On (Not) Taking Time to Write

I have spent the last couple weeks visiting other folks’ classes and thinking about what I wish I was writing about (rather than writing). This thinking about but not actually writing points me to a quality of life (indeed, I vacuumed the house in the middle of composing this post). What gives me pause is a question about whose life. I can accept that my inaction is mine, can even do something about that. But what if, as I suspect, this quality of life has to do with being a teacher.

Here’s the worry. We (the society that I am a part of) have established the role of teacher in such a way so as to almost assure that teachers won’t write much, because writing is not of value to them or because they cannot write and also be a teacher very easily.

Two things occur as I work out this line of thought. The first is the role “teacher.” I use this noun to designate a human that is vocationally committed to working among learners in an attempt to optimize learning. The setting of that work—public or private, primary or secondary—changes the focus of the teacher but not, I think, the nature of the work. Interestingly, some “educational” settings have slots carved out for teachers. A kindergarten classrooms and middle school math classes are places where teachers ply their trade. A “teacher” may find other versions of school less native to the role or habit or intuition or art or whatever it is that we practice. I encountered a few gifted teachers in graduate school but they were the odd person out, professors with the freedom to try an experiment. Louise Schleiner was one of these. I worked with her just after her third book found a publisher, at a point when she began to play with pedagogy. Her seminars began to emphasize revision and audience. She shared draft manuscripts and asked learners to share theirs. She became less interested in midterms and more interested in having students write with a conference or a publication in mind. It strikes me as unlikely that she read much about teaching; English professors didn’t then (unless there were, as John Greppin once remarked, among those young faculty interested “pedagogy”). Easily on her way to full professor, Louise reallocated time to play with teaching. Few of her peers did (though some lectured beautifully).

Like any role players, teachers look for space in which to act. They find support or not; make choices based on what is sanctioned and what risks they are willing to take. As I look around me, I wonder whether the post-No-Child-Left-Behind U.S. has much interest in learning. We want test scores and want to maximize human assets, but probably are fairly disinterested in calling some of our community to work among learners to optimize learning. That smacks of socialism or affirmative action. It has historically been “women’s work,” and we have been disinclined to resource that.

My second reflection has to do with what writing is and does. I remember Earl Anderson taking about someone who got a first job at what seemed to Earl a "fourth-tier" college (maybe even a community college) and who “published his ass off to get out of there.” I remember being struck by this conversation. In my third or fourth year away from graduate school, I like teaching and saw the work of a community college teacher as attractive. Earl's tone suggested that he could view teaching as something that one did between more interesting ventures (though his students vouched for his teaching--interesting wrinkle). Earl was moving toward the end of his career as a professor and finding that his work was finding a more and more receptive audience. I wonder now about writing to escape. A lot of us do it, but I am suspicious that escape is not what I am after when I say I want to write. Rather, I see act, the act that is working out this sentence, as ethical participation with a community (Ricouer’s little ethics from Oneself as Another comes to mind here as it often does). The writers that I care about are doing what Achebe talks about in “What Does Literature Have to Do with It?” They are (we are?) working out alternate realities but in rhythms that draw communities into considering living alternately. They are channeling traditions and habits and energy into paths that readers consider and enact or reconstruct. We publish to escape, perhaps; we write to dig in.

Teachers, on this line of thinking, need to write. On my experience, most of them, at least in the public system, have to fight to find time and resources to do write, have to sacrifice teaching or family to do this.

Seems like grounds for a work stoppage.

Musing on Engaged Learning

So I just got back from the Pacific Northwest Two-Year College English Conference. It’s a pretty small meeting of community college English faculty. The theme this year was “Pedagogy and Politics: Citizenship in the Classroom and the Community College.” I’m paging through ten pages of journal scribblings and consolidating what I learned. There seem to have been two threads for me:

1. School is not really structured to support deep learning; that sort of learning happens in communities of engaged people who rely on one another to develop.
2. Students and faculty often have quite different perspectives on the ethical and historical issues that define a general education; they need to arrive at a common vocabulary if they are to become a real learning community.

Perhaps the most interesting phrase was “the unstated curriculum.” Paul Bodmer used this phrase to name the social life that most community college students never experience. Faculty and most folk who run colleges spent time “on campus”; that is, they lived with a group of people who were also in the business of learning. The ideas and skills that circulated in class followed us around quite naturally in lunch conversations or arguments at a local tavern. In the best case, “on-campus” learners practiced not for class but in a community. Bodmer observed that the majority of community college students come in for a class and then leave; they don’t really experience the “unstated curriculum.” One result is that they get fewer opportunities to practice and get feedback from other learners. They come to see knowledge as something owned by authorities and not constructed by learners. He wondered about (without in the way of a solution) how to offer the current generation of college students a chance to experience the “unstated curriculum.”

I wonder about this as well. We know (Bodmer pointed to reports issued by the DoE and the AAC&U) that not all (and likely not enough) students are not leaving college with fluency in “critical thinking” or “problem solving.” We know that this is so in part because they have too few opportunities to practice these skills and get feedback on their development. Of course, the current crop of students practice thinking and think quite fluently. But the exemplars are The Daily Show and Fox News (Bodmer’s examples). In these cases, the thinking is produced by someone else and neatly packaged. Humor or ideological correctness displace rigor and argument.

In the final session I attended, we talked about how to imagine a research writing class as a student club that was responsible for publishing work on important local topics. What I still wonder is whether my students would find this a) too boring (it ain’t the Daily Show) or b) the crackpot idea of some social do-gooder (the folk at Fox News might say this).

On Exploring College Further

I was scribbling on the bus yesterday morning (my route doesn’t have a wireless router yet, so I didn’t publish from there). I am reading a couple pieces about education with a bunch of writers (at least, I believe I am reading “with”; are you all reading?). As I reread the material, two of the three pieces seem “unusual” for a college course. One piece, a chapter from the ubiquitous Rules for Writers (Hacker rules!), sounds and feels like pretty typical college reading. But we are matching that handbook chapter with a chapter form Frances Moore Lappé’s Democracy’s Edge and the introduction to the second edition of Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers. Lappé and Elbow create an odd context for Hacker. They talk frankly about learning and about how school has interfered (Elbow’s book first appeared in 1973) and does interfere (Lappé is responding in 2006 to No Child Left Behind and testing and such) with learning. I have offered these texts as a launching pad for a ten-week exploration of higher education and its status in the U.S. democracy. In reflection, it’s a potentially confusing and, I think, powerful context.

