Introduction
He came more and more to be unable to care for, or think of soul but as in an actual body, or of any world but that wherein are water and trees, and where men and women look, so or so, and press actual hands.
–Walter PaterMy point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.
–Michel FoucaultYes, the chances of paradise are small. So what?
–Toni Morrison
My laugh is too big. The embarrassed faces of my university colleagues taught me this. At first I was confused, a little worried. I was a beginning assistant professor. What was I doing to alienate these potential friends who might sit and talk with me about wonderful, worthy things (these certain evaluators who would sit and judge me as worthy or not of the university)? Then I was hurt. I laugh loudest when (whack) the meaningfulness-ridiculousness of life is made plain. At exactly the moment I assumed, trusted, abandoned decorum for, lost my self to this obvious truth, I was rejected. The rejections were small, certainly. Momentary (still punishing).
I tried laughing smaller, softer, politely. Then I laughed louder on purpose, tried not to care–screw it.
It’s a rural, small-town, northern Wisconsin laugh. My father’s laugh.
When my dad retired–he was a cheesemaker for over 40 years in a small factory owned by local dairy farmers–my mom threw a party. She asked my brother Jeff and my sister Sue and me to say a few words. I didn’t want to, because that sounded like a funeral. But I was wrong.
My brother developed a “B” theme as he re-membered summers he worked with Dad in the cheese factory: Jeff wore Red Ball brand rubber boots; he had to stay alert, stay on the balls of his feet; he sweated a lot (the factory was very hot and humid) so his … certain body parts itched, and he scratched them. Sue talked about how, when we were little, we had to get up before sunrise on Christmas Day (usually so cold) so we could go to church together, because back then my dad worked seven days a week, even on Christmas (cows gave milk every day). They spoke well, made people laugh, start crying.
They didn’t have anything written down. I did, and I felt stupid. But then I decided that that’s what I was, a writer–and I realized that this was the first time I would stand before these people, this community in which I grew up, as one. This is what I had written on a small piece of paper, what I read:
All of you know that my dad is a hard-working person. Now, as I’ve lived and moved around a little, I’ve met many hard-working people. Unfortunately, for many of these people, it seems that hard work shrivels up their spirit. Every extra hour of labor seems to cost them some of their kindness–every struggle they endure becomes a sign for them of their superiority, as if working hard gives them the right to sit in judgement of others. My dad does not live this way in the world. His life of hard work seems to make him more sympathetic to others’ struggles, quicker to be generous with his family and friends and neighbors and strangers, who are, after all, also just doing the best that they can. I’m thankful to my dad for showing me how dignified hard work can be when it is joined to a generous, caring spirit.
I confess that I played the pedagogue, wagged my finger here, just a bit. This retirement party for my dad took place in December 1994, soon after the Republican Party’s victory in Congress that year. I was sick of hearing a truly ungenerous rhetoric heralded as the voice of the people. Good, hard-working people stood before me–but I had heard more than a few of them practicing this rhetoric, trying on this hard-hearted talk (I don’t think their hearts were hard, but maybe with practice). So I talked back. I don’t think I overdid it. When I looked up from my reading, my aunts and uncles nodded, reassured that I had focused my attention where it should have been–on their brother, John, my dad–and captured something important about him.
If stories about the author in an academic book seem improper to you or make you nervous or bored, have no fear. This book is about writing in schools and radical democracy. In the chapters that follow, I sometimes invoke experiences that I have had in the classroom, but not until the Conclusion do I tell another personal story from my private life. (Consider yourself warned: that story is about, among other things, sex, the Catholic Church, and me. If you don’t want to read it, then please don’t.)
That said, this book is, in other ways, thoroughly and consistently personal. In chapter 1, “Writing Workshop as Carnival,” I draw heavily on my own teaching and research in a third grade classroom. My goal in this chapter is to explore what sort of learning environment and classroom community writing workshops provide for students in schools. My method is to portray the workshop as a form of carnival.
When I say writing workshop, I mean the kind of primary and secondary school writing classes imagined, researched, popularized, and promoted by Donald Graves (1983, 1994), Lucy Calkins (1986, 1991), and Nancie Atwell (1987). In general, I think that writing workshop approaches have transformed teacher and student roles, writing tasks, and classroom organization in positive ways. I interpret workshops as sites of possibility, as offering opportunities for learning not found in traditional classrooms. Although others have certainly contributed to my understanding and images of what writing workshops are supposed to be like (e.g., Donald Murray, 1979, 1985), it is Graves, Calkins, and Atwell who have been most influential. When I point to workshop advocates in this book, I refer to these writers.
