Landings

I am (not) home.

For the past month or so, I have been pedaling my bike through the Rock and Wisconsin River watersheds once again. I know where I am, seem to know the people I walk by on the street, for their basic facial features are much like those of my own family. The black ash and Norway maple that line the streets here in Madison, Wisconsin formed the landscape of much of my youth. While I grew up on the other side the northern sub-continental divide in the Lake Superior Basin among sugar maples and the occasional remaining white pine, time in Eau Claire and Madison, and Milwaukee and Cleveland and Washington State, for that matter, set me on my path. While I came into myself along the waters that flow out the Montreal River into the big lake, it has been the Wisconsin and Cuyahoga, even more the Nooksack, Nisqually, but especially the Cedar-Sammamish and the Milwaukee that have brought me to where I am. A child of streams I could drink from, I am a person of polluted urban waters.

My path has circled back to the city where I first lived away from home, a place between the Northwoods and the city. Madison is, of course, not the place I remember. A two-decade consumer binge is everywhere visible here. The campus is more akin to what Mark Edmundson (1997) called “a retirement spread for the young” than to a land-grant college. Indeed, it is much easier to find a local restaurant on the UW homepage than to find the University mission statement. Still, the mission is compelling:

The primary purpose of the University of Wisconsin–Madison is to provide a learning environment in which faculty, staff and students can discover, examine critically, preserve and transmit the knowledge, wisdom and values that will help ensure the survival of this and future generations and improve the quality of life for all. The university seeks to help students to develop an understanding and appreciation for the complex cultural and physical worlds in which they live and to realize their highest potential of intellectual, physical and human development.

It also seeks to attract and serve students from diverse social, economic and ethnic backgrounds and to be sensitive and responsive to those groups which have been underserved by higher education.

The phrases that make a college work are here: “examine critically,” “knowledge, wisdom and values,” “quality of life for all,” “appreciation for . . . complex cultural and physical worlds,” “ intellectual, physical and human development,” “serve,” “underserved.” But it is a mission that has abandoned the land-grant context for one that is closer to an unabashedly self-interested culture. The Extension can take care of the state’s needs. The UW is a global brand and as such cannot be constrained by a mission that binds it to a lifeplace in any concrete ways. Like its sister institutions, the UW has given up on embodying the Morrill Act. That mission simply does not pay.

The mission of this place was revised in the late 1980s when I was last here. Oddly, the dissonance I feel in that mission is part of what has drawn me here. An educator, I have uncoupled myself from the role of teacher and come to study the context of U.S. classrooms. I am caught in Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974) paradox of neighborhood: I can “recognize the extent and uniqueness” of the place of interest—the classroom—only by moving to adjacent places that let me look back at it, but by making this shift, I am less involved in the place of interest, less a neighbor. I need the distance for a time if I am to see more deeply what it means to compose college.

Fortunately, I have landed in a corner of the campus that will bind me to learners. My initial foothold in the UW is a project assistantship in the WIDA Consortium, a WCER project. WIDA aims at this mission:

To promote educational equity and academic achievement for linguistically and culturally diverse students through the development and dissemination of curricular, instructional, and assessment products and resources.

While this statement is as distant from the places of learning as the UW mission statement, there is a difference in its implementation. WIDA is a consortium; its members are bound by statute to pursue the needs of three-quarter of a million English language learners and their teachers. The products and resources that WIDA produces have to work in the classroom, have to facilitate access for English language learners or those products and resources are abandoned, in part because they will not sell. Working at WIDA, I will study how language learners gain access to school and the cultural, social, and economic capital that are accessed through school. Moving through the ELPA, I will imagine how college students gain access.

Place matters. I have a new one.

