Less is More: The Power of Constraints
Alan Maley, UK
Alan Maley after over 50 years in the field, now has no job but occasionally has work. He lived and worked in 10 countries, including China, India, Singapore and Thailand. He helps run a creative writing group for Asian teachers (http://flexiblelearning.auckland.ac.nz/cw> His main occupation is pottering with intent. E-mail: yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
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Introduction
Some examples
1. Using word arrays
2. Writing metaphor poems
3. Withholding information
4. Drama: Hotel receptionist
5. Construction tasks
6. Reduction activities
7. Performing a text
8. Dicto-comp/ Speed dictation
9. Physical constraints / dictation for the left hand
10. Prose into poem
Concluding remarks
References
Take a large irregular shaped field with a mixture of long and short grass, some bare patches and hillocks of earth here and there. Let loose a crowd of boys with a couple of footballs. Tell them to have fun. It is likely that some kind of activity involving kicking or throwing the balls will happen, and for a time, it will be fun. But it will not be football.
Now take a rectangular piece of well-mown turf of regulation size, marked out with white lines, with goal posts at each end. Bring on two teams of 11 people, each team wearing different coloured shirts. Bring along a referee with a whistle, and linesmen with coloured flags. The game must now be played for two sessions of 45 minutes each with a 15 minute break at half-time. There are strict rules which everyone must obey, and which the referee will ensure are respected. He blows his whistle, and the game begins. This is ‘the beautiful game’ of football. And within those constraints of space, time, numbers of players and artificial rules, the players must exercise all their skill and ingenuity to create the elegant patterns of movement, and the excitement of the match. And no two matches will ever be identical.
Pretty much every game is circumscribed in this way, whether it is chess, with its finite set of squares and pieces combining into an infinity of possible moves, or the arcane restrictions which govern the game of cricket. Without the constraining framework, there is no game.
And the same goes for most, if not all, instances of creative endeavour. And many artists and writers have acknowledged the role which constraints play. Robert Frost once wrote that ‘Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down’. And some have been even more blunt - ‘A blank cheque kills creativity.’ (Molokoma Mokhonoana)
It seems paradoxical. After all, most people think of being creative as being totally free to let the imagination run wild, to let it all hang out, to express oneself to the fullest extent. It seems counter-intuitive to impose constraints. Yet in some powerful way constraints clearly do foster creative activity. In order to break out of the box, we need a box to break out of. ‘…the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles’ (Jonah Lehrer). Or as the Chinese, T’ang period poet put it, we are ‘dancing in chains’.
Painters have always had to work within the constraints of a frame of some kind, and the physical nature of their materials. Sculptors must mould (and be moulded by) their materials to bring their shapes to life. Film-makers have to work within constraints of time, budget, technical possibility, and so on. Musicians have to work within the range of human hearing, and have a limited, though large, range of notes to play with, and their instruments can only make certain kinds of sound. Writers must struggle with form and with the limits which words place on the expression of reality at second hand. Dancers must work within the limits of the movements a human body is capable of, and of space and time (and timing). No one is exempt.
Inevitably, classroom teaching is similarly constrained by factors of time, space, numbers and regulation. This is where a problem comes in. Institutional constraints, such as curriculum, syllabi, textbooks and examinations are usually externally imposed, and can become a negative form of constraint when they are perceived as tying teachers hand and foot, with no wriggle room at all. This is in contrast to creative artists, who willingly impose constraints on themselves in the pursuit of their art. So, perhaps we need to separate institutional constraints which are externally imposed, from the constraints we willingly place on ourselves in the way we conduct our teaching, and to model ourselves on creative artists rather than on assembly-line workers. Institutional constraints can sometimes be a stimulus for creativity but they were not designed with that in mind. By contrast, the constraints we can invent in our teaching are specifically there to stimulate creativity, just as they do for creative artists.
