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FRAGILITY AND ENDURANCE IN CHILDREN'S WRITING
AND TEACHING AS ACTS OF ATTENTION

By

Dirck Roosevelt

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Teacher Education

1998

ABSTRACT

FRAGILITY AND ENDURANCE IN CHILDREN'S WRITING
AND TEACHING AS ACTS OF ATTENTION

By

Dirck Roosevelt

The teaching of schoolchildren is widely understood, by practitioners
and scholars, if not by the general public, to be complex, untidy work. At the
same time, the demands placed on teaching and schooling are immodestly
high, e.g., that schools should produce good citizens, that schools should
bring "all children" to academic accomplishments reflecting standards that
are high and rigorous. John Dewey and other notable figures before and since
argue for a positive connection between education and democracy. Dewey
also argued passionately that the qualities of artistic expression and experience
should be nurtured in schools, indeed, that education would not be fit for
democracy nor would democracy be achieved until "the release of distinctive
aptitudes in the arts" became the chief business of schooling.

This study enters into these issues from a point of view informed by
the author's own practice as a teacher and, especially, a teacher of writing, for
more than 20 years, and, by the author's deep sympathy with the ideas and
ideals of John Dewey.

The study proposes a "shift in perspective" or a "reorientation of
views" on teaching. Arguing that habitual views of teaching portray the
teacher as properly yet pretematurally "busy" with, for example, the activities
0f telling, interrogating, judging, and correcting students, the study proposes
in contrast that we consider teaching as importantly comprised of "acts of

attention." The construct of "acts of attention" is proposed as an interpretive

device for understanding aims and efforts of teaching that seek to draw out
and engage children's creative or artistic abilities, as writers of fiction and
poetry. "Acts of attention" as a construct helps make visible and available to
discussion under-examined aspects of teaching, such as the experience and
maintenance of states of trust, mistrust, and doubt between students and
teacher.

The study site and the context for these proposals and discussions is the
author's own teaching of a "writing workshop" to diverse classes of fourth
graders attending public school in a mid-sized industrial city. A small
number of children and their writing are represented and discussed
extensively and in great detail. Drawing on philosophers such as John
Dewey, Annette Baier, Stanely Cavell, and Elaine Scarry, on the psychoanalyst
D. W. Winnicott, and on scholars of literature such as Harold Rosen and
Robert Scholes, the author theorizes and practices "sympathetic readings,"
that is, interpretive engagements with the children's texts. These
engagements and the descriptions and analysis in which they are embedded
are intended both to make persuasive cases for the "unsuspected" power of
the children's writing and to provide concrete material with which to discuss

and explore the construct of "teaching as acts of attention."

Co 'ght by
DirianRoosevelt
1998

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Acknowledgments

The acknowledgment is an intimidating genre, indeed, gratitude being
such a weighty load to bear, so happily borne, but making such a sound along
the nerves I get dizzy. It is true that all the friends, loved ones, students, and
significant "others" I know could deservedly find their place in here: true
debts, impossible to redeem in practice. Those who have had confidence in
me, those who have allowed me both doubt and confidence in them, are the
larger cast; those who have directly contributed to my doing of this work are
the ones who must be named (with the usual caveat issued in advance for all:
no one receiving my thanks for what works in this dissertation must be held
liable for the errors and blind spots in my thought nor the obscurities in my
expression).

First of all I wish to acknowledge the teachers who so generously let me
find the space to do the teaching I report and discuss, and who entered so
willingly into its spirit: Alyjah Byrd, Jane Boyd, and also, Barbara Acker.

They do the work that must be done, with grit and grace, and they helped me
to do my part in more ways than they know.

I did not teach children in Patricia Pricco's classroom, but innumerable
conversations with her amidst the joint work of teacher education and
thought for children contributed enormously.

The incisive and capacious support and instruction of Suzanne Wilson
were invaluable in bringing me up to and into this work.

Jessica Howard, Corinne Biggs (formerly Hyman), and Patricia Carini
are friends, colleagues, and teachers without whom this never could have
happened ; Jessica, in particular, I thank for her endless and formative

encouragement in helping me learn how to have the confidence to write.

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Lillian Weber is ever in mind as the paradigm for passionate
conviction I have needed, and endlessly admired.

The study group for comprehensive exams that I was lucky enough to
be part of ("compers") was an invaluable source of support over the years of
working on this dissertation: Carol Barnes, Steve Mattson, Sue Poppink, Kara
Suzuka, and Sarah Theule-Lubienski.

Then there are colleagues, friends, and intimates who deserve fuller
acknowledgment than space allows me: Thea Abu El-Haj (so much thought,
shared doubt, and mutual struggling), David Carroll (well, how many years
now?), Sarah Cohen (you know), Susan Donnelly (countless close readings,
insights, and shared interests), Helen Featherstone (so much warmth, shared
thought, and humor), Magdalene Lampert (great teaching, great flowers, great
friendship), Sharon Feiman-Nemser (how did you find time to be aware of
this?), Ruth Heaton (brains, heart, company, this it-turns-out-survivable
thing called a dissertation), Susan Melnick (bad times can make good
connections), Janet Johnson Navarro (small spaces and big thoughts, and
dissertation struggles, shared over the years), Bill Rosenthal (Mal, here of all
places, certainly), Eliot Singer (too smart for his own good, generous to a fault,
like this whole list), Steel Stillman (well, for a brace of decades, at least, now,
of looking and talking, for instance...), Steve Swidler (stubbornly and rightly
persevering, and dissertating brilliantly, and more), and Kara Suzuka
(doubting and befriending and thinking in good measure). To each, I hope
You know at least a small portion of how much I have benefited from and
often depended upon you.

Of course, my parents, for all their sufferings, strivings, triumphs in

the face of the impossible, and love.

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And, at the center of the structure, I acknowledge with deepest
appreciation, gratitude, and respect, my dissertation committee:

0 Cheryl Rosaen, for her kindness in joining this project at a very late
date, for giving it such scrupulous attention, and for setting me straight on
some crucial points.

0 Jenny Denyer, for all of the same, for innumerable acts of good
friendship and colleagueship, and for tolerating so much verbosity in so
many contexts.

0 David Labaree, for his exceptional intellectual and personal decency
and generosity, including his willingness to enter into and contribute to such
an idiosyncratic project, and for much material support as well.

0 David K. Cohen--certainly, for far more than I can say--for his always
bracing, always wise, always warm, and always welcome interest, interest that
has done so much to teach and to encourage me, and for the person he is.

0 Joseph Featherstone. Jay's apparently infinite humanity and capacity
for hope, never more present than in dark times, his passion (for the
democratic prospect I continue to believe underlies and justifies this project,
for the work of human imagination, to name but two), his wit, and his
extraordinary and unfailing generosity, have helped to keep me afloat on
many a turbulent sea and have helped me believe and know much I have
needed to believe and know. I cannot thank him enough.

0 Deborah Lowenberg Ball, the director of my dissertation. Deborah:
Well, Deborah is close, as close as teachers and friends come, to indescribable.
Renowned for her work in mathematics education, she had no hesitation in
Signing on for a project not associated with that, but located well within the
work for which she is or should be equally known, studying teaching practice

"from the inside." Over the years she has become a "co-participant" in my

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project, a conversational partner-~like Jay and a few very significant others I
have acknowledged, but with a particular and uncalled for intensity of
commitment and attention both to detail and to "big picture"--at the heart of
the dissertation. Deborah has, I mean, acted as if understanding what I am
trying to say "from the inside" is the only way to direct a dissertation; so
thinking, she has challenged and fortified me at every step of the way. I had
no right or reason to expect this much from a person who set out to do no
more and no less than an honest job of teaching. The gift is simply

enormous. I am forever grateful and indebted, and, again, can not say nearly

as much as there is to be said.

Finally, to Tena Harrington, for endless patience, encouragement, and
attention to detail, my deep thanks.
And to Tena, Tammy Hillis, and a good number of others, thanks for

repeatedly telling me to "get back in that office and write." Oh, yes, it was

Jay's office, mostly.

viii

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................... 1
Overview ............................................................................................... 1
Contrasting "busy-ness" with "attention" ...................................... 2
Establishing some theoretical context and antecedents ............... 7

"The case is of child": Theory and point of view, continued....12

Organization of the dissertation ....................................................... 18

Chapter 2 "There the kid was, stranded in a car": Reading

the Fictions of Children as if they Mattered ............................................. 21
The fictional: Some theory ............................................................... 21
Fiction: A stab at a "close" or "sympathetic" reading .................. 34
A child's writing, a teacher's reading: Forms of Thought ......... 52
A child's reading: Seeing resemblance in difference .................. 57

Afterword: Thinking about teaching, opening up
"attention" ........................................................................................... 61

Chapter 3 "You are getting ready to be a new person":

Mediation of Faith and Doubt in a Writing Workshop? ...................... 77
Feelings of authority and the authority of feeling: Why
look at doubt? A beginning .............................................................. 77
A boy who presents a problem: Comedies of unreliability ........ 85

"What kind of place is this?": Fictive adventures,

live themes .......................................................................................... 100
Wondering and hurt: A further look at trust ............................... 125
"I still need a key": Creating a voice ............................................... 135

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Valuing doubt: Further speculations ............................................. 147

Afterword: Attention as accepting doubt, having faith,
and "taking him at his word" ........................................................... 159

Chapter 4 "Unsuspected Literatures": Public School Classrooms as

Laboratories for the Creation of Democratic Culture ............................. 170
Overview ............................................................................................... 170
Art and democracy as related works ................................................ 171
Instance of what a child's poem can achieve ................................. 173
The need for "democratic culture" .................................................. 182

"Sometimes it makes you go insane":
Further correspondences .................................................................. 189

Culture-making: "No contact of this human

sort is replaceable" ............................................................................. 196
Afterword: Teaching--attending--"forms of life" and
the existence of a fragile community of sentient readers .......... 200
Chapter 5 Conclusion with respect to teaching ......................................... 212
An immodest recapitulation ............................................................. 212
Four aspects of "teaching as acts of attention" ............................... 214
Creating conditions and opportunities ........................................... 216
Sanctioning the content ..................................................................... 219
Being an audience, being interested ................................................ 220
Giving editorial help, helping to make the writing ..................... 221
Coming to closure ................................................................................ 222

Appendices ........................................................................................................ 226

Appendix 1 Notes on Method ........................................................... 228
Appendix 2 Brendan's final version of "The Garbage Can
Seller," March .................................................................................... 249
Appendix 3 C.J.'s "Gang War" Story (in two parts) ...................... 253
Appendix 4 C.J.'s "Street Ball" .......................................................... 259
References .......................................................................................................... 265

xi

Chapter 1

Introduction

Overview

Only imaginative vision elicits the possibilities that are interwoven
within the texture of the actual. The first stirrings of dissatisfaction and

the first intimations of a better future are always found in works of art.
John Dewey, Art as Experience, (1934, pp. 345-346)

This dissertation proposes a shift in perspective on teaching. I argue
that some conceptions we have of teaching are so habitual and ingrained that
they are difficult even to perceive and that these conceptions effectively
prevent us from noticing other aspects of the work of teaching that are, I
argue, potent, significant, and deserving of far more scrutiny than they have,
to my knowledge, received. I want to turn our gaze, for the time being, away
from what I call, in brief, "the busy-ness of teaching" in order to orient us to
what I will call "teaching as acts of attention." The primary site for this effort
to expand and re-think some of what we mean by "teaching," this effort to re-
direct our vision, will be my own practices of teaching writing to nine and ten
year olds. And the main line of approach to those practices, in turn, will be
through contemplation and exegesis of some of those children's work as
writers: imaginative work that, I suggest, "elicits" a surprising and
compelling "vision" of "the possibilities that are interwoven within the
texture of the actual." Thus discussion of some aspects and possibilities of
teaching I wish to understand as acts of attention will be situated in
presentation of actual efforts to teach, presentations themselves
contextualizedubecause teaching is only a means, a gesture made in faith

good or badflby examination of the thought and creativity of those subject to

the teaching.

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Contrasting "busy-ness" with "attention"

Consider three vignettes of teachers and teaching.

Horace tells the students to open their textbooks to page 104 and
read the paragraph at the top. Two students have no textbook.
Horace tells them to share with their neighbors. Always bring
your textbook to class. We never know when we’ll need them.
The severity in his voice causes quiet. The students read.

Horace asks: Betty, which of the words in the first sentence is an
adverb? Silence. Betty stares at her book. More silence. Betty,
what is an adverb? Silence. Bill, help Betty. It’s a sort ofa verb
that tells you about things. Horace pauses: Not quite, Bill, but
close. Phil, you try. Phil: An adverb modifies a verb... Horace:
O.K., Phil, but what does "modify" mean? Silence. A voice:
”Darkly.” Who said that? Horace asks. The sentence was
”Heathcliff was a darkly brooding character. " I did, Tafly says.
O.K., Horace follows, you're correct Taffy, but tell us why
”darkly” is an adverb, what it does. Taffy: It modifies
"character." No, Taffy, try again. Heathclifl? No. Brooding?
Yes, now why? Is ”brooding” a verb? Silence.

Horace goes to the board, writes the sentence with chalk. He

underlines darkly. Betty writes a note to her neighbor...
Horace's Compromise, Theodore Sizer, (1984, pp. 12-13)

Mrs. Zajac seemed to have a frightening amount of energy. She
strode across the room, her arms swinging high and her hands
in small fists. Taking her stand in front of the green chalkboard,
discussing the rules with her new class, she repeated sentences,
and her lips held the shape of certain words, such as
”homework," after she had said them. Her hands kept very
busy. They sliced the air and made karate chops to mark off
boundaries. They extended straight out like a traffic cop 's,
halting illegal maneuvers yet to be perpetrated. When they
rested momentarily on her hips, her hands looked as if they
were in holsters. She told the children, "One thing Mrs. Zajac
expects from each of you is that you do your best. ” She said,
”Mrs. Zajac gives homework. I'm sure you've all heard. The
only meanie gives homework. ” Mrs. Zajac. It was in part a role.

She worked her way into it every September.
Among Schoolchildren, Tracy Kidder, (1989, p. 4)

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A fourth grade student ostentatiously, vigorously, crumples up a
piece of his own writing—~a story he has labored over for a week
or more-~and tosses it in the trash, indignantly turning his back
on his teacher, who doesn't want him to do this, doesn't want
this anger, wants to read the writing, and who, of course, wants
as well to feel a successful teacher. In the tellingly ugly phrase
that comes undesired to mind, he wants to ”keep the kid on the
reservation.” The teacher reaches towards the child, telling him
to dig out the work, assuring him of his interest. The child
walks away. The teacher has angered him, through some
imposition of authority, some failure to heed, some perceived or
actual mistreatment, a shortcoming of fairness or interest. The
teacher, for plenty of understandable, and indeed, justifiable
reasons, wants to maintain his authority. He also wants to be a
responsive and a useful teacher for the child. He wants the child
to know he cares about the work thrown away, out of his reach,
out-~apparently—-of the child's universe of cared-for things. He
wants to help the child take whatever next step the writing may
have suggested.

The teacher reaches towards the child-~as if to put a hand on his
shoulder, to say, "go ahead and pick it up, I do want to read it, "
or as if to say, "damn it, go get that back now.” Or as if to
communicate both moods at once. The teacher stretches towards
the child, physically, and in his attitude, his effort (in thought,
feeling, will) to retrieve a situation gone sour.

Memo, Dirck Roosevelt, (Fall, 1996)

There are commonalities across these three vignettes. Each teacher
tells~commands--and speaks as if entitled to, as an authority, though the
amount of telling varies from portrait to portrait. Both the fictional Horace
and the real teacher of the third vignette can reasonably be said to be failing in
these moments: a precise understanding of adverbs is not (yet?) evident, the
child's short story remains defiantly (perhaps, or sadly), in the trash. Beyond
this, the differences between the first two scenes on the one hand and the
third on the other are of more interest than the similarities. The scenes are
constructed differently, for one thing. "Horace" and "Mrs. Zajac" are, literally,

the lead characters in each of their scenes; indeed, Chris Zajac is described as

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an actress in "a role" ("in part," to be sure). These two teachers appear first,
down stage and center. The third scene, however, opens with the actions of
the "fourth grade student," to which the teacher-~as if now striding down
stage towards the student—-attempts to respond. To the extent that the much
abused "teacher-centered" versus "child-centered" distinction holds water,
the first two scenes depict teacher-centered instruction; the third may suggest
a child-centered classroom. The quality of feeling varies from scene to scene
as well. Certamly we infer, correctly, Horace's feelings of frustration-but it is
notable that "brooding darkly" has had all the feeling washed out of it--except
that in Sizer's clever handling the phrase takes in Horace, Sizer himself, and
the reader, all gloomily brooding on teaching-~but for the students the phrase
appears to be mainly an occasion to demonstrate their inability to

satisfactorily account for adverbs. Chris Zajac's feeling would appear to be
feigned: she is an actress emoting as part of her job.1 The teacher in the third
vignette, or the author of that vignette, though, appears almost preoccupied
with feeling: The student is "indignant," "angry"; the teacher is full of
"wants," including the wish to "feel successful." He is also angry, has "ugly"
thoughts, claims to "care," and virtually pleads with the child, suggesting yet
another dimension of feeling. Horace interrogates, and explicitly,
immediately, judges the adequacy of students' answers (so far, they are all
indged inadequate, though several are allowed to show some promise). Mrs.

Zajac "ha1t(s) illegal maneuvers," "like a traffic cop"; her hands are described

 

1 .
This of course would not be an entirely fair characterization, as readers of Among

Schoolchildren will know. For my purposes the fact that both "Horace" and Chris Zajac are
honorable teachers doing good work in difficult circumstances is an asset. The distinctions I am
drang are not between "good" teaching and "bad" teaching; rather, they are between, most

broadly, different views of teaching or, more narrowly, they are efforts to relocate peripheral
or neglected aspects of teaching to the center.

as ready to draw pistols at any moment. Above all, she is "very busy." The
third teacher "wants to be...responsive."

In this dissertation, I examine teaching with an eye towards that
desired quality of responsiveness. This necessarily locates me and the work
in relation to two equally important subjects of examination: the interior
state from which desiring and responding emanate, and the persons and
objects to which the teacher responds, wishes to respond, or fails to respond.
Hence, my own teaching, allowing me (partial, to be sure), access to my own
"interior states," and prolonged exposure to my students and their work, is
the research site.

Centrally, the dissertation proposes a conceptualization of teaching as
acts of attention. The goals of this (re)conceptualization are multiple. In the
first place, the concept enables me to illuminate important but under-
examined aspects of teaching--to call them from the periphery to the center of
the stage. ("Trust" between students and teachers--and its complements and
contrastsnis one of those "under-examined aspects," one I examine at length
in Chapter 3.) In the second place, more ambitiously, the concept of teaching
as acts of attention offers itself as the shift in perspective I spoke of at the
outset, a potential reorientation of our understanding of what is fundamental
to teaching. Methodologically, the concept functions both selectively and
dialectically. That is, as an organizing idea, it helps me to choose from among
the available data, and serves as an interpretive lever for examination of that
data. And the concept organizes the rhythm of the work, directing and
animating the flow of analysis now to particular, concrete events, now to

larger ideas and speculations, and back again.

 

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One place to begin the argument for this concept is through a
preliminary inquiry into the meaning of the word and the idea, "attention."

We were told of the third teacher that he

stretches towards the child, physically, and in his attitude, his
effort (in thought, feeling, will) to retrieve a situation gone sour.

This teacher, in this small drama that did in fact occur, can be said to be
attending to the child. The fact that that attention is not visibly bearing fruit
is part of the meaning of the word--that is, it is one of its myriad potentials.
As the dictionary gives it to us, "attention" (cognate with "tend" and
"tendency," a fact that will turn out to have importance) literally, originally,
means to stretch towards. It is not given that reaching or taking hold will
occur. The word long ago acquired meanings implicating an attitude of the
spirit as well as the body. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (1971),

the basic meaning of the word is:

To stretch to... hence, to direct the mind or observant faculties,
to listen, apply oneself; to watch over, minister to, wait upon,
follow, frequent; to wait for, await, expect...

Attention connotes, then, a disposition of will, mind, energy, sense
organs, and heart; as an attitude of the body it conjures up both the image of
stretching towards an object of concern, and that of the body held in reserve,
awaiting the occasion for action. Attention implies both watching out for, or
over, and waiting upon; it suggests concentration; as a sibling of tend, it
incorporates the feelings of care and the activities of caring-for or cultivating.
(These last meanings, in turn, will take us to culture and culture-making,
important topics throughout the dissertation, and central to the discussion of
Chapter 4.) As the use of "minister" (as a verb; the noun form works as

W911) in the OED definition points up, the attitude of attention paradoxically

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combines a kind of leadership and a kind of service. Finally, attention
connotes expectancy: a sense that something or someone valuable or
important will happen here, which we are called upon to notice, if need be, to

protect, and to engage.2

Establishing some theoretical context and antecedents

The concept of teaching as acts of attention, then, may serve to shape
how we look at and understand teaching. It concentrates on observing,
listening, noticing, remembering, anticipating, reflecting (in both its currently
fashionable and its more literal senses), imagining, cultivating, and
contemplating as components of teaching. In addition to these largely
receptive activities, the concept is intended to focus on doing something with
the fruits of that receptivity; specifically, it addresses creating in several
senses to be developed more fully in subsequent chapters, such as, creating
culture, making space, and helping children to do the work of culture-
making, specifically in the case of this work, writing. In these senses, the
concept relies in part on William James' "where faith in a fact can help create
the fact" (1984, p. 323; the whole essay is pertinent to my work here). All of
this is in deliberate contrast to teaching understood as consisting largely or
essentially in telling, commanding, instructing, directing, interrogating,
testing, judging, correcting, and the like. A contrast between active and
passive is not intended, though a contrast between calm and restless may be

aPPmpriate. Most succinctly, the intention is to counter the image of teaching

 

2 I follow the etymological trail a few paces further for the sake of another word. One of

attention's relatives is tendency, which can be described as an inclination, a predisposition, a
11kelihood, an attitude or orientation of the spirit or soul. (It is even perhaps, containing tend,
the attitude or fact of embodied care.) The word "attitude" has at this point made its way into
the discussion halfa dozen times. I don't think this is incidental and I would like, looking
ahead, to mark for future reference the fact that attitude is an importantly placed, significant
word in The Child and the Curriculum (Dewey, 1956b)-

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as a preternaturally busy endeavor with an image of teaching as a thoughtful
activity (not finding that phrase paradoxical) (see [Lampert, in press] and
[Schom 1983]). And, as indicated a moment ago, making space for students'
"thoughtful activity," including the activities of "observing, listening,
contemplating, making," and, centrally, imagining, is essential to and is
indeed the justification for this perspective on teaching. I will return to this
issue repeatedly. I want to stress that the images and conceptualizations I
outline here and pursue in the body of the dissertation are not designed to
eliminate "telling," etc. as elements, they are intended only to move those
familiar teaching activities to the side for the time while bringing attention to
the fore.

Conceived of in these terms, teaching is an aesthetically oriented
activity, one which might be viewed as a form of criticism in the non-
pejorative sense of acts of appraisal and appreciation. It also appears as a
psychological activity in several senses, including the literal and the
Deweyan: as work concerned with "how mind answers to mind," "soul
action," "inner attention," and "the first hand and personal play of mental
powers" (1974 , pp. 324 & 318). These terms, these "inner" or "psychological"
aSpects of teaching, will recur liberally throughout the dissertation.

What, though, gives rise to the image of the "busy" teacher, and what
more can be said about what might be gained by, at least temporarily,
displacing it with a focus on teaching as acts of attention? The busy image is
there in Horace's pedagogy as earlier shown: give directions, ask questions,

evaluate responses,3 give further instructions, all at a rapid clip, all in the

 

3 N9“? Jackson's observation (1986, e.g. pp. 66-68) that in questioning for the purposes of

evaluating teachers betray a lack of trust, are "insincere," for another glimpse of why a look at
attention in teaching may yield insights and possibilities impossible to grasp in the more
famrhar View; again, "trust" and its problems is a central theme of my Chapter 3.

service of the teacher's previously chosen destination. It is even more visible
in Chris Zajac and her "frightening" energy. It is grimly visible in Jackson's
depiction of the "the teacher, with his prescriptive dicta and his surveillance
over students' attention...the student's first 'Boss,'" and of school as a place
where students are obliged to learn "the denial of desire" and how to "falsify
behavior" (1968, pp. 31, 15, 8: 27). And it is straightforwardly visible in an
anecdote told by a colleague. She observed one of her student-teachers during
"center time" (a time when students are permitted to choose from a number
of activities and are allowed an amount of self-direction towards ends of their
own choosing). She asked why the student-teacher seemed so bored and
disconnected, apathetic. The student-teacher replied, as if with her hands still
in her pockets, that she thought of "center time" as "more or less my break
time" (K. Dunsmore, personal communication, 1997). «As if, when the
student exercises some volition and self-direction, the teacher is necessarily
out of work. Here, as with the Jackson remark it echoes, we touch on a theme
I will address by a different route later: questions of the possibilities of
schooling as fostering, or impeding, the development of democracy. And the
"busy teacher" image can be caught in the "common view of teaching as
prevention and repair/'4 a view which would seem to have little to do with
the meaning of to educate, to lead forth, to draw out.

A source or originating occasion of this expectation of busy-ness--which
the teacher tends to feel so strongly it is hardly if ever necessary for any on-
looker to propose it-can perhaps be found in a deep paradox of teaching. On
the one hand, as teachers we are supposed to possess something our students

can benefit from-we may as Jackson says be akin to "gift-givers" (1986, p. 67)--

 

4 (D. Ball, personal communication, 1997). This view assumes as its starting point the idea

that children are essentially faulty goods.

and we wish to feel needed; on the other hand, as has often been observed,
our purpose as teachers is have our usefulness outgrown, to be left behind.
Both expectations cannot be satisfied at once, nor once and for all. Pushing a
bit further, we can see that there is sadness in teaching: Though, in our
relationships with students they may or must be, in sociological terms
"primary" to us, we are necessarily "secondary" to them.5 This adds a
considerable dimension of feeling to "being left behind."6 And yet, or
therefore, there is anxiety in teaching, when we return our gaze to the idea
that students are expected to need us, that we are supposed to have something
of worth that they don't have. This leads us to look for what they don’t know
and can't do, because there we see a job of teaching to do. We worry if they
seem to understand something we have missed, if they don't seem to need

us. What am I do if I don't have anything to tell you, to show you, which I
can test you on next week? What if your behavior does not stand in need of
correction? I will have no purpose, my work will have no focus, nor
justification. This anxiety, then, puts a focus on children's inabilities and
needs, on their dependenceuwhich can be seen as precisely the thing teaching
is supposed to "remedy."

If we could look past or through the busy-ness of the teacher to the
thoughtfulness and receptivity of the teacher, we might see something of the
interior life of teaching. This, again, would be a vantage point for
"psychological observation," for "insight into soul-action"--that of the
teacher (Dewey, 1974, pp. 325 & 319). For example, to refer once more to one
Of the "under-examined" aspects of teaching I am interested in, we might

glimpse something of how the teacher experiences trust, mistrust, and doubt,

¥

5

6 (D. Labaree, personal communication, 1997).

Of course, granted a reasonable degree of psychological good health, this is also cause for
great satisfaction.

10

worry and confidence, etc., and how these play both into the overt or manifest
activities, choices of action, of teaching and into how the teacher listens and
understands, or fails to understand. Such, at any rate, is one of the aims of
this dissertation.

Looking at the teacher as one who listens, who is receptive--who is
attentive--brings up again the idea of teaching as aesthetically oriented, with a
job of teaching being to provide the student-~more accurately, the student's
work-substantive gestures of appraisal and appreciation. This is to identify
the teacher as, in part, an audience. In particular, the teacher will be the kind
of audience that artists in all fields seek: one that is responsive, willing to be
led where the artist wishes (game for "the willing suspension of disbelief"),
enthusiastic at least some of the time, but also actively intelligent and critical,
within, for the most part, the terms set by the artist's project and tradition.
This conception, again, argues for contemplation and reflection, in which the
teacher makes no haste to determine the meaning of students' work and
expressions but rather is willing to live with them and let their meanings
emerge and accrue over time. Simone Weil stresses this aspect of effortful
patience when she says, "[aJttention consists of suspending our thought,
leaving it detached, empty, and ready..." (1977, p. 49). One is ready because
one is expectant, hopeful, curious; one suspends thought «provisionally, in
order to be ready to resume thought guided by the student's productions--
because the job of attending is not to determine the object of attention but to
be alert and alive to it as it emerges, to answer it on its own grounds, the
grounds where we meet, where the child's present and future tendencies are
joined.

The idea of the teacher choosing a certain--provisional, temporary,

€Xpectant—-emptiness of thought, and the idea that the object of attention will

11

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not necessarily be the child per se but the child's representations in works
(see, e.g., Carini, 1991) brings to the fore another of the teacher's jobs within
the concept of teaching as attention. That is the job of "making space,"
perhaps, we could say, making a play space in which the child can

experiment, invent, imagine, take risks.

"The case is of child": Theory and point of view, continued

Reaching, from these last remarks, back to the three vignettes near the
start of the chapter, there are two dangers that need to be addressed. One is
the danger I have tried to vivify with discussion of the "busy-ness" of the
teacher. And that is simply to suppose that teachers and teaching are the
objects of teaching. They are not: the teacher is a means or a medium; the
student--the enhancement of the student's experience, the enabling of the
student to have transformative power over experience and the world, thus to
join and re-make the "community"--is the point.

A second danger is the one Dewey tried to talk us out of long ago, the
dichotomizing of "child-centered" and "teacher- or subject-centered"
approaches to teaching and curriculum building. In The Child and the
Curriculum, Dewey did his economical best to argue us out of the intellectual
and moral laziness involved in all dichotomous thinking and specifically
involved in the notion that we must either suppose that "life (is) petty,
narrow, and crude...the child egoistic, self-centered, impulsive..." and that
therefore, "(s)ubject matter furnishes the end, and...determines the method
(whereas) (t)he child is simply the immature being who is to be matured" or
that "the child is the starting-point, the center, and the end" (1956b, pp. 7, 8 8r
9)- He urged upon us a "reconstruction" of what is after all "a really serious

practical problem--that of interaction"--also called "due interaction," which I

12

take to be an invocation of justice--between "an immature, undeveloped
being and certain social aims, meanings, values incarnate in the matured
experience of the adult" (p. 4, emphasis added). He warned as well that such
reconstruction entailed "travail of thought" (p. 4) and then went ahead and
tried to walk us through it, asking us to understand that subject matter is not
"fixed and ready made," that the child's experience is not "something hard
and fast," but rather, "fluent [as if "experience" itself could speak: which, as I
hope to demonstrate, it can], embryonic, vital," urging us to "realize [that is,
both to see and to make true in action] that the child and the curriculum are
simply two points which define a single process" (p. 11). He developed the
idea of "the psychological" and "the logical" (e.g. p. 10) as characterizing those
two points, instructed us on the usefulness and beauty of "maps" while
insisting that "(t)he map is not a substitute for personal experience(, it) does
not take the place of an actual journey" (p. 20). The purpose of the map, the
purpose of subject matter, is to give "past experience in that net form which
renders it most available and most significant, most fecund for future
eXperience" (p. 21). Subject matter--hence presumably the whole apparatus of
the classroom-«has no justification except insofar as it acquires "significance"
and fertility in the life of the child. Thus the teacher's "problem is that of
inducing a vital and personal experiencing" (p. 23). Dewey never uses a word
like "vital" (like "fecund" before it) carelessly. He means us to understand
that the child's experience in the classroom, if it is educationally, morally,
politically justifiable, must have aspects of urgency, even of necessity, and it
must actually be life-producing which is in Dewey's terms to say, productive
of ever richer, more significant, communicable human experience. He points
out, like Rousseau before him, that "(w)e get used to the chains we wear" (p.

28): we get used to trivial, insignificant, "deadening," isolating experience or

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substitutes for experience. "The danger here is not a merely theoretical one.
We are practically threatened on all sides" (p. 24); "evil" is the word
repeatedly used to describe the result of getting all this wrong (e. g. p. 24).7 (As
with most philosophers, we owe it to Dewey to take his choices of words
utterly seriously. If we do that, the passion in this apparently dry and
awkward prose leaches out of the page and into the reader.)

Dewey concludes by addressing the problem he initially set out to
address: "How, then, stands the case of Child vs. Curriculum? What shall
the verdict be?" (p. 30). (That this is metaphorically posed as a legal matter
supports again the suggestion, that this is a matter of justice.) At this point,
Dewey bears close watching. I will quote at some length. He begins to answer

his question as we would expect:

The radical fallacy in the original pleadings with which we set
out is the supposition that we have no choice save either to
leave the child to his (sic) own unguided spontaneity or to
inspire direction upon him from without... There is no such
thing as sheer self-activity possible--because all activity takes
place in a medium, in a situation, with reference to its
conditions. But, again, no such thing as imposition of truth
from without, as insertion of truth from without, is possible...
Now, the value of the formulated wealth of knowledge that
makes up the course of study is that it may enable the educator
to determine the environment of the child, and thus by .
indirection to direct. Its primary value, its primary indication, is
for the teacher, not for the child. It says to the teacher: Such and
such are the capacities, the fulfilments, in truth and beauty and
behavior, open to these children. Now see to it that day by day
the conditions are such that their own activities move inevitably
in this direction, towards such culmination of themselves. Let
the child's nature fulfill its own destiny...

MOInents later, Dewey begins his final, very short paragraph:

k , " n 0
7 WhiCh is thus another opportunity to assert that the "child" vs. "curriculum. dichotomy is
a surface manifestation of the deeper problem: the failure to properly value ordinary

experience, Which as I read Dewey and as I read the facts, is a failure to fulfill or live up to
emocracy's promises.

14

 

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The case is of Child. It is his present powers which are to assert
themselves; his present capacities which are to be exercised; his
present attitudes which are to be realized.

(pp. 30-31)

Having undone ("deconstructed," we might say) the false dichotomy
calling for a choice between the primacy and determinacy of the child or the
curriculum, he concludes, "the case is of Child."8 This somewhat wily
pronouncement leaves us with a challenge: How are we to understand
"subject matter" and "medium...situation" in these ways, as "indications"

(not determinations, not prescriptions) of "the capacities...in truth and beauty
and behavior" open to our children?9 Joining the long line of people who
have tried to make not only theoretic but, as he urges, practical use of Dewey's
work, I propose that the concept of teaching as acts of attention may be of
assistance, by virtue, for instance, of the stress this perspective places on the
interior ("psychological") activity of the teacher. That interior activity
centrally includes the interpretive pedagogical work explicitly called for by
Dewey when he speaks of "indications" (pointings, showings, proclamations),
when he writes that subject matter "says to the teacher: Such and such are the
capacities..."10 The concept of teaching as attention should also be of help in
taking up Dewey's challenges here in that it is a concept which places

"determining the environment of the child" close to the heart of teaching,

g

8 Notice that the title of the essay is dyadicnchild and curriculum-mot triadic: "teacher" is

omitted. Cohen (personal communication) deems this an odd omission, as in one sense it

certainly is (for Dewey is certainly not developing a view of schooling that Will diminish the
teacher's practical-or moral, or epistemological--importance; quite to the contrary). In
another sense, though, the omission can be seen as a reminder that the teacher's is a service job,
the teacher is, as previously said, "merely" a means, an occasion.

9 Dewey is echoing Keats here--"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all/ Ye know on
earth, and all ye need to know""--a fact that Art as Experience, which quotes Keats liberally,
will make clear is not insignificant.

1" Compare Ball in the same spirit, as I read her, (e.g., 1993) on what it takes to "hear the
math in the child."

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understanding "environment" to have moral as well as aesthetic,

intellectual, social, and material dimensions.

I have on several occasions made reference to the aesthetic as a
dimension of teaching, have supposed that criticism understood as "acts of
appreciation and appraisal" is an element of attentive teaching, have just
underscored an interpretive activity crucial to teaching understood in these
ways, and have been pleased to have cause to quote some of Dewey's
references to "beauty" and to art. I elaborate on these and related ideas and
issues in the chapters to come, but it is appropriate to anticipate here by saying
a little bit about why I will find it useful to consider the work of children
much as one might consider adult artistic productions.11 In Art as Experience,

a bedrock text, I might say, for my project, Dewey asserts that,

In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and
unhindered communication between man and man (szc) in a

world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.
(1934, pp. 104-5).

Early in the book, he has devoted an essential chapter to the
transformation of "experience" (the mass of "doings and undergoings"
comprising human life) into "an experience"--a crucial distinction and
transformation, the function of which is essentially to give pattern, order,
Stability, and significance (and to leave behind the literal and the

autObiographical, to venture into the world of potentiality) where there was

K

11 This will “Of be quite to claim that all of this work has a clairnon our aesthetjctattentlon
and interest independent of our work as teachers-though I will claim that some 0 i
essentially does.

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none before, that is, to make out of the flow of experience, art, to make out of
the inchoate and the private, the communicable and the communicated.
From this point of VieW, the purpose of subject matter is to enable students to
transform their experience, to achieve, "in a world full of gulfs and walls,"
"unhindered communication." (And, as we will see in Chapter 4 especially,
students' transformed, ordered experience as art can in turn become "subject
matter.") If, as David Hawkins would point out, you don't have subject
matter, you can't have communication (see 1974a”). But subject matter--the
"acquiring" and "mastery" of subject matter--is, again, not an end in itself; its
purpose is to help the child achieve "fecundity" of experience, to achieve
significant communication. Contemporary philosopher Elaine Scarry, in
another text that has become fundamental to my thinking in this project,
makes the same point in different language when she says that a poem "exists
not for its own sake but to be read...the poet is working not to make the
artifact (which is just the midpoint in the total action), but to remake human
sentience..." (1985, p. 307, emphasis added). From here, two points emerge:
One, the attentive teacher (if he or she is a possibility) will expect to have his
or her capacity for feeling--his or her compassion, his or her ability to
perceive--re-made by the works of children, and that will be a democratic
Preject; Two, a purpose of teaching will be clarified or highlighted: to enable
P90ple to achieve these kinds of power in and for their own and each other's

BXperience, ‘3 In the body of this dissertation, the locus for the development

\

12 Also see (Hawkins, 1974), a very useful critique of The Child and the Curriculum, which
l‘laWkins also sees as making "a rather awesome demand" on us as teachers and theorrzers of
teaching (p. 173). .. . th
1 Perhaps here it is well to recall that both "experience" and "experiment are rootetc-lh in e
word peril. (That is, "to have power in and for" another's experience 15 to render the 0 ter
person Vulnerable, or, more accuratelynas I discuss in Chapter 3--for the other tof aclcieIiDn
erability,") Also see Dewey (again from Art as ExperiencE): "It IS the fate E tabel'ongs to
Cl"Baillie [i.e., an experience transforming human person]...that it cannot secure w a g

 

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and representation of that kind of power, and the source of remaking, will be

the writing of children.

Organization of the dissertation

In Chapter 1, I have attempted a philosophical and theoretical
overview of the dissertation. I have been particularly concerned to introduce
and begin to develop the concept of teaching as acts of attention, and to
suggest some of what this concept may afford (e.g., a "psychological" view of
teaching, a glimpse into its interior; a further contribution to the already
significant body of discussion and example of teaching as a "reflective" or a
"thinking" practice). I have been at pains to say that, while I propose this
concept in contrast to the image and implied concept of teaching as "always
busy," I do not intend an active/ passive dichotomy, nor do I mean to replace--
but only to add to, and for a space to displace--more familiar views of
teaching. I trust the following chapters substantiate these claims. I have also
attempted to situate the idea of teaching as acts of attention within a reading
of Dewey, specifically, his account of the child, the curriculum, and the
interpretive teacher in The Child and the Curriculum and his connections of
art, the universal human capacity to transform experience into forms of
lasting worth, and democratic possibility in Art as Experience. He will be a
recurrent and I hope a familiar figure in subsequent chapters.

In Chapter 2, I introduce the reader to my primary inquiry Site; my
teatCiting of a fourth grade "writing workshop." I provide an overview of

Some of the literature on this topic, including some critiques of my own. I

 

\

it Without an adventure in a world that as a whole it does not own and to which it has pfhe
[lam/e title. .Whenever the organic impulse exceeds the limits of the body [1464, Til 0 If to
tune] it finds itself in a strange world and commits in some measure the fortune o e 88

external circumstance" (p. 59)-

18

 

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outline a theory of narrative and of fiction and critique the emphasis on
"personal experience narrative" in so many contemporary accounts of writing
pedagogy. I then begin to expand and make available the idea of teaching as
acts of attention by endeavoring a conception and a performance of a
"sympathetic reading" of fiction written by a fourth grade child. I surface, and
challenge, a likely reading of this work as excessively "violent"; in particular,
I criticize what I see as typical "autobiographical" or "literal" readings of
children's work. I offer instead a reading stressing this work's ability to
contribute to adults' (persons') sensibilities and understandings and propose
that classrooms should be places "safe for dangerous ideas."

