This is a very important aspect of a carnival sense of the world. People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact in the carnival square. … All distance between people is suspended.
–Mikhail Bakhtin

Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another. It remains for the most part to secure the intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of space.
–John Dewey

Mikhail Bakhtin (1984b) called carnival the “second life” of the people. He thought that the carnivals and popular festivals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance conferred the “right to emerge from the routine of life, the right to be free from all that is official and consecrated” (p. 257). This second life of the people was both unofficial and antiofficial­–unofficial because the playful, fearless spirit of carnival loosened the grip of established norms and relations and allowed alternatives to emerge in their place; antiofficial because this same carnivalistic spirit engendered and supported the criticism and mockery of the official social order and ideology.

In this chapter, I compare writing workshops to Bakhtin’s carnival and argue that workshops embody important carnival characteristics. Work­shops create unofficial spaces in schools, loosen the grip of traditional roles and tasks in classrooms through increased student control of their own literate activities. These unofficial spaces, however, are not without their limitations and problems. Workshops, as currently imagined, are seldom antiofficial, and then only accidentally. And workshop advocates ignore how these unofficial spaces might support not only the expression of something new, but also the (sometimes violent) reassertion of old power rela­tions, old meanings and values.^[1]

Many of the examples I use to evoke workshop life in this chapter are drawn from teacher research I first wrote about in When Children Write (Lensmire, 1994 / 2023). In that book, my primary concern was to describe my own and my third grade students’ experiences and activities in a particular writing workshop–our hopes; our relations; our struggles with teaching, learning, and writing. In this chapter, my subject is the critical examination of writing workshop approaches as an agenda for writing classrooms, as a blueprint for democratic living.

Bakhtin On Carnival

I emphasize four features of Bakhtin’s carnival.^[2] The first is the participation of all in carnival. Carnival, for Bakhtin, is not a spectacle, not something performed by some and watched by others. Instead, the line between spectator and performer is blurred, as in the 18th-century Roman carnival described by Goethe (1970) in his Italian Journey. During carnival, participants move in and out of processions, games, mock battles with confetti, verbal duels, and exaggerated reenactments of the body’s struggles with birth and death. For Bakhtin (1984b), it is only later, with the encroachment of the state on popular festive life and the movement of festive life from the marketplace to the private household, that the people’s participation in carnival shifts toward spectatorship–carnival becomes a parade, and the carnival spirit is “transformed into a mere holiday mood” (p. 33). The full-bodied carnival that interests Bakhtin features an active, universal participation, is a “play without footlights” (p. 235); “Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they live a carnivalistic life” (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 122).

One of carnival’s laws–and for Bakhtin perhaps the most important­–is the seeming obliteration of the official, established social order, and “all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette” connected to it (p. 123). In the second life of carnival, behavior, gesture, and discourse are freed. With the suspension of social hierarchies and conventions, a joyful “disorderly conduct” flourishes:

Members of all social strata mix, joke and cavort in a mood of carefree abandon and “universal good humour.” … Young men and women, each dressed in the clothes of the opposite sex, interact in a scandalous and provocative manner. Mock officials parade through the crowd, accusing people of horrible crimes and threatening them with arrest and punishment, which only elicits howls of laughter from the populace. (Gardiner, 1992, p. 44)

Carnival is life turned inside out and upside down. This disruption of life’s routine, and especially the temporary abolition of powerful social hierarchies, allows participants to experience relations with each other and the world that are unavailable to them in everyday life.

A second important feature of carnival, then, is free and familiar con­tact among people. Physical and social distances between people are suspended in the jostling crowds. Constrained, coercive relations give way to ones based in freedom and equality. For Bakhtin, carnival is a context in which people take up and work out, even if only temporarily, new relations with others. Participants experience “in a concretely sensuous, half­-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life” (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 123).

But it is not only social relations that are transformed in carnival, not only people who get mixed and combined in disorderly ways. For Bakhtin, a “free and familiar” attitude spreads over everything, as values, ideas, events, and things are wrestled from their ordinary places in thought and practice, rearranged, and perceived anew. Carnival participants take up new relations not only with the people around them, but also with their world. A third feature of carnival, then, is a playful, familiar relation to the world.

This playful stance is signaled in numerous carnival practices, such as clothes being worn inside out, or underwear as outerwear; countless gestures, such as walking backward, standing on your head, showing your backside; the use of spoons and pots and other household objects as weapons of war in mock battles; and the creation of useless objects, such as buckets and barrels without bottoms. Bakhtin (1984b) warns against passing too quickly over these seemingly frivolous activities, and sees great import and possibilities in carnival’s playful manipulation of the everyday world:

It is a gay and free play with objects and concepts, but it is a play that pursues a distant, prophetic goal: to dispel the atmosphere of gloomy and false seriousness enveloping the world and all its phenomenon, to lend a different look, to render it more material, closer to man and his body, more understandable, and lighter in the bodily sense. (p. 380)

As the weight of the established social order and official ideology is lifted in carnival, unofficial and antiofficial discourse and activity emerge. The fourth feature of Bakhtin’s carnival is this strong antiofficial current in the carnival sea–what Bakhtin calls carnival abuse, or profanation­–which is expressed in the loud blasphemies, obscenities, and parodies that sound in the carnival square. Bakhtin emphasizes that carnival abuse is not personal invective aimed at other individuals. Instead, profanation has as its target the system of practices and ideas that oppress the people. Carnival abuse is directed, by the folk, at traditional authority and its “old truth,” which are represented by “a Mardi Gras dummy, a comic monster that the laughing crowd rends to pieces in the marketplace” (p. 213).

