The Garden of Thought - About Writing Poems in Upper Secondary School

Abstract

This chapter takes as its starting point a 10-year-project in the upper secondary school in the north of Sweden, called “The Garden Of Thought”, which involved students in creative writing such as poetry, as part of the ordinary school curriculum. One of the main questions was whether the students accept creative work of this kind as part of their schoolwork, since a poem can be highly personal, involving love and the deepest feelings.

A recent study of mother tongue teaching in Sweden shows that students mainly practise what the author calls “internal schools genres”, i.e. genres that are constructed for the purpose of the school alone (Nyström, 2000). It also shows that many students write in their free time. Students outside the boundaries of the school use more creative genres, such as poetry and song lyrics. It is suggested that creative writing activities should be a part of the ordinary school curriculum. The question I pose in this chapter is, thus, how do young people themselves feel about these forms of creative writing in school? Are they prepared to break down existing borders between their schooling and their private lives?

In my study it is evident that writing poetry could become a common part of mother-tongue teaching. At the same time there are evident differences between writing in the privacy of home and in the public space of school. Students, it seems, develop a range of strategies to deal with this dualism.