ABSTRACT
The most direct kind of intervention involves the teacher in direct consultation with the child about particular poems. The teacher’s interventions can thus be creative without amounting to trespass; it is a creative gesture to help unfold what is implicit in the child’s original version. Interventions which do not interfere are more difficult; they involve the teacher not in direct self-expression but in subduing self-expression in the effort of imagining one’s way into another imagination. The teacher’s suggestions then derive from a sense of what the child is attempting and are not superimposed on it. Relations between children are changed by collaboration, and their own relation to writing seems likely to be altered, becoming more critical in response to friends’ comments but also more serious in response to their evident willingness to take each other’s work seriously.