Redirections

On 12 June 2009, I formally resigned from a tenure-track position at Cascadia Community College, my college. A member of the fourth cohort of faculty at this new college, I find leaving it much like leaving home. In my six years at the College I rethought teaching college English and labored over reinventing the structures of the kind of college education that Mark Taylor (New York Times) or Thomas Toch (Atlantic) and various other voices have been calling for of late. As I began to clean out my office, I wondered about my decision to leave that place and the community that has put down roots there. I am, after all, college teacher by vocation and intuition as well as by training. If I could not ply my trade and grow at Cascadia, I likely am unable to pursue my profession anywhere.

Yet, leave I have. In the fall, I will start at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, a new place where I will develop differently. My guess is that the ELPA community has a very different interest in college teaching than my Cascadia community. The students and faculty there study educational leadership and policy; they are not engaged in guiding novices into higher education and making space for them. While, like my Cascadia community, they must generate feedback about performances for learners, they likely perceive learners and learning quite differently. Performance at Cascadia means documenting interactions in a half-dozen new and distinct discourses in search of growth in one’s ability to think, learn, communicate, and interact (Cascadia’s college-wide learning outcomes). Performance in the research-1 world seems to be more focused on contributions by already fluent members to specialist discourse communities. Cascadia aims at the cultivation of reflective practitioners; the UW, at credentials.

At one level, this change in professional trajectory makes little sense. Many teachers, especially those interested in general education, move away from R-1 settings where the focus is status and research rather than collective learning. At another level, though, the professional trajectory of a teacher has to wend through settings where the development of new knowledge is central. The demands of community college teacher’s life, at least on my interpretation of those demands, left me disconnected from the new knowledge being generated in my field and largely unable to affect the evolution of ideas or practices or institutions within that field. After teaching for 20 years, I am finally dissatisfied with the way a classroom teacher has been constructed, and I aim to push back a bit at that structure.

This change has been invigorating but also deeply sad. Sitting in my inbox this morning was a note from a former student who had encountered a Tobias Wolff short story on iTunes and flashed back to an experimental entry-level literature course that he and I shared. Corey was a student who had learned to learn and, in that class, learned to turn away from grades and toward art. He thought I might appreciate the piece and sent along a link. I will, for the next few years, not meet students like Corey in the context of a class I have designed and facilitate. I hope, in a few years, to understand more completely how that class worked for Corey and whether it is possible to ground a functional college curriculum not in grades and status but instead in craft and performance. Unsurprisingly, it is a student who, at just the right moment, helps me see what I am about.

This new gig cannot work without ongoing collaboration with learners who see themselves as learners. Cascadia provided those collaborations. Here is to discovering new provocateurs (not really collaborators, as I think about it) at the University of Wisconsin.

On Great Books

I am mulling over Earl Shorris’s fall 2008 Common Review article on “great books” (I'm hoping it shows up as a back issue soon). As I contemplate surrendering (for a time) a position as a humanities teacher and taking up the role of education researcher, this seems like a theme worth thinking about.

Shorris, and the Great Books Foundation for that matter, has me in a sort of bind. I am the product of a great books education. Well, more precisely of a books education, for few of my faculty would have identified explicitly with the University of Chicago or the Great Books initiative. I spent seven years studying literature before I ever thought of how to build a career as a college English teacher. I kept taking classes in my masters program even after I had met the basic requirements because the books and the chance to read was what I needed to do in my mid twenties. In those classes, I forged lasting relationships with other humans and also a sense for how I fit in the world and what the traditions I inherited from my parents meant. I took up a habit of learning that has stuck. While that education has rarely directly produced much social or economic capital, I would not trade it. I love those books.

But still I wince when Shorris reels off the phrase “great books” without any need to justify the adjective. Indeed, he uses the phrase almost to declare that the adjective is inseparable from the noun (he is even able to talk about “the greater great books”). It is not the notion of “great” value in these books that makes me pause. My work in college classrooms over the past twenty years and my reading of establishment media makes me believe that we need what Shorris declares readers get from great books:

They see a thousand disputes and expect a thousand more. They learn that the comfort of surcease is slavery. That is what they find in great books, the common dream of humanity, the unending dream of humanity, the unending argument, freedom.