In Chapter 3, I examine at length the writings of one fourth grade boy,
our interactions, and my year-long (and subsequent) efforts to understand
him and his work, and to devise appropriate teaching "moves," including
interpretive ones. I come to argue that a student's doubt of the teacher may
be a healthy, educative phenomenon, and I attempt to weave together
literary / aesthetic appreciations of this child's work with philosophic
investigations of the phenomena of trust and doubt with some excursions
into the psychology of trust, doubt, and growth.

In Chapter 4, the imagination, always important in this project, is
named by children and becomes the central phenomenon of interest;
similarly, an important part of the context for me, that of the appropriate
relationships between schooling and teaching and democratic principles and
aims is also explicitly identified and brought to the fore. In this chapter, the
site for the inquiry is poetry--some produced by students of mine, some
produced by well known adult writers. The creation of "democratic culture"
is the immodest subject of the chapter, in which ideas about art assume

increasing pertinence. Discussion ranges--even more than in the previous

19

chapters--from the nearly microscopic detail to concerns so large as to almost
defy honest talk.

Each of the three central chapters concludes with an explicit account of
how I see the effort to do and understand teaching through the lens of
"attention" to be visible in the stories and interpretations I offer. It is also the
case that the manifest activities of teaching become more visible as the
chapters succeed one another.

In Chapter 5, I review the concept of teaching as attention as it might
appear after dwelling in the concrete detail of the stories which have
intervened since the present chapter. I also briefly sketch out further
implications, specifically implications for teaching and for the education of
teachers, suitable I hope for further inquiry.

In Appendix 1, I discuss my research methods and rationale.

20

Chapter 2
"There the kid was, stranded in a car":
Reading the Fictions of Children as if they Mattered1

As this is written, the world is full of the clang of contending armies.
--John Dewey, Democracy 8* Education (1966, p. 146).

The fictional: Some theory

Children's writings typically elicit a narrow range of adult responses.
Sometimes we are charmed, though perhaps not deeply or memorably.
Sometimes we are dismayed. For long stretches, we become preoccupied with
the mechanics of children's writing: its spelling and punctuation, more

N H

ambitiously, its syntax. In recent decades, "writing process, writing

workshop," and similar approaches have been gaining in popularity.2 These

 

1 The work in this chapter was supported in part by the Michigan Partnership for a New
Education and the Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, Michigan State
University. The opinions expressed are my own.

The bulk of this chapter appeared under the same title in Curriculum Inquiry (28),1. © 1998
The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the annual meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, New Orleans, April 1994.

For many helpful comments on this work, I am gratefully indebted to Deborah Ball, Alyjah
Byrd, Susan Donnelly, Jay Featherstone, Sylvia Rundquist, and several anonymous reviewers.

2 Though it seems possible the appeal has crested.

Lucy Calkins (1986; 1991) and Donald Graves (1994; 1983) are two of the most well known
contemporary proponents of these approaches, approaches which value the development of
individual "voice," place considerable faith in the child or novice writer's capacities to make
worthwhile selections of content and form, and assume the importance of a "real" audience.
There is also a growing literature expressing skepticism, at least, about many of the
assumptions, claims, and implications of these approaches to school writing. Trenchant,
though often sympathetic, criticism was offered some time ago by Barrs (1983) and Delpit
(1986, 1988, 1992), joined more recently by Lensmire (1993, 1994a), Dressman (1993, 1995),
Stotsky, (1995), and Tobin (1995), among others. There are three main thrusts to these critiques:
that "writing workshop" advocates are oblivious to social (racial, economic, class, and
cultural) biases and inequities built into, or at least very typically present, in these
approaches, and-a related but distinguishable complaint--that these approaches
sentimentalize childhood; finally, several commentators criticize what they see as an over-
valuation of the "personal experience narrative" and corresponding under-valuation of other
genres, including fiction.

The work of Calkins, Graves, et. al., has important antecedents in, for example, the work of
Kenneth Koch (1971, 1974) and Teachers and Writers Collaborative, both of whom came to

21

more ambitious and generous positions stress young writers' capacities as
generators of ideas, themes, and forms in the service of the writers' own
interests and experiences. Such approaches encourage us to be surprised,
startled, even challenged by children's writings; they help us to appreciate the
linked development of technical command and substantive concerns, and
they remind us that "real writing" generally exists in relationship to an
audience (though that audience may be provisional, hoped for, unrealized).
Importantly, these approaches honor children's choices of topic and form.
However a tendency also exists to treat child-writing, whether or not
presented in the first person, as if it were essentially autobiographical, a more
or less straightforward rendering of personal experience. I have observed this
tendency--so pervasive as to be nearly invisible--with experienced teachers,
with undergraduates studying to become teachers, and even with parents
embarrassed by the quantity of blood and violence in their own child's

writing.3 The literalistic tendency to read children's writing as if it simply

 

attention during the sixties. Similarly serious attention has been paid to the writing of older
students by Mike Rose (1989, for example), and Peter Elbow (1973, 1986). The so-called whole
language "movement" is clearly part of this context as well.

And Michael Armstrong's appreciative curiosity, tactful analysis, and graceful prose set an
extremely high standard for anyone writing about children's writing (Armstrong 1980; see
especially the aptly titled "The Literary Art of Children," pp. 10—52; also see "The Leap of
Imagination" [1998]) .

The larger tradition, from my perspective, is that of "progressive education," with its
emphasis on humans as active shapers of experience and authors of inquiry. The giant figure
here of course is John Dewey, speaking at the turn of the century of the need for an education
addressed to "our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce" (1956a, p. 26).
Art as Experience (1934) is for me an especially important source. Also significant to me here is
the work of Patricia Carini and other colleagues of mine at the Prospect School (see, for
example, Carini's discussion of children as "makers of works" [1991]; also see her essay, "Dear
Sister Bess" [1994], in which she investigates-with different inflections but many overlapping
concerns—a theme I take up, the teacher’s work as a reader).

3 Indeed, the very popularity of the "writing workshop" approach may have something to
do with this. The literalistic tendency, and a kind of apprehensiveness about fiction, is
discernible in the writing of a number of its advocates. In The Art of Teaching Writing
(Calkins, 1986), the writing of fiction is addressed awkwardly, as an afterthought; in Living
Between the Lines (Calkins, 1991), it is hardly possible to find a sample of child-writing that
is not in the first person, not explicitly derived from an actual incident in the writer's life. The

22

 

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opens a window onto the facts of the writer's life is greatest when the content
is disturbing. And this is understandable: clearly an important part of a
teacher's duty is to consider whether, for example, a child who writes about
child abuse may be representing actual, firsthand or near-to-hand, experience,
and is therefore in need of concrete help, not literary guidance.

But it is also the case that children often, even typically, choose to write
stories. In my experience with elementary school youngsters story“ is the
genre of choice and "once upon a time" has yet to lose its fundamental
appeal. Child-writers demonstrate repeatedly, by the formal, narrative
conventions they employ, and often by diction and tone as well, that they are

well aware of operating in the realm of fiction--a place where tales are made,

 

"personal narrative" and the "memoir" seem to be the genres of choice for Calkins (see, e.g.,
1991, p. 165f.). I maintain that this preference does not necessarily coincide with children's
preferences and proclivities in a context of choice. Barrs (1983) develops this argument in
sometimes devastating detail. And Power (1995) similarly critiques the "confessional" strand
in Calkins' work. More recently, both Calkins (1986, 1994) and, especially, Graves do give more
attention to fiction. In his more recent work, Graves (1994) agrees that "(o)f all the genres,
fiction is usually (children's) favorite" (p. 287). But he continues with apparent wariness: "Of
all the genres...fiction is the most demanding. This does not mean that children should be held
back from writing fiction. Rather, it means that we need to do much more to help them than we
may have realized in the past" (p. 287). As he continues—in the sole chapter devoted to fiction
in this very large book—he stresses the difficulties of writing fiction. In contrast, though not
necessarily in contradiction, I will take the impulse to fictionalize to be a fundamental human
property and a resource for teachers.

Wariness about the fictional and the fantastic has a long history, from which (otherwise)
progressive pedagogues are by no means immune. The "Bank Street Readers," for example,
eschewed all deviations from "the real"; in The Little Red Schoolhouse (DeLima, 1942), a fine
documentary history of a progressive school, there is some wonderful (and some less wonderful)
writing by children, but realism is absolutely the order of the day. Chukovsky's From Two to
Five (1963) contains hilarious, and sad, accounts of some Soviet educators' disapproval of fairy
tales and nonsense verse: literature, they claimed, which had no place in the life of the young
child, who would be corrupted by it into mistaking the imaginary for the real.

4 Neither "short story" nor "novel," as the terms are employed in discussion of adult writers'
work, seems, on the whole, quite right for discussing young writers' work (which possesses
elements of both). The fairy or folk tale is, I think, a more apt prototype. "Romance" is a
candidate too—possibly the best of all. I stick, for the most part, to "story" as the most basic
term, except when genre distinctions seem specifically helpful for analyzing and appreciating
particular pieces of children's writing.

23

 

I."

 

 

 

 

 

and the facts of the world not merely recorded but subjected to transformative
order or disarray.5

In this chapter, I want to claim a larger space for the fictional--a space
larger than that often provided for it in classrooms, and in the literature on
children's writing. I propose that fiction is a site, or an occasion, for the
productive, sometimes disruptive, educative encounter of the child-writer
and the world of culture, imagination, morality, hope, and doubt. I argue that
an important part of our jobs as teachers in this context is to be alert,
appreciative, self-questioning readers of children's stories. I claim that the
narrative act is the essential, generative, meaning-making act: and if this is
so, and if we take seriously much of what we claim to believe about the act of
reading, than as teachers and readers part of our work is to make meaning
with the child-writer. To support these claims, I show a child-writer at work
on the craft of fiction and I suggest some appropriate readings that respect the
fictional character of his work, readings that seek to be true to the idea that
"right reading" is neither capricious nor passive, but is an active engagement
with the possibilities of meaning provided by an author. I do not wish to
simply discount the value of the first-person, autobiographical narrative; I do
want to propose that we do better at recognizing and appreciating the
fictional, and to provoke some discussion of when readings that stress the

fictive impulse might be the most pedagogically just, and useful, readings.6

 

5 Harold Rosen-whose work I find indispensable—offers several telling examples of
children's inclinations towards the fictional (1986). Barrs too-(1983, e.g., pp. 836 and 837)--
provides confirming observations, as can many other teachers and parents. And Lensmire
(1994a, e.g., p. 90f.) observes a preference for fiction, in an analysis stressing psychological and
sociological factors.

6 I hope my use of "just" will be validated in due course. Meanwhile, though, a criticism that
could be fairly—justly--leveled at excessive emphasis on the "personal experience narrative" is
that it invites us to be careless of children's (and families') privacy. A continuing search for
the "authentic"-the more painful the experience, the better, from this point of view—-
especially when it is relatively powerful adults, teachers, asking relatively powerless
children to provide it has, I think, something distinctly unseemly about it. Power (1995)--and

24

Finally, I suggest that such readings, through their capacity to force a
reevaluation of experience and their creation of a public space occupied by
writer and readers, have an implicitly social, indeed political, import.
Initially, though, I need to stipulate some of what I mean by "fiction" and
offer a brief account of the reader's role in encountering fiction.

At a time when literary theory is remarkably abundant, and remarkably
contentious, this is doubtless a foolhardy task, but I don't see any fair way
around it. Two well-regarded students of language provide reliable and, I
hope, unexceptionable, points of orientation. The lexicographer Eric Partridge
traces the etymology of "fiction," finding that its Latin root means "to model
in clay," from which follows, "to fashion or form, and finally to invent,
imagine..." (1983).7 And Jerome Bruner observes that, despite "the
specialization of ordinary languages in establishing binary contrasts...none
impose(s) a once-for-all, sharp grammatical or lexical distinction between true
stories and imaginative ones..." "Truth and possibility," he goes on to say,
"are inextricable in narrative" (1990, pp. 52, 53). These observations, in
conjunction with each other, allow us to take in the most significant features
of the terrain: On the one hand, fiction is a making, more pointedly, a
making up, a work of the synthetic imagination; on the other hand, "nothing

can come of nothing," as the fool said to King Lear8--the fictional sculpting

 

by her report, Donald Murray--has a similar reaction.

7 This movement from the concrete to the intangible-or from the material to the
metaphoric-occurs repeatedly in the history of European, if not all, languages. Readers of
fiction are expected to make this move with narrated events, not just individual words.

8 It may be helpful to imagine in what contexts would it be helpful to ask, "Is King Lear
true?" What happens when we ask if it is "possible, or plausible?," and what if we ask if it is
"false, or a lie?" The play is full of great truths and facts of a sort--jealousy is poison, honest
love often goes unrecognized, the destruction of linguistic and of civil order are connected, and so
on—but as a whole it is a fiction. And so on.

Philosopher Elaine Scarry—who will become increasingly important to me in subsequent
chapters-will come to say, "When one day the nature of human creation is fully unfolded, a
new language will accomodate a long array of distinctions that are now nearly invisible, and
that only begin with the profound difference between a creation and a lie, a fiction and a fraud"

25

must begin with the stuff of fact. Furthermore, in stories, we are interested
equally in "truth" and "possibility"; neither we nor our language, speaking
us as we try to speak it, knows exactly when and where, nor how, to
distinguish between them.9
Nor do we necessarily care to. It is the imperious play of imagination
on fact, imagination on imagination, word upon word upon world, which
animates us as we partake of story. Indeed, we can think of fiction as an arena
of free play--dramatic play being the prime example of this--though "play," as
Vygotsky (1966) among others reminds us, does not mean "without rules."10
In the familiar childhood plays of "house," "school," "forts," and all their
many and more particularized off—shoots, there is never just one thing going
on. We may observe startling feats of mimicry in which a parent or a
teacher's exact gesture and tone are perfectly replicated; we may hear
impressive acts of retentive listening, in which vocabulary, diction, and
actual dialogue of characters from favored stories (books, movies, tales told
aloud) are borrowed wholesale. We are likely to see ordinary objects, often
discarded ones-cardboard boxes, sticks, bits of clothing--transformed into
miniinalisitc but evocative props. We will certainly also see actions and hear
Words that have never before happened, at least not in the children's

experience. If we watch closely, we will observe both preexisting agreements

 

 

(Scarry, 1985, p. 150).

And so we could return to "autobiographical" readings and the "personal experience
narrative," and say that autobiographical stories too are constructions, selections, chosen
rcpresentations of the self-mot quite "the self itself." Rather than treating children's fictions
as if they must "really" be true life stories, then, we could ask why we should take the "true
life stories" at face value. But that is not the job of this piece.

1" Gregory Bateson~(1972)--is one of those others. I am indebted to Eliot Singer (personal
Communication, 1995) for helping me to see that the connection between play and story is not
self-evident, and for his own worthy articulations of the links. Nor can I fail to mention
(though he did not get play altogether right) the man who proposed "that every child at play
behaves like a creative writer" and that "a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a

continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood" (Freud, 1995, pp.
143, 152).

26

 

and the development of new ones, concerning what kinds of things particular

characters may, and may not, do and say, valid and invalid uses of props,
specified powers belonging to specified characters, and so on. And all of these
things will be going on together, woven into an experience that its
participants find coherent and engrossing. In other words, there will be lots
of pieces of ordinary life, cultural inheritances of many sorts, long-standing
and novel conventions governing the participants, and invention, both as to
some particular words and actions and as to the overall selection, rejection,
and combining of the elements. Ideas and energy will generate the play, and
result from it. All of this is true of stories too, in terms both of the
relationship between author, plot, character, and genre, and the relationship
between reader and story, though stories are significantly different from play
in their tangible residue.

Entering the fictional world, we feel ourselves to be in the presence of
invention. Much may be familiar, or much strange—-a ratio that will typically
change, in one direction or the other, over the course of a good story--but the
sense that the imagination has been at work already, conjuring possibilities,
making things up, will be palpable. This signal difference between fictional
and nonfictional genres seems so obvious as to hardly deserve emphasis, but
it does-~in part, to repeat, because the distinction is simultaneously obvious
and muddled. "Nothing," indeed, "can come of nothing": the fictional world
necessarily shares features of our world, including signs and symbols and
other "stuff," both "natural" and "cultural." But these are combined and
revised, and often intensified, in ways that may be idealized or fantasized or
may take on the quality of a nightmare. They have a logical plausibility,
though the logic may be that of the psyche in fear, in exultation, in hope--

intermingled, most likely, with the mundane, with elements of the psyche

27

 

".

‘v

 

 

that daily undergoes school or work or family or state. There can be no sharp
dividing line between the fictional and the "actual" world as far as features or
activities are concerned; the fiction writer has no resources to draw upon
other than the ones we all possess. The nine year old who asks, "but is it
true? did Hercules really exist?,"11 is asking a question that is at the same
time naive and correct. If there was no room for confusion about such things,
fiction would have no claim on our attentions. The fictional part of story
craft lies much more in the employment of language and form which seduce
our attention, and the knitting together of incident in ways which stimulate,
provoke, and ultimately please by their resolution (or by the significant
character of their irresolution), than in the inventiveness spent on the
discrete elements of the plot. In many traditional forms of fiction--(a
capacious category: think of Tristram Shandy)—-one source of our pleasure as
readers lies in the ways in which we remember and are reminded, and allow
ourselves and are allowed to half forget, that we are in the presence of
invention. If we had all awareness or all forgetfulness of the made--fictional--
nature of the story, the pleasure and sense of emancipation mingled with
concern that a good story provides would be much diminished.
What truly sets fiction apart from daily life is not any special property
of the specific scenes it gives us; rather, it is the fact of those scenes (made,
recalled, recombined-mo matter: chosen) being subjected to order--their

"beginning, middle, and end-ness," we might say.”- That order, that ability to

g

11 A type of question that will, in my experience, persist well into the elementary school
Years if it is not-as it too frequently is-met with instant correction, not infrequently
disdainful, and even derisive.

12 So I feel confident in asserting that my occasional movement back and forth between
"story," "fiction," and "narrative" is not, as it may appear, slippery or evasive. On the one
hand, "beginning, middle, and end-ness" is the essential common ingredient to any reasonable
meaning ofany of these words (notwithstanding the ways in which "modernist" and / or "post-
modernist" work may strive mightily to resist these features: resistance which would be
meaningless and indeed invisible without recognition of those very features); on the other

28

 

"see how things come out," and to see something of their origins is a property
of art—-and religion--but not of the continual flux of daily life. This order is
the "value added" of the human imagination.13 Meaning, in other words, is a

product of the imagination-~which does not mean it is a lie.
The relationship between literature and "the real world" is
"problematic," indeed. This is not a startling observation. What's important
to keep in mind is that as ordinary readers, we appreciate and manage this
problematic relationship all the time, as do children. The excessively
literalistic reading is a special peculiarity of teachers reading children, whereas
the playing with the lack of clear demarcation—-the pleasurable tensions of
doubt and possibility, which can become the challenges of being implicated--is
the common property of readers (and listeners) everywhere. "Was Hercules
real?" is a question to be treated with respect14 because the possibility of
Hercules killing his teacher in a rage, for example, blundering dangerously,
"not knowing his own strength," and so on--to mention those possibly less
familiar parts of the story that fourth graders of mine found immediately
interesting, and uneasy-making--is exactly what makes his story meaningful
and compelling. Dismiss the question as childish or silly and you have

dismissed that potential for meaning. The move from literal plausibility to

‘—

hand, in generally preferring "fiction," I am deliberately accentuating the "made-ness," the
invention of what goes on within the structure.

13 There are, of course, works of art that refuse, or try to refuse, the privilege of granting order.
But these works take their meaning from the tension between "actuality" and "art": they could
not exist without a tradition of order-giving art against which (vainly?) to rebel. In "Texts for
Nothing," Beckett‘s narrator insists, "a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I
made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough"
(1995, p. 116). The futility of this resistance is unmistakable, and moving.

14 And not just from nine year olds. "Real naiveté is precious," according to Clara Park. In her
marvelous essay, "Rejoicing to Concur with the Common Reader," she goes on to quote a
community college student: "Mrs. Park. We've read what Homer says about the afterlife, and
what Plato says, and now we're reading what Dante says and they're all different. Mrs. Park.
Which one of them is true?" (1991, pp. 1-2), a question she uses to launch one of her own, "(h)ow

would we teach literature if we were in fact convinced...that it can matter in the lives of our
students?" (p. 5).

29

 

 

~;

 

 

metaphoric truth will occur in time, and the power of the metaphoric will be
greater if some shadow of the horror of actual possibility lingers.

"Pity and fear" remain among the most welcome gifts of fiction.
Glimpses of possible meaning, the chance to recognize aspects of one's own
experience in the well imagined drama of other experience, the prospect of
another set of human relationships--all are offered to the reader. But the
reader pays a price of admission: we must enter the fictional world on its
terms, we must treat it as if it could be. We must be prepared for some truth.
Otherwise, no recognition is possible, and the fictional world is not animated,
as it must be, by the reader’s imagination working in concert--even if
sometimes unwilling concert--with the author's. Again, it is not the task of
fiction to offer us a wholly alien world; rather, its job is to force upon us

some recognition--it is to make us say, "Here are some things that are true
about my day-to-day world, though perhaps I have not thought of them
before, or for some time," or, "Yes, I too have had dreams, or fantasies, or
nightmares like this." The fictional world discloses to us, if we let it,
commonalities, places where our various individual continents touch shores,
share horizons. Without recognition, there could be no reading. (Or, as
Walter Benjamin observes, the crucial thing about the multiplicity of human
languages is the fact of translation--imperfect, to be sure, but actual [1969, p.
72].)

There is risk here, as in any project entailing self-knowledge, as in any
relationship. We have many ways of speaking of how reading is an active,
even vigorous, relationship, one in which the reader undergoes the chance of
being implicated, or "rewritten," by the text. Rosenblatt, following Dewey,
refers to reading as a "transaction" (1978). Scholes tells us, "to read rightly we

must start to write ourselves. We shall have to add something to (a) text in

30

 

order to read it" (1989, p. 5). "Reading," he goes on to assert, "is not just a
matter of standing safely outside texts, where their power cannot reach us. It
is a matter of entering, of passing through the looking glass and seeing
ourselves on the other side" (p. 27). My current favorite picture of the
relationship between reader and story comes from a writer who is both a
novelist and a teacher. In his book, Reads Like a Novel, Daniel Pennac recalls

the early "instruction" in reading the parents gave to their child.

We opened him to the infinite diversity of things imaginary,
initiated him into the joys of static travel, endowed him with
ubiquity, delivered him from Chronos, plunged him into the
fabulously populated solitude which is a reader's. The stories we
read to him were swarming with brothers, sisters, parents, ideal
doubles, guardian angels...who, for their part, were struggling
with their own ogres, and so found refuge in the worried
beatings of his heart. He'd become, as a reader, their
reciprocating angel. Without him, their world didn't exist;
without them, his own world remained to him hopelessly
impenetrable. He thus discovered the paradoxical virtue of
reading, which consists in abstracting us from the world, to let us

find a meaning in it.
(1994, pp. 9-10)

That is one kind of reading-idealized, yet very real. It bears some
relation to ways we sometimes think of reading when we talk about what we
want to have happen for our students as readers (though no doubt
"constructivism" is more safely dry than "reciprocating angel"). It bears, as far
as I can tell, no relationship to the ways in which we customarily read what
our students write. Much of our training-—and, it must be admitted, many of
our inclinations as well-~steers us in other directions. We look, often, for
faults~which is, too often to say, to the places where we see a job for
ourselves, our job being to fix, to add, to correct, to bring something new to

the picture, to do something the student, we think, or hope, could not do

31

 

without us. With the best intentions, we often look to generic features: is

there "expression" in the prose, is there plenty of "description," are there
"characters, setting, goals, obstacles, and resolutions"? There is nothing
wrong with any of this, up to a point, except that this "busy-ness" is both too
much and not enough: the implied treaty, the mutually obliging transaction,
between writer and reader is left out of account. When we want to praise, we
also look for the familiar-which is not at all the same as saying, we look at
ourselves, look to see if we can recognize ourselves in the crazy mirror of the
work.

The literalistic, "autobiographical" reading of children's writing-—
regardless of the genre chosen by the child--again, more often than not, fails
the test of "right reading." When teachers (and psychologists) read children's
writing as if it must be a more or less decodable transcription of the child's
"real life experiences," we are, I argue, being far more nai‘ve, with far less
justification, than the child who asks of Hercules' exploits and sufferings,
"but is it true?" It seems odd that people whose business is childhood should
take such narrow, unresponsive views of children's capacities. For it is not at
all clear that what I'm calling "autobiographical" readings are, pedagogically
speaking, the most fertile (always allowing for the possibility, which certainly
happens, that a child-author is "sending a message" calling for direct, practical
response). We can, that is, think of the author as a collection of biographical
facts, a series of life experiences with an end point marked (for the reader's
purposes, though not the teacher's) by production of a particular text. We can
also think of the author as a maker--that is, a person who thinks and has
ideas (sees possibilities and meanings), a person who shapes ideas and events
in linguistic, narrative, form with some consciousness of a hearer or a reader

whose response is of some interest. From the perspective which takes

32

author-as-maker (again, not necessarily exclusive of consideration of the
author's biographical facts), we gain access to the idea of craft as something
which may be open to teacherly intervention and support, and content as
something which may be susceptible to teacherly thought, productive of

teacherly imagination.15 (Of course, "teacher" in these instances can be

H H H H

replaced or joined by "colleague, classmate, peer.") In stressing the
possibility that a child's writing may be productive of thought for a teacher,
and of genuine "literary" interest to a teacher, I am not, I think, indulging in a
sentimental egalitarianism: I am Romantic, if that is the word, enough to
believe that no generation of adults has reached an acme of knowledge and
understanding such that we can reasonably and responsibly suppose that the
duty of children is first to master all that "we" know before getting around to
knowing anything for themselves; I am sufficiently committed to the idea of
inquiry and the possibility of being educated that I think it is reasonable and
appropriate for teachers and students both to approach the world as learners;
but I am working on flatter ground here. I understand children to be
continually engaged in creating and shaping meaning in language, typically
in narrative form;16 I try to take seriously the idea that literary meaning is a
product of the encounter between reader and text, a product made possible by,
but not guaranteed by, the author. If these assumptions are correct, and if part
of our job as teachers is (1) to respond to and try to further children's efforts to
make meaning, and (2), more narrowly, to help them be literate, then it is

sensible to explore deliberately our roles as readers of children's texts. I try

here to make a case for and to do a piece of such exploration.

_¥

'5 And in both these kinds of "access" we have, certainly, been enormously aided by the work
0f Graves, Calkins, et. al., though the particular kinds of "teacherly thought...(and)
imagination" I am exploring here do not seem to me to be a feature of these authors' work.

'6 Brunet argues that from as early as eighteen months a child's "leaps forward in speech
were fueled by a need to construct meaning, more particularly narrative meaning" (1990, p. 89).

33

Fiction: A stab at a "close" or "sympathetic" reading

I move now to a presentation and close reading of several pieces by a
nine year old (I am a white male) whom I taught a number of years ago. I
propose that if we are to give a fair reading to this work, we must do several
things more or less at once. We must grant the possibility that his writing
deserves to be treated as fiction. Doing this, as teachers, we will want to
remind ourselves from time to time what pleasures, possibilities, forms of
command, fiction provides for the writer. And we must do the real work of
reading: making, or "constructing," as we like to say, meaning with the
writer, not standing safely apart from the text. This means admitting the
possibility that the world he narrates is the world we, too, live in--not merely
a private one, not merely the facts or fantasies of his life, but some of the facts
and fantasies of our own. I argue that one reason for us, as teachers, to read in
these ways--intently, personally, vulnerably, subjectively--is that this provides
us with a way of finding out the real quality of what our students do (see,
think, perceive). I hope to persuade the reader that this child-author has
produced "worldly fiction" worthy of our attention as readers and as
inhabitants of a world discemibly similar to the fictional one. I assert that,

while I find this writing remarkable in several respects, this child-writer's

capacity to contribute is not unique.

There the kid was stranded in a car with a dead guy
on the driver's seat. The kid moved the guy in the
back seat and tried to drive the car first he went
backward then he went forward and there was blood
all over the windshield the kid put on the
windshield wipers and said "I killed 2 guys!" the

kid yelled he didn't know how to drive. the car

34

was a Lamborghini so he went as fast as the car
could go he got there in 6 hours.17

Brendan18 was a student in my fourth grade writing workshop when
he wrote these lines. The blood on the windshield, so thick and greasy it
requires wipers-—conjuring up a vivid cinematic moment (one very
reminiscent of Pulp Piction19)--captures in an image the recurrent violence of
this story and the way in which the protagonist essentially can't help but see
the world through a bloodied haze, while the passage as a whole captures the
sense of being at all times in danger of being out of control: the world as full
of anarchic force.20 There is to my ear a pronounced writerly sensibility at
work here as well, as evidenced by the poetic rhythm of the first quoted line

(which scans reasonably well in dactylic meter):

Thére the kid was
stranded in a car
with a déad guy

on the driver's seat.

The ambiguity of punctuation in the entire passage can even be seen to
increase its poetic sense. Finally, as one unifying thread, the specification of
six hours is characteristic of the story as a whole. The first, perhaps most
lasting, impression most readers take away is that of bloodiness and

confusion. What is not evident in the passage itself, but is very much part of

 

'7 Children's writings are reproduced essentially as they appeared in one version or another.
Ihave occasionally made silent changes in punctuation or spelling to approximate the spoken
delivery of a piece or to help the reader focus on the meaning but, as almost all the work quoted
here went through a lengthy process of revision, these changes are very few. A complete
unedited typescript of this story is attached.

18 A pseudonym as are all children's names in this dissertation.

'9 Which movie, however, came out several years after Brendan did his writing.

20 At the risk of cliché, I find it hard not to be reminded of Yeats' lines in "The Second
Coming" (written, like Democracy and Education, in about 1916): "Things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned..." (1956).

3S

the story I want to tell, is that these lines also represent a long, even arduous,
process of revision.

I was a guest in Brendan's classroom, teaching three to five hours a
week in the context of a several year collaboration with Alyjah Byrd, my host
teacher in a professional development school. The student population was
multi—ethnic, multi-national, and moderately diverse socio-economically.
The workshop structure was simple. The first session of each week usually
began with a meeting involving discussion, often leading to an assignment.
For instance, early in the fall, we talked about "where ideas for writing come
from," we did a series of exercises in description of natural objects, and
worked on a group description (oral and written) of a historical photograph.
On rare occasions, I made individual assignments. The bulk of the writing
time, however, was devoted to "choice writing," during which students were
responsible for generating themes and forms on their own or in collaboration
with peers. I met with individual students for conferences when I saw a need
or when they requested. Each week I also provided a "back up assignment"--a
theme, opening sentence, or direction "for people having trouble coming up
with ideas." At least one, and usually more, sessions each week ended with a
twenty minute meeting for "sharing work." Alyjah Byrd and I also met each
week to discuss individual students, the workshop, "writing across the
curriculum," and other topics of mutual interest. The stories and other pieces
Iconsider here were written the year after the Persian Gulf war, the year
when Jeffrey Dahmer achieved notoriety for cannibalism, also the year when
Mike Tyson went on trial for rape--violent events which all made their way
into the children's writings and discussion of each other's writings.

From October to March, Brendan worked intermittently--in bursts of

concentration, leavened by work on assignments and on other pieces of his

36

own choosinguon the story from which I've just quoted, "The Garbage Can
Seller." The story first came to my attention when "silliness," in the form of
raucous giggles, broke out at Brendan's table. The flush on his face when I
glanced over, and the way others looked from him to me to their pages and
back, suggested that he or his work had stimulated the outbreak. It was mid-
October, early in our work together: the students were unsure about my
expectations and the extent of their opportunities, particularly in regard to
"choice writing"; I was intent on establishing a serious (though not a solemn)
atmosphere and on communicating my watchfulness and interest. Looking

over Brendan's shoulder, I read:

Once upon a time in a very small small store there
was 13 garbage cans. The man that owns it is poor,
he lives in a small box. He is rich compared to
his friends, he has a wicked step brother that is
rich: he owns a store that sells everything, even
boxes...

Continuing, I learned that the poor man, later identified as Henry, had
bought, at the rich step—brother's store, "a can of beans and 2 boxes of cheese."
These lines, I supposed, had led irresistibly to thoughts of flatulence and thus
to giggles. Without much deliberation, I urged Brendan to continue writing,
enjoining everyone to "seriousness" and "concentration," trying to address
my commentary to the behavior surrounding the writing and not to the text
itself. Looking back on my journal, I can see that I had doubts, over the next
several weeks, about the future of this story, which quickly grew violent as
first Henry's house was destroyed, and then he and his wife were
"slaughtered." Brendan kept working on it, though, and was eager to read

what he had to the group at sharing time. In early November, he did.

37

Henry's wife, it transpired, had given birth to a baby an hour after she
died. At fourteen that baby--now, "the kid"-—goes to the police "to find out
who killed his mother and father," only to discover his next-door neighbor is
the murderer. When he returns, he finds the neighbor "dead on the floor."
Standing over him is the boy's grandfather--apparently they are meeting each
other for the first timeuwho is also the father of the dead "bad guy." (Thus
the "bad guy" is also the boy's uncle.) Again, the writing was greeted noisily,
with what I took to be nervous laughter. Brendan himself was not composed
as he read. Instructing him that his job was to "read so that we can pay
attention," admonishing the others for "silliness that's not helpful to the
person who is sharing or the people trying to listen," I pressed him to keep
going. The brief discussion that followed focused to some extent on the
question of why the bad brother killed "the kid's" father--"I told you, he was
jealous," the grandfather explains--but most questions turned on the
difficulty people had keeping the characters and their familial relationships
straight.

Indeed it was difficult to keep track of the characters. For the most part,
they were unnamed and related by blood or marriage; all were embedded in a
densely eventful story spanning several generations. Increasing "goriness"
was notable-corpses continued to multiply--as were the motif of poverty, the
recurrent orphaning of the central character, and Brendan's frequent use of
number: costs, earnings, and time regularly being quantified. I did not at the
time formulate an idea that later seemed very apparent, that on one level the
story (at least in this version) is a classic tale of the search for one's origins, a
search which--as, for example, in the myth of Theseusuis typically, even
perhaps necessarily, accompanied by psychic and bodily risk. (Not only have

"the kid's" parents been murdered before he was born, but the evildoer is a

38

member of the family. Biblical references to brothers come to mind here, as
do certain fairy tales. Borrowing a psychoanalytic lens for a moment, we can
imagine that the dead father and the now dead uncle represent two polar
possibilities of the parent--the good and the "wicked"--which in turn become
two possibilities of the child's fate. Nor is the threat over with the death of
the "bad guy." In good mystery story fashion, the hero's search apparently
endangers not just himself but others: his grandfather is the next to be
murdered.) If such a reading makes sense, it is worth remembering that the
outcome of such a search is typically the formation of an identity that is on
the one hand historically conscious, even tragic, and on the other, self-
created. (We do not need to burden Brendan with a conscious analytical
understanding of his story in these terms to regard him as working with such
themes and possibilities,21 any more than we need expect a young man's
reading of Hamlet to be the same as that of maturity, or the anonymous
tellers of "Rapunzel" to understand their story as Anne Sexton [1971] or
Bruno Bettelheim [1977] came to understand it.)

Early on in Brendan's work on "The Garbage Can Seller," I found
myself speculating about my decisions--spontaneous perhaps, they
nonetheless were decisions--to encourage Brendan to stick with this story, or
at least, not to discourage him. It is not that, in the early stages, he needed my
encouragement, though I think later on my close work with him helped to
sustain his investment; it is just that I had doubts about the "seriousness"
and potential of the piece, at a time when I was working hard to establish a
serious atmosphere for the workshOp. (As a guest in the room, I had

simultaneously to earn my right to the role of "teacher" and to establish that

 

21 Though I can't help recalling that once when the class was speculating about the origins of
language, Brendan suggested that it had been invented by children (a possibility that Lewis
Thomas, for one, found worthy of consideration [1990, p. 95]).

39

my manner and expectations were in some respects different from Ms. Byrd's,
but no less serious. Characteristically, I was asking the students to contend
with a good deal more ambiguity than they were used to in school. I gave no
grades, and I very seldom quantified my expectations for their writing--
nonetheless, I expected productivity, care, and respect for the efforts of others.
Each of these expectations had particular colorings and implications for
individual students, as I got to know them and their work. And they were
free to exercise a good deal of choice--as to theme, form, writing companions,
etc.—-not only free to, but expected to: thus, I hoped, choice and responsibility
were jointly experienced. Given the unusual degree of choice, the non-
specific, non-quantified expectations, and the fact that we were "in school," it
was important to me, at this still early stage in the game, to establish that the
workshop did entail "real work") It is easy enough to express disapproval.
This can readily be done without being explicit, through tone, look, or re-
direction--even when students nominally have "choice" as to theme.
Students generally understand very well the tacit limitations on their
freedom of expression in school. I was confident that some teachers--perhaps
including myself at other times--would have found ways to divert Brendan
from this content, if not to render it inconceivable before the fact. I
wondered, if these suppositions were correct, how he surmised that perhaps
the boundaries on acceptable content in this situation were not what they
sometimes were in school. I became the more intrigued by these questions
when it occurred to me that the somewhat exaggerated, somewhat
uncomfortable, laughter of Brendan's classmates may have been prompted
less by the beans and cheese than by an appreciation of the "anarchic" strain

in the plot. ("Silliness," as the word is used in elementary schools, can after

40

all be understood to mean a kind of anarchy--hence the discomfort, and
constrained vocabulary, it evokes in adults.)

I did not, in any case, discourage Brendan, and soon came to affirm that
decision, finding myself enthusiastic about the concentration and care he was
investing in the project, and increasingly curious as to how it would develop,
both in craft terms-~it soon became clear that it was in a seemingly endless
process of revision as well as extension--and in substance. For a while, I
persuaded him to work with me on a genealogy of the characters. He put up
with this good-humoredly and indeed began in his text to name the
characters and otherwise make it a bit easier to distinguish them. The
genealogy has often seemed to me since then a quixotic, clumsy move, largely
missing the force of the story. I now see it as my attempt to bring order to a
chaotic ("anarchic") situation: a wrong-headed imposition, probably, but still
an understandable teacherly response.

Meanwhile, Brendan's story grew ever more extravagant in the
violence of its imagery. The introduction gave us the garbage can seller,
living in a box, going to buy groceries from his wicked step-brother,22 for his
Wife, returning to find his house vandalized, and then being murdered by an
unspecified "they." His wife is also murdered, though she manages to give
birth, posthumously,23 to a baby boy. We move forward in time to a plausible
age for coming of age, fourteen, at which point the boy seeks those responsible
for his parents' murder. It turns out he has been living next door to the
murderer, over whose corpse he meets his grandfather, who explains that the

dead bad guy--the boy's uncle—-had killed the boy's father out of jealousy. The

 

22 Though "step" is later dropped. I assume, as in so many fairy tales, it has served its
purpose, as an intensifier, or even synonym for "wicked," not as a literal indication of familial
relationship.

23 In the version Brendan was reading to us in November.

41

"old man" invites the boy to live with him; however, en route to his house,
in the middle of explaining that indeed, he had killed the uncle, on account
of his membership in "the mob," the grandfather is himself killed, by the
mob. It is as at this point that the boy finds himself "stranded in a car with a
dead guy on the driver's seat." In the final chapter, the grandfather's corpse

(and car) is stolen, and the police and the boy go in search of "the mob's hide

out

And when they did find it they peeked in and saw
the mob having a feast. The police man said
"they're eatin em!" and the boy said "no they're
not stupid, he's over there," he was tied to a wood
cutter. The police man said "it don't matter he's
dead," the police man pulled out his walkie-talkie
and was gunna call the other police men. The boy
snatched it away and called in backup. They got
there in an hour and crashed the party. Some
police men got killed and some didn't but they got
the mob. And locked them up for 2,240 years
without bail or parole.

