Unscripted Moments in A Writing Class: Learning from Papi's Cologne

I.

This morning in a fifth grade class, I read aloud a writing piece I had begun about the death of my father a decade ago and his penchant for wearing black socks with sandals. It was a difficult piece to read out loud, unfinished and raw, and I told the children this as I struggled to read.

A bit later in the class, a child told me that her writing piece, like mine, was a difficult one.
"How so?" I asked.
She motioned to her notebook where I could see pencil and blue pen markings all over a page, including lines of print crunched into the margins.  We had talked about rereading with a pen in hand and I could see that she had done so.  She said that it was a struggle to get on paper what she wasn't sure about.  I might have sighed at that moment.  I listened as she read aloud a narrative about memory and how at night when she is alone in her bed, when her home is quiet, she recalls the smell of her Papi's cologne and this triggers her to think about the man who no longer lives with her.

She's struggling to get the words just right and this I think is the more important lesson to learn than the actual writing.  We have been exploring narrative techniques and no technique prepares the writer for the struggle to say what must get said.

I listen as she rereads again, noticing this time she has also drawn her bedroom with herself in bed and a thought cloud above her that contains a man.

"It's a difficult story to tell and it is brave one for you to try." I say this to her, feeling the inadequacy of my words while knowing such words from me are most likely unnecessary.  She's flirting with the power that comes from telling something true. She is an agent acting.


II.

I am learning as I work each day with the children and their teachers that in writing workshop where there are no units of study to be employed or scripts to be memorized, or prescribed evidence to be mined--that the present is mostly all we have. And, there is no grander thing than the present unfolding before us as we make it.

It is in the making that deep learning takes hold.

III.

Later in the day, well into the evening, my husband finds me and tells me about a protracted lesson for seventh graders he has read in preparation for some work with a teacher. The teacher is working from a script and the kids need to debate (using sentence starters) an action the speaker in a poem took.  The students' task is to "find evidence to support or refute the narrator's (not speaker) decision to take a specific road" in Frost's "The Road Not Taken."  They need to ponder (and of course find obligatory evidence) about whether the speaker's turn up the untrodden road was a good or bad decision (I kid you not).

I cringe, thinking about Billy Collins's poem, "Introduction to Poetry," where readers want to tie a poem to a chair "and torture a confession out of it."

Best get out the rope, I tell my husband.

IV.

Scripted lessons, especially jam-packed ones, leave little room for the unexpected, the unplanned, the unimagined, or the turn down an untrodden road.  There simply is no room left for anything novel to arise--such as your Papi's cologne--as time ceases to be about what is emerging and instead presupposes an epic construct.  Scripted classrooms are worlds where the action has already been performed.  The task in such narrow, poorly lit places is to mime.

I think of these scenarios as ones that lead to entropy--where the available energy in a room is sucked out quicker then it can be replaced as students dutifully (or not) complete the assignments.  I mean, really, how can new breath even happen in an epic world?    I think of Maxine Greene who wisely told us:

"We need to recognize that the events that make up aesthetic experiences are events that occur within and by means of the transactions with our environment that situate us in time and space” (p. 130).

Us situated in time and space by means of the transactions we have with our environment?  Not in a scripted classroom.  Already made stuff being enacted over and over in thousands of classrooms defy the physics.

Surely, we might want more for our learners and for ourselves. Surely we might want the satisfaction that comes when the child holds his or her power and pen in hand.

A Primer for Creating Units of Study

This is a webinar that Kathy Glass gave earlier this year.  Although it is lengthy, the information is interesting, especially if planning units of study aligned to ELA CCSS is relatively new to you.

Rhizomatic Learning: Maps as Lived Performance, not as Artifact

Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways...A map has multiple entryways, as oppose to the tracing, which always comes back 'to the same.' The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged 'competence'...What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration (Deleuze & Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus pp. 12-13).

I've been thinking about the Common Core State Standards and the practice of using these standards, or the Common Core Curriculum Maps, or Heinemann's already made reading and writing Units of Study as 'the' maps curriculum writers in Districts trace in the development of local curricula that then gets handed to teachers to enact.  By their very nature, the made map, like a tracing of a map is an epic artifact, not a performance and learning requires performance. The epic world is sealed, untouchable and both learners and their teachers need to live in the middle of the work they compose.  

That's the map as performance which is rhizomatic.

