Turns out that Teaching Writing Grades 7-12 in an Era of Assessment: Passion and Practice will be published after all. Pearson gave us the go-ahead to go into production just before Thanksgiving 2012. We're anticipating publication in mid-summer to late summer. The catalog description of the book will be available from Pearson in May. Horray! Here's my own initial chapter, once again, but now in its revised ready-for-publication version:
Passion and
Practice: Personalizing the Theoretical
by Jonathan Lovell
Introduction
In introducing Teaching
Writing Grades 7-12 in an Era of Assessment: Passion and Practice with attention to the theorists and
theorist-practitioners who served as pioneering founders, my goals are
two-fold: to demonstrate the
practical but profound influence of these founders on our practices as teachers
of writing today, especially in light of the emphasis on writing found in the
Common Core State Standards, and to put some flesh on the bones of these
seminal thinkers, showing how what they wrote was deeply enmeshed in what they
did as practitioners themselves.
As Malcolm Galdwell (Outliers: The
Story of Success, 2008) and Howard Gardner (The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand, 1999)
have recently expressed, excellence in performance in any activity is dependent
on a willingness to perform this activity over and over again. The question for the authors discussed
in this opening chapter is the question all teachers confront, however much
they believe in the essential nature of repeated practice in relation to
performance excellence: why might
my students wish to engage in the
performative activity of writing?
And why might they wish to engage in this practice not simply with
dogged persistence, but with genuine passion?
For those readers not fortunate enough to be
teachers during the time these founders were active, my hope is that the
accounts of this group will serve as a direct and memorable avenue to
understanding them. It is especially important that this act of tough-minded
homage be done during this “era of assessment,” since the broad, comprehensive,
and inspiriting view of language growth that was/is uniformly espoused by these
founders is presently in danger of either being either marginalized or simply
forgotten. While each account is embedded in a personal narrative, the
experiences I relay are likely to be similar to those of any teacher of
writing: that writing is a comprehensive literacy that we as teachers as well
as our students can find most challenging. Additionally, the teacher writers of
Teaching Writing Grades 7-12 in an Era of
Assessment: Passion and Practice reflect in their pedagogy the influence –
consciously or unconsciously-- of these founders.
James Britten and the Value of “Expressive”
Language
In 1969, in my second and final year of study at
Oxford University, I chanced on a recently published paperback entitled Language, the Learner and the School, by
Douglas Barnes, James Britton, and Harold Rosen, all of the London Institute of
Education. What help might this
publication provide, I wondered, for a position I’d soon be assuming teaching
English to 10th and 12th graders at an independent day
school in Wilmington, Delaware?
The perspective these researchers brought to their
study was intriguing. What happens, they asked, when students move from being
taught by a single primary grade teacher to the six or seven different teachers
of their subject-centered secondary classrooms? In asking this question, these researchers brought to their
observations a point of view that sounds strikingly contemporary: how do students at the middle and high
school levels come to understand the often quite different “academic languages”
used by their different subject area teachers? And how does the language these different teachers use to
describe and explain their different subject areas compare and contrast to the
language the students themselves might use to explain what they already know
and what they are in the process of learning?
What gave particular resonance to the work of this
group, however, in contrast to the focus today on having teachers gradually
lead their students to an increasing sense of command of the academic language
of their respective disciples, was the respect they had for how students
expressed themselves when they met in small groups to discuss what they were
learning, independent of a teacher’s guidance. I was sufficiently intrigued by the contrasts between the
“expressive” language the seventh grade students in the study used to convey
their understanding of what they had learned and the academic language used by
their secondary level teachers that I vowed to conduct my own small classroom
experiment when I began my teaching.
Rather than tell students what I thought they should notice about the
short stories we were reading for our 10th grade curricula, I would
take out my notepad and write down what they said. And I was prepared to wait quite a long time, in silence,
before I said anything myself.
Otherwise, so I reasoned, I could not be sure if what I was listening to
was my students’ own “expressive” language or their desire to sound as much as
possible like their teacher.
It turned out that my students did have to endure
quite long spells of silence in those first few weeks of my teaching, and I’m
not certain that I made very productive or beneficial use of the
student-centered language that I learned as a result. What I did learn was that the majority of the students I
taught were simply not very interested in talking about short works of fiction
that had been “pre-packaged” by a publisher who cared little about what
interested them, and who marched them doggedly through groups of stories
according to what these works of fiction revealed about the salient
characteristics of the short story genre.
It did not matter in other words, if I did not say a thing, since the
organization and academic focus of the anthology we were using spoke volumes
“on my behalf.” While I gradually
abandoned my experimental role as an observer and recorder of my students’
responses to the short stories they were reading, I did not forget the impact
that reading those initial research studies had had on me as an eager and
expectant young English teacher.
When I returned eight years later to the work of
this group of researchers, their writing had become much better known, both in
England and the United States. In
response to the influential teaching and writing of James Britton, author of Language and Learning (1972), the world
of English Education that I re-entered in the fall of 1977 was abuzz with
discussions of “expressive writing,” writing-across-the-curriculum, and the
development of writing abilities from the early to the later teenage
years.
In the position at Columbia University's Teachers
College for which I’d been hired, my job was to organize an MA program in
English Education for prospective secondary level teachers and create new EdD
and PhD programs in the teaching of reading and writing.