Amen. This basic criteria describes the texts that kept me in school. The most important of them, though, were not great by the measures Shorris implies (books with authority, classics). Sir Thomas Wyatt’s epistolary satires, the sonnets of Barnabe Googe, the work of Sherwood Anderson and John Steinbeck and Lucille Clifton. Wyatt is labeled a “silver” or “drab” poet; it is Shakepeare who is golden. The craft in these texts and the contexts in which I encountered them caught me up, addicted me to the “unending argument.” It is not clear to me that naming that craft “great” is either valid or useful. The contexts in which I encountered these texts surely were not universally great. I studied at times with indifferent teachers and nearly always with too many distractions. I read Steinbeck for the first time in a rush to be ready for an exam. The books had their effect, but they were not books on Shorris’s implied list, and the setting was rarely that of the Clemente program.

In 1993, in my first full-time college English gig, I taught a class called “Great Books.” As I read parts of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces with students at a regional campus of Kent State University, I found myself caught between a certainty that this reading mattered and a deep skepticism about how my college and discipline named what mattered. I found then and find now the need to declare books “great” curious. I am happy to argue for the qualities of different texts; I know that I prefer the Inferno to the Republic, and I know why. I wrote a dissertation that reflected at length on the history of the reception of texts, of how texts become great and lose that status. I have spent hundreds of hours drawing relatively students into texts with no interest in declaring those books or those students “great.” Indeed, my students have taught me again to relish Hamlet, in part because they do not know whether it is great.

Shorris’s need to have great books strikes me now as both self-evidently important and at the same time revelatory of a culture losing its way. Not knowing the cultural artifacts that make up one’s cultural entitlement is, at some very basic level, to be intellectually poor and, worse, to lose track of what it means to be human (though Shorris is surely right in arguing that knowing these artifacts does not necessarily make one intellectually right and humane). Of course, a meaningful education needs to include a careful reading of tradition, of great books. But declaring the artifacts of a tradition great can also invite a kind of quietism. Shorris concludes, rightly I think, that the great books make space for continual dispute. The stories he shares of poor people in Darfur and Cuernavaca and and Chicago and Madison sitting to read great books are compelling, and Shorris labors not to idealize the effects of reading Plato. But the telling of these stories dodges action and responsibility. I can read them and feel that the world still works and then flip on HGTV or go and fill my car with fuel or buy tomatoes from Mexico in Seattle in January. I finish the article more certain that the humanities matter and also that Shorris’s humanities and the institutions he mentions (among them Bard College, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s College but also Berea College and the Korean National University) are complicit in “the comfort of surcease.”

Let me offer an apology. Shorris imagines inviting people into the great books conversation might (again, he avoids utopian claims) result in more disputation and freedom. Surely this can happen, in some places. By holding onto his adjective, he seems to avoid locating the invitation and linking the reading of books with being in a time and place and owning the implications of actions. Reading the great books, according to Shorris, helps the reader understand that there is no answer to “the riddle of earthly life,” only unending argument. Great books on this line, sanction humans in disconnecting from place and the demand for answers and actions that relationship to place makes. The books may well be great; the abstract notion of greatness is problematic.

Since about 1970, students moving through U.S. colleges and receiving what Robert Hutchins might call—and the U.S. New and World Report certainly has called—“the best education” have dug a $2 or $3 trillion hole in the U.S. economy and exported the ideology of leverage. The economic growth that the best and brightest enabled between 2001 and 2008 is, it turns out, roughly equivalent to the debt that economy generated during the same period. Highly educated Americans have—reading whatever books were required, enshrined self-interest—become comfortable with the fruits of imperialism, if not with the idea. They have become expert in using law and reason as an instrument (Stanley Fish is a wonderful emblem for a humanist in this setting). They are caricatures of the heroes of the books collected in any culture (even the deeply flawed characters Shorris mentions). They are now managing a plot wherein the characters who have failed (made loans that won’t be repaid, cars that won’t sell, schools that do not provide all students access to learning) remain protagonists even though the logic of the plot aims at other values. They have overseen an environmental debacle and are able to make the argument that being concerned for habitat is too expensive.