The purpose or project of carnival abuse, however, is not purely nega­tive. For Bakhtin, profanation is profoundly ambivalent–that is, both negative and positive, both destructive and regenerating. Carnival abuse kills the old so that the new can be born. This ambivalence is clearly seen in one of the most important rituals of carnival–the mock crowning and decrowning of the carnival king. In this ritual, a carnival king is crowned, only to fall prey later to carnival abuse in the decrowning, as he is stripped of his regal vestments, crown, and other symbols of authority, and subjected to ridicule and beatings:

The ritual of the decrowning completes, as it were, the coronation and is inseparable from it (I repeat: this is a dualistic ritual). And through it, a new crowning already glimmers. Carnival celebrates the shift itself, the process of replaceability. … Under this ritual act of decrowning a king lies the very core of the carnival sense of the world–the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal. Carnival is the festival of all-annihilating and all­-renewing time. (Bakhtin, 1984a, pp. 124, 125)

This, for Bakhtin, was the lesson taught in carnival: things change. In carnival, the people laughed at ideas and practices supposed to be universal and eternal, and saw them for what they were–partial and contingent. And for the folk, for everyday people worn down by oppressive conditions, this was a hopeful lesson.

Active participation; free and familiar contact among people; a playful, familiar relation to the world–these carnival features are also important aspects of writing workshops. Profanation, however, is not; carnival abuse is muted in the writings of workshop advocates and is redirected, in sometimes disturbing ways, by children in their talk and texts. In what follows, I examine and evaluate these similarities and differences between workshops and carnival.

Workshop As Carnival

Affirmations

The active participation of both students and teachers is a prominent theme in workshop literature.^[3] In the opening sentence of one of the classics of workshop advocacy, Donald Graves (1983) asserts: “Children want to write. They want to write the first day they attend school” (p. 3). The problem, according to workshop advocates, is that traditional school practices do not encourage and sustain this active engagement with writing. In fact, traditional practices actually deny participation, demand passivity, and produce student resistance. Thus, workshop approaches emphasize the need for teachers to provide students with the opportunity to explore and learn about writing by writing. The primary strategy of these approaches is to grant students increased control (or ownership) over their own literate activities. According to Graves, writing workshop teachers

Want the child to control, take charge of the information in his writing. Their craft is to help the child to maintain control for himself. That is the craft of teaching. They stand as far back as they can observing the child’s way of working, seeking the best way to help the child realize his intentions. (p. 6)

For workshop advocates, students’ increased control over their work helps them regain their interest in and commitment to expressing themselves in print.

In the workshop I set up with my third graders, this active participation–as well as the second feature of Bakhtin’s carnival, free and familiar contact among people–can be seen in the primary activities of different parts of our daily routine.

Our workshop had a three-part routine. The first part–the opening meeting–lasted approximately five to ten minutes and was modeled after what Lucy Calkins (1986) calls minilessons. I used this time to teach, usually in a whole-class situation, the procedures and norms of the workshop and aspects of the craft of writing. This part of the routine placed students in a fairly traditional, passive student role. Interestingly enough, once students got used to the relative control they exercised in other parts of the workshop routine, they actively resisted the opening meeting. They persistently complained about it, claiming that it wasted their writing time; they called the opening meeting, among other derogatory things, the “open­ing infinity.” Students even circulated a petition in the workshop that called for the opening meeting to be shortened. By March of that school year, we were calling the opening meeting the “opening minute,” and I was consciously working to keep it short (Fieldnotes, 3-12-90).

The second part of the routine, lasting approximately 30 minutes, was writing time. This was the part of the workshop where children exercised the greatest control over their own work and movement. Children used this autonomy to engage in topics and stories that they found meaningful and to engage their peers and me in ways and at times that suited their work and the problems they faced as they wrote. If children needed to talk with someone about ideas they had for revisions of their stories, for example, they had the freedom to do so. They could go to their peers, or to me, or to Grace,^[4] the regular classroom teacher, who often worked with us in the workshop. Primary activities for children during this time included brainstorming, drawing, drafting, revising, and editing texts; holding conferences with peers and the teacher; publishing selected texts; and reading. Children made choices during this time as to what they wanted to work on, with whom, for how long. My primary activity was to help students identify important stories,^[5] revise their texts, and get their drafts ready for typing and publishing.

