How will the creative powers of children and young adults in schools be recognized and developed?

I explored writing workshop advocates’ answer to this question in previous chapters. With the help of Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on carni­val and Dostoevsky, I affirmed the free and familiar contacts among students and teachers and the playful relation to the world promoted by workshop advocates. I praised their rejection of monologism, their embrace of a plurality of student voices. I commended workshop advocates’ vision of an alternative teacher position that asks teachers to help students live and write about their own vigorous, adventurous lives, inside and outside the classroom.

At the same time, I worried about how Jessie removed herself from the workshop’s public spaces because she recognized no friends there; how Anita expressed herself to (hid herself from) a supportive, perceptive teacher (a superior who had her under surveillance). I criticized workshop advocates for ignoring social and cultural boundaries and hierarchies that animate children’s lives within and without workshops, for remaining si­lent about the silencing effects of smaller and larger cultural politics of meaning. I objected to workshop advocates’ overly individualistic and private conception of voice, and labored to express an alternative conception that would somehow do justice to how Jinx and Sammy labored to express their very souls on paper, with words not theirs, and anticipating the conflicting desires and demands of readers friendly and unfriendly, readers beside, below, above. I questioned the narrow, technical work imagined for teachers–work that abandons students to the current world, to dominant meanings and values, rather than engages students in delib­eration about that world, in criticism and transgression of those meanings and values. Work that might actually help students move with power and responsibility, help them be free.

I like imagining workshops as carnival, and teachers as Dostoevskian novelists. I think these metaphors help us enrich and extend workshop approaches, even as they help us raise questions and name problems. In this chapter, I work through some problems that I have, so far, only named. I respond to three questions: How–after we recognize limits to carnival’s abundance–do we imagine desirable classroom communities? If we desire deliberation about meanings and values in the workshop, what does such deliberation sound like? And if we are serious about helping students imag­ine and create new worlds to live in, how do we think about and support such transgression? I am obviously not the first to take up such questions; my responses are anything but exhaustive. I hope they will be helpful.

Desirable Classroom Communities

I follow John Dewey (1916 / 1966), in his Democracy and Education, in my effort to imagine desirable, worthy classroom communities. Dewey argues that the education various communities provide is dependent on the quality or worthiness of those forms of life. We are confronted imme­diately, then, with the “need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life” (p. 83). In creating this measure or ideal, Dewey cautions, we must avoid two extremes. We cannot just make up our ideal “out of our heads”–if we do, we have little assurance that we can pull off or even approach it in practice. We also cannot simply name whatever already exists as our ideal.

Dewey’s method for creating his “measure” and avoiding these ex­tremes is to “extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and sug­gest improvement” (p. 83). When he does this, Dewey arrives at two ques­tions that we can use to assess the quality of community life. Before shar­ing these two questions, Dewey reminds us that any given community or society is actually always made up of a number of smaller communities or groups. Dewey’s first question is concerned primarily with life within these smaller social groups, the second with interactions across these groups. So:

Now in any social group whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups. From these two traits we derive our standard. How numerous and varied are the interests which are con­sciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association? (p. 83)

When Dewey uses these questions to judge the worthiness of the life and education afforded by his gang of thieves, he finds that (1) the interests shared are few–“reducible almost to a common interest in plunder”–and that (2) this interest serves to “isolate the group from other groups with respect to the give and take of the values of life.” That is, the quality of the thieves’ lives is diminished by the lack of a variety of activities and expe­riences that would develop and expand shared interests within the group, and by the lack of meaningful interactions with other groups–groups that represent (and present as opportunities for growth) alternative meanings and values. The education provided by such a group, Dewey concludes, is “partial and distorted” (p. 83).

In contrast, when Dewey applies his measure to a healthy family, he finds that (1) there are “material, intellectual, and aesthetic interests in which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth for the experience of other members” and that (2) the family is not isolated from other social groups, but “enters intimately into relationships with business groups, with schools, with all the agencies of culture” and “plays a due part in the political organization and in return receives support from it” (p. 83). Such a family does well against Dewey’s standard–many in­terests are consciously shared and communicated, and the family enters into numerous contacts with other forms of association.

Below, I use Dewey’s questions to evaluate writing workshops and make suggestions for their improvement as a form of associated living. Before I do this, however, I need to expand briefly upon one aspect of Dewey’s analysis, as it is a key assumption in my evaluation.

Dewey emphasizes that within any given society or community there are always numerous smaller societies and communities. He evokes this pluralism with reference to political, industrial, scientific, and religious associations; political parties, cliques, gangs, corporations, and partner­ships; and diverse populations with diverse languages, religions, morals, codes, and traditions. Dewey (1916 / 1966) writes that

From this standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an inclu­sive and permeating community of action and thought. (p. 82)

In what follows, my “minor political unit” is the classroom–more specifically, the writing workshop. Furthermore, I assume that this work­shop community is not some sort of tight, “inclusive and permeating com­munity,” but rather a collection of “loosely associated societies.” I refer to these smaller societies within the workshop community as friendship groups, and use this phrase to evoke the myriad ways that children divide them­selves up–sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, sometimes for an hour and sometimes for years–when given the chance.

One danger with imagining the workshop community as a collection of friendship groups is that it might exaggerate fragmentation, might make the walls that divide groups of children seem higher and sturdier than they are. Consequently, we might not pay attention to how children sometimes jump over and knock down walls, and we might miss possibilities for our practice and theory on how to help them do it.

I’ll try to be careful. At the same time–and this should come as no surprise–I am equally concerned that writing workshop advocates, and progressive literacy educators and researchers in general, often ignore or wish away hierarchies and divisions among children.^[1] With Dewey’s help, then, I try to respect the lines children draw without necessarily accepting them once and for all.

Here goes.

I have argued that workshops enable students to participate actively in workshop life, to take up free and familiar relations with each other, and to take up playful, adventurous relations with the world. In other words­–in the words of Dewey’s first question–workshops allow children to ex­press and share numerous and varied interests in each other and the world. I have said, and I say here, that this is good.

Because students in workshops are able to choose whom they will work with, they usually collaborate and conference within friendship groups. Students’ interests, then, are not only expressed in their written texts, but also in their patterns of association in the workshop. The worst thing we can say about these texts and friendship groups, at this point, is that they might express already formed interests–interests formed in the meanings and values of the playground, family, neighborhood, and popular culture; formed in the workings of social class, gender, and race. But this isn’t much of a criticism–yet. We all come from somewhere. Furthermore, the techniques taught in workshops about how to compose and revise texts and how to respond to peers do help students develop their texts and work with each other more effectively. Workshops are good for allowing children to asso­ciate in friendship groups, and they help children work more effectively within these groups.

