Foreword to 2nd edition

University of Richmond

I.

In 2002, I was in the first cohort required to take a battery of Praxis tests to get my 5th through 12th grade English/Language Arts teaching license in the state of Minnesota, and I was planning to enroll in the seminars necessary to extend my post-baccalaureate coursework toward a Masters of English Education. I entered the program after completing an undergrad degree in English literature and Cultural Studies, and I saw teaching as a vocation in a kind of old school, almost naïve way: a way of taking what I understood to be my strongest skills and putting them to work in the messy, complicated business of caring for students and their/our communities.

The political winds in Minnesota were shifting just then, and the election of Independence Party candidate Jesse Ventura to governor led to a dramatic reduction in funding for schools, both P-12 and university, which meant that getting a full time job teaching English in a Minneapolis high school was starting to look close to impossible. As the fears about my future set in, I did what I’d been doing since I arrived at the University of Minnesota: I studied hard and sought out every opportunity I could find for intellectual engagement. I goaded some of my licensure program colleagues to attend an academic talk with me in Curriculum and Instruction (probably offering to buy a few rounds at our local bar afterwards as enticement), and saw, sitting a few rows in front of me, a body I’d never seen before: a body whose long hair (in the back) stood out in that crowd. When the voice—loud and clear, but without the slightest whiff of dominance or belligerence—asked a question, I turned to my colleague and whispered who IS that? “That’s Dr. Lensmire, the new literacy hire.”

It feels weird to even type “Dr. Lensmire” instead of “Tim.” I can’t remember the exact conditions of our first encounter, but within a few weeks I’d met Tim and we discovered a shared love of literary theory (a field that was marginal in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota, and which was treated skeptically, to say the least, by most of the faculty and graduate students) and, more importantly for our developing and now decades-long relationship, a shared experience of being white, masculine subjects from small, but not quite rural, midwestern towns. In an academic environment where many of the faculty came from highly educated backgrounds and from prestigious, often Ivy League, graduate programs, and especially from “bigger,” more cosmopolitan places Tim and I—usually over food, and often with beer—recognized in each other people trying to figure out not just how to survive, but how to move through the university in ways that didn’t eschew the values and commitments we grew up with as (formerly) Catholic, working class, small town men, even as our intellectual and political investments in progressive and radical projects made us critical of the cultural and political environments we came from, and of the kinds of politics that often attach to white male subjects.

Those commitments are the very core of Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching, a book that might be helpfully summarized as a book about the profound ambivalences and complexities of classroom relations: among students, between students and teachers, and between each participant in the room and the texts, communities, worldviews, and longings that they bring, that shape who they (we) are and what they do.

In terms of disciplinary location, the book is, most obviously, an engagement with work on youth (mostly elementary level) literacy practices orbiting Writing Workshops, and readers will note that the work of people like Donald Graves, Nancie Atwell, and Lucy Caulkins figures prominently. This scholarship—and the rich set of instructional and relational practices that Workshop advocates had developed since the 1970s—isn’t just a critical foil for Tim: Tim believes in what Workshops might do, in their vision for worldmaking literacies that thrive when classrooms can be dis-attuned from “traditional” models of authority and pedagogy, from what Paulo Freire (2000) calls the “banking model” of learning. But Tim also worries, a lot and in philosophically and politically nuanced ways, about how that vision is too simple, too romantic, too caught up in presumptions about literacies—especially writing—that don’t really describe what it actually looks like, or better feels like, to work with what I want to call, with a nod to Fredric Jameson, actually existing children (as opposed to what Judith Levine [2005] calls “the theoretical child”).

My reference just now to Freire signals how the tradition emerging from Freire’s North American reception—usually called “critical pedagogy”—is a second crucial reference point for Tim’s book. Especially in chapter three, “Voice as Project,” Tim is attentive to how critical pedagogy offers a counterweight to Writing Workshop’s romanticism, to how it foregrounds the need to “interrogate” (a word Tim uses with a nod to Henry Giroux) how inequalities of sex, race, gender, sexuality, and ability shape our worlds in order that we might act toward the emergence and maintenance of other, less-fucked-up worlds, worlds that don’t hurt us so much, or at least don’t hurt us in the same ways.