When I say carnival, I mean the kind of living that Russian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1984a, 1984b) associated with the carnivals and popular festivals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Bakhtin thought that such social contexts could teach us much about how to bust open and transform traditional, restrictive spaces and talk. In chapter 1, I use the lessons of Bakhtin’ s carnival and my work with third graders both to affirm and question the workshop’s guiding vision: children writing themselves and their worlds on the page, within a classroom setting that liberates student intention and association.
This book is personal, then, because it is profoundly shaped by my own experiences as an educator. It is also personal in the sense that I try, as best I can, to keep persons–living, growing selves, flesh-and-blood humans–before us, center stage, as I theorize the teaching and learning of writing in schools. Dell Hymes (1972) once complained that the study of language too often takes a “Garden of Eden” perspective in which the “controlling image is of an abstract, isolated individual, almost an unmotivated cognitive mechanism, not, except incidentally, a person in a social world” (p. 272). Unfortunately, workshop advocates imagine teachers and students similarly–imagine them as abstracted from the smaller and larger social contexts within which they move, as isolated from the complexity and conflict of human association and institution. Workshop advocates pretend we never ate the apple. And by embracing this Garden of Eden view, they simply ignore much of our own fallen world (our home), where “meanings may be won by the sweat of the brow, and communication is achieved in labor” (p. 272). They ignore much of the difficulty (and satisfaction), the struggle (and joy), of teaching and writing in schools.
In chapter 2, “Teacher as Dostoevskian Novelist,” I examine teaching and the teacher’s role in writing workshops. Bakhtin’s (1984a) work is again important–this time, his celebratory reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction. For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s novels featured strong characters who, in dialogue with each other and the author, articulate a plurality (a polyphony) of worldviews and truths. And this in sharp contrast to the monologic novels of most other writers–novels with a single worldview (that of the novelist) mouthed by servile characters. In this chapter, I look to Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky in order to celebrate and criticize how workshop advocates have conceptualized teaching and the teacher. I do this with a metaphor: I imagine the teacher as a novelist–a Dostoevskian novelist–who creates a polyphonic classroom-novel and takes up dialogic relations with student-characters. With this metaphor, I begin to revise the roles and responsibilities of workshop teachers.
I explore and reconstruct workshop images of students and their writing in chapter 3, “Voice as Project.” Student voices have not fared well in our schools. Whether spoken or written, they have too often been reduced to lifeless, guarded responses–responses to the questions and assignments of powerful others, responses formed in the shadow of teacher scrutiny and evaluation. In this chapter, I describe how workshop advocates and others have conceived of student voice. Then, I propose an alternative conception that, I hope, has a better feel for how writing feels for students, one that better recognizes the dangers and possibilities of student expression in schools.
In the end, I grab hold of writing workshop approaches, shake them, break them, remake them, for one reason: I hope to help teachers and students live worthier lives in schools. And for me, worthier lives means more democratic lives.
I need to be as clear as I can here, since, in these ugly times, ugly things roam and reproduce under the cover of democracy. By democracy, I do not mean whatever form of capitalism the United States is currently selling to other countries. I do not mean more decisions made by markets (and, oh, could you educators please crank out more workers who think it is exciting to lose their jobs and benefits when it is profitable for stockholders?). I do not mean a grand cultural tradition preserved for us in the good old history textbooks (slaves were happy back then), virtuous children’s stories (girls and women were happy back then), and the finest American literature (I don’t know why all the authors are white men-hmmm, that’s a puzzle).
I do not even mean, in the main, a very reasonable, worthy meaning of democracy–one to which public schools have paid some attention in the past, one for which we must struggle, one under attack by conservatives who want schools and the state to serve ever more efficiently the demands of capital, patriarchy, and white supremacy–democracy as political system, as form of government. I think that the sort of living I propose for students and teachers would make a powerful contribution to the education of future citizens, that it supports the development of capacities for thought, feeling, and action required if democratic institutions and procedures are to flourish. But the meaning of democracy (the goal for school writing) I pursue in this book is more immediate, present day, everyday. Humbler. Harder.
When I say democracy, I mean what John Dewey (1951) called a “way of life”–a way of life that is “controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature” (p. 391). This working faith is not an intermittent, abstract faith in human possibility, one that works only on Sundays or when our eyes glaze over in satisfied contemplation of the progress of humankind. Instead, it is a working, workaday faith that guides and expresses itself in our everyday habits and interactions with others. It is a faith I continue to learn about from my dad, John, as I watch and experience how his generous, caring spirit moves in the world.