Thus, workshops do well with the first question of Dewey’s test.

They fail the second.

We can characterize this failure in terms of the quantity and quality of interplay among friendship groups in writing workshops.

I reported in chapter 1 how students in a third grade workshop di­vided themselves up along social class and gender lines, and how they avoided contact with students on the other side of those lines. Friendship groups tended to cut themselves off from interactions with other groups. When they came into contact–when children’s “forms of association” came into “interplay” with each other–it was not necessarily in ways that led to sharing and hearing and learning. Instead, this interplay was often characterized by distrust and hostility and competition, and served to re­assert hierarchies and boundaries, rather than blur or transgress them. Friendship groups may have been friendly on the inside, but not in their relations to other groups.

My argument does not depend on children and friendship groups in every workshop, everywhere, conducting themselves exactly like this one. However, I do assume that adults and children make distinctions about who and what they find more and less desirable. Furthermore, I assume that these distinctions have consequences for our actions, consequences for our choices of whom we will associate with and for the talk and texts we produce. These distinctions can change–certainly, hopefully. But at any given moment, choices are made and have effects in the world. My claim about workshops, then, is simply this: Nothing about student choice assures communication across friendship groups.^[2]

What about sharing time, when student authors sit in the front of the room and read their work to the class? This seems the perfect occasion for the interplay of friendship groups in the workshop, a time when the voices of diverse forms of life would sound and be answered within the larger public, the classroom community. When we listen to how sharing time is orchestrated by workshop advocates, however, we are disappointed (if not surprised) by its thin, narrow range. For sharing time is arranged the same as teacher response to text–affirm the writer, discuss technique. A plu­rality of student groups might express themselves in the stories read, but their meanings and values, their imaginative visions, are ignored, dis­regarded in the pursuit of “what works and what needs work” (Murray, 1985, p. 140).

My treatment of deliberation, below, is aimed exactly at supporting an alternative sort of sharing time, one that might redeem workshop ap­proaches in relation to Dewey’s ideal. But first I must address–and reject­–an obvious solution to this problem of limited interaction among students from different friendship groups.

Make them work together. Regulate collaboration and peer confer­ences with a nod, perhaps, to cooperative learning group schemes in which the teacher intervenes directly in decisions of whom children will asso­ciate and work with in the classroom. After all, why should we allow stu­dents to choose whom they will work with when these choices often re­produce divisions by race and gender and social class that we hope to undermine? In grander language: Are we not supporting an unworthy sort of pluralism–separatism–in our support of student-chosen friendship groups in the workshop community?

Dewey (1916 / 1966) certainly rejects separatism:

The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity and formal institution­alizing of life, for static and selfish ideals within the group. … It is a com­monplace that an alert and expanding mental life depends upon an enlarg­ing range of contact with the physical environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it–the sphere of social contacts. (p. 86)

If a group remains isolated, it is denied the chance to grow, to become more flexible. When we interact with others outside our primary associations, we encounter different ways of acting, thinking, and feeling. These pro­vide opportunities for us to expand and reflect upon and reconstruct our own habits, our own characteristic ways of being in the world.

And of course, the problem is not just one of isolation. Hierarchies of influence and assumed value usually accompany separation:

The influences which educate some into masters, educate others into slaves … The more activity is restricted to a few definite lines–as it is when there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of experiences–the more action tends to become routine on the part of the class at a disadvantage … The evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less per­ceptible, but equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane. (pp. 84, 85)

I love how Dewey gives it to privileged groups here (I would say from close observation and depressing experience in the university that he’s got it about right)–this is especially fun because members of these groups are his most likely readers.

However, I am troubled by how we might interpret Dewey’s account of the dangers of separation and hierarchy for subjugated groups, and by what this interpretation suggests for their struggle to survive and to contest this subjugation. At times, Dewey seems to frame the problem as one of quantity (consider his call for “numerous” shared interests as part of his “measure” or “standard”^[3]). That is, what oppressed groups really need is more interaction with other, including privileged, groups. If we frame the problem this way, then it would never be reasonable for members of these groups to limit their interactions with others. More interplay, more learning, more good. Cooperative learning groups–in which teachers purposefully assign diverse students to groups in ways that put diverse strengths into play in problem solving and task completion–are built on just this sort of thinking.

In the end, Dewey is concerned with both quantity and quality of in­teraction. My concern, however, is not a better interpretation of Dewey, but this: that we remember that harm is accomplished not just through isolation, not just through no contact, but also in contact, in interaction with other groups. More interaction can mean more opportunity for injury, more opportunity to be watched and controlled. If this is true, then it becomes very reasonable for members of subjugated groups to, at times, purposefully limit interaction with other groups.

What does this have to do with friendship groups in the writing work­shop? I want to interpret and defend friendship groups–and their seem­ingly separatist ways–as reasonable, as embryonic forms of what Patricia Hill Collins (1991), in her exploration of black women’s activism, calls group survival and community-building.^[4]

Collins conceptualizes black women’s activism along two primary dimensions: (1) the struggle for group survival and community-building, and (2) the struggle for institutional transformation. In her portrayal of the struggle for group survival, she pays particular attention to black women’s efforts to create “Black female spheres of influence” within which alterna­tive patterns of consciousness, self-expression, and value, to those of domi­nant groups, are nurtured and developed. For Collins, these spaces repre­sent “Black women’s refusal to relinquish control over their self-definition” to a dominant ideology that defines them as mule, mammy, Jezebel, and welfare mother (p. 142). This sense of refusal, and the need for time and place for the hard work of alternative vision, is evident in the words of black civil rights activist and musician Bernice Johnson Reagon. Reagon evokes the sound and feel of a conversation in a “little barred room” safe from intrusions by the outer world:

That space while it lasts should be a nurturing space where you might sift out what people are saying about you and decide who you really are … in that little barred room where you check everybody at the door, you act out community. You pretend that your room is a world. (cited in Collins, 1991, p. 145)

Collins emphasizes that the struggle for group survival and commu­nity building is not enough, that struggle for institutional transformation is also essential. But she is careful to emphasize that the two are related, and not just in the sense that a given, concrete action may contribute to both struggles at once. These struggles are related in the sense that they represent different moments in a larger, continuous effort to bring about social change. Thus, for Collins,

Group survival is designed to foster autonomy … [and] autonomy provides the foundation for principled coalition with other groups that are essential for institutional transformation. (p. 145)

In other words, action that fosters autonomy, that sustains and strength­ens a subordinated community, creates possibilities for that group to come together with other groups in ways that might benefit everyone.