The End

My notion that there is some humor here--in, say, the phrase "crashing
the party," or in the almost quaint reference to the "wood cutter" (has
Brendan heard "Along Came Jones"?)--is not, as far as I can tell, typical.
Perhaps it is aberrant. Far more usual is this reaction from a colleague, an
experienced, generous, and accomplished teacher:

...I don't want to play psychologist, but this is a disturbed child--

preoccupied with...killing, a lot of killing—J don't know whether

he's--I don't know whether he's watched a lot of violent TV or

whether his parents might be violent...l would think he might

be a child at school,24 I think he might live in that

area...across from a couple of bars.... Perhaps--probably there's a
lot of resentment in the family against people who have money-

 

 

24 A more urban public school, serving a predominately black and Latino, socioeconomically

mixed, population; also, the school I am working at at the time of the interview--the school of
the children who will come into the next two chapters.

42

-and--the child--maybe it's been homeless or there's some
problems with paying the rent or what. It's ahh, weird...
(Interview with "L. G.," 11 / 19 / 93)

The leap from distressing content in the child's writing to the assumption
that there is equivalent distressing content in the personal facts of the child's
life is an easy one, perhaps a habitual one for many of us in our
responsibilities as teachers. (And these "leaps" all too often-~as hinted at
above, and substantiated later in the interview--take in a large measure of
socioeconomic and racial stereotypes.) Again, I don't wish to deny that our
responsibilities as teachers must certainly include asking ourselves if our
students' writings are telling us something literal, or "true," or at any rate
very pointed, about their lives, something we ought to be aware of--but I
believe our educational responsibilities require some different responses of us
as well. Indeed, the facile assumption of, and subsequent search for, direct
autobiographical connections may well distract us from that which is of
greatest educational interest and import.

I suggest again that we consider "The Garbage Can Seller" as a piece of
fiction--an approach that obliges us, again, to construct some meaning with
the writer, through the medium of the text, rather than supposing the writer
is just handing us the meaning ready-made (and rather than constructing
meaning at the writer, as it were). What might such an approach yield?

0 In a close up, formal perspective--considering matters of diction and
imagery, for instance--having fiction in mind would draw our attention to
several features of the story's final paragraph. "The mob," the specter of a
human being becoming a "feast," the man "tied to the wood cutter," "the
walkie-talkie" even, and the final locking-up of the mob "for 2, 240 years

without bail or parole": for all of these, the obvious assumption is that they

43

are drawn from an available cultural vocabulary (whether TV news or grade-
B movies or even old songs by The Platters); the burden of proof--a heavy
one, I thinkuwould be on any notion of their being drawn from the firsthand,
"real-life" experience of a nine year old living in suburban housing in a large
university town.

0 Taking a broader perspective, it is often helpful to try--as a temporary
move-to reduce a piece to its narrative bare bones. If we do that with

Brendan's story, we might get something like the following.

The hero is an orphan, a boy who has never had the chance to
know his parents. He is alive at all only because his mother,
though murdered, managed still to give birth to him. As he
approaches maturity, he sets out to discover the murderer of his
parents. It turns out he has been living beside the murderer all
along: literally, as his next-door neighbor, figuratively, in that
the murderer was his uncle. By the time ”the kid" "meets” the
”wicked step-brother,” though, he too is dead-—killed by his own
father, the boy's grandfather, whom the boy is also meeting for
the first time. The "old man” offers to take in the boy, but he too
is murdered (by ”the mob” to which the ”wicked” uncle had
belonged). The boy is now actually as well as symbolically
bloodied, in the car that is the murder site. The grandfather’s
corpse is stolen. The police and the boy go in search, and find
him. The boy corrects the policeman's grisly notion--that the
corpse is being eaten by the mob-~and the boy, not the policeman,
calls in reinforcements. The bad guys are put away for good and
then some. There is no hint that "the kid ” wishes to perpetuate
the vendetta.

Thus: a boy goes in search of his origins, that is, his parents'
killer--all, besides himself, that remains of them. It turns out he
is descended from a line which is half good (presumptively, and
perhaps on the evidence of his near-miraculous birth), half evil.
Fratricide has taken place. Then, at the very moment when the
hero is about to confront this partial or alternative lineage
(hence, possible destiny), the ”wicked” brother is killed by his
own father. Briefly, this parent--the boy's grandparent--offers
the prospect of a family for the boy, but he too is killed before he
can make good on this offer of a partial restoration of order.
This fourth (.7) murder leaves the boy "stranded" again, at the

44

wheel of a vehicle he cannot, at first, control. (Indeed, he
declares he himself has become a killer too--”I killed 2 guys! ”--
but it is never clear who. Pedestrians? Or, somehow, by
initiating the search, his uncle and his grandfather?) The boy is
then instrumental in achieving justice of a sort for his parents’
and grandfather’s murders.

Through his quest, the hero travels from a state of ignorance
about his origins-—or rather, about the ruin of his origins: he has
not had the whole story--to a state of experience and knowledge;
he moves from total or near total helplessness to a qualified
degree of power, a point at which he can take some effective
action. The cost of all this is of course the experience itself, as
well as further destruction.

He has not been born in safety nor into a world that proves safe.
(How many children, at one time or another, protest, ”I didn't
ask to be born”?) His situation is not promising. Doing nothing
is apparently not an option. He sets out to learn about his past
and arrives at his future, a place where he must try to take action
in the world. Which is to say, to discover his fate. The
knowledge is not comforting, the action not very effective, but
these are our only prospects.25

What we gain from such a distillation--granting that it could be done
more artfully, and with different emphases--is a sense of the plot as mythic or
archetypal. Which is one way of saying the narrative has become accessible to
us, recognizable as a variant on the shared narrative of the identity quest:

Who am I, where did I come from, how is my destiny shaped by my past, how
do Incan I?-become an active shaper of my own destiny? In his radical call
for a revaluation of ordinary, common experience--with art as a means for
and an image of this possibility-~Dewey remarks that "it is the fate of a living
creature...that it cannot secure what belongs to it without an adventure in a
world that as a whole it does not own and to which it has no native title"

n¥

25 Formally, the story is a tragedy, in that it ends with the restoration of order. The other
possibility of course is a comedy--ending in a marriage.

45

(1934, p. 59). We might say that an orphan is the perfect symbolic
representative of such a fate--being dispossessed, needing to "make one's own
way" without capital, is emblematic of the orphan, which is perhaps why he
(typically: though a female classmate of Brendan's wrote several tales in
which an orphaned girl was the hero) is such a favored figure in fairy tales,
amongst other literatures. Trying to teach us how to "read" a work of art,
Dewey--as so often, recalling earlier (e.g., Wordsworth's) and anticipating so
much contemporary (cf. the remarks by Scholes earlier quoted), thought--

asserts:

Perception is an act of the going-out of energy in order to receive,
not a withholding of energy... (T)o perceive, a beholder must
create his own experience. And his experience must include
relations comparable to those the original producer underwent.
They are not the same in any literal sense... Without an act of
recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art.

(1934, pp. 53-54)

If, then, we are to give Brendan's story a "right reading"--or, as I would also
like to say, a sympathetic reading-we'll have to actively work with the text,
bringing to it the energy and feeling of our own experience, engaging with
emotionally "saturated" experience presented in the text, to arrive at an
eXperience of our own which is not exactly new, but transformed. If my
reading of the story is at all reliable, that transformation will have something
to do with re-experiencing myself as an "adventurer" in a world that "(I do)
not wholly own," in which, perhaps, I am curious about origins, invested in
my fate, and anxious to take effective, moral action--to control that bloody car,
not kill anyone with it, maybe even apprehend the perpetrator of so much
prior violence. And here having restored the circumstantial, "violent," flesh

to the bones of Brendan's story, the reader's question becomes, "How credible,

46

how familiar, is this depicted world of violence and mayhem?" Is there any
answer other than, "very familiar indeed"? '

Such readings, I submit, establish that the child—writer and the teacher-
reader share significant common ground. (For a teacher, an adult, this might
be one instance of a reading that does not stand "safely outside the text.") But
this it is clear is reversible: A "right reading" is one which finds common
ground in an enabling text. From any perspective we choose--ethical,
epistemological, psychological, pedagogical--this means that we understand
the story as being a story of the public world, not a mere transcript of the
private facts, fears or fantasies of the writer.

Nothing of Brendan's school life outside of these writings, in any case,
gave any reason at all for entertaining the kinds of dire worries they
sometimes elicit. (No signs of "preoccupation" with violence, nor violence,
nor unusual fearfulness; no worrisome encounters with parents; etc.) On
the other hand, turning from the content of his writing, and from speculation
about his extracurricular life, to Brendan as the writer, much that was
noteworthy was evident over the course of his work on "The Garbage Can
Seller" and other pieces. There was, as opposed to the disorder and violence
of the events written, the discipline and gentleness of the child writing; there
was appreciable growth in his writerly skill (technically and substantively),
increasing self-confidence, and an apparently self-conscious use of writing to
begin to explore some of the possibilities and predicaments of grown-up life.

Consider these further glimpses of Brendan as a writer:

0 He completed, for a display of workshop writings in December, a
substantially different revision of "The Garbage Can Seller," beginning, "Once
upon a time in Chicago 1947, on the very poor side of town there was a little

store owned by a man named Joey Wilcox." From this opening line alone, we

47

can see that Brendan is by now in far greater command of the strategy of
specifying, quickly and efficiently, time, place, characters' names, and other
details that will enable the reader more easily to follow the story line (though
"efficiency" is not perhaps a characteristic of the piece as a whole). He
introduces a whole other conceit--one popular with his peers, too--of
beginning the story with a dream, one that may or may not turn out to be
real, or that may render the events "unreal" (a ghostly possession occurs as
well). He continues enthusiastically to explore the pleasures of literary
diction, speaking at one point of "a bunch of ruthless bandits," and at another
declairning that "the Fire Engines rolled in like 1,000 horses running through
the wild west." Horror and inter—generational complexity continue to be
prominent features. In a twist, he concludes the story on a note of decided
ambiguity: the killers, also identified as "two friends," escape to "a very small
island with more criminals to kill. Or maybe to kill them." Ultimately, he
decided to combine this version with the final revision of his first attempt,
creating a somewhat unwieldy story in which several of the same events are
depicted in different times and with different families.26

0 His growth in literary craft was further evident in a piece he wrote in
the spring in response to a whole-class assignment. Everyone was to write a

table for a class book. Brendan's contribution follows.

THE MORAL IS PAY YOUR TAXES OR ELSE

Once upon a time in Kansas there was a family that
lived in a old beat up barn. It was March tax
season. One day early in the morning the tax man
came to collect the taxes. He said "I have come to
collect your taxes. The father said "I'm sorry we
don't have the money please give us another week.
So the man said "Okay just one more week. So he
hopped on his horse and rode off. So Monday rolled

 

2" It is this version, the final one, that is appended.

48

around and the tax man came back, he said "DOTKM
EMEITHEDKWEY?" The father said "NO." So the tax
man grabbed the mother and tied her to a barrel and
took a ax to her head and made the whole family
watch.

This was going on for years and years the tax man
had given them weeks and weeks and weeks it was the
same thing every year.

So finally it came to the teenage boy the last of
the family living.

So they tied him up to a barrel and chopped his
head off but he was still alive and he was
laughing. They dug a hole threw the body in and
then the head after it.

This is striking prose, in several respects. In the first place, it is
shocking, an effect it achieves through technique as well as content. It is
markedly concise and economical, moving swiftly to its conclusion. Setting
and characters (if that is the word: "archetypes" might be more apt) are
quickly established, with just enough time-consuming detail to create for the
reader the experience of moving from the mundane to the horrific. The
prose is simple--the sentences are much tighter than in "The Garbage Can
Seller"--but artful, demonstrating once more the author's pleasure in literary
diction (e.g., "Monday rolled around"). The rhythm is sure and compelling,
poetic at moments (as in the second, unpunctuated, paragraph with its
insistent but not overly tidy repetitions: "for yéars and yéars," (twice), "wéeks
and wéeks and wéeks" (three times), "the same thing évery yéar"
(semantically once, rhythmically four beats, the most pronounced phrase of
all). Formally, the narrative begins in the classic way (while yet locating us in
the mythic mid-America of, say, The Wizard of Oz, not the same as the far-off
land of fairy tales). Our expectations of a conventional resolution are raised

only to be confounded, however. And this happens twice: We naturally

49

hope that "the teenage boy, the last of the family living," will put a stop to the
killing, restore order and decency, but he does not. Then we may hope for at
least a sort of moral triumph, as might be achieved if the story ended with the
image of the boy laughing-—but we're not permitted that either. The story
ends bleakly and with the sound of finality. This is effective fiction by any
formal criteria I can think of. Substantively, the fable stands as an
accomplished rendering of several of the themes--poverty, family
dismemberment and the orphaning of the only son, extreme and irrational
violence, questions (despair even) about the prospects of effective moral
action in the world--which stand out in the more laborious work of "The
Garbage Can Seller."27

0 Finally, in his year—end self-evaluation, Brendan writes:

I.) I think i am a good writer. I really want to
write like Stephan King when i grow up.

2. I think Writing Work Shop has helped me with my
working abilities and has kind of been
icouriging me to do better in school.

3. I think the kinds of books i like to wright are
books about homeless people to help them get
off the streets and adventures, funny books,
scary books.

4. Adventures, scary, and funny books interest me.

because i like them.

i need to work on punchuaction.

My imagination helps me write.

Punchuaction and people not under standing my

writings get in my way.

\IONU'I

Brendan's sense of accomplishment and growth, as a writer and a

student, was shared by his current and previous year's teachers, his mother,

k

27 "The Moral 15...," which was written very rapidly and with no apparent effort, can thus be
thought of as another, in some ways more successful, revision of the earlier pieces, a procedure
well recognized by writers. See, for example, Elizabeth Bishop: "1 think everyone feels that
his or her best poems were lucky accidents... But of course they really aren't at all-~they are
indications that you have worked hard on all the others, and felt deeply, and somehow
managed to create the right atmosphere in your own brain for a good poem to emerge" (1994, p.
8&.

50

and me. Most significantly for my purposes here, it is evident that he is
thinking of himself as a writer of fiction, that is, as a person-—an author, a
makeruwho shapes event and language in purposeful narratives, narratives
that have as one of their aims the seduction of a reader's attention. (Note for
instance the manipulation of diction we have seen, a kind of play pleasing to
writers-~who wish, however, for readers with whom to share the pleasure;
and the comment, "people not understanding my writings get in my way")
He identifies his writing as, in part, representative of his perceptions of and
concerns for society; he is cognizant of genres from which he makes
selections; he associates his activity with that of "real writers." The stories
I've presented are unified internally by stylistic elements such as repetition,
quantification, and strong rhythm; the violent disruption of family structure
is a motif common to all; taken singly and in order of composition, they
display a movement through escalating crises to, in turn, resolution (not
perhaps fully satisfying), apparent irresolution, and complete dissolution.
There are appreciable, makeable, shareable strains of meaning, one of which I
Synopsize as, "Is morally effective action possible for a young (male) person
growing up 'today'?"28 Through all of this, Brendan is certainly, in some
Sense, "expressing himself," if that tired expression can still carry meaning--
though I maintain he does this at least as much through his qualities as a
Craftsman as through his distinctive themes and plots. "The teenage boy the
1ast of the family living" may be no more than a mere subject of experience, a
ViCtim; Brendan the writer is evidently more than that: it seems far more

appropriate to regard him as a linguistically alert thinker in the process of

\_

28 In the next chapter, the reader will meet C], a young writer whose protagonists can also be
heard as raising this same question, repeatedly and urgently.

51

growing up as a citizen. As such, what he is "expressing" is a world we share

with him, though we may choose not to recognize, to "own," it.

A child's writing, a teacher's reading: Forms of thought

I began this account with several concerns in mind. I have maintained
that the "fictional impulse" is evident in children's writings far more than
some recent literature on the teaching of writing to children, and much
practice, seems to acknowledge; correspondingly, I've argued that our
readings of children's writings--inc1uding those where the fictional
imperative is, to my ear, very apparent--are too often reductionist, naively
literal and "autobiographical." I have claimed that such readings fail to reflect
much of what we currently claim to believe about reading-that it is an
"active," joint, meaning-making transaction between reader and text--and
I've attempted to demonstrate some readings of a child's writings that seem
to me more fully to respect the fictional impulse. The readings I attempt are
aided by attention to formal elements in the work; and they are readings that
implicate the reader in the text, and in the world that the text may illuminate,
locating author-student and reader-teacher as being able to participate jointly
in a public space created by complementary experience, shared conventions,
and shared predilections for narrative. I've aimed to portray Brendan as a
Student who shows himself able to take formative responsibility for an
interest, to pursue an idea and a project over many months, to shape
language effectively and to develop appropriate self-consciousness in the
Process.29 I have proposed that a reading attentive to substance in these ways

may not only be more appropriate—-more responsive to the purposes and

 

 

?9 Ideas which, with the qualified exception of the last, seem to me in keeping with the
Integrated, nondichotomous, morally charged views of human effort and intellect urged on us by

DEWey in, for example, "Interest and Discipline" and "The Nature of Method" (1966, chaps. 10
and 13).

52

powers of fiction to criticize and to celebrate, to imitate and to transcend—-but
may also be more pedagogically useful and just, in that it provides access to,
and offers respect for, the child's capacity for making meaning and exerting
discipline over time.

I would like now to modulate the terms in which I address and
readdress these concerns. I would like to assert again that the narrative act is
a form of thought ("a meaning making strategy," as Rosen insists [1982, p. 10]),
as in its way is reading, and to stipulate that fiction is an art. I will rely rather
heavily on Dewey to help me, I hope, make clear why these modulations and
assertions might matter. To begin with, thinking entails memory and
anticipation, musing and selection; it entertains the possible as well as the
actual, it necessarily transcends present time and solitary self (all of which,
again, are clearly part of story-making). Writing during World War I about
"thinking," which he insists entails "risk" (1966, p. 148), Dewey goes further:

Reflection...implies concern with the issue [i.e., outcome, but
"topic" or "subject" can be heard as well]--a certain sympathetic
identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the
course of events... If we cannot take sides in overt action, and
throw our little weight to help determine the final balance, we
take sides emotionally and imaginatively. We desire this or that
outcome. One wholly indifferent to the outcome does not
follow or think about what is happening at all. From this
dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the
consequences of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes
of thought. Born in partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it

must achieve a certain detached impartiality.
(p. 147)

(The "paradox" of thought here is of course identical with the "paradoxical"
nature of reading earlier identified by Pennac. Similarly, it is the self-same
Paradox that allows writing-mo matter how intellectually and emotionally

Charged for the writer--to become an object, subject to dispassionate craft.)

53

 

 

 

The scenario Dewey has in mind here is, first, of a "general in the war, or a
common soldier, or a citizen of one of the contending nations," any of whose
"concern with the issue" is concrete and total; second, "neutrals," for whom
"the stimulus to thinking is...indirect and dependent upon imagination" (p.
147). We are all "neutrals" when it comes to reading or watching a story--and
yet, by this account, if we are thinking, we do not stay neutral, we have made
a "sympathetic," "dramatic," identification of ourselves with the events
depicted. Otherwise, they have no meaning for us,30 they are hollow. Dewey
stresses the meaning of "sympathetic" that is more or less equivalent to
"partial" ("we desire this or that outcome": that the allies will win, or not;
that "the teenage boy the last of the family living" will survive, or at least
leave behind a visible smile). I wish as well to take "sympathy" in its more
neutral meaning-the meaning that is similar to "compassion," to feel with,
with no particular judgment (yet) attached to the feeling. This is more or less
the sense in which Rousseau uses "pity" (1966, p. 32, for example); Max
Scheler characterizes it as "the processes which one may describe as 'rejoicing-
with' and 'commiserating'...processes in which we seem to have an
iInmediate ‘understanding' of other people's experiences, while also
'participating' in them" (1970, p. 3).31 In this sense, sympathy is involuntary,
though it can very well be suppressed. Certainly, "sympathetic
identifications" of both the narrower and the broader sort may be troubling, as
I have tried both to stress and to acknowledge (i.e., the bloodiness of
Bl‘endan's stories, is distressing-and the thought that the anarchic and

Violent world he shows may be in some true way be the one we live in and

\

Pragmatically speaking, they have no consequence--but it is clear (for Dewey already in
1916) that imaginative consequences count.
A more familiar link might be to David Hawkins' assertion that "we're all in it together"
(1974, p. 62)—mutually ignorant, puzzled, stimulated, or curious, depending on your mood or
temperament: but in no case have we chosen this ontological state.

54

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are also subject to [may even have helped to make] is also distressing). But
the disturbance here, in fiction, is not exactly that occasioned by horrid events
and photographs (of wartime, say), on the news. The disturbance is greater
because the violence, the chaos, what have you, is only felt because of our
capacities—the writer's capacity, and the reader's--to imagine it. It is in us.
Which is what makes it instructive in both a literal and the common
meaning of the word. Consider a later remark of Dewey's (written during the

Great Depression rather than wartime):

Because art is wholly innocent of ideas derived from praise and
blame, it is looked upon with the eye of suspicion by the
guardians of custom, or only the art that is so old and "classic" as
to receive conventional praise is grudgingly admitted... Yet this
indifference to praise and blame because of preoccupation with
imaginative experience constitutes the heart of the moral

potency of art. From it proceeds the liberating and uniting
power of art.

(1934, p. 349, emphasis added)

The highlighted phrase has various possible applications. I stress its sense
that, for the artist-writer and the viewer-reader, to the extent that they have
done their work well, the imagination temporarily overpowers all other
agents. It gets past all the gates of custom and safety we have erected. On this
Plane, the imagination--of which sympathy is a species--is not moral at all;
that is, it makes no judgments of right and wrong. But it makes morality
Possible, in that it makes consequences appreciable, "real." And, specifically,
"the moral potency of art" comes in its "disclosure of possibilities"--
Possibilities of the human heart, and the humanly inhabited world.
"Liberation" points to the freedom from a feeling or thought that can result
f1'Om its objectification (the "paradox" earlier referred to); it refers also and

IIlore particularly to liberation from an unsatisfactory present, whether

55

through vision of a possible and better future, or through a deep and even
impartial seeing of the flaws of the present, urging a need to change. I am
not, however, suggesting that Brendan is engaged in a conscious act of social
criticism, any more than I earlier wished to suggest a conscious myth-making
activity on his part—-though both sorts of activity might be part of what it
means for a reader to "make meaning" of a fictional text, from which work
stems one form of the "unity" Dewey refers to.

I do want to argue that Brendan is doing something we ought to call
thinking. I stress this word for several reasons. As educators, nurturing the
capacity for and exercise of thought is presumably one of our most
fundamental duties--so making "thought" somewhat visible should have
some usefulness in helping us make wise selections of activities to foster, to
discourage, to wait patiently upon, and the like. Thought, moreover, is taken
to be active, more than a mere reaction, though it is a mysterious "activity"
indeed (notwithstanding a large literature fortunately beyond the scope of this
dissertation). Finally, though, it is the public character of thought I want to
emphasize. As the word "re-cognition" suggests, when we communicate and
understand, one thing we are doing is participating jointly in thoughts about
Something (the weather, the state of our souls, the world around us). Objects
0f art-—including good stories--are both records of thought and occasions of
thought (the record being inaccessible without an active infusion of new
t1iought). Another way of saying this may be to say, they are not mere acts of

"SEN-expression." Again, Dewey can help:

The act of expression that constitutes a work of art is a
construction in time, not an instantaneous emission... (T)his
statement signifies...more than that it takes time... It means that
the expression of the self in and through a medium, constituting
'the work of art, is itself a prolonged interaction of something
issuing from the self with objective conditions, a process in

56

 

 

which both of them acquire a form and order they did not at first

possess.
(1934, p. 65)

The "objective conditions" are, first off, the medium--paint, or marble, or in
Brendan's case, language-and in the second place, aspects of "the world out
there," an entity both actual and imagined. The world out there, as it
happens and as we imagine it, is in constant flux, the language is a field of
infinite potentialities, the self is continually under construction. "Prolonged
interaction"-including much writing and crossing out and rewriting--brings
"form and order": the experienced world—-acutely imagined, severely edited
into story--becomes newly legible; language achieves a specific, hitherto
unrealized, bounded shape; the self acquires a new layer of definition
through the activity of making, laying down of perception. The job of the
reader is to cross over into the text, leaving safety behind, to do the "re-
creation" Dewey speaks of, and so have one's own experience rewritten, and
so animate the text. If a job of education is to promote the child's making of

meaning-acquisition of "form and order"—-this crossing over becomes a job of

teaching too.

A child's reading: Seeing resemblance in difference

Am I asking Brendan's writing to carry an excessive burden? In that I
am applying to it too many words of my own, doubtless; in that it has the
POWer to move, to "unite," in Dewey's words, I believe not. I offer one final
episode to confirm this from a perspective other than my own. I take this
episode to be an instance of "right reading," of reading with "sympathy."

"The Moral of the Story Is Pay Your Taxes or Else," was, as I've said, a

response to an assignment: everyone in the group had to write "a fable,"

57

which, we had decided, is a particular kind of story providing a moral or a
lesson. It is at best barely plausible that the "lesson" of Brendan's fable is
given by the title; it would be far more artistic, far more characteristic of a
writer concerned with homelessness who, in acute and uneasy, ungentle,
humor, titles a work "The Garbage Can Seller," to generate tension between

title and text. As some of Brendan's classmates said in the introduction to

our "Fable Book,"

There can be more than one moral in a fable. For
example, there can be a written moral for your
story or fable, and the reader can still make up
another moral. Sometimes a moral is the solution
of the fable. But sometimes a moral might not be a
solution--for example, if a fable has a sad ending
to the story, the moral might not be a solution.

As one part of the Fable Book assignment, each fable was to be
accompanied by a drawing, made not by the author, but by a reader, a
classmate. This part of the assignment, then, was a kind of exercise in
interpretation. The boy who illustrated Brendan's fable certainly did not
provide a "solution," but it is arguable that he provided a countermoral. He
Showed, crudely but very clearly, a crucifixion taking place beside what looked
like "a old beat up barn." I was at first startled--partly, no doubt, because I had
had no more than superficial faith that I really would get interpretations, not
"mere illustrations"32--but quickly felt the rightness of the drawing. In no
Way a literal response to the story, a crucifixion--as a symbol of innocent
Suffering--provides not only a coherent response, but a satisfying one, one
that adds a measure of hope: that meaning might result. So Brendan's

Classmate had surely interpreted the story, had done the work of "re-

 

 

32 Probably too because in this multinational school of many different faiths, all reference to

Yehgion was officially frowned upon-—a fact that, unfortunately, ultimately led me to
discourage this picture.

58

creation." He had made a statement about its meaning not explicitly given by
the text, he had found form that was latent in it, drawing on it and on his
own imaginative experience. Like any good interpretation, this drawing has
the power to make other readers reconsider the text. I, for example, can not
now read "The Moral Is..." without connecting the gory dismemberment and
death of the family and, in particular, of "the teenage boy the last of the family
living," to other instances of innocent suffering and sacrifice potentially
redeemable in the consciousness of those who witness, survive, or come
after. We can say that an interpretation creates a kind of community around
the text—-the "liberatory unity" Dewey speaks of.33 In this case, for instance, I
now recognized Brendan's classmate and myself as participating jointly in an
arena of meaning created by Brendan's fable and our reaction to it. It seemed
to me, also, that this boy, in drawing the crucifixion, had intuitively
apprehended something crucial to Brendan's fable with a speed and a
sureness that spoke of a commonality of perception and understanding
between the two, a commonality that awaited an occasion of recognition.
Despite various obvious differences between them--for instance, race, first
language, and preferred subject matters in writing-~their experience of the
World had important similarities, such that when mediated by Brendan's
fable, the connections leapt to the fore, silently.

In her book, What is Pound There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
(1989), Adrienne Rich speaks with wonder and pleasure of the common
English names of certain wildlife, and in particular of "the poising of
hEterogeneous images" in designations like "Leather Star" and "Volcano

Barnacle." She remarks,

K

33 An idea I will develop somewhat further in Chapter 4, "Unsuspected Literatures."

59

re
Cu

Human eyes gazed at each of all these forms of life and saw
resemblance in difference--the core of metaphor, that which lies
close to the core of poetry, the only hope for a humane civil life.

(1913- 3-4)

The perception of "resemblance in difference" is, many of us would agree,
"the only hope for a humane civil life." The meanings of "Kansas" in
American culture--The Wizard of Oz? "Amber waves of grain?"--Lizzie
Borden?, the Jeffrey Dahmer story, the Christ story, homelessness, gangster
movies of the 1930's and 1940's, money and the lack of money, the classic
fairy tale invitation to give oneself over to the pleasures of story-—"once upon
a time..."--the existence of groups called "families," in which it is the ordinary
fate of the young to see the protective capacities of their elders diminish, to
survive their death or disappearance, the idea of a fable as a story which
teaches, the perception of violence as shocking, but also perhaps pleasurable,
to an audience--and, certainly, more--came together, are brought together--a
"text," after all, is a weaving, a made object with texture, with depth and
dimension, contrast, shadow, to be passed through the fingers repeatedly--in
the musings of nine year old boy and certain readers of his writing. I don't
want to heap too much on it--"It's only a story," after all. But a story, as
Harold Rosen insists, is an act of thought, and a story that is remembered
takes up residence in the thoughts and feelings of others--it has no life if it is
not so taken up. A story worth its salt becomes a communal meditation on
the feelings and perceptions and apprehensions we delight in having and fear
to have and must have if we are to live in the world as sentient beings. And
if we are not sentient, we shall lose both the objects of our thought and our
capacity for thought itself, and certainly render ourselves incapable of
perceiving "the resemblance in difference" that we require to perceive. What

Brendan gives is a chance to take another look at how the world announces

60

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itself in our time, and an occasion to ask ourselves, What is our duty as
teachers in a world that looks like this? The meaning of the question is
indeed quite different if we suppose the world we are peering at is the
relatively narrow and private one of Brendan's autobiography or a larger,

indeterminate one in which we all figure as players.

Afterward: Thinking about teaching, opening up "attention"

Hoping that large question will linger in the air, I turn now to what is, I
trust, a more modest task: I want to begin to draw out, from the specific
material of this account of Brendan's stories, some of the particular aspects
and efforts of teaching that the idea of "teaching as acts of attention" is
intended to frame and bring into focus. Clearly, I have offered "sympathetic
reading" of children's fictions "as if they mattered" as one way of trying to
enact an attention at once circumspect and imaginative. I claim that such
attending can be considered an element of teaching in part, of course, because
the notion of "making-meaning-with"--as Scholes for literature and Dewey
for art assert is essential to the fulfillment of textual or artistic objects--is then
an effort to help fulfill some aspect of the child's meaning-making capacity.
(And helping people develop their capacities to make meaning is, I will just
stipulate, a central purpose of teaching.) I want both to propose that there is a
certain logic to this argument-—one I have attempted to illustrate in practice in
the main body of the chapter with the aforementioned assistance of Dewey
and Scholes, among others-—and to acknowledge that there is a curious,
Cheshire Cat-like quality to the argument, in that so much of the "reading"

happens after the activities one would normally call, for better or worse,

"teaching," are long over.

61

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Certainly I want to say again that attention is an attitude, a potentially
enabling attitude, that may manifest itself along a continuum of ways, great
and small, over time (and, as such an attitude, in some sense it does not
require justification from its objects, though I have in effect been asking
Brendan's stories to "justify" themselves here). But the temporal quality of
the reading I endeavor raises directly some further aspects of teaching
understood as acts of attention that I think are sufficiently describable, and
sufficiently close to recognizable as "teaching," that they deserve explication.
Perhaps they will even restore some body to the Cheshire Cat.

The temporal, in a sense, the developmental, nature of the reading I've
tried with Brendan's stories is easily illustrated. Not too many paragraphs
ago, I underscored a point the reader will surely not have overlooked: that I
put a great deal of energy into interpretive engagement with the stories. Yet
when I first introduced Brendan at work on "The Garbage Can Seller," I
wrote, my attention having been drawn by "raucous giggles," that "I urged
Brendan to continue writing...trying to address my commentary to the
behavior surrounding the writing...not to the text itself." Not long after that,
I report myself meddling, more or less, in that text--specifically, through the

business of the "genealogy." These are three distinct modes of response:

1. The neutral, apparent non-response which clearly does not amount
to no response but rather is a tacit (provisional) nod of approval or,
rather, acceptance;

2. The "meddlesome" response, which, had it borne more fruit, could
be seen as a kind of co-participation in the making of the text; and,

3. The active, engaged response of interpreting, of "making-meaning-
with."

62

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"Attention" does, for me, run through and link these responses, as I hope
now to show.

Early in the chapter, outlining an agenda, I said that I wished to "claim
a larger space for the fictional-—a space larger than that often provided for it in
classrooms, and in the literature on children's writing." I went on to
"propose that fiction is a site...for the productive, sometimes disruptive,
educative encounter of the child-writer and the world of culture,
imagination, morality, hope, and doubt." And, sketching the argument for
sympathetic readings, I concluded by suggesting that "such readings, through
their capacity to force a re-evaluation of experience and their creation of a
public space occupied by writer and readers, have an implicitly social, indeed
political, import."

The architectural metaphor that isn't quite a metaphor, the figure of
"space," points to several of the meanings of attention that have been at issue;
in particular, it organizes the three modes of response to Brendan's writing
into a roughly coherent whole. Keeping in mind that "tending," hence
"cultivating" and, ultimately, "culture," are bound up in the verb to attend, I
want to bend the metaphor into making or clearing space, as in clearing a plot
of land for planting, as in making an open plaza in the middle of a city. In the
writing workshop, the effort to clear away, to make room, is most obvious,
first, in the allocation of time for the workshop itself (three to five hours a
week, not in school terms a trivial amount), and, second, in the priority given
to "choice writing" (that time when each child was responsible for finding
theme and form) within the workshop. Now, within this "space" various
tools and constraints--a "back-up assignment," "sharing time,” projects such
as the "Fable Book," to mention only some of those I have touched upon in

passing--are certainly provided; nonetheless, what I want to stress at this

63

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stage is that which is cleared away, absence being not always easy to notice.
There are, for example, no quizzes or tests, nor indeed hardly any traces of
formal assessment.34 (Informal assessment and evaluation, on the other
hand, are continuous-but that is so much a part of the fabric of this story that
it hardly seems to need pointing out.) Certainly, as I've indicated, I had
important expectations for the children's writing, but these tended to be
psychological and subjective, e.g., that the writing they were doing come to
matter to them in some way. I seldom quantified my expectations (as in, I
want one more page). Nor did I come to each workshop armed with a battery
of "learning objectives," though, again, it is evident I had some big ones in
mind. Though there were of course certain routines--beginning each
workshop session with a group meeting, the provision of the back-up
assignment, fairly regular sharing times--I tried to keep these capacious and
flexible. I did not wish to routinize or calcify "the writing process" itself, so,
although "draft" and "revise" were very much part of my vocabulary, I did
not present writing as a necessary sequence of steps. I did try to manifest an
attitude that said, Of course false starts and unfinished work are part of
writing, and-~for reasons I hope my comments on "The Moral Is..." as a
"successful revision" make clear--I permitted a good deal more repetition of
theme and plot than I observe many of my colleagues being comfortable with.
(If we are to treat children as "real writers," we should allow that

obsessiveness is a big part of the make-up of grown-up "real writers. More
politely, we could call upon the important observation that most of us are

lucky to have one or two ideas in a lifetime, ideas we may--again, if we are

 

3’4 However, in the years since I taught Brendan, writing has become a focus of the state's
battery of standardized tests. Indeed, although the test focuses on "process writing," in this
classroom, and in others I know of, "writing workshop and fun writing" are no longer practiced,
due to felt pressures of the test and from district curricular mandates (A. Byrd, personal
communication, 1997).

64

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luckynspend a lifetime or so working and re-working) There were limits to
this permission to reiterate and revisit--I occasionally invoked a standard,

"it's not good to get stuck in a rut"--but these limits followed no particular
rule, rather, a kind of crude sense, a kind of tact, if you will, whose cultivation
is one of the central themes of this work and of the idea of teaching as
attention. I think then of the workshop as a time when some of the clutter of
schooling is brushed away,35 a time to deal with the blank page.

But, as Brendan "deals" with that page in his extravagant manner, my
job has still just begun. For, in addition to trying to make the material and
social space of the classroom hospitable to imaginative activity--including,
provisionally, the unseemly, potentially disruptive activity of "The Garbage
Can Seller"--there is a kind of "making space" that must go on in the
consciousness of the teacher. This could be put as a matter of making
decisions ("spontaneous," less than fully deliberate, intuitive, "they
nonetheless were decisions") about when to defer evaluation (about the
worth of "The Garbage Can Seller," for example) and about what to evaluate
(Brendan's evident "investment of concentration and care" in the text rather
than the text itself, for example). This could also be seen as the stance of
"effortful patience," which is one way I have proposed to understand
"attention." This is attention as Simone Weil spoke of it, as the job of
"suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready" (1977, p. 49).
This stance of expectancy and receptivity is perhaps the first step on the road
of sympathetic reading. Attention is empty in the sense that the object of
attention is not to be determined by the teacher but is to come into View; it is,

with the meanings of cultivating, tending and tending to, and waiting upon

 

35 And of course there is no logical reason to confine this disencumbering to a place in the
schedule marked as "writing workshop."

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or ministering in mind, an image of a plot of land, now cleared, to be
cultivated, an open square or a stage on which someone or something of
interest or importance may emerge. Thought here is suspended, not
abandoned: it awaits prompting and guidance from the object of interest.
And as the object comes into view, to reverse a phrase, the patient effort of
"making-meaning-with" can begin in earnest. Assuming that that object--
"The Garbage Can Seller," for instance-may turn out to be of interest and
even importance, if I can create in myself the right conditions of receptivity is,
to touch on an important point not yet, for reasons of narrative clarity, made
clear, made far easier if previous observations of children investing, let me
say again, "effort and care" into projects not at once compelling or attractive
to adults, have ultimately revealed products of available and assessable
worth. (In this sense the sympathetic reading of Brendan's stories is
recognizable as teaching long after his fourth grade is over in that that reading
supports and encourages my ability to "give the benefit of the doubt" to future
students' projects, including some students to be introduced in subsequent
chapters. Likewise, this makes clear that, encountering Brendan and his
fiction and my musings on that fiction, the reader is, inevitably, entering a
teaching story that long precedes these events.)

Giving Brendan's story the tacit nod of approval, and trying internally
to ready myself for the possibility, even the likelihood, that that story will
turn out to have recognizable and explicable value (for thinking, as thinking),
can be seen as two kinds of "making space." The nod and the internal
readying can also be seen as a series of moves and decisions that I will
sometimes find it useful to term "sanctioning the content" of the writing, in

this case violent, perhaps "unseemly," clearly--to "L. G.," for example--

66

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disturbing content.36 Clearly the logical next step (not that, in the real world
of teaching, these "steps" happen or can happen in neat, linear fashion) is
then to engage with that content, to read it as if it will yield interest and
meaning.

Almost without knowing it, this reading "as if" gets one involved in
the "risky" business of thinking as Dewey understood thinking, as I
understand sympathetic reading: as a matter of "sharing in the
consequences"--the consequences of being orphaned, for example, or of being
at the wheel of that bloody car. It was this reading "as if," and the felt need to
justify to others--and the research project that grew in part out of these
speculations, doubts, and puzzles--that led me eventually to put such a stress
on the fictional character of Brendan's writings, for it was recognizing the
writing as fiction that reminded me how to read, and prompted me to learn
more about how to read.

Thus I come to the final kind of "making space" I have in mind:
granting room and respect for the "play-space" of fiction. This is the space in
which many normal consequences are suspended; it becomes possible and
safe to explore possibilities of image (the windshield covered with blood) and
narrative logic ("and they threw the head in after") that otherwise obviously
cannot be. It is in this space, as I shall increasingly argue, that imaginative
activity does some of its most important work: both the criticism of the world

that is poetry,37 even, as I've suggested, the bleak poetry of "The Moral Is..."--

 

3’6 A process of revision cannot be allowed to be endless, so I will take this opportunity merely
to acknowledge, but not now to take up, the fact that readers may find the "disturbing content"
of Brendan's storiesuand even more, those of C.J., to be addressed in the following chapter-to
be made more so by the recent series of schoolyard killings by children and by arguments that
widely available cultral images of violence and an inability to adequately distinguish "fact
from fiction" help account for such horror (see, for example, Bok, 1998).