Dewey, writing in 1939, emphasized the personal aspects and demands of such a way of life and faith:
To denounce Naziism for intolerance, cruelty and stimulation of hatred amounts to fostering insincerity if, in our personal relations to other persons, if in our daily walk and conversation, we are moved by racial, color, or other class prejudice; indeed, by anything save a generous belief in their possibilities as human beings, a belief which brings with it the need for providing conditions which will enable these capacities to reach fulfillment. (1951/1939, p. 391)
Dewey, of course, dedicated much of his life and writing to figuring out how education–and specifically education in schools–might provide conditions for the development of human capacity in all its diversity and power. In this essay, however, and in the larger context of the rise of fascism and Stalinism, Dewey (1951/1939) invoked not school but home and street comer as sites where democracy would live or die:
When I think of the conditions under which men and women are living in many foreign countries today, fear of espionage, with danger hanging over the meeting of friends for friendly conversation in private gatherings, I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street comer to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (p. 392)
This is what I am shooting for, this meaning of democracy, this way of life. In schools. In classrooms that are living rooms gathering friends for intimate conversation, 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.
I focus on life inside classrooms, and I often write as if teachers and students get to make this life up as they please. Of course this is not true. Indeed, the odds (I mean the status quo in school and society) are against students and teachers pulling off this democratic project in workshops. The odds improve if teachers’ work is organized in ways that enable them to move with agency, responsibility, dignity in schools; if the meanings and values of students, parents, and communities are attended to in curriculum, evaluation, administration; if state and federal funding actually assures that all students and teachers have classrooms and schools (not falling down on their heads) with books, pens, paper (I know I am supposed to ask for computers, but even books, pens, paper would be nice); if public schools survive at all. There is much to do, much more not addressed in this book.
Still, even as schools and society are struggled over and change (for good and for bad), students and teachers make their way through all these days in classrooms, making up, living (even if not as they please) lives.
I conclude my effort to make up better lives in writing workshops, to reconstruct workshop approaches in a Deweyan image of democratic living, in chapter 4, “Community, Deliberation, and Transgressive Stories.” This chapter is about stories. It is about helping students to imagine new roles and lives for themselves in our society: new because they don’t like the old ones, new because the old ones won’t work in a new world, new because they had no roles in the old stories (were supposed to be grateful just for the opportunity to sit in the auditorium and watch as others played the leads). I discuss how workshops might yet embrace the sort of rich, life-sustaining, and critical conversations called for by Dewey (1916/1966) in his Democracy and Education, analyzed and celebrated by Patricia Hill Collins (1991) in her Black Feminist Thought, and demonstrated by Richard Bernstein (1992) in his The New Constellation. I discuss how workshops might yet provide the conditions students need to experience and imagine new relations with others, envision and create new, humane, livable worlds.
I live in a similar and different world now from the one in which I grew up, where I learned to laugh. I am the same and different. I remain white, male, enjoy privileges in this society because of this, because of too many years of schooling. My friends and neighbors have changed. Early religious and moral commitments have become moral and political commitments to creative, radical democracy. These worlds, accidents, purposes, people, help and hinder what I understand, what I imagine, what I write. I am not an unmotivated cognitive mechanism. I am a person (I take a position) in a social world.
This position is not just my doing. I have been positioned by others in the past, by what they thought I should be because of my sex and skin color and where I came from. I have been positioned by others in the past who looked at me and imagined, generously, what I could become. You, gentle reader, position me now as you read what I write, as you respond to my attempts to position myself and this book.
Let me try one more.
I am driving down the street in a rusty white car with my son John and my daughter Sarah in the backseat. It’s an early-summer St. Louis day, windows rolled down, radio very loud. I am joyful, a little nervous, because I am going to an outdoor basketball court where I haven’t played before, which means that I will have to show a new group of people that I can hoop a little (maybe, way down, I’m a little joyful, a little nervous, because I will probably be the only white player there–but I am getting used to playing with my new neighbors and friends). Then an old Jethro Tull song comes on. But I have no idea it is by Jethro Tull (I guess instead some new alternative rock band because I hear an accordion). I have no idea it is an old song. It is stunning, exhilarating, seems perfect for this hot, humid day (even as its refrain stretches me back to the middle of winter, Wisconsin).
This is what I heard:
Do you ever get the feeling
that the story’s too damn real
and in the present
tense? Or that everybody’s on the stage
and it seems like you’re the only person
sitting in the audience?
Skating away
Skating away
Skating away, on the thin ice of a new day.