The final ten minutes or so of the workshop routine was sharing time (modeled after Graves and Hansen’s [1983] “author’s chair”). Sharing time was one of two primary ways for children’s texts to go public within the classroom, to reach a larger audience than those in teacher and peer conferences. (The second was our workshop “library”–a few shelves at the back of the room where we housed children’s published pieces. Children donated the books they wrote to the library for certain amounts of time so that other children could check them out and read them during writing time and other parts of the school day.) During sharing time, one or more children read their stories in front of the class, after which classmates and adults in the room shared their responses. Sometimes children shared finished pieces, which they had typed, illustrated, and bound between card­ board covers. Other times, children used sharing time to get help with planning or revising earlier drafts of texts.

Unlike traditional classrooms, our writing workshop did not lock children into passive spectator roles. Like participants in carnival, children experienced a blurring of performer and spectator roles in the workshop­–“active” producing authors were not separated from “passive” consum­ing readers. Instead, children moved in and out of the roles of writer and audience. In both sharing time and the workshop library, child writers and their stories occupied spaces typically reserved for adults and official texts: in sharing time, the storytelling child replaced the teacher at the front of the room; in the workshop library, the child’s book replaced the adult­-authored and -selected text. And in contrast to traditional seating arrangements that bind children to desks and constrain peer relations–relations that flourish only at the edges, or in the absence, of the teacher’s gaze (Erickson & Shultz, 1992)–writing time permitted movement and provided children with access to each other. At any given moment during writing time, children were clustered around desks, huddled under the bookshelves, or on the move to a conference with friends. Children could draw close to one another and engage each other in less constrained ways.

Writing workshop approaches encourage free and familiar contact among children. They also seek to lessen physical and social distances between teachers and students. As was suggested above in my discussion of our workshop routine, the teacher in the writing workshop is often among children, rather than in the front of the room.^[6] In addition, workshop approaches encourage transformed teacher-student relations in their conception of teacher response to children’s texts. A major concern of workshop advocates is helping teachers avoid falling into a typical classroom discourse that affirms the traditional social hierarchy between teacher and student, and silences students (Cazden, 1986).

Workshop approaches emphasize that teacher response should not simply evaluate student writing for grading purposes, but should seek to help students realize their own intentions in text. The teacher, once the sole initiator and audience/evaluator of student writing, now follows the child (Graves, 1983, p. 103), watching carefully for ways to encourage, support, model, and coach, at appropriate times, through response. Calkins (1986) would have teachers draw close^[7] to students and become a genuine audi­ence for them, an audience that is interested in what young writers have to say.^[8]

Our first job in a conference, then, is to be a person, not just a teacher. It is to enjoy, to care, and to respond. We cry, laugh, nod, and sigh. … Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes the purpose of a conference is simply to respond. Other times, if the moment seems right, we try, in a conference, to extend what the youngster can do as a writer. (p. 119)

In addition to transformed social relations, writing workshops support the active engagement of children with writing through the transformation of school writing tasks. And in this transformation of task, writing workshops, like carnival, encourage participants to take up a playful, familiar relation to the world. In at least three ways, workshop approaches support this playful stance by young writers.

First, workshop approaches reject traditional school writing tasks: they reject the grammar and usage textbook with its gloomy exercises, as well as tightly controlled teacher assignments. Second, writing workshops grant students wide powers to determine the topics, audiences, purposes, and forms of their texts, and support students in their choices. Rather than confront an alien, imposed world, children are asked to explore their own familiar worlds, and to do so in their own language; workshop advocates want “the schoolyard talk of children to become the poetry and prose of the classroom publishing house” (Willinsky, 1990, p. 200). As Nancie Atwell (1987) notes, workshop approaches have strong student-centered commit­ments in that “individuals’ rigorous pursuit of their own ideas is the course content” (p. 41). But this “rigorous pursuit” is not necessarily “gloomy” or “serious”: What are brainstorming, friendly conferences, and Peter Elbow’s (1973) “free writing,” but strategies for replacing an all too serious school approach to ideas and work with a playful, familiar one?^[9]

Finally, writing workshops support children’s playful, familiar stance to the world by bringing writing itself close to students and demystifying it. Rather than experiencing the typical, alienating school task of producing texts for evaluation purposes, children experience what it means to engage in the craft of writing, continuously and close up. They explore their experiences and world through drafting and revision, through seeing the effect of what they have to say on multiple audiences in the workshop. In the writing workshop, the process of writing and the role of writer are not kept at a distance, not denied children. And through writing, children begin to give shape and order to their world:

By articulating experience, we reclaim it for ourselves. Writing allows us to tum the chaos into something beautiful, to frame selected moments in our lives, to uncover and to celebrate the organizing patterns of our existence. (Calkins, 1986, p. 3)

In support of children’s active engagement with writing in the classroom, writing workshops encourage a free and familiar relation to the world by child writers, as well as free and familiar relations among workshop participants. Thus, it seems reasonable to compare writing workshops to carnival–a reasonableness that is only strengthened if you have ever actually experienced the noise, laughter, and incessant movement of active children in a writing workshop. Having made this comparison, how­ever, I must immediately admit that if workshop is carnival, it is a rather pale, subdued one: one without the critical, sharp edge of Bakhtin’s carnival. A carnival without bite.