Why? Lappé, while her focus is on public secondary education, offers a thesis about the purpose of education that catches us all in a sort of bind. She says what we believe but not what we expect:

[Education is about] developing the capacity to be responsible for oneself, to
know oneself well enough to discover one’s own passions and how to feed them
through a life-time of learning and satisfying work, to be able to collaborate
in creating communities that work for all, and to have the courage to stand up
for what’s right even when it’s unpopular (254)

She does not dodge the need for new knowledge or skilled performance, but she declares that education has to be about the development of learners. The bind here is that learners and teachers live in fear of grades and degrees and graduate school. We more often than not wonder “when will I use this” or “how does this pay” and lose our focus on how learners need to grow. Lappé challenge me (and I hope us) and I wonder if we will be willing to take up the challenge she borrows from John Dewey: see education as the practice of living well and not preparing to live well in the future; that is, learn and act in the world in which you live (267).

This thesis has huge implications for how we (these writers and I) need to look at our research and discussions and writing. We are, if we respond to Lappé’s challenge, doing work for our communities and society. We are acting as citizens.

Elbow deepens this challenge in a variety of ways. What strikes me most is his “believing game”:

a disciplined and methodological use of believing, listening, affirming,
entering in, attending to one’s experience, and trying to share one’s experience
with others (xxi)

For me, Elbow’s “nonargument” names the sort of “argument” that democratic citizens do, the sort of work that we should see ourselves engaging with and for our communities (local and global). Citizens notice problems and opportunities around them, and they shoot off their mouthes but also listen and wonder and consider and try out ideas and ventures and solutions on their friends and fellow citizens. Citizens reflect on and see if their community is (because of these ideas and ventures and solutions) being conserved or saved or improved or transformed or whatever.

Democratic citizens. College writers. The link here excites me. Can we (these writers and I) move beyond “doubting” (“criticizing, debating, arguing, and trying to extricate oneself from any personal involvement with ideas through using logic”) to “believing” and then put the two games in play together? That might be fun. In my mind, we would arrive at a place where “arguing” becomes productive for us as individuals and communities.

On Working Like a Writer

I think that I’ve decided not to work as hard this year. I’m going to show up a bit later and head home earlier.

Hmmm, the issue is not really whether I will work hard; the comparative is misused here. Instead, I am planning to work differently. This summer my almost 45-year-old body told me both that it needs to be worked and that my habitual patterns of use won’t do. Mindlessly racing my bike to campus and then back home up Latona seems to be wearing out my knees. Taking on every new task that my College needs done is leaving me short on new ideas and making it unlikely that those ideas I hatch will be followed through. I am no longer satisfied with half done papers and reports and continually aching IT bands. Something has to give.

I think that I see change and growth in a seemingly new ability to write about teaching and learning, an ability to write without a chip on my shoulder. Having to write literary criticism in grad school largely shut me down; since 1987, I have struggled to find a substantive ethos. What I have found value in doing (teaching and learning) used up my engagement as an arguer and reflective practitioner and researcher and even poet. My sense that I should be contributing to professional discussions outside my classrooms made me angry—where was that energy to come from. The result was a pretty antagonistic voice, one that found problems in other people’s arguments and was without much hope about building arguments that led to new truths about learning and experiencing languages. The question that quenched my motivation to produce went, I suspect, something like this: “Who needs another antagonist, another Stanley Fish?” I largely quit writing rather than becoming yet one more George Will or Al Franken.

Twenty years and a lot of energy later, I seem to be in a different place. My classrooms still absorb as much energy, but I am a great deal more effective at expending that energy. I seem to have as much energy available even though I am diverting some to the body with which I practice. And so, writing again becomes appealing, for maybe for the first time, I want audiences to discover their values in my work; I am not stuck on the approval of one or another sort of teacher. The trick (or at least a trick) now becomes sustaining the flow; another, guiding it.

For instance, as I finish the conference paper I am currently working on, I wonder about the people who will sit in that room. How many will there be? What will their interests be? They won’t share my interests in theory, but they will care about classrooms and interactive learning. This scribbling is leading to solutions:

1. I open by talking about my College and the Teaching and Learning Academy theme for the year: “How do we encourage interactions that transform learners?”
2. I pare back the theoretical section in the piece (dumping most of it into notes) and get to the point.

Guiding the flow of writing in this instance happens as I imagine potential connections between an audience and my topic and the values I see in that topic area. I wonder if that always works? I need to find out.

August Second Reflections on Writing

So as I was scribbling in my journal this morning in a local coffee shop, I noticed that for the first time in a month, I was writing a second extended prose passage in a single week. I noticed, paging through the same week the skeletal outline of a poem as well. I have been wondering as of late why I am not more driven to do this sort of play with words. I seem continually to mutter, “I want to find more time to write.” But here in a summer when I am teaching a single class, my journal is collecting cobwebs.

My wife, who is surely tired of my muttering, has observed, “If you are not driven to write, you are not. Perhaps you should stop feeling guilty.” That comment was settling in as I did a 45-minute run, part of a training regimen that I have no problem completing. I have been diddling with triathlons for a year or so; I’ve been involved with literature and rhetoric seriously for almost twenty. If I can dedicate time (and a good deal of energy and suffering) for the former but not the latter, perhaps Linda is right.

But as I write this reflection, I am thinking, “This just won’t do.” I am more and more suspicious of writing teachers who do not themselves write. I have long been at risk of being such a teacher. Over the past decade only my drafting of a journal, an occasional sequence of poems, an endless number of writing assignments, notes, and conference papers have saved me. I could began listing reasons and slide into a critique of my culture and its view of teachers and education and poetry, but to what end. The fact is that I have only just kept the teaching of writing from becoming a formulaic means of earning a paycheck or, at best, a venue to facilitate human development (as opposed to specific sorts of literacy).

Troubling.

I sit on outlines for two books (with a contract for one) and a half-dozen essays, and I write more outlines. I design activities to facilitate other people’s drafting. I wonder how to practice what I think. How complete is my thinking when drafts don’t get done? Are there authentic audiences out there? I am struggling to imagine them.