A good example of this latter kind of constraints is the Silent Way, developed by Caleb Gattegno in the 1970’s and 80’s. Gattegno believed that the effort for learning has to come from the learner, not simply be supplied by the teacher. His system depended on minimal teacher spoken inputs, and the ingenious, creative manipulation of a colour-coded chart and a finite set of coloured wooden rods, each length a different colour. He showed that, working within these very tight constraints, it was possible to generate highly creative utterances.
In this section, I shall offer ten examples of activities which exploit the notion of constraints. I shall describe each one, then comment on just how the constraints operate to generate a creative response. In some cases, I have suggested other, related activities.
What to do:
To generate a word array, you need a very short text, like this one:
He never sent me flowers. He never wrote me letters. He never took me to restaurants. He never spoke of love. We met in parks. I cannot remember what he said but I remember how he said it. Most of it was silence anyway. (Leszek Szkutnik)
You then extract all the words from the text (once only, even if they occur more than once) and arrange them like this:
he in me
sent I most
parks anyway was
of never flowers
silence took wrote
it said what
letters restaurants how
to cannot love
spoke we remember
met but
In Step 1, students are asked to write down as many sentences as they can using only words from the array. They cannot change or add words. But they can use the words from the array as many times as they like. Set a time limit for this, say 10 minutes.
In Step 2, they share what they have written in pairs or groups of three or four. They can pool the sentences they have written and generate more examples. Again set a time limit.
In Step 3, the pairs or groups try to use some of their sentences to compose a short text – poem or prose. Again set a time limit.
In Step 4, they share what they have written.
Finally, you let them see the original text, so that they can compare it with what they have written.
How it works.
There are rigid constraints here: only the words in the array may be used. The time available is also limited. Yet, time and again, students will come up with highly creative texts. How is this? I think partly because the word limits mean that they can concentrate on this vocabulary only – they are not trying to look for the words they need. But these words can be combined in a large number of ways, so students mentally engage with trying out all the syntactic combinations they know, accepting some and rejecting others. In Step 3, they are actively trying to discover some kind of narrative thread from among their sentences. The nature of the content words will to some extent guide their choices but their texts will always be different, even if there is some generic similarity.
What to do.
Prepare two columns, one with uncountable nouns, the other with countable nouns, as in the example:
Hope a spoon
Life a knife
Marriage an egg
Love a brush
Anger a window
Disappointment a mirror
Work a banana
Happiness a rope
Time a bus
Hate a cup
Fear an alarm-clock
In Step 1, ask students to write out 3 metaphors (you may need to explain what a metaphor is) by joining any item from column 1 with any item from column 2, at random, using ‘is’. Allow only a few minutes for this. For example:
Time is a mirror.
Anger is a brush.
Love is a banana.
In step 2, students share their examples. They then choose just one of their metaphors and add one or two lines which either explain or contextualise the metaphor. Allow a maximum of 10 minutes for this. For example,
Love is a banana.
When you have eaten the fruit
Only the skin is left.
How it works.
Here the constraints are on the very small number of words to be used, which generate a finite number of possible combinations. There is no natural connection between the words in the two columns. However, once a metaphor has been generated, students immediately try to find a meaning for it. That is the nature of the human brain: it seeks significance and pattern even where there is none. So out of the magic box of the metaphor, there springs a significance (often a highly visual one). The pod of the metaphor is squeezed, and out of it pop the brightly coloured peas. Another constraint is in finding just two lines to condense this meaning.
(Acknowledgment: I have slightly adapted this idea from Jane Spiro. Creative Poetry Writing. OUP. )
What to do.
Either prepare a number of short story texts on pieces of A4 paper, or ask students to write one for themselves. Students work in groups of four.
In Step one, one of the students in each group crumples the paper into a ball (text facing outwards). Only parts of the text are visible. The group is not allowed to unfold the ball: they have to read and write down as much of the text as they can see.
In Step two, a student holds the paper behind her back and unfolds it, then crumples it again but differently. Group members again try to write down what they can see, and try to incorporate it with what they wrote down in Step one.