This is my defense of friendship groups: that students, especially stu­dents not aligned with and maligned by dominant meanings and values, need them. Students need them as safe (or at least safer) spaces of self­-definition and resistance, need them to construct platforms from which to speak with autonomy. Let them enact community away from hostile peers and the teacher’s surveilling eyes; let them pretend that their barred room is the world. For the moment. For the moment it takes to name the world and their places in it, in writing.

Collins (1991) rejects interpretations of black women’s activism that would reduce it either to this or that–as aimed at either group survival or institutional transformation, as expressing either a form of separatism or a vision of racial integration. Instead, Collins argues that this tradition of activism embodies a “both/and humanist vision of society” that has space for both group survival and institutional transformation as worthy, has time for different strategies required at different times (p. 161).

Dewey’s ideal, of course, had a both/and logic from the beginning. His ideal society is not one that depends on squeezing and flattening out plurality into a single, tight, permeating community that must look like this or that. Instead, his ideal values both shared meanings and interests within groups and the interplay and conflict of these meanings and interests as different groups interact. Dewey, of course, wants the conflict of different groups played out in a way that is conducive to listening, learning, and reconstruction. So do I.

I embrace a both/and interpretation of friendship groups, and re­ject interpretations that would pronounce them either good or bad. They are both–and their ultimate worth, in this case, depends on what hap­pens in another workshop moment: sharing time. We recognize friend­ship groups while at the same time working to keep them as fluid as possible. We grant students the right to make distinctions, to choose who they need for comfort, courage, information, and inspiration. But we also create public spaces, sharing times, within which the meanings and values issuing from these student-chosen groups–and even the internal workings of them–are questioned, shaken for integrity, deliberated, and reconstructed.

One final both/and. Now that I have argued as best I can for allowing students to choose and work within friendship groups in the writing work­shop, and have rejected cooperative learning groups as a solution to the problem of limited interaction among different groups of students, I con­fess both that I have, as an elementary, junior high, and university teacher, assigned students to cooperative learning groups in the past and that I will in the future. Student-chosen groups are an extremely important aspect of my own teaching. They are accompanied by explicit talk about the bene­fits and risks for self and community of choosing differently next time, as well as, occasionally, by more direct teacher intervention into patterns of student association. In the end, teacher judgement, not this or that argu­ment, must carry the day. My purpose is not to restrict teacher action, es­pecially in the form of a once-and-for-all proscription of cooperative learn­ing groups. Instead, I have defended friendship groups because student autonomy–including students’ primary associations–should not be dis­regarded without pause, without careful reflection.

Deliberation and Stories

A melody is a chord deployed in time. (Dewey, 1934 / 1989, p. 189)

I have been haunted by this line from Dewey’s Art as Experience for some time. It conjures Dr. Borowitz, I suppose, and the music theory and composition tricks he taught me almost two decades ago in college. (If you are trying to make up a melody, for example, you can start with a chord and simply play the notes that make it up one after the other–literally “deploying” the chord “in time.”) But I think Dewey’s line haunts my thoughts more for how it expresses, in such condensed form, the unity of space and time in our experience of art and life.

The line concludes Dewey’s argument against conceiving of some arts as spatial and others as temporal. Instead, Dewey asserts, space and time are “common to the substance of all works of art” (p. 210). Painting, for example, is considered a spatial art. But in our experience of a painting, our attention shifts, moves, from place to place, from this aspect to that. This doesn’t happen in an instant; the earlier influences the later. Our ex­perience of painting, then, depends on movement not only through space but through time.

We readily recognize this movement in music–music doesn’t exist without time for its sounds to unfold, without time to play itself out. Dewey reminds us, however, that the sounds of music shrink, expand, rise, fall; that tones are “high and low, long and short, thin and massive” (p. 213). He reminds us that space is crucial to music, that we “hear distances and volumes in music” in the intervals between notes in a melody and the pil­ing up of sounds on top of one another in chords and harmonies (p. 188).

My sketch of desirable classroom communities in the last section em­phasized space in our own and students’ experience of the writing work­shop. Friendship groups drew lines; they were isolated and distant from or in contact with other groups; they sought safe places behind doors, walls. Friendship groups were piled up–in hierarchies of power and value–like notes in a chord.

It’s time, then, to emphasize time, to pay attention to how the relations among friendship groups might play themselves out, unfold. I attend to two particular times in the workshop: to how the relations of friendship groups play out in sharing time, and to how these relations unfold in the stories students write.

Let’s begin again.

A story is a world deployed in time. (me, now, here)

I have criticized workshop sharing times because they allow the worlds deployed by students’ stories to be extended without discussion about whether or not these are the worlds within which students and we want to live. I am especially concerned about the social worlds deployed by stu­dent stories–how these stories contribute to the ongoing face-to-face re­lations among individuals and friendship groups in the workshop, and how students’ stories reach outside the workshop to grab larger patterns of re­lation and meaning and value, and then hold them up, during sharing time, as ways to be with each other in the world.

Stories give us, among other things, direction. Direction works for and on us in two ways. It works by focusing our attention and action on certain things and not others: “Look there! Isn’t that a beautiful bird?” And it works by ordering our activity, by calling out certain actions at certain moments: “Duck! Too late–oh, that’s going to leave a mark.”^[5] Stories provide direc­tion; they focus and order our responses to the world. Or, as J. Hillis Miller (1995) puts it: Stories are “policemen of culture” (p. 69).

Workshop advocates ask teachers to support the direction of students’ stories without asking them to consider–and without asking students to consider–where these stories lead. I propose, then, deliberation about sto­ries in sharing time. I mean deliberation in Dewey’s (1922) sense of a “dra­matic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing lines of action” (p.190). For Dewey, deliberation is a playing out, a rehearsal, of what would happen if we pursued this or that path. During this rehearsal, we pay close attention to our own and others’ responses to the action. Deliberation is dramatic–both in the sense that it involves unfolding scenarios and in the sense that it is emotionally charged (Caspary, 1991). Dewey emphasized that deliberation is not some dry projection of profit or pleasure or pain. Instead, deliberation involves a full-bodied (if vicarious) experience of this and that course of action. Not only do we try to see our way, we try to feel it:

To every shade of imagined circumstance there is a vibrating response; and to every complex situation a sensitiveness as to its integrity, a feeling of whether it does justice to all facts, or overrides some to the advantage of others. Deci­sion is reasonable when deliberation is so conducted. (Dewey, 1922, p. 194)

When a student writes a story, she is engaged in the imaginative rehearsal of possible lines of action. She is engaged in deliberation.^[6] Delib­eration is also enacted within friendship groups, when friends mark more than run-on sentences, mark the desirability of deployed worlds. In what follows, however, I use deliberation to name what happens–what we hope happens–after students’ stories have been shared, made public, within the workshop.^[7]

Patricia Clifford, Sharon Friesen, and David Jardine (1995) remind us of what we do not want to have happen. They focus our attention on a story written by a primary school student named Sinead and explore what it might teach us about living, literacy, and schooling. Sinead’s story is about a Christmas concert disrupted by a howling coyote. However, Clifford, Friesen, and Jardine demonstrate how Sinead’s story is also a profound and generous re-writing of the identity and place of one of her classmates, Manuel. Manuel was the object of psychological testing and school prac­tices (what Clifford, Friesen, and Jardine call “uppercase events like At­tention Deficit Disorder, Hyperactivity, Learning Disabilities, Developmen­tal Delays”) that certified him defective and banished him to the margins of classroom and school communities (p. 15). With the help of the native trickster figure, Coyote, Sinead challenged these official school pronounce­ments and placements; in her story, “Manuel the monster child is welcomed in from the margins and given a home” (p. 9).