37 Recalling the etymology of "fiction" offered earlier, it now is pertinent, having
deliberately introduced "poetry," to note that, etymologically, a poet is a maker (Partridge,
1983)

67

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criticizing by sound, image, and implication a world in which a young man's
"prospects of effective moral action" look very bleak indeed, and the positing
of a possible and preferable world (which these stories of Brendan's do only by
the tenuous modes of "beginning-middle-and end-ness," suggestive of the
possibility of meaning, which his classmate of the crucifixion and I in my way
have attempted to rise to).38

I have used "space" here as a figure of teacherly efforts to attend in
several ways, always with the image of clearing an area in which something
of interest or importance may eventuate, and then seeing to, looking after,
caring for, that possibly important, interesting object or performance when it
occurs. (In the case of a story, then, the teacher may "look after" it in an effort
to help it fulfill its meaning-making capacity. The further argument, initiated
in this chapter and to be taken up later, is that in doing this, the meaning-
making capacity of both the student-writer and the teacher-reader are
enhanced.) Space has meant the provision of relatively generous, relatively
unencumbered time and opportunity to write during the school day, and
within that time and opportunity for others--classmates, teacher--to hear/ read
and respond. In this respect, space-making has a goodly number of concrete,
practical components: uncomplicated, for the most part, but driven by ideas
and convictions--and curiosity. Sometimes it will seem useful to sum up this

aspect of the dimensions of teaching I am trying to take conceptual hold of as

 

38 Quoting "Matthew Arnold's dictum that 'poetry is criticism of life,” Dewey goes on to
complain that the phrase "fails to see or at all events to state how poetry is a criticism of life;
namely, not directly, but by disclosure, through imaginative vision addressed to imaginative
experience (not to set judgment) of possibilities that contrast with actual conditions" (1934, p.
346). I am of course suggesting that poetry or fiction may criticize as well by imaginative
"disclosure" of something of the horror of "actual conditions" and present possibilities. Goya
and Beckett are but two examples that immediately come to mind of artists who have likewise
used the imagination. Later, in the poetry of a young girl (Chapter 4), we will see what at
least one reader, I surmise, takes to be a very painful disclosure of possibilities in marked
contrast to actual conditions.

68

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"creating conditions and opportunities (constraints, expectations, invitations)
for children to write." Space has meant the more psychological matter of the
effort to create internal conditions in the mind of the teacher: conditions of

"suspended thought, emptiness and expectancy," understood as
preconditions for sympathetic reading; and space has been used to mean the
recognition and validation of both the ties and the distinctions between the
"play-space" of fiction and "the real world." It is also relevant to note that
Dewey (1956b, e.g., p. 31), using a "space"-like word he favored, would say that
all of these activities can be understood as part of "determining the
environment of the child," which he deems a, if not the, fundamental
educational task.

Taking all these senses together, a remark from poet Elizabeth Bishop,
touched on in passing earlier in the chapter, (in connection with
understanding "The Moral Is..." as a revision of "The Garbage Can Seller"),
seems entirely to the point. "I think," she writes, that "everyone feels that his
or her best poems were lucky accidents... But of course they really aren't at
allnthey are indications that you have worked hard on all the others [i.e., the
less good ones], and felt deeply, and somehow managed to create the right
atmosphere in your own brain for a good poem to emerge" (1994, p. 86,
emphasis added). It is of course the notion of "somehow creating the right
atmosphere" (or as I have said, "space") that particularly makes me want to
re—insert Bishop here. One way of characterizing what I am attempting would
be to say I am trying to go a bit beyond that word "somehow," to gain some
conceptual clarity about how we go about creating the right conditions,
atmospheres, spaces. When we are discussing what goes on in people's brains
or minds, we are not, I trust, ever going to achieve unassailable, rationally

plain and empirically verifiable, clarity, nor are we ever going to have a

69

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language better suited for our purposes than the language of metaphor.
(Which is by way of acknowledging that a quality of "somehow" will always,
rightly I think, pervade this discussion.) I am also attempting to locate
Bishop's "right atmosphere" socially: not only within the mind of the writer,
but also within the mind of the teacher-reader and in the public space of the
classroom, a space constituted in part by the interactions of readers and
writers in and around texts which evince "hard work" and "deep feeling." In
this, I am guided not only, unoriginally, by the climate of the times in which I
write, but by Dewey's insistence that as teachers we are vitally concerned with
the question of "how mind answers to mind" (1974, p. 324), a point to which I
will return.

Through spatial images, I am trying to open up some of what I mean by
"teaching as acts of attention," to discuss more fully some particular "acts."
Sympathetic reading, as I said early on, can be understood as one prolonged
effort to attend, with many stages (as just reviewed), stages which occur
recursively, readings which reverberate. Then too, the idea of teaching as acts
of attention has itself functioned as an analytic tool or perhaps challenge. For
example, it has only been by reading and even obsessively re-reading the data
on which this chapter is primarily based--Brendan's stories, my teaching
joumal--and earlier drafts of the chapter itself-~and then by putting myself in
conversational milieu where the idea of attention could be expected to be
interrogated, that the recurrence and importance of the figure of space-
making became visible; in particular, became visible not simply as an absence
or series of absences but, rather, as a circle of activity and effort. To rotate the
attending idea once again, it is possible to say, that I am trying to understand
and learn how to practice teaching itself as an inquiry (an effort made more

than usually visible and vulnerable once it became clear to me--for the most

70

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part, after Brendan's fourth grade year--that I was engaged in the research
project that would become this dissertation). So, when I report that "(e)arly
on in Brendan's work on 'The Garbage Can Seller,' I found myself
speculating about my decisions...to encourage Brendan to stick with this
story," and that, "(l)ooking back on my journal, I can see that I had
doubts...about the future of this story," I am trying to make attention--in the
sense we often use "reflection"--a deliberate part of my teaching. Choosing
self-consciousness in this way had at least three consequences at the time: It
made me considerably more deliberate and curious about deciding when to
comment directly to the content of children's writings, when to opt for
dispassion, when to focus on, for example, children's reactions to each other's
writings not the writings themselves, or to address myself to formal elements
only; it made me a more sensitive observer of the qualities of "concentration
and care" Brendan invested in his stories (both because I was curious and
interested in what was going on for him, and because being able to point out
that investment to myself and others legitimated--more or less, enough for
the circumstances--my permitting him to continue in these veins); and it
powerfully stimulated me to read Brendan's stories in the "as if" mode I have
described.

"As if" is the mode of the imagination. With this in mind, I call again
on Dewey and on a statement of principle that goes to the heart of what I am
trying to do in and understand about teaching. This re-invocation of the
imagination serves to link, directly, methods of teaching and analyzing
teaching with the purposes those methods aim to serve-~for an education of
the imagination (literally, a drawing out of the imagination) is a major
purpose of this teaching, and imagination is likewise, I am trying to say, to

show, a major resource or duty of the teacher. Finally, this will be to re-

71

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approach "teaching as acts of attention" from an angle suggested but not
developed moments ago: the idea of creating a "play space" in which
"imaginative activity does some of its most important work...(e.g.,) the
criticism of the world that is poetry."

At the conclusion of Art as Experience, then, Dewey declares,

Our revolt is in fact a reflection upon education that proceeds by
methods so literal as to exclude the imagination...one not touching the
desires and emotions of men (sic).

(1934, p. 347)

I note in passing that Bishop's assertion that a good poem depends in part on
"feeling deeply" exactly parallels Dewey's assertion that an education that
mattered--one that was not sterile--would be one that engaged the "desires
and emotions" of students. I want myself to assert that it is in the spirit of
this unfinished revolution that I try to teach and to understand teaching and
learning. As Brendan's teacher, my aspirations centrally included making the
classroom--the writing workshop in particular--into an environment
hospitable for imaginative activity. I wanted, indeed, for children to learn
something of the pleasures and powers of (written, especially) language
deeply informed by their "desires and emotions," language as a tool for giving
form and shape and substance to desire and emotion, language as a site for
the encounter and re-creation (as Brendan's fable was re-created as a
crucifixion) of desire and emotion. I wanted to do what I could to continue
learning about how to make the classroom be, if possible, whenever possible,
a place that honors our human "impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to
create, to produce." I wanted, as I came to think of it, that the classroom be a
place safe for dangerous ideas--awkward perceptions, unseemly imaginings,

disruptive thoughts. That is, to repeat, there needed to be space for Brendan

72

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to have such ideas, space for me to hold and not instantly reject them, space
for his classmates to contemplate them.

These aspirations turn out to be intimately linked to earlier
propositions of Dewey's. At the turn of the century, he proposed that for
teachers, "the root of the matter"--the matter that is teaching-J'is not in (us),
unless (we) continue to be students of subject-matter, and students of mind-
activity" (1974, p. 321).39 We must, he urged, learn and continue learning to
"observe psychologically" (p. 325), to gain "insight into soul-action" (p. 319),
"to see...how mind answers to mind" (p. 324, emphasis added). These skills,
these qualities of vision, are a crucial part of what I am trying to make more
present, more central, and more comprehensible through the concept of
teaching as acts of attention. I mean this in at least two ways: that fostering
the answerability of mind to mind is a central task of teaching (hence, as a
teacher, I am, again, actually delighted when one mind answers another by
"re-creating" "The Moral Is..." as a crucifixion); also and perhaps more
strangely, I am proposing that cultivating answerability, responsiveness, in
the teacher's mind to the student's mind--call this attending-~is also a key task
(responsibility) of teaching. It is for this reason, in particular, that Dewey's
assertion of the "dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in
the consequences of what goes on" (1966, p. 147) matters to me. In what I
have called sympathetic reading--a form of thought, a meditation—-it will be
my fate too to live as if in "an adventure in a world that as a whole (I do) not
own and to which (I have) no native title" (Dewey, 1934, p. 59), to live in a

world in which a "young man's prospects of taking effective moral action"

 

39 It is not my intention here to pursue the "study of subject-matter" fork, except to observe
that I felt it necessary, trying to learn ways of reading Brendan's stories, to ruminate on the
meanings and ambitions of fiction, ruminations that could perhaps be construed as part of my
continued study of subject-matter.

73

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are few, to live in a world in which "the teenage boy the last of the family
living" is not living for very long.

"Mind" is a name we have given to the home or site of the
phenomenon of "thinking," here understood as, in particular, "making-
meaning-with." "Idea" is a name for one product of thinking; the word
derives from to see (Partridge, 1983). We could suppose an idea then is a clear
seeing or an acute perception, a something clearly beheld. Thus, an image
and an idea, rendered evermore distinct by the same dualism that has
separated or tried to separate feeling from thinking, turn out to be construable
as two words for one kind of product, representations of and attempts
("experiments," Dewey would say) at "getting to the heart of the matter,"
"understanding." I make this slightly cumbersome statement in order to
underscore my contention that when Brendan gives us, successively, "the
teenage boy the last of the family living," his head "chopped off but...still
alive and laughing," and finally, "a hole" into which they "threw the
body...and then the head after it," in these images he is thinking, he is giving
us ideas. I would say these are potentially dangerous ideas--they may
threaten, for example, our sense of well-being, our hopes for childhood
experience; they are images of and ideas about a world that, I have argued,
implicates us (we can't apprehend them as ideas unless we're willing to be
implicated); they threaten us with complicity.

Hence my gradual understanding of and increased concern for making
the classroom "safe for dangerous ideas." When I began the more formal
analytic work on Brendan's writings, I had a modestly good general sense of
the ideas for which I have relied upon Harold Rosen (though they are not the
exclusive property of him or anyone)--that a story is an act of thought,

narrative a meaning-making strategy, and so on—-and I had certainly

74

experienced the truth of these ideas as both a reader and a writer. But as I
worked, with the aid of Rosen, Dewey, Scholes, and many others, on the
doing and the conceptualizing of "sympathetic reading" of Brendan's stories,
it became ever more important to try and say why this might matter for
teaching, to fend off, or answer, an imagined impatient reader who would
regard all this as a somewhat precious and mostly misplaced piece of literary
criticism. The surest way to do this has seemed to be to take as seriously and
as far as I could the proposition that Brendan is offering ideas, that his stories
are truly acts of thought. For surely no one can argue that thinking and
having ideas are anything other than central to any humane and defensible
conception of education.40 To take this proposition seriously in the ways I
wished, in ways that respected the qualities and indeed the traditions of
Brendan's writing, Dewey's discussions of the need for "re-creation" by the
viewer (here, reader) of a work of art, and his insistence on the "dependence
of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the consequences of what
goes on" (1966, p. 147), were invaluable. Only, in this phrase, it has been my
attempts as a teacher to think—-to read "intently, personally, vulnerably,
subjectively," to have my own experience "re-written"--that have become the
warrant for asserting that Brendan is thinking, having ideas. (Is there any
other way in which thought proves itself as thought except in the
answerability of one mind to another?) This prolonged, asymmetrical
transaction has both been a process of attending, in several senses, and an
effort to understand and explicate and demonstrate something of the process

of attending: in particular, attending as a means of furthering and honoring

 

40 -To an education for democracy, as well, I will wish to argue. In this context, I think we
can and must understand the institution of public education as both an expression of faith in the
possibility of democracy and an effort to further democracy: thus, an institution dedicated to
the premise that all children, as all citizens, can have worthwhile ideas, ideas that can enter
powerfully into the experiences and imaginations of others.

75

human imaginative capacity enacted in the meaning-making activity of

creating stories.

76

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Chapter 3

"You are getting ready to be a new person":

Mediation of Faith and Doubt in a Writing Workshop?1

I [see] the child as in the position of having to steal language
from his or her elders. The concept of stealing [is] prompted...by
wanting to emphasize the asymmetry of the work to be done on
each side of the inheritance, the elders exaggerating their
contribution of sounds, as if to relieve themselves of the anxiety
in the fact they mostly repeat themselves and wait... This
condition is the basis and parable of the possibility and necessity
in the education of humans, of making language mine, of
finding my voice (my consent, my right to speak, to promise, to
break my promise).... Call this...the condition of the possibility of
the self-theft of culture...

Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, (1994, pp. 36—37)

Feelings of authority and the authority of feeling: Why look at doubt?

A beginning

As a teacher of writing and a once upon a time would-be writer myself,
I have often tried to articulate how I understand "what writing is": what
intellectual, psychological, personal, social-«in a word, educational--purposes
it serves. I mean particularly, though not exclusively, what used to be called
"creative writing," i.e., fiction and poetry. A phrase I have often used to

describe one crucial function of such writing is to say that its work is to "give

 

1 The work in this chapter was supported in part by the Michigan Partnership for a New
Education and the Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, Michigan State
University. The opinions expressed are my own.

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the annual meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, (Roosevelt, 1996).

This work would not have been possible without the generosity of my colleagues Jane Boyd
and Barbara Acker. I am also gratefully indebted to Deborah Ball and Jay Featherstone for
many helpful comments. Special thanks to Ruth Heaton, Steve Mattson, Sue Poppink, and
Kara Suzuka for help with data collection. I am also grateful for the intellectual and moral
contributions made by Thea Abu El-Haj.

77

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form to feeling."2 I mean by this something along the lines of, through
language grasping at experience, through written language giving a special
grip and hold to that grasping, "the desires and emotions of men" (sic) may be
"re-created" in such a way that the writer has new, more powerful, access to
his or her own experience, is in a position to represent and thus discover
something more of his or her relationship to the world, is able to assert some
plausible, albeit perhaps modest, transformative control over that
relationship. A young student of mine--a ten year old child with a reputation
for, if not stealing, its cousin, lying-spent the better part of a year giving such
form to feeling and re-creating his relationship to the world about him, as I
have come to see it--to "steal" his way into a new relationship to voice, self,
and world, in fact--in remarkable ways. Specifically, I have come to think of
him as having given specifiable, concrete shape to the feeling and experience
(for it is an event, not just a state) of doubt. In this chapter, I describe how, as I
see it, he did so, and how I as the teacher, again as I see it, played some part in
that "taking hold." This is necessarily a speculative inquiry, one in which
imagination guided by logic must have its say. I have done my best to alert
the reader at those moments when my interpretations, in my view, follow
the logic of the available evidence but are not themselves directly confirmed
in the evidence.

In this account, I hope to continue trying to expand and usefully
complicate our understanding of the place and possibility of writing in the
schools. But I have a further aim in view: I want to make a start at a larger
argument about teaching, specifically, that doubt between student and teacher

may be a healthy, educative, phenomenon, not something simply to be

 

2 I suppose I am here echoing Wordsworth's tricky statement that "poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings...recollected in tranquillity" (1965, p. 460).

78

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deplored and if possible fixed. This argument, in turn, is located within the
conception of teaching as acts of attention, a concept which the chapter, I
hope, continues to illustrate and develop. "Attending," for example,
continues to look like preoccupation and meditation upon a student, his
meanings, and my relations--and in the background, but significantly, his
classmates' relations-~to these; though here these meditations and the
vicissitudes of this relationship are more dramatic--more comic, even--and
more exposed than in my account of Brendan. In regard to doubt, I do not,
finally, take a thoroughly skeptical view, as one might who wished to argue
for mistrust or doubt as desirable goals or outcomes of an education; rather, I
propose a characterization of teaching as a "mediation of faith and doubt,"3
and learning likewise as a kind of reconciliation of the two. I aim here to
make, not only the teacher's often understandable doubt of, and need to find
faith with, the student, subject to examination, but to make the issue of the
student’s doubt of the teacher central. The concept of teaching as attention
serves here to help me "look past...the busy-ness of the teacher to
the...interior life of teaching" with which this chapter is centrally concerned--
and to find, ironically but in no contradictory spirit, that that interior life is
very active indeed. "Attention's" meanings of "watching out for, or over,
and waiting upon" are also pertinent to the teaching discussed here. And,
"attention," helps me to understand, and perhaps to do, a kind of stepping
back from self difficult but important to do in teaching. In making these
arguments, not only do I draw heavily on my own work as a teacher, and on
the writing and classroom life of my fourth grade student, and, as

throughout, on John Dewey; I draw also on various thinkers writing outside

 

3 I am indebted to David Cohen for this formulation (while I cannot hold him responsible for
the uses I make of it), and to his pointing me towards Willard Waller (1965) and his relevance
for this work.

79

of education per se, in particular, the philosopher Annette Baier and the
psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott.

Several other contexts need to be acknowledged before turning to my
story. One is the history, especially the recent history, of efforts to fashion
"authentic" or "powerful" pedagogies of writing. I will let the work of Graves
(e.g., 1983; 1994), Calkins (e.g., 1986; 1991), Delpit (e.g., 1986; 1988; 1992) and
Lensmire (e.g., 1994a; 1994b) serve as markers for this history, which I have
reviewed at somewhat greater length in Chapter 2; Silberman (1989) provides
a very useful and principled (though already somewhat dated) overview of
this territory. My own interests in this matter continue to include a desire to
claim a larger space for children's fictional impulses, and to do so by

attempting "right, sympathetic," or "attentive" readings of their fictional
work. This chapter works on, and also complicates, that project.

Finally, I want to situate my work within the larger context of
"progressive" education. As I understand them, all progressive pedagogies,
whether located more at the psychological/ individualistic end of the
spectrum, or more towards the political/ social end, seek to develop and enact
a vision of classrooms as places in which children are encouraged to exercise
and further their intellectual, imaginative, and social powers. A progressive
classroom or school, in other words, cultivates children's capacities as self-
initiating but not autonomous-rather, connected and responsible--actors, in
whatever realm of social and academic--ultimately, political-~life they find
themselves. From this point of view, writing, fascinating and fertile though
it is as a human pursuit, is but one element in a larger landscape of hope and
frustration. I believe it is important to stipulate my larger ambitions--
ambitions which include the development of children's "expressive," let's

say, and "authentic, voices"; their "rights to speak, to promise, to break

80

their promises"--for a number of connected reasons. In the first instance, the
aims and practices I imply bring the locus and nature of classroom authority
into the very center of the frame. I play deliberately on "authority": the
writer is an author--literally, a creator--and the teacher is an authority—-source
of direction and maybe wisdom, responsible one--and the root word is of
course the same, a root implying parentage. The progressive educator, as I
depict her or him, seeks to elicit and encourage children's capacities to be
authors, in many senses and suggestions of the word. At the same time, in
our time and culture, we have, at best, limited resources for imagining
classrooms as places that are not exclusively adult-directed. Compulsory
public education is the most obvious impediment to such imaginings;
whatever we may think age or greater experience owes to youth is another,
more diffuse, impediment. As Waller observed in the 1930's a "school is a
despotism...in a state of perilous equilibrium...a despotism resting upon
children, at once the most tractable and the most unstable members of the
community..." (1965, p. 10). It is not responsible to invoke the notion of
children exercising authority in classrooms without acknowledging and
seeking to explicate some of the tensions between the putative authority of
the children and that of the teacher.4 The question of the sources and extents
of the teacher's authority and power is not made less important or
troublesome in "progressive" classrooms. On the contrary; it is more so. It is
at least more exposed. I try to let it be similarly so in this paper. I explicitly
raise and examine the issue of trust between student(s), teacher, and surround
(classroom structure, expectations, provisions, tone, etc.). Trust is a concept

that properly looks quite different when viewed as between parties with non-

 

4 A full explication of this tension--desirable though it surely is (and impossible though it
might be)-is beyond the scope of this chapter.

81

 

 

equal power and authority, for example, teachers and children (see Baier,
1986), a point I will develop at some length later. For all these reasons, my
claim to be working in a progressive tradition is at least as significant as the
narrower context of the "writing workshop," however conceived.

At the time of the stories I will tell, I was a guest in Jane Boyd's
classroom, a fourth grade of 28 students in an urban public school, also a
professional development school associated with Michigan State University.
The class was approximately two thirds black and Latino, one third white;
approximately one fourth were designated as having "special needs"; about
half received free or reduced lunch (B. Rochowiak, personal communication,
January, 1998). Middle and working class families predominated; there were
several instances of extreme deprivation and / or familial disarray. Barbara
Acker, a special education teacher working on an "inclusion" model often
worked alongside me; Jane was usually out of the room. (These
demographics were roughly typical of the school as a whole, though the
inclusion approach to special education was not.) This was my second year in
this school, working at Jane's invitation.

The workshop met four afternoons a week for an hour and a quarter
per session. I began each workshop with a group meeting. Announcements,
assignments, and occasional "mini-lessons" or reviews (of vocabulary,
punctuation, commonly confused words, etc.) were the primary order of
business here, with assignments at times leading into substantive discussions.
I made assignments with several purposes and audiences in mind. I wanted
to ensure that each child did at least a small amount of exploration of genres
and themes, I wanted us to regularly have some work in common (thus
enabling, I hoped, productive and provocative comparisons, illustrations of

novel and unexpected responses to the "same" topic, task, or form), and I

82

wanted to give myself periodic Opportunities to direct attention to a particular
topic. And I wished to demonstrate, to the children, but also to other
teachers, that, despite a degree of choice to which they were quite
unaccustomed, this was "real school." On Mondays, I typically gave an
assignment suitable for working on, steadily or on and off, over several days.
Typically these assignments aimed to highlight or develop some aspect of
form and genre (though this vocabulary did not figure in my talk with the
class). In the fall I gave a number of assignments highlighting, and calling on
children to employ, patterns and structures drawn both from their own work

and from material I presented to them.5 In the spring, I assigned students the

 

5 For example, regarding structure:

 

 

Title Author Star We 1 Trouble
Seven Ravens little girl, find brothers, lost key
sister set free
Brer Rabbit and Brer Rabbit thrown into
the Tar Baby Briar Patch
Brer Fox eat/skin/burn fire

Brer Rabbit,
rope to hang,

intelligence‘

Tar Baby
Helpers Candy Aladdin wife
Christina house, baby,
father .
car car acczdent

 

 

 

 

In this assignment, I provided the categories, drawing in part on previous discussions about
"what makes a story good. "Title" and "author" need no explanation; "star" was a term
proposed by students in the previous discussion; "desire or need" was my term (in lieu of the
more typical "goal"). Perhaps I borrowed it from Kenneth Burke, who is certainly where
"trouble" (livelier, I think, then the more usual "obstacle") came from. It will be noted that
"resolution" and "setting" are, deliberately, absent. The italicized examples were generated
during discussion, drawing on stories recently read to the group. (Candy was one of the
students.) The assignment was to write a story including one or more members for each category.
I complicated and varied this structure and, with some help from the group, added possibilities
to the key categories, over the course of the fall. The point was not so much to teach that
stories must include each of these structural elements as to draw attention to the fact that
stories often do.

1’ Cameron, a student to be met in the chapter after this one, characteristically, suggested
that Brer Fox was lacking in intelligence.

A "pattern" assignment was based on the blues standard "Call it Stormy Monday"

83

job of selecting and responding to a word, phrase, or idea from the Gettysburg
address, treated as a piece of poetry. And, for most of the year, I gave a very
brief assignment called "focus words" on the other days of the week. In this, I
gave the students two words--typically, contrasting words, one relatively
abstract, one relatively concrete, both with some emotional valence (e.g.,
pride and winter on one day; fear and nighttime on the next); the direction
was to choose one and write about it (a minimum of five lines at first, later
tennone of the very few places where I quantified my expectations for
writing). Often we would brainstorm possible approaches (e.g., describe the
thing, say what it makes you think of, do a story about it, etc.) during the
meeting. This device had several purposes. It was intended to ease (speed up
and quiet down) the transition from meeting time to writing time, by giving
everyone something to do right away--a focus, a tool for concentration. It also

ensured a certain modest but nonetheless reassuring (to my colleagues, for

 

(Crowder, et. al., 1988):
They call it Stormy Monday
But Tuesday's just as bad.
Yes, they call it Stormy Monday,
But Tuesday‘s just as bad.
Wednesday's worse
And Thursday's oh so sad.
Yes, the eagle flies on Friday,
And Saturday I go out to play.
Yes, the eagle flies on Friday,
And Saturday I go out to play.
Sunday I go to church,
Then I kneel down to pray.

Lord have mercy,

Lord have mercy on me.
Lord have mercy,

My heart's in misery
Crazy about my baby--
Yeah, send her back to me.

I wrote the lyrics out on chart paper, we discussed them (and generated quite a respectable,

traditional interpretation in the process) and then they were to write a "poem" of their own,
beginning with Monday, alternating "good" and "bad" days with reasons of their own.

84

example) minimal daily productivity. And, given that most of my students--
in this as in other years--tended to gravitate towards fiction writing, focus
words were a way of nudging them towards consideration of other forms, as
each focus word response was typically either a sort of incipient essay or a
poem.6 Assignments notwithstanding, my intention was that students would
generally spend at least half of their time on "choice writing." The meeting
was followed by "silent ten," theoretically (and sometimes in fact) a ten
minute period of silent, independent writing time. This in turn was followed
by "quiet writing" time, during which collaborative projects were permitted,
sometimes encouraged. A degree of conferencing took place amongst the
students, especially at times when we planned to change the work on display
or publish a collective book, but I did not formalize "peer conferencing,"
though I conferred often with individuals and small groups. I also did not
make "revision" a ritual for each week or each piece of writing. For some
students it was a pretty regular activity, and everyone worked at it, as part of
the assignment structure, at least a couple of times over the course of the year.
In the fall, and then again in late spring, I scheduled "sharing work"--a time
for everyone to gather on the rug and those who wished to to read or present
their work-~a couple of times a week at the end of the afternoon. I also read to
the group intermittently (e.g., "Brer Rabbit" tales [Rees, 1988], Tuck

Everlasting [Babbitt, 1975])--as part of the meeting, in lieu of sharing work,

during "silent ten," or at the end of an unusually unsettled afternoon.

A boy who presents a problem: Comedies of unreliability

Describing his "method of doubt, " which directs ”never...accept
anything as true if (one has) not evident knowledge of its being

 

6 As the year went on, another function of the focus words turned out, for many, to be as a
particular kind of communication with me, a phenomenon I describe at more length later.

85

so,” Descartes adds, ”Not that I imitated the skeptics who doubt
just for the sake of doubting, and affect to be always undecided;
on the contrary, my whole aim was to reach security, and cast
aside loose earth and sand so as to reach rock or clay. ”

Discourse on the Method, ( 1971, pp. 20 8 28, emphasis added)

One day in late September, Erika, a black student who is new to the
school, complains to me, "C.J. said I was going to marry Anthony Y. [who is
white and was in C.J.'s class last year] (and) the babies would be mixed..." This
has caused derisive laughter amongst the several (black) students in the
vicinity. C.J. himself is a very small, angular featured, conservatively dressed,
African American boy of nine, in his second year in this school. He is
repeatedly the object of complaints. Erika is often an accuser, though I believe
she enjoys the role of the righteously indignant and would not willingly
forego all of these dramas; Anthony Y. and C]. are involved in a long-
running dispute whose causes I am unable to determine, though part of the
dynamic may be that Anthony is quickly provoked into a flushed face and a
passionate retort, often physical, whereas C.J.'s demeanor is impassive and
his tone sardonic long after everyone around him is thoroughly fed up.
Earlier in the month, Anthony came to me three times in one week to tell me
that G]. had threatened to "get him" after school (--an event for which he,
Anthony, was not simply going to wait). Nor are these by any means the only
children who have been affronted. C]. has called Candy "zebra breath"; he
has borrowed a pen from Miguel, (the least offensive person in the room, and
the one least likely to take visible offense), and has steadily, silently, refused
to return it; he has frequently made Eric, (who spent the previous year in a
football helmet, being extraordinarily prone to seizures), the butt of cruel

jokes. And so on. He is from time to time accused of stealing, and has an all

86

too well established reputation (dating to the previous year) for lying. At one
point--in an atypical loss, or partial loss, of self control--he puts into words
what is often suspected in his tone, saying, publicly, "Fuck you" to another
teacher. Much of the time, though, he is only reported to have committed
misdemeanors--they are infrequently observed by his teachers, who,
however, find the reports very easy to believe. Confronted, or merely
questioned, he cocks his head to the side and gazes at you as if in assessment--
curious, as I come to imagine him, as to how much temper (which is to say, it
becomes important to note, feeling), he has provoked. He denies wrong-
doing, or--far more irritatingly--says, in tone, expression, and sometimes in
word, "80?" He will not be drawn into a discussion either of facts or of rights
in these situations; sometimes, he goes through the motions of promising
"to do better," but these are nearly always prompted by his mother, and seem
to carry little force.

I find C.J. challenging, as he presumably intends. The pattern of "lying
and denying" is troubling, and troublesome. Demeanors I describe as

"impassive, sardonic," or "assessing" might also be summed up as "cold,"
an impression heightened by the quantity of violence in his writings and the
apparent lack of affect attached to it. He seems, in short, to do, if not
everything in his power, a great deal, to make trust in him difficult or
impossible. However, as I think about C]. in September--and indeed all year,
and since then-trust, or confidence, seems to occupy something very like a
central position in the teaching I am trying to do. I believe, for example, that
"the better angels of our nature" are usually somewhere in the offing and that
a classroom can and should be a good place to entertain them; I tend to think

that the offering of trust is usually reciprocated, in time. Trustworthiness is

often, I believe, as William James put it, one of those "cases where a fact

87

cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming," a situation,
that is, "where faith in a fact can help create the fact" (1984, p. 322). Whether
my stance is naive or merely stubborn is, I suppose, a matter for conjecture.
C.J., in any case, tested my ability to maintain this stance. As time went on, I
came to think of him as implicitly raising the question, "How much trust is
necessary or desirable in an educative relationship, how is it to be obtained
when conditions militate against it, and in what directions must it flow?"

In my day to day work, then, I determined to offer trust to G].
whenever possible. I wanted to "give him the benefit of the doubt," and to
make the gesture explicit. The corollary, which I left implicit, was that I
would exercise particular vigilance, would be on the look-out for occasions to
point out wrong-doings which I myself saw. There was no shortage of
opportunities for either move. If I saw him shove someone out of his way,
call someone a name half under his breath, surreptitiously "borrow"
someone's magic marker, and the like, I would call him on it--"that's the
kind of thing that makes it hard for people to trust you"--and correct him
briskly, never questioning or inviting discussion. The following journal

excerpt from October is fairly representative of times when I "gave the benefit

of the doubt."

Ralph & C.J. had a tussle yesterday--it is true that the list of
people who find cause to complain about C.J., 8: who can get
genuinely, deeply, angry is long... (I)t is also true that Ralph is
sparked to fists pretty quickly. They both agreed that C.J., coming
up behind / next to Ralph, had complimented his work; Ralph
[who is white] either said "thanks" or "thanks boy" (the first
time I thought I heard "boy," but Ralph didn't repeat [on the
second telling] & C.J. didn't pick up on, so I let it lie); C.J. put his
hand on Ralph's head 8: either forcefully or not, either friendlily
or not, pushed his head a bit (as you might tousle someone's
hair?)--I told them I could either believe that G]. had meant to
bother or that he hadn't meant to bother/ be rough, but
[nevertheless] had been: could they tell me how to decide? No.

88

OK, I said, then I am going to trust, to believe that C.J. didn't
mean to bother, because I prefer to trust-~but I need him to help
me be able to trust him. Did he understand? Nod. Did Ralph?
Nod. OK for now? OK.

(Journal, 10 / 8 / 94)7

The anecdote has its share of ambiguity (e.g., the possibility that G]. had
been given cause to be offended, the possibility--less clear at the time, I like to
think, than in the recounting-~that both boys were simply nodding and
yessirring in an effort to get back to their own pursuits as soon as they could--
which is surely how Waller would interpret it). Variants on this approach
were times when a complaint involving C.J. would be made and I would say
to him things like, (as I did in response to the "mixed babies" episode), "what
I'm noticing--about every two days, around where you are, is trouble." A
trick to all this was to find ways to make it clear that I was not being willfully
blind or oblivious, not, as it were, looking for ways to be taken advantage of.
It was important to avoid "offering trust" in ways / at times that would seem
patently unfair or inappropriately incurious (as to the "true facts of the case")
to other children. Another tricky thing was to find occasions when I was in
genuine doubt about what to believe, times when I could legitimately suspect
C.J.--and still "give the benefit of the doubt" with a degree of honesty. The
first "trick" encompasses common enough teaching moves, ones perceptible
to a sensitive observer who spends enough time in many an early childhood
classroom. I spell these out because I think the second "trick" is not

susceptible to observation and yet was the whole point of the exercise. It

 

7 My journal is characterized by informal shorthand, idiosyncratic punctuation, and poor

spelling. I have silently corrected these features. The journal was for me a recording space (my
major way, in addition to collecting work, of keeping track of what children were doing, what
plans and agreements we had made and so forth), a reflective space (a place to raise questions
and to critique my practice; sometimes, a place to let off steam), and a place where I did some
but not all of my planning.

89

requires, or consists of, an internal teaching "move" without which, I believe,
the gesture would be moot, practically and morally: I had to be vulnerable to
real doubt, at some risk of having my trust abused, for my gesture to count as
"trust" at all. A sure thing would mean nothing. Real trust required taking
the risk that I was being gulled and finding it in me to have faith that, at least
in part, C.J. had been inclining towards "the right thing," or had done no
wrong thing. I could not say "I'm choosing to trust" but mean "my
suspicions are thicker than they were before." I had to be willing to turn my
back on him for a while, and he had to know that, to believe I was doing that.
Over the course of the fall and into the early winter, this approach
seemed to be bearing some fruit, but there was nothing like uniform progress.
On the one hand, C.J. regularly sought me out for conferences about his
writing (which he was not obliged to do), and he often seemed to go out of his
way to give me a rather formal "good bye, Mr. Roosevelt" (e.g., 11/ 12 and
11/ 28) at the end of the day (a hectic time when such courtesies were not the
norm). On the other hand, troubling incidents continued. The following,

from early December, was one of the worst.

...while my back was briefly turned, G]. was up out of his chair
and pounding on Eric in the chair next to him, hitting him
repeatedly, hard, perhaps as hard as he could, on the head &
shoulders. I grabbed him 8: lifted him up, plunking him down
near the door & sending him to the office...

(Journal, 12/7/94)

(Lest I appear to have over-reacted, I point out that Eric was the boy who had

spent the previous year in a football helmet to reduce the chance of injury

90

during one of his many seizures, a fact of which C.J. was well aware.8) Clearly,
I had to be careful in turning my back to C.J.

On this same day, however, when he was returned to the classroom at
home-time, about an hour later, C.J. went directly to his cubby, retrieved his
latest story, and handed it to me silently on his way out the door. Such
contrasts-unreliable, even conceivably dangerous, child; child who seeks me
out in my role as writing teacher and is sometimes gravely courteous to me--
gradually forced themselves on my consciousness. Belatedly, I began to
consider that, all the time I was contending with my difficulties trusting him,
he, in fact was doubting me. Following Descartes, I choose "doubt" to
characterize C.J.'s stance and actions because the word connotes an active
seeking and testing--a quest for certaintyurather than a merely passive or
reactive mistrust. "Mistrust," furthermore, suggests an attitude formed, a
judgment at least tentatively made, whereas "doubt," again, implies a
question, a live investigation.9

A review of my journal substantiates this reconsideration, this
refocusing of my attention away from my attitude towards the child to his
attitude towards me. (The teacher is accustomed to interrogating; the teacher

must be subject to interrogation.) C.J. in fact sought me out more frequently

 

8 To this day, I am not certain what prompted the outburst, though I do know it was a
generally unsettled, unhappy day in the classroom. I can speculate that something about Eric's
vulnerability, and social awkwardness, made C.J. acutely uncomfortable. And it is quite
possible that Eric was in some way deliberately provocative: he was known to be on several
occasions later in the year. Such mysteries are, too often, an uncomfortable feature of school
life-especially when, as in this case, someone else handled the subsequent disciplinary
conversation.

9 James is again relevant. Consider: "(T)here is some believing tendency wherever there is
willingness to act at all," and, "Let us give the name hypothesis to anything that may be
proposed to our belief...(and)...call the decision between two hypotheses an option"; these in
turn come in several forms: "living or dead; forced or avoidable; momentous or trivial..." (1984,
p. 309). Finally, taking doubt as an active search, with C.J. thus portrayed as on a quest that is
at base moral, consider this: "If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head
will assuredly never make you believe in one" (p. 321).

91

in .rl. ..n u 4} .H .t J. a :T. ..M ..L

than many children in the group, more so than any of the other boys, with
one possible exception. Most of my conferences were held on an ad-hoc,
informal basis as the need arose from a student's point of view or my own. (I
did sometimes schedule conferences in advance, but proved, speaking of
reliability, embarrassingly unable to make good on such promises most of the
time.) C.J. often asked for conferences, and often--daily, for a while--chose to
sit at the round table where I stationed myself, even on days, as were frequent
in the fall, when I'd had cause to reprimand him at group meeting.10 And he
complained when I promised but failed to get to conference with him—-
though I sometimes didn't fully register this complaint until after he'd gotten
into some kind of trouble (for instance, one day I sent him to the office, he
slammed the door dramatically on the way out--"OK, Mr. Roosevelt," loud
and sarcastic; only later did I recall he'd earlier complained of waiting
"months" for his conference [journal, 10/ 5/ 94]). Most telling was the
frequency with which he gave me his work to read at the end of the day, let
me know what he'd written at home the night before,11 or, as I've mentioned,
said "good-bye" to me at the end of a difficult day.

One week in November illustrated this seeking, probing, withdrawing,
questioning--in a word, doubting-stance particularly well. On Monday, at
sharing time, C.J. reminded me that I'd promised him he could continue a

turn begun the previous week--and asked me to read his story for him, which

 

10 The students were arrayed at seven rectangular tables seating 34 each, not at individual
desks, with, when I was teaching, great (but not total) freedom to sit where they chose once the
beginning meeting was over. Additionally, there was a slightly threadbare carpeted area
bordered by (equally threadbare) couch and upholstered armchair, two adjoining study carrels
(added late in the fall), a table holding three computers, one private desk facing the wall (and
another outside the door in the hall), a round table near the door and the computer stations
and, diagonally opposite, Jane's desk. I stationed myself at the round table, held what
conferences 1 held there, and made it clear students could choose to work there.

11 For which no "extra credit" or other such external inducements were available from me. I
gave, in fact, no homework.

92

I did. The next day during sharing time, he reduced Candy to silent, near to
tears rage-apparently he'd chastised her for being "white" (true) and ridden
with "lice" (almost certainly not true)--and this ordinarily tough, resourceful
and vocal girl had shut up in a furious discomfort. I'd taken C.J. to task,
received no denials or excuses, and told him I was "extremely disappointed in
him" for being cruel. The following day, a Wednesday, I had (as usual) not
been at school. On Thursday, he'd written--in response to the "Stormy
Monday" assignment—-that "Wednesday is good because we don't have
writing workshop" (journal, 11/ 14-11/ 18/ 94; I go on to note, with an
embarrassment I will later judge misplaced, that he had succeeded in

"hurting my feelings" by writing this). Long after the fact, it seemed
reasonable to suppose we had had a moderately trusting or trustworthy
exchange on Monday, followed by my expression of disappointment in C.J. on
Tuesday, followed in turn by my scheduled absence on Wednesday,
culminating in his statement of anger at me on Thursday, a statement which
could also be interpreted as his being glad there was no one around to be
disappointed in him, and as a pointing out to me that I'd been gone,
unavailable--a complex, but quite human, stew of mixed feelings and mixed
statements, all sensible in the context of a testing inquiry. My final journal

entry for the week (Friday's) begins:

C.J. the other day threw away "Pit Bulls," tearing & crumpling it,
telling me (typically) as he did so. Later I asked him...if he'd
thrown it out 'cause he was mad (at me?) or 'cause he really
didn't want to work on it anymore--[He replied that there were]
"no books (i.e., to look up stuff)"--"what [, I asked him,] are
teachers for?..." "...help?" "yes--next time I could [help you find
books, etc.]..."

