Prose
Teaching Robert Swindells' Staying Up.
As a prelude to this textual study, it would be helpful to have some kind of debate with student teachers about how you approach literature in the classroom that
deals with controversial issues – the potential here for a role-played debate with concerned parents, English teachers, governors and librarians (among others) is considerable. Again, as for study of previous texts, the suggested activities are intended for classroom use, but are best brought to life (and of course discussed) through modelling in ITE sessions – given sufficient time.
Some of the points we considered in relation to The Black Cat apply also to this novel. Like some others written by Swindells – notably Stone Cold – it deals with some difficult and sensitive socially realistic issues, such as the effects of unemployment, class differences in a youthful relationship, and the conflict between peer pressure and commitment to academic progress in an adolescent boy. The narrative voice, however, is shared between this boy, Brian, and a teenage girl, Debbie, and it is in fact her story which is the closer to the bone, dealing as it does with a rapist. So again we have a story to which some may object – although Swindells deals sensitively and responsibly with these issues, all of which come up in the ever-popular teenage soaps on television. Certainly, alone amongst the texts we have examined so far, it falls within the category of texts written specifically for pupils of secondary school age, and is arguably a fine example of this genre. The novel also works well as a story on several levels, and the seriousness of the social realism is well integrated with the plot and characterisation. The 'staying up' of the title refers on one level to the desperate need of the local football club to avoid relegation – a need matched by the desperate support given to the club; more profoundly, though, it suggests a general need to survive against the odds. The metaphorical interplay is well worth investigating in itself as part of the English curriculum.
We have already looked at a range of approaches to literature in the teaching of English, many of which, clearly, could be transferable to Staying Up. We must, however, at the same time encourage student teachers to be aware of the dangers in swamping the enjoyment of a good read of an entertaining book through overkill of approaches, however imaginatively creative. The poet U.A.Fanthorpe, herself at one time an English teacher, issues us a timely warning here. In her poem Dear Mr Lee she speaks with the voice of young pupil studying Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie, a standard inclusion in any secondary school English Department stock cupboard:
'So Dear Laurie, I want to say sorry'
I didn't want to write a character sketch
of your mother under headings, it seemed
wrong somehow when you'd made her so lovely,
and I didn't much like those questions
about social welfare in the rural community
and the seasons as perceived by an adolescent,
I didn't think you'd want your book
read that way, but bits of it I know by heart,
and I wish I had your uncles and half sisters
and lived in Slad, though Mr Smart says your view
of the class struggle is naïve, and the examiners
won't be impressed by me knowing so much by heart,
they'll be looking for terse and cogent answers
to their questions, but I'm not much good at terse and cogent,
I'd just like to be like you, not mind about being poor,
See everything bright and strange ...'
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The sentiments expressed here will certainly strike a chord with many English teachers keenly aware of the pitfalls of over-study, murdering in order to dissect, as Wordsworth warned two centuries ago. There sometimes seems little opportunity for pupils simply to enjoy a book during school time, either individually or communally. Calthrop some time ago (1971: 23) recounted the experience of English teachers testifying to the sheer enjoyment of a class reading a book for pleasure; teachers who
| felt that the shared experience of reading a common book was something of great value to themselves and to their classes. They ... took the view that the feeling of sharing something worthwhile, the common sense of enjoyment, and the resulting process ... was akin to the experience of a theatre audience. |
It is all the more important now, with far greater pressures on both pupils and their English teachers at every stage of the secondary curriculum (and, of course, the primary), to safeguard and develop this sort of collaborative feeling within English lessons. And it can be done. The secret lies in tuning in to the needs of the audience, the pupils, as must any performer. Teaching in this sense is performance, and the principal prop so often will be some form of literature.
This warning amounts to a statement of the need to keep a sense of perspective. If the reading is not enjoyed on one level or another, then following it is not likely to be very fruitful for either teacher or pupils. But even if enjoyment of reading is paramount – and I can think of two or three occasions when the kind of shared whole-class enjoyment alluded to by Calthrop applied to a reading of
Staying Up – it need not preclude further activities. Student teachers could take any of the vast number of empathetic approaches to literature which have enlivened English classrooms, for example some of those given in Appendix II in
Cox on Cox, 'Approaches to the class novel', (Cox, 1991) and apply them to
Staying Up. Approaches may include:
- A pre-reading activity, whereby pupils are given several elements of the plot (for example, a struggling football team, the closure of a local factory, and an adolescent boy-girl relationship) and asked to weave them into their own story. It is interesting and enjoyable to compare pupils' narrative ideas with Swindells' own.
- The same sort of interest may stem from prediction exercises taken at various times in the unfolding plot, either quickly written down and shared, or given more dramatic form through thought-tracking.
- Ideas of prediction and varying the plot could take fuller expression still in converting the entire story into some sort of 'choice novel', in which readers choose at various points between a range of courses of action, each one leading to a different 'outcome' in the ensuing story. An alternative to conscious choosing is to shake dice, thus making the whole enterprise into a kind of game. Either way, the project is quite ambitious and is best undertaken by small groups, possibly using ICT to shift text around.
All three of these activities focus on the plot, and aim to encourage readers to take an active role in interpretation: playing with the elements of narrative, in essence.