An Orderly, Individualistic Carnival

Bakhtin emphasizes that a central aspect of carnival is its struggle against the official social order, its attempt to meet and disable established social relations and ideas with laughter, frank speech, and, especially, carnival abuse or profanation. Bakhtin’s carnival has a strong antiofficial commitment that is simply absent from the writing workshops promoted by Graves, Calkins, and Atwell. These workshop advocates do provide important critiques of traditional school practices, but they seldom link these critiques and their proposals for classrooms to broader societal problems and struggles for change (Berlin, 1988). Workshop advocates make the teacher responsible for sharing a technical, craft curriculum with students that is aimed at supporting and enhancing children’s writing processes. The content of children’s writing is left up to individual children. Thus, any carnival abuse that does occur–and it does (I share some examples below)–is incidental, and represents an individual student’s decision to challenge, parody, or criticize aspects of her world. But there is no system­atic commitment within workshop approaches to the development and support of such critical practices by students.^[10]

The bite of carnival is blunted in writing workshops, in part by the guiding visions workshop advocates have put forward.^[11] In contrast to Bakhtin’s images of a subversive, popular carnival, workshops have been guided by visions that are neither playful and critical enough nor collective enough to sustain profanation. As John Willinsky (1990) has noted, workshops are often portrayed in ways that recommend them as effective preparation for an official, corporate, workaday world, rather than as carnivalesque breeding grounds of playful, critical dissent and liberatory alternatives:

[Workshops] would, after all, encourage independent and collaborative projects while drawing on peer support networks and conferencing with professionals to enhance the production values of the final and literate product. It can all sound and seem very marble and glass, office-tower work. While the editorial meetings at the classroom publishing house may not be a training ground for the leveraged buy-out artists, neither is it so removed from hustling projects and prospectuses for tomorrow’s Wall Street jungle. (p. 19)

Bakhtin’s carnival took place in the medieval market square, a site that shared something of the hustle and excitement, I suppose, of Wall Street. But Bakhtin’s carnival was animated by a desire for freedom and equality, and celebrated a shared, communal abundance, rather than individual selfishness and greed.

For Bakhtin, profanation was a collective, critical response to an op­pressive official world. A second aspect of workshop visions that under­mines profanation, then, is their almost exclusive focus on and concern with the individual writer. Workshop approaches, as Mark Dressman (1993) puts it, “lionize lone wolves.” The goals of workshop approaches are conceived of in terms of supporting individual children’s intentions for writing, and project a vision of empowerment that is at odds with visions, such as Bakhtin’s, that conceive of positive social change as the product of individual and collective struggle.

Workshop advocates have embraced an individualistic, Romantic rhetoric that abstracts writers and their texts from social context. James Berlin (1988) argues that this rhetoric does provide a powerful “denunciation of economic, political, and social pressures to conform” (p. 486). The problem for Berlin is that while this rhetoric champions resistance to dehumanizing forces and conditions, it is always (and only) individual resistance:

The only hope in a society working to destroy the uniqueness of the individual is for each of us to assert our individuality against the tyranny of the authoritarian corporation, state, and society. Strategies for doing so must of course be left to the individual, each lighting one small candle in order to create a brighter world. (p. 487)

It is not that individual children do not try to light a candle every now and then in the writing workshop, for they do. There is carnivalesque student writing in the workshop that targets aspects of the official world and submits them to a playful disrespect and abuse. A fairly direct example comes from one of my students, Rajesh, who made his gym teacher into the main character of a story he wrote. This gym teacher was almost uniformly disliked by children in our workshop–according to them, he was quite mean. In his first draft, Rajesh used the teacher’s actual name in the story; later, Rajesh changed the character’s name to “Jud Coat.” Rajesh’s story:

Far far away in the milky way galaxy there was a planet called MEAN. The things that lived on it were called Tickyes.

One of the Tickyes came to our planet earth. Now, Tickyes can change shape. So it changed into a man called Jud Coat. He got a job at Clifford School. Jud was very mean! When anybody said Hi to him he would beat them up! And the worst thing was he kept multiplying. So somebody was going to have to get rid of him.

And so I, Rajesh, stabbed him in the brain. [“the heart” in another version]

In his story, Rajesh targets an authority figure for criticism–“Jud was very mean!”–and abuse–“stabbed him in the brain” (a rather severe form of “uncrowning”?). Within the logic of the story, Rajesh’s abuse clears the way, presumably, for a better world, one without the mean and multiplying Tickye, Jud Coat. Thus, in addition to the criticism and abuse of a powerful figure in Rajesh’s official school world, the story has something of the ambivalent quality (both destructive and regenerating) that Bakhtin claimed characterized carnival abuse.