(Journal 11/18/94)

93

 

 

 

As "typically" indicates, this was not the first time C.J. had thrown away,
hidden, or otherwise deprived me of access to his work--an act always, I think,
drawn deliberately to my attention. The journal entry continues--in a little
duet of conflicting and hesitant expectations so familiar that, even several

years after the fact, it's easy for me to miss its special salience in the context.

Yesterday [i.e., the day of his "Wednesday's good...no writing
workshop" writing], on the rug [i.e., at the end of sharing time],
leaning against couch, 'can I get my name off board'lZ-Jstand
up'--'huh?,' puzzled, about to be indignant-~‘stand up, turn
around, look...you're already off...‘ A smile, though Jane says,
rightly, he seldom does.

He asks, then, for a good favor, as if I might possibly bestow it, begins to
misinterpret my response, prepares to "be indignant," and then accepts the
"favor" already given, or earned, with an unusual smile, as if in recognition
that we are joined together in some kind of game--perhaps an important one,
perhaps not.

Finally, re-reading my journal I discover, to my dismay, times when it
was certainly I who warranted mistrust. Even on these occasions, though,
C.J.'s active consideration of the possibility that I might be trustworthy can
still be glimpsed. (Again I want to point out that for some time I was at best
barely responsive to that consideration--"glimpsed" is a good word--though it
now seems to me almost incontrovertible.) To illustrate this, and to continue

the portrayal C.J., I take a slight detour. As I have said, I regularly gave the

 

12 With extremely mixed feelingsnas if trying to demonstrate Waller's gloomiest findings
about the incompatibility of exercise of teacherly "authority" (force) and the promotion of
student "authority" (self-initiative)--I was employing a variant of an "assertive discipline"
approach (see, for example, Charles, 1992)—something quite out of character, except to the
extent that low level pragmatism becomes characteristic over time. I often kept two lists on the
chalkboard, one for "the group," one for "individuals." I'd put names and / or tally marks in
each column when unruliness or other misbehavior became excessive, with each tally mark
indicating something like a minute of lost recess time. -And then I urged people to "earn back"
this lost time, often looking for every opportunity to erase a tally mark or a name.

94

group brief assignments, often no more than literary versions of finger
exercises. One of my favorites was stolen from Kenneth Koch (1971, pp. 156-
174). The pattern is to alternate phrases beginning "Once I was" with ones
beginning "But now I am"; the invitation is to play with metaphor. I gave
the following examples (the material in parentheses was notes to myself,

possible ways of explaining the imagery).

 

Once I was... But now I am...

a lion (proud, on top of things, a moth (wimp, at the bottom

 

 

angry) of the food chain)
a boy a girl
a root a tree (growing older)
water ice
underground [ _______ ?]

 

Several weeks later, I assigned a variant on this theme, with the first phrase

now containing two openings (alas, my suggestions were trite).

 

 

 

My ________ used to be But now...
family just my mom & dad all of us
whole world [ ________ ?] [ _______ ?]
dream bright blue barracudas silent stars

 

Here is C.J.'s response to the second assignment:

11—7-94

My teachers at my old school were nice. But now at my
new school they are mean.

I yous to live with my brothers dad But now I do not.

A long time ago white people yous to get there butt
kicked

But now they still do.

A long time ago the prinsible be beating people now kids
get guns.

I yous to be small but now i'm not.13

 

13 In this and in other samples of C.J.'s writings (except where noted otherwise), I have

95

The piece seems to demand an initial psychologized, or
"autobiographical," interpretation. We can easily suppose, for example, that
it expresses the wish for greater size and strength on the part of this
exceedingly small (though wiry and pugnacious) child. And, this being an
assignment and I the principal, perhaps only, reader, it is easy to read in it
C.J.'s suspicion of, or anger at, his new, white, writing teacher (in this still
new school). Certame it can be taken as a provocation. Going a step beyond
the personal, we can also see something quintessentially American in C.J.'s
invocation of violence across lines of color, age, and authority.14 At the time,
that's as far as I went in considering the piece as possibly a pretty direct
communication about current events in C.J.'s life, or in the classroom
intersections of our two lives,15 and turned my attention to other aspects of

the piece (which I will address shortly).

 

preserved the original spelling or corrected it visibly in brackets; I have left punctuation
intact; and I have tried to respect line breaks, though these are ambiguous: sometimes they
seem dictated by reaching the margin of the page, other times they fall more or less into
phrases and probably come where they do as a strategy to meet my length requirements for the
"focus words"—-rarely, they may reflect a self-conscious attempt at "poetry," of which we had
done some study and which others--but definitely not C.J.«declare that they are writing.
14 An invocation to which (speaking of "trust," or bad faith), his quite calm and
unthreatening elementary school has unwittingly contributed by the recent--mistaken, I
believe—proliferation of posters offering $500 rewards for information about weapons in the
building. (No recent events in the school or the district warranted these posters; this was
before the rash of schoolyard shootings by children. Also see Chapter 2, footnote 36.)
15 I had provided each student with a bound notebook (the classic school "Comp Book"), and
the classroom was well supplied with loose writing paper (and moderately well supplied,
with my encouragement, with drawing paper). The notebooks were intended for assignments
(such as the "used to be/now" pattern pieces and the focus words) and for rough drafts of choice
writing. Everyone used them for the assignments; only a few used them for rough drafts-
mostly, as I see it, because they seldom thought of what they were writing as a "draft" at all
and preferred to write on paper that could be put directly into book or display form.
Furthermore, besides requiring revisions for display purposes a few times a year, I did not in
this class much stress the language of "drafting," "editing," and "revising." Many times
children would in fact produce a second and final version of their work, usually on the computer,
and usually with more interest in producing neat and mechanically correct copy than in
substantive revision. Some, like C.J., wrote in pencil and preferred to make mechanical
corrections as they went along.

A consequence of all this was that I was usually the only reader of the work in notebooks

96

In reviewing my journal, though, it becomes clear that such a
generalized reading of C.J.'s "anger" is inadequate. He had in fact been angry
at me that entire afternoon. And, though I failed to fully appreciate it then,
he had a very obvious reason for being so. During the group meeting (the
time when I introduced the assignment), C.J. had been drawing--something
ordinarily prohibited at that time. I had overlooked it, however, as it was a
welcome change from his then habitual scoffing and rude interjections, and
as no students were complaining. It's something Jane Boyd felt strongly
about, though, and she was still in the room. Jane reprimanded C.J., and I
was drawn into the exchange. C.J. was indignant: "he let me do it before"; I
replied that he knew it was "not allowed during meeting even if it helped
(him) not be rude," and told him that he had to stop. I am confident C.J.
knew I had been aware of the drawing and had chosen to overlook it, and was
now contradicting myself--in effect, going back on my word. On this, and
surely other occasions as well, I was presenting myself as unreliable--inviting

mistrust-4n quite specific ways.

 

(the only exceptions I am aware of were a handful of girls who also used the notebooks to write
notes to each other, and that Jane or Barb would sometimes ask to see someone's notebook). In a
way, then, the notebooks were classic school fare: work produced at the behest of and for
evaluation by the teacher, rather than at the students' initiative. Nonetheless, of particular
interest to me--and important, I believe, to a number of children--was the way in which the
notebooks became a vehicle of communication between individual students and me. I took the
notebooks, and any other work students chose (or, occasionally, were required) to give me home
most nights. I wrote brief responses-comments, further questions; occasionally, chastisements;
rarely, an enthusiastic, or disappointed, comment about something else that child had done or
not done that day outside of the notebook-and returned the work the next day. A number of
children came to count on this exchange, pointedly remarking, if they found no comment in their
notebook, "you didn't read our work!"; some made the exchange explicit, asking me questions
(sometimes followed by, "answer "), or responding in turn to my comments. C.J. was
one of these. He made clear by commenting to my comments (see below) that he read them.
That activity, coupled with my being the primary and almost certainly only reader of his
notebook, in conjunction with the kinds of writing the assignments elicited (more on this later in
this chapter) makes me believe it is reasonable to assume that everything in his notebook
(certainly including "My teachers at my old school were nice") can be read as part of an on-going
communicative exchange (sometimes direct, sometimes oblique) with me.

97

C.J. and I had several more exchanges which may be read as variations
or further installments on this theme that same day. Earlier in the week, he
had brought in a letter to me (presumably written at his mother's behest)
saying that he was "sorry" and would "try to improve." Though it would not
be my custom to solicit such a letter, I thought it deserved response,16 which I
wrote in his notebook. He responded in turn, though not in kind. Where I
wrote, "thank you for the letter," he wrote, "So"; where I wrote, "I believe
you can improve," he again wrote "So," and there was somewhat more in
this vein.17 I came upon these responses as I was looking at "My teachers at
my old school were nice..." That evening in my journal I wrote, "...in
questioning him about these comments, I put my arm around him and tried
to be very slightly humorous, not angry, while commenting to the 'rudeness'
of 'so'... He didn't seem to mind this--how to understand that?" (journal
11 / 9 / 94). In retrospect it seems clear that this was a case of C.J. "giving active
consideration" to the possibility that I might after all be reliable in some
sense. (And there is an irony, though I think not an oddity, that I might with
one hand, as it were, intuit that the time might be right for a certain kind of
gesture and tone-~and not only intuit it; my journal for these months is full
of explicit ruminations on the issue of "trust"--and at the same time be
puzzled that the gesture and the tone are not--at that moment--rejected.) A

few lines further on I note,

 

16 Both in respect of the possibility there was some genuine intent to the letter and out of
appreciation for his mother's consistent responsiveness whenever a complaint (periodically
made by Jane, often with me unaware) was made from school to home.

17 Sometimes I seem to have positively invited these sarcastic and challenging ("testing")
responses. For example, part of my response to "My teachers at my old school..." was, "Do you
want people to hurt each other...?," to which C.J. rather triumphantly responded, "Yesll" At
first--and perhaps last--glance, my question seems no more than remarkably naive; there is an
outside chance, though, that it might fairly be described as ingenuous, even as a sort of testing
of my own (-there will come a time when a different response to the same question is
conceivable).

98

Finally, he had, under pressure, "promised" to put the latest
version of the ghetto story18 in my box at day's end,19 so I could
catch up. I know he knows I want to read it, I know that he
wants me to, most times (e.g., many days he tells me he 'got
more done,’ 'finished,‘ etc.) But at afternoon end he was angry
again, denied the promise, and refused to put it in the box...
(Journal, 11 / 9 / 94)

I will return to issues of trust, mistrust, and doubt. I want now, though, to re-
approach them through a more extended consideration of C.J. as a writer.

Looked at from a formal point of view, two aspects of "My teachers at
my old school were nice..." caught and catch my attention. First, C.J. has
made sure to fulfill the minimal requirements of the assignment--that he
write five phrases-~while also apparently feeling, correctly, free to interpret
and change the pattern as he sees fit, not to follow it slavishly. Most
interestingly, he has taken up a portion of the larger invitation offered by the
task: though he is not exploring metaphor per se, he is using the figure of
temporal change to represent change of more than temporal, more than
literal significance. As for time--as a setting and almost as a player, certame
as a medium through which C.J. as a narrator moves with remarkable
confidence and fluency-~it will be a noteworthy element in his fiction writing.

And it is as a writer of fiction that C.J. becomes increasingly visible in
the classroom, beginning in early September and continuing throughout the
year. I have tried to depict him through the traces of his covert activities, in
moments of anger, and in a characteristic pose, head tilted to one side, staring
coolly at a skeptical teacher, as if to say, "So? What's it to you?" I have I h0pe
begun to portray him as a doubter, a person testing the limits of

trustworthiness and possibility in the space of the workshop. Please with this

 

13 Shortly to be introduced.
19 A cardboard box I used to cart children's notebooks and other writing, and a clipboard
containing my plans and notes to myself, back and forth between home and school.

99

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offer
SiOI'l:
mix
SPEC].

”real

 

nos-eh
Irma
l . .

us la‘

99 pm

i-l‘r‘
“Mite:

in mind picture him also as the proud possessor of a red leatherette folder
with brass corner protectors, a Christmas gift from his mother, in which he
often carries the fiction he is working on to and from school. He takes his
stories very seriously indeed. I have made passing reference to a few of those
stories. I would like now to venture into their world, and to hazard some
speculations about how fictional possibilities might be seen to illuminate

"real life" possibilities for C.J., and for others.

"What kind of place is this?": Fictive adventures, live themes

And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is

born ye shall cast into the river...
(Exodus 1:22)

Any piece of classroom life, like any piece of a person's life, examined
closely enough, presents virtually infinite complexity. A chief difficulty of
factual writing, as opposed to fictional, is that the writer (me, for example),
has far too much material; in fictional writing, the principle of selection will
be primarily aesthetic: What is shapely, what pattern pleases, provokes,
perhaps instructs? Where shall we have our beginning, middle, and end? In
factual writing some other principle is supposed to prevail--What serves the
argument?, for example-~and the very idea of a beginning, middle, and end is
to be resisted. This attractively rational distinction founders at once when
one is trying to discern pattern in "real life": My search is itself a
fundamentally aesthetic act. --This little authorial intrusion is by way of
acknowledging that I am here on a search for patterns and themes--meanings-
~in C.J.'s work and life in the classroom, a search that involves me in making
choices out of the voluminous data available, a search that takes me into

speculative waters. I do my very best to ground the meanings I perceive in

100

evidence, but it is still the case that another observer might identify different
but equally valid themes; as for C.J., he may already have carried his
interpretation and presentation of self as far as he wishes. However, the
themes I propose, and their contexts, have, I believe, an honest claim on our
thoughts and willingness to be convinced. Two broad thematic lines are
suggested. One is the line of "trust and doubt," words and ideas that I bring to
the story, whose pertinence I have so far tried to sketch in a preliminary way.
The other "line" is summed up by a question habitually asked, in one form or
another, by C.J.'s fictional protagonists. The question is, "What kind of place
is this?"; associated with it is the idea or assertion, or threat, "You are getting
ready to be a new person."20 These words and ideas are presented by C.J. and
his characters, though I have selected them for the pertinence I feel in them.
Ultimately, I see the theme of doubting and trusting and that of interrogating
your surround and transforming the self as two branches of one theme
(perhaps the oldest one there is, the quest).

At the end of the September day when C.J. made his provocative
remark about Erika and Anthony Y.'s marriage and their "mixed" babies, he
read a story to the group at sharing time. The story is called Gang War;21 here
is the beginning.

A long time ago on the west side. Little kids did not like
them self. Because there parent was on drugs. So one day
a little baby parents died from drugs. The baby was threw

in the river. It travaled for two weeks. He ended up in
LA. So two men came and got it. And took it home. They

 

20 A sub-theme, or unifying theme, which I do not develop, may be learning and practicing-
activities perhaps necessary to answer the question and achieve the transformation. See, for
example, "...football[:] It is a hard sport so it's got to have detail because [y]ou got to learn
how to play" (assignment, 9/ 6/ 94).

21 Like all of C.J.'s stories, this one is accompanied by drawings. Not simply "illustrations,"
they typically precede the verbal composition, and often contain information not present in the
text itself. The cover for "Gang War," for instance, shows a brown skinned youngster-
presumably, the protagonist.

101

 

OWNL'
“"lu‘lll

Lit-m
... 1m

‘5
V I"?

il‘dfl

already had a little boy. He was a gangster. He named the
baby Warren—G. Tyrone22 and G liked it.

10 years later
Now he is ten years old. So him and Snoop23 went to a
dangerous place called gang war. This is where I grew up
at said Snoop. Warren you have to take a test. What kind
of test said Warren. A test that you have to take if you

want to be hard. After he got his test they gave him a
tour around the gang war. After Warren took his test they

went to robb a store....
A skilled writer is at work here. (His grasp of punctuation may be weak--
though it's possible the hesitations in the first few lines are not entirely
wrong or unintended; in any case, if you read these passages aloud with the
natural inflections and rhythms of speech, as C.J. did, and if you supply, for
example, the missing apostrophe S in "baby's parents"--as C.J. almost certainly
did--it is clear that the underlying sentence structure is fine, and mistakes of
grammar and usage are few.) The narration is assured, taking immediate
hold of the audience's attention, steering it directly into the "meat" of the
story. (Though C.J. has recently written, in an assignment, that "lots of detail"
is one of the characteristics of a "good story" ["What makes a story good,"
assignment, 9/ 6 / 94]--a notion often advised by well-intended teachers--the
complete lack of distracting detail is one of the things that's noteworthy here.
Every word counts, in moving the story forward and establishing the
emotional tone.) Also noteworthy is C.J.'s attention to time and his narrative
command of movement through time. He does not fall into the trap,

common to inexperienced writers, of assuming that he cannot take us from

 

27- Spelled "Tyron" at some places in the text, but I feel confident Tyrone is intended. C.J.'s
story appears here almost as he wrote it. I have, silently, made a very small number of changes
to ease reading: changing lower case to upper case in names (which C.J. remembers to do
inconsistently) and a few times when I am positive a new sentence is beginning/ a different
character is speaking. A complete, modestly and visibly edited, photocopy is appended.

23 That would be the "little boy" that Tyrone and G "already had," "a gangster."

102

point i
particu
notice '
salient:
preper:
long ill
Shanda:
happen
miredil

greater

{Unites
times. i

i'mec C

vI

~.'i" '_1

point A to point B without telling us about intervening events that have no
particular relevance to the story. He simply steps out of the narrative to give
notice that ten years have passed (and then, making sure we don't miss the
salience of this for his protagonist, he repeats the point within the narrative
proper: "Now he is ten years old"). C.J. begins his story in a classic way, "A
long time ago...," a device that ordinarily serves to alert the reader that strict
standards of realism will not apply in the story to come--things that have
happened "A long time ago" or "Once upon a time" may be marvelous or
incredible: those times are not our times, the imagination thus is granted
greater freedom. Simultaneously, though, the imputed ancient provenance
of the story, and the fact that it is nonetheless being told now--or, by artistic
courtesy, re-told--promises that it holds some kind of value for us in our
times. Indeed, this story seems to find itself both in old times and current
times, or in a space hovering between them, as it locates its events "A long
time ago on the west side," and as it borrows "self-esteem" speak, "little kids
did not like them self"--a feeling that might be of now, or might be a bad
thing that used to happen but no longer does. The reference to drugs
functions similarly. It could bring us into the present; it could be--if the story
is set in an imagined future, relinquishing our actual present--a shadow from
the past, a reminder of bad things "little kids" are free of "now." In story,
anything that makes psychological and aesthetic sense can happen, which is,
again, one reason we have story. And then C.J.'s fable seems to locate itself
squarely in the far-off of Biblical times or fairy tales: "The baby was threw in
the river." This, we know, invariably means that an effort to thwart destiny
will fail; great things will come from an infant so treated. "Two weeks" later,
the baby, and we, are "in LA" (itself perhaps a place more mythic than real,

especially for a midwestern child-writer very fond of movies, crediting

103

Menace II Society as the inspiration for his story [journal, 9/ 27/ 94]). Still only
a few lines long, "Gang War" has already woven together several different
diction's and has raised disjunctive expectations. (And one way readers
sometimes simplify their lives--are teacher-readers especially vulnerable to
this?--is by not feeling the full range of the expectations and possibilities an
author sets up.) The multiple references are both familiar and in some
tension with each other. Narratively speaking, we are in an ambiguous
situation.

The baby is rescued--in effect adopted--and named "Warren," no longer
an "it." (Oddly, perhaps, he is named by his adoptive brother not his adoptive
father. But the paternal figures appear pleased with the boy's choice.) This
all-male family may or may not reflect an all-male society into whose adult
ranks Warren is deemed, at ten (a year older than his author), ready for
initiation. He is "to take a test...a test that you have to take if you want to be
hard." We are told nothing of the test itself (as is appropriate for the
mysteries of initiation). We proceed immediately into the conduct of a
robbery (and can be forgiven if we momentarily thought that was the "test,"
rather than an activity made possible by the test). As the story continues,
Warren shoots a man in the head, the cops come and apparently arrest him,
though he protests his innocence, we gather he is jailed (it's all highly

compressed), and the father figure, G, somehow rescues him.

[Warren says,] thanks for geting me out. You are
stupid said G. What did you do to get in jail.
Robbed a store. I shouldna got you out of the
river. Now we got to leave. Come on said Tyrone.
What kind of place is this Now you are tryna get
high. Put your hands behind your head. Run bang
bang bang bang Tyrone Snoop G was dead. Warren was
lonly. But he saw this African man. Him and
Warren was talking. In two weeks Warren was not a
gangster. The guy gave him a home. He got married.

104

He had a baby boy. I don't want Dre to grow up
like me.

We understand now that the society into which Warren was inducted
is not the society of the father figures who have rescued him, though it is the
society of the "little boy (Snoop) they already had." In any case, while
expressing misgivings at having pulled Warren from the river, G takes him
with them as the family hastily leaves town. The narration here is even
more radically condensed: neither the journey nor the destination are
described; we know they have arrived somewhere because someone--
presumably Warren--asks, "What kind of place is this?" It is--once again--a
dangerous place. There is shooting (by "cops"? by "gangsters"?--we aren't
told), G seems to give Warren a last bit of assistance ("run!"), and the family is
killed; Warren is orphaned for the second time-perhaps because his very
human question was taken as impertinence, which would make him to an
extent responsible for these deaths.

Into his loneliness comes a figure identified only, but surely not
accidentally, as an "African man"--a benevolent figure who fills a pastoral
role, setting Warren on the right track, providing him what he precisely
needs, a home. This in turn seemingly leads to a prOper adulthood and the
establishment of his own family--a woman is at last present, fleetingly, not yet
named, though titled ("wife")--complete with a son (named) for whom
Warren has a version of the hopes entertained by parents everywhere, a
better life for the offspring-hopes that are expressed in the first person, as if
the reader is being addressed directly by the character. The reform does not
take. With absolutely no explanation, nor even a paragraph break, the story

continues (and concludes) as follows:

105

Warren went to jail The African man came to visit.
He said I will never help you again.

Warren's Wife took Dre to day care. There were a
car comeing it start shooting Warren was dead

'PHE FEM)

What do we have here? Despite his having abandoned gangbanging,
Warren goes back to jail. Because he's reverted to his "old" ways? Because
past bad acts have caught up with him? We aren't told, but the African
man's response makes it sound like backsliding is the case. Warren can't
help himself, perhaps; anyway, his rescuer gives up on him.24 Salvation isn't
in the cards. And Warren is shot dead (again, we're left to guess at reasons, if
there are any,) in verbal proximity to a setting devoted to looking after young
children, a day care center. Destiny is, after all, not thwarted (this is neither '
Exodus nor a fairy tale, despite the hopes it shares with these, but, in its own
way, something closer to tragedy).

"What kind of place is this?" The question lingers, not exactly
unanswered--it is "a dangerous place"--but somehow unresolved. This baby
might after all have been better off "threw in the river" and never plucked
out. But he was, and so a story is initiated but not satisfactorily concluded,
and we're left wanting something more. Apparently C.J. felt the same way,
and his classmates too: he had written a continuation, Gang 11 War,25 which
he'd initially promised to read as well (described by him as one story, they
appear physically as two separate "books"). We were running out of sharing

time, though, and he declared Gang 11 War "not done." The group pressed

 

24 But has he perhaps managed to release Warren from jail first?
25 Borrowing from Menace II Society as he is, the title may mean Gang War Part Two and
something like Gang Goes to War.

106

him to continue, I urged him as well, telling him "they really want to hear

this," Jane graciously allowed us to run over schedule, and he continued:

When Lori got home she saw Warren was shot up. She

cried and cried. The ambulance came. Im sorry

he's dead. Warren had a funeral There was over 2

million people there.

Now Dre is 7 years old. Mom do I have a dad yes

said Lori. Where is he he died when you were 5

months old. Don't crie mom. I loved him very much

said Lori. Can I go out side and play yes.

Warren's wife is now named, an unidentified figure-paramedic?
policeman? African man? narrator?--expresses sorrow, and there is a fantastic
turnout for the funeral. The passage of time is as usual indicated without
fuss, and the boy asks, as children will, questions about his origin. The
question is answered after a fashion, and Lori cries (again it's worth noting
that not every writer, certame not every young writer, would have shown us
this, not told us, as writing teachers used to say). And then a neat bit of
psychology is deftly handled: the boy, Dre, takes an adult role, offering words
of comfort to his mother, who responds with feeling--to which Dre responds,

like a child, with a request to go outside and play. Told yes, he does so, and a

friend tells him to take a look at a car.

Dre went to look. Someone snatch em. Help called
Dre. who are you I'm the guy who killed your
father. Why do you want me. So you can work for
me Do I get money. Yes you get money. What kind
of place is this This is where your dad yous to
come all the time. Wy he was a ganster. What is a
ganster Something you are geting ready to be....

"What kind of place is this?" The recurring question, echoed here by
insistent "why's," may symbolize the stance youth takes as consciousness
grows. -It is a not necessarily grateful challenge to the older generation,

perhaps; in these stories, it is specifically the uncertain, doubtful, inquiry of a

107

youngster repeatedly thrust into threatening new circumstances. Dre appears
to be in the "dangerous place called Gang War" all over again, a place perhaps
for education, testing, initiation: "a gangster (is) something you are getting
ready to be." Why Dre is getting ready to be a "gangster," and why his father
was one, is unanswered. Unanswered, or incompletely, unsatisfactorily
answered questions abound here. As the story continues, the "guy who killed
(his) father" gives Dre a gun ("for what?") and sends him to shoot an

unnamed man, which he does, "twice in his head."

Good job. Her 2000 dollars. Dont 1*!* up or you
will die. Hi mom were have you been I been out you
got a prolblm. Yes bang Dre shot his mom in the
rib. Dre ran. I shot my mom in the rib. Good now
you are a ganster. What does that meen You can do
eny thing you want. You meen I have to live on the
streets. Yea wy you scared. Wy should I be
working for you if you killed my father. Because If
you dont the same thing will happen to you.

There's a suggestion of childish or adolescent fantasy here--parent asks
where you've been and you tell them off--but we are quickly made aware that
this is a dark and unwelcome fantasy. Dre doesn't just tell his mother off, he
shoots her, and somehow the detail of shooting her in the rib adds a poignant
specificity. Dre is congratulated, welcomed into the ranks, initiation
accomplished. He asks what this means and is told, "you can do anything you
want." He seems to know that this fantasy is a fake and a lie: "You mean I
have to live on the streets?" It doesn't sound like the life of a romantic
outlaw. Rather than rising to the bait of "are you scared," he poses the
question the reader has likely been waiting for--why should he do this?26 He

is answered with the threat that he, too, will be killed.

 

26 As, in discussion at sharing time, C.J.'s classmate Gideon asked why a kid would shoot his
mother, protesting, "it's not Iikely..."--a comment that could have been a wonderful starting
place for discussion of the idea of fiction, but I failed to seize it. (C.J.'s reply seemed to be that
a kid who would shoot his mother was "stupid" [journal, 9 / 27/ 94].)

108

Bold, or foolhardy, Dre responds, "I got to go somewhere...to see my
mom, now let me go." He goes to his mother, apologizes, but is rebuffed ("get
out of my room"), promises her that when she gets home (?) she "will be
surprised"--by a making-amends gesture, perhaps?-—and returns, we gather, to
the gang.

You been gone for two hour. So what thats my mom.

Come on lets beat him half the death. Now how do

you feel Like this bang bang. He shot the 2 guys.

And then is free to go. The story continues and concludes:

Dre grew up and had a little bit better life than
his dad. He got married to a gril named Wendy. He
had twin boys. After he got out of college he died
from canser.

And that's the end, except for a drawing which may show Dre contemplating
his father's grave. "What kind of place is this?"--one of only marginal
progress it seems, of unmitigated threat.

Earlier, I proposed that to doubt is, or can be, to seek; specifically, I
argue that C.J. as a child and a student in the context of the writing workshop
I taught was engaged in a search for reliability, security. His actions and tones
seem to say this, especially the repeated actions of giving me his work to read
at night or informing me of his progress, of coming to the round table to
work in proximity to me, of bidding me good bye, and--in the months after
the stories I've just presented-~asking me to read his work for him when it
was his turn to share.27 All of these actions, interspersed as they are with
occasions of extreme rudeness, anger, and untrustworthy-dishonest, mean,
sometimes physically aggressive--behavior with classmates, taken all

together, can be "read," I propose as asking the question, "is this workshop a

 

27 Again, attendance at sharing was required but sharing itself was never required. I
occasionally put a bit of pressure on individuals to do so, but never on C.J.

109

reliable, a secure, even a good, place for me?," and, "is this teacher
trustworthy, someone I can count on?"

To this I add that C.J. the writer of fiction can be seen repeatedly to
depict a protagonist who is also engaged in a search, specificallyuas is
common since literature began--a search for identity and perhaps for
meaning. A personal identity--a more or less harmonious constellation of
life purposes, accepted roles, sense of meaning, stance in the world--is not a
given, either in life or in literature; it is made, or "made up," we might say--
though what it is made up out of is to a great extent given. (Hence, tragedy.)
All this is clear in C.J.'s stories: A gangster "is something you are getting
ready to be," Warren is told: an identity is achieved with effort, it requires
education, and evaluation--others' acceptance or recognition of your right to
it.

Reviewing "Gang War" and "Gang II War" from this perspective

provides something like the following:

The story begins with an infant cast away in the river, his birth parents
dead and his own birth as it were repudiated. He is then rescued--
”adopted," re—born even--and given a (new?) name--in another place
(not "the west side” anymore), ”in LA.” At ten, he is told to take a test,
”a test that you have to take if you want to be hard. ” (It seems to be
assumed that Warren does want "to be hard ”; the test itself is
apparently mandatory.) He passes, apparently achieving that "hard"
identity, as a gangster. His ”adoptive father” (as I see him) calls that
identity seriously into question, though, telling Warren instead that he
is ”stupid." Because of his "hardness," or his ”stupidity,” the "family”
has to go to a new, but again dangerous place. In this place, the
protagonist is promptly orphaned again--and is in a way responsible for
this fate--and becomes ”lonely.” Yet another father-like figure, the
"African man," appears on the scene and seems to achieve, by talking, a
further transformation in the protagonist’s identity: "in two weeks
Warren was not a gangster anymore. ” Indeed, with the help of the
African man’s gift of a home, Warren seems to become what in
another story (shortly to become part of the one I relate) C.J. will call ”a
regular man with kids,” and a wife. This apparent transformation does
not take; the protagonist is killed.

110

All places are dangerous ones. Indeed, we can say that a secondary task
of these stories is to explore trust and its dangers in a world of risk--not only,
in "Gang War," for Warren, but for those who seek to care for him. After
initial pleasure, G suffers first disappointment and then death in his efforts to
care for Warren; the African man merely has his trust, or hope, betrayed.
Alternatively, we can say that no adult--not the birth parents who died of
drugs and sent the infant into the world not liking himself, not G who tries
and fails, nor the African man who apparently succeeds but in fact fails, and
refuses to try again--is capable of nurturing this child and sustaining him into
healthy adult-hood; none can underwrite a worthwhile transformation of
his identity. They cannot even make his survival possible.

There is however "one child left to carry on," sort of. Dre also begins
life without a father who can sustain him; he has a mother but as soon as he
leaves her side he is kidnapped by his father's killer, and no one answers his
call for help. The killer wants to hire Dre, and to transform him into "a
gangster" too. (We note that the relationship of employer to employee is not
that of parent or parental figure to child.) The boy seems properly skeptical
about this transformation: he does not embrace this identity. However, he

shoots (but does not kill) his mother (for not responding to his call for help?
No reason is given). The unnamed killer/would-be boss declares that by this
act Dre has achieved the transformation into "gangster," but Dre questions
this. He is, in a word, doubtful. He returns apologetically to his mother, who
rebuffs him. Thus, having rejected the identity of "gangster," he is not
allowed to resume the identity of son / child. He returns to the gang-~again
WE're not told why; like so many events in these stories, it is as if the

Protagonist (like Brendan's) has no choice in the matter--and they punish

111

him for having left in the first place (that's in effect his second punishment
for a leaving). He kills them, leaves, and "grows up." Like his father, he
becomes a "regular man with kids," and a college graduate as well. Unlike his
father, he does not "slide back." Still, he too dies young, of cancer, and is also
unable to see his sons through to adulthood. His transformation hasn't taken
him all that far. The world is still "a dangerous place."

C.J. continues, with something bordering on obsession, to reiterate
these themes--the need, perhaps forced on one by others, to achieve a
different identity; testing; the dangerous passage into an adulthood which
may itself provide no safety--for most of the school year. These stories give a
world in which males predominate, sometimes exclusively;28 the image of
the "gangster" informs the plot until mid-winter, when a transition to
basketball begins to take place. As a writer, C.J.'s craft continues to be marked
by a certain economy and a confident narrative flow. The following excerpt
from a story written in November--the same story he first "promised" and
then, angry, refused to show me, (only to relent, under pressure, a day or two
later)--is not great writing but it is interesting writing and it does articulate

C.J.'s central fictional themes with precision and clarity.

from Boyz Living in the Ghetto29

Once in Long Beach Compton there was 7 boyz they
were regelar kids. [Until]30 one day a man named
Pimp came and said Hey, let me show you something.
The boyz said OK. Pimp snatched em. You are
getting ready to be a new person. Pimp had to beat

‘

28 In Menace II Society, in partial contrast, sanity and hope are represented by the central
female character--who, however, is not able to rescue the central male character, whose last
act after being fatally shot is to embrace / shield her five year old son.

The text is taken from my journal (11 / 14 / 94) into which I had transcribed part of the story
(once he did give it to me to read). I have made a number of silent changes to ease reading but,
.38 With all transcripts of C.J.'s writing, I have retained the majority of his errors so that the
{nterested reader can get an accurate sense of his mechanical skills and their gradual
1mprovement over the year.

"Into" in the text.

112

them first. So he did. But they could not feel it.
Soon all of them looked different, they was
gangsters. Now that they are gansters they could
kill someone... [So they were allowed to do "a
drive-by"; Pimp went to jail, not them, because
they're juveniles.] ...They went to see there mom.
There mom didn't like the way they looked. So they
shot her... [There is quite a bit of shooting, Pimp
is rescued from jail.] ...He had a lot of girls for
each of them.... [Each gangster and the girl each
one "had" are named. Time passes, indicated by
headings such as "2 years" and "7 days later." They
go on another "drive-by" but "O.G."31 gets shot out
of the car, they can't go back, they shoot him.]
They knew O.G. was dead so they sprey painted on the
wall, The memory of O.G.... [They decide to quit
Pimp's gang because he beat them at the start, they
decide to kill him.] When he got in they was gonna
shoot him up. Where's everybody? I'm!!not!!
playin!!with!!you guys. Pimp hi. It was over.

they was regalar men now with kids.

THE END

In its way, this is an effective and well constructed story. Its opening
sentence contains a form of the classic beginning, crisply provides necessary
information--we're in "the ghetto," ("Compton," the setting for both Boyz ’N
the Hood and Menace II Society), the story is about children--and establishes
the social fact on which the moral drama of the story turns: "they were
1' egular kids." They start out that way, anyway, and then are kidnapped
("Snatched," like Dre, again lured by the promise of something to see); their
kidnapper tells them, "you are getting ready to be a new person"--a curiously
ambiguous message. It has an attractive sound to it, yet there is, as usual, no
hint of choice or volition on the youths' part. A beating is mandated as part
of the transformation, but they are spared the pain («again this is a curious
formulation: the need for the "beating" announces that the transformation

er“Sails pain, but this announcement is coupled with the appealing fantasy of

31\
In the fall of 1994, it is conceivable that O] was intended.

113

a pain-free growing-up). The accomplished transformation is signaled by a
change in appearance; their mother, predictably, does not approve, and they
shoot her. The identity of "gangster" carries with it license to kill and--no
longer "kids"--license to "have girls." There is no suggestion of pleasure (or
"desire," though, certainly, "emotion") in this new identity, though, and one
of their number dies ambiguously. He is memorialized (in writing) and the
rest decide to quit the gang, on account of that ostensibly painless beating.
Quitting appears to require shooting Pimp (and note the assurance and
economy with which this narrator handles that: Pimp is shot, and dies, in the
space between "Pimp hi" and "It was over"). We then come full circle: The
boys have grown up, they are now free to be "regular men," with children of
their own. This may be progress of a sort (relative to Warren and Dre), but
the passage from the story's first sentence to its last seems, finally, devoid of
meaning. They have been diverted from ordinary life for, it turns out, no

purpose.
Now consider a story C.J. worked on towards the end of the year, in

April. It is called "Street Ball"; it begins as follows.

Once there was a boy. He thought of a word. And
the word was street ball. And he wonderd what does
that mean. So he made something called a basket
ball. He went out side and said, "streetball" "I
need a street." And he found a street and said,
"How do I play street ball?" And He saw something
on the ground and he named it a chain.

And he saw a lot of wood and built something and
named it a rim.And he took his ball and shot it and

it went in the rim.

50 years later

"Hey ya'll want to play some ball?"...

114

C.J. displays here an enviable narrative confidence: There are no false

starts, no hesitations, no superfluous explanations32 in what is at once a
decidedly unconventional beginning to a piece of fourth grade writing and a
sort of ur-text of the creative imagination, in which the path from inspiration
to creativity, straight through language, is clear and unencumbered. This is
the signal transformation of the protagonist: He is no longer a locus of
destructive power but is rather himself a creative force. The operative words
coursing through the passage announce and enact this force--he thinks, he
wonders, he makes, he finds, he names, he builds--and when he shoots, he
does so with a ball, and he succeeds, and playing is as it should be for a boy, a
central activity. Language here precedes concrete fact, as if language calls the
world into being. The boy has a word--we don't know where it's come from,
so we call it an inspiration--before he has a meaning or an external referent
(and it will turn out to be a complex referent: not an object but an activity, a
game); flowing from that word are the construction of objects--making-up
and making-the finding of objects, the naming of objects, and eventually the
activity itself. Why not call this (with Cavell, 1994, pp. 36-37) "the self-theft of
culture"? It is, finally, with some relief that we note the protagonist is just 'a
boy," not a "gangster," not even "a regular man." Though "a coach" will

aPpear later in the story, there is essentially a parental absence--perhaps the

hero is self-created as well?
Pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott has taught us, among

0ther things, to think of "the antisocial tendency (e.g., "stealing [to which I
Would suggest lying is the verbal equivalent] or being a nuisance") as an
expression of hope in a child (who has experienced)...a break in the continuity

\

32

Ch The mechanics, too, are virtually flawless in this "first draft" text. I have made no

a all"‘ges in the passage quoted here; subsequently, as the narrative voice largely disappears
d dialog takes over, I have made changes (see below).

 

115

of his or her life-line" (1986, pp. 216 8: 219; also see 1971).33 From this
perspective, it is like doubt, an active investigation, a sense of potential. For
much of the school year, C.J.'s protagonist has been caught up in a sometimes
failed, sometimes forced, essentially futile search for a sustainable and a
sustaining identity. He has been at times suspicious, skeptical, of the world

he finds himself in, and increasingly skeptical of the identity the world seems
to expect of him. He has mostly been lost to the experience of childhood.

Now we find a protagonist, a child, who is a kind of author, one who initiates
meaningful transformation in the world around him. Here is Winnicott
again, quoting a patient at a critical point in the analysis: "in trying to achieve
being myself I have had to use artificial props, and these are no longer
necessary. I feel just now aware of a much more positive hope... I used to
feel there was no prospect that I would actually start to exist" (1987, p. 151).
Just so, C.J. has succeeded at last in creating a character--a herouwho is capable
Of "achieving himself" without "artificial props" (though artfully). This
Character has an affirmative "right to speak" and no longer, perhaps, a need to

"break his word." Surely as his readers we are now "aware of a much more

positive hope."34

The intelligence can only be led by desire.
Simone Weil

One of the satisfactions reading and writing share with each other but
not with "real life" is our freedom there from the relentless forward motion

\
33
N50 see, e.g., "Naturally, the fountain pen stolen from Woolworths is not satisfactory: it is

2:2; the object that was being sought...the child is looking for the capacity to find, not an object"

34 “Inicott, 1986, p. 93, emphasis added).

did The reader who mistrusts symmetry and tidiness will perhaps be relieved to hear that C.J.
Ilot altogether abandon violent content, nor did he become at all times a model citizen.