The made map that one then traces cannot carry with it the intentions, contexts, complexities, misunderstandings, and nuances that (in)formed the original. Meaning always exists at points of utterance. This is why curriculum is better situated as complicated conversation (Pinar, 2008). Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) would tell us that "Discourse lives as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word" (Location 4116).  Curriculum taken from the Common Core, the Common Core Maps, or the prefab units of study will result in a mere tracing that "has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it" (Deleuze & Guatarri, p. 13).

The authors of the Common Core Curriculum Maps say:

Educators may view the curriculum maps as “road maps” for the school year, using them to jumpstart the lesson planning process. As common planning tools, these maps also can become the backbone of rich, content-based professional development as teachers collaborate to refine the curricula for their particular schools and classrooms.

Folks, there are no made roads worth traveling at the cost of your freedom.  The entryways and exits have all been preplanned and the attractions delineated. Alongside that made map is a calendar to keep you and your young charges from dreaming, dallying, racing, reversing, erring, collapsing space, making a detour. 

No musing allowed/aloud.  

And there you are motoring about and you get an itch to go left and you just can't do it. The road you are on is an accident.  So what's a body to do? 

Live wide awake lives and let's call that "the content".  Dwell in the imagination and we might consider that akin to process. A little of each of these, along with consistent learner agency and we would find that would be enough.

Beaver Moon (11.10.11, M.A. Reilly)

The finest educators I know do this or try to do this as they labor under the mountain of predetermined 'content' and testing requirements.   I once taught middle school learners who decided early in the school year to remove most of the furniture from the room where we met and to organize the year as a collection of clubs they determined.  Although this was 1996,  one of the clubs a handful of students enacted was a gaming club and I was surely the student my students were teaching. We had a dance club, a reading long novels is great club, a solving community problems club, an editing club (my choice),  and a host of others that came and went as the year progressed. In the room which was carpeted, there was a very large table and a handful of chairs, a couple of easels, some computers and lots and lots of supplies (paints, pastels, brushes, software, cameras, books, magazines, newspapers, and so on).  In December of that year, about a dozen of us took to studying the moon for a month. We hand made art journals, collected and read related resources, interviewed a variety of people who had different expertise about the moon, and took to standing outside at night regardless of the weather for a full moon cycle.  Our journals were filled with our observations and became the texts we studied.  Beneath the club work, I threaded skills, strategies, and dispositions into the work we composed (as did the students) and I hoped it would keep them in good stead. I know that I still am studying the moon and the work 15 years ago continues to inform how I see.

"[T]he rhizome is not the object of reproduction" ( Deleuze & Guattari, p. 21). It is the made work that happens in the company of self and others.  At the time I was 'teaching' this middle school class, I was completing my doctorate at Teachers College/Columbia University.  There I was both teaching and participating in seminars where I was trying out ideas, discussing  and writing about what I understood to be happening with the middle school students.  It was in the middle of  all of this languaging with young teens, graduate students, doctoral advisor,  peers, and family that theories and practices merged, blurred, became a map made from the dialogic threads we composed. Again, Bakhtin (1984) is helpful.  He explains:

The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue (p. 276). 

Leaving Dublin (2008, Reilly)

Each year is new. Not repeatable.

A premade curriculum, neither you nor your student have made, will get you lost.

Annie Dillard says it well in The Writing Life:

Process is nothing. Erase your path. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs. I hope you will toss it all, and not look back.

Literacy, Colonialism, and Web 2.0

When my grandmother was a child, she practiced speaking Irish with other children secreted behind the tall hedgerow skirting the lane where she and her family lived. Such were the times in Ireland, the decades preceding the Republic’s freedom from Britain--a time when British rule prohibited the Irish from speaking the language of home.  One-hundred plus years later, I sit at home 20 minutes west of Manhattan, thinking of this woman I never met, of a country, I too left, and wondering about the parallels between colonialism and our national need to reclaim teacher and student voices in the classroom. To be sure, this imperative is not new.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said defines imperialism as "the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory."  He defined "colonialism, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism" as "the implanting of settlements on distant territory." In thinking about the relationship between the two, I wonder about those educational practices that serve to colonize classrooms, students, teachers, and schools, of which there are many.

