What Is Spoken Word Education?

This week I leave my position as Lead Educator on the Spoken Word Education MA Programme, it's been a great three years and it's been hard saying farewells to students and teachers. Here's a video of a few of the students I've worked with over the years at an all school showcase. Also look out for a series of blogposts on Spoken Word Education coming out on Apples & Snakes in the coming weeks.

On Race, Feminism, Education, Gentrification & Colonial Cocktails

“Students from gang-ridden areas of the East London borough of Hackney have been learning how performing poetry can help tackle life, one word at a time.”

After visiting the young poets I work with in Hackney, this is how the article, written last week by the Reuters journalist begins. (The journalist had good intentions, but skewed editors). Straight off, I’ll say the students I work with in Cardinal Pole are not themselves “in-gangs”, they are mixed-ability (in terms of literacy and predicted grades) and between the ages of 12 -17. They attend our after school Spoken Word poetry Club and are indeed, growing up in the marginal regions of Hackney, still, as one of the English teachers rightfully put, "our students are up to more than just rising against their circumstances."

“The Spoken Word Education Programme, founded by a former Chicago social worker, aims to help pupils in some of London's most deprived districts to articulate their feelings and have their voices heard despite an often difficult upbringing.”

Peter Kahn is not merely a “former social worker”, he’s an English teacher and community leader with over 25 years teaching experience.

"These kids are so disenfranchised," said Christian Foley, a poet and spoken-word educator at Cardinal Pole school. "The gang warfare arises from the fact you own nothing, and so you're going to fight over a lamppost because that's all you have."

Christian was in fact referring to a different working environment, not the students in Cardinal Pole. This is a clever spin, because what Christian was actually highlighting was the systematic failures in our government in welfare and education and how this ties to the future prospects of our young people. Also,(ironically, given the tone of this article), how harmful the negative reinforcement of stereotypes are for both, society and the individual within it. We don’t necessarily “give students a voice”, they already have one, we counter the argument that they don’t have anything worth saying. We recognise that whether they speak or not, other people (media, politicians etc) are already speaking for them.

“Hackney was one of London's four most dangerous boroughs in 2013, according to the Office for National Statistics. It also ranks in the bottom quarter of the capital's 32 boroughs for a range of indicators including low income, health and education, according to London's Poverty Profile, an independent data provider.”

When you say Hackney is “dangerous”, I think what should be asked is, dangerous for whom and why? Hackney is known as “the socialist borough”, due to its long history of anti-racist and anti-fascist organisations. Evident too, in the names of Hackney streets such as Sojourner Truth Close and Nelson Mandela House. Public figures such as James Baldwin, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Michael Jackson, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis have all spoken and passed through Hackney. The Dalston C.L.R James library acknowledges a powerful Caribbean activist. In certain circles, this indeed, sounds dangerous.

"A Symbol Of Hackney's History Of Tackling Racism" - Anthony Kendall

“The spoken-word initiative began with Peter Kahn, who used poetry to help students in one of Chicago's most crime-plagued districts. He found that pupils who could not discuss their problems would open up when performing poetry they had written, helped by the art form's links to hip-hop music.”

Yes, Hip-Hop music but also, many of the students are aspiring actors, public speakers, physicists and attend an after school “Debate Club”, which they excel at.

"A Complicated Answer," an anthology produced by the Hackney pupils, covers experiences from witnessing a stabbing to losing a friend to cancer. There are several about fathers leaving their families.”

Yes, there are also poems about poetry, friendships and “what it’s like to play the piano”. The poems in “A Complicated Answer” are about bravery, not ghetto pathologies.

“the programme is backed by institutions including the Arts Council. Since its 2013 inception, Cardinal Pole has seen one student into Oxford University to study English literature; while others at the school, which is principally made up of ethnic minorities, have improved their English.”

Something cuts me here, it’s on the edge of saying “ethnic minority children are being civilised by the English language, and look, they now have the prospects of attending a prestigious but also, a racially problematic institution, Oxford University. Just the other day Oxford made headlines for serving “colonial comeback cocktails” in their Union bar. Is this really the golden measuring bar for academic success? I've known students from ethnic and working class backgrounds who became suicidal after attending Oxford and similarly acclaimed universities.

“Poetry is not a panacea, and those involved in the programme know it has its limits."You never give up, but sometimes it just takes time you don't have," Kahn said. "They may not make it to (age) 25."