I was qualified, however, for neither of these
roles, having managed to get through my interview by doing some quick research
in the field of composition studies and somehow managing to persuade my
interviewers that I knew what I was talking about. When the spring semester
came around, however, I was in deep trouble. I was responsible for teaching a course entitled
"Composition for Teachers of English," with my audience composed of the
dozen or so MA students I had begun to work with that fall as well as about
thirty New York City high school English teachers who were taking the course to
move up a notch on their salary scales.
What made teaching this course especially
troubling for me, however, was my own writing. I was trying to complete the second chapter of my dissertation--a
study of the work of the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel
Rossetti--but what I was in fact doing was crossing out sentences and
paragraphs I’d written months earlier and feeling like I was sinking slowly and
inexorably into an ever-deepening verbal morass. What I really needed to do, I remember thinking, was
re-title my course "De-composition for Teachers of English." That was a subject I knew something
about.
I managed to make it through the first few Monday
evening classes. Following the
graduate school model with which I was most recently familiar, I lectured to
the class on the research described above by James Britton, John Dixon, and
Douglas Barnes. As this research
evolved in the late sixties and early seventies, it paid increasing attention
to the disconnect between the "expressive language" students might
use to convey their initial responses to what they read, and the overly dry,
academic language they were required to use in their writing, especially as
they moved from 7th to 12th grades.
Peter Elbow and the Value of Respectful Listeners
While this research was indeed quite important,
the lecture-discussion style in which I presented it to my class was a
disaster: a modeling of just the
sort of dry academic language that Britton, Dixon, and Barnes were arguing
against. Just how disastrous was
revealed to me by a note my chair left on my desk a few weeks into the
semester. "I thought I'd
better pass along this letter written to President Cremin of Teachers College,"
it read. "I wouldn't take it
too seriously, but it does suggest problems that might be worth
addressing." A student in my
class who was teaching at the innovative private day school to which President
Cremin had sent his own children wrote the letter. In the letter, she referred to a lecture that Cremin
had recently given on the need to bring a greater sense of professionalism to
teachers at the K-12 level. An
excellent way to start in this direction, she suggested, would be to fire a
recently hired assistant professor teaching a course entitled "Composition
for Teachers of English."
As I was sitting disconsolately at my desk,
expecting to find my belongings unceremoniously dumped onto the street at any
moment, two of my graduate students walked into my office. "We heard you were having some
trouble with that course in the teaching of writing," they told me. "We thought you might find this
book helpful. We use it in our CUNY
basic writing courses and find the practices it recommends work very well."
The book was Writing
Without Teachers (1973) by Peter Elbow. I figured that at that point I had nothing to lose, so I
began reading. What immediately
drew me in was Elbow's account of himself as a writer. He’d had more and more trouble with his
own writing as he progressed from college to graduate school and had become
hopelessly stuck in the writing of his own dissertation. Since his inability to write
disqualified him from any potential job he might get teaching English
Literature at the college level, the only job he was qualified for, ironically,
was as an instructor of freshman composition.
Elbow did more than write about his own travails
as a writer, however. More usefully,
he outlined a program for addressing the deep-seated doubts and failures of
nerve and confidence that he suggested we all face as writers, no matter our
age or grade level. Try writing in short bursts, Elbow suggested, not letting
your “editorial mind” prematurely censure what you’ve written. Try writing these short bursts at
unusual times of day or in inconvenient places. "Writing in difficult circumstances" I came to
call this approach, practicing it by writing before I'd had my morning coffee
or on the New York City subway as it lurched its way from station to station.
The most distinctive and important component of
Elbow’s approach, however, is his insight into the importance of getting
response to one’s writing. Just as the internal editor in our mind tends to
censure our work prematurely, so do those who respond to our writing. And yet getting response is crucial to
discovering what we have to say.
So Elbow suggested that rather than reading a writer's initial drafts
silently, authors should read their writing aloud to a small group of
listeners: once through a first
time so listeners gain a sense of the content of the writing; then a second
time so they gain a sense of its emerging shape. Elbow further argued, quite surprisingly and innovatively,
that rather than having listeners suggest revisions to the writer, they should
describe the effect of hearing the author's words read aloud.
Listeners would begin by recalling words and
phrases they’d remembered from the piece, then they would summarize the piece
as a whole, and finally they would tell the author what hearing the piece read
aloud led them to think about as they were listening to it. These “showing,” “telling,” and
“generative” responses should be written out by the listeners, Elbow suggested,
then read aloud, and handed to the authors who'd who had their pieces responded
to in this objective fashion. In
this way, authors themselves could decide how to revise their writing so that
it produced the effects on listeners that they liked, or that they admired in
other pieces they'd heard in their small groups of writers and listeners.
I was fascinated. I decided to put Elbow's approach to the test, producing a
“composition manifesto,” as my students came to call it, for the next
class. “We will write each week,”
I announced, “including your instructor." And I went on to explain that we would form small groups of
five or six, read our pieces of writing aloud to one another, respond in the
ways I'd just learned from reading this compelling new book, and document what
happened to us and to our writing as we went through this process.
And for those in the class that chose to stick it
out, our writing--and more importantly our appetite for producing and revising
our writing--did indeed improve: steadily,
obviously, and often quite dramatically.
I later came to see that what Elbow was proposing was the creation of a
community of respectful and skilled listener-readers as much as confident and
competent writers. That's what these
elaborate rituals of response were all about: gaining steady and consistent practice in learning to become
attentive and respectful listeners.