Other examples from our workshop were less direct, and seemed in­tent on testing implicit teacher and school definitions of acceptable topics for student writing. James, for example, told me on one of the first days of school that he was going to write about vomit (Fieldnotes, 8-30-89). Later, he and Ken wrote a story in which the two main characters–Kurt and Lisa (both named for children in this third grade classroom)–went to bed together. (Grace made James and Ken remove this event from their story before they shared it with the class.^[12])

I point to these as examples of carnivalesque writing because they employ–even if without the conscious intention of the authors–one of the main strategies of carnival abuse that Bakhtin (1984b) examines in Rabelais and His World. Within the system of carnival images, both the earth and the lower body (the belly, bowels, and reproductive organs) functioned as grave for the old and womb for the new. In carnival abuse, then, a common tactic was to bring the high “down to earth” or into contact or association with the lower body, where the old would be killed, and then transformed and reborn. For example, one of Rabelais’s characters in Gargantua and Pantagruel says that the shadow cast by a monastery’s belfry impregnates women. This bit of carnival abuse works by associating the high, church tower, with the low, human body (male penis and pregnant women). Bakhtin argues that this abuse is not directed solely (or even primarily) at somewhat less than abstinent monks. Instead, “the monastic belfry, uncrowned and renewed in the form of a giant phallus … uncrowns the entire monastery, the very ground on which it stands, its false ascetic ideal, its abstract and sterile eternity” (1984b, p. 312).

James and his friends made the carnivalesque move of taking up as topics, within their official school writing, functions of the human body usually censored out of elementary schools or at least tightly controlled within them (as in sex education). They were young Rabelaises, with the similarity in strategy explained by the continuity of what they and Rabelais were up against–a Western tradition that separates mind from body, and that asks its students to “look higher” to the things of the mind. As James explained in his interview, he liked to “make serious things funny when the day’s kind of going slow, and it’s really not going, nobody’s really having any fun” (Interview, 5-24-90). If you want to have a little fun, then one thing you can do is “look lower.”

We can even hear echoes of carnival in an official workshop story told by Calkins (1991). When consulting with a school district on workshop approaches, one of her colleagues was met at the airport by a group of teachers who said that they were relieved that she had come, for they had embraced the writing workshop dictum that children could choose their own topics, and it had led to a problem. The problem? All over the school, students were writing about farts. Calkins’s colleague told the teachers to tell the students to stop it, and the teachers responded with surprise–they could do that in a writing workshop approach? Calkins concludes:

We laugh and think, “How silly.” But it’s not silly. It’s sad. The problem is not that kids are writing about farts but that some of us have lost confidence in our ability to think for ourselves within the writing conference. (p. 228)

This is a fair enough moral to the story, especially given the larger context of low teacher status in our country and continued attacks on teachers and schools for putting the very survival of our nation at risk. But there is another moral, another problem lurking in Calkins’s story. For me, the problem is that workshop approaches have an impoverished view of the ends toward which children might put their writing.

Workshop approaches have traditionally emphasized personal narrative. Children’s writing remains cozily wrapped in a Romantic rhetoric that portrays it as “the innocent perceptions of children making individual sense of the world and their role in it” (Gilbert, 1989a, p. 199). Rajesh, James, and the children writing about farts were pushing writing in another direction that sought to upset and challenge aspects of their world­–a direction that might, with support, grow into mature forms of parody or criticism.

I am sure that the students who were writing about farts were just “having fun.” But surely part of the fun was knowing that, within the relative freedom of the writing workshop, they had found a topic to write about that made authority figures nervous. Writing workshops created a small space for expressing a part of life that is traditionally closed off in school, and the kids exploited that space. Calkins’s colleague suggested that these children should just stop it. Maybe so. But the responses of Calkins and her colleague suggest to me that workshop advocates assume that once traditional social relations and school tasks are transformed in the writing workshop, students will have nothing left to challenge, criticize, abuse. These advocates tend not to consider the broader social, cultural, and political aspects of children’s present and future lives, and pay scant attention to the benefits for children that might come with helping them oppose and criticize aspects of their world (Davies, 1993; Lensmire, 1994).

For Bakhtin, carnival abuse represented an explicit, collective struggle with an oppressive social order. At best, writing workshops, as currently imagined, might allow individual dissent. At worst, they might shut down even this, because their guiding visions provide no real resource for making sense of and responding to student resistance and opposition.

I have argued that writing workshop life contrasts to the “second life” of Bakhtin’s carnival in its lack of profanation, even as individual stu­dents sometimes push their writing toward such an “abusive” end. I conclude my examination of workshops by articulating a problem that is common to both the writing of workshop advocates and Bakhtin’s writing on carnival. Carnival abuse, it turns out, is not the only sort of abuse that is possible within the relative openness of carnivals and writing workshops.