This is Peter Kahn acknowledging a reality for some of his inner city students in Chicago, but equally relevant, is some of those students grow to feel isolated from an education system which glorifies fascist, sexist and racist literature, I’ve written about this in a previous blog post.

“Despite this, at Cardinal Pole there seems to be an irrepressible optimism among students. What is poetry, the educators ask Tian Sewell Morgan, one of their star students. She thinks for a few moments and answers: "Blood in words."”

Yes, blood in words, as in the blood (that stays in her body) is poetry, as opposed to the idea that poetry is something keeping blood inside her.

Articles like this in Reuters contribute to the conservative's attempt to justify the social cleansing of London and the racist fear-mongering of working class ethnic minorities. The disparity between rich and the poor in the UK is vast and easy to contest, words are powerful, but they aren't enough. 

In the East London schools I've worked in, I've seen students have schooling disrupted because their council homes have been sold to private investors. Many are moved to Kent, where Fracking was a possible cause of a recent earthquake. 

Careless language is a misused weapon, people often say, "you get what you deserve", but we live in a country which built an empire on slavery and the oppression of the poor. There are twelve million dead Africans in the Atlantic, responsible for the wealth and building of British colonies world wide. Without those mass burials, there is no "Great Britain". This is why Nationalism takes on a form of genocide denial, or genocide glorification. Decolonising your British identity is difficult and I've yet to have a discussion on it that didn't involve someone getting upset or defensive.

George Orwell differentiated patriotism as "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life" and Nationalism as a desire to colonise and "secure more power and more prestige, not for oneself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his (or her) own individuality.”

I was asked the other day why "I put up race related articles on facebook, why is race a struggle, isn't feminism a more pressing issue?", the idea that a struggle needs to struggle against each other has only led to inside bickering of people on the same side of the coin. In this area, I myself have used embarrassingly careless language on twitter which I made a public apology for.

C.L.R James, in a speech in Hackney in 1984 addressed an anti-racist rally by saying, "I want us to be aware that for a long time women have been at the very bottom of society", James asks, if education is how we defeat oppression and austerity, why is it that there are higher amounts of women graduating from universities and still so few in Congress, Parliament or positions of political policy influence? 

C.L.R James states "black people in particular have a lot of experience of being maintained in a position subordinate to the general level which is attainted by men and women who are not black." He goes on to say it would be hypocritical to claim a "fight for equal rights"as a racially exclusive battle. This from a man, born the same century slavery was dismantled in the Caribbean, where he was born (1886) and spent over seventy years as a historian and activist.

The Island That's Hard To Find In English is a poetry manuscript I have been working on for the past two years. I am currently travelling to all the colonial hotspots in the UK (Liverpool and London covered wildly) but recently I was in Bristol and learned the idea for the African slave trade was put into motion by the Mayor of Bristol, John Hawkins. I'm delving into this history and feeling how it re-aligns my sense of self as a British, Jamaican. America's first UK based Embassy was built in Bristol after a falling out during the trans Atlantic trading profits of Rum and Sugar from the Caribbean. 

This links directly into our current culture and conservative-led government with the passing of a law called "TTIP" which allows major corporations compensation for "loss of profits", tax payers are now insurers for multi-nationals (as if their off-shore tax havens weren't enough of an insult). When slavery was abolished, slave merchants, plantation and slave owners were also compensated for loss of profits. Unbelievably, this was paid for by the tax payer. These people were rewarded instead of punished (there was no human rights bill that would see to it otherwise). Charles Dickens mocked this in Little Dorrit, "Credit is a system, whereby a person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay". 

Human rights laws which would have seen the enslavement of Africans as unjust are now being undone by Michael Gove. When talking about colonialism, people in the UK often ask what it has to do with today? I find it incredible that anyone could go through the English education system without having such questions answered? Today is built on yesterday. 

Disclaimer

My thoughts here are by no means complete, it's merely an outpouring of thinking and feeling done while working in education, examining my privilege and positioning myself in a society, hung over after too many colonial cocktails.

Spoken Word Education MA

Graduating From Goldsmith University with an MA in Spoken Word Education
Keith Jarrett, Indigo Williams, Raymond Antrobus, Dean Atta, Pete The Temp, Cat Brogan

Two years ago I started the worlds first MA in Spoken Word Education at Goldsmith University. This Wednesday, I graduated with full honours. Never went to University before and left institutional education at 16, but this is testimony to what is possible when we commit to our passions. Proud of my fellow poets and the Goldsmith professors and Peter Kahn, who gave me the chance to prove myself academically. I got a distinction.