I am one of those educated folks (though my pedigree is not great; I am the product of state schools). For the past 20 years or so, I have tried to manage a career as a public servant in a culture that is not clear on whether the phrase “public good” is meaningful. I love the books, but my exposure to the books tells me that I have to turn to service learning, I have to ask students to read their environments and take up an obligation for inventing and testing answers. We will still read, but rather than hiding behind abstractions about greatness, we are beginning to wonder about how studying at a publicly funded school draws us into networks of obligation.

We are working with, among other texts, Aldo Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic.” My students do the reading fairly quickly. The discover that Leopold noticed in the 1930s that environmental education (great or otherwise) had not slowed the flow of topsoil down the Mississippi and argued that more of that same education would likely not result in more learning. We talk about the big idea here: the question, for Leopold, was not the books to be read (though he sensed that content mattered) but the moral and ethical purpose behind the reading and the relation of the readers to the topic. My students read Leopold and wonder about his greatness, for I do sing his praises. His prose is beautifully balanced but difficult to their ears. His ideas seem of obvious importance and completely implausible. But what seems to matter in their education happens next. Once we have read, we try to use it to rethink where we are and how we relate to our place. In coming years, we will begin to use his thinking to launch community initiatives; rather than simply thinking about the great ideas, we will try them out and document our efforts.

My students find this approach to books, great or otherwise, a bit odd. They are accustomed to reading books selected by others because these books are correct though not always great. They are practiced in arguing about whether they agree or disagree with the ideas and being tested on whether they understand the main points. They are unused to hearing ideas generously, illuminating those ideas collaboratively, and putting those ideas to work in real environments away from school. The work is hard; evaluations of the work are descriptive and difficult to sort onto a normal curve. I am not used to this practice either. In fact, I rarely manage to facilitate it in a very complete way. This sort of service brings with it serious obligation to those who have not read the books and to those who have and have elected to do nothing with those books. My students regularly declare I am asking too much. They know other readers and writers are getting away by parroting forms.

But those who take up the obligation, find their way to a different voice. And they come to love the books, not because the books are great but because the books have the capacity to motivate and guide and obligate action. My students are honest about our realities: we acknowledge that we learn more about how we should be than we are willing to live out. Still, the books lead us to action, give us a sense of a public space in which we need to talk and listen and say what we have found in the books. Like Shorris, we learn that the public dispute is unending, but we also learn that we are obliged lovingly to make claims, to add to the tradition that we love. In the midst of this learning, often at the end of a course, my anxiety about “great books” and the humanities becomes productive not because my students and I have covered great content but because we have entered into a community that speaks from the tradition to the present. Our claims are almost never great. Indeed, in a ten-week quarter, much of what we write is not as good as what we are able to write. But we carry on, we are willing not to be comfortable.

What Do College Students Need?

A friend who teaches history recently turned me onto a 6 January 2008 entry in Stanley Fish’s New York Times blog. In his reflections on the humanities, Fish (in his compelling rhetoric) declares with certainty that the humanities cannot “save us,” that it is not the business of humanities faculty to save us. The last paragraph of this entry puts a point on the argument:
To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.

What is interesting to me is that this line of argument grows out of reflections on how New York State might improve “academic quality” through investment in, among other things, research and “academic superstars.” Like his culture, Fish takes a supply-side approach to the topic. What matters is maximizing supply. The only line of thinking available involves increasing incentives to produce and invest in what is already being produced and invested. Reflecting on what is being supplied or about what moral or ethical or ecological side-effects is at best inefficient, at worst imperialist. There is no perspective from outside the activity that matters.