A Shared Uncritical Populism

When the restraining hand of traditional authority was lifted during the actual carnivals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was not only powerful groups and the official ideology that were in for abuse and mockery. Peter Burke (1978), for example, tells of a London festival in 1512 that became the occasion for the massacre and expulsion of foreigners. In certain instances, powerful groups used the openness of carnival to their own advantage; in others, relatively powerless groups turned against even more powerless groups.^[13] Thus, even as carnival provides opportunities for freedom and equality and a protected space for antiofficial activity and discourse, it also “often violently abuses and demonizes weaker, not stronger, social groups–women, ethnic and religious minorities, those who ‘don’t belong'” (Stallybrass & White, 1986, p. 19).

I have been similarly concerned with how children treat one another in the carnival atmosphere of the writing workshop. Workshop advocates have assumed that the classroom communities students and teachers create for themselves in writing workshops will be supportive, productive ones for everyone. Lisa Delpit (1995) and Annette Henry (1996), among others, have questioned this assumption, especially for children who do not bring white, bourgeois meanings and values to the classroom. Thus, an important criticism that Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) attach to Bakhtin’s work on carnival–namely, that it embraces an uncritical populism–also holds for the writing of workshop advocates. Although these advocates are concerned that teachers take action to help students interact with each other in supportive ways–and their books contain helpful suggestions toward this end–ultimately workshop advocates overestimate (as I did) the effectiveness of such teacherly interventions. They overestimate the goodwill and openness that students have toward one another, especially across lines of social class, gender, and race.

My characterization above of free and familiar contact among children in the writing workshop was quite similar to the portrayals of peer relations in workshop literature. Atwell (1987), for example, who writes from her experiences as a teacher of eighth graders, asserts that “small groups [of students] form and disband in the minutes it takes for a writer to call on one or more other writers, move to a conference corner, share a piece or discuss a problem, and go back to work with a new perspective on the writing” (p. 41). My worry is that this openness and fluidity is only apparent, that beneath it are more stable patterns of peer relations among children that divide them, subordinate some to others, and routinely deny certain children the help and support that others receive from peers.

In our third grade workshop, when given the choice, girls worked with girls, and boys with boys. And the working-class children who lived in a large trailer park in the middle of this mainly middle-class community found themselves at the bottom of informal peer hierarchies of status and power in the classroom.^[14] The experiences of Jessie–one of the children at the bottom of the peer pecking order–help us understand what is at stake here, and suggest the importance of appraising the peer relations that children work out with increased control over their own work and lives in workshops.

Jessie was the classroom’s “female pariah,” ostracized by nearly every­ one “by virtue of gender, but also through some added stigma such as being overweight or poor” (Thome, 1986, p. 175). Jessie was not small, and she came from the trailer park. Nearly everyone in the class, in their interviews, said that she was the least popular person in the class and the least desirable to work with. Bruce, for example, called her “idiotic, dumb”; John said that she stank; and Mary that Jessie never brushed her teeth. Only a few children said that they had worked with her in the class.

Grace and I often intervened in verbal fights between Jessie and other children. For example, when I arrived at school one Wednesday morning in February, I saw Robert and Suzanne, among others, yelling at Jessie, calling her “zit face.”^[15] I told them to stop it and made a point to walk up to Jessie and say good morning. Jessie paused long enough to say hello before continuing her own verbal defense and attack.

These verbal fights continued over the next few days. I wrote in my notes that “Jessie has been doing battle with Mary, Suzanne, Carol, and even sometimes, it seems, her friends Karen and Janis. But primarily with Suzanne and Mary” (Fieldnotes, 2-9-90). That Friday, I discovered that attacks on Jessie had found their way into print. When the children left for lunch, I noticed a child’s text in the wastebasket. It was a story entitled, “The Killers in Mr. Lensmire’s Class”:

When we got into the classroom on Monday morning we heard singing. It was Jil, Jessie, and Paul. They were singing a dumb song that went like this: Let’s get together, ya, ya, ya. Mrs. Parker [Grace] was out of the classroom. Then Lisa shot Jessie in the back. AAAAAH! Jessie said with a scream!

I do not know who the author was, or why he or she threw it away. The attack on Jessie, however, was not the only one accomplished with the piece of paper I found in the wastebasket. Below the story was a message, written in cursive. The message read: “Mary you’r stupid!” It was written twice, once in pen, once in pencil. On the back of the paper was: “To: Mary.” Perhaps Mary had written “The Killers in Mr. Lensmire’s Class,” had given it to Jessie (or Jil or Paul) and had received a critical response to her work­–“Mary you’r stupid!”–which she threw away. In any event, Jessie was being attacked in real life and as a fictional character.