These questions lead me to the one that most needs an answer. What am I willing to give up in order to write? That is a question I hope to explore with other “writers” this fall.

Here's to the High Life

An add that Miller beer has been running for a few weeks finally registered on my awareness today. In the ad, a threesome of beer truck drivers in Miller uniforms, enter a deli and begin observing what is on sale, a $7 candy bar and an $11 can of tuna fish. They declare that such commodities make the "high life" too exclusive and so the store loses the ability to sell Miller beer ("high life" has been on the label of Miller products for as long as I can remember).


What I love about this ad is that it makes me laugh at myself. Since the Great Lakes Brewing Company began churning out "good" beer, I have rarely bought a six-pack of Miller High Life. Actually, my disinterest in Miller likely dates to my discovery of European beers in the mid 1980s. Now in Seattle, I've developed a palate for fresh beer brewed with attention to detail and type.

That said, I've begun to be troubled by the tastes of the folks I hang out with (and so with my own tastes). It's one thing to be aware of fresher, more complex beer. It's another to declare, "I would never eat the Manchego they sell at Trader Joe's!" (You know who you are:).

I am sure that the Manchego sold at Whole Foods or the finer cheese counters in Seattle is different, even better than that sold at Trader Joe's. But Trader Joe sells Spanish Manchego at a price that I (a teacher) can afford. I grew up in Wisconsin (then America's Dairy Land), but for us, cheese was cheddar, swiss, maybe blue. Manchego is pretty exciting in any form. I'm troubled by the notion that my palate will head in directions that my way of life can't support.

I've gotten accustomed to paying $6 a six-pack without even thinking about it. Perhaps I need to think about that, to think about what company my tastes are putting me in. That fact that Miller beer is owned by a South African company that makes enough beer to flood Milwaukee makes me unlikely to switch back (well that and the fact that Deschutes Brewing's Black Butte Porter is, for me, just a lot more satisfying). But I'm going to order up $4 pints a bit more critically.

So here's to advertising undermining the culture it aims to sustain.

On being a writer and taking a writing class

I’ve been reading John Gardener and Seamus Heaney of late, a fiction writer and a poet. I respect the work of the former; love that of the latter. I want to think here about what Gardner says about writing something and about what Heaney believes a writer offers.

To me, the Gardner of The Art of Fiction is a fairly grouchy fiction writer who knows his stuff. What strikes me as really valuable in the text is his thinking about what writers set out to do (he’s talking about fiction writers, but I am going to try to generalize his thinking a bit). He takes as axiomatic that writers have to know the “rudiments” of writing (grammar and, I suppose, paragraph structure and the like). I’m not sure this is always the case but surely it often is. What he follows that contention with is more interesting to me: self-expression does not cause a “writer” to write; rather, it is the desire to produce a kind of writing and an effect that triggers the act of writing. Self-expression, if it happens at all, is a byproduct.

While this is true to my experience, it seems foreign to a lot of the developing writers that work with me. Often students come into my classes with a sense that they will only be able to write something good if they can find a way to express themselves in the text. I rarely am able to convince someone holding this position strongly, to focus instead on working in a genre (the essay, perhaps) or seeking to move a reader or even to create a text that feels one or another way. That said, I am in no way certain that I help developing writers understand what taking on a genre and producing an effect involves; at least I rarely offer genre and effect as compelling aims for writers in a required course.

This begs a question that has followed me around for more than a decade. Are English 101 students “writers” in Gardner’s sense of that word? More importantly, need they be? I have long seen my work in “academic” or civic terms. The point of English 101 is to enable a student practice cultivating arguments and playing with a critical discourse that is used in the college curriculum. I have worked with some version of David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” in mind; I came down on Bartholomae’s side in the CCC debate he had with Peter Elbow back in the 90s. But as my tenses here suggest, I am changing my mind. Over the past 17 years, I have taught and written with creative writers, and I am increasingly suspicious that they can help me to complete my view of what I do. They ask writers to work on writing as writing, not as participation in a discourse. While I believe both are necessary, the energy my students need to move into a discourse may just be found in being a writer, as writers (as opposed to critics or rhetoricians) define that role.

Consider Gardner’s offerings in the second chapter of Art.

1. Writer’s have to “convince readers” (22).
2. The “mainstay” of all fiction (and I add all writing, with some trepidation) is “moment by moment authenticating detail” (23).
3. Writers convince readers by establishing an authentic context and voice.
4. The purpose of writing (Gardner’s writes “fiction”) is to help us know what we believe by inviting us to enter a dream that is “vivid and continuous” and focused without distraction.
5. Writers tend to perceive themselves either as accountants doing exercises or athletes seeking to win competitions (Gardner’s metaphors—no offence to either accountants or athletes).
6. Writers develop when they produce for publication.

At one level, there is nothing novel here. Gardner’s manifesto came out in 1984, and he largely consolidates a mainstream approach. In many ways, I have been inviting students to adopt just such a writerly role. At another level, this list is revolutionary or at least transformative. If my students entered college writing courses expecting to practice being writers for eleven weeks, we would live together differently. If they came ready to “plot” out essay in the way Gardner explains plot rather than to learn and implement correct organizational schemes, we would have more fun, write better stuff.

I could write for a long time about why many students do not arrive at college expecting (or even willing) to be writers. Perhaps I will. At this point, I want to think about how to make the invitation to write in ways that are compelling but also challenging.

More on that later.

Changing Times

Here's a glimpse into my less thoughtful life.

My students and I are writing just now about college (a theme we often write about), and a question that has been pursuing me as of late is, What difference might the “humanities” make in a college education in the U.S. in the 21st century (we’ve been reading, among other things, Mark Edmundson’s diatribe about liberal education). A narrower version of this question goes like this: What is it that the humanities contribute to a Cascadia education? I suppose my interest is driven in part by the demands of accreditation and a fear of being irrelevant, but I think the interest runs deeper. Between 1981 and 1994, I worked my way to three degrees in English. I studied the humanities because I loved the courses and (for the most part) the people who taught them. Despite the fact that I was moved enough by literature and drama, music and architecture to forego more lucrative and, much of the time, comprehensible interests, I have never written for myself an apology. Oh, I offer to my students various arguments about the value of the courses we are beginning; those arguments may even be valid and compelling. But I have never integrated such an argument to the point that I might offer it to the parents of one of my students (or to group of my students who are themselves parents).

