Ripples

Written By Victoria Ryle

Margaret Meek Spencer, 1925-2020

MMeek_HTT.jpg

I heard this week, that one of my early teaching heroes Margaret Meek Spencer died this month (Barrs & Dombey, 2020).

She used to call into the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education in London https://clpe.org.uk/ regularly in the late 1980s/90s, at a time when I was an advisory teacher for Language during the early implementation of the UK’s National Curriculum. She was hugely influential on my thinking as a literacy teacher and I remember her with great fondness.

I revisited my old dog-eared copy of How Texts Teach What Readers Learn (Spencer, 1988), with its copious underlinings and marvelled at how much makes sense and how little has changed in the forty-plus years since. I particularly like the concluding sentence: ‘What we have to realise is that the young have powerful allies in a host of gifted artists and writers to help them subvert that the world of their elders’ p. 40.  Now more than ever do we need our young to subvert the world of their elders, given its current parlous state.

So what has all this got to do with publishing books by children as authors? After all, Margaret was insistent that children should have access to the best writing, in the hands of skilled writers and artists capable of engaging readers in powerful ways. She also understood that “understanding authorship, audience, illustration and iconic interpretation” p. 10 are a vital part of developing literary competencies. Children may not always be highly skilled, but they are frequently capable of engaging readers. More importantly, as authentic makers and manipulators of materials into book form, they can build powerful understandings of authorship and audience in purposeful ways.

My revisitings of Margaret’s work surface one special book from my archive, sadly now an absent ghost in my collection. I wish, I wish, I wish was a book by children in my grade 1 class in Harlesden, North London in 1985. Created in a large format, it documented a regular class circle game. As we gathered on a mat under the sprawling branches of a card, paper and painted tree installation, we chanted our wishes for the day as a way to check the emotional temperature of the class. A selection of resulting images drawn in texta and crayon were cut out and pasted onto large sheets of thin black card. The effect was striking, and proved a popular read as a one-off big book for individual and group reading. To our delight and surprise, this book was selected by a visiting advisory teacher to be published as part of a set of four books for distribution across all schools in the London Borough of Brent. This, my very first experience of publishing the work of children with high production values, represented a leap across the chasm from the home-made, one-off production of books to a new world of professionally published books. And with it came a dawning understanding of the power of the act of publishing in itself, and the potential for young apprentice literacy learners.

Margaret Meek reiterates the cyclical nature of readers into writers:

 “Strange as it may seem, the reading of stories make skilful, powerful readers who come to understand not only the meaning but also the force of texts. It is a strong defence against being victimised by the reductive power of so called ‘functional literacy’. It also makes writers” (Spencer, 1988) p. 40. Something I have observed time and again in the work of children as authors, as the influence of favourite books and favourite authors come to haunt their own work as apprentice creators. Possibly I wish, I wish, I wish  has haunted young authors since – it was always one of those books that 'walked’. A good sign of a text that teaches.

I hope Margaret’s death at the ripe age of 95 is a timely excuse to reinvigorate thinking around the importance of powerful texts of all sorts in support of children becoming literate, and I wish, I wish, I wish her influence and inspiration will continue to ripple on in powerful ways.

 

Barrs, M., & Dombey, H. (2020, 28 May 2020). Margaret Meek Spencer obituary: Educationist who saw a child’s joy in the story as the key to learning to read, Obituary. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/may/27/margaret-meek-spencer-obituary

Spencer, M. M. (1988). How texts teach what readers learn. Stroud, UK: Thimble Press.

 

 
Victoria Ryle
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