In her interview, Jessie said that she had only two friends in the class, Janis and Karen (both from the trailer park). She said she sometimes had conferences and shared her finished pieces with them, but usually she kept her work to herself. Although she published four books during the year, she did not share her books either during sharing time or in the workshop library. She often had conferences with me, Grace, and the teacher aide. In contrast to many of her classmates, she looked almost exclusively to adults as audiences. When asked if there were things about the workshop that she did not like, she said, “Sometimes I didn’t like it was when Mr. Lensmire couldn’t get to me [for a writing conference]. I didn’t like that” (Interview, 5-30-90).

There were other children who seemed to prefer adults as audiences over peers, but most children in the workshop enjoyed and valued conferences with classmates, and shared their work with the class in sharing sessions. In fact, because they valued their interactions with peers, the opportunity to conference and share their work with classmates was one of the most positive aspects of the workshop for these third graders.

But not just any peers. Children in the workshop sought and avoided specific peer audiences in their daily interactions in the classroom. Children accomplished this by selecting whom they held conferences and collaborated with on their stories.

In general, children worked with friends within gender boundaries. All children identified other children with whom they did and did not want to have conferences–in other words, they made inclusions and exclusions, and these differentiations were often associated with social class and gender differences. Karen, for example, spoke for children in the class when she stated that “the boys like the boys, but the girls like the girls” for peer conferences (Interview, 5-21-90). In Mary and Lori’s interview, Mary was quite explicit (as were most children) about with whom she did and did not want to work: “I like working with Carol, Lisa, Marie, Sharon, Emily, Julie, and Suzanne. And I don’t like working with the boys” (Interview, 5-31-90). Mary’s list of girls, except for possibly Emily and Julie, is a fairly complete naming of the most popular girls in the class. She was also forthcoming about girls with whom she did not want to work and why. Mary said that “some of them had lice, they stunk,” and she did not like their “styles” or their personalities.

Mary: Most of them, and some of them are from the trailer park and I don’t like working with people who are from the trailer park. … Like at first I thought that Lori was from the trailer park before I went over to her house the first time.
Lori: Thanks a lot.
Mary: Well I did.

These valuations and devaluations of peers were acted out not only in patterns of association in the workshop, but also in stories that children wrote. Ken’s story “All about Ken, Troy, and James,” for example, embodied a hierarchy of characters that reflected social relations among boys in the class. Ken, Troy, and James were popular and powerful middle-class students in the workshop. In Ken’s story, they were powerful dinosaurs who, in the first scene, dominate three other, smaller dinosaurs. The smaller dinosaurs were named for three other boys in the class:

Me and Troy and James were running after three Pterodactyl. Their names are Robert and William and Bruce, and Robert and William and Bruce flew down. And then James ran up to get William and Troy ran up to get Robert. And Ken went up to get Bruce. And James said, “Look who I caught, a little squirt.”

The story pitted three friends with superior size and strength as dinosaurs against three other classmates. These classmates were not Ken’s friends, nor were they popular children. Two of the three were from the trailer park. One of them, William, was called a “little squirt” (he was one of the smallest boys in the class). Whatever Ken’s intent, his story rehearses the sort of divisions and hierarchies that children created and experienced in the writing workshop.

Witness the list of characters Mary and Suzanne drew up for a play they had written. In the column to the left are the characters’ names in the play. To the right are the names of children Mary and Suzanne thought should play those parts. Except for Joshua, who was Suzanne’s fifth grade neighbor, all the children listed were students in this classroom:

Not all roles are created equal. Three characters (and only these characters) had no lines, had nothing to say in this play: Tower 1, Tower 2, and Tower 3. These roles were assigned by Mary and Suzanne to John, Leon, and Robert. Leon and Robert lived in the trailer park. John did not. Like Jessie, however, John was harassed a lot (unlike Jessie, he often cried and, on occasion, tried to bite those teasing him). As objects 1, 2, and 3, John, Leon, and Robert were to stand on stage from the beginning of the play to the end. Present throughout, but mute.

Jessie was from the trailer park, and she decided that it was too risky to share her stories with peers. After identifying children with whom she did not want to have conferences, Jessie described how she would feel if she were forced to do so:

Interviewer: What would they do with your writing? How would you feel if you had to conference with them?
Jessie: I would feel like a jar of slime. Being sat on.
Interviewer: So maybe they don’t treat you very well?
Jessie: Yes. No, like getting cut in half. (Interview, 5-30-90)

Later, she said that she never shared in front of the whole class because they would make her feel the same way in that situation. Jessie declined my numerous offers to have her share with small groups of classmates.

From the beginning, I worked with Grace to make this writing workshop, and its conferences and sharing times, a safe place for children to write and share their work. We did many activities to help children respond to each other’s writing in helpful ways. We talked often about how we needed to support and respect one another. Obviously, these teacher efforts were not enough to make the classroom a safe place for Jessie to share her work with peers. When asked why other people felt comfortable sharing their stories in front of class, Jessie said, “Because they have lots of friends.”