And in the process of becoming these listener-readers, writing is
“brought out” of us that responds directly to, and is in a sense the creation
of, this new community of writers and listeners. One of Elbow’s most enduring legacies is that most 21st
century K-12 teachers have come through college composition classes where peer
response groups are the norm.
Lucy Calkins and the Value of Writer’s Workshop
Four years later, I’d left my tenure track
position at Columbia in response to a position my wife was offered at UC
Berkeley and had assumed a one-year renewable position at UC Davis teaching
freshman composition.
At Davis, I was one of forty-odd composition
instructors. Some were graduate
students in English, some were Davis residents, and a few like me were PhD's in
English looking for full-time tenure track positions elsewhere. Everyone taught
the same course, using a session-by-session instruction manual based on
Frederick Crews' Random House Handbook of
Rhetoric and Composition.
My students at Davis were quite different from
those I’d taught at Columbia. Products of California's affluent and protected
suburbs, they treated composition instructors as service providers whose main purpose
was to insure that they, the service recipients, maintained their 4.0 GPAs. "What must we do on this
comparison/contrast paper to get an A?" they would ask. Or "Could you tell us exactly what you want on this
descriptive writing assignment?"
They'd arrive at my office door, graded papers in
hand, asking me to show them which words, phrases, and commas they should
change to upgrade their paper from a B- to an A. Soon, they were coming up to me as I walked into class,
asking me with an edge to their voices if I might "make the next assignment
clearer," so they would "know what I wanted" and could
"give it to me.”
I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted to shake my students by their
shoulders until their collective teeth rattled, saying to them: "Write about something that matters to you, or I will go completely
bonkers!"
I recall driving to Davis one morning, numb with
apprehension, with a pile of thirty "classification" papers sitting
expectantly on the passenger seat beside me. In these papers my students had been asked to "select a
generic group of things and describe the features that distinguish the
sub-categories that make up this group." Although I'd skimmed these papers the night before, I now
had to re-read and grade them before my first morning class. Every single paper, it seemed to me as
I sat at my wine department lab table working doggedly to complete this task,
described the bicycles ridden on the Davis campus and the various
sub-categories into which these bicycles might be classified.
"What should we do, Professor, to get an A on
this paper?"
"Write about something that matters to me," I wanted to shout, "or I
assure you I will start swinging from the trees outside our classroom windows
and loping across campus on my legs and forepaws."
I was in the middle of my first semester, my desk
at home littered with piles of composition assignments I could not bear to look
at, when I received a call from my former department chair at Teachers
College. Because our decision to
move to California was made quite late in the prior semester, my chair had
decided to leave my position vacant for a year so that a departmental committee
could conduct a proper search for my replacement.
"We have an interesting candidate for your
English Education position," my chairman said. "I wonder if you could help us out." He explained that while the candidate's
research had been in the general field of English Education, she'd focused her
studies on upper elementary level students. "But it's first-rate stuff," my chairman said,
"really first rate. Could you
give this candidate a call, perhaps have her send you her current
work-in-progress, and write an evaluation to the search committee of her
appropriateness for the position?"
"Glad to," I replied, trying to sound more
confident than I felt. "Do
you want me to be an advocate for the position as well? I would suspect she's being courted by
other universities." My chairman replied that he’d be pleased if I would,
describing the candidate as a “rare find."
I called her the following weekend, and in
response to her asking if Columbia usually called candidates as parts of their
searches, told her that hers was an unusual case.
"'Unusual' good or 'unusual' bad?" she
asked me.
"'Unusual' good," I said, mentioning my
chair's reference to her as a "rare find."
"How would he know? What's he read of mine he likes so much?"
This is more difficult than I'd anticipated, I
thought to myself. I wonder what
she has written? So I asked her
about her research.
The manuscript arrived a week later: 300 pages
wrapped in brown paper. I started
reading immediately. The content drew me in at once, fascinated. Here were third and fourth graders
writing exactly as I wanted my college freshmen to write: choosing topics of consequence to them;
experimenting with different modes of writing--narrative, poetry, drama; and getting
thoughtful and respectful feedback on their pieces from their teachers and
fellow classmates. And the writing
that the students in these classrooms produced was absolutely stunning. Several years later, when I used the
book that emerged from this dissertation, Lessons
From a Child (1983), as one of the textbooks for a college level writing
course I was teaching, a student came into my office shortly after the class
had begun, asking anxiously.
"You don't expect us to write as well as the kids in this book, do
you?"
The author of that small but seminal volume, Lessons from a Child, is Lucy Calkins. I
wrote an enthusiastic review of her candidacy for my former department, which I
first showed to my then middle school aged daughter. "It's well written, Dad," she remarked, "but
this person does walk on the ground
like the rest of us, doesn't she?" As it turned out, she was selected for
the position at Teachers College, where she is still teaching. Having written,
among many other publications, the highly successful Units of Study for Teaching Writing (K-2 and 3-5) and Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating
Achievement, and having directed the influential Teachers College Reading
and Writing Project over many years, it’s now clear that she does indeed walk on the ground like the
rest of us, only a more sure-footedly and quite a bit faster.