In Step three, this process is repeated. Students are then asked to read their complete texts. After that, they uncrumple the original and compare it with what they have written.
How it works.
Here the constraint is the need to make sense of fragments. They can only write down what they can see. The creativity emerges from the need to fit the fragments together, as an archaeologist does with shards of pottery. This is literally ‘making sense’, and involves the active reassembly of syntactic bits and pieces, and seeing the semantic and narrative links between them.
This is, of course, only one among many possible ways of withholding information: information gap activities, jigsaw reading and listening use the same principle. And the use of a picture covered with a sheet of paper with a small hole cut in it is another: the hole can be moved 10 times, after which they must describe the picture.
(Acknowledgment; I learnt this activity from Andrew Wright)
What to do.
You need to prepare a number of slips of paper with sentences written on them. All the sentences are things a guest might ask a hotel receptionist to deal with. How ‘difficult’ or complex they are will depend on the level of the class. Here are some examples.
There’s a snake in my loo. Please send someone at once.
Can you tell me the way to the nearest post office?
How much does it cost to send a postcard to China?
I just tried to get into my room but there are two naked men sleeping in the bed!
I turned the tap on in the bath and now I can’t turn it off. Please help.
Put a chair at the front of the class. The rest of the class should sit in a half-circle facing the chair. One student sits in the chair and acts as hotel receptionist. Another student is given one of the slips. They must not show it to anyone else. This student then takes the part of a guest who is unable to speak, so they must convey what is on the paper purely by mime and gesture. The receptionist must say what she thinks the guest is trying to express and the guest can indicate whether this is right or not. The rest of the class can call out words or phrases to help the receptionist.
In Step 1, it is sufficient to have guessed the general idea. For example, the receptionist might say, You’ve got a snake in your bathroom. You want me to send someone up to your room now.
In Step 2, the receptionist, helped by the rest of the class, must find the exact words on the paper. This is linguistically far more demanding.
How it works.
Here the main constraint is that the guest is not allowed to speak, so everything has to be expressed through body language and facial expression, and this has to be interpreted by the receptionist and the class. In Step two, the constraint is to find a precise form of words for the idea discovered in Step one. Even when students are not actually speaking, they are trying out different formulations in their heads in an extremely active way. The requirement that they find the precise form of words, involves their running through their entire repertoire of possible utterances.
What to do.
Students will work in groups of about 5. Each group is given this set of materials: 6 white filing cards (9 x 14 cm is a good size but any size will do), 20 paper clips, 3 large rubber bands.
In Step one, you instruct the groups to make a structure, using all their materials. Their structure should be as high as possible, as stable as possible and as aesthetically pleasing as possible. They can bend but not fold the cards and cannot cut them in any way. Set a time limit for this, (perhaps 15 minutes)
In Step two, you choose the winning structure. (Many will be good to look at but unstable because too high. Others will be stable but low and dull to look at….)
In Step three, groups dismantle their constructions, and start again, trying to improve on their original design This time, they must write a set of instructions which another group would be able to reconstruct their piece. (If possible, repeat the activity in another class. This time, the same materials are used but each group is given the instructions written by another group.) . Set a time limit for the construction process and another time limit for writing the instructions.
How it works.
The activity is constrained by the materials themselves, by the criteria for assessing success, and by the limited time allowed. Within these quite tight constraints students usually produce extremely creative work, and spend a lot of time polishing the language of the instructions.
What to do.
Prepare copies of a longish poem or prose text. For example, this poem by Wordsworth.
The Daffodils.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er dales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils.
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle in the Milky Way,
They stretch’d in never-ending line
Along the margin of the bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:-
The poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed, and gazed, but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.
For oft, when on my couch I lie,
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
In Step 1, students are given 10 minutes to read the text.
In Step 2 they work in groups of three. Their task is to reduce the poem to 12 lines without losing anything essential to its meaning. Allow 10 minutes for this.