Clifford, Friesen, and Jardine show how Sinead’s is a value-and meaning-full story. Their exasperation and sense of injustice are appar­ent when they imagine the technical, empty response this story would receive if teachers and students performed, in sharing time, as directed by workshop advocates:

“That’s nice, Sinead. Thank you for sharing your story with us,” someone might have said as they plunked her into the Author’s Chair (Calkins, 1986) and unleashed a barrage of profound illiteracies:

“How long did it take you to write?”

“Where did you get your ideas from?”

“I like the part with the howling. What part did you like best?” (p. 17)

Deliberation changes what students’ stories are in the classroom com­munity. Instead of mindless direction, students’ stories represent mind-full experiments of how we might live, testable hypotheses of better and worse ways to quickly and slowly wind and unwind our legs, arms, hands, in space and time. As a first move in deliberation, a story is

A form of inquiry that can contain both the world and the relations within which it becomes the focus of our attention … Like our bodies, it literally takes place. Its storyline takes up time, as we do, from beginning to end. (Grumet, 1990, p. 107)

Sharing Time

Sharing times characterized by deliberation among members of dif­ferent friendship groups–the “full and free interplay” of Dewey’s ideal–demand certain virtues of workshop participants and expose them to cer­tain dangers. My account of these virtues and dangers is brief, and draws on Richard Bernstein’s (1992) work in The New Constellation. First, I name several responsibilities that students need to take up in their interaction with other students about stories. Then I list four dangers lurking in delib­eration, even as students try to act virtuously in relation to each other. I close by returning to a problem first raised in chapter 2–the problem of the teacher’s role in writing workshops. I compile a medley of teacher responsibilities–responsibilities called out by and answering to the respon­sibilities and dangers of deliberation for students.

Students’ first responsibility in sharing time is to listen carefully to the stories and comments of others. Such listening depends on the as­sumption by students that their peers–including those in other friend­ship groups–have something to say, and that this something might con­tribute to their understanding of themselves and the world. Workshop advocates want students to listen to others’ stories during sharing time. They provide concrete suggestions for how to help students listen and respond to peers’ work. This listening and response are aimed at improv­ing the effectiveness of the author’s writing processes and text. Thus, stu­dents are supposed to assume that their peers are writers and can im­prove how they write–this is good. However, there is no demand that students attend and respond to what is said, the meanings and values, the direction, expressed by stories.

This demand is present in the literacy practices described by Patricia Enciso and Bronwyn Davies. Enciso (1992, 1996) focuses on how we might help young children articulate their experiences of stories. In what Enciso calls “symbolic representation interviews,” children created paper cut­outs that represented a story’s characters, setting, and author, as well as the children themselves. Then children arranged the cutouts, moved them around, talked about how they positioned themselves in relation to the identities and world deployed in the story. Davies (1993) explores the “radical possibility of giving children the capacity to disrupt the domi­nant storylines through which their gender is held in place” (p. 1). Spe­cifically, she describes efforts to help elementary school students employ ideas of power, desire, discourse, and positioning, to examine how gen­der is constituted through various visual and written materials. Davies and Enciso suggest one way, then, to help students listen carefully to others’ stories: We can give them access to critical concepts such as power and positioning, concepts that help students talk about and back to how stories focus and order readers’ identities and worlds.

My move to critical talk about stories is, however, premature. A sec­ond responsibility in deliberation is exactly that we not move to criticism too quickly. Instead, we must actively seek to understand what others are saying. For Bernstein (1992), this requires effort and imagination, requires the attempt to “grasp the other’s position in the strongest possible light” (p. 337). In a debate, we might pay particular attention to our doubts about an adversary’s ideas, and then use these doubts to expose the other’s posi­tion at its weakest points. But in deliberation–at least in the beginning, when we are trying to make sense of ideas different from our own–we must instead use our imaginative powers to represent others’ ideas as force­fully as we can our own. Wayne Booth (1988) makes a similar point when he asserts that we must “surrender” to others’ stories. He sees this move as indispensable to any later act of criticism:

The essential first step, the step that provides data with which criticism of narrative deals, can only be that primary act of assent that occurs when we surrender to a story and follow it through to its conclusion. That act of as­sent will usually include assent to innumerable occasions for critical doubt offered by the author … But we discover the powers of any narrative only in an act of surrender. (p. 32)^[8]

Booth’s talk of surrender to the powers of stories evokes Dewey’s description of the emotionally charged quality of deliberation, its “sensi­tiveness” and “vibrating response” to “every shade of imagined circum­stance.” It also points to the third responsibility our students take up in deliberation–that they be open to learning, growth, changing their minds. Bernstein (1992) writes of “the courage to risk one’s more cherished pre­judgments,” but for me, even talk of courage and risks to cherished beliefs understates what is at stake (p. 51). Changing your mind means changing your habits, your dispositions to act, think, and feel in certain ways; it means changing your self. James Garrison (1997) gives us a better feel for this responsibility’s repercussions:

When we grow … we must become someone else. When our personal iden­tity changes, our relationships will change. Will those whose love sustains us–our parents, our friends, our children–continue to love us if we change? If we grow, not everyone in our web of relationships will respond to us as they did before. Why should they, since we are not the same? (p. 48)

Listening carefully, seeking actively to understand others’ ideas, re­maining open to growth–these are difficult obligations I propose for stu­dents to honor during sharing time. We do not usually honor them as adults and teachers. But even when we do, even when our students do, trouble is our lot. When we proceed to deliberate in good faith, dangers follow (our inevitable failings speed their arrival).