 

116

of time. We can of course re-read (and, as C.J. does, write out time as well as
into it), and, while I cannot insert my present understandings of C.J. into my
actual time-past dealings with him in the classroom, I can apply these latter
day understandings to his writings when I re-read them (indeed, it becomes
difficult not to do this). I spoke earlier of ”much violence" and "an apparent
lack of affect" in C.J.'s fiction; while teaching, I often worried about an
apparent "coldness" in C.J. himself. Other teachers also thought they
perceived these qualities. However, re-reading "Gang War," "Boyz Living in
the Ghetto," and other stories in light of the identity quest interpretation, and
in light of "Street Ball" (and other writings I will shortly introduce)--a process
of re-reading that I began at some point during the year I was teaching C.J.--
what I am increasingly impressed by is the sense of a tremendous amount of
feeling just beneath the surface, pushing at the skin. Then, however, the
sense of coldness predominated, although I had my eyes out for other
qualities, a search instigated in part by Dewey's remark--in The Child and the
Curriculum, in the course of discussion of "the logical" and "the
psychological"--that "affection and sympathy are the keynotes of the child's
life" (1956b, p. 5).35 Here are some traces of that search.

...re: C.J., my worries about "coldness"--"well guarded, but inside
the stockade the campfire is very low" [is how it occurred to me
to put it]--& talking with [a friend] about "passion & care,"
qualities, with their eliciting objects/foci, you can almost always
find in someone-well, you can see at least "care" in the sense of
"careful craft" (in the choice writing, the drawing/ drawing

 

\
35
The remark was at the front of my mind because I was using the book in an introductory

eduCation course in which the major project was an intensive, semester-long child study. I had
Sgggested to students that they might test the assertion and gain a useful focus for some of their
0 Sel'vations by looking for these characteristics in their "study children," and, if found,

COhtel‘nplating in what ways, if any, they might be said to be "keynotes." The suggestion was
0 . as far as I could tell, a fruitful one for most of the students; I, however, eventually found it

so in my thinking about C.J.
ill "Sympathy" here would be the deep quality exhibited by Brendan's classmate when he
ustl‘ated "The Moral ls Pay Your Taxes or Else" with a crucifixion.

117

studies now going on; in the dress; in the speech?). I don't
know about "passion," although there can be a form or mirror
image of passion in the intensity of his insults / derisive tone 8:
look. Very little affection, it's true-though I liked to think the
humorous cock of the eye / upward glance / part grin of "did you
see Boyz ’N the Hood last night [i.e., on TV]?," suggesting
pleasure that I had 8: that he had guessed correctly this was the
inspiration for the day's focus word-~might have had some
affection in it. It had, anyway, it's safe I think to say, interest in
whether I, "Mr. Roosevelt," had in fact seen this important-to-
C.J. movie...

[As for what he wrote about it:] "I saw that movie and Rickey got
shot and he died. And Trey and Ice Cube killed the dudes that
killed Rickey. And Trey was getting readdy to get marreid but he
did'nt. And my favorite part is when Ice Cube shot that dude at
that resterant."36

...Note C.J., Gideon, Michael, Lincoln, 8: Marcus working on a
basketball book together, with Anthony Z. 8: Jon C. working at
the same table-this sprung out of the "learning how to draw
basketball players" stuff [a few weeks previously, C.J., Jon C., and
another classmate, Cameron, had been laboriously engaged in
copying, and modifying, a drawing of a basketball player by
Lincoln,37 a highly skilled and practiced draughtsman; now, I
speculate, this activity--this little school of masters and
apprentices-has expanded both in number of participants and in
the range of activity (writing as well as drawing is being taught
and learned)]--can think of this as a sort of "community of skill
8: interest," I think. I don't think it has so much to do with
liking each other first 8: finding stuff to do together second, or
the two simultaneously; I think it has to do with: admiring
Lincoln's skill at drawing 8: wanting to learn how; admiring
Marcus's too?; Anthony's getting the tracing book 8: trying to
teach himself with that; (somewhere in the background Ralph's
similar efforts, 8: Ralph brother's skill at drawing--R brought in
a stunning Spiderman drawing by his brother); maybe admiring
C.J.'s skill with a story line 8: ease with the physical / mechanical

\

36
Indeed, violence does not disappear from the writing nor rudeness from the child—-but they

Elmirush greatly. And their function always calls for interpretationuthis, for example, could
? an investigation of what it will take to provoke me on this day (not this), or, somewhat
dlfferently, a deliberate, willed, refusal to appear to share anything with those who, in the
voul‘se of our class discussion, found "sadness" in this movie (for that would be to acknowledge

37‘11nerability).
Like C.J., Gideon, Michael, Marcus, Anthony 2., and Cameron are black; Lincoln and Jon C.

a .
re Whlte.

118

acts of writing (they should admire these, anyway). I don't know
that there's all that much affection in here, except maybe from
Michael to (who? Gideon?), but there are various currents of
admiration, I think. cf "affection 8: sympathy are the key notes
of the child's life"--there is "sympathy" here, I think, in the
sense of "sympathetic vibrations,"38 a being attuned to each
other's interests, to the whatever it is in this material

(basketball / current basketball heroes 8: teams/ drawing basketball
mascots--Lincoln 8: C.J. showed me yesterday a striking picture
of their "mascot," a Rottweiler headed 8: pawed human figure,
with the ball in flames, and tear marks drawn on the page from
his claws)--they know, without having to ever articulate it, what
attracts them to this stuff, even if I don't, or don't readily,
automatically. Obvious, maybe, this fact of their attunedness,
but important...

Affection may, probably will, come, of course-but Lincoln 8:
C.J., most obviously, are not obvious objects of affection, far less
givers of same. [They both seem to me to be respected for their
talents, but not particularly liked]

They started this joint story as an official project on Thurs...

(Journal, 3/10, 3/14, 8: 3/18/95)

Several years later, that meaning of "sympathy"--being "attuned" to

each others' interests and standards of value, including aesthetic value,

participating in a somewhat shared world View not requiring of (perhaps not

sturdy enough for) articulation-still seems right to me. As for "affection," I

“’33, possibly for good reasons (i.e., to ward off some form of complacency or

self-congratulation, as I myself was plausibly an object of occasional affection

at this point), underestimating some signs of that--but I would catch up with

these pretty soon.

Here, however, I want to return (which is to say, in the real time of

these events, to move forward a month past the initiation of the "joint story"

referred to above) to "Street Ball" and the "community of skill and interest"

Surrounding its making. In doing so, I will continue to run a risk I have been

 

See "Education as Growth," (Dewey, 1966), another reading for my TE class.

119

running for a while now: that of being careless (at best) or disingenuous (at
worst) in failing to be clear about when and why I might want things I say
about C.J.'s fictional protagonists to reflect on C.J. himself, confusing the real
(changing) boy with various fictional ones (committing the
"autobiographical" fallacy I have previously [in Chapter 2] criticized). This
risk is compounded when I attempt to borrow hints and insights from
psychoanalysis--something I will attempt again. Now, I want only to
acknowledge these risks; later, I will address them directly. Returning to
"Street Ball," "50 years" after the boy's inspiration and invention, the diction
changes radically. The Adam-like boy and his exceptionally calm narrator are
gone, the action opens out and the tempo steps up.
"Hey ya' 11 want to play some ball? "

"Yeah, what teams?"
"You, Shorty, C.J. and Michael."

"OK What we going up to?"
"15. Ya'll take ball."

"OK II
.Michael passes it in to Shorty and Shorty shoots
a three. "All chain fool."39

Formerly we had a solitary unnamed "boy" wondering, naming,
building: setting the stage. We move from his meditative perhaps silent
(internal?) monologue to the external, to dialogue, and to co—operative action
(foretold by the nature of the boy's activity, a game requiring players). No

PI‘Otagonist dominates the story the way Warren and Dre dominated theirs,

 

 

39 From here on, all of "Street Ball" appears in an edited text. I have edited primarily in an
eff Ort to clarify the dialogue, laying it out conventionally in paragraph form and occasionally
relnoving what I have taken to be superfluous quotation marks. Obviously this procedure is
Subject to error. A complete transcript of the story, specifying some of these editorial changes
and alternative possibilities, is appended.

Many of the proper nouns in "Street Ball" are recognizably names of C.J.'s classmates,
Peginning with his own. It will be noted that these are the same boys just described in my
Journal as "working on a basketball book together" (not this book, which dates from about a
Inc)nth later) or at any rate sharing table space and conversation. I have given these characters
the Same pseudonyms as their, as I take it, "real life" correspondents, and I have drawn
atteIition to the substitution by putting the classroom-character pseudonyms in italics.

120

though "C.J." is certainly featured a good deal of the time. The story

continues.

"It's winners give me the ball." Shorty goes up
for a dunk but he throws it back to Michael and

.Michael dunks the ball.
"The score is 4 to a big Fat zero." .Michael

throws ally to Shorty and Wesley packs Shorty's

mess.
"Now we get ball."
Gideon throws it to C.J; and C.J. hits a three.

The score is 0-7. C.Jl passes the ball to.Michael

for a ally but it is packed
by an and the score is 7-0. C.J.,.Michael,
Gideon, Shorty is leading. Gideon takes it out
shoots a 20 feet jumper and now the score is 9-0.
They need 3 more p[o]ints to win. Gideon passes it
in to Michael and he passes it to Shorty. Shorty
passes it and C.J; shoots a three. The game is
over. C.J., Gideon,.Michael, Shorty wins the game.

A man was coming up to the court...

I quote at length for several reasons. In the first place, C.J.'s narrative
confidence, his willingness to dispense with needless explanation or
connective tissue, here gets the reader into some difficulty. It is hard, at least
for one who is not a basketball aficionado, to follow the action and to
determine who is speaking-though it would be easy--it appeared easy, at
Sharing time-for the children whose names are incorporated into the story to
do so if, as I believe, the game on the page enacts the verbal play they were
having as they contributed to C.J.'s construction of the story, now suggesting
an incident, now negotiating a better deal for "their" character, now
b0rrowing an idea for a different story, and so on.40 Second, while "C.J." gets

plenty of action, other players are given their share of the limelight--a

\

40 This depiction is somewhat hypothetical, as I was never able to listen in on these

C{N‘Versations (if I could understand them from where I was, the table was being too loud), and

gldfi't think to tape record them until too late. The hypothesis is reasonable, though, on the
a§13 of other observations-~of some of these students, and others--on the basis of the internal

Ev lC1ence of the story, and on the basis of some of these same players' participation when

Stl‘eet Ball" was shared (see below). Also see Dyson's excellent account of these kinds of

negotiations (and more) in (Dyson, 1997).

121

tendency that will be elaborated in interesting ways as the story progresses.

So, the "man (who) was coming up to the court,"

said, "Is any of ya'll any good?"

"Who are you?"

"My name is Corey. I'm a coach in Long Beach
California."

"Yeah Im pretty good"

"You ain't no good Shorty."

"forget you."

"what is your name"

"C.J."

"And who are your friends here?"

"This is Gideon, Michael, Shorty, Wesley,
Lincoln, JOn and Marcus."

"Who is the 4 best people?"

"Me, Michael, Gideon, Jen."

"Do ya'll wanna play in California in a 4 on 4
tournament."

"I don't know man but I'll think about it."

"My number is 394-4835. Call me"

"Hey Hey I changed my mind, I will play."

"I will too" said Gideon. C.J., Gideon, JOn and
.Michael decided to play in California in the
tournament. Who ever wins will be drafted to play
in college or NBA. C.Jfl allways wanted to play for
Indiana.

2 weeks
Later...

It is not clear why "Shorty," who seemed pretty good at the beginning
0f the story, is brushed off here,41 but C.J. the narrator again displays a good
Sense of psychology when he has "C. J ." the character at first play it very cool
in his response to the obviously desirable invitation, only to turn around and
"Change his mind" right away. And the patient reader can now figure out
that one of the original teams was made up of "Gideon," "Shorty," "C. I.," and

"Michael," the other of "Wesley," "Ion," "Lincoln," and "Marcus" (see

Appendix IV). As the story continues, "C. J ." and his team, named the

\
41
Perhaps, at the table, to make room for Jon to become "Jon." (If "Shorty" has a real-life

Cc)I-lnterpart, he is not part of this class and not, as far as I know, part of the school.)

122

Hoopers, meet with good success, playing a team named the Hogs, whose

individual players are not named.

The Hogs passes it in way down court it is stolen
by.Michael He takes it down court and dunks it the
Hooopers take a 5 point lead.

2 minutes later

The Hoopers win lS—O. Marcus and the other guys
that did not make the team made there own team and
signed up to play. Their team's name is the Spurs.
Marcus, Lincoln, Shorty and Wesley are a team....

So the ones who got left out don't get left out after all. In fact, "if they can go
undefeated for two games straight," they will play the Hoopers in the
tournament, and the team that wins that match "will be drafted to a college
basket ball team." We watch as the Spurs beat their first opponents, the

Warriors. Then,

2 weeks later

The Spurs went underfeated For two game and they
beat Suns they are [in] the champion chip with
Hooppers today. C.J. comes in to shoot he makes
it. Shorty come into shoot and he misses. So The
Hoopers get ball..Michael passes it in way down
court to Gideon and he dunks Hooppers lead 2-0.
Marcus is driving down court and passes it to
Lincoln and Lincoln shoots it. And it gets blocked
by JOn and Jen runs down court and throws a alley
cop to C.JL and C.J; makes it.

3 minutes Later
It is tied at 13 and Hoopers get ball. C.Jfl passes
it in to Gideon and it is stolen by Anthony42 and
Anthony passes it to Marcus.Marcus dunks the ball.

The Spurs win the tounement! They will get
drafted!

1 Month later

\
42
This would be Anthony Z. (not Anthony Y). He seems to have displaced "Wesley."

123

Marcus gets drafted to North Carolina. Lincoln get
drafted to Oklahoma State. Anthony get drafted to
Purdue. Shorty gets drafted to Arkansas. C.J.
went to the NBA in the year 1999 and played for San

Antonio Spurs.

THEIIflflD

It seems to me that the "community of skill and interest" that I
thought I observed in the c1assroom--a large handful of boys working on joint
or similar projects, drawn together by shared interests (whether those would
be called "basketball," "drawing," "writing," or indeed, "co-operation") and
the admired skill of several (C.J. centrally)--can be seen here to be dramatized
and perhaps idealized in the story. (Out of the shared interests, mutual
admiration, and cooperative work, friendship and indeed "affection" may
arise; they are not what gets the work going.) It is an inclusive sort of story in
which everyone gets to be seen doing well at one point or another and the
only ones who might be thought of as being (quite tamely) "put down"—-
"Shorty" and "Wesley"--do not have classroom analogs. This inclusivity or
communality was both signaled and noted during sharing time. For C.J. did
not read the story himself, nor did he ask me to--he asked Marcus instead.
(He did a fine job: It was far easier to follow the story hearing it read by
Someone who knew it from the inside out than it is to follow it on the page.)
And in the discussion, Gideon remarked, "usually when people put
thelriselves on teams, they make themselves win [but] you didn't: how
COrne?" (a touch I certainly had not picked up on hearing but then, I was not
implicated in the story”). To which C.J. responded to the effect that he didn't
Want to always do the same old (predictable) thing (journal, 5 / 11/ 95). Finally,
I am told by those who know the game better than I do that it is not far-
\

43
b "Cl." however, does go straight to the NBA, leaving "Gideon" and his other teammates
ehind, while "Marcus'" team goes, less glamorously, to college.

 

124

fetched to see the basketball being played in the story as a particularly co-

operative version of the game.44

Wondering and hurt: A further look at trust
Also in April--very possibly on day when he began writing Street Ball--

C.J. wrote in response to an assignment:

When I grow up...45
I want to play for
the Indiana Hughers.46
And when [I] get to the
NBA I will play for
the Orlando Magic
I want to be number
1. And if I don't make it
I wonder what will
happen to Clarence.

I said I needed one more sentence; I gave several possibilities, one of which

was "something you're scared about about growing up" (journal 4 / 24/ 95). I
received:

The thing I am scared about
growing up is getting hurt.

Details and contrasts, both obvious and less obvious, deserve noticing.
Of course we notice that Clarence (C.J.) resembles "CI." the character who
"always wanted to play for Indiana" and ends up going straight to the NBA.

The plainness, and the plaintiveness, of "I want to be number 1 and if I don't

I“ake it I wonder what will happen to Clarence" is, however, a different voice

\

44 The maneuver called the "alley oop," for example, is described as a two person scoring
effort in which the two players must know and be able to "read" each so well as to virtually
a1“iiCipate each other's moves while yet concealing these from their opponents. (D. Carroll,
Esel‘sonal communication, June 16, 1997) for enlightening me on this point.

h The phrase "When I grow up" was one of three prompts given by me; the other two choices
4 ad been: "If the wind took me away..." and "Tell about the end of the world (made-up)"

i.e., Hoosiers.

125

from that which narrates the bulk of "Street Ball." C.J. the child seems to be
acknowledging to himself that, except in fiction, he is unlikely ever to play
professional, or even college, basketball.47 And there is something
deliberative, even solemn in his referring to himself formally, by his full first
name, as he sometimes signs his stories, though he is never addressed this
way in school. "I wonder what will happen to Clarence" can in any case be
taken to be the underlying question for virtually all of his writing. From this
point of view, one job of fiction is clearly to explore negative as well as
desirable possibilities--to get to know them in the imagination, to objectify
them, to put them aside if they will let you. "Wondering," in any case, is the
special job of fiction-~and is sometimes said to be the salient characteristic of
childhood. In "Street Ball," wondering is the seminal activity from which
follows the construction of meaning, of objects, and of the activity. In fiction,
"wonder" can evoke creativity; in the "real life" of "When I grow up," it can
seem to mean waiting on fate. One task of the imagination is to make this
not completely true, to bring intentionality and hope into "real life." Is C.J.
learning this? And then there is the simple, unguarded declaration: "The
thing I am scared about growing up is getting hurt." Recall "My teachers at
my old school were nice," and my ("na‘1‘ve"?) marginal comment, "do you
Want people to hurt each other?," and C.J.'s ("triumphant"?) "yes!" Much
Seems to have changed since then: C.J.'s range of expression is far greater, as
is his capacity for vulnerability, that is, trust. --On which more shortly. One
final thing to contemplate here is that in evoking the act of wondering--close
kin to imagining, and the root of all philosophy--on the one hand, and being

hurt on the other, C.J. is identifying the full and polar range of human

\
47
He and Gideon have both recently seen the devastating Hoop Dreams, which may have

alded this recognition.

126

sentient experience. Pain, that is, locates a person fully in the fragility of the
body (and in extreme cases renders one inarticulate); wondering and
imagining are the activities which take us farthest beyond the limits of the
body (and are the sources of verbal and all other creativity).48 Pain is perhaps
the most isolating of experiences, whereas imagination and its relatives-mot
only wonder, but sympathy and compassion--are the experiences, or qualities,
which join.49
And "joining" seems to be going on for C.J. in several ways this spring.

In March and April, as I have indicated, he is a central member of a sort of
writing and drawing workshop within the larger "workshop," a small
"community of skill and interest," and he is dramatizing a similarly joined
community in Street Ball. Also in March, he seems to attribute to me a kind
of sympathy and affection in respect to his writings. He remarked50 that he
"feel(s) good when there's a story he's [i.e., Mr. Roosevelt is] proud of-—that he
tells us he likes" (audio tape, 3/ 21 / 95). Similarly, a week or so later, an
undergraduate student of mine—-one of several who were observing and
helping out once or twice a week for much of the semester--an African
American woman who'd taken a special interest in C.J.--asked him, "Why do
You write these stories?," meaning, the "violent" ones, the "gangster" ones,

(Wishing he wouldn't write them). "Mr. Roosevelt likes to read them," he

 

 

48 See Scarry‘s, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (1985) for a
fascinating, extremely challenging, discussion of these relationships. This book has influenced
my thinking about these topics in ways I cannot yet specify. Though of course I cannot hold it
responsible for my confusions and errors, it must share heavily in the credit for any insights I
gay achieve.
, Scarry asserts that pain means certainty for the one hurt, and doubt for the observer (and
mdeed pain has been one of philosophers' favorite topics when they ponder "the problem of
other minds"). Rousseau similarly, argues that needs separate human kind while desires join
Ssee. for example, 1966, pp. 11-12). "Compassion," though, would seem to deconstruct the pain-
II“agination polarity. Understood as the beginnings of an effort to relieve the one in pain from
50 at pain, the continuity is restored (see Scarry, 1985, p. 306).

In an interview with a colleague of mine. Colleagues interviewed most of the class, in pairs

or threesomes, in March and April.

127

told her (journal 3/ 25 / 95). I suppose that is to rest partial responsibility with

me, but in a reversal of the usual teacher-student relationship: I am not

responsible because I dictate the product; rather, I am responsible because I
accept the product, and am said to like it. Indeed, I am said to be proud of
C.J.'s stories-—a curious choice of words which seems to put me, let's say, in an
avuncular relationship to their author. --Or at least, it is as if to say that I am
granted the right to be his teacher, to share authority for what he does in the
c1assroom-—as if it is now our classroom...

I think C.J.'s identification of my pleasure and pride in his writings--
this what I take to be voluntary or accepted co-responsibility for his work, this
apparent belief that I am in some sympathy with his project--can be
understood as a provisional decision to trust, or an acceptance of finding
himself trusting. I will have more to show of this development, but want
first to do a brief examination of the concept of trust. I have said that C.J.
seemed early on to implicitly pose the question, "How much trust is necessary
or desirable in an educative relationship, how is it to be obtained when
conditions militate against it, and in what directions must it flow?" (When I
first began to articulate that question for myself, I was primarily concerned

With my ability to trust C.J. but, as I hope I have shown, the movement in the
Other direction gradually assumed greater interest and significance. «Not, of
C0‘uII'se, to suppose that they are unrelated.) And I have said that I came to
understand C.J. as doubting the worth and reliability of the writing workshop
and me as its teacher, proposing doubt as an active search for the thing
dESired, namely, security or trustworthiness, (and, ultimately, value or
11leaning in activity). That is of course as well to say that he did not as a
Inatter of course "trust" his (new, white) teacher. Early on, I suggested that a

CC“Timon, perhaps "natural," teacherly expectation is to think that maximal

128

trust of the teacher by the student is a good thing, perhaps an essential thing, a
thing-~if not at once present--to be obtained as quickly as possible. I believe
this is what I assumed.51 I have since come to think that it is, quite
straightforwardly, not necessary for the student to "trust" the teacher as a
matter of course--doubt, in fact, may be (ontologically) inevitable if not always
announced-~and it is indeed intelligent to doubt. (Later, I shall return to the

question of whether we can go further and say that doubt of the teacher can be

seen to have positive educational value.)

Feminist philosopher Annette Baier offers an elegant definition of

trust.

Trust...is reliance on others' competence and willingness to look
after, rather than harm, things one cares about and which are

entrusted to their care.
Trust and Antitrust (1986, p. 259)52

On each side of trust there lies danger. On the one side, we live in a
world of other people and are not self-sufficient;53 thus, we cannot, single-
handedly, adequately look after all the things we care about all the time:
"Without trust, what matters to me would be unsafe" (p. 231). On the other
SidE, trust itself by definition entails danger: It is "accepted vulnerability to

anOther's possible but not expected ill will (or lack of good will) toward one"

\
51
1\IIore accurately, perhaps, this is, I think, what I thought I thought--but when I found
mySEIf explicitly questioning the assumption, it may have turned out that I was not actually
oPet'ating on that assumption for some time. For C.J. is certainly not the first student to have
Strusted or doubted me. In hindsight, I can see that such teacher-student relationships have

g2 ten been of particular vigor and interest.
The essay I quote from and related essays can also be found in (Baier, 1994). I have found

iRiel-'5 work on trust immensely helpful. This chapter as a whole, not just this portion of it,

B
:53 been influenced by it.
Dewey thinks, however, that we often speak as if we are or can and should be. He counsels

t1"at this is a "form of insanity," a widely circulating one (1966).

 

129

(p. 235, emphasis added). Of particular significance in the context of student
teacher relationships, "trust alters power relations" (p. 240)--in classrooms we
could say at the very least it accentuates them--the entrusted one gains power
over the one trusting, obviously a liability if the trust is misplaced. In this
connection, Baier argues that contracts and promises, which are often taken to
be our best and perhaps only needed models for trust, only make moral sense
between equals. "(They are) device(s) for traders, entrepreneurs, and
capitalists, not for children, servants, indentured wives, and slaves" (p. 247).
Hence, her emphasis on accepted vulnerability as the criterion for "trust,"
rather than enforceable bond. Baier weaves all of these strands together in a
passage with direct bearing on classrooms in general and the writing
workshop--as a place dedicated to children's making of artifacts--in particular.

"Why," she asks, "(do) we typically...leave things that we value close enough
to others for them to harm them(?)"

The answer...is that we need their help in creating, and then
in...looking after the things we most value... The one in the best
position to harm something is its creator or nurse-cum-
caretaker... Since the things we typically do value include such
things as we cannot singlehandedly either create or
sustain...(including) intrinsically shared goods such as
conversation, its written equivalent, theatre and other forms of
play...we must allow...other people to get into positions where
they can, if they choose, injure what we care about, since those
are the same positions they must be in in order to help us take

care of what we care about.

(p. 236, emphasis added)
The repeated use of "care," "take care," and the near equivalent, "look
after/'54 is crucial to Baier's explication of "trust" and to my use of her work

here.55 "Affection and sympathy" (the "keynotes of the child's life") are

\

54
55

All of which are, of course, also near synonyms for "attend."
‘ Baier goes on to assert the "Socratic truth that the human soul's activity is caring for
gs" (p. 236), a comment similar in spirit both to Dewey's remark about "affection and

130

intimately and inextricably bound up with the activities of caring-for,

whether as cause or as by-product, and "vulnerability" is--again, intimately
and inevitably--implied by care and caring-for. To this we should add, by way
of reiteration, that the child in school is there by compulsion.56 Finally I want
to stress Baier's proposition that trust has material as well as psychic content:
some thing is cared for, is entrusted to another; her examples of such

"things" include "conversation, its written equivalent [perhaps C.J.'s
notebook entries are a form of this]...and...play [of which, I have argued earlier
(Chapter 2), fiction is an instance]."

From these perspectives several points become much clearer, especially
if we hang on to the idea that trust has content, a cared-for something put in
the way of harm we hope and believe will not come to it, but about which we
can have no absolute certainty beforehand. For one thing, it is obvious that
in wanting to trust C.J. I occupy ground wholly different from his: the
vulnerability I will experience in trusting him is simply not comparable to
that he will experience in (if) trusting me. My position as adult and teacher
alone ensures this; my being white presumably ups the ante; being male
Probably does likewise. What "goods" of mine may come to harm if I trust
CL? My sense of authority or peace of mind or professional pride will be
haI’Ined if he works to earn or re-eam his reputation for "lying and denying,"
but this is an occupational hazard and one I willingly took on: a modest risk.

AS a teacher, I have faith that the child's "investment of effort and care" (e.g.

 

\
sytnpathy" and to David Hawkins' assertion that "(t)he soul is not contained within the body

but Outside, in the theater of its commitments" (1974, p. 51).
u The fit between "compulsion" and "care" seems at first a poor one, but it grows more complex
13 Don examination. See, for example, Baier's acknowledgment that unequal power relations are
by- no means necessarily wrong or inimical to trust, the relationship between parent and infant
leemg the most obvious example (e.g., p. 249); also see Cohen's analysis of Waller, e.g., "If all

' g requires some trust, it also may entail some resistance [or doubt?] and thus some

Corlipulsion from another source" (Cohen, 1987, p. 35).

131

in a writing project) betokens value and worth, even if I cannot confidently
articulate what the value is, and I need to believe that what looks like "an
investment of effort and care" is an investment of effort and care. I also need
to continue to believe that writing does provide an avenue for each child to
clarify his relationship with the world, gain some self knowledge, make some
connections to larger experiences, and exert some imaginative power. These
pieces of pedagogical faith are surely vulnerable--I would indeed be pained to
find them completely undermined, or abused--but again, this goes with the
territory.

C.J., though, is not operating in territory he has freely chosen. And the
childish "goods" of his which would be subject to harm if in any way
entrusted to me are far more tangible, and yet more delicate, than my adult,
teacherly ones. I mean his writings, in which he demonstrably invests time,
care, energy, effort, and attention--and "writings" here must be taken to
include the meanings of those writings. The fragility of these objects and the
power differential between the child and teacher (enhanced as it may be by
factors of color and gender and the intersection of all these with the past
history, in and out of school, of the child and the teacher) are, I believe,
sufficient to show why it would be reasonable, self-interested, and smart for
C-] . to be slow, at least, in trusting me and in sharing the care of his writings
with me. It is natural for children to be vulnerable to adults; it is not natural-
‘01‘ is perhaps not "natural" in our time and place--for them, especially as they
grow up, to choose that vulnerability and to unilaterally extend it outside the
fa111in circle. (Indeed they are usually taught not to. It is perhaps no longer

the case, if it ever was, that the teacher is, or should be, a special case of the

S tranger."57)

\
I think few teachers would welcome this thought, if I am correct in the assumptions about

132

The playing out of doubt and trust and vulnerability to harm can in
fact be observed quite directly in one several times repeated action of C.J.'s-
the crumpling up and throwing away of his work, or the hiding of it: denying
me access-~and in his twice repeated affirmation that I "like" and am "proud"

of his work. A likely interpretation of the denying me access to his work is
that he is actually protecting his investment. He hurts it before I get a chance
to; specifically, he hurts (or hides) the material object so I can't get access to
the imaginative one.58 His doubt or, rather, at that moment outright mistrust
is expressed most plainly. But if we take the earlier actions in conjunction
with the later statements that he writes his stories because "Mr. Roosevelt
likes to read them," we can go a step further (if we are willing to take him at
his word--which may be our duty). That is, if he perceives, correctly, that I do

like to read his work--that I care about it, perhaps even care for it, in some

the desirability of quick and easy trust from students to teachers I posited earlier. Baier in her
Context finds an assumption not only similar to mine but directly relevant to our context: "The
few discussions of trust that I have found in the literature of moral philosophy assume that
trust is a good and that disappointing known trust is always prima facie wrong, meeting it
always prima facie right. But what is a trust-tied community without justice but a group of
mutual blackmailers and exploiters?" (p. 253). Waller makes one of many complementary and
Characteristic assertions when he says, "Teacher and pupil confront each other with attitudes
from which the underlying hostility can never be altogether removed. Pupils are the material
In which teachers are supposed to produce results. Pupils are human beings striving to realize
themselves in their own spontaneous manner, striving to produce their own results in their own
gay" (1965, p. 196).
.. In Baier's terms, the "creator" protects the object by keeping it out of reach of the
Ca.l'etaker." It is worth noting that the more usual procedure in schools seems to be that
C dren work on material of no particular importance to them, which the teacher can have
élmost unlimited access to without trust ever becoming a serious issue viz a viz the work. (This
IS Cc>Inplicated when the [all too often] intrinsically unimportant work of school becomes, for
some, important on account of the adult approval registered through grades, smiley faces, and
the like. Thanks to Kara Suzuka [personal communication, Jan. 1997] for clarifying all this for
file.) Waller again makes a complementary observation: "Whatever the rules that the teacher
ays down, the tendency of the pupils is to empty them of meaning. By mechanization of
fonformity, by 'laughing off' the teacher or hating him out of all existence as a person, by
Saking refuge in self—initiated activities that are always just beyond the teacher’s reach,
Cl dents attempt to neutralize teacher control" (1965, p. 196, emphasis added). One way of
e8cribing the teaching I report is as an effort to bring children's "self-initiated activity" into
39 center of the classroom. Whether such a move can survive or confound the entanglements,
0‘T‘flicts, and contradictions of authority referred to here and earlier is yet to be developed.

133

way—-then he hurts me when he hurts or withholds the work. He hurts his
relationship with me at the same time that he asserts its existence. (Of course
he does not want to be conned any more than I do: If there is any danger I
might withdraw my apparent offer of acceptance of his work, might go back

on my word again, he will get out of the way first.) If the basic gesture
combines protecting the object from possible harm by me and hurting me (the
one from fear, the other from anger), than a kind of test is going on and the
question must be: Do I get hurt? If yes, I pass--but only if I stay within
bounds. The hurt must be proportional, understated, for we both know that
he not I threw away (or hid) the work; we both know I probably had some
degree of right in whatever I did to cause the mistrust, fear, and/ or anger
(certainly, if I was "extremely disappointed" in him for driving Candy to tears;
plausibly, if I found myself momentarily unable to negotiate the gap between
my response to his drawing during meeting and Jane's). And the next
question will be: does C.J. get to resume his writing, do we get to try again?59
If yes, we both pass. So, not only the writing and the child, but the teacher
and the relationship between the three of them are vulnerable. But also they
are sustainable: the surround does not crumble, the teacher does not turn
aWay, the child will write again, the teacher will read, and enjoy, again. I
have suggested that mediation of faith and doubt may be one way to
Characterize (part of) the teacher's role. I will not develop this fully here, but

\
5
9 This is critical. The child must not be allowed the power to deprive himself of the thing

he Cares about; the consequences of his actions must be contained and if necessary meliorated by
e adult if he is to be enabled to grow. (See for example, Winnicott, "the child absolutely

requires an environment that is indestructible in essential respects..." (1986, p. 94). This is not
only" a psychological matter; it holds true of inquiry in general. Imagine if the initial failure

Off-1n inquiry was taken to be once and for all. Hawkins remarks, "There are going to be several

ItIlsses for every hit, but you just say, 'Well, let's keep on missing and the more we miss the more

refill hit.‘ The importance of this in the 'I-Thou' relationship between the teacher and the

. Ill1C1 is that the child learns something about the adult which we can describe with words like

confidence} 'trust,‘ and 'respect'" (1974, p. 56).

 

134

want to point out how this idea may be accurate. Definitions of "mediate
include (according to The Oxford English Dictionary): "To occupy an
intermediate or middle place or position; to be between; usually, to form a
connecting link or transitional stage between one thing and
another...(and)...to intercede, or intervene for the purpose of reconciling."
C.J.'s possibilities of mistrust, of doubt, and of faith or trust60 meet, in a sense,
in me.61 I respect, or tolerate, his mistrust of me and his anger, while looking,
hopefully, beyond those states. Most important, I believe, is that I am not
expecting him to make whatever it is he has, carries around, puts into the

writing, totally vulnerable—accessible to me--all at once, or even ever.

"I still need a key": Creating a voice

Moral philosophers, teachers, and of course parents, are not the only
ones properly concerned with children's abilities to trust, or rather, with what
happens when that ability is somehow (sometimes mysteriously) damaged.
Winnicott, for instance, developed the concept of "holding" to describe the
process by which infants are brought from a state of absolute dependence
(including the speechlessness literally meant by "infant") to a state of healthy
"living with" and, ultimately a healthy state of independence (or, I would
PTEfer, following Baier and Dewey, adult inter-dependence) and full-
VOicedness (having successfully "stolen language from one's elders," being
nOVV one of its proprietors as well as one constituted by it). It is a simple but

f 1‘1-1itful concept that can suggestively deepen our sense of the meanings of

\
60 I take "trust' -'other than the original trust of infant for parentnto be in part based on

:xperience, and "faith" to be more of an affirmation of what will come, not necessarily as
vulnerable to experience as trust is. When I speak of the child, trust is the more appropriate
61 Oice; when I speak of the teacher, I incline more towards the idea of faith.
And of course in deeper senses altogether in the most significant adults in his life, e.g., his
I‘I‘Oflier who gave him the folder with which to protect his writings.

135

"trust" and of C.J.'s (as I see it) achievement of trust. "Holding" certainly and
indeed "especially" "includes the physical holding of the infant, which is a
form of loving" (Winnicott, 1960, p. 591) but it also includes "the total
environmental provision" (p. 588), that is, the anticipation of and attendance
to all of the infant's physiological and psychological (originally not
differentiated) needs: the fact, we might say, and the sense, of security. The
alternative is obviously the possibility of being dropped (literally or
figuratively). The concept of holding extends itself in several ways. For one,
it extends to the possibility of being held if need be. Here, a paradigmatic
image is that of the parent sitting or squatting, knees apart, with hands
outstreteched, as the toddler attempts to walk--she will be caught (held) if
need be, but only if need be; she is on her way. Directly following from these
senses of being held is the idea that, if the infant/ child is not properly held,
there is no possibility of breaking away, of healthy individuation occurring.
Finally, if one is not held, one must hold oneself--an isolating but not
autonomous position into which therapeutic or quasi-therapeutic

interventions may be called for (the analyst, for example, takes over the

"holding" function).62

 

 

62 I have mostly used my own words to sketch out this theory of "holding" because it is not
altogether clear to me where I may have taken liberties with Winnicott's concept for my own
Purposes. The primary resource for the concept in his own words is "The Theory of the Parent-
.Infant Relationship" (1960), on which I have drawn heavily. (For instance: "The term
holCling' is used here to denote not only the actual physical holding of the infant, but also the
“ital environmental provision prior to the concept of living with. It refers to a three-
1111ensional or space relationship with time gradually added" (pp. 43-44); and "(In) a holding
enVironment, the 'inherited potential' (of the infant) is becoming itself a 'continuity of being'.
The alternative to being is reacting and reacting interrupts being and annihilates. The holding
enV ironment therefore has as its main function the reduction to a minimum of impingements to
iCh the infant must react..." [p. 47]). He also elaborated on the theory throughout his
Career. One such site which I have found useful is Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an
halysis Winnicott, (1987) (for instance, "If people fail to hold a child in the early stages,
the“ the child has to take over holding himself" and "You hardly believe that I could find you
Q i1dish and still allow it, and in fact you have never been able to do this here" [pp. 112 8r
1 17D. Finally, I believe I owe the image of the toddler (among so much more) to Lillian Weber

136

This works for me, here, as follows. C.J. doubts because he wishes to
trust—-or, in Winnicott's terms, he wants to be held but is afraid he'll be
dropped; so, he has to hold himself, so, he can't be a child and he can't
become himself either. In his fiction, C.J. depicts protagonists--e.g., Warren
and Dre--who have been "dropped," who fail to become; in "Street Ball,"
however, he depicts, first, a protagonist who seems to successfully "hold"
himself and then, in a crucial development, a whole cast of protagonists who
seem successfully to "hold" each other.63 The first protagonist in "Street Ball"
seems almost to create himself; the subsequent ones may be said to "become
themselves" when they are (just, only) "boys" who then, fictionally, grow up.
The quest had been for an identity as a child who can be safe and grow up safe
(not be "hurt"), for an identity located in the realm of creation not
destruction. In the day to day life of the classroom, as he doubts-—prods and
tests-the workshop and his teacher, C.J. seems over the course of the year, to
move generally-mot uniformly--from a "hard," sarcastic, challenging posture
to a more vulnerable, "soft," young posture. He seems in some ways to
become a child. This tendency can be traced in his notebook writings and in
my journal. I present this material as "Exhibits" and "Commentary"--almost
as a slide show--in the hopes that, at this point, not much commentary is

needed and we may move briskly along. We begin back in January.

 

\
(See, for example, "The posture of 'let's assume capacity [on the part of every child, at first "in

a Purely exploratory and 'faith’ kind of way"]’ was visualized in the gesture she once pointed

out-N: a gesture of her hand aligned with and following closely behind the child, but not

ac{fl-lally touching(;) (t)hat small palpable space between hand and child was alive...with the

glld's capacity and the teacher's recognition and fostering of it..." (Alberty, 1996, p. 4).

o f The stories being fiction, it does not matter that Winnicott says these--or, rather, the first
t1"tese--is not in the long run sustainable "in real life," as one point of fiction is to transcend

l le sorry state of real life.
It may be that I have underestimated the role of the coach: he may symbolize the "good

enough" adult.

137

Exhibit A, Peeing on the bathroom floor; interpretation--

In the bustle of transition into writing workshop, C.J. sidled up
to me and said Erika had gone to another school. I crouched, a
bit lower than eye level. He said "good" or words to that effect. I
looked at him; he gave a bit of a smile; I pulled him towards
me, a hand around his waist--'what would I say if he left?‘
Someone nearby said "good," I think, or did he?--anyway, I said,
no, I'd be very sad. Another smile. Standing up, I acknowledged
that he and Erika had fought a lot. He also made contact with
me one or two other times, including asking if he'd had his turn
to share his book yet, then recalling he hadn't. And, was
continually in squabbles during meeting, with Jennifer....