In Step 3 they first share their versions, then reduce their 12 lines to 8 lines, again without losing anything essential. If they wish, they can substitute different lines for the original 12, but they can still only use lines from the poem. Allow 10 minutes for this.
In Step 4, after sharing their versions, they are asked to reduce the poem to a haiku. In this case, they do not use lines from the original poem – only the main idea and perhaps some of the vocabulary. Allow 10 minutes for this.
For example:
I saw daffodils
by the lake: now in my mind
they are dancing still.
How it works.
The main constraint is length here. And the requirement for them to progressively reduce the length of the text forces them to process the text deeply to extract from it what seems essential. In the case of removing lines, they are creatively re-inventing the poem. In the case of the haiku, they are finding their own words to express the core meaning of the text, and this too involves deep processing and creative effort to squeeze this into the 5-7-5 syllables of the haiku form.
What to do.
Prepare copies of a short text suitable for performance. This can be either a short poem or an extract from a story. Here is an example:
Milmaq was a solitary person. He would spend hours in the forest, not hunting, simply sitting still, watching, waiting for something to happen. A spider would swing its thread across the canyon between two branches. A woodpecker would drum at the trunk of a chestnut tree, its neck a blur of speed. Above all, the trees themselves would speak to him. He would be aware of them creaking and swaying in the wind. He could sense the sap rising in them in the springtime; feel their sorrow at the approach of winter. If he put his ear to the trunk of a tree, he could hear it growing, very slowly; feel it moving towards its final, magnificent shape.
Alan Maley The Man Who Talked to Trees.
Students work in groups of five or six.
In Step 1, they read the text together, making sure they understand all the vocabulary. Allow 5 minutes for this, then check there are no problems with meaning.
In Step 2, groups are told to prepare a dramatized performance of the text. The objective is to make the text sound as interesting and striking as possible. Everyone in the group must have an active role. They will need to decide on how the text will be read, paying attention to volume, pace (including pauses), pitch, tone, mood, etc. They will also need to decide who will read which parts of the text, which sections will be read by more than one voice, whether they wish to add background sounds or actions, etc… They will then need to rehearse the text several times. Allow 20 minutes for this.
In Step 3, they perform for each other and vote on which performance is the best.
If there is time, allow them another 10 minutes to revise their performance in the light of ideas they may have picked up from other groups’ performances.
How it works.
The constraints here are on time for the preparation, and on manipulating the criteria for performance. This involves them in deep processing of the possible meanings of the text, and ways of making those meanings prominent through the way they speak the words. Animated discussion and highly creative interpretations are the result.
What to do.
Select a short text suitable for the students’ level – poems work well but so do short prose texts like the one above in 1. Using Word Arrays (He never sent me flowers…). Tell the students that they will do a dictation but that you will read at normal speed, without pausing. They will hear the text three times only.
In Step one, you read the text aloud at normal speed, without stopping or pausing. Students just listen; they are not allowed to write anything. As soon as you finish, then they must write down anything they can remember from the text – words, phrases, even whole lines. They then have 5 minutes to compare notes with their partners.
In Step two, repeat the process, again reading at normal speed. This time, they can note down words and phrases as you read. Again they have 5 minutes to compare notes with a partner, gradually reconstituting the text you have read.
In Step three, repeat the process. Again, they can write as you read. At the end, they are allowed 10 minutes to compare notes and share and consolidate what they have written with others in the class.
In Step 4, they read what they have written, while others offer corrections if they wish. You write what they say on the board and change it as more information comes in. Finally, you distribute copies of the text for them to compare with the ones they have written.
How it works.
The constraint here is mainly to do with pace/timing. The fact that the text is read at normal speed means they have to listen especially carefully, and then deploy all their linguistic repertoire to progressively reconstitute the text by trying out likely words and phrases to fit the overall meaning even when they are not 100% sure of the words they have heard. This is an activity which requires highly creative construction. They are in effect re-writing the text.
What to do.