One is what Bernstein (1992) calls the “false we”–when a sense of shared understanding is achieved more through projection or silencing others than through dialogue (p. 51). A second, related danger is to underestimate how difficult it might actually be to understand another’s world and traditions. Bernstein writes that we must be vigilant against “think­ing we can always easily translate what is alien into our own entrenched vocabularies.” Instead, we may need first to learn another vocabulary­–we may need to surrender to others’ words for much longer than it takes to tell a story–before we can “recognize the ways in which rival traditions are and are not translatable” (p. 336).

A third danger is that we overestimate the efficacy of polite conversa­tion–that we assume that friendly talk assures everyone the chance to make themselves understood. It does not. As Bernstein puts it:

Sometimes what is required to communicate–to establish a reciprocal “we”–is rupture and break–a refusal to accept the common ground laid down by the “other.” … It is a self-deceptive illusion to think that the “other” can al­ways be heard in a friendly dialogue” (p. 52).

I remember well just such a rupture, a break, in a friendly dialogue I had just begun with my third grade students. I was launching a biography project in which students would write about important women in their lives. I told them that we would collect and publish their biographies in a book that we would then donate to the school’s library. I told them that I had already talked to the librarian, and that she had agreed to assign their book an official call number and type up cards for the card catalog. I told them that this book was important, because when I had gone to the library and looked at the biography section, the shelves bore ten books about men to every one about women. I said that we all knew this wasn’t right, since women were just as important as men. Their book would begin balancing things out.

John raised his hand and asserted politely that the reason there were more books about men in the library was probably because men were stron­ger and did more important things. Even as John spoke I recognized this as a “teachable moment”–as a moment to teach about gender and inequal­ity, as well as teach third graders about how we conduct ourselves in class­room discussions on important topics. I don’t wear jackets with patches on the arms; I don’t smoke a pipe; I was standing and not sitting at the time. But before John had finished speaking, I was, at least in my imagination, settling back into a chair, crossing my legs, slowly blowing out smoke from a pipe. Maybe a dramatic pause, then: “Well, what do other people think about this?”

I never had the chance to blow my smoke. As John finished, Suzanne jumped out of her desk and asserted less politely that she would show John who’s stronger at recess. Then she must have decided that she didn’t re­ally want to wait that long; she started toward John. With the scraping of chairs and gleeful chants of “Fight! Fight!” in the air, I suspended this par­ticular deliberation and helped Suzanne back to her chair.^[9]

We might interpret Suzanne’s action as a failure to live up to the re­sponsibilities of deliberation (and my failure to teach them). Perhaps she did not seek to put John’s remarks in their best possible light. But we can also interpret her move as a necessary refusal to occupy John’s all-too­-common ground. Suzanne’s promise to demonstrate her body’s power upon John’s body disrupted the dialogue. But would a polite questioning of John’s story about stronger men commanding more space in the biogra­phy section have communicated as much? Would it have suggested as forcefully to John and others Suzanne’s “vibrating response” to this line of action?

The fourth and final danger facilitates each of the previous three–that we confuse what it is we want, what we desire in and from deliberation. The danger can be made plain by considering what “shared in common” means.

Bernstein (1992) is clear: “There can be no dialogue, no communica­tion unless beliefs, values, commitments, and even emotions and passions are shared in common” (p. 51). So is Dewey (1916 / 1966):

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to po­ssess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge–a common understanding. (p. 4)

I confess that such lines from Bernstein and Dewey give me the willies. I worry that they are saying that the goal of deliberation is, in the end, for everyone to become the same, to think, feel, act the same. But this is a seri­ous mistake. “Shared in common” and “possess things in common”–these do not point to how people might be alike, to shared or common charac­teristics. John and Suzanne, for example, both had rather quick tempers­–they “possessed” these “in common.” This is not what Bernstein and Dewey are talking about.

Think of a belief or value or passion or aspiration as a material thing set on a table (if it helps, think of a bible or a meal). Then think of this thing as shared by three people who are sitting around the table. Two people have warm feelings for it; one doesn’t. The first loves the thing so much that a large part of his identity is wrapped up with working on it. The second hates the thing; she spends much of her time and energy avoiding or criticizing it. The last loves the other two people and is just happy to share something with them. The thing, however–the meal, bible, the belief, value, passion, aspiration–is there between them. It is shared in common.

Deliberation does not aim at making people think and feel and act the same. We endanger deliberation when we confuse a desire for shar­ing with a desire for sameness. Differences as well as similarities, agree­ments as well as disagreements, can be set on the table. As for the bear­ing of students’ stories and responses during sharing time–they don’t all need to aim in the same direction to be part of a common activity and understanding:

To pull at a rope at which others happen to be pulling is not a shared or con­joint activity, unless the pulling is done with knowledge that others are pull­ing and for the sake of either helping or hindering what they are doing. … [If] each views the consequences of his own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes into account the consequences of their behavior upon himself, then there is a common mind; a common intent of behavior. There is an understanding set up between different contributors; and this com­mon understanding controls the action of each. (Dewey, 1916 / 1966, p. 30; emphasis added)

Teachers are responsible for encouraging this plural and common understanding in the writing workshop. When we ask students to partici­pate responsibly in deliberation, we ask something arduous. Even more is demanded of workshop teachers. Not only do they participate in delibera­tion themselves with students; they also organize it, make sure it happens in the first place. Obviously, part of making it happen is helping students write stories–otherwise there is nothing to talk about. Here, however, I focus on responsibilities teachers take up for sharing time.

As organizers and conductors of deliberation, teachers teach its respon­sibilities. They teach critical concepts and techniques that help students hear consequences, in others’ rehearsals of experience, for their own. They make judgments of when to intervene in and interrupt students’ ongoing delib­erations–to enforce polite conversation, to support ruptures of politeness for the sake of communication.

As participants and players in deliberation–and in addition to lis­tening carefully, seeking to understand, and remaining open to growth­–teachers take on at least two more responsibilities. First, they stand with the underdog; they take sides. Fairness demands it. Friendship groups­–in their stories and responses to stories–draw on cultural resources al­ready marked, already validated and denigrated, by dominant groups in communities and societies outside the workshop. Friendship groups that align themselves with dominant story lines are well-positioned to dominate deliberation. They benefit from repeated access to occasions and sites in which authorized meanings and values are practiced, extended, and defended. They will often sound more reasonable, persuasive–sometimes because the telling example comes quickly and well-formed (because a lot of money and time has been spent elsewhere developing and telling it); sometimes just because their stories and responses sound familiar.