Supply-side thinking about school increasingly fascinates me. Fish declares that education (at the very least in the humanities) ought not be expected to save us, that is, to make us more healthy or fend off danger. Education (and the humanities) is a thing to be enjoyed within an always closed system. And Fish knows the system as it presently exists (he established part of the authority of his argument by pointing to 45 years of experience in this system). The logic here is perfect as long as one accepts that the system of education as it exists is all we get.

Fish’s analysis is absolutely accurate for the teachers and students of literature that he knows. That said, I feel no particular obligation to accept his analysis as what is so. Indeed, his argument collapses in on itself with exclamations like “there is no evidence to support [the salvific effect of the humanities]” and “I can tell you [the notion that the study of the humanities make one good and wise] just isn’t so.” Fish is largely uninterested in evidence from outside his narrow experience and is certain that the authority vested in a professor is enough to carry the generalizations. I have spent nearly 20 years in the company of college humanities teachers who Fish likely would not recognize as such. We care deeply about students and write and revise class activies and handouts more often that essays. Oddly, on any evidence about humanities teaching (number of classes taught, number of students encountered, number of papers responded to), this is the community that will need to make judgments about what impact the humanities have on learners (we are pleased to leave to Fish and his community judgments about the significance of publications about rhetorical theory and the like).

From within my community of practice, I find Fish’s assumptions to be consistent but of relatively little use, his assertions about use, pleasure, and justification to be fairly hollow. Free from that community (I tore up my MLA membership card almost a decade ago), I continue to look for ways that education (and humanities education) can make a community more healthy and safe (words worth thinking about at length). The issue for my community is not primarily whether education can save us, but what health looks like and whether our educational practices actually move us toward health so defined. The exploration of these questions may well lead me to Fish’s conclusions, but they will lead me there through data about learners and teachers who remain largely outside Fish’s field of vision. This exploration will also lead to a much more diverse conversation than the one Fish appears to presume. Rather than looking at what commodities are identified with academic quality, I am interested in conversations about what we want from education, conversations that ask stakeholders to speak with honesty and to listen to other stakeholders.

Humanities Now?

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. A narrower version of this question that is of interest to me goes like this: What is it that the humanities contribute to a Cascadia Community College education? I suppose my interest is driven in part by a literature teacher’s fear of being irrelevant. My work in a college that assesses itself is a more significant driver, at least in the present. I began asking these questions with more urgency after Cascadia (the college where I teach the humanities) began to take up program review eighteen months ago and my colleagues needed to wonder about what learning in the humanities might look like. If learning happens in the humanities, then I need to be able to argue with some confidence that the study of literature (my bag in the humanities) will alter learners’ practice of being human and enable them better to pursue “important social ends” (a phrase of Lee Shulman’s that I am taken with). Making this argument seems both attractive and harder than I thought it would be. The argument turns out to be very personal. 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. I have long offered 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 at Cascadia:

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 one’s 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.

I have convinced myself of a need. I now wonder whether what I offer in a humanities course has much to do with it.

To Professional Students

When I first read Lee Shulman’s essay “Professing the Liberal Arts,” I scribbled the phrase “professional student” in the margin of the second page and again about three-quarters of the way through the essay. This phrase has me thinking. My friends and I at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire joked about becoming professional students in the 1980s. We were humanities students from rural Wisconsin and the Milwaukee suburbs. Studying at a regional campus, we had only a vague notion of graduate study and the professional academic world. For us, “professional student” named a mythical opportunity to continue to study literature or art or music or history. A few of us went on to grad school and stuck to the liberal arts trajectory of our bachelor’s degrees. I lived as a happy but poor semi-pro for a decade.

My ideals about being a student have evolved since the mid ‘80s. College is more expensive and seems to be a more instrumental venture; higher education seems to have become concurrently more accessible and less available. Because being a student is both more dear and less valued, students and teachers seem to be a bit confused by one another’s expectations. Shulman, I think, offers a way forward.

