Rodari and the Sense of Nonsense: Fostering children's creativity according to Italy's beloved "toymaker"
Gianni Rodari is Italy's most famous children's author, writing dozens of collections of fables and fairy tales. Most Italians know at least one of his nursery rhymes by heart. He even won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1970, considered the Nobel Prize for children's literature.
He referred to himself as a “toymaker”, because he believed that stories should be as fun and engaging as any toy, a sort of game that could be returned to again and again. He died in 1980, only 59 years old, and although many ideas about parenting and educating children from the 1970s and 1980s don’t transfer well into the modern age, Rodari’s ideas are no less valid today than they were decades ago.
Rodari was more than just a children’s author. He started out as an elementary school teacher and was also a well-regarded political journalist and special correspondent for some of Italy’s most important newspapers. But in the late 1960s, he took a break from writing to explore children’s education and development, returning to work directly with teachers in the classroom to test his ideas. This culminated in his masterpiece, “The Grammar of Fantasy: Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories”, published in 1973, considered a manual for incorporating creativity into educating and raising children, which put the focus on the child as creator, producer, and researcher, rather than a passive recipient of education.
Here are some of Rodari’s ideas for fostering creativity, which apply not only in the classroom and not only to children.
Mistakes aren’t a dead-end, but a point of departure
In “The Grammar of Fantasy”, he gives an example of an error that a student could easily make, which would turn “Lake Garda” into “Garda’s needle (if you accidentally add an apostrophe to the Italian, “lago di Garda” becomes “l’ago di Garda”). Rodari notes that the teacher could take out a red pen and correct the error, or use this as the starting point for an entirely new discussion, asking the child to tell the “history and geography of this very important needle of Garda, shown on all the maps of Italy. Is the moon reflected in its point or its eye? Can it prick your nose?” In fact, one of Rodari’s collection of stories is called “The Book of Mistakes”.
He wanted education to be fun for children, and was famous for noting, “Why learn through tears what can be learned with laughter?”. He went on to say, “If we put together all the tears shed across all the continents over spelling errors, we would have a waterfall powerful enough to generate electricity. But I think that kind of energy is too costly.”
The verb “to read” cannot be formulated in the imperative
Much like “dream” and “love”, “read” cannot be turned into a command. In 1964, Rodari wrote a magazine article entitled “9 Ways to Teach Children to Hate Reading”, which is prescient for today’s parents struggling with screen time. He cautions against the following:
- Offering books as an alternative to TV. Rodari writes that TV is fun for kids, enriching their points of view, developing their vocabulary, and introducing them to ideas outside their everyday lives. He notes, “I don’t think denying something that is fun…is the ideal way to make them love something else, instead it will make reading seem like a bother or punishment.”
- Telling today’s kids that we used to read more books. “Adults are often tempted (and are rarely able to resist) extolling the virtues of their childhoods, which memory paints with vivid colors, making it seem idyllic. Memory betrays and deceives …..You can’t ask kids to love a past that they don’t belong to.”
- Not reading to kids. The sound of a parent’s voice, bringing a character to life from the page, creates an intimacy and familiarity unlike any other way we interact with our children.
- Ordering children to read. A child can be forced to learn the techniques of readings, but a love of reading comes from something inside us and just as a tree only flowers under the right conditions and at the right season, a child develops their own relationship with stories.
Know your audience
Rodari often returned to classrooms to test out story ideas on students. In an interview, he described what he learned during these sessions. “You’d be sure that they would laugh at a certain point, and instead, nothing. You would realize that they were struggling with certain words or concepts. Then they would laugh at an entirely different point, and that is how they let you know: this is what you need to do, this is a good idea…. These “workshops” taught me that there are not simply different levels of understanding, but also different methods. Sometimes a story is completely clear to them. Other times they wouldn’t be able to recount it back to you or explain it, but they liked it anyway, a sign that they understood it, or are able to absorb it, in their own way.”