The macropolitics of social and cultural struggle hook up, here, with the micropolitics of face-to-face interaction among members of different friendship groups. Davies (1993), for example, in her analysis of a delib­eration among fifth and sixth grade students about a recent news story, found that boys undermined the claims and stories of girls by citing the exclusion of women from certain professional sports. The news story con­cerned a woman who had sailed around the world by herself, and Davies notes that the conversation began with talk about adult women and whether or not they could be heroic. Soon, however, the ”boy’s attack is on girls” and it is accomplished, in part, by boys’ assertions that women cannot play male sports such as football (p. 71). Now, girls sitting directly in front of these boys played these sports. But by invoking a division and hierarchy between men and women in the adult world, boys were able, in this instance, to separate themselves off from girls and dominate the conversa­tion. Thus:

Although the girls can and do play the boys’ sports, the fact that women are excluded from them in the adult games is not just a problem for the future but something that impacts on their idea of who they are now. The rules of adult sport will exclude them. Their sameness now [with boys] is eroded and undermined by that social fact. The boys can use that knowledge of social struc­ture to gain ascendancy over the girls and to dismiss the everyday evidence of their competence. (p. 72)

Unless we are willing to stand by and sanction the reproduction of larger patterns of relation and domination within deliberation, teachers need, at times, to lend their knowledge and power to certain students–need to stand with them. Think of it as trying, as best they can, to join particular friend­ship groups for a while. Or, in Collins’s (1991) terms, cited above, the teacher attempts to participate in principled coalitions with individuals and friend­ship groups for the purpose of institutional transformation (in this case, the transformation of everyday talk during sharing time).

This won’t be easy. Students might reject the proposed coalition. Whom to stand with and when may be difficult to determine, since students’ dis­tinctions of who is us and them and in and out will change, sometimes from moment to moment. In addition, even as other responsibilities such as lis­tening carefully and surrendering to others’ stories demand suspending judg­ment, this responsibility demands that the teacher make critical (if shifting) distinctions between those students and ideas she affirms and those she opposes.

Still, the fact that we live in a classist, white supremacist, patriarchal, and heterosexist society gives us some beginning clues as to which stu­dents may find themselves positioned as undesirable in deliberation. If we truly want all voices to sound during sharing time, teachers will have to persuade these students that their voices are actually desired, no mat­ter the disruption to dominant story lines, the rupture of polite talk. This is especially important since not just these students, but most students, learn that silence and obedience are what is expected and rewarded. bell hooks (1994) links the usual decorum of classroom life–with its avoid­ance of conflict and dissent–to the dominance of bourgeois values in schools. Bourgeois values condemn “loudness, anger, emotional out­bursts, and even something as seemingly innocent as unrestrained laugh­ter” as “unacceptable, vulgar disruptions of classroom social order,” as traits “associated with being a member of the lower classes” (p. 178). Students learn that–as my Grandma Lensmire would have said it–they mustn’t do these things.

What is acceptable and desirable must be expanded if students’ beliefs, values, passions, and aspirations are ever going to get shared, become com­mon, during sharing time.

This points to the final teacher responsibility for sharing time–that the teacher bring story lines to deliberation that are not necessarily repre­sented in students’ stories, so as to expand, again, what is available as di­rection for living. This responsibility is sometimes lived out during shar­ing time, but its demands spread to all the work the teacher pursues with her students, all the work that might be remembered, retold, appropriated for sharing time. Sometimes, the teacher multiplies students’ story worlds by sharing stories from his own life; more often, by giving students access to stories told and written by others outside the workshop, from the near and far past.

I have backed us into the whirling, churning (do I smell something burning?) questions of canon and curriculum, questions of what is wor­thy and important for our students to learn in schools. I will pull us away quickly. But before I do, I note that the teacher responsibilities I have out­lined for deliberation–in terms of helping students learn to write–might just as easily be interpreted as responsibilities teachers take up to help students learn to read and criticize texts. To experience the meanings and values of stories, to surrender to their direction, is to read them. To then deliberate their direction–to attend to “human, ethical, and political re­actions” in order to appraise meanings and values and how these are produced–is to criticize them (Scholes, 1985, p. 23). Thus, deliberation is aimed, in part, at criticism, at helping students pursue critical explora­tions and evaluations of other students’ stories.

I say “in part” because, important as criticism is, it is not all that we want. Criticism takes up already existing meanings and values in stories, already existing alternatives. It does not involve the creation of new alter­natives. In a world marked both by continuous change and by the repro­duction of oppressive structures, we want–we want and need–new sto­ries. We want and need stories that reconstruct the old worlds deployed in old stories. We want and need, as Garrison (1997) so forcefully argues, poetry and prophecy: that which imagines “what is absent yet present in our need” and that which names the “values needed in needful times” (p. xvi).^[10]

I don’t mean to deny the creativity and imagination demanded by criticism. I don’t mean to imply some sort of strong distinction between criticism and creation. In his final riff on Matthew Arnold’s line that “po­etry is criticism of life,” Dewey (1934 / 1989) emphasizes that the “most penetrating criticism” is, in the end, the imaginative vision of an artist that helps us see unrealized possibilities: “It is by a sense of possibilities open­ing before us that we become aware of constrictions that hem us in and of burdens that oppress” (p.349). Similarly, Paulo Freire (1985) intones (with religious overtones) that “there is no annunciation without denunciation, just as every denunciation generates annunciation”(p.58). Toni Morrison (1992) notes that reading and writing, criticism and creation, harmonize for the writer in pursuit of her art:

Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. (p. xi)

To say all that–even when done so wonderfully well by Dewey and Freire and Morrison–is not to say that criticism and creation cannot be distinguished, at certain moments and for certain purposes, to good effect. I distinguish them here for two reasons. First, by attending to each in turn, I can provide a richer account of what it takes to support learning to write in classrooms. In my discussion of sharing time, I have concentrated on criticism, on students listening to and reading and deliberating other stu­dents’ stories. In deliberation, students come to recognize some of the pos­sibilities embodied in stories inherited from and created with their pasts and close friends. Students also come to recognize some of the limits of these stories, and that there are others. In what follows, I concentrate on creation, on the conditions that might support the writing of transgres­sive stories.

My second reason for distinguishing between criticism and creation is to make sure we understand into what sort of trouble we are headed. Creation, like carnival profanation, is ambivalent, both destructive and regenerating. Its pursuit may very well be more dangerous and violent than the pursuit of criticism. I say more about this later. For now, I cite Jacques Derrida’s summons that we take up criticism tirelessly, perpetually. We may never succeed in removing violence from our world, but we can, as Derrida writes,

Try to recognize and analyze [it] as best we can in its various forms: obvious or disguised, institutional or individual, literal or metaphoric, candid or hypocritical, in good or guilty conscience. And if, as I believe, violence re­mains in fact (almost) ineradicable, its analysis and the most refined, inge­nious account of its conditions will be the least violent gestures, perhaps even non-violent, and in any case those which contribute most to transforming the legal-ethical-political rules. (cited in Bernstein, 1992, p. 217)

I share with Derrida the belief that violence is pretty much ineradicable, and I have tried as best I can in this book and in When Children Write to pay attention to various forms of violence in the writing workshop. Further­ more, I agree that sophisticated analyses of violence like the ones Derrida produces are (perhaps) non-violent, (but in any event) important contri­butions to rewriting society’s directions.