In this post, I want to examine one example of colonized practice: prescribed units of study for writing. I want to explore how prescribed, commercial units of study act as agents that "re"settle classrooms into "writing workshop" products, stripping from teachers and students agency, voice, and maintaining "literacy" as a Web 1.0 practice. Now to be sure, I am not talking about organic workshops that are made by teachers and students, although these too may maintain web 1.0 practices. First a bit of clarity as to what I mean by Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 literacy practices.

According to Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2003), Web 1.0 practices privilege:

letter recognition, skill sharpening, and enhanced fluency with reading and writing conventional linear texts via use of word processing software, drill and skill software, electronic early reader books, audio software functions for matching sounds to letters, authoring software and so on. (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003 as quoted in Wohlend, 2010).

In contrast, Web 2.0 literacies integrate "the principles of Web 2.0 online interaction: global participation, multi user collaboration, and distributed resources and knowledge. Web 2.0 includes social networking sites like Facebook, fanfiction sites, wikis, massively multiplayer online games, and music- and video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Literacy 2.0 practices involve ways of participating in vast digital networks through posting, blogging, recording, remixing, uploading and downloading" (Wohlend, 2010, p. 147).

When schools (such as all public school in New York City) adopt prescribed units of study for writing that situate literacy as a single user event, a misdirection occurs.  As the mother of a 12-year-old boy, I have watched as his literacy learning has been largely influenced by "Units of Study" borrowed and in some cases, wholly adopted, from Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP). Whereas he has benefited by having caring teachers and administrators, he also has been defined and to a some degree, limited, by the his schools' misunderstanding of what it means to be literate. In every classroom he has occupied, authorship has been situated as  solo event, limited to the mind of one.  Yet, when I watch my son play online at home, he is composing narratives with other players from across three continents. I listen as he strategizes with players in order to complete missions, advance troops, considers his partners, and win/lose contests. The work emerges as the play ensues. Recently when he was teaching me how to play an online game, he told me that I needed to be sensitive to emerging situations.

"You can't figure it all out on your own," he told me.  "You got to look and see what you partners are doing and figure out how you are going to lead or assist."

A very different type of narrative emerges in the virtual world where authorship is inherently collaborative, subject to emerging situations, and located in partially constructed narrative worlds. Against this richness, I worry each school year when my son (and I imagine so many other children) is required to dust off a small moment narrative as one of the genres he must write. 

"I just gotta get it done," he tells me as I read a rather poorly written story. "It doesn't mean anything."

We all suffer through these narrative attempts and what is learned is significant. My son learns compliance and I learn about practices that colonize a classroom. Allow me to elaborate. 

Not too long ago I worked at a NY college as professor in the department of Literacies, Language and Culture. The graduate students I worked with were usually certified teachers, mostly teaching in New York City public schools, and returning to college to earn a post graduate degree in literacy.  At the beginning of a spring semester, two of the graduate students in a leadership and literacy course teaching at public schools in the South Bronx showed our class their multi-page curriculum map. The maps were voluminous, stretching across legal size paper and containing many pages that indicated what they were to teach each and every month.  Further, the school day was also parsed, and indicated what techniques they were to use at each given moment in the day.  Many of us were pretty amazed at the level of detail the maps contained and were alarmed that anyone would be given such a map, let alone a teacher. Consider this exchange:

“You have to follow this exactly,” Sophie indicated, pointing to the curriculum map she had been given by her principal. The kindergarten map, highlighting writing, was several pages.

“Can you actually teach all of this in a single year?” I ask cautiously as I turned page by page.

“You have to,” Sophie said. 

“If at 10:00 it says shared reading and someone comes into your class and you aren’t doing shared reading, you’re in trouble,” explained Lana, who teaches at a different public school in the Bronx.

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“Well I don’t really know.  I just know you have to do everything the way it’s spelled out if you want to be teaching next year. The threat is implied.”

"We have to follow exactly as the Unit prescribes. I mean we spent a week on learning about writing instruments and I never would have done that."
"What kind of writing instruments?"
"Crayons, markers, pencils," Sophie answered. "I had to introduce each instrument. The kids were so bored and it was the first month of kindergarten. It's not how I wanted to start, but I have no voice in this."

"Everything is scripted," explained Lana.  "I was reprimanded by a literacy coach because I called my kindergartners, children, instead of writers. It's all so absurd."