...And it took a hell of a long time to get a satisfactory silent 10--I
got angry (loud, flushed) several times. In the midst of this I was
told (first by Diamond, then by Anthony Y.) that someone had
peed all over the bathroom floor, Diamond assuring me it was
C.J.. I made an announcement at one point, acknowledging [that
the floor had been peed on], insisting it should not be a subject of
giggling and finger pointing (while also saying I believed I knew
who but was not announcing it publicly), comparing it to
"cursing, but secretly," saying they should know "only a person
who was scared would do a thing like that." [I also requested the
custodian's help. I did not, in fact, charge or question C.J.-~or

anyone else--with the act privately, either.]
(Journal, 1 / 5 / 95)

C0 m menta ry--

Compare: "The patient knows Winnicott knows more of him than he
ever interprets. This is one shared secret between them." (Khan, in
introduction to [Winnicott, 1987, p. 17].) (This would have been one of the
on ly times, almost certainly the only time, when I ventured such an
interpretation of C.J., towards him or to anyone else about him.)

"The question for the teacher and the student (or the therapist and
patient) is what the apparently more-knowing one chooses to interpret and to
Share" (D. Ball, personal communication, 7/ 5/ 97).

. C.J.'s inquiry regarding Erika is perhaps open-ended. I would be

Sul’prised if, at this point in the year he expected me to react with outrage,

138

though I suppose that would always be an outside possibility. Why did he in
any case draw my attention to Erika's leaving and his pleasure in or approval
of that fact? Just to find out how I would react--an exploratory gesture? Did
he seek correction, disapproval, whatever? Certainly he would not have
expected me to say, "yes, isn't it great she's finally gone." --Not, at least, on
the basis of the kinds of things I do say; but fear need not be logical; the
intuition--if it was that-~that what really concerned him was the kind of thing
that might be said behind his back may have been on the money. In any case,
he was finding out a little about me. It would be nice to say it was a successful
inquiry: he got affection, a correction of his negative comment wrapped up in
a positive comment about him, proof that I paid at least some attention to
details of his life (that they had fought a lot). And he seemed, by his
expressions, to be acknowledging all of this, taking it in not rejecting it.
However--there was the peeing on the bathroom floor, later that
afternoon. Here he very conceivably does something which I publicly
interpret-~perhaps correctly, and most unusually--as an expression of fear.
Assuming this was C.J. and assuming my interpretation and its internal
assumptions (e.g. that the act was intentional) are more or less correct, doubt
manifests itself here as constricting, and as straining hard to be self-
CO“firming: piss on the world, piss off the world, in anticipation of how it
Will piss on you (not so different from throwing away or hiding your story

bEfore you're rebuked for it, or simply not praised).
Exhibit B, Self-initiated honesty--

...C.J. asked me to read his story for him (his turn to share)--VL's
vs. Geez, very bloody, though "peace" is last word, after "the
end." Showing pictures--many, dramatically bloody (8:
effectively...-—there was a lot of giggling, especially Diamond,
A'dona, Ralene, Jennifer--I finally got smart enough to
remember to say that we'd do one more page-~if people couldn't

139

be serious enough, we'd quit; if they could be, we'd do another,
8: so on. Got through 3 or 4 this way, but then Diamond &
someone burst out with giggles again, & I stopped us. This to the
intense annoyance of several--not however directed at me but at

each other. A step of sorts, I hope...
A really great occurrence: at end of sharing meeting, I asked

for hands of people who had not done today's half page of focus
word--[three or four hands went up] and, at first, C.J. I wrote
[these names] on board [as a reminder to myself & to them, not
in connection with any extraneous "consequences"], saying on
Thurs. I would choose where they sat and insist on them doing
focus words first thing. Then Candy, sitting next to C.J., told me
he had done it & he, I think, nodded, so I took him off the board.
After meeting, he came up to me & said, "is that for today ’3 focus
word?" "Yes," I said, and he said he had not done it-—and went
to put his name on board (I may have asked him to do this--if so,
he did it without demurral--but I don't think so). And I got to
call him back & thank him for being honest, for which I thought

I got a small nod of the head....
(Journal, 1 /11 /95)

Commentary--

I came to think of this as C.J.'s moment of "self—initiated honesty." He
went somewhat out of his way to find out his (in my eyes, but perhaps today
in his as well?) obligation and to take responsibility for it. This was, in my
exPerience--and other teachers' as well—-a first.

This seems to me to have signaled trust. It is safe to be honest. Mr.
Roosevelt won't spurn the gesture (e.g., by scolding him for not having done
the work already). It would be excellent if it were fair to say that he was
indeed showing some acceptance of the focus word assignment as (at least

Partly) rightfully his responsibility. For if this were true, it would be a
relatively small step to say that on some level he credits that structure with
providing something that is good for him--whether a chance for a particular
kind of communication with me, to do a (worthwhile) kind of writing that he

Wouldn't initiate on his own, or both, in the privacy of the notebook space.

140

Certainly he does make interesting, startling, use of the focus word over the

remainder of the year.

Exhibit C, "I "--

1/31/95 I
I do not know what
this word means but
I think it means I
do not know what
it means.

("Focus word," from C.J.'s notebook. The alternative choice
was "game.")

Commentary-—

I take this to be an instance of living with a special form of doubt, self
doubt, rather than running from or disguising it. (I would not be so confident
in interpreting it this way--which is, essentially, to take it literally or at face
value--to take him "at his word"--were it not for the identity theme in the

fiction, and Exhibit F, below.)

Exhibit D, The Valentines' Day Episode-—

Jane organized a Valentine's Day party, complete with cupcakes
and punch, to which I was invited. The children brought cards--
one for each member of the class was the rule-~and candy. I
brought cheap ball point pens I'd found on sale, and stickers. It
was not going well: Several children have written nasty notes to
each other on the cards.

After distributing my tokens, I go to the office to fetch C.J. and
another student to join the party. When we return I find some
of the pens and stickers have been pocketed: there are now not
enough to go around (C.J., for example, will not get one).

Jane is exceptionally angry. She summarily ends the party,

requiring those who have received pens and stickers to give
them back to me. It is, to say the least, an unpleasant afternoon.

141

I miss the next several scheduled workshop sessions, having to
go out of town. When I return I give an assignment: Last time
we had writing workshop the day ended really badly--Write me a
letter: tell me any thoughts you have about that, tell me if
anything good has happened for the class since then. I
specifically direct that they are not to assign blame.

C.J.'s responseunot an actual letter--was to vaguely cast blame on
someone who wasn't even in the class and to say "it was really
nothing."

I wrote back telling him why I did not think it was "really
nothing," telling him he had to write me a real letter back. He
wrote:

Dear Mr. Roosevelt.
Nothing have been going good sins you were gone
because Mrs. Boyd was still a little mad and I hope
you find you pens.

from Clarence

A handful of bold arrows were drawn pointing to the letter so I'd
be sure not to miss it. Contrite, merely aiming to please,
whatever--the tone was different and he'd made a gesture. I
certainly could take it as a softer more generous response if I
wanted.

Then, off in the margin (but in no danger of being overlooked)
he writes,

NOW you happy?
C0711 menta ry--

A colleague found the marginalia rude; I found it funny, and clever:
he Communicates in two different rhetorical modes, thus animating the
COIItents of each message. They seem to vibrate. Also he retains his
independent right not to care, or not to seem to care, as much as I would like
him to about the Valentine's Day events--and the ability to have the last

Wol‘d. And he gives me a choice of messages to reply to and tones in which to

142

reply. I let him have the last word on this one, while making sure to let him

know that I did read them.

C.J.'s initial response is thoroughly skeptical, dismissive: it wasn't an
important event, and anyway so and so probably did it, no I won't bother to
abide by your guidelines (make it a letter, don't cast blame). This is a rejection
of the spirit and the form of the assignment. I do not accept that; I disagree
on the matter of spirit, and on the matter of form, I direct him to do the
assignment: write Mr. Roosevelt a letter. He writes back, perhaps in a mode
of flattery, in any case, in what I am certainly entitled to take as an
improvement of tone; contriteness even if feigned is a gesture meeting me
half way. But he also makes his wonderful marginal comments, thus

retaining his independence or detachment. He can still be skeptical about all

this sentimental stuff.
Exhibit E, I always wanted to know--

4/25/95 Cry
when some one
cry tears come out
of your eyes. I always
wanted to know what
the[y] are made of.

(Focus word, from Notebook.)
Exhibit F, A key?--

5/23/95

My Self is me C.J., and I am a he not a she.
That's me. Remember the he?

I need a key to look at other people.

Is "me" my self and I? And you—-

are you a he or a she?

You are a he like me.

I still need a key.64

64\
I have punctuated and reformatted this piece in an effort to extract its meaning as fully as
stSible. The original was laid out and punctuated as follows.

5/23/95 My Self.
is me C.J. and I am

143

(Focus "word," from Notebook; the alternatives were "other people"
or "choose your own" [i.e. write about any word you wish to].)

Commentary--
Based on C.J.'s previous uses of the notebook, I identify myself as the

"you" being addressed. This "speaker" no longer needs to "hold" himself, is
thus free to be a child, an undeveloped potentiality, who will be able to leave
the holding situation behind and risk individuation. He has here achieved a

certain ability to tolerate, to live with, indeed--importantly--to play with some

self doubt. (The rhyming is a form of serious play--"key" at first occurs, I
assume, fortuitously, but then takes meaning from and returns meaning to

the context; "me, myself, and I" is a venerable form of serious play with the

mysteries and instability of "identity.") He has certainly "given form to
feeling," has articulated a distillation of the identity questions I see running
throughout the fiction. But the lack of a narrator, the occurrence in the
notebook space, and perhaps the tone announce that this is not a piece of
fiction. C.J. seems to be speaking directly to me--but "speaking" is a
misnomer: C.J. "himself" would never actually speak (out loud) like this. It's

a piece of writing, an artifact, and the "voice" is an artifice, though not exactly

a fiction. A name for this might be "first person conjectural."

Exhibit G, Trust?--

The other day, C.J. asked if he could carry the box65 (a first, he
said), which reminded me I wanted to call his mom. After

a he not a she thats me
remember the he? I need

a key to look at Other
people is me my self and
I and you are you a he or
she you are a he like

65 me I still need a key.
The box I used to ferry the writings and other odds and ends between home and school.

144

 

leaving off the box, I told him to follow me, went to office &
asked [the secretary] for [the] number, & called--tone friendly but
restrained, I never told him what we were doing or why I was
going to call. He was impassive, as so often. Trusting?
Watching & biding his time? Not protesting or querying,
anyway. Told [his mother] I was calling because earlier in the
year had had to call several times with concerns, wanted to call
now & say, overall, how well he was doing...he should be proud
of his writing--its order/ organization, his play with/ command
of time, [etc]. She said that was nice to hear, she'd have to

commend him that evening.
(Journal, 5 / 25 / 95)

Exhibit H, Things can really happen--

5-30-96

1 What kinds of writing do you like to do? Why?
The kind of writeing I like to do is about sports
because I like sports a lot.

2 What are you good at in writing.

I am good at makeing long storys and draw good.
3. What is hard in writing.

Nothing is hard about writing to me because im good.
4 What helps you write.

my head helps me write my stories.

5 What things do you learn from other people.
That things can really happen.

(Year end self—evaluation--an assignment--from Notebook. The
italicized questions were posed by me, written on the chalkboard,
and copied into the book, though C.J. copied them down after
having responded to them.)

\

Shildren often asked, at the end of the workshop-~or, sometimes, well in advance-if they
0‘lld'carry the box from the classroom to the professional development space down the hall

:vhere I parked my belongings before and after workshop. Apparently this was something of a
reat.

145

 

Commentary--

"That things can really happen" is a key insight, I believe. I will return

to this. Meanwhile, I propose that the tone of this self-evaluation is one of

confidence, earned confidence, rather than arrogance or bravado.

Exhibit I, More fear--

6-1-95
I hope

dallar.

I hope
I hope
dentis
Afraid
Afraid
Afraid
Afraid
Afraid
Afraid

for lOOOO,2lO6

for a high drolik car
for that the

was never evented.

of big dogs

of cats

of your grangpa

of the basement

of Halloween

of people.

(Focus words--"hope for" and "afraid of"; the third alternative
was, as always at this point in the year, "choice," i.e., write about
any word you wish to. This is C.J.'s final notebook entry,
opposite a farewell message from me, written earlier in the day.)

Com mentary--

It seems reasonable to say that C.J. is here taking some responsibility for

his own fears, as the first protagonist in "Street Ball" takes responsibility for

the World, while C.J. here, speaking very much as a child ("I wish for that the

dentist was never invented") is in a sense meeting the world.

He has become a child-~not a "natural" child but a child in the voice he

has successfully created for expressing the doubts and fears of childhood. In

t11e context of creative activity--the fictional stories, the cooperative writing

and drawing, the "first person conjectural" writings--he has taken

146

respor
of the

his 011

has 111.

One l'l

child"
”made
made
from
fully f
more
a'dthc
happ
Cared
311ij
hat;
spate

responsibility for his fears (of being hurt) and doubts (of what he will become,
of the suitability of the world for his becoming). That is to say, he has become
his own authority.

As a teacher, I have misgivings, retrospectively. I worry that these
writings are perhaps too vulnerable, too exposed, that this trust is unwise
after all. Then I remind myself that--in "My Self" at least, and most

strikingly--C.J. has created a voice which is not his own speaking voice. He

has maintained a distance, both a space of potentiality and a possible shadow,

one voice masking the other.

Valuing doubt: Further speculations

The poem of the mind in the act of finding/What will suffice...
Wallace Stevens

Why do I say that C.J. has "become a child" though "not a 'natural'
child"? I might as well say he has become a writer, a natural writer. He has
"made language his, found his voice, his consent, his right to speak"--he has
made for himself several voices, in fact. He has--still echoing the passage
from Stanley Cavell with which I began this chapter-«begun to show more
fully his capacity to be educated, that is to say, drawn out into the world, thus
more visible and vulnerable in the world, but also in a position to be
anthoritative in that world, to make his mark, to show "that things can really
halppen." One thing he can authorize is that the creation and care of his
Caired-for objects, his stories for example, will be shared. This makes them
Subject to harm, but, as Baier points out, it also increases the possibilities of
C1"eation and sustenance. Another thing he can authorize is, within the small
Space of the notebook, a limited sharing of the childish voice he has

C01IStructed, the one which comes ever closer to being unmediated by artifice

147

of any sort. There is now every "prospect that (he will) actually start to exist."
He is perhaps himself "getting ready to be a new person"--not because of some
imagined other's wish as to who he should be, but by force of his own
"accepted vulnerability," his increasing capacity for "affection and sympathy,"
his ability to speak in a variety of registers appropriate to the varying modes--
imaginative, guarded, naked, solitary, in company--in which each of us
struggles to form an acceptable self, personally authored, recognized and
accepted by others.

What part has doubt played in these accomplishments? Certame it
has ensured that they have not come lightly and that the workshop
environment has had to prove its capacity to "hold" C.J. and to accept his
marks upon it. That which is eamed--"stolen"—-through struggle and scrutiny
carries with it a degree of assent, or consent, a degree of reliability. Both the
qualified trust C.J. eventually permits himself and the teaching he to some
degree accepts are sturdier than they would have been without some struggle.
But--granting that, granting too that the child's doubt of the teacher is
understandable, intelligent, and perhaps ontologically necessary, arising
properly from the disparity in power, position, and potential vulnerability,
and from the intimacy of vulnerability if genuine cared-for goods are at stake
as, here, they are--is there however any educational benefit, any gain in
learning, to be attributed to this doubt? It would make a certain kind of sense
if there were, given philosophical traditions asserting that doubt, skepticism,

is the path to surer knowledge--or to surer understandings of the fragility of
knowledge. But doubt of what I "know" of the world is not identical to my
dOUbt of another person's trustworthiness or of the value of a particular
SEtting for me, though it would be strange indeed if they had nothing in

Common as attitudes or strategies. In C.J.'s actual case, in any event, can we

148

see any ways in which his doubting may have contributed directly to his
learning?
There are at least two cases where "learning," understood in part as an
increase in power to be authoritative, can be observed emerging in a context
of doubt, a context which, far from smothering the learning, seems to
enhance it. In the case of the weekly and daily assignments, including the
focus words, C.J. is cautious at first. He seldom rejects outright the invitation
proffered by the assignment, but he maintains a degree of distance and always
makes room to withdraw himself further, a non-committal or doubtful
posture captured by the actual or implied "So?" which crops up—-in the
notebook and in the classroom itself--so frequently in the fall. The larger
context is his active doubting of me as the teacher who established the
workshop and made the assignments. He tests my interest in his work (the
"choice writing"), my reactions to his assignments (e.g., "My teachers at my
old school..."), and my willingness or ability to hold the situation together (to
prevent temporary damage from becoming permanent damage). Certame he
observes me attempting to trust him (as with Ralph), which is to say both that
he knows I am reserving some residual right to mistrust him and that I am
taking a risk which he can see as a risk (though it is smaller than those he will
come to take: mine can not be commensurate with his). He can see me
respecting, tolerating, or rejecting his behavior--these stories in which bad
things happen: mothers get shot by sons, these marginal comments and
assignments containing rudeness to me, his mistreatment of Eric or Candy--
and he can see me respecting the differences amongst them: Outraged
banishment from the classroom for his treatment of Eric, calling him on
VErbal rudeness without attaching punishment, reacting calmly, sometimes

COOlly or skeptically ("I'm noticing women and girls get badly treated"), but

149

with curiosity to the stories, willingly reading them to the group, taking them
home to read myself. He sees, of course, my mis-steps and omissions as well
(breaking my word--my silent approval--over the matter of drawing during
meeting, for instance). As Baier says, "tact" and a certain willingness to
forgive are necessary parts of a trusting relationship (1986, e.g. p. 238)--though
here we may say that the teacher's share is far larger than the child's, just as a
consequence of the fact that the child's vulnerability must be greater.

In January, I have argued, C.J. can be understood (in his "moment of
self-initiated honesty") as accepting some of the responsibility for the focus
words,66 a move that will soon be paralleled or complemented by what I have
interpreted as his assigning to me a share of the responsibility for his stories.
This also is one signal--more than that, an instantiation--of some achieved
trust, some possible security. And from roughly this point on, C.J. can be
seen, increasingly often, to quite fully accept the invitations of the focus
words (the most basic of which is simply to vary genre, tone, and subject).67
One invitations is, as he interprets it, the possibility of creating ("learning")
voices suitable for a different kind of--a less mediated, less guarded, more
personal and direct-expression of appropriate childhood fears and doubts. I
want to reiterate that, most of the time at least, this "voice" is nonetheless an

artifact.68 There is an indefinite but important distance between C.J. the

\M

66 Perhaps at that moment he accepted it primarily because he was coming to some acceptance
Of my authority rather than for any sense that the expectations in and of themselves might be
Worthwhile for him (though presumably these would not be unrelated).

67 We can also trace a trend in the focus words themselves, one I don't think I was conscious of
at the time, towards less and less "safety"; e.g., in the fall I might offer winter and pride, in

the spring I might offer hope for and afraid of--though at that point I was also, quite
deliberately, saying that students could choose their own focus word. At the time I thought of
tl‘lis as a move to make the assigned quality of the focus words virtually disappear, leaving

Eehind only a tool for those who wanted one.
8 ~ A word with a different valence from "artifice" as used by Winnicott's patient. The one

s‘wlggests a made object of value and meaning, the other, a sham, or at best a crutch no longer
needed.

150

ex;
[I‘ll
of t
the
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"real," that is speaking, embodied boy, and "My self...C.]....(who) still need(s) a
key," the conjectural, written, verbal trace of a boy, objectified thought and
speech of a boy. The self that faces the uncertain world without and the fears
within is a created self, an achievement. (Again, this achievement can also be
expressed as taking responsibility for his feelings and his place in the world.)
(However, when we reach C.J.'s last notebook entry, concluding with the list
of things to be "afraid of"--"people," finally--the written voice is so close to
the natural speaking voice of a younger child that, as I have said, I have
misgivings. A little more art would perhaps protect him better. On the other
hand, the fact that this is the last entry is either entirely coincidental or,
maybe, a generous acknowledgment of trust to me. Either way, read in the
context of the rest of his work, there is probably no reason to fear that C.J. lost
his capacity to create masks. What is to be hoped is that he maintained his
now greater capacity to choose the figure of and the occasion for those masks.)
Thus, what C.J. learns here is a significant increase in the range and
modalities of voice; this learning not only represents but occurs in and enacts
a greater responsibility for the instabilities of one's feelings and the world I
around one; a more authoritative self, confident enough to own its own
doubt, has been created. Faith and doubt are now mediated, to over-simplify,
Within C.J., or by him in his verbal artifacts, whereas earlier he had relied
more on me to perform that mediation. It seems reasonable to suppose that,
Without the prolonged and active doubting of me and of the whole workshop
Surround, efforts to achieve security, C.J.'s leap backwards into childhood and
VUInerability, forward into responsibility and multi-vocality, could not have
been so bold.
Another slant on learning emerging from a context of doubt is both

SiIl'lpler and more complicated. This requires us to take C.J. at his word. He

151

announces that he has learned, from other people, "that things can really
happen." This implies a previous state in which he did not know this (--this
what? this piece of knowledge so humanly fundamental as to be virtually
invisible-~like original trust--until, unless, it is called into question?). I
imagine the earlier state as being one in which, below consciousness, the
world exists as simply given, while the new, learned, state is one in which the
world is understood as malleable, as something I can perhaps add to. This is a
shift in perception that would be aided by the imaginative actions of fiction--
we could say this perception is fiction's purpose-—and it is a shift that may at
first seem to make fiction itself less necessary but, on closer examination, will
make it still more necessary, as hope, the impetus for world adding-to or
transforming action, requires imaginative content.69 But this new perception
also requires or may even be re-described as a separation from the world, a
holding of it at arm's length as it were. «Which is precisely what Descartes,
having "once been deceived by (his) senses and resolving never fully to trust
them again," and all skeptics since then, has done. I am not proposing that
C.J. is a budding epistemologist--no more, that is, than all children are7°--but,
having found doubt a useful concept in trying to understand him and his
actions-trying now to press a little harder on that concept--I am wanting to
use some (more) of the language of philosophical doubt to see what it may

yield in terms of ordinary human doubt (is there a difference, other than

 

69 I develop the idea that hope requires content further in Chapter 4, "Unsuspected
Literatures," next.

70 A two and a half year old looks at a much admired four year old. The four year old stands
on the other side of a fence over which he has just climbed—an action not yet part of the
universe of possibilities of the younger boy. A moment ago they were standing side by side, no
fence intervening. The younger boy looks at the older as if to say, "how can this be? A moment
ago you were here and now you are almost here but there is something in between..." Not
having any idea how this could have happened, nor being sure what has happened (it is as
likely that something has magically intervened as that the four year old has magically gone
slightly but also enormously elsewhere), he must, I imagine, be more or less in the position of
wondering what he "knows" and wondering how it is that he thinks he "knows" it.

152

 

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expertise?).71 The skeptic, then, is described as one for whom the world is in
danger of being lost: Having found his knowledge of the world to be less
reliable than he had thought, he endeavors to achieve certainty. In this he is
"unsuccessful...because the presentness achieved by certainty of the senses
cannot compensate for the presentness which had been elaborated through
our old absorption in the world... (P)resentness was threatened, gone.
Epistemology wished to make knowing a substitute for that fact" (Cavell,
1976, pp. 323-324). But knowing is not a substitute for immersion in the
given, which is one reason trust is not essentially a cognitive act. C.J.'s
position resembles the Skeptic's in two ways: In his active doubting (quest for
certainty or security) of the trustworthiness and value of the workshop, and
the teacher; and in that he is subject to loss of the "old absorption in the
world." Standing apart from it now, as someone who can act on the world
not just a participant in it, he is a critical spectator, someone who can act and
make decisions (an authority). And this process of detachment or holding the
world at arm's length echoes the process of individuation--the ultimate
resistance to being held--that marks the creation of an autonomous
(interdependent) self. The doubt he now experiences and must live with is
fundamental, profoundly human and profoundly open: Who is this self to
be? What he knows is that "things can really happen" (which is not to say,
"you can do eny thing you want"). Selves can come into being, language can

come into being, new things can be made, sometimes, situations do hold you

up.

‘

71 And philosopher Richard Kuhns, writing in tribute to Winnicott, finds that
"(e)pistemology has developmental roots that must be exposed if knowledge is to be put on a
firm footing" and that "the problem of skepticism is readily viewed as having both a
psychological and a philosophical aspect" (1992, pp. 205 & 198).

153

 

To recapitulate, then, early on I posited doubt as an active search for
security. I developed this as not only an inquiry into the reliability and
trustworthiness of the teacher and of the writing workshop as a surround but,
furthermore, as an inquiry into the possible meaning and value of that
surround and of the teacher as an attentive reader and observer and as an
authority, a giver of assignments. Finally, I see doubt as metamorphosing
into a recognition and provisional acceptance of self-doubt coupled, still and
most broadly, with doubt of the "suitability of the world as a context for

coming into being. That development, I propose, entailed the achievement
of some degree of security--of trust--along the way, without which the
successive stages would have been, if not impossible, far more constrained
and encumbered. This is both to speak very specifically, indeed personally, of
"C.J.," and to speak, I suggest, of a kind of potentiality which may exist, in
some form, for all students in their capacities (existence's) as children, as
learners, as creators of artifacts, as self-creators.

To speak from the point of view of the teacher, from my own point of
view as the teacher in this instance, I tried to show some reasons why my
doubt of C.J. as an actor in the classroom was provoked and some of my
efforts to offer trust in spite of that-«because of that. I have left mostly implicit
ways in which I might doubt him as a writer, but I should specify that many
teachers, perhaps most, would tend to find the writings he spends much of
the year on--the "gang" stories--of limited value at best, more likely,
objectionable. I have only touched on this in part because I address that

general issue directly elsewhere (e.g., in Chapter 2), in part because much of

this chapter offers a reading of those stories which proposes their value,72 and

 

72 - Not quite as literature per se, but as doing literature-like things (seeking, questing,
objectifying the internal), doing what Winnicott describes as an essential function of play,
"display(ing) the ideas that occupied his life" (1971, p. 41).

154

in part because I develop the idea of faith in "the child's investment of effort
and care" in a project, at greater length elsewhere as well (Roosevelt, 1995).
Two other points should be acknowledged: One, I am writing, obviously, in
hindsight, writing myself ever more firmly into a position of confidence
regarding C.J.'s writings, and I would have to make a special and peculiar
effort to recapture doubts about those writings which I may have experienced
at the time (there are traces of these, seldom strong, in my journal). Second,
and directly related to the last point, I was during the year in question,
confident enough in my own teaching that I could live reasonably well with
my own doubts and, more significantly, with the doubts of my colleagues Jane
and Barb.73 Another point, which I do not fully understand but want to mark
down for future reference, is that somehow C.J.'s doubting of me contributed
to my willingness and ability to "take him at his word," that is, to take his
notebook writings "at face value," even "literally." I have several times
alluded to the importance of this, of which I am convinced. But the issue

remains to be developed.

What does C.J. doubt?

That "Mr. Roosevelt" is reliable--trustworthy--fair--will take good care
of his writing;

That he, C.J., can grow up without getting "hurt";

That this world is a suitable context for coming into being;

That he, C.J., knows or will be able to figure out who he is (what his
"real self" is, what sustaining and sustainable identity he will achieve, or that

any of these are possible).

 

73 > I did, as scattered comments indicate, give credence to those doubts by periodically saying
that no one should write about the same thing--"gangs," "violence," or anything else for that
matter-- orever.

155

The purpose of doubt for the child has been to make the teacher prove
himself, and to establish the kind of relationship--caring, attentive, tending
to, human and thus humanly vulnerable, but "larger" or "longer lasting"
than the child's anger or mistrust--that exists between them. The teacher
must show specifically that he is trustworthy, that is, that he can and will take
good care of the cared-for things of the child, specifically, the verbal artifacts
(including the feelings, meanings, and tendencies bound up and objectified in
these). The process has been one of testing, pushing back, withholding,
offering: Does "Mr. Roosevelt" let you down more than he holds you up? Is
he appropriately vulnerable (can his feelings be hurt, showing that you
matter and your actions have significant human consequences?) but not
inappropriately vulnerable (he is the adult, he must not over-react, for that
would show he has not enough strength for the job)? Does he protect the
cared-for thing? Does he give you space in which to explore, find out,
"elaborate" what is of interest to you? Do the things he requires you to do
turn out to have value or are they essentially in conflict with you? Is the
placement of feeling, doubt, and meaning into verbal objects in fact a safe
transfer? --And then, if and as the child achieves trust, he can regain a certain
childishness, and can begin to create a healthy and reliable autonomy or
interdependence.

In the fictional world, meanwhile, danger is constantly present for
most of the year; someone is regularly driven to ask, not with pleasure,
"What kind of place is this?" Destructive disorder seems to prevail.
Eventually, in "Street Ball," a creative order emerges, the imagination
Conjures language and a world into being. This world does not drop away, it

is reassuringly solid.

156

 

 

The student must have both faith, or trust, and doubt in the teacher.
Without some element of faith--that the teacher can see something you
cannot, has been someplace you have not, has something that is good for you,
perhaps even necessary for you--the student could accept no guidance of any
sort. (If that were the case--as Waller at his gloomiest thinks it is--there
would be no instruction in teaching; teaching would consist only in the
issuing of commands which would variously be obeyed, evaded, subverted,
and so forth.) And without some element of doubt in the teacher, the student
could never become himself, never do work that was his own. If a student
accepted and absorbed every idea, criticism, appreciation, evaluation,
direction, etc., of the teacher, there could be neither independence nor
interdependence, no self-definition at all. Both faith and doubt are necessary:
All of one leads to loss of vigor and autonomy, all of the other leads to sterile
isolation. An implication of this is that the teacher must give the student
cause to doubt as well as to trust. (Thus, my "naive" comment to C.J., "do you
want people to treat each other badly" can be reinterpreted as intuitively
correct“) In the course of doubting-probing, testing, assessing--the student
reaches towards becoming an authority, the author of his own life; in the acts
of faith--accepting the other's guidance, attributing to the other some
authority for your own work--the student is led where he could not go on his

own.

‘

74 Recalling that the occasion for this query was C.J.'s invocation of a world in which "white
people get their butt kicked," I want to acknowledge a line of interpretation I have tried to
leave available to the reader but have not actively pursued, namely the racial and larger
SOCio-cultural dimensions of C.J.'s relationship, not only to me, but to his "universe of
POssibilities," both fictional and actual. Viewed from this perspective it is entirely plausible
to read his stories as making a rather limited journey: from one widely available cultural
inlage of black youth, the "gangbanger," to another, more socially acceptable but, as I have
aCknowledged, no more realistic one, the "basketball player." Thanks to Thea Abu El-Haj
(personal communication, 11 / 25 / 97) for helping me to clarify and urging me to draw attention to
this line of interpretive possibilities.

157

Earlier, I said that "C.J.'s possibilities of mistrust, faith and doubt...meet
in me..." That is perhaps to say that as a teacher I am a live occasion for those
possibilities and I must be willing to handle them all at once, to store up the
future possibilities, as it were, while the student enacts one or another of
them. That is one meaning of the idea of "mediation." The dictionary tells
us that to mediate is "to be between...to form a connecting link or transitional
stage between one thing and another...to intercede, or intervene for the
purpose of reconciling...to be the intermediary or medium concerned in
bringing about (a result) or conveying (a gift, etc.)..."; mediation is described
as "the state or fact of serving as an intermediate agent, a means of action, or a
medium of transmission; instrumentality" (OED). This stress on being a
medium is for me one of the attractions of the concept of mediation--again

the image is almost of the teacher as a site on or in which certain explorations
and developments will take place. After which the student, naturally, moves
on. Similarly, we could say that for the child, the teacher is "an
instrumentality"; though the child must never be that for the teacher.75
"Reconciliation" may at first seem an unlikely pedagogical task. In the
context of faith and doubt, however, it is clear: The teacher must reconcile
the two within himself, and faith must always prevail. More importantly, we
move here from the side of the teacher to the side of the student. C.J. must
acknowledge (I must acknowledge for him; I may even have to "intervene"
for this purpose) the claims of both faith and doubt; the setting must permit

him to move between the two. There must be no hurrying and no forcing.

‘

75 In sociological terms, the teacher-student relationship is a "secondary" relationship, not a
Primary one. It is by definition a temporary relationship. However, once again, it is clear that
the relationship looks different from each end: though the teacher is an instrument or medium
@317 the student; the student must be treated by the teacher as (in Kantian terms) "an end in
hLIllself." Thanks to David Labaree (personal communication, 1997) for these clarifications.

158

Afterward: Attention as accepting doubt, having faith, and "taking
him at his word"
I proposed at the outset of this work that the concept of "teaching as
acts of attention" can shed light on what I called "the interior life of the
teacher." More recently, I have invoked the idea of "authority," claiming that
authority as the "right to speak"76 (and, crucially of course, to be listened to,
heard, heeded), and authority in the sense of author, maker of texts, are
profoundly linked. I have gone as far as to argue that we can see C.J., not only
developing both these kinds of authority, but as authoring for himself a kind
of self, one capable of living with both trust and doubt, including self-doubt. I
have called this, and continue to call this, an achievement. I believe it is also
right to say that we can understand the comedy--of good and questionable
intentions, of tests given, passed, and flubbed, of understandings and
misunderstandings—-enacted by C.J. and myself as a partial reconstruction of
my authority as his teacher. Central to that undertaking was the acceptance of
doubt as an intelligible and intelligent, proper and educative, attitude on C.J.'s
part, an acceptance to which I will return. Coming to that acceptance (idea,
confidence, belief), however, was to a great extent an activity of "the interior
life of (this) teacher." Signs of that activity during the year of teaching C.J.
have been visible both early and late, in, for example, remarks such as these:
C.J. "cocks his head to the side and gazes at you as if in assessment--curious, as
I come to imagine him...," and, "...as I think about C.]. in September--and
indeed all year...," and, "my journal for these months is full of explicit

ruminations on the issue of 'trust'..." (Here we can note a parallel between

x

76 To refer again to the Cavell quote (1994, pp. 36-37) with which I opened this chapter, in
t1"1e passage in which "finding the right to speak" is identified as essential to "the education of
humans," which requires "making language mine...finding my voice (my consent, my right to
Speak, to promise, to break my promise," also called, "the self-theft of culture"--the journey I
SEE C.J. making.

159

the partial or shared privacy of "the notebook space" for C.J. and the journal
as a private or only voluntarily shared space for me--the right "space," as was
also the case with Brendan and "The Garbage Can Seller," rather than the
classroom, usually, for me to do my doubting in.) Internal teaching activity is
of course also visible, and to an extent visibly consequential, albeit
incomplete, when I discuss (and am at pains to render "visible") the making
of "...an internal teaching 'move'...: I had to be vulnerable to real doubt, at
some risk of having my trust abused, for my gesture to count as 'trust’ at
all..." Indeed, the starting point and the ending point of attending here could
be translated as something like letting the child and the child ’3 work
preoccupy the teacher, the thoughts of the teacher. Thus, perhaps inevitably,
the figure of space is raised again, as it was so centrally in the analysis of the
effort to teach Brendan "attentively." That is, again, in the immediate
context, the making of "inner space" in the mind of the teacher, the sense of
readiness and expectancy I have, with help from Simone Weil, spoken of,
making the mind into an abode in which the workings and possible
meanings of the child and the work of the child can be meditated upon,
turned over, recalled, is a central part of how I understand teaching as the
activity of attending here. (And the journal--and other written forums of the
teaching/ inquiry process, e.g., email exchanges, analytic memos, etc.--become
extensions of the mind.) Visible in this account of C.J. and the effort to learn
how to be his teacher is another kind of interior work that was not
particularly evident in my account of work with Brendan. --That is to take, in
addition to "the child and his work,"77 a key idea--in this case, the one
initially indicated by "trust" and "confidence"--and letting it preoccupy,

inhabit the mind. That developing cluster of ideas, as suggested in the

x

77 And of course, the other children, their work, and their interminglings.

160

quotations above (e.g., "explicit ruminations about 'trust ), becomes a sort of
magnet or framing device for observations and recollections, speculations
and interpretations too, of the day's or week's events. Then the idea and the
child--both sometimes emerging into greater clarity, at other times seeming
swathed in shadow--take up a mutually informing, mutually interrogatory
relationship in thought. Here, in other words, I note there is a tendency of
the idea and the live object of interest to play off of each other, and there is
attending in the conscious and deliberate fostering and following of this play.
As in the case of Brendan, as ever, "thinking" continues, to have to do with
the activity of the imagination, with the "sharing in the consequences"
spoken of by Dewey. Indeed, my entire discussion of "trust," with Baier's
help, can be read as an exploration of the possibilities and limits of such
sharing, a different, though complementary, approach from reading
Brendan's work as fiction, which asserted the moral as well as the
epistemological necessity of such sharing.

As I consider and re-consider all of these "inner" goings-on, what keep
coming into view are the psychological dimensions of teaching (and of course
learning), and psyche's meaning, soul. The topic looks ever more daunting.
And this for at least two reasons: The venture feels riskier than the account
of Brendan, for it does seem that many reaches of my life as a teacher, my
inner life trying to teach, are exposed here; and there is often a speculative
quality--both leaping and precarious--to my interpretations of C.J., his work,
his life and relationships in this classroom. Also, "the soul" is not something
one wants to talk about casually or crudely. I do not want to abandon the
notion of interiority, at all--nor do I want to leave it sealed off. Certainly,
having set out to discuss it and make it visible, I do not want to mystify it.

Therefore I want for a moment to take up directly some of the challenges

161

posed by the idea of the psychological dimensions of teaching. Doing so, I am
both reassured and alarmed to recall Dewey's frequent pairing of "mind" and
"soul," his self-conscious reference to "the psychological" in teaching and
learning (I mean, with full recollection that psyche = soul), and his bold claim
that "insight into soul-action" is "the supreme mark and criterion of the
teacher" (1974, p. 319), that "how mind answers to mind" (p. 324) is
something we can learn to see. What is reassuring of course is the thought
that Dewey should maintain that, in some sense, these are, a) matters of
observation, and, b) matters of education--things we can learn to do (the
original context for his assertions is his recommendation that we make
learning such powers of observation the foundational task for learning to
teach73).

But the question of how we are to see and understand on these levels
remains, for a moment, mysterious. An answer, part of an answer, is the
activity called introspection, no less real for being, indeed, mysterious. But
there is also a more accessible set of paths, already pointed out in passing, that
I want to re-insert here. Discussing trust as (in Baier's terms), "accepted
vulnerability," I was aiming to focus on the idea that "trust (in any case, very
often) has a material as well as a psychic content," that something is typically
entrusted, as stressed by Baier in phrases such as "we need (others') help in
creating, and...in looking after the things we most value," such "things," she
continues, include, prominently, "intrinsically shared goods such as
conversation, its written equivalent, theater, and other forms of play" (1986,

p. 236).79 Along the way, I noted her adjacent remark "that the human soul's

78 While the immediate context for Dewey is learning to distinguish between the "giving of
inner and of outer attention..." (pp. 318-319).

79 ‘I think of the exchanges in the notebook, including the texts I have thought of as written in
the "first person conjectural," as "conversation (or) its written equivalent"; the stories, as
fictions, are a kind of "theater...(or) play"--as indeed "My teachers at my old school..." is

162

 

activity is caring for things," which in turn brought to mind David Hawkins'
assertion that "(t)he human soul is not contained within the body but
outside, in the theater of its commitments" (Hawkins, 1974, p. 51). For
"insight into soul-action," by these accounts, we will want to see in what
objects care is invested and how care is maintained, we will look to see where
and how, to what and to whom, commitment is expressed; curious (still) to
learn about "the interaction of mind...how teachers and pupils react upon
each other--how mind answers to mind" (Dewey, 1974, p. 324), we will wish
to look at what objects people entrust to one another, at what objects they
shield from each other (and when and why and how), at what actions they
undertake with respect to each other's cared-for things.

These emphases on the objects and worldly activities of care should
make the "psychological dimensions" of teaching feel much more available
to study; "insight into soul-action" should indeed feel like something we can
both learn and teach something about without calling on powers any more or
less extraordinary than the human ones of imaginative observation and
reflection. "Attention," in turn, should come into view as what it must self-
evidently be, a line of thought and action, a continuity and a reciprocity
between "inner" and "outer." It is now clearly reasonable to expect that,
when teaching takes the form of "imagining" and "ruminating" some traces
of those activities will be visible in how objects are handled--including
centrally for these purposes, those "verbal objects" I keep wishing to
characterize as both "frail" --as the voice is frail, as it is easy for C.J. to crumple
up and throw out his story, and as understanding and re—creation, which
stories and poems require, are hard won and tenuous—-and "enduring"--for

the ways in which themes and questions of importance will recur and

 

another kind of drama.