So here goes. I’ll start from the boilerplate that describes the humanities and associated learning outcomes:


Languages, literature, the arts and philosophy are essential cultural expressions of being human. Underlying these subjects are ideas such as aesthetics, ethics, symbolism and creativity that vary across times and cultures. Through the humanities, learners participate in others’ subjective experience of reality and convey their own.

Learn: Learners will gain knowledge of the core content of at least two humanities disciplines and of methods of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Think: Learners will analyze and evaluate humanities content, drawing conclusions about the form and impact of human artifacts.

Communicate: Learners will discover and use a creative process to communicate understandings of human experience through visual, musical, dramatic, oral, or written products.

Interact: Learners will investigate the context and language of the human experience to examine and explore their everyday worlds and to expand their experience and under- standing of other cultures and times.

I have to admit that I like the last sentence of our summary: “learners participate in others’ subjective experience of reality and convey their own.” We are suggesting that one studies the humanities to practice listening to the way that others have represented experience and to speak richly about those representations in ways that are honest to her experience.

So what would I watch, say, a lit student doing in order to know where they are in achieving such an outcome? I would want to see her talk about literary texts as historical forms but as a person who is consuming those texts (and not some disembodied expert). I would also want to see her respond to another person talking about a literary artifact. It might be that just the latter would do. If a learner considered a response to a text and explained how that other presented an artifact as an aesthetic form and how that other’s response builds for her a more complete understanding. This “talk” could be delivered in a variety of media (from a book club performance to a conference talk to a website to a podcast to a conventional essay. This “talk” might be aimed at a variety of identified audiences and assessed for its effectiveness.

This sort of performance might integrate (for me and my students) our purpose in studying literature or drama. Our aim would be the ability to talk richly (with creativity and sensitivity) about artifacts that make humans identifiably human. We would aim at understanding hard, theoretical analysis but also at identifying honest responses to aesthetic forms. Rather than taking the experts as the last word, we would aim at being able to listen to the experts so that our own responses become both more expert and also more open to alternative understanding.

Should college take up this aim with an entire course distribution area (15-20% of a degree)? The question becomes easier to answer after this thought experiment. Our students need to learn how to read expert literature and grapple with artifacts that don’t yield an obvious interpretation (think of designing an ad or trying to repair the HVAC system in a hospital). They need to be able to listen generously to other’s ideas and report back those ideas with accuracy and honesty but also go beyond what others say to new solutions. They need to be able to settle in on an interpretation of a situation without rejecting or losing track of the various alternative explanations. They need this sort of humanities.

Back

It’s been a while since I’ve been here, at all. The spring term has been full of good work, but little of it has supported much in the way of reflection and writing, at least for me. A colleague at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges mailed a list serve with a review of a book titled “Defending the Community College Equity Agenda.” The review wonders about the focus of community colleges and their faculty. I find myself doing the same. The number of demands on our energy seems to draw us away of our central goals and at times from our values.

The diffuse focus and the questions about purpose have been made more clear for me because in a world literature class my students and I have been relentlessly focusing on a purpose that makes sense to me. Lately we have been reading Ernest Gaines novel A Lesson Before Dying. The process has involved thinking, with growing clarity, about what sorts of “social energy” circulates in a piece of fiction or poetry. Gaines spare prose about a tiny setting has systematically drawn us into discussions of agency and how a human finds a place in a community always already unjust. By the time we encountered the stream of consciousness journal late in the novel most of us were reading ahead, more interested in completing the narrative than in meeting assignments. We paused on the final sentence, “I was crying,” and wondered about (at least I wondered about it) how a new awareness in a final sentence causes a reader to have to rethink an entire novel.

It is the work of learning how to read with care and talking about well written sentences and chapters, that seems to me to be important. My class and I have valued it. Our work will help some of my students achieve their academic goals (the central issue in “Defending the Community College Equity Agenda”): they are better readers and writers now, have a fuller sense of the world and have shown themselves able to encounter “foreign” traditions and practices with curiosity and without judgment.

Still, I resist thinking about our work in terms of the attainment of goals. I am more interested in the growth I have seen in our ability to argue (I use that word the way that, say, Christopher Lasch did in Revolt of the Elites) about difficult texts. We have learned how to tackle the ultimate ill-formed problem (a poem by Chinese poet Duo Duo) and, without the need to establish some imperialist “correct” reading, develop satisfying responses to the problem that build more complete notions of the world, yes, but also result in what Heaney has called “undisappointed joy.” We are working out explanations of our reading experience and reflection on those explanations in an attempt to see how reading texts from China and India and Africa make the experience of living in the U.S. more intelligible, less inevitable.

I think we are making ourselves more free. As a community college teacher, I want to defend that work (by documenting it) as the aim of a community college education.

Exploring My Place (pretty vague title just now: Growing Home???)

I was walking down to Hollywood Video last night. I’d seen the first bit of "National Treasure" on some cable channel and decided to avoid the commercials. On a typical Saturday night, traffic is snarled at the corner 2nd Avenue NE and 45th Street N. The cars leaving the video store lot and trying to get into Dick’s, a local hamburger joint, make getting onto the street where I live a challenge. Even so, I was thinking on that walk about what a great Seattle neighborhood Wallingford is. In the past twenty-four hours, I had walked to get groceries and takeout and a meeting with some friends. I regularly walk to book and computer stores, a major university library, a half-dozen pho shops, and a YMCA. On a clear day, my neighborhood walks and bike rides bring me to views of Mount Rainer, the Olympic Mountains, the Cascades, downtown Seattle and Lake Union; I can pick from three largish parks and a university campus if I am in the mood for green space. All these thoughts ran through my head as I found my DVD (it was free) and headed for the Shell station to pick up some Milk Duds for my wife. As I crossed 2nd, for some reason I thought, “we cannot really afford to live in this delightful place.” A one-bedroom bungalow a half-block away recently sold for above its $415,000 asking price. I love this place but cannot imagine being a homeowner, not sure if we will be able to stay long-term.

