eco’s reflections on monsters and ‘the ugly’ in, On Beauty. So too can we nourish states of play, ‘prioritising movement or diversion’ to ‘lean towards the imaginative, sometimes the outright rebellious’ as our own Julienne van Loon writes in ‘The Thinking Woman’.

The trick here is of course to do our research and spend some time thinking on what brings us pleasure as much as what brings about states of rapture and gratification in our students. For me, as a writer, it is a 5am start, before neighbours wake; and a large A3 notebook with Copic Markers and a pen that seems to improve my handwriting. This I discovered the hard way, burning out in my 5th year of teaching noting that my arts practice had been swallowed by all the astounding array of negatives research and staff room banter backs up on the teaching profession. I have always been more creative in the morning and so I simply set my alarm for one hour earlier.

In this ritual, I recognised how beautiful my home was …in comparison to the spaces I taught in and wondered how we expected students to imagine when faced with blue tacked walls and stained white boards. As 5am suddenly became a frantic, ‘I should have left 20 minutes ago’ …I giggled on route to school that my time might fly …and that I might be the rebellious artist I want my students to become.

From here I have spent a great deal of time experimenting in class with writing processes that cultivate pleasure. I have delighted on many occasions since that, once pained expressions have transformed into states of revelatory shock… that the period is over. That they have been immersed in states of rapture and seen a different kind of light.