He asks us to reflect on what it means to be in a profession. His six criteria are useful, but what seems most important to me is the focus on service and the generation of new knowledge. Professionals pursue “important social ends” (14), and they test and expand knowledge developed in the academy (15). They do this work in and on behalf of communities whatever their own interests are. While thinking of the professions in these terms makes me mutter about investment bankers (are they professionals?), this argument helps me rethink how we might understand the role of a learner in the first two years of college. First, we have to stipulate to the social ends general education students pursue. I might argue for the development of citizens with critical literacy and what Richard Hugo called a “crap detector.” I think that we (members of the U.S. democracy) need such development, would be enriched by it. I might also suggest that pro students are pursuing the interpretation and celebration of cultures (another social good). Perhaps most importantly, they are contributing to the refinement of the process by which members of our society get an education. Clearly, other arguments could be made. Bring them on.

Second, we need to clarify how students are applying theoretical knowledge in a field of practice and using their own judgment to revise theory and report back to the theoreticians. The question here for me is, What is the field of practice in which a pro student labors? Shulman hints at an answer to this question: “service learning” (26). Many of my general education students see classes as communities, but passing communities that exist of a brief period and exist to serve the learners. Shulman, by suggesting “a clinical component or the equivalent of an internship experience,” outlines quite a different perception of the classroom. If GE courses are service to the broader community, then the learning community is not about the learners but about producing learning that is of use to someone. In such a setting, it makes little sense to ask, How many points is this worth? Instead, the question is, Have you done enough reading and writing or drawing to contribute to the cause?

Shulman wonders aloud, “How might this sort of thing go on?” He offers a methodology, the case study, that works brilliantly in professional schools and in the third and fourth year of the college curriculum. What cases might the professional students that I am imagining work on? To even begin to work on that question, teachers like me (Shulman admits he knows little about teaching in the GE curriculum) have to reimagine our classrooms and identify more clearly what service our students are involved in. I have only vague ideas about what that service might look like, but I know at least the part of the problem I need to work on.

New Thoughts on Writing in School

So, I am rethinking my position on school writing a bit because of my experience this past summer helping someone get ready to take the GRE General Test. In a conversation with a friend, I brought this up, and her reply was, “What’s the GRE?” I thought that was a wonderful response. For those aware of it, the GRE becomes an overwhelming and all-encompassing part of life. For the rest of the world, it is quite irrelevant. I hadn’t really thought of it since taking it about 23 years ago.

So, for some definition. The Graduate Record Examinations are a set of standardized tests. Universities and some fellowships use the scores on this test in their process of deciding whether someone is ready for graduate school or for a research position. The test is for those trying to get into grad school what the SAT is for high school juniors and seniors. The current version includes tests of verbal and quantitative reasoning, but also of argumentative and analytical writing. The two writing segments are timed, vague, and, from the points of view of most writers, ridiculous. The test offers a claim and writers have to present their perspective on the issue implicit in the claim. Here’s an example: “Important truths begin as outrageous, or at least uncomfortable, attacks upon the accepted wisdom of the time.” The writer gets 45 minutes to agree or disagree or restate.

As we got ready for the test, we practiced. I practiced so that I had a better sense of what the demands were. Practice involved looking at a prompt, clicking on a stop watch, and going through an intentional process (I actually drew my approach in my journal). I found these sessions to be so unappealing that I had to schedule them and tell my wife when I was going to do them. If someone else were not asking me about this work, I would have avoided it. I found myself wondering, “Is this how students feel when they confront one of my writing assignments?” I knew how to make a response, even had confidence that I could draft a strong response. I just dreaded spending the 45 minutes that it would take.

Here’s what has me rethinking the impromptu, though. In a couple of instances, the act of writing under pressure actually led me to interesting, innovative thinking. I found myself wishing that I had more time when the clock hit 45 minutes because I had found an approach worth pursuing.

So does this mean that school writing, even timed, impromptu writing can actually lead people to think more completely? Scary.

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?”