But read in relation to Tim’s unceasingly nuanced and careful attention to what happens when children write (to use the title of Tim’s first book), critical pedagogy too seems romantic, overly simplified. Drawing on Elizabeth Ellsworth’s “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?”, an essay that I still teach and cite with regularity, Tim allows us to notice how that tradition very often veers off into abstraction when thinking power, and, unfortunately for those of us trying to actually be together in the messy work of worlding, usually at exactly the moment we need not abstraction but what Mikhail Bakhtin usually calls “the concrete.” As Tim writes in chapter 3: “Somehow, the sweaty, painful struggles over meaning that characterize life in society are left at the classroom door of critical pedagogues.”

Bakhtin—and John Dewey—are the thinkers Tim turns to throughout Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching to amplify what is most interesting and helpful about Writing Workshop and critical pedagogy approaches, while also offering him so many ways to deromanticize the picture, to push abstraction and presumption into an account of this “sweaty, painful” work (which is also joyful work, and the work of storytelling in any case). As Tim says, in the last paragraph of chapter 1, “I have tried to pay attention.” This book is, more than anything else, a generous, searching, beautiful spur to those of us who read it to pay attention, to engage the embodied, corporeal messiness that happens whenever people come together. I most often use the word “study” to signal that intellectual, speculative practice that happens when people get together to think, to feel, to talk, to laugh. I get that word from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), but re-reading this book, I realize that Tim primed me for Harney and Moten; in his introduction, Tim writes: “This is what I’m shooting for, this meaning of democracy [Dewey’s], this way of life. In schools. In classrooms that are living rooms, gathering friends for intimate conversations, gathering neighbors from up and down the street (not just the gated village) to deliberate—sometimes softly, sometimes loudly, with and without heat—the stories of the day.” Although I tend to think through a different vocabulary—one I’ll lay out briefly in a moment—this paragraph, and the impulses behind it, continues to orient almost everything I write, about literacy or anything else.

II.

Sensing my presumptive career as an urban English teacher slipping away in the growing tide of what many of us now call “neoliberalism,” I started to think about PhD programs. In my undergrad days, I’d been more than a little in awe of the faculty and their learning, their comportment that seemed so different from mine. I was harboring budding desires to become like them, but also couldn’t really see myself pulling it off: I was too provincial, too small town; I didn’t even have the educational background to know how to pronounce the names of most of the writers—in “literary theory” or the adjacent field of Continental Philosophy—I was voraciously reading. Tim changed that, and in the years between I met him (in 2002) and when I earned my PhD in 2011, Tim and I met often—again usually over food—and those encounters (that “study” as Harney and Moten would say) were the single most important determining factor in my becoming the thinker, writer, and professor I am today.

While I did study with Tim in an official capacity—first in a gradate seminar on race, Bakhtin, and literacy that clearly grew out of Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching even as it moved toward the work on race and whiteness that would culminate in Tim’s 2017 book White Folks: Race and Identity in Rural America—mostly, we wrote together. Between 2004 and 2017, we co-authored four essays, including writing what will undoubtedly be the only thing I ever publish in an AERA journal (2010’s “What Teacher Education Can Learn from Blackface Minstrelsy,” in Educational Researcher). The first thing we wrote together, “Abandon Voice?”, published in an online UCLA education journal, was my first real scholarly publishing experience. I want to dwell on that essay here because it was our response—and, in some ways, my response—to some of the reception Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching received.

I should back up and say that while Writing Workshops and critical pedagogy were the main intellectual traditions Tim wrote from and towards in the book, my interests in theory and philosophy more broadly caused me to note, when I first read the book, how much it also sat in interesting, and compelling, relations to much larger, almost architectonic shifts in theoretical discourse. Structuralist linguistics (emerging in the very early 20th century in Switzerland) had, by the midcentury, ushered in what is variously marked as the cultural or linguistic turn in many of the social sciences and humanities fields, which in turn reshaped education broadly and literacy studies specifically. This “turn” valorized textuality, the play of signifiers, a focus on discourse as the presumptively linguistic “construction” of reality and selves. One of the turn’s main bugbears was “essentialism,” especially “biological essentialism,” and so references to bodies and even “voices” came to be viewed with some suspicion.