Perhaps I think too much. I admit that I worry about just how I inhabit the place I live in. Since 1981, I have changed addresses at least once every three years; I have lived in nine different counties, for as few as three but only as many as five years. I suppose my story is not that different from many of my peers, highly educated professional people who have moved around the country in pursuit of degrees and careers. But my story makes me uncomfortable. My parents have lived in the same house since 1970, and my mother’s parents lived on the same farm in the same house from 1932 until they died (1995 and 1997). My folks know the place where they live, know the streams and springs that feed their well, know when the cowslips will bloom and when the weather will change. My grandparents knew the actual birds that returned to nest in houses or trees each season; that is, they knew specific birds, could actually pick out a finch or red-tail hawk with the binoculars that always hung by the west-facing picture window. My grandfather put in that window the 1970s for the purpose of being able to see more birds. They both died on that 120 acre place in Hollaway township.

Now in Seattle, I am still trying to distinguish Douglas and Silver fir, much less the various maples native to the northwest. I know the streets in my neighborhood and the routes I ride on my bike. I can manage downtown and know enough to avoid the ‘burbs (they make me unsettled, a little queasy). But my sense of place feels anemic compared to the one held by my people. I walk to stores (many of them national chains) but do not have a feel for the soil or the fauna. Indeed, this place is all so built up and (high-end) convenient that knowing soil and fauna feels like criminal trespass. I am acquainted with my neighbors, at least enough to say hello, and my wife and I have had one or two neighbors over for dinner a few times. Our next-door neighbor watches our cats when we fly back to Wisconsin for visits—she’s from Madison; we look after her dog when she is gone (to more exotic locales usually). We have a connection with her, but it is one that really comes from a different place. So I live in a place that I love but know only it the most shallow way. I wonder what the implications are of admitting this. My parents know who they are in part because they know the place where they live. Who am I?

The minute I write that, I wonder if this is all just nostalgia. I have studied ecology and human community, have taught “learning communities.” I may not have a deep sense of belonging connected to some of the places I have lived, but I know what it means to feel “at home.” My feeling of home has to do with people, with conversations that get into meaningful topics, with afternoons on the trails around the glacier at Mt. Rainer or on the roads through Discovery Park or along County C through Ozaukee County as it parallels the Lake Michigan shore. That feeling of home can feel as intense as my childhood connection to the maple forests of Iron County, Wisconsin, but is it? I wonder. Can my transitory, relational sense of place nurture my own growth and carry me into a well-lived life the way that Hollaway Township did my grandparents. Does place do that for anyone in the urban and suburban U.S.? Because my own intuitions about place are skewed by nostalgia and guilt and because my culture is not known these days as one that cares for or about places (we care deeply about “place” when that word aims at status but not, I think, otherwise), my wonder is tinged with concern. I cannot, it seems, make a claim without hedging.

In the coming weeks, I want to explore my place in the world.

Here's to Complexity!

On reading the Greenwood “Literature in Context” monograph on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, I was a little concerned. Kalu Ogbaa is surely right about the novel: Achebe is offering a pre-contact Iboland that is not Edenic. Achebe is pointing out “native” traditions that make a people vulnerable to the debacles of colonization and post-colonial Nigerian experience. But he is also working through a pre-colonial reality that complete on its own terms, complete independent of contact with Europe. Ogbaa seems to emphasize (for a largely high school reader) the way that Achebe implicates Africans in “scotching Africa” (1). I wonder about this emphasis. Seems to me that the novel (and Achebe’s other novels and his essays) are as interested in the everyday experience of real Africans as it is in establishing blame for what happened after the arrival of the British. Indeed, it is the relationship between everyday experience and the experience of colonialism that seems to drive the work.

Ogbaa notes that Achebe documents a set of “ugly” traditional practices (exposing twins, dismissing the contribution of women). What Ogbaa passes over (in this admitted simplified introduction to the novel) is the frequency with which the narrator and even characters in the novel think about those traditions. Rather than reporting on the “mistakes of the ancestors,” the novel puts those traditions into play and reflects on them. What annoys me with this simplification is that it seems to ask young readers to fall into the very binary (Europe scotched Africa vs. Africans scotched Africa) that this novel—as a novel—undoes.

The crux of this misreading involves the analysis of point of view. Ogbaa declares that the narrator is “an omniscient reporter” who understands the Igbo and reflects their “feelings” (7). I can hear the novel this way. The narrator to my ear is at once an insider and outsider. Like Achebe, the narrator ahs heard and taken at face value the traditions and belief structures of the tribe; the narrator even knows (in an empathetic way) the intentions of these tribe members. But like Achebe, the narrator (and many characters in the novel, even Okonkwo) is aware of alternative traditions and beliefs and of the provisional and contradictory way that individuals hold intentions. Surely Achebe offers a view into what caused the scotching of Africa, but that view is contained within a narrative that makes impossible the determination of a simple causal chain (X caused Y caused Z).

Indeed, such a view is what, in 1958, this novel seeks to undo. The narrative continually questions causal links (tossing in the discontinuous nature of experience—indivdiuals choose to kill others, captives are assigned to new homes, guns “accidentally” explode). Rather than helping readers establish a history of the scotching of Africa, the narrator (and narrative) moves readers (at least readers like me who come from outside of Africa) to wonder about how we see history unfolding and whether our presumptions are not inherited from the ancestors and are, in some instances, a waste.

This I would argue is a more compelling purpose in this novel. Achebe chose not to write history and to write narrative instead. This last claim might lead us to wonder about whether history is not always already a sort of novel (it surely is always narrative). That’s another thread.

Can’t resist encouraging readers of TFA to go and see Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond. I happened to watch it last night and can hear “the great African novel” rattling around like a ghost in the lines and scenes.

What's a Student Got to Do?

So I recently made a posting at Inside Higer Ed. This happened a few days after I wrote the post below titled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” I seem to be back to this topic. We (my students and I) have just finished our first week of spring-quarter classes. That first week always (re)introduces me to eager learners and to students who hope to be able to sit quietly in classrooms and get through. It is that latter bunch that I am thinking about here.

The question I have is about access to education. I value access; anyone who can read and also put together a few sentences in English is welcome in my classes. That said, I am worried about making access meaningful. It’s not clearly to me that coming to one of my classes and sitting there silently grants access to much of anything. I suppose that I could do stand-up comedy or show lots of films to draw folks in (I am experimenting with podcasting and blogging), but I wonder what those sort of entertainment-based media give access to.

I guess that I am writing here with a sort of question in mind. What is the purpose of coming into a college class and just sitting? What do I need to do to make that more rare? Clearly, I need to move away from large-group discussion (there are lots of reasons why that format limits involvement). I need to design small group interactions so that no one is able to hide but that all feel safe in contributing. I can get better at these things.