I get lost, however, at Derrida’s “most” in “contribute most to trans­forming the legal-ethical-political rules.” Compared to what? Unless his category of “refined, ingenious accounts” has space and time for the prophet’s annunciation, for the poet’s imaginative vision, I think that Derrida has it wrong.^[11] Criticism may very well be less violent than cre­ation. But that doesn’t mean that it contributes more to transformation (it may mean it contributes less).

Criticism is not self sufficient. It needs stories to rehearse on. And I doubt that we can make ourselves up out of doubt.^[12] We need stories. And if we want to make ourselves and our worlds up differently, then we need different stories.

Story Time

I had become paralysed … I was pondering all of the elements of storytelling that may unwittingly reconstitute the gender order that any feminist story is attempting to undo, worrying about how to be aware enough to remove them all, and beginning to realise that that is actually impossible … Any story has to incorporate what we know already if it is to be comprehensible, if it is to be pleasurable enough to capture the reader’s imagination. It must do both of these if it is to move us on to a new possibility different from the ones we know already. (Davies, 1993, p. 190)

Even when a writer sets out to create a transgressive story, her story will unavoidably be a mix of old and new. As Davies reminds us, it is im­possible to undo, all at once, all the forms, beliefs, meanings, and values upon which the writer must draw in order to communicate. Some things will have to be left intact, closed, assumed, already answered, in order for other things to be broken, opened up, un-assumed, questioned, and re­-answered (or left unresolved).^[13]

There are many ways–involving any to many of the “elements of story

telling”–for a story to be transgressive. And the reader, of course, can be more or less attentive to what is different. The reader can rehearse the story in ways that emphasize new questions and new answers, or old ones; the reader can refuse to rehearse at all. If the reader is generous and shares her deliberation with the writer, the writer can learn about his story–what was comprehensible, what captured the imagination, what was old and new.

Thus, creation–where creation is distinguished from criticism and from old stories–ultimately depends on both. A generous supply of old stories

and a generous criticism are necessary conditions for the flourishing of creation.

In what follows, I return one last time to the workshop as learning envi­ronment and community of writers, in order to review and extend my account of how it supports creation. I emphasize a particular sort of creation and transgression: the production of student-authored stories that direct students to cross boundary lines that divide them from other people, sto­ries that imagine others as possible sources of learning, meaning, value, friendship, and love.

How do writing workshops–the workshops I have affirmed, criti­cized, and reconstructed across the pages of this book–support the writ­ing of creative, transgressive stories? I recount five ways.

The first is simply the invitation to students to write stories. Besides making material available for deliberation and others’ learning, this invitation makes possible the expression of unique, unexpected visions. For the question isn’t

whether students will transgress in their writing–we should expect

the unexpected from children and young adults–but whether or not these transgressions will be noticed, recognized when they happen, surren­dered to long enough for their possibilities to be explored by students and teachers.

The second creation-supporting feature of workshops is their accep­tance of student-chosen friendship groups. Friendship groups can close off contact with others and support the writing of stories that do the same. But the acceptance of friendship groups that reproduce and contribute to divi­sions among students along race, social class, and gender lines is also the acceptance of friendship groups that transgress these lines. When students see and hear what others are and say (and are curious and like it) and desire new classmates with whom to conference and collaborate, the work­shop’s space and time for student-chosen groups is transgressive.

The third way that workshops support transgression is in their dis­order, their carnival quality, their mess and mix of stories and bodies. School tasks are broken and remade; conventional student and teacher roles abandoned, new ones tried on, played. Workshops make available expe­riences with others and the world that are unavailable in traditional class­rooms. They create possibilities for a transgressive sort of living that then might be reported, pushed further in imagination, written down.

I worry that as we up the ante of our goals for workshops (as I have, as we must), we might lose sight of how important this aspect of work­shops is. Sometimes, seriousness of purpose leads to somberness, tighten­ing up, a fearfulness of failing in an important endeavor. As we become more “serious,” we risk undermining the sort of joyful, playful relation to the world and each other that would actually allow us to look fearlessly at the world and tell the truth about it, as best we can. In other words, in order to criticize and rewrite the world and stories in the workshop, we and students will need to play (with ideas, with each other) in order to experience and imagine something better–a something better that throws the present’s shortcomings into bold relief. Seriousness can undermine truthfulness, and criticism may require child’s play. I have always liked Madeleine Grumet’s (1988) call for us to look to our “daughters’ lies,” their fantasies of how things could be, for help in redeeming our own and our children’s lives:

In showing us the world as they would have it, they reveal the world that we fled because we were not brave enough to pitch our tents and raise our flags there. Their lies

“Remember to have your best manners on tonight and great voices. We want our parents to be impressed, don’t we? Of course we do.”

“Not me,” thought Sinead to herself.

“Good afternoon.”

RRRRRRRRIIIIIIINNGGGGGGGGG. The bell rang.

“Try to wear something nice tonight,” said Mrs. Cliffrie.

can become our knowledge. (p. 162)

I have not addressed the fourth creation-supporting feature of work­shops in this book, and I do little more than mention it here. Lucy Calkins (1991) has called for the addition of “genre studies” to workshop ap­proaches, in which students and teachers put aside student-chosen writ­ing projects from time to time and focus their attention on learning about a particular genre of text. This is good, as far as it goes–what Calkins proposes can help students understand how different types of text work, are put together. We can imagine such work leading to playful variations and reconstructions of the genres studied. Once again, however, workshop advocates avoid critical appraisals of texts, avoid criticism of content, or work that explores how different genres are valued and devalued by more and less powerful groups in various situations. Luckily, directions for a more meaning-and-value-attending, politicized, and transgressive version of genre studies can be found.^[14]

Clifford, Friesen, and Jardine (1995), for example, tell how they ex­plored native stories with Sinead, Manuel, and their classmates–they all read picture books, listened to storytellers, drew pictures, examined the art of native illustrators and artists. Nothing so radical, I suppose (the study of native people is even part of the prescribed curriculum in Alberta, Canada, where the authors work). But what particular stories you study in your genre studies makes a difference, doesn’t it? They studied Coyote stories.