In a bunch of ways, Tim and I both loved that work, and we draw from it liberally in our writing. But we also felt a dis-ease with scholarship that dis-attuend to our bodies, to the ways that political work isn’t just about “discourses”  (and ideas, ideologies) but also about, well, sweat. Taking as our point of departure Barbara Kamler’s wonderful 2001 book, Relocating the Personal: A Critical Writing Pedagogy, which cites Tim’s work on voice affirmatively in order to swerve away from voice toward “text,” in “Abandon Voice?” we wanted to think about why “voice” still mattered to us. We didn’t think we were precritical or naïve or essentialist in wanting to imagine pedagogies of voice. Part of that essay (especially the first section, written by Tim) summarizes arguments laid out in Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching, and then the next part (written by me) summarizes critiques of voice, especially Kamler’s, and especially those anchored in feminist theory. In the second half of the essay, we write together, and drawing on my interest in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983, 1987), and the biopolitical elaboration of their work that was associated with people like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2000, 2004).

What I don’t think we were able to say clearly enough then in our argument that we value “voice” precisely because it stubbornly insists on embodiment, is that we ultimately thought that the cultural or linguistic turn authorized itself with an impoverished, overly simplified understanding of the body. In the years after I completed my PhD, I became increasingly interested in fields like posthumanism (Snaza and Weaver, 2014), new materialisms (Snaza, Sonu, Truman, and Zaliwska, 2016), and affect theory (Dernikos, Lesko, McCall, and Niccolini 2020) to elaborate what were, in our 2006 essay, something closer to intuitions, hunches, gut feelings (Wilson 2014). These fields each seems to move away from that cultural turn toward various kinds of attention to bodies, to matter, to how the very stuff of worlds exceeds and at time resists or outstrips discourse about worlds.

A full elaboration of what those fields do, and how they enable a different kind of radically non-essentialist thinking of bodies and selves is beyond what I could offer in this Foreword, but I will quickly note five of the major takeaways which have been helpful for me as I have written about literacy, classroom practice, and ways of being together that refuse or otherwise disrupt the heteropatriarchal colonialist violence that structures most of our lives, most of the time (Snaza, 2024).

First, a “self” is not only not autonomous (the presumption that Tim finds in both Workshop and critical pedagogy approaches) but, pointedly, an effect of how myriad nonhuman systems, operating at many scales, function. What Tim calls “becoming” in the third chapter of Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching, gets generalized: in the radically open-ended, non-telological (and non-eschatological) ongoingness of worlds, whatever we are, we are part of that.

Second, in that becoming of worlds, it is not only humans who “have” (or are able to situatedly activate) agency: all matter is agential. Everything—at microscales of quanta and macro scales of evolutionary and geological drift—has a non-zero capacity to act, to enact change. What’s more, since “humans” are effects of that agency, we can learn to attune (to “pay attention”) to how nonhumans in classrooms and schools—desks, chairs, pencils, paper, lights, chalk, plumbing systems, computers, metal detectors, moldy ceiling tiles, etc.—shape who we are and what we are able to do.

Third, this includes, at least for me (Snaza, 2019), the strong claim that all human literacies include non-humans, and the even stronger claim (which many humanist readers encounter with suspicion) that literacy is not a human affair. Literacy is part of how worlds hang together, no matter who or what participates.

Fourth, my conception of politics (which is, as I have argued at least once [Snaza, 2017], mostly compatible with precisely the understanding of democracy Tim borrows from Dewey and develops in this book) is also nonhumanist, more-than-human. For me, every entity exists in political relation to other entities. In all encounters (between a teacher and a student as between a bacterium and a drop of sweat), the possibilities for future movement, future growth (to use Dewey’s term), future encounter are reshaped, modulated, transformed. What we usually think of as human politics (not just electoral politics but the wider Deweyan understanding as  “form of living”) is, for me, an instance (or a version) of a much wider, and frankly weirder, scene of the political that extends toward infinity in manifold directions.