Donald Graves and the Value of Learning
from Our Youngest Writers
In the spring of 1982, however, the University of
New Hampshire group through which Lucy Calkins was introduced to the field of
composition research was just starting to gain wide attention. Its leader, Donald Graves, was known at
the time primarily through his authorship of the Ford Foundation monograph Balance the Basics: Let Them Write (1978). In this powerful study, Graves pointed
out that for every dollar spent on the teaching of writing, one hundred dollars
are spent on the teaching of reading.
Even more tellingly, he noted that for every dollar spent for research
on the teaching of writing, one thousand are spent for research on the teaching
of reading. His conclusion was that by not taking advantage of a child’s
initial urge to write rather than to read, we significantly underestimate the
power of the “output languages” of writing and speaking in favor of the “input
languages” of reading and listening.
This monograph, along with the fact that Graves
was receiving the David H. Russell Research Award for authoring this study and
concurrently publishing his seminal work Writing:
Teachers and Children at Work (1982), was creating quite a stir in the hallways
and sessions of the 1982 NCTE Annual Convention in Washington, DC. As a rather wide-eyed attendee at this
conference, I was greatly impressed with the energetic and dedicated cadre of
young scholars that Don Graves had drawn into his orbit: Lucy Calkins of
Teachers College (discussed above), Nancie Atwell of Boothbay Harbor, Maine (soon
to publish In the Middle: Writing,
Reading, and Learning with Adolescents in 1987), Mary Ellen Giacobbe of
Atkinson, New Hampshire (later to publish Talking,
Drawing, Writing: Lessons for Our
Youngest Writers in 2007), Linda Rief of Durham, New Hampshire (later to
publish Seeking Diversity: Language Arts
with Adolescents in 1992), and Tom Romano of Edgewood High School in
Trenton, Ohio (soon to publish Clearing
the Way: Working with Teenage Writers in 1987). But I was also impressed with the fundamentally important
perception about language growth on which much of the research and practice of
this University of New Hampshire group was based.
This perception might be expressed by observing
that while most parents would never dream of putting their hands over their
children’s mouths if they uttered the words “mama” or “papa,” telling them not
to speak until they could say the words “mother” or “father,” something analogous
was happening quite routinely in the teaching of writing in our nation’s elementary
school classrooms. Rather than
recognizing and honoring children’s desire to write, as well as their
confidence they had something important to say, and rather than learning the
predictable patterns of “invented spelling” that young children routinely use
when they begin to write, teachers were closing the door on these nascent
efforts at written communication, focusing their attention instead on
handwriting, spelling, and the basic punctuation conventions of simple
sentences. By imposing this adult
perception of the “fundamentals” of written communication prematurely, teachers
were unwittingly creating a nation of students who either hated to write or
were convinced that they were “horrible writers.” It was just as if parents had indeed put their hands over
their children’s mouths when they began to speak, with the analogous result
that we were raising a nation of children who were being essentially chastened
into silence.
That’s effectively what we’d done in our practices
in the teaching of writing, specifically in this era of ever-increasing
high-profile assessments. Rather
than capitalize on the simplicity and depth of Graves’ innovative understanding
of how students might grow as writers and how we might assist them more
humanely and productively in our practices as teachers, we have been
increasingly focused on testing that segments writing into component parts, and
in the process largely destroys our students’ urge or desire to write.
James Gray and the Value of Writing Teachers
Collaborating across All Grade Levels
A few months after these enlightening experiments
with my younger daughter, I applied and was selected for a position in English Education
at the University of Nevada, Reno.
The community of public school teachers and university faculty to which
I was introduced was eye-opening and inspiriting. One of my new position’s job requirements was that I
collaborate with a group of K-college teachers who formed a professional
development community known as the Northern Nevada Writing Project. While I had some familiarity with the
Writing Project through my collaboration with Sondra Perl and Richard Sterling,
the New York City Writing Project Directors, during my time at Teachers
College, my experience was still quite limited. As part of my new position at UNR, I was asked by the two
Co-Directors of the Northern Nevada Writing Project (both high school
teachers), to apply to the Bay Area Writing Project’s Invitational Summer
Institute.
I spent over four and a half weeks in the summer
of 1984 in the company of 25 other K-college teachers on the UC Berkeley
campus, under the direction of Jim Gray, founder of the Writing Project. Having now served as a director or
co-director of 28 subsequent invitational summer institutes, it seems clear to
me that there is a compelling connection between the inspiration for attending
to younger students’ beginning writing development among the researchers at the
University of New Hampshire and the concurrent founding of the Bay Area Writing
Project at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-70s.
Both the University of New Hampshire program under
Don Graves, and the University of California Berkeley/Bay Area Writing Project
program under Jim Gray, began with the perception that there were talents and
abilities among their target populations that had gone largely unnoticed
because these quite different populations had not been given the opportunity to
“see” the emergence of their own abilities in a concrete and convincing manner.
In the case of young children, this was largely because most teachers believed
that several small “steps” needed to be mastered before younger writers could
“walk” with confidence as mature writers.
In the case of practicing teachers, the worker-supervisor model under
which the field of public school teaching continues to function today made it
all but certain that administrators would fail to see their “teacher-workers”
as valuable and insightful sources of knowledge. Looked at from this perspective, neither the young writers
in Don Graves’ initial studies of elementary school children in Atkinson, New
Hampshire nor the mostly middle and high school teachers who made up the Bay
Area Writing Project’s initial 1974 Invitational Summer Institute were
accustomed to being heard or listened to with the idea that they had something
important to say, something important to teach the rest of us.
