'School visits' versus 'workshops'

Have some school visits coming up next week. I like Alix Flinn's tips for school visits, which are mostly translatable into doing visits for secondary schools here (I wanted to say something here about never having flown anywhere for a school/library visit, but actually I did once opt for an Aer Arann flight across the country as it was cheaper than a train ticket).

I have a page about school/library visits here, because it seems like a wise move. These are usually not workshops. In workshops it is not particularly important whether participants are familiar with what the writer has published, because the focus is on how the writer can help participants with their own writing for the time that they have together. It helps, I think, particularly with younger groups, if there's familiarity there, but it's not absolutely necessary.

On the other hand, the emphasis in a visit is about the author themselves. Not that it's an ego-trip, but that the focus is on what this author has learned from their own experiences, and what they can say about the world of writing professionally based on those experiences. The jumping-off points for talking about writing are different: with a visit it's the author's own works, whereas with a workshop it's a particular writing exercise. This isn't an especially rigid classification, but that's been my experience. With a workshop it also helps to have more time, so that a writing exercise can be explained properly, so that it can be discussed afterwards, and so that feedback can be given to as many students as possible. (After all, if it's just about doing a writing exercise, the teachers in the school can grab a book or go online and pick one. Part of what you're getting in a workshop, facilitated by someone outside the school, is a fresh opinion, as well as someone with a different professional background.)

Why have an author visit? They're often about encouraging reading more so than writing. Even if a group has never heard of the author (and this really is where teachers owe it to their students and to the visiting writer to provide enough background information before the visit), the author will probably read something from at least one of their books. That in itself might be enough to spark a conversation. It can also make a difference for kids to see that writers are real people, that they exist and that they can be there in front of them and that writing is not this mystical magical process that's completely cut off from them. And that there's this connection between this person sitting in front of them and the words that they're reading out and the book in their hands, a link that can make books suddenly relevant.

Why have a workshop? If you have a group who are passionate about writing, or it is important to you as a teacher or a librarian that they begin to develop this passion. This may well be less important than getting students excited about reading (if they don't like reading, they will probably not be terribly excited about writing). The kind of writing they will do in a workshop will not be the sort of stuff that teachers should be teaching them. It will not be about How To Impress The Junior Cert Examiner or How To Punctuate Correctly. It may not follow a teacher's ideal of what good writing is. (Look, I adored English in secondary school. Or from third year onwards, at least. But I have also seen far too many bright, creative people who write very well and yet don't get good marks in English-as-taught-in-school to feel comfortable advocating school English as an appropriate preparation for those who want to write creatively.) In short, workshops may not be suitable for many groups, though they might be perfect for some.

This is just my take on the matter (she said, in that terribly feminine way of qualifying her opinion): I strongly encourage those organising visits or talks to think about why they're doing so, and what they hope the students to get from it. Usually it's fairly simple (get them enthused about reading! Have a real life author there for them! Find something to take up that Thursday afternoon class!), but if there's something specific you hope an author will cover with the students (e.g. getting a very reluctant-reader group interested in reading, or doing a writing exercise with the group), discuss it beforehand, and don't assume that it comes as part-and-parcel of their standard visit.