Fifth, and finally for now, this means that when I think about “literacy” I’m often trying to move away from what humans, with humanist worldviews, consciously think they are doing. While I do sometimes turn to psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious to frame that, what I love about affect theory, new materialisms, some posthumanisms, and other non-humanist theories is that they help us attune to how those aspects of literacy, education, and politics that are available to consciousness are something like the tip of the iceberg.

The upshot of all of this to me is that I try to approach literacy with a kind of humility, keenly aware that no matter how expansive I can make my conscious attention, I will always be missing a vast amount of what actually happens. Despite leaning into what I call “strong” claims above, I try to write as much as possible in the subjunctive mood: I’m interested in offering compelling, nuanced accounts of what might be happening. And, like Tim, Dewey, Bakhtin, and all the scholars (mostly in feminist and critical race/ethnic studies) working with standpoint epistemologies, I try to sit with the radical limits on what I can know, can see, can feel from here.

Here, I have a body, shaped by and only able to thrive because of a host of other entities on whom I am politically (and ontologically) dependent and to whom I have political responsibility. If standpoint epistemologies lead me to humility, they also open me toward wonder: worlds are weird. Things never happen the way I expect, or only partly so. And my first responsibility, as a companion in study with others, is not to short circuit that by hiding behind forms of scholarly mastery (Singh 2018). I don’t really have patience for theories that are too sure of themselves, too sure about how worlds (or literacy, or education, or politics) work.

III.

I don’t think Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching says these things exactly, but I don’t think it precludes them in any way, and re-reading this book again anticipating being at a desk writing this Foreword, I was struck by just how much Tim’s book (and, Tim: the sweaty, loud, laughing, loving thing that he is) opened me toward these kinds of ideas. I don’t think I can quite say that this book “prefigures” or “anticipates” new materialist, posthumanist, or affect theory-driven approaches to literacy, but I do think it was trying to find ways out of the cultural/linguistic turn, and the sometimes astonishingly narrow-minded abstractions of critical theory, by turning to pragmatism, Bakhtinian linguistics, and, most importantly, a humble, wonder-filled attention to what happens when bodies gather. And as “more-than-human” approaches sometimes too struggle with translating abstract claims about “ontologies,” “intra-active” becoming or “pre-personal” perception into the kinds of description teachers and researchers need to navigate classrooms, I write here in the hope that some of us might find in this book a kind of model for, to summon Dewey one last time, how we think, how we tell stories.

And so I want to end by imagining that instead of you reading this on a screen, we’re together somewhere in a room where I’m talking (the smells of our bodies circulating and my voice modulating the air pressure in ways that touch your inner ears). I invite you to hear the love in my voice as I grab my well-worn copy of Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching to read aloud its last sentence, hoping that you can now hear, as Tim invites us to, how I appropriate his words for my own ends, giving them my own spin, while also hearing the ways that whatever “I” want to add also comes from outside of me, from Tim, from Bakhtin, from Dewey. I want you to hear, in my voice, an expansive feeling that I have only ever been able to call “love.” “We need to tell stories and have our stories answered by other stories and questions, need to rehearse different ways of being and acting in the world, in a rich celebration and deliberation of what is and what could be.”

References

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Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Brian Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dernikos, B., Lesko, N., McCall, S., and Niccolini, A. (Eds.). (2020). Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogies. New York: Routledge.

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Lensmire, T. J. (2017). White folks: Race and identity in rural America. New York: Routledge.

Lensmire, T. J., and Snaza, N. (2010). What Teacher Education Can Learn From Blackface Minstrelsy. Educational Researcher, 39(5), 413–422. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X10374980

Levine, J. (2002). Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Snaza, N. (2019). Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Snaza, N. (2024). Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Snaza, N., and Lensmire, T. J. (2006). Abandon voice? Pedagogy, the body, and late capitalism. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.5070/D422000573

Snaza, N., Sonu, D., Truman, S. E., and Zaliwska, Z. (Eds.). (2016). Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies. New York: Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-1648-3

Weaver, J. A., and Snaza, N. (2014). Posthuman(ist) Youth: Control, Play and Possibilities. In Critical Youth Studies Reader. New York: Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-1271-3

Wilson, E. A. (2015). Gut Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.