In the University of New Hampshire research
studies, what gives young writers the confidence they have something to say is
the time and the patience their teachers provide for them to think through and
draft and revise their writing. In
the Writing Project summer institutes, what builds this confidence in having
something worthwhile to say is the evenly allocated time that every participant
is given to present a workshop demonstration of a “best practice” in the
teaching of writing to the other participants in the institute. Both practices accomplish similar
goals. They begin with individuals
who are uncertain or deeply skeptical that their “words” are worth listening
to, and they provide these individuals with an attentive and respectful
audience that helps to bring forth the very “words of consequence” that the
young writers or selected teachers are half-convinced they do not possess.
It is no accident that both programs came round to
a belief in the fundamental importance of teachers as writers. The forerunner to the Writing Project,
as Jim Gray explains in Teachers at the
Center (2000), led to the somewhat accidental creation of “afternoon writing groups” in which
small groups of teachers write and get response to their writing. This now-standard feature of all Writing
Project summer institutes was an unanticipated outcome (one which evolved during
pre-1974 years when Gray’s summer programs were located on the UC Davis campus
and were NDEA funded) of several high school teachers’ desire to “try out” some
of the practices in the teaching of writing that had been presented during the morning
sessions. Similarly, it was
only in his later writings that Don Graves began to understand the importance
of teachers consistently bringing their own experience as writers to their
conferences and mini-lessons with their students. A major legacy then of Don Graves and Jim Gray is this focus
on teachers as writers.
Don Murray and the Value of Attending to
the Practice of Professional Writers
It was Don Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing: A Practical Method of Teaching Composition
(1968) that I read, along with Janet Emig’s The
Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (1971), in preparation for my interview
for the English Education position at Teachers College. What struck me in Murray’s
accounts of his own practices as a writer was how authentic, and not
infrequently, how moving they sounded.
His words fairly leapt off the page, and it was clear to me that the
urgency and vitality of what he had to say were directly related to the honesty
with which he described, and often dissected, his own practices as he moved
slowly and often painfully from initial draft to final product. The “lesson” conveyed by Murray’s book is
two-fold: writing is far more
messy and labor-intensive than had been generally acknowledged by traditional
approaches to the teaching of writing, and the most convincing and heart-felt
instruction in this field of endeavor would come from someone who was himself or
herself a passionate practitioner.
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It was Murray’s call to arms in this respect that
led me to insist, in my “composition manifesto” to my Teachers College
students, that we would all write, “including your instructor,” and that we
would reflect on what we’d learned about our own writing in relation to our
teaching of writing, as we progressed from draft to draft on our various pieces
of writing. And it’s
Murray’s message that reverberates in my mind today as I ask the participants
in our San Jose Area Writing Project Summer Institutes to use their
end-of-institute evaluations to describe their experiences with their afternoon
writing response groups and to reflect on what they will take from these
experiences to their classrooms in the coming year. Two of the participants’
responses from our 2011 summer institute indicate the power of the connection
that teachers begin to make once they see themselves as writers teaching writing:
After we
settled down and got a chance to get to know one another, we got along great.
We discussed how we wanted feedback. Some wanted 50% positive / 50%
constructive; another wanted it “ruthless”; another only wanted us to tell her
she was a good writer. So we settled on 50/50 and nothing mean. It was healthy
to compromise. After we read one another’s work aloud, passed it around,
commented, made changes, brought it back--rinse, wash, repeat--we were all so
much closer. We saw improvements and wonderful work come from places we didn’t
even know existed. It was amazing.
I hope to
create and foster the use of writing groups in my own classes this coming year
because I feel it was such a valuable experience for finding out that I was a
writer. Correction –that I am a writer. I have rekindled something long shoved off as youthful
pretentiousness. I believe that if
I can create a safe enough space within small groups, I can create a safer
space in the whole classroom.
-- Melissa M, 11th-12th
Grade Teacher
My
experience with my afternoon writing group was very cathartic. We would meet after each morning
session and debrief everything.
Most of our afternoons were spent talking and reminiscing. After writing and reading so much, but
having little time to comment… most of us were bursting at the seams to share…
anything and everything. We found
ourselves sharing stories, life experiences, quotes, comments, concerns,
etc. We would jot down ideas, etc.
then parade home with “homework” and writing assignments. It turned out that this was what led to
the majority of the creative spark for me. I would take most of this home, let it percolate, and then
start my actual writing around 10 pm or so.
I think the
biggest experiences I will take to my classroom for this coming year are the
options that were provided by our Afternoon Writing Group facilitator and the
fact that, sometimes, you just have to talk about things before you write. Sometimes I assign things without
talking through them. I think it would
help to allow students to sit in writing groups of about 3 or 4 to bounce ideas
off one another before they start writing. This could help get their creative spark lit.
--Katie N, 9th-10th Grade
Teacher
Both these responses demonstrate the significance
of Don Murray’s insistence that teachers of writing not only “talk the talk”
but also “walk the walk.” As we
face the predictable onslaught of “hard-wired” approaches to the teaching of
writing in our public school classrooms in the name of aligning our curricula
to the Common Core State Standards, it is helpful to remember Don Murray’s
frequent admonition that creating writing worth reading involves a process that
is by nature messy, unpredictable, and idiosyncratic.