One of the consequences of Jessie’s relations with her peers was that her writing was never shared publicly in the workshop. Most children never encountered Jessie’s retelling of “Sleeping Beauty”:

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess, and her name was Jessie. One day, she was sleeping, and she heard a noise so she got up and went upstairs to the room upstairs. When she opened the door she saw a spinning wheel.

When she was spinning at the spinning wheel, she poked her finger. Suddenly she fell asleep, and everyone fell asleep too. Just then a prince came.

He snuck into the castle and found the princess and kissed her. And suddenly everybody awoke and the prince became an empire.

Jerome Bruner (1990) believes that the stories we tell and write “mediate between the canonical world of culture and the more idiosyncratic world of beliefs, desires, and hopes” (p. 52). Our stories represent a sort of compromise between, on one hand, how the world and we are supposed to be (given to us in the “canonical world of culture”) and, on the other, what we might imagine our selves and world to be. When we tell stories, we retell old ones; we also manipulate and twist (and maybe sometimes even break and rewind) these stories in ways that express our “idiosyncratic worlds.”

The twists Jessie gave to a more canonical version of “Sleeping Beauty” (from the Grimms [1883], for example), are heartening, and suggest a valuing of self, movement and activity, and power. Her crowned princess is named Jessie, instead of Rosamond. Jessie the author (as well as Jessie the princess) avoids altogether the angry witch who casts a death spell on the young princess, as well as the good witch who transmutes that spell to sleep. Jessie seems impatient with sleep–the princess “suddenly” falls asleep, only to be awakened almost immediately by a prince who “just then” arrived. In the Grimm version, the two live happily ever after together. Jessie’s princess and prince may do likewise, but Jessie leaves this open. She is not content, however, with some sort of romantic bliss for the two. Jessie’s version ends with the rise to power of her prince: He becomes “an empire.”

Jessie’s story may also be read against another “canonical world of culture”–the peer culture in which Jessie participated. The distance between the canonical peer world and Jessie’s more “idiosyncratic” one is great. Jessie was not beautiful in the stories peers told about her. In that world, Jessie labored, moved, to avoid those who would cast spells that “cut her in half” and tum her into a “jar of slime.” The school year was long, and she had little chance of friendly association (nor did she say she wanted it) with the powerful.

Jessie wrote herself and a vision of the world on the page, but others seldom heard her voice or saw her vision, at least not in the public spaces the workshop provided. Jessie thought that those spaces were for people with “lots of friends.”

Most children had enough friends to make free and familiar contact with peers at least a mixed blessing. But there is an underside to children’s relations that workshop advocates have not confronted. As in carnival, workshop participants sometimes use the free and playful space not to work out humane new relations, not to lampoon and discredit an unjust, official order, but to reassert and reinforce ugly aspects of exactly that same unjust, larger society. Abuse in carnival (and the writing workshop) is not, as Bakhtin wanted it to be, solely aimed at worthy objects of uncrowning. Some targets are chosen because they are easy targets, because already uncrowned, never crowned.

Conclusion

I have portrayed writing workshops as a form of carnival in order to highlight important, liberatory aspects of workshop life, and to identify problems that threaten to undermine its positive force. I have pointed to active participation; free and familiar contact among people; and a playful, familiar relation to the world as positive features of writing workshops that we should affirm. And I have questioned the individualistic and un­critical visions that guide current workshop approaches–visions that provide precious few resources for understanding, supporting, and criticizing the diverse ends to which children might put their talk and texts.

Workshop advocates have consistently criticized the traditional, con­trolling, fault-finding writing teacher, and have promoted instead a supportive teacher who finds meaning and who shares the craft of writing with students. The role they have imagined for teachers, however, assumes that teachers will never have to take up a critical stance in relation to children’s work and the larger society within which children live and learn. Consequently, workshop advocates have drastically underestimated the sort of intellectual, moral/political, and aesthetic influence and leadership actually required of writing teachers if they are to be responsible in their work with children. In the next chapter, I examine strengths and weaknesses in how workshop advocates have imagined teaching and the teacher’s role.

My third grade students and I created a community within the writing workshop, and children’s writing emerged from and contributed to that community. The community we created was important for the experiences and learning of the children and teachers there. If, as Harris (1989) asserts, we “write not as isolated individuals but as members of communities whose beliefs, concerns, and practices both instigate and constrain, at least in part, the sorts of things we can say” (p. 12), then we had better pay attention to the communities we create in classrooms.

With the help of Bakhtin’s work on carnival, I have tried to pay attention. Writing workshop approaches have the potential to contribute to the creation of more humane and just forms of life in school and society–a potential grounded in workshop commitments to help students engage in meaningful activity and take up open, learning relations with each other and the world. The absence of Jessie and her “Sleeping Beauty” from the public spaces of our workshop, however, reminds us that transformed peer relations represent both promise and problem in our progressive pedagogies. In the open, engaging, laughing, playing workshop­ carnival, students have something to say about who speaks and is heard. We ignore what they are saying at our children’s and our own peril.