The Importance Of Spoken Word (mentioned in The House Of Lords by Baroness 'Maggie Jones')

Source - http://www.labourlords.org.uk/talent-shows

In Picture above : Peter Kahn, Holy Family Students, Baroness Maggie Jones & Spoken Word educators (Raymond Antrobus, Dean Atta, Indigo WIlliams, Keith Jarrett, Pete The Temp & Cat Brogan)   

Maggie Jones on the importance of spoken word skills to help young people realise their aspirations.

One of the joys of being in Labour’s Education team is the chance to get out and about, visiting schools and being inspired by the enthusiasm of pupils and teachers alike.

Last week, I attended Holy Family School in Waltham Forest – a multi-cultural secondary school experimenting with writing and performing poetry as a means of nurturing confidence, creativity and self expression. The result was outstanding – a room full of articulate, funny, thoughtful young people excited about what they had, and could, achieve. Sitting in the audience I had no doubt that any employer would be impressed by the skills these young people had learned.

I will be raising the importance of such skills in a Lords debate on the importance of preparing young people for the world of work. We already know that the CBI and Federation of Small Businesses are desperate for young people to have better ‘soft’ skills such as communication, collaboration and problem solving. Yet the government is driving education in the opposite direction, with an obsession on cramming facts, working in isolation and sitting traditional exams. As part of this move spoken word skills have been removed from the English curriculum.

We have previously warned Ministers about the dangers of giving schools responsibility for careers advice without any resources or expertise, and it would be interesting to understand whether they – and indeed the Department for Education – believe the changes to have been consequence free. A recent report from the Commons Education Select Committee on this issue paints a horror story of poor training and advice, with teachers pressurising young people to stay on in the Sixth Form at all costs to improve the school budget. In response, the government said that careers provision was a matter for individual schools – something that the Chair of the Committee rightly described as an abdication of responsibility.

The result of such inaction from Ministers is reflected in a recent report from Pearson which discovered that over a third of young people relied on TV programmes to help them decide on careers, with and one in ten girls looking to celebrities for inspiration.

With a dwindling job market, we must give young people the best preparation available to have any chance of success. The Coalition’s failed economic policies have resulted in youth unemployment rates of over 20%, with more than a million not in education, employment or training. We can help by realigning their aspiration to the types of jobs that will be generated over the next two decades, many of which may not even exist today. Some of these jobs will be in the creative, innovation and high tech industries. But the CBI has also identified a critical lack of skills in the manufacturing, construction and engineering sectors – all of which could be drivers for future growth in the economy. Yet our education system is failing to address these new demands.

This is why Labour is putting renewed emphasis on the importance of vocational education to match the best academic provision, supported by quality apprenticeships. The new technical exam announced today is welcome, but it is a belated gesture towards something we have long argued for. And we will continue to criticise the government’s backward looking curriculum changes, which fail to meet young people’s aspirations and provide the gold standard skills needed to create a modern, thriving economy. It is the least we can do for those talented pupils I met at Holy Family School.

Baroness Maggie Jones of Whitchurch is a member of Labour’s Shadow Education team in the Lords

Published 4th July 2013

Comments On BBC's Panorama - 'Why Young Black Boys Are Underachieving' / Spoken Word Education

Sol Campbell

I enjoyed the panorama programme, it was optimistic and the BBC (who have negatively played up to black stereotypes in the past) did a good job. It did not venture too deep into the background of the boys, so it avoided presumptions that could be made about young black boys.

Sol Campbell was a nice hook, him being there acknowledging that it is not enough for black boys just to have footballers and rappers as role models was spot on and a powerful thing to see. 

I don't want to come across as patronising but the media ought to depict more examples of black men taking responsibilities - I was in a year 8 class last week asking kids what they're listening to, most of them said "Kendrick Lemar", they said they like stories, they aren't into gangster rap at all... now, why did this surprise me so much? why did I expect them to be into gangster rap and impressed with that culture? - doesn't that comment on how even I (as a Hackney born, Anglo-Jamaican) bought into an idea of black kids wanting to be gangsters? most of them don't and this a fact. 

It was good to see a range of high and low achieving black British men, including one young man persevering after 400 rejections, testimony of his refusal to allow (what we should openly call institutional racism) get in his way. It makes me angry and frustrated that the statistics are acknowledged by Government but they continue with their lack of support for the people who are qualified to help. 