Ken Macrorie
and the Value of Bringing Voice to Research
If Don Murray
represents the typical New Englander in his dedication to a strong work ethic
shading towards dogged persistence, Ken Macrorie represents the irreverence of
the typical westerner. He never
met a grammar rule he didn’t like . . . to break. Born in the Mississippi River
town of Moline, Illinois, Macrorie frequently evokes, both in his stance toward
writing and in his own writing voice, the spirit and voice of Mark Twain: “Persons
attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons
attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a
plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author” (preface to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). It therefore comes as something of a
surprise that Macrorie was a good deal more involved than Murray, five years
his junior, in working within traditional organizations in the field of English
Education. He was a Professor of
English at Western Michigan University from 1961 to 1978, where his focus was
on teacher training (or “re-educating teachers trapped in unproductive teaching
methods,” as he put it). He served
as editor of NCTE’s professional journal, College
Composition and Communication, from 1962 to 1964, when it was regarded as
the leader of the assault on the “current traditional” paradigm in writing
instruction. And finally, he served for thirteen years, both before and after
his retirement from WMU, at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English, a summer
master’s program conducted under the auspices of Vermont’s Middlebury College,
where he taught practicing high school teachers to become writers and to take
that knowledge back to their classrooms.
In terms of this
chapter, however, it is Macrorie’s re-conceptualizing of the writing of the
traditional research paper that will illuminate his many contributions to the
field of writing instruction. The
book that introduced many to Macrorie’s boldly original reconsideration of
research writing was Searching Writing
(1980), or as the book was more helpfully re-titled in 1988, The I-Search Paper. In Chapter 6 of this book, you will
read how middle school teachers, Brandy Appling-Jenson and Carolyn Anzia, and
high school teacher, Kathleen González, have adapted Macrorie’s I-Search Paper strategies for their own
classrooms. In this chapter,
however, I focus on the impact Macrorie’s original text had on my teaching of
freshman composition classes at San José State University.
Like most college
level freshman composition programs, San José State requires the completion of
a “research paper” as part of every student’s introductory level writing
requirements. On the one hand, I
understood the rationale for this requirement, since such “academic” writing
would be routinely required of students as they moved to higher-level
university classes. On the other
hand, I was all too aware of the pull my students would feel toward simply
“lifting” their material from previously published sources. I was not
unsympathetic to this pull. It’s
one we have all felt to one degree or another, after all, and it’s especially
understandable when beginning level college writers are placed in academic
environments where they have very little notion of what constitutes
authentically compelling academic writing.
This is where
Macrorie’s understanding of what it means to search, whether for an obscure bit
of evidence that might illuminate a larger academic argument or for something
as relatively mundane as the best price on a car stereo system, comes to the
fore. I can’t recall if Macrorie
also suggested a Gallery Walk to heighten interest in these initial searches,
but that’s what I did with my San José State freshman classes. Everyone wrote down their research
question on a large piece of poster paper (with one nervy freshman writing in
his, “what is the meaning of life?”) and then everyone in the class did a
gallery walk past these posters, writing graffiti-like comments on these easel
sheets if one knew something about the content of the search or if one had a
suggestion for the author about how he or she might pursue the search.
The next steps were
to “research one’s topic” and to keep a running record of the steps one took to
move closer to discovering answers to his or her research question. At least one interview with one
informant was required for the search, and these I customarily prepared for by
setting a question for the class as a whole and then bringing in an informant
that the class could collectively interview. A further requirement was for a “saturation report,” where
the researcher would describe a setting that had come to be significant in his
or her search. As with the
whole-class interviews, I would generally take the class on a short “field
trip” around the building in which the class was being held and ask everyone to
select a setting they found memorable and describe that setting in a way the
rest of the class might recognize.
The culmination of
the I-Search paper was for students to write a narration of their pursuit of
their question. They would start
with what they knew or didn’t know about their topic, follow this with an
“argument” that explained to their readers why the question they were pursuing
was important to them, document the steps they took to learn the answer(s) to
their question, and conclude with a summary of what they had learned by the
time “the whistle blew” and they had to end their search. Needless to say, issues with plagiarism
were simply non-existent with such a rich and compelling experience of
“researching” a question of one’s own choosing. What surprised me, however, was the vibrancy and liveliness
of my students’ voices in the papers they submitted.
I sent a batch of
these papers to Macrorie himself, then living in retirement in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. He wrote back a few months
later, explaining that it took him some time to read through what I’d sent him
and asking me to please send less next time. While he complained that he could not fully understand how
my students managed to survive my “barrage” of instructions (a “running
syllabus” I provided for my students, made up of single-spaced narratives
describing each successive class), the papers they wrote clearly demonstrated
that I must be doing something right. “They are a delight,” he wrote. “So loose
in the saddle, so lively, so uncluttered with the usual hogwash of freshman
compositions.” I could hardly have asked for a more satisfying recognition of
my students’ writing abilities, nor a more compelling argument for the value of
re-conceiving the research paper as a authentic quest, placing the student
writer at its center.
James
Moffett and the Value of the “Ladder of Abstraction”
In focusing on
James Moffett’s contributions to the field of composition instruction, I return
to my early days teaching 10th grade in Wilmington, Delaware, then
fast-forward to my final two years teaching “Composition for Teachers of
English” at Teachers College. My
purpose in doing so is to illustrate the profound influence that the theorists
discussed in this chapter have had, and continue to have, on the practice of
writing at all levels, and also to illustrate how these theories might be
practically applied in actual, concrete teaching situations.