But, should I cut out the folk who resist participation even when (or maybe especially when) participation called for? How do I hear from those who resist so that their concerns can be considered and so that I can adapt the classroom?

And here’s the question that bothers me most: should my students have to participate? It’s a required class, after all. How am I to respond to a student who says, “Thanks, but no thanks; I prefer to sit and write down what you say?”

Spring Break Thoughts about School

A week ago, I was riding the Metro 372 from the U District up to my college in Bothell. It was the Monday of Spring Break. I was listening in on a gaggle of Nathan Hale High School students talk about a literature class. One was bragging that he had been a star in a recent “Socratic seminar” even though he had not read any of the material covered by the seminar. Another person said, “Well, you did read the first chapter ‘cause we read it together in class.” Another person chimed in, “Did you spark the novel?” The conversation devolved at that point to some pretty adolescent flyting until one student started talking about Mad Magazine. He offered an almost verbatim quote of a particular text in a recent volume and then an interpretation of why it was funny; his peers listened even though it wasn’t yet 8 AM. Then some one tossed in another pretty sophomoric comment and the insults flew.

Smart students with an unfortunate view of teachers: it seemed that they perceived teachers as authority figures almost completely unaware of how students thought about literature and how they read. In fact, the whole point of the literature class seemed to be fooling a teacher into believing that assignments had been read and that the student’s interpretation matched the teacher’s.

This strikes me as a tragic use of resources, of time and space. Sure there are “correct interpretations” and correct answers to math problems, but it’s not clear to me that a meaningful education can be gotten by fooling authorities into believing that one is correct. Interpretations and answers are the end result of a process that is, for most learners, more important than the end result. A professional engineer knows how to use numbers to model a situation; a writer knows how to decipher a text or situation. Neither puts a lot of weight on having gotten correct answers in school. Could be I’m taking a utopian position here. I suspect one can go a long way without knowing how to use fluently numbers and words. A Yale or Harvard MBA taken after fooling professors is still a Yale or Harvard MBA. Education is, at one level, a way to pile up social capital.

Guess that I am not really interested in the piling up of social capital in the absence of personal development. I ask students to develop their own readings and to document the process by which they came up with those readings (and rarely offer my own interpretations). Rather than asking them to be correct, I ask learners to be purposeful and conscientious; that is, I ask them to take what we do seriously and to take responsibility for doing it. No more; no less.

I find a great deal of joy and enjoyment in this practice (I expect to have “fun” in my classes this spring). But I’m the sort of person who took three degrees in “English” (and minored in math). Am I asking too much of my students? Am I failing to teach them the rules that will enable them to be “correct” and thereby accrue social capital.

Maybe, but I doubt it. On my experience, purposeful and conscientious students who enter just educational institutions end up being able to be correct enough to do what they want to do. Trying hard, of course, does not guarantee getting the correct answers. At times, learners discover that mastering one or another process or content area will cost a lot of time and energy. Confronting such a situation, a purposeful, conscientious learner makes a choice: she invests the time and energy or alters her goals. She doesn’t complain about having to make an investment.

Hmmmm, this is making me think more precisely about my obligations to this sort of learner. I have to provide access to processes and content and have to provide comprehensible feedback on performances. I’ll go after this line of thinking in another posting.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

So I woke up early last Saturday (like 5:30 AM early) thinking about some pre-writing that I had read the day before. My mind was trying to make sense of the process that seemed to be represented in that work. The writers had gotten an assignment from me that asked them to imagine a project and outline how they would proceed and how they would use the reading and writing they had completed already. Most of them completed the assignment. (No complaints there.) But I finished the batch of pre writes uninspired. In only a few of them did I hear a writer using writing to figure out her or his path. In most cases, I heard a student fulfilling an assignment.

Maybe I’m the cause (I gave the assignment). Maybe the writers I’m working with don’t use writing to figure out what they are doing. Whatever is going on, I woke up anxious about the drafts that will come in next week. If these writers aren’t planning their work, what am I going to get? What can I offer in response to writing that is unplanned? What are the chances that a writer who doesn’t plan drafting will plan rewriting and revising? If there’s little planning and reflecting, how will the writers begin to write differently?

And when will I start sleeping better?

I guess what I’m working toward here is a concern about how my students see their work as writers and how they might. Early this term, this bunch read a piece by writing teacher Nancy Sommers; they encountered her claim that writers have to be their own sources have to “bring to bear” judgment and interpretation. The pre writes I read largely avoided that sort of commitment. I didn’t see many “connections” (another word Sommers uses) made between what writers wanted to do and what they had read.

Is it unreasonable to expect first-year college writing students to play the role of writer (and especially the role of academic research writer) with some seriousness? What is the cost of their choosing not to play? It is as if a lot of students in a first-year writing courses are willing to pay tuition and even to do the work (and concede that first-year writing courses are important): they are prepared to be student writers. But do they want to be writers and researchers, individuals who take on the obligation of making connections and offering their interpretations and judgments to others? Why might someone even want to do that?

And when will I start sleeping better?

Some Thoughts about Collaboration and Reflection

I’ve been doing a good bit of collaborative writing as of late (have to for a couple projects). Can’t say that I am enjoying it entirely. The give and take is fun, but waiting for other folks to “give” is not. Maybe I need to chill out, but I think I am seeing one reason, at least, why the student writers I work with groan a bit when I announce a group project. I’m a pretty good collaborator (at least I like to think so), but I am seeing the limit of my ability to work and play well with others.

My thinking goes something like this. I seem to take a farmer’s approach: I stay engaged as long as I see that a group is building meaningful capacity of one sort or another. That capacity need not, of course, be related to completing a particular task. My grandfather and I used to bullshit about any number of topics that had little to do with getting cows milked or hay bailed. We were building a relationship, taking joy in being together. That’s meaningful human capacity and was meaningful for us. It was worth the time. My grandfather had no interest in, say, knowing which clothes were fashionable (and I follow him here) or writing complex essays (he and I differ here). Investing time in such do involve building capacity but not, for Norm, meaningful capacity. Likewise, my grandfather refused to buy an all-wheel drive tractor with a cab and air conditioner. Such a piece of machinery offered tremendous capacity, but such capacity seemed to him not worth the cost.