People of the black community ought to be employed not just to mentor and campaign but to be the ones who influence the culture at the top in the boardrooms where policies and funding for supportive projects can get off the ground.

Spoken Word Education

The majority of kids I work with are black and mixed heritage (African / Caribbean) and many of them have taken to poetry, showing up after school for Spoken Word club, run and created by Peter Kahn and co-led by poets Indigo Williams, Dean Atta, Keith Jarrett, Cat Brogan, Pete The Temp and myself. We have high achieving students working alongside some lower achievers, including students who have a history of suspension - we have helped many kids find positivity in the sharing of their voice from the poetry community we have created in the school to the showcases - where parents and other students come to watch students perform their poetry, where they are applauded for being who they are. I have noticed that students consistent in reading and writing, generally have a heightened awareness of themselves and their identity, this awareness creates higher self-esteem and confidence in verbal and literary self expression.

Here's some footage from the first Spoken Word showcase with the students we've worked with.

Our next showcase is Wednesday 19th June 

http://www.paperlesspost.com/events/3882231-954e095e/replies/74188873-634fe511?utm_campaign=reminder&utm_medium=email&utm_source=event#paper/front/0

Also, Peter Kahn is going to be speaking about Spoken Word in Education at the London Literature Festival on 4th June.

More info - 
Peter Kahn, the co-founder of the London Teenage Poetry Slam has launched the first ever Spoken Word Education Training Programme as a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.

He has been 'training up' six established Spoken Word poets, including winners of the Edinburgh Fringe Slam, the London Poetry Award and the UK Poetry Slam, to work in six new London schools.

This INSET session is aimed at secondary school teachers and offers a hands-on workshop using some of the lessons that have been used over the course of the school year.

Level 3 Function Room
12 noon - 4pm (lunch break included)

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/the-school-of-spoken-word-inset-73543

Following on from the INSET for teachers event in the afternoon, Peter Kahn, who has just has launched the first ever Spoken Word Education Training Programme introduces an evening of performances from the Spoken Word Educators involved in the programme. These include Dean Atta, Raymond Antrobus, Pete the Temp, Cat Brogan, Keith Jarrett and Indigo Williams, as well as Spoken Word Club members from Holy Family Catholic School.

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/the-school-of-spoken-word-73552?dt=2013-06-04

Spirit Level at Royal Festival Hall

6pm

How Spoken Word In Education Is Changing The Landscape For Modern Poets

This year Goldsmith University launched their first Spoken Word Education module as part of the Teacher / Writer MA program and I’ve been lucky enough to be one of the six London Spoken Word poets piloting it. The other five are Indigo Williams, Keith Jarrett, Dean Atta, Cat Brogan and Pete The Temp – If you know your Spoken Word poets you’ll be familiar with these names.

Since September we’ve been going into a secondary school in East London and leading lessons on poetry and performance as well as setting up a Spoken Word poetry after school club which had over eighty sign ups from years 7, 8 and 9.

Peter Kahn coordinates the program, a teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Chicago. He runs the largest school-based spoken word club in the world and is featured in the award-winning documentary Louder Than a Bomb. 

The project is also partnered by some of the UK’s leading institutions and organisations such as Apples and Snakes, Avron and Spread the word. 

We challenge the idea that “poems are old fashioned and have to rhyme” and we get students talking and writing from their personal experiences to generate poetry in their own voices. Many teachers have already given positive feedback about the impact of having poets in their school. Some students really open up in their poetry and it can get emotional. This has been a good way to hear the kids that are calling for help. Ultimately we have a lot of fun with language, performance games and watching the kids develop as young poets. We’re all coming across more and more talented young poets and we call it our mission to nurture talent and give poets higher platforms to aspire to. This will change the landscape of Spoken Word and poetry for a new generation. 

I didn’t discover Spoken Word until I was twenty but if a quality poet came into my school when I was fourteen I definitely would have been hooked sooner.

Some of the top Spoken Word Educators in the country including Jacob Sam La Rose, Simon Mole, Polarbear, Charlie Dark and Hollie McNish all make a living mentoring young poets and improving the standards of Spoken Word poetry nationwide.

The more exposure top quality poets receive the more impact Spoken Word poetry will make as an art form.

If you know of any schools that would be interested in setting up a Spoken Word Club please contact : mrpkahn@hotmail.com