Old Man Coyote is one of the First People who created the world and human life and culture. One of Coyote’s gifts to us is fire, which he stole from the “upriver end of the world.”^[15] But Coyote, as William Bright (1993) emphasizes, is no “Promethean hero”:

He is an insatiable glutton, a gross lecher, an inveterate thief, liar, and out­law, a prankster whose schemes regularly backfire. In short, Coyote is the archetypal Trickster known from literatures all over the world–Renard the Fox of medieval French legend, and Anansi the Spider of West African and modem Afro-Caribbean tradition. (p. 3)

This is who Clifford, Friesen, and Jardine (1995) invited into a primary school classroom. (Goodness gracious.)

This is why:

Calling to us from the boundaries of our own world, Coyote howls holes in the taken-for-granted [and] invites us “in” through such openings, such opportunities for understanding … He teaches. And he teaches by teaching us the limits of the world. And he teaches such limits through their viola­tion. (pp. 8, 9)

They report that almost all of the children in the class wrote Coyote stories. The children weren’t asked or required to write stories about Coyote–they just did. This genre study incorporated the transgressive “feral agency of Coyote herself”

into the imaginations and stories of children (p. 9).

For me, the most developed and generative account of genre studies­–of what genre studies could be in writing workshops–is Carol Lee’s (1993) book on signifying and the teaching of literary interpretation. Lee traces the processes and results of a project that involved teachers and black stu­dents from six classrooms in two urban high schools. The project sought to bring students’ and community-based knowledge to bear in classroom instruction. More specifically, Lee’s project explored how signifying–a form of social discourse–might be drawn upon to teach students to read and make sense of difficult, complex fiction.

Lee explains that, within the African American community, to signify means to “speak with innuendo and double meanings, to play rhetorically upon the meaning and sounds of words, and to be quick and often witty in one’s response” (p. 11). In other words,

signifying demands producing and responding to the sort of metaphoric and ironic language that is often encountered in literature (and that often baffles or alienates novice readers). Lee claims, then, that many African American adolescents bring to literature classes a “powerful intellectual tool which goes unnoticed, devalued, and untapped”: their signifying ca­pacities (p. 13). In her research and writing, Lee tests–and ultimately re­deems–this claim. She demonstrates that the signifying powers of black youth can indeed be mobilized to good effect in the interpretation of rich and complex literary texts.

Lee’s project was transgressive–at a minimum, doubly. It reached across the usual white, bourgeois values of schooling to embrace black youth and their language. It also embraced African American fiction as worthy of study in schools. Black texts trespassed the white canon in Lee’s project, and this gave students the chance to feel at home even as their worlds were expanded, questioned, remade in the imaginative visions of black authors. Lee was not concerned with investigating how such liter­ary study might influence the stories students write. But I can’t help feel­ing that transgression breeds transgression, and that the students in her project were ready to write creative stories, transgressive stories that howled holes in the taken-for-granteds and limits that we assume and impose, that they endure.

If they weren’t ready–that is, if Lee’s project is to be extended in some way to help students produce transgressive stories–then what about this: that teachers focus explicit attention and discussion on moments of trans­gression in literature and how they are produced, and then tell students to go try that in their writing. In his work on gender and genre, John Willinsky (1995) argues that such moves will help students experiment with “writ­ing against, rather than the far more intimidating writing with, the masters, finding a place within the folds of their great cloaks to tug at their ears, turn their collars around” (p. 253). For what it’s worth–when I revisit Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais and carnival, it often seems less a literary or philosophical study and more a teacher’s or writer’s guide filled with les­sons on how you too can transgress in speech and writing. “Today, we will practice degrading superiors. One strategy is to compare some aspect of their face to an animal or to another part of the human body (preferably from the lower bodily stratum). For example, the chancellor has a small nose that looks like … ” (see Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 316).

The fifth and final way that (reconstructed) workshops support trans­gression is in their deliberation about stories. Deliberation teaches students what their stories mean and gives them the chance to write similar or dif­ferent stories next time, with a better sense of how their writing influences others. Dewey (1916 / 1966) reminds us that

Activity begins in an impulsive form… It does not know what it is about; that is to say, what are its interactions with other activities. An activity which brings education or instruction with it makes one aware of some of the connections which had been imperceptible. (p. 77)

As writers, we and students are oblivious to many of the meanings and conse­quences of our texts. Deliberation about stories helps students learn what their writing is about, helps them see and feel how it interacts with the stories and lives of others, helps them begin to understand the powers and responsibilities of writing. Without deliberation, without access to others’ responses, students are cut off from instruction that would help them take greater control over and responsibility for their literate activity.

However, even in workshops characterized by deliberation, the activ­ity begins in impulsive form. And this is dangerous. Teachers take risks (even risk their jobs) when they encourage creation–for creation demands openness to the unpredictable, the unknown, in schools, and the one thing usually required of teachers is that they stay in control, keep order.

Even when teachers have external support for their work inside workshops, creation and transgression are dangerous. If writing begins in impulsive form, then students’ stories will sometimes hurt and do violence to others, whether the writers intend it or not. Students and teachers can try to minimize the hurt, can take steps to decrease the likelihood of violence.^[16] But if workshops are open to the creative activity of students, then they are open. And that means monsters^[17] and outlaws^[18] will walk in the door.

Pandora’s Pedagogy–that’s the name Deborah Britzman (1991) gives to the sort of teaching and living I have proposed. Britzman assures us that such a pedagogy will unleash unpopular things in the classroom and let them roam about. We will witness powerful, even creative, renderings of truly ugly ideas–renderings that reassert dominant meanings and values, that “subvert the fragile coalition that depends upon concern for others” (p. 64). We will witness imagined worlds that undermine our arguments and hopes for more democracy.

So why do this? Why would we ask teachers and students to risk this danger and violence?

Because

such a pedagogy will unleash unpopular things in the classroom

and let them roam about.

Monsters disrupt our complacency, our easy common sense of what is normal, right.

Outlaws are outside the law, sometimes, not because they are bad, but because they are good.

Sinead, a little kid, understood this, did this. With her teachers’ and Coyote’s help, she imagined a classroom and school (and concert) that had space and time for Manuel and his voice. She denounced specialist and reasoned pronouncements of who Manuel was, and offered a generous and crazy (like a fox) alternative for his present and future. Sinead made Manuel into a big howling dog. That should be bad. But it’s good. Sinead made Manuel into Old Man Coyote Number Two–Sinead imagined Manuel as one who teaches by transgression, as one who might teach her if she lis­tened carefully. I think we should listen carefully to these children.

Why should we do this? Because we will witness powerful, creative visions that teach us about unrealized possibilities and unregarded others. Because

we will rehearse truly beautiful stories that strengthen our hopes for de­mocracy. And let us live it.