Hmmm, so I begin to check out of a group if it has interests that seem not worthwhile or seem too costly. That makes sense to me, but brings me to ask for details. What is worthwhile and how do I know. This seems to me a question my students and I wrestle with. Take, for example, a roundtable assignment some just completed (quite nicely, I might add) or a proposal some just wrote (not quite as smashing). I’m not sure that all of them felt that these activities were worthwhile. I think what they were unsure of was the effort involved in synthesizing ideas, speculating about possible outcomes, and reviewing past effort. What I noticed was folks speaking extemporaneously or free writing. It felt like few had worked up notes (there were some exceptions) or paged through what they had done and free wrote about it before setting to the published project they were submitting or performing. The result were quite nice individual performances and sentences, but roundtables and proposals that were incompletely integrated and that did not really reveal what the performers/writers knew. The roundtables rarely named a central theme and stuck to it; members acknowledged each other but didn’t often get involved with what others said.

So I wonder why. Do I need to spell out even more clearly the value of synthesis, speculation, and reflection? Maybe. Is it unreasonable to ask U.S. students to value these intellectual disciplines? Maybe. If the later is the issue, I’m in trouble. I feel that these disciplines are central to being human (oddly, my farmer grandfather did too). I join groups to pursue these disciplines. I'm not sure that I work well with learners who are uninterested in making connections, imagining alternatives, and listening to others and themselves.

Do I need to?

Some Thoughts on Reading a Bunch of "Exploratory Essays"

So I just read a batch of “exploratory essays” that came in in my “Writing from Research” course. I’m popping quotation marks around some phrases here because I am interested in the exchange these students and I are having. I think that the exchange tells me something about school and something about the complexity of the ethics of rhetoric. I asked for “essays” within a genre that we defined in class at some length. The process is straightforward: develop a complex question, one for which you don’t have an answer. Then go and find sources and explore them in an attempt to see if you can find an answer. Here’s the way the “exploratory essay” we all talked about develops: you summarize (in a generous way that respects the context of the source) what is new in a new source of information; you do some analysis of what you summarized to try to understand what the source offers; you reflect on how the source has expanded your thinking and brought forward your exploration of that initial question.

My students are smart; they read well and write with clarity. All in all, this was a pretty successful batch of drafts. What interested me in this batch of papers (notice the shift in terms here) was a kind of resistance to a new genre. I don’t want to rant here but I might a little. Just trying to figure this college composition thing out.

About half of the papers did what came naturally to the writer: they argued a thesis with now apparent intent to open the writer up the information from sources. Others offered a report, sort of repeating what Wikipedia or some other (sometimes more focused) sources offered. A few tried out the exploratory form but made pretty uneven use of paragraphs. Rather than using blocks of text to make the moves of summary, analysis, and reflection cohere, they sort of just wrote (I read several two-page paragraphs). It was as though the tool on offer (the “exploratory essay”) was either too foreign or too much labor or not adequately understood or something. Maybe it is that in an academic world dominated by the five-paragraph essays, it’s hard for a school writer to imagine paragraphs serving other purposes, hard for them to see the paragraph as a tool for thinking rather than a teacher’s metric.

This resistance showed in two other ways as well. First, writers struggled to link the sources they were working with. I kept scribbling the same idea in the margins: “maybe in a revision use a content-based transition.” As I read, I could see, “oh, this source got you thinking about this and the logic you are not naming is that knowing this, you next need to know that.” What I wondered is why that was visible to me and not to the writer. Hmmm, the answer to that is kind of obvious to me now. I had the opportunity of reading a complete draft; many of the writers may not have taken up that opportunity.

The second resistance is more interesting to me. As a writing teacher, I have begun to use over and over the phrase “frame this source reference.” My meaning is not especially novel at one level. I mean use what Diana Hacker calls a signal phrase that announces the source; I mean integrate some thoughtful paraphrase or summary and quote selectively; I mean “connect” (a verb Nancy Sommers plays with) the ideas you draw from a source to the purpose you are achieving within your paragraph and bring your judgment and interpretation to bear on what you’ve borrowed. Nothing new here. Writers’ resistance to “framing” is, I think, also not especially novel. To “frame” naturally, I have to be comfortable in open conversations, conversations where my assumption is that others have as much (or more likely more) to say than I do. I have to be ready to be generous as a listener/reader and also as a speaker/writer. U.S. citizens, on my observation, are not comfortable in such conversations. So many of us are puzzled by the humility that “framing” requires. It’s not natural; we don’t do it.

One final resistance that leaps to mind. Wikipedia. I’m inclined to include the acronym WTF here. I know about Wikipedia; I use it when I don’t have enough time to find a better treatment of a topic or when I just need some dates. It’s a beautiful tool, but it’s an ENCYCLOPEDIA. Actually, it’s likely closer to either a dictionary or a blog. It’s not, finally, a researchers conversation partner. The papers I read had some intense conversations with Wikipedia entries. Cool. Not enough. I want conversations with the sources that Wikipedia authors read. This resistance is driven, I think, by time. If a writer hasn’t given herself enough time to read, reflect on, make notes on, and then work with a 15-page essay or article, she goes to Wikipedia. It makes sense. Sadly, it probably also terminates serious exploration, at the least it leads her to write in generalities that make exploration less likely.

So I had a fun read, wrote lots of comments. But I’m talking with my friends about why U.S. citizens are so resistant to intellectual exploration. Is it in the water? I suppose Mark Edmundson’s grouchy 1997 critique of consumer students offers some limited insight. Makes me sad, makes me think many of my students will miss out on the joy of a college education, makes me really really worried about my fellow voters.

Midterm Reflections

So I'm rereading this stuff and noticing that I'm not writing very concretely about class. Look for that in the coming posts. I'm also going to try to get visual and hypertextual. These are big aims for me. I have several degrees in English and all of them were done before 1995. I get into books, books without pictures largely. Not saying this taste of mine is somehow superior, but it is mine:)

Teaching and Learning

I was recently at a retreat with a bunch of community college faculty from around the state of Washington. I find these sorts of meetings both exhilarating and exhausting. We stay up too late but have conversations about what learning might involve. As I listened to others, spoke my own mind, made a presentation, I saw something about learning that I don’t attend to often enough. Tom Drummond over at North Seattle Community College has been riffing on this theme for a while (maybe 20 years); I’ve been scribbling it in the margins of student papers for at least 10 years: SLOW DOWN!