Choose a very short text suitable for their level. For example:
‘It’s hard to live/ in a studio apartment/ in San Jose /with a man/ who’s learning to play the violin’./ That’s what she told the police/ when she handed them/ the empty revolver/. (Richard Brautigan)) The slashes indicate possible places to pause.
In Step one, you dictate the text, one short phrase at a time. They must then write it down but using their left hand (or their right hand if they are left-handed)
In Step two, they compare texts with a partner, and you write it up on the board. They then discuss the problems they had, and anything relating to the meaning of the text.
How it works.
The constraining factor here is the need to use the non-dominant hand. This imposes a double burden on the students. They have to pay attention to the words they hear and then to the way they can write them down in an unfamiliar way. This is highly constraining but oddly, it often results in students paying closer attention to the words they hear.
A possible variation of this idea of ‘making strange’ is to present a short text upside down, which they have to copy the right way up. Or a text printed back to front, which they have to copy the right way round. Such techniques force a greater degree of attention than normal.
What to do.
Prepare copies of a shortish prose text. For example, the text in 7. Performing a Text, above. (Milmaq was a solitary person…)
Students work in groups of 3 or 4. Each group has copies of the text. The task is to write out the text as if it were a poem. They cannot add to or omit any of the text – they must use it as it is. This involves making decisions about where lines should end. Other considerations, such as the overall appearance of the poem on the page will also enter into their decisions. Allow 15 minutes for this, then groups exchange their versions and discuss the differences.
How it works.
This is a deceptively simple activity. In essence, all it involves is copying out the text. but the results invariably show great differences in the way groups divide up the lines, and the ingenuity with which they render the images in the text in visual representations (for example of the spider swinging its thread between two branches, in the above text). The constraint of making a prose text into what looks like a poem requires a heightened quality of attention to the language and the way meaning is patterned, and seems to release a high degree of creativity in the visual representation of meanings.
In this article I have tried to demonstrate the power of constraints in stimulating creative activity in language teaching. This power is repeatedly evoked by creative artists of all kinds. I have suggested that we, as teachers, can set up constraints in much the same way that artists do. This is consciously to impose constraints – of time, space, pace, length and language – on ourselves and our students to spark a creative response. By restricting ourselves to less, we get more.
I have suggested, however that externally-imposed constraints may have a negative effect on creativity. If we are put in a strait-jacket of rules, regulations, syllabus and textbook control, and suffocated by tests and examinations, we are less likely to be stimulated. Of course, even close confinement can sometimes lead to high levels of creativity. The case of Anne Frank and Anna Akhmatova spring to mind. But though both Anna’s rose to the occasion and wrote highly creative work from the imprisonment in which they found themselves, I hardly think they would have chosen to be confined in the first place.
I believe there are ways we can rescue creativity even when we work in strictly regulated circumstances, though we would not choose to work in such straitened environments. I offer as examples the kind of highly-attuned teaching recommended by Adrian Underhill in his ‘dark matter’ of teaching (Underhill, 2014), the ideas for pushing students a little further in Demand-high teaching as advocated by Scrivener (2014), and the small but potentially highly creative outcomes from the small changes recommended by Fanselow (1987, 2010) in applying his heuristic : Do the opposite. And even the kinds of activities I have described above can quite easily be accommodated within a restrictive system. But ultimately, we would be better off in a system which allowed the kind of freedom from control which would facilitate greater creativity through the voluntary, self-imposed constraints I have been advocating.
Fanselow, J (1987) Breaking Rules. London/New York: Longman.
Fanselow, J (2010) Try the Opposite. Charleston, S. Carolina: Booksurge Pubs.
Scrivener, J. (2014) Demand-high Teaching. TESOL Teacher Education and Development: Special number of EJALELT 3 (2), 47-58
Underhill, A (2014) Training for the unpredictable. TESOL Teacher Education and Development: Special number of EJALELT 3 (2), 59-69.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Drama Techniques for Creative Language Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
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