Letter writing to elicit expression
Mrinmayi Vaishampayan
Festivals call for some very colourful and engaging days at school too! September comes with Ganesh festival, celebrated primarily in Maharashtra, followed by a chain of festivals like Navaratri, Durga Pujo, and Diwali. Schools are filled with a range of cultural events and celebrations during these days. Involving children in different activities during this time can be looked at as a very meaningful design of educational experiences.
In our school, festivals come with a series of dynamic activities that stimulate students’ diverse faculties. Instead of long vacations students enjoy school days participating in varied cultural programs performed by the best in the field. There are also creative activities where they can express themselves through different media, be it writing, performing, talking, or even creating.
This year we had letter writing as one of the self-expression activities. We asked the children to write letters on two subjects. These subjects were intentionally kept generic and open-ended to give the children freedom of choice.
- …and I was appreciated!
- Now that I think, I can see I was at fault…
Little did we teachers know that this activity was going to unfold multiple layers of children’s socio-emotional lives. We were surprised by the range of situations the children wrote about and expressed themselves truthfully without any hesitation or fear of judgments. Letter writing proved to be the most subtle and effortless way to help children express. We got glimpses of what goes on in the minds of our students, and the many important insights about their lives beyond school.
With the overwhelming letters where children wrote about their fears, regrets, hurt, grudges, joys, and overall emotional needs, we decided to do a basic analysis of themes which came up from the writing. We tried to analyze the contents of the letters based on the age, gender, and experiences. Here is what we came across.
The task – The children wrote these letters in the given time at the school. No specific instructions were given about the language, writing styles, or whom they should write the letter to, etc. Everything was left to them except the subjects. No one was forced to submit the letter upon the end of the given time.
Image courtesy: freepik.com
The sample – The children who wrote the letters came from middle class, urban, mostly nuclear families.
The themes which arose from these letters range from everyday but intense matters to occasions where they did not get a good chance to express themselves. The occasions they wrote about included fights with family members, the care and attention they miss from parents, lack of communication in the families, strained relationships, social situations where they helped strangers, somewhere a stranger had an impression on them, situations where they felt extremely lonely, got over their own weakness or limitation, grieved, realized their mistake, and felt guilty.
Adolescence is an age when you are always on an emotional roller-coaster. It is not easy to express how you are feeling and the whys and whats of it. Children in this age prefer keeping their intense emotions to themselves and often take a lot of time to build trust in a person to talk about their difficult emotions in the school setup.
Letter writing served as a subtle and easy way to express the intricacies of their socio-emotional experiences. Students might have felt emotionally safer because of the open nature of this form of writing. Moreover the judgement-free structure of the activity might have boosted their confidence. The idea of putting out pent-up emotions with the underlying assurance that no one is going to poke them about it later, might have helped children express more freely.
Many times, we as teachers would like to know about the family background, interactions, relationships, etc., of our students in order to know them better. Students might not feel very comfortable if we formally inquire about these things. To decode student behaviour in school, all these experiences of the students can give some crucial cues to teachers to decide their action plans.
Once we realized that letters helped students to express themselves better, to reveal their vulnerability, we took conscious efforts to process the letters further, where we found some serious emotional turmoil through the letter. The class teachers had a one-on-one chat with the student. In a lot of cases, we also tried to address the matters more subtly without bringing up the reference of the letter. This helped keep the trust of the children intact.
Semi-structured letter writing exercise could be a powerful tool to elicit information from the socio-emotional realms of adolescents. Further processing of the data elicited from the letters plays a crucial role in building stronger teacher-student relationships.
Our school learnt this in retrospect. We hope all other teachers will make a conscious use of this technique.
The author is a school psychologist and can be reached at mrinmayi.vaishampayan@gmail.com