He learned the expression “pie in the sky” from a friend who had spent time in America, and the wording appealed to him. He brought it into a classroom and played around with images and ideas with the kids, which eventually he used in his book “Torta in Cielo” about a scientist who tries to make a bomb, but gets the formula wrong, and ends up with a great pie in the sky, hovering over the city like a UFO. It is one of his best-selling books.
The sense of nonsense
Rodari understood all too well the power of words, observing, “A stone thrown in a pond creates concentric waves that expand on the surface, involving in their motion, at different distances and with different effects, the water lily and the reed, the toy boat and the fisherman’s dinghy… Words are no different, they enter the mind by chance, producing waves on the surface and below the surface, generating an infinite series of chain reactions, involving sounds and images, analogies and memories, meanings and dreams.”
When he was a teacher, Rodari would have 2 children go to the chalkboard and each write a word without being able to see what the other had written. Then they would invent a story about the two words. For example, one wrote “eye” and the other “faucet”. And they would invent a story about eyes and faucets. Or books and boats. Or trees and lightbulbs. “There were stories that just kept going, we had to break them down into episodes. Some had no beginning or end. But they made the children laugh”. Later, in “The Grammar of Fantasy”, he termed this technique for sparking creative thought the “fantastical binomial”.
Above, listen to Rodari read 3 of his nursery rhymes from “Nursery Rhymes in the Sky and on the Ground” (in Italian).
We are all artists
Rodari ends “The Grammar of Fantasy” with a discussion on the importance of imagination and stresses that we are all artists, all creative individuals, that creativity is no less important for scientific discoveries than it is for creating works of art. Creativity is not for the elite or those who pass certain tests, it is a necessary condition for daily life. A creative mind is one that is always asking questions and finding problems where others see easy answers. It prefers fluid situations that may sometimes be scary. But, and he was sure to emphasize this, it is also a playful process, and, as adults, we can learn a great deal from the creative process of children.
By focusing on Rodari’s ideas and techniques for fostering creativity in this article, we don’t get a sense of his own imagination. So I translated part of the introduction he wrote for his book, “Nursery Rhymes in the Sky and on the Ground”, which was published in 1960, and seems the perfect closing:
“Dear children (with parents in parentheses),
It is very convenient, for me, to introduce my nursery rhymes to you. If someone else had done it, they might tell you they were terrible, boring, useless, and instead of writing them, it would have been better if I had gone hunting for mushrooms. But since I get to introduce them, I can tell you that my nursery rhymes are wonderful, fun, and almost as useful as bread. This is my opinion, and also the opinion of my daughter; at least she says so, and I have always taught her that she mustn’t tell lies.
I have been writing nursery rhymes for 13 years now, and I have written more than a hundred, and I have a bunch of ideas for writing more, a little at a time. It is difficult to do more than one a month, on average, because the idea has to be truly good, and it takes a while for it to develop, and then you have to choose the lines one by one, so that they aren’t too similar, and so that each line says something, and that the words form just the right music. In addition, in each nursery rhyme, there must be something new, and some news, to really know and understand, you don’t get by reading the newspaper every morning.
Many of these nursery rhymes are about spaceships and astronauts, as is right, because you will be the ones that will go to the stars: some will be admirals of the vessel, others the radio operator, and I will be so old that I will just have to be content on some park bench back here on Earth, with my nose up looking up at you in the skies…There are happy nursery rhymes and sad ones, just as with the calendar there are golden days and dark days. But there are no nursery rhymes without hope, I don’t know how to write them.
…Everyone knows that at one time, the world was all wrong: there were rivers, but no bridges to cross them, mountains, but no roads or tunnels, not even hiking boots that pinch your toes! With courage and determination, people resolved many of these errors, but there are still quite a few, and you will need to help fix them. I hope my nursery rhymes make you want to roll up your sleeves and get to work.
To the moms and teachers, I just want to say “thank you” if you have the patience to read these to the children who don’t know how to read yet, but they are the children of today, and they already understand everything and even a few things more!”
Corporate Strategy and Planning Director
6 年Amazing Mary!? What? a wonderful man!