Having no voice is problematic, especially when you are a learner and required to do things that make little sense. Imagine what is being learned by children who watch their teachers following a script. Now to be sure, prescribed curriculum abounds and there are variations on writing workshop by other for profit groups.  What these groups have in common though is a belief that a prescribed curriculum is superior to a locally invented one.  That is a colonial mind set: the belief that some foreign entity holding more power knows better than the local people what is good and bad for them.  Additionally, as these prescribed literacy curricula are all lodged in Web 1.0 methodologies, they not only remove agency and strip voice from teachers and students, but they also ensure that the work that is being privileged is out of date with the times.

In the opening to A Guide to the Writing Workshop (Heinemann, 2006) the first of Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5, Lucy Calkins channeling Isaac Newton writes, “The books are intended to be read and used in sequence, each book standing on the shoulders of the books that go before it…A few homemade units can be inserted between the fifth and sixth book. I suggest one of these be a unit of study on poetry, and I will later direct you to sources of support for that unit and others” (p.4).  A few pages later Calkins writes, “There is no one ‘right way’ for a yearlong curriculum to proceed. In this series, I lay out one curricular journey, one that is especially important to the community within which I teach” (p. 25). Yet, the units of study as suggested by Calkins would fill all but four weeks of a school year.  Precious little time remains for teacher ingenuity or student interest. Calkins explains, “I’ve deliberately left this month absolutely open. Chapter 9 in this book helps you to imagine possible units of study you could coauthor with your colleagues…Whatever unit a group of colleagues decides to pursue, the process of designing that unit will probably follow a course similar to the one I outline in Chapter 9” (pp. 33-34).

 

Web 1.0 literacies are privileged in the Units of Study.  In contrast consider the classroom  Karen Wohlend (2010) describes in A is for Avatar: Young Children in Literacy 2.0 Worlds and Literacy 1.0 Schools. She writes about observing two first graders who wrote an invented version of Digimon Rumble Arena, a two-player video game. Wohlend writes:

Attempting to understand this game from the Literacy 1.0 convention of narrative fiction shrinks the boys’ divergent, rapidly changing messiness into a one-outcome progression (Ranker, 2006). Literacy 2.0 activities, such as video games, produce nonlinear and dynamic interactive texts, as opposed to the Literacy 1.0 linear and fixed narratives (beginning, middle, end) that are typically generated through story writing in an elementary school writing workshop. Video-game play merged the boys’ individual play and design moves into a joint text that blurred the line between reading and writing as each interpreted the other’s move and produced a counter-move. The pretended video game demonstrates that new texts require coordinated action.

In writing workshop, a single author produces a book with support from others who consult but do not produce the text; responsibility for production is alleviated but always individual (p. 148).

Wohlend's observations are important and offer a different understanding of authorship. The Units of Study movement posits the belief in specific types of genres that students should learn about and replicate across grade levels.  Yet missing from these units are the types of texts the two first graders compose in the classroom depicted by Wohlend. Hybrid works informed by new uses of technology are sorely missing, even though  the youngsters populating public school classrooms are avid users of virtual worlds ( Marsh 2008, 2010; Merchant 2005 ).  Ironically, in the opening to the NYC Units of Study (influenced by TCRWP)  - Launching the Reader's and Writer's Workshop: Where We Begin, the authors state the curricular intention:

The focus of the curriculum in the early grades is to offer young children the opportunity to ‘bring their lives to school'.

Yet, the very world of digital media is missing. Researcher Jackie Marsh (2008) indicates that there were12 million registered users of the virtual online world, Club Penguin back in 2007. Club Penguin targets children 6 through 14. No where in the units of study does it include privileging the extended play by students in virtual worlds as an example of authorship.  Authorship within the units of study is limited to a paper-bound text, even if computers are used.  Where is the potential for remix inside units of study?  Where is the potential for the emergence of a made genre, not already delineated by adults? Where is the potential for agency and voice?

Works Cited

Calkins, L. 2006. A guide to writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

------------. 2006. Units of study for teaching writing, grades 3-5. Portsmouth NH: 

Marsh, J. 2010. Young children's play in online virtual worlds. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 8, 23-29.

Marsh, J. 2008. Embedded link.

Merchant, G. 2005.Barbie meets Bob the Builder at the workstation: Learning to write on screen. In J. Marsh's (ed.) Popular culture, new media, and digital literacy in early childhood (183-200). New York: Routledge/Falmer.

Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. NY: Vintage.

Wohlend, K. 2010. A is for avatar: Young children in literacy 2.0 worlds and literacy 1.0 schools. Language Arts, 88 (2), 144-152.