In my teaching in
Wilmington, I enjoyed and was stimulated by teaching my 12th
graders, but it was my 10th graders I truly loved. They were at such a volatile and
important stage in their intellectual and emotional development, and I came to
believe that if I taught wisely I could make a significant difference in their
lives. What was at issue, to my
mind, was whether or not I could persuade my 10th graders to
entertain more than one point of view on a given subject.
What frustrated me in trying to come up
with teaching practices that would serve to jostle my 10th graders
from their often quite strong allegiance to a pre-determined position was the
pervasive influence of the five paragraph theme. As described by Janet Emig in The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, the “Fifty-Star Theme,”
as Emig nicknamed the five paragraph theme, was both frustratingly persistent
in the secondary level English language arts curriculum and wholly unrelated to
any real purpose or practice in the larger world:
Why is the Fifty-Star Theme so tightly lodged in the
American composition curriculum?
The reason teachers often give is that this essentially redundant form,
devoid of content in at least two of its five parts, exists outside their
classrooms, and in very high places-- freshman English classes, business
communication, and in the “best practices” of the “best writers.” This fantasy
is easy to disprove. If one takes
a collection of writers who current critical judgment would agree are among our
best, can one find a single example of any variation of the Fifty-Star Theme?
The answer is no. (97)
I found I could persuade my 10th
graders to “inhabit” a point of view different from their own by engaging them
in dramatic re-enactments, but when my 10th graders wrote an
argumentative paper, all the intellectual and emotional suppleness they
displayed in their dramatic re-enactments went out the window. Was Friar Lawrence to blame for Romeo
and Juliet’s tragic deaths? He
certainly was, argued any number of my 10th graders. To prove it I will devote my first
paragraph to a thesis stating that he was guilty, then will write three body
paragraphs in which I will locate details from the play that support my thesis,
and will finish with a concluding paragraph that reminds you that Friar
Lawrence was indeed guilty of the tragic deaths of Romeo and Juliet. While I found myself, not too
surprisingly, assigning more and more dramatic re-enactments and fewer and
fewer “opinion papers” for my 10th graders as I progressed from my
first to my third year of teaching, I never found a satisfactory way of
addressing the deeper question of how to persuade my students, at least in
their writing, to unleash themselves from the safety and security of their
pre-determined positions.
Eight years later, at Teachers College, when I
began teaching my “Composition for Teachers of English” course for a third
time, I faced a similar but more vexing version of this same mind-set. My writing course now used both Peter
Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers
(1973) and James Moffett’s Teaching the
Universe of Discourse (1968) as its primary texts, and had become well
enough known and highly enough regarded to attract a small but vocal population
of TESOL graduate students. “This
business of a student-centered approach to writing development is perhaps a
defensible strategy for English speakers,” they argued, “but it simply will not
work with our ESL adult populations.” These TESOL teachers were quite clear
that what their students needed were clearly
structured lessons with a strong focus on grammar and conventions. “How are they going to avoid making
mistakes in their writing unless we, as their teachers, point these out to
them?” they would ask. “And if we
were to put this Elbow nonsense to use in our classrooms, all we’d observe
would be the blind leading the blind.”
While I did not agree with these strongly held
opinions about the writing development of adult ESL students, I could not
challenge them effectively as a practitioner since my own experience was
limited to a single summer’s teaching, many years earlier, in Hong Kong. How
might I introduce points of view that gently questioned these quite plausible
pedagogical certainties? How might
I do so without claiming more than I could reasonably claim on the basis of my
own quite limited teaching experience with adult ESL learners?
Appropriately enough, the answer came right from
Moffett’s Teaching the Universe of
Discourse. “Start by
understanding how difficult it is,” Moffett might be imagined as saying, “to
theorize about best practices in the teaching of writing to ESL adults.” To do so convincingly, according to the
theory set forth in Moffett’s book, involves not only imagining a large general
audience of readers, but also the writer’s ability to hypothesize “what could happen” in many future ESL
classrooms beyond those in which one has actually taught.
These imagined admonitions come from a theory of
discourse that Moffett had been developing since his early years teaching
English to high school students in New Hampshire. As presented in the collection of articles that formed the
basis of his book, this theory posits that all acts of written communication
can be understood as occurring at one point or another on a “ladder” of increasing
abstraction regarding the “distance” between the author and his or her subject
on the one hand, or between the author and his or her reader on the other. A writer writing notes to himself or
herself about an object or event that is close at hand--“what is
happening”--would be engaged in writing that represents the closest possible
“distance” between author and subject. Conversely, a writer presenting a theory
about “what might happen” in a periodical designed for a general readership
would be engaged in writing that represents the greatest possible “distance”
between both subject and audience.
It did not take me long to realize, given this perspective on writing
argumentatively, that I was asking my Teachers College TESOL students to write
persuasively from something akin to the farthest points “out” on both sides of
Moffett’s abstraction ladder. I
was asking them, that is, to tell “what happens” in adult ESL classes while
addressing a wholly imagined audience of general readers.