I think that we all hope that teachers will come up with some magic strategy that makes learners see what they will need to know and do and how to comprehend and act. Anyone who has taught a while knows that the magic happens from time to time but rarely because a teacher “knows,” at least consciously. It happens because the teacher has slowed down a setting at a moment when a learner is ready to look again at what she or he is up to and to say, “Oh!” The knowledge is always already out there (the teacher learned it somewhere, and the Net makes what the teacher knows as close as a Tully’s). The skills are a matter of practicing substeps even if they are boring and hard. What is magic is the opportunity to look at what’s been said or tried and to own that look. Such an act requires the normal time-space flow to SLOW DOWN so that a learner can still see what’s happening but doesn’t have to do or learn the next thing just yet.

Why is such an act so rare, I wonder? As a writer, I can dig a poem out of my journal almost every time if I take time. Why don’t I do this very often? Other things to do? Not sure that this sort of reflection earns me much money (indeed, it may be costly)? Lack of confidence? Perhaps if we stop and look at what we have done in an effort to understand and complete that action or thought, we will discover that more effort is needed, that we will have to stop watching TV if we hope to achieve what we value. Were we to slow down, we might wonder whether we need an iPod or a mobile phone or whether we can really afford them.

Seem to be sounding a bit Wendell Berryish here. Not sure that’s a bad thing.

Reflection on Some Stray Rhetoric

Last month, I heard a story on the radio this morning about a raid on the Iranian consulate in the mainly Kurdish city of Erbil in northern Iraq. As I followed up this piece in the New York Times, I found this:

Today, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said in a news conference in Washington that the United States would act to defend American troops from attackers in Iraq, regardless of the nationality of the attackers.

He said that “with regard to those who are physically present trying to do harm to our troops, regardless of nationality, we will go after them and defend ourselves.”

What fascinates and saddens me is a violation of citizenship that will likely spawn more violence. The “we” Pace refers to are U.S. nationals (mostly) in Iraq (another nation) after an invasion prompted by the defense of U.S. national interests. The U.S. forces have become taken on a role that is interestingly nationless. The raid was done without informing local leaders and with U.S. hardware. The U.S. forces are acting in their own interest of survival, but their interest, in this instance, seems not to support the interests of the groups who have to live long-term in the space (at least the physical space) in which they are acting. The men and women serving the U.S. in this space cannot act as citizens, cannot come into conversation, cannot win (unless winning is defined as enslavement or genocide). Condoleezza Rice and General Pace may decide that this is the only way to respond to the situation; they may be accurate in this judgment. But they are surely promoting a sort of agency that can guarantee no one’s security, particularly not that of the world’s vulnerable. Moments like this make talk about a U.S. “victory” in Iraq more and more out of alignment with any notion of the success of a democratic people.

What does this have to do with writing students? Guess the sort of writer that I want to be and to work with makes note of these sorts of contradictions and tries to make them productive.

On the Right (and Responsibility) to Learn

So I was at a lecture this past Monday. Bill Talbott (a University of Washington philosophy professor) was addressing the question “Which Rights Should Be Universal?” (his title was “The Discovery of Universal Human Rights: How to believe in universal human rights without being a moral imperialist”). While Talbott was only indirectly concerned with citizens and active learners, he spoke rather directly to what I’m blogging about here these days. He noted that the topic of human rights is a topic “made for under-grad education.” At the center of his talk was an argument about how humans arrive at an understanding of moral issues. He senses, rightly I think, that in his tradition (one that finds its roots in Greek and Roman thinking), people have attempted to start from universal principles. The problem with this approach is that it is almost always possible to find exceptions to moral principles (he offered some spiffy examples), and so the tradition finds itself in a bind: I might want to argue that genocide is wrong, but I may not be able to defend that principle from all challenges, so I am left unable to defend my moral belief, I find myself at risk of holding a contradictory position or deciding that I can’t hold moral positions. Talbott argues that the problem isn’t that we have identified the wrong principles but that we are using the wrong method: we don’t start from principles; instead, we make moral judgments and then try to discover the principles that explain our judgements.

What does this have to do with facilitating the growth of citizens? A lot. If we take Talbott at his word, then citizens are obligated to develop and exercise their own judgment. They have to engage in conversations about what is good for them without resorting to some sort of “paternalistic justification” (you just have to do this because it’s for your own good). Every human has a right to this kind of development and, I would add, an obligation to engage in and protect this kind of development. Learners who are fully human can’t enter a class and say, “Just tell me what I need to know for my own good” or “Entertain me!!” Rather, they have to enter a class and wonder, “how do I need to develop in order to be more able to make judgments.” If a teacher isn’t ready to help learners understand what development is on offer and how to go about developing, it’s a bad class. But the teacher cannot do the development for the learner.

I’d like to live in these sorts of classrooms.

Winter Term, 2007: Introductory Thoughts

So I’m going to use this tool to keep a sort of running response to class, but I’ll keep it here out in the open. I’m teaching a 101 (college composition) and a 102 (writing from research) this term, but I think I’ll invite students from both classes to read and respond. On one level, my goal is some sort of meta-commentary about what is going down in class. But at a deeper level, I am trying to do some writing about how school (especially college English at a community college) can or might facilitate the growth of citizens. As I was reflecting on my experience in fall 2006, I came to see the act of teaching rhetoric as closely related to the act of creating spaces wherein folks get to practice being citizens and to become better at being citizens. In coming weeks, I’ll try to tease out what I might mean by “citizen” (I’m reading an interesting book on that topic just now).

I’ll start here by thinking a bit about the first day. I’m typically impressed the first time I meet students by how aware they are and by how they are trying to negotiate a productive space in the classroom. I think that too many teachers (myself included) forget that for many students, being a student is not a primary role or interest. Teachers put a great deal of effort into preparing classes and see the work of their classes as serious. Students see the classroom from . . ., well lots of other perspectives. I almost always like the vibe that develops the first day, as I try to convince students to take over the classroom and find their place. Still, there are always a few students who, for reasons as diverse as they are, find ridiculous the notion of making the classroom their own space. I am particularly interested this term in allowing and enabling learners to be “active” (my College’s word). We’ll see how this evolves.