Assisted by a sequence of mimeographed writing
assignments then circulating among those familiar with Moffett’s work (later
published as Active Voice: A Writing
Program across the Curriculum, 1981), I began to design a sequence of
writing assignments along the lines suggested by Moffett’s “ladder of
abstraction.” My primary purpose
was to present a practical application of Moffett’s theory of discourse so that
everyone in the class could experience this rather complex theory first-hand. I also hoped, however, that I might
unsettle some of the fixed notions of conventional, grammar-oriented writing
instruction that were held by my TESOL students.
I started by asking my students to write from the
perspective of a speaker on a soapbox in Central Park advocating practices in
the teaching of writing that were the opposite of those presently held by the
author. What would such a speaker
say to defend his or her position?
What arguments and examples would such a speaker use to convince his or
her listeners of the compelling nature of his or her point of view?
Next, I asked my students to write out a dialogue
between this strident soapbox speaker and themselves, toning down the stridency
of the speaker’s stance so that the conversation might be civilized and
even-tempered.
Third, I asked my students to imagine that the
speaker moved upstate so that face-to-face conversation was no longer
possible. I advised that the
conversation be continued, but this time as an exchange of medium length letters
(I suggested four; most students wrote six to eight).
Finally, as this sequence of writing assignments
evolved as I taught it for my fourth and final year at Teachers College, I
asked my students to step back and imagine they had just discovered this
exchange of letters and had decided to edit them for publication. They would provide a preface in which
they told readers something about the backgrounds of the two writers, insofar
as they had been able to “unearth” these personal backgrounds in their “research.”
They would also say something about the importance of the topic these two
letter writers were addressing—a level of importance that led them to decide to
publish this consequential exchange of views.
As it turned out, I never did add the final step I
had originally envisioned for this sequence--transforming this final “edited
exchange of letters” into a formal argumentative essay. I think what we all realized by the
time we became “editors” of these two correspondents’ exchange of letters is that
the forcefulness of one or another of their opening points of view was far less
interesting than what motivated them to adopt their initially antagonistic
stances and what led them to engage in extended correspondence with one
another. What I do know is that I
stopped hearing about the indispensability of a grammar-based approach to the
teaching of writing to adult ESL students, or to non-ESL high school students
in New York City public schools for that matter, and I did hear a great deal
about the “characters” that my students had brought into being as a result of
the seriousness with which they assumed their roles as editors.
What I would say today is that this particular
sequence of writing assignments utilized my 10th grade students’
ability to “inhabit” the role of someone other than themselves, putting this
talent in the service of helping us all to view those holding opinions
diametrically opposite to our own with greater understanding and sympathy. And isn’t that what “teaching towards
adulthood” is all about? This is
the contribution that Moffett helped us realize: we were all teaching writing in a wider “universe of
discourse” where our roles were to help our students and ourselves come into
greater awareness of our capacities not only as writers but also as more fully
developed human beings.
Lessons Learned from the Founders of Passion
and Practice
The chapters of Teaching Writing Grades 7-12 in an Era of Assessment: Passion and Practice that follow
introduce a wide range of teaching practices that have been refined and
modified over the years by middle and high school teachers committed, as were
the founders I’ve discussed above, to the centrality of writing in their
English Language Arts curricula and to the potential of each of their students
as writers. While the last twelve
years, with their emphasis on educational policy focusing exclusively on
“accountability” as measured by test scores, have unquestionably been difficult
and frustrating times for these teachers, the teacher writers in this book have
each found ways to “make their writing curriculum work for them,” to borrow Tim
Gunn’s mantra from Project Runway. Since each of these teachers is also a
writer, as well as a colleague with whom I’ve worked directly in one or another
of the Invitational Summer Institutes of the San Jose Area Writing Project,
they also represent a group about which I’m especially proud. Not only have they found a way to bring
their passion for writing and the teaching of writing to their students, they
have also found the time, energy, and commitment to bring what they have
learned to the wider audience of this book’s readers.
References and Resources
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Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, l987.
Barnes, Douglass; Britton, James; Rosen,
Harold. Language, the Learner and the School. Harmondsworth, England:
Penguin Books, 1969.
Britton, James. Language and Learning. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970.
Calkins, Lucy. Lessons from a
Child. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1983.
____________ . Units
of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007.
_____________ . Units of Study For Primary Writing: A Yearlong Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
Calkins,
Lucy, Mary Ehrenworth, and Christopher Lehman. Pathways to the Common
Core:
Accelerating
Achievement. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2012.
College
Composition and Communication.
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Elbow, Peter. Writing Without
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Press, l973.
Emig, Janet.
The Composing Processes of Twelfth
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Council of Teachers of English, 1971.
Gardner, Howard. The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand. New
York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999
Giacobbe, Mary Ellen. Talking, Drawing,
Writing: Lessons for Our Youngest Writers. Portland, ME: Stenhouse
Publishers, 2007.
Galdwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and
Company, 2008
Graves, Donald H. Balancing the Basics:
Let Them Write. Ford
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______________ . Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann,
1982.
Gray, James. Teachers
at the Center: A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Writing Project.
National Writing Project, 2000
Macrorie, Ken. Searching Writing.
New Jersey: Haydon Book Company, 1980.
____________. The
I-Search Paper: Revised Edition of Searching Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1988.
Moffett, James. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, l968.
____________. Active
Voice: A Writing Program across the Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton/Cook, 1981.
Murray, Donald. A Writer Teaches
Writing: A Practical Method of Teaching Composition. Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
Rief, Linda. Seeking
Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992.
Romano, Tom.
Clearing the Way: Working with
Teenage Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann,
1987.