163

modulate themselves under at least minimally hospitable conditions, for the
ways in which these artifacts linger and grow in the mind of the attentive
reader-listener. (From this perspective small details will grow in importance-
-for instance, the box in which I carried students' notebooks and often other
writings back and forth from home to school--to me something of an
embarrassment as somewhat shabby and cramped, a place all too easy for
work to get folded, wrinkled, and torn, but also I see now more clearly, a way
of saying "these things in here matter and they won't be out of my sight,"
which would also add some nuance to the apparently popular ritual of
carrying that box out of the classroom and to the professional development
room with and for me at the end of each workshop.80)

I have shown that C.J. cared a good deal for his stories and that he
sometimes entrusted them to me, an act made visible precisely by the small
drama of the occasions when he withheld them. The question than arises,
How did I handle them? What actions did I undertake with respect to them?
The obvious answer, that nonetheless has consumed many a word, is that I
read them--at home, and also, at his request, at sharing time. Less obvious to
me, apparently perceptible to C.J., was that, as he said, I liked to read them.
Perhaps the remark was made cannily, as if to say, "You don't approve,
because they're violent? Well, he ’s the teacher, and he doesn't stop me:
don't blame me, blame him." But it is also reasonable to assume-~at the very
least, keeping in mind that he made comments like this more than once,
keeping in mind the issue of "taking him at his word"--literally, even, in fact,

when he is not "writing stories"--that to some degree he either felt this to be

 

80 Note as well the teacher writing on the student's work: experienced sometimes by the
student as disrespect or desecration, sometimes experienced in the opposite way by the teacher,
as attention, as he has since high school valued books by underlining key passages, writing
marginal comments, and so on, perhaps with images of Talmudic scholars or medieval monks in
mind.

164

the case or wished it to be the case, that is also to say, that the comment was
made with some warmth.

In fact, it was the case: and I would almost like to go so far as to say that
for his assertion that "Mr. Roosevelt likes to read them" to be true is what
"teaching as acts of attention" means in this chapter. That would perhaps be
extravagantubut it would fit with my surmise that C.J. began to wonder if (or
even "recognize" that) "we are joined together in some kind of game--
perhaps an important one, perhaps not," and it would be in keeping with
another of Hawkins' seminal assertions, that we are or should be or should
understand ourselves to be "all in it together" (1974, p. 62). In any case, what I
want briefly to highlight is that I had to learn to like to read his stories. I
believe I both did and did not know this at the time. I "knew" it in the sense
that, as a teacher, as I have previously said in connection with Brendan, I had
already made a deliberate decision to generally "give the benefit of the doubt"
to "investments of effort and care," to presume they denoted something of
value. C.J.'s investment was pronounced and visible. I knew also that in
seeking to apprehend something of that value one strategy I could employ
was to make myself pay attention both to formal or craft elements and to
thematic or content elements and to deliberately shift from one focus to the
other. I have now discussed the themes, content, possible meanings that a
"sympathetic reading" of C.J.'s stories may yield at length. However, at the
time, the first thing I was aware of being able to appreciate in those stories was
his apparently effortless assumption of narrative authority as demonstrated
by his easy and fluent handling of the passage of time-~something that causes

many young writers a good deal of difficulty.81 What I did not know, or know

 

81‘ By contrast, in Brendan's stories, early learning to like to read came in the noticing of his
use of number-something I have mentioned but not developed because only recently did I
understand that noticing that was noticing, and beginning to appreciate, something of the

165

well--and this seems odd--is captured in that simple verb to like. I was aware
of something drier-respecting, or valuing (activities I of course don't want to
denigrate in any way). A trace of my verging on understanding that
something warmer was called for can be found in my use of the line from
Simone Weil, "the intelligence must be led by desire"; the aptness of this
thought for C.J., in turn, must have been prompted by those appearances he
gave of "coldness" (combined with those suggestions of "intelligence" given
by his almost every gaze). But--as with the issue of whose doubt was salient,
to which I will shortly return--I had my thoughts, it seems, directed in the
wrong place. While I was wondering about, and lamenting how few were the
in-school signs of "affection and sympathy, the keynotes of the child's life," in
C.J., it now seems that the provision of "affection and sympathy" in school
was what was called for. In particular, the verbal objects, the cared-for-by C.J.
things needed my provision of affection and sympathy. It was indeed
important for it to be true that "Mr. Roosevelt likes to read them"; that is at
the heart of the ambition to teach attentively as understood in this chapter;
that was indeed part of the reconstruction of my authority as C.J.'s teacher.

Here it seems desirable to stop for a moment to note that Baier speaks,
surely correctly, of "tact" as a necessary part of a trusting relationship. I would
like to think that the efforts to attend I have described in my work with C.J.
have involved some degree of tact. Certainly it is easy to identify some of the
places where tact is called for. Though I see instructive parallels between C.J.
and his fictional protagonists, for example, I must try to avoid conflating

them (not wanting to commit the "literalistic, autobiographical" fallacy

 

quirkiness and individuality of the writer. It never yielded much literary meaning for me-—
though it might do so for another reader-but it was an important early step in appreciating his
writing. Noticing his fondness for "literary diction" was of course another, slightly subsequent,
more obvious one.

166

myself); though I borrow some ideas and language from psychoanalysis, I
must remember it is not my job to psychoanalyze C.J.32 Likewise, though my
interpretations of the meanings of the shifts and modulations of C.J.'s voice
in his notebook writings become quite ambitious, I must somehow exercise
restraint. Perhaps this is one reason I hold fast to the idea that in some senses
I do want to read those writings "literally," to refrain as far as possible from
interpretation, or, to put it in the way that seems most apt, to "take him at his
word"--when he says "I: I do not know what this word means" or, "I still
need a key" or, "I wonder what will happen to Clarence (and) the thing I am
scared about growing up is getting hurt." As Scarry says, "body and voice...are
among the most elementary and least metaphorical categories we have" (p.
182). When the body is referenced in this way, when the self is called into
question and thus conceivably into existence, when the voice takes on these
registers and these tones, how else are we to take them but as if they fully
mean what they say "on their face"? Why would we not take them that way,
unless we had somehow shielded ourselves from the possibility they would
have meaning?83 The poet Howard Nemerov, not exactly meaning what I
am meaning, I think, but in a spirit so closely related that I wish to bring him
in here, remarks that "a poem is not so much a thought, or a series of
thoughts, as it is a mind... And...in the presence of an attentive human mind

a poem will recognizably think..." (1978 , p. 103). Consider the possibility that

 

82 On this point, it is important to underscore that my discussion of C.J. is concerned only with
his life in school: I had no reason to venture beyond that, in thought or deed, except on the few
parental and the far more frequent cultural occasions I have mentioned or alluded to.

83 Also consider from Scarry in conjunction with C.J.'s work and my analysis of it, including the
analysis of "Street Ball," the notebook writings just referenced, and skepticism as "losing one's
absorption in the world while finding it malleable": "(Do have a body is to be describable,
creatable, alterable, and woundable. To have no body, to have only a voice [i.e., like the God
of Moses] is to be none of these things: it is to be the wounder but not oneself woundable, to be the
creator or the one who alters but oneself neither creatable nor alterable" (p. 206).

167

 

in some sense C.J.'s notebook writings "I" and "My Self" are poems of a
certain childlike sort, and that they are thinking.84

Returning to the main path of the discussion, though not perhaps
unrelated either to the need for tact or to the possibility of small poems
thinking in our presence, if held in our presence with sufficient care, is the
simple importance of providing time. For C.J., clearly, (even more than for
Brendan), "making space" has meant making temporal space: letting work,
thoughts, responses, develop over long periods of time, time, that is, within
the normal provisions of the school year, not to mention research time
afterwards. I do not think this time is just the time needed for the teacher to
get around to interpretations, accommodations, revisions, readings of a
"sympathetic" sort, though it is these: I think it is also time gradually felt by
the student as opportunity to pursue the themes that feel like they matter, as
they matter, time for repetitions, accruals, revisions--and sometimes the
stepping into, the authorizing of, a new possibility. I observe, in contrast,
how often we are in a great hurry in schools.

Finally, the idea of "attention" as making space, of teaching as centrally
including "determining the environment of the child," is further extended in
this chapter by the conception of "the holding environment." "Holding" has
meant the provision of a secure, stable, responsive but not overly responsive
emotional surround in which, indeed, "affection and sympathy" have their
place, as do the detachment and dispassion necessary for stability. The key
discovery entailed by paying attention in the course of teaching to the

provisioning of that environment and the student's demeanor and activity

 

34 And enjoy, if so inclined, the fact that Nemerov is discussing George Herbert's poem
"Prayer," while for Weil, "prayer consists of attention" (1977, p. 44, emphasis added).

Nemerov's idea, meanwhile, will take on even more resonance in a few pages, encountering
the poem "Quiet Eye."

168

 

within it has been the significance of C.J.'s active doubting. My early
concentration on how I was going to provide and manifest trust, "give the
benefit of the doubt," both obscured the importance of C. I. ’s doubting (because

I was focused on myself and my actions), and ultimately helped reveal that

importance (because the terms "confidence, trust, mistrust," and "doubt"
were in the air, in mind). Attending thus has meant a kind of stepping past
or aside from the self of the teacher--seeing the teacher as not necessarily the
key actor but as an occasion--and a willingness to interrogate that (teacherly)
persona and let it be interrogated (tested, doubted) by the student. It has
meant accepting that my offering of trust, while worthwhile, was far less
significant than my proving myself, up to a point, trustworthy. This has
meant accepting that the teacher is necessarily and properly an object of
attention, doubt, and judgment, as well as an acting subject. More visible,
now, is a kind of duality in teaching and the teacher-role: At the same time
that the teacher goes about making decisions and taking actions, that whole
panoply of behavior is itself a kind of text being read and interpreted by
students. As with any reading, the more actively the student engages, the

more meaning is likely to be produced. This, I have suggested, raises the

intriguing possibility that the teacher ought to occasion doubt.

169

 

Chapter 4

"Unsuspected Literatures": Public School Classrooms
as Laboratories for the Creation of Democratic Culture1

Work, culture, Iiberty--all these we need,

not singly but together, not successively but together...
--W. E B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Polk (1961, p. 22)

Overview

In this chapter I aim to further develop the practice of "sympathetic
reading" and to extend its work--and thus the idea of attentive action as an
important part of teaching-~more clearly into the social and political domains.
The narrative focus on the chapter is on the interaction of a number of child-
writers with each other and each other's products, and with me, and, in the
discussion that is this chapter, with the products of some mature writers. The
setting is twofold: There is the writing workshop and there is, again, the
interior space of the teacher reading and thinking. The chapter opens with
some thoughts about the relationship of culture, democracy, and education,
and concludes with an expanded and, I hope, enhanced, treatment of those

themes.

 

1 Warmest thanks to Barbara Acker, Jane Boyd, Jay Featherstone (to whom long life, not to
mention what he has in abundance, "work, culture, liberty"), Susan Melnick, and Margery
Osborne for their contributions to this chapter. Further in the background, but to me equally
essential, are the contributions of Pat Carini.

This work was supported in part by the Department of Teacher Education and the
Professional Development School initiative, College of Education, Michigan State University.
The opinions expressed are my own.

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the annual meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, Chicago, 1997.

That paper in turn was revised as an article in a theme issue of Theory Into Practice ,
"Constructing a Liberatory Practice in School Subjects." 37 (4 ) (Roosevelt, 1998, Autumn). This
is a further revision of that article.

170

Art and democracy as related works

Consider two assertions by John Dewey:

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a
mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.

In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and
unhindered communication...in a world full of gulfs and walls that
limit community of experience.

In the first quotation (Democracy and Education [1966, p. 87]), Dewey
interprets "democracy" as a way of living in deliberate relationship with
others; what is distinctive about this "mode" is that in it, we choose to have
experience in connection with others and to communicate that experience
with each other. In the second quotation (Art as Experience [1934, pp. 104-5]),
reminding us of the existence of numerous "gulfs and walls"--both natural,
let us say, and humanly constructed barriers--lying between us and the
achievement of a democratic mode of life, he offers art as a paradigm of the
"conjoint communicated experience" that would characterize and announce
this mode of life, should we in fact achieve it. Certain that we have not
realized democracy, he proposes the experience of art as both a conceptual
model for better understanding what democracy requires of us (as well as
what it would provide) and as a kind of site or tool for working towards it.
Gloomily aware of "gulfs and walls" (including ones between those who own
and employ, those who produce and are employed, those who are
unemployed) he nonetheless has the audacity to dream of "complete and
unhindered communication" between what he will elsewhere call "moral
equals."

I attempt here a first-hand, concrete, exploration of how works of art
may in fact function in these ways--as media of deep communication between
human beings otherwise separated by "gulfs and walls," as promises or
emissaries of the democracy we have not achieved. My context is the reading
and writing of poetry (both one of the most ancient and one of the most
fragile of arts), once again in Jane Boyd's fourth grade classroom, the same
yearand class in which C.J. was to preoccupy many of my thoughts, my
second year as a guest in this room. I present instances of students' poetry

171

and responses to poetry. I accompany these vignettes with my readings of the
children's work, and I trace "correspondences" between their work and that of
some well-known adult poets, playing all of these texts and readings off of
one another.2 I propose, in this company-~in keeping with previous chapters,
but with a perceptible increase in the stakes--that the children's work can
demonstrably be seen to be undertaking linguistic and imaginative "moves"
of the same type and tendency as the adult artists'. I claim that this
necessarily small set of stories, writings, and readings is indicative of a larger
set of actualities and possibilities: I argue that it powerfully suggests the
possibility we might achieve the creation of democratic culture--and that that
creation is a key task and a realizable goal for public school classrooms. This
proposition entails, for me, two subsidiary hypotheses: that public school
classrooms be places in which children have occasion to exercise real choice
over the disposition of their intellectual energies, and that they be places in
which children are engaged in the creation, not just the reception of
"culture."3

 

2 As I proceed, I make liberal use of italics in the text, in an effort to represent the reading
and the re-reading which, in between the activities of teaching and of addressing the reader
directly, are the main "method" by which the correspondences emerge.

3 I have spoken a bit about "democracy," and will have more to say. For my other "keyword"
here, I rely on Raymond Williams (1983) who points out that the word "culture" is fraught
with history and arguments of value. I want to use the word without losing sight of its origins
in the senses of "cultivating" or "tending to"; it is, then, a word connoting the activities of
living, growing, and caring-for (and thus of course has much in common with "attention").
Beyond that, I use it largely in one of the senses given by Williams, as an "independent and
abstract noun (describing) the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic
activity" (p. 90, emphasis added). I want as well to accept that the considerable range of
meanings associated with "culture" "indicates," as Williams says, "a complex argument about
the relations between general human development and a particular way of life [e.g., for my
purposes, a democratic one], and between both and the works and practices of art and
intelligence" (p. 91). Finally, there will be moments when senses derived from anthropology-
culture as a set of beliefs and practices, often tacit; as "a particular way of 1ife...of a people, a
period, a group..." (p. 90)-will also apply. In a more extended treatment of these themes I
would, no doubt, elaborate further upon this and other core pieces of vocabulary.

172

 

Instance of what a child's poem can achieve

In the midst of a typically gray and chilly January, I introduced my
students to a poem:

Quiet Eye

A winter wind blowing
through a snowy field.

The deer is standing

there motionless, but to
quiet eye she is springing
in a field of joy.

by (Iris)4

Line breaks work here as so often in poetry, as a form of punctuation,
variously underscoring and interrupting both rhythm and sense. The
slightest of pauses between the first two lines evokes a contemplative mood
that a prose sentence wouldn't have time to create; the line break also seems
to serve the animating purpose of the missing "helping verb.” So too, the
barest of pauses between "standing" and ”there” is unnatural; combined with
the absent comma after ”there," the phrase as a whole imitates the
”motionless" state it reports. Then the break between "to" and ”quiet” accents
the first syllable of ”quiet," so spilling into the two final lines, an arcing,
wave-like shape which well captures the sense of ”springing":

...but to
quiet eye she is springing
in a field of joy.

Hear also how the last line resolves itself into a firmly iambic rhythm-~in
English, the most natural of all, truly a felt resolution.

These formal elements help to establish the haiku-like sensibility of
the poem:5a still, contemplative, space is created; an "ordinary” (undramatic,

‘

4 © The Prospect Archive & Center for Education 8: Research, North Bennington VT. Used
with permission. Parentheses around a name--as in (Iris)-are a convention adopted by Prospect
to indicate the use of a pseudonym.

5 Haiku comes immediately to mind because I read an "authentic" haiku with the class in
the weeks after discussing "Quiet Eye," as we continued our--my?—-exploration of poetry. But

173

"natural") but evocative image is given, and given time to be absorbed by the
attentive reader. And then a counter-image is overlaid or elicited, the
hitherto ”motionless" deer now ”springing in a field of joy. ” One of the great
pleasures of this final image, for me, is that it is essentially verbal: Idon't
initially see a picture at all--"a field of joy” is an idea, not a place--a high poetic
accomplishment.

Other readers might indeed see a field; many of my students did, I

 

think, conjure up at once a clear image of one. I'm led to think this, though,
by their having gotten an idea out of the words as well: They heard the
season "spring" in the verb "springing" (which then I imagine leads very
easily--as it does to me now--to an image of a meadow in springtime). The
sense of spring, after the invocation of winter, makes perfect sense, but I had

 

certainly missed it.

I had been wanting to work on poetry with this class for some time,
understanding poetry to be, from one perspective, a special kind of pleasure
in pattern, form, and order, as well as concision (or, we might say, "focus").
Over the course of the fall, I had found the assignments I was most interested
in were those that aimed to expose students to, and ask them to play with,
issues of structure or pattern in writing (as I touched upon in the previous
chapter). Though occasionally deemed "stupid" (i.e., confounding or
obscure?), and though the issue of structure was not necessarily what turned
out to be the thing that "got across," in general, these kinds of assignments
had met with satisfactory responses: They seemed to be taken as curiosities of
at least moderate interest, they often led to work that was interesting in its
own right; sometimes--most pleasing to the teacher--traces of these
assignments could be found in choice writing. An early example (related to
one presented in the course of discussing C.J.) of the kind of assignment I
mean can be illustrated by the following chart, which I presented to the class.

 

the mOre apt referent here might be the early 20th century English language genre or school of
Imagism, to which poet William Carlos Williams-soon to come into this storynwas for a
while an adherent.

174

 

Beginnings Things to bring Things to find

 

 

 

 

Once upon a time... A knife Gold Treasure
It was a dark and stormy night... A chair A true friend
In the old days, when wishing still A magic blanket A pet lion
helped... A bottle of water A mother or father
In the days when the animals Seven League boots Heart's desire
talked... A Radio
A long time ago on the west side, A magic feather
little kids did not like them A knapsack
self... Food
1 3 1
(Journal, 9/ 19/ 94)

I presented both the categories and the examples of each as "ideas to borrow,
experiments," and thought of them myself as "ways to shape stories"; the
assignment was to write a story with one "beginning," three "things to bring,"
and one "thing to find." Students could choose from among the examples
offered, or come up with their own--but they were asked to specifically
identify their choices for each category (planning notes, 9/ 19 / 94). As for the
sources of the examples: The last offering under "Beginnings" will be
recognized as coming from C.J.'s story "Gang War," a fact I pointed out to the
group; "When the animals talked" is taken from a book (versions and
analyses of the Brer Rabbit tales) of the same name (Faulkner, c. 1993);

"When wishing still helped" is a classic Grimm beginning; the first two are
of course familiar. In the category of "Things to bring," the chair and the jug
of water came directly out of a story, The Seven Ravens, that I had recently
read to the group (Grimm Brothers, & Zwerger, 1981).6 The "magic feather" is
also from Grimm (from a tale echoing in my head, not one I had read to the
group); "Seven league boots" (from childhood stories by Howard Pyle that I
had much loved) were planted in the hopes someone would ask about them
or better yet-~as I seem to recall in fact happened--guess roughly what they
meant; "Food" was added to the list at a student's (Michael's) suggestion.
"Heart's desire," in the category of "things to find," was provided, like

 

6 In that story, an infant girl is the innocent cause of her brothers being turned into ravens.
Finding out about this, also by accident, when she is older, she goes in search of them: "She
took nOthing with her but a little ring as a memento of her parents, a loaf of bread for hunger, a
little jug of water for thirst, and a little chair for weariness" (1981, not paginated). She does
succeed in rescuing her brothers, at the cost of one of her own fingers.

175

"magic" before it, in order to indicate that anything was possible, a point I
made some effort to draw out in discussion of what those two words meant.
(I trouble to give the sources of some of these examples as the examples
themselves become significant in various ways as this story continues.)

In November, a similar assignment offered:

 

 

Beginnings Characters Desire or Need Things to Bring Trouble
In the bad days... A lost brother or Matches A storm
In the future, when sister A magic feather A liar
everything is free... A horse Bottle of water A bear
Heart's desire $5 A big mistake

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Classroom charts, Fall 1994)

(The "lost brother or sister" were also prompted by The Seven Ravens; the
horse I think was prompted by Thoreau's famous catalog of losses?) On this
day I spoke about the categories as "rules" and as "patterns to help people get
ideas"; I further specified, "no guns, no Mortal Kombat, not more than five
dollars," this last because someone had suggested that with enough money all
problems could be solved.3) The assignment was to choose an element for
each category (again, from the suggestions or "from your own imagination")
first, and then to write using them; I then complicated this rather rigid
attempt to get them thinking with me about these "patterns" or "rules" by
going on to say that, as they wrote, they might change their minds and replace
the chosen "thing to bring," for example, with a more appropriate one
(planning notes, 11/ 28 / 94). One student-~Lincoln, who had written a well-
received poem not long before--asked, "Can we do a poem instead?" to which
I'd said yes; shortly thereafter another student, Cameron, asked, "Can we do a
rap," to which the answer, agreeing that "a rap...is a special kind of poem or
song...," was again yes (journal, 11/ 28 / 94).

 

7 "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail," he
announces early on in Walden, in a passage that has caused much scratching of heads from its
first publication (Thoreau, 1968, p. 10). The point-—and it is an obscure one-~in saying this is to
suggest that some quality of loss was in my head, maybe in the atmosphere, on this day.

8 Which is perhaps no more than to say "magic" in other words, which would make my
objection seem rather Puritanical. I mention the other restrictions as evidence for earlier claims
that my tolerance for "objectionable content" was not endless, nor always the same. Indeed on
this day I note, "I am not happy with a lot of what they are writing-~a definite problem"; I
also wonder, "More poetry. No violence now till (winter vacation)?" (journal, 11/ 28 / 94).

176

 

By January, a number of students were doing work--sometimes as a
way of addressing an assignment, often in "choice writing" time--that they
and I called "poetry." I wanted now to respond directly to and build on this
emerging interest. Thus I first introduced them to "Quiet Eye" in mid-
January, as material for conversation, conversation that I wanted to steer--
with thoughts of pattern, form, concision, and rule (or "discipline") in my
mind--in the direction of "what makes a poem a poem?" The initial response
to "Quiet Eye" was strong, and I decided to return to it on this day several
weeks later, while further plans for working on poetry simmered in my head.

The class was interested to hear that "Quiet Eye's" author, (Iris), had
once been a student of mine as well, in Vermont. I'd been her teacher when
she was six and seven, at the Prospect School; at the time she wrote "Quiet
Eye"--ten years before my Lansing Michigan fourth graders encountered it, at
about their age at the time of this story--I was the school's principal.9 My
students were curious to know if I "still knew (Iris)"; finding that I knew of
her, they wanted to know where she went to college; shortly, a number of
them would choose to write to her, letters that were poignant in their
immediacy and insistence. First, though, many were eager to discuss the
poem. With notions, as I've said, of bridging from the work on patterns and
structures to some study of poetry, I gave a stupid--at least, untimely--
question, "What makes it a poem?" The group utterly ignored this;
eventually, I too had the sense to abandon it. They wanted to talk about what
the poem meant; the fact that it was "a poem"--a thing that looks different on

 

9 The poem was available for my use because Prospect created and maintains an "Archive of
Children's Work," a collection of every school product—writings, drawings, paintings,
mathematical exercises, and some photographs of three dimensional work--which children
chose to leave with the school, accompanied by teachers' narrative records. (Iris's) file alone
contains approximately 1400 items, spanning the entire 8-9 years of her attendance at Prospect.
Without the Archive, I very possibly would never have read (Iris's) poem, which I don't
believe I encountered until after her graduation; in any case, I should not have had ready
access to it ten years later. -Democratic culture would presumably be "of the people, by the
people, for the people," of whom public school children could be representative in several
senses. Honoring their work by preserving it in this way, and by using it as source material for
subsequent generations of childrenwas I have in other years used work collected by Koch (Koch,
1971) or Richard Lewis (1966)—could be one element of such culture.

177

 

the page, a thing that's kind of song-like, or rap-like—-was duly noted and, as it
turned out later, deeply appreciated, but the puzzle of meaning was what
sparked discussion and thought. They wanted to know "who 'Quiet Eye' is,"
and "who 'she' is." They wanted to know "what the answer is"--to these
specific questions, and to the poem as a whole.10

Several people supposed that Quiet Eye and (Iris) were one and the same.
Candy "noticed something," that gender is specified--"'she' is a...is a girl..."--
but was confused about whether "she" referred to (Iris), to Quiet Eye, to the
deer, or to all three. Anthony Y. clarified, by way of a somewhat convoluted
analysis of the syntax, that "she" must refer specifically to the deer. And,
referring back to our first discussion of the poem, Cameron proposed,

...I think she [Quiet Eye] still is Mother Nature, because she is
"springing in a field of joy," and she...she goes into winter, and
like...when we go into winter, she goes--she keeps on going
ahead of us and, like, "she is springing in a field of joy," that
probably might be like she's...in one place where...nobody has
discovered or something.

(Audio tape, 1 / 30 / 95)

That was, altogether, a fairly long speech, with many pauses to search for
words. The class, which had been noisy--sometimes clamorous to get into the
conversation, sometimes restless and distractible--was remarkably silent
while Cameron spoke.

 

10 I think it would be a mistake to too quickly dismiss "seeking the answer" as a naive
approach to reading poetry, though to an extent it is that. I suggest that the desire, the almost
urgent desire, for an "answer" was primarily reflective of two things: my students' sense of a
personal connection, through me, to the real child who wrote the poem and whose identity
might thus be supposed to be found in the poem, and the sense that there was mystery and
meaning in the poemuand meanings are often enough—certainly in schools—located in
"answers." I think, in fact, in our present context, that I'd rather have students take a
somewhat literal minded approach to literature--one which assumes there is something like
an "answer" to be found in it--think again of, "But was Hercules real?"--then to take the
exaggeratedly relativist approach which says in effect, "it's all interpretation...opinion...it
means whatever you want it to mean..." Too many of my undergraduate teacher candidates
seem to have absorbed or constructed the idea that, if there is no certain or single "right
ansWer," then there are no standards of reasonable or unreasonable interpretation at all:
anything goes. Such a view-for which I do not hold them primarily responsible--trivializes
both literature and the mind.

178

 

I am unsure, now, how to proceed. I want to linger on the ”one
place...nobody has discovered,” thinking of Hamlet's ”undiscovered
country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” The tone is different--
or does Cameron, too, have an idea of death, or after-life, on his
mind?--the sense of mystery just over the horizon is complementary.
But I couldn’t linger then, nor did I think of Hamlet.

I responded with an interpretation.

That's a beautiful idea. It reminds me, Cameron, of the time
[earlier in January] when we were talking about what makes

New Year’s "new year" and we talked about the calendar, and

Gideon and some other people were helping us to see that it goes
around in a circle, from winter to spring to summer to fall and
then again... I kind of like the idea that Mother Nature is always
just one season ahead of us, like sort of getting ready for us to
come to the next season--is that partly what you were thinking?

(Audio tape, 1 /30/95)

Was this an engagement with his thought, or a muddying of it? The class
was less attentive to me than to Cameron, but he nodded, accepting my
reading.

His extraordinary thought is perfectly in keeping with the tone of the
poem, yet goes a large step beyond the text. (I wonder what (Iris) would
think.) (Iris) takes us with a single image, and leaves us with an idea, or an
idea nested within an idea. Cameron grabs the idea and runs with it,
supposing it to have a whole cosmology immanent within it--we’ve gone
from a lyric to an epic mode. I think of William Wordsworth, high Romantic
poet, celebrator of childhood and of common experience rendered in, as he
maintained, common language. In his work he fashions ideas of the mind's
power from his experience of nature-—surely he would recognize the spirit of
Cameron’s thought. In his autobiographical poem, ”The Prelude,"
Wordsworth ( 1965), recounts a walking trip through the Alps. He and his
companion have been hoping for some kind of epiphany, and are bitterly
disappointed to discover that they have actually crossed the Alps, with no
epiphany achieved. He feels ”lost,” abandoned by ”the leadings from above”

179

 

he has come to count on. In retrospect, though, he finds in this experience an
affirmation of the power of mind or soul:

But to my conscious soul I now can say--

”I recognize thy glory:”...

Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,

Is with infinitude, and only there;

With hope it is, hope that can never die,

Effort, expectation, and desire,

And something evermore about to be.
(Bk.VI, ll. 599-608) (p. 268)

Cameron imagining a spirit in the natural world solicitous of human
beings' journey through time, imagining an endless cycle of such care and
”joy," is himself dealing with ”infinitude" and "hope." He is recognizing the
”glory” of mind, its constitutive and re-constitutive power, demonstrating to
us by his speculation that the human mind or soul is the author of the idea of
infinity, the only author of the idea and the practice of hope.

And indeed, Jon L. names the power at work here as Wordsworth and
other Romantics named it: "I think that Quiet Eye is imagination," he tells
us. Candy agrees, pointing out that the deer in the field is "motionless"
("still"); thus, the place where she is "springing" ("jumping") is in Quiet Eye,
in her imagination (audio tape, 1/ 30 / 95). Candy's confirmation makes the
point that imagination transforms. We can go another step and see that
without it, hope is not only impossible, it is inconceivable; so too, then,
would be "effort, expectation, and desire." «This is one reason why "the
works and practices of art," including literary art, must be so important to us
in schools: they are the breeding grounds for the imagination, without which
hope has no content, without which, then, we could learn neither aspirations
nor skills for change.11

Hope, effort, expectation, and desire, all made possible by the lively
imagination, point outwards, into the world of action (as Wordsworth

 

11 This is a traditional argument that I am glad--without being sanguine, recognizing that my
argument is not, taken altogether, the same--to abide with. See for example, Northrop Frye:
"The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one
capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is one
reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of imagination" (1957, p.
347).

180

 

pointed to the early hopes of the French Revolution and, later, to the
revolution in Haiti, then to turn-~more modest, or more ambitious still?--to
the revolution in consciousness he hoped his poetry would inaugurate).
Actions my students took subsequent to discussion of "Quiet Eye" were slight,
even humble, but nonetheless noteworthy. Some of them wrote poems and
many, as I've mentioned, wrote letters to (Iris). In one of the most striking of
these, A'dona takes the idea of imagination and, in particular, an incipient
idea of consciousness (though she does not as far as I know yet have a word
for it), and uses this as humans usually, sooner or later, do: to construct the
experience of simultaneously occupying one's self, or body, and standing
aside from oneself; simultaneously knowing oneself and being a mystery to
oneself. She writes:

Dear Iris,

I want to know what does your poem mean. I like
your poem, Quiet Eye. I don't know what the eye
is. Is it a deer? Is it winter outside? Is the
deer imagining the inside of his head is joyful and
i hope i can be your friend?

your friend,
A'dona

Arising, as good interpretations so often do, from an apparent mis-
reading (see, for example, Bloom, 1975)--that the deer and Quiet Eye are one--
A’dona asks a startling question, ”is the deer imagining the inside of his head
is joyful...?” I find this suggestion of consciousness as a hall of mirrors
irresistible: the creature imagines--an act ”from the inside of the head, " we
commonly suppose--what the inside of his head is like, or what it could be
like--but then where is he doing the imagining from? And is he working his
way to a picture of the current state of ”the inside of his head, ” or is he
working his way to a transformed future state? Does everyone suppose that
"joyfulness" is something residing ”inside the head”?12

 

12 If A'dona is inventing or re-inventing the idea of consciousness, as I take her to be, then she
is doing a version of what Wordsworth had to do in reflecting on and changing the meaning of
his experience of unwittingly crossing the Alps.

181

I began by adopting Dewey's proposition that art and democracy are
related works, related needs or ambitions or ideals; in particular, I am
wanting to work with the proposition that they are connected on the thread
of the possibility of "complete and unhindered communication...in a world
full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience" (Dewey, 1934, pp.
104-105). The larger proposition, then, is that such communication is what
art enables and what democracy requires, or will be--and that, in small ways
we can here begin to glimpse flashes of such audaciously imagined
communication, and thus, in turn, the possibility of "community of
experience," in the responses engendered by (Iris's) poem, "Quiet Eye." That
proposition re-surfaces the main argument of the chapter, namely, that with

 

"democracy" understood as "a mode of associated living, of conjoint
communicated experience" (Dewey, 1966, p. 87, emphasis added), that public
school classrooms can be envisioned as sites for the creation of democratic
culture: A culture of communicated experience of the kind that the art of
poetry for example can be--and because it is democratic culture, that that
communal joining in and around the making and re-making by reading of
the poem will be something that all people can do. In order to show how
large I conceive the interior space of (Iris's) very small poem-—and other
verbal artifacts that gradually come into the discussion, such as Cameron's
vision of Mother Nature and A'dona's letter to (Iris)-—to be, I have brought in
the idea or phenomenon of "correspondences" amongst these and other
works. These correspondences are readings of different works that
reverberate, echo, inform each other; they are complementary meanings
found in disparate works across time and other "gulfs," complementarities
that suggest each thinker is responding to some element in the world, in
human life, with a degree of harmony of insight, mood, and depth of feeling
that is simultaneously surprising and unsurprising, that suggest we can
indeed discover ourselves to be "all in it together."

The need for "democratic culture"

Keeping A'dona's letter in mind, I want now to address directly this
larger issue-~the creation and meanings of democratic culture--and to trace
correspondences of a different sort than those so far proposed (between Quiet
Eye "springing/ in a field of joy" and the creative imagination as understood

182

by the Romantic poets, via several fourth graders; between Cameron's idea of
infinity and Wordsworth's; between A'dona's idea of consciousness and
anyone's). I stole the title of this chapter from Walt Whitman, an American
" Here, I acknowledge my debt and bring him directly into the
story. Like Wordsworth—-but inflected with "a special resonance by the

"Romantic.

American experiment,"13 and by Lincoln's recent "re-dedication" to that
experiment in the face of the "test" at Gettysburg--Whitman understood the
quest for liberty and the search for a democratic culture "of the people, by the
people, and for the people" to be linked, indeed, interdependent. Soon after
the War, he wrote a strange, rambling, provocative essay, Democratic Vistas
(1974). In it, he raises a challenge atop a set of related problems.

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the
face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was
there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and
here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us.
The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed
in (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings),
nor is humanity itself believed in.

As a poet and as a citizen Whitman is distressed and angered--while yet
hopeful--about the lack of culture, particularly literature, fit for and fruit of
democracy. "These states," he asserts, "have assumed the task to put in forms
of lasting power...the democratic republican principle, and the theory of
development and perfection by voluntary standards, and self-reliance" (pp.
317-318). The qualifying phrase, "in forms of lasting power," is critical: these,
he is certain, we have not accomplished.14 He continues:

 

13 The phrase is Jay Featherstone's (personal communication, 1998). From him also come these
understandings of the big word, "Romantic," that I have again invoked: "It means, as Isaiah
Berlin put it, that truth is multiple, not single, that truth is made, not found; it places a special
value on the conjoining of will and desire made possible by human imagination, and on the
power and worth of ordinary people's visions and dreams, and thus wants a people's culture in
which as Keats put it humankind would become a democracy of great oak trees; it asks, What
would it take to sustain the value of live experience over time, to keep alive the vitality of
childhood expereince and add to it the effective powers of adulthood...?" (taken from my notes
of Featherstone's talk at the North Dakota Study Group annual meeting, Woodstock IL:
February 1998).

14 One of the more obvious and recognizable of those forms, many of us hope and have hoped,
ought to be public schooling.

183

 

 

 

Admitting...the priceless value of our political institutions,
general suffrage (and fully acknowledging the latest, widest
opening of the doors [i.e., African American voting rights]), I say
that, far deeper than these, what finally and only is to make of
our [America]15a nationality16 superior to any hither
known...must be vigorous, yet unsuspected Literatures, perfect
personalities and sociologies, original, transcendental, and
expressing (what, in the highest sense, are not yet expressed at
all) democracy and the modern.

(p. 319, emphasis added)17

A major burden of this chapter is (at least) to demonstrate that these
"vigorous," too little suspected literatures are available, if only we will tend to
them. (They may be all around us.) I mean, for example, that "Quiet Eye" is
such an "unsuspected," unexpected, piece of literature,18 and that it and the
facts of the responses it engenders signal the possibility of the "democratic
culture" I am interested in. I hope as well--perhaps vainly, if Auden is correct
that "poetry makes nothing happen"19--that such literatures, and the
circumstances of their creation in pubic schools, may amount to instances of
the "forms of lasting power" into which democratic principles and theories of
development must be placed, by which they must be enacted. Habits are
"forms of lasting power" (not the only kind, of course): I am proposing that
the possibilities and patterns of communication that (Iris) and Cameron and
A'dona are exhibiting here, by means of the art object (poem), could, if
regularized (which is not to say routinized) become a kind of habit of expected

 

15 "Western world" in the text; I believe, taken in context of his whole essay, my substitution
is warranted. "I shall use," Whitman has said in the immediately preceding paragraph, "the
words America and democracy as convertible terms" (p. 318).

16 Not a "race" but a "citizenry."

17 While "perfect personalities" (and even "transcendence") sound odd, even jarring, to our
ears—and I considered subjecting them to ellipses-the ways in which Whitman does not sound
contemporary are often as big a part of his relevance and his challenge as the ways in which he
does.

13 What does a work have to do or be to count as "literature"? I claim it has to have the
realized possibility of certain kinds of effects, efflouresences, in some readers--no more, no less.
My claim is not singular--see for example Northrop Frye, "(T)he question of whether a thing
'is' a work of art or not is one which cannot be settled by appealing to something in the nature of
the thing itself. It is convention, social acceptance, and the work of criticisim in the broadest
sense that determines where it belongs" (1957, p. 345).

19 Though William Carlos Williams, still en-route to this story, has thought (as Adrienne
Rich reminded), that "men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there [i.e., in
poetry]" (1962, p. 161).

184

 

fellow-feeling and commensurable meaning that would support and in small
but vital ways enact the democratic hope. Towards such ends, I return for a
moment to a statement of Whitman's just quoted, a statement that for me
captures the underlying idea and challenge, the premise of the whole
argument about education, culture, and democracy. Acting as a doctor
"diagnosing some deep disease," (a role the Civil War had taught him too
well), Whitman baldly states, "the underlying principles of the States are not
honestly believed in...nor is humanity itself believed in."

Nor is humanity itself believed in: That is for me the key, the "Open
Sesame," the secret behind Bluebeard's forbidden door. It's true the
principles are not believed in, but they are not believed in because their
foundational premise, faith in humanity--in the profound capacity of all
humans--for self-government--for mutual tending to a common good--"to
add worth to the world," as Patricia Carini puts it, repeatedly and tirelessly
(1995)--is not honestly held.20 Such faith can only be held in patience and in
action together; it requires daily practices of "effort, expectation, and desire," a
belief and a struggle for "something evermore about to be." In classrooms,
faith in each human being not only can but must be held in patience: salutary
achievements, epiphanies, if you will, are not easily found nor do they always
appear at the times and in the garb we expect--but such patience is not
passivity or resignation; it expresses itself in attention, in action, and in
detail.

One "detail" will involve significant choice: (Iris) could be
commanded to write a poem, to write a haiku even-~and conceivably she was—
-but she could in no sense be commanded to write that poem, and a poem of
such calm and distinctive personality will only come about when there is a
natural rightness in the fit between writer and her subject; thus, any
"assignment" behind it will have been experienced as a justly chosen
instrument for furthering the student's purposes or vision. (As Simone Weil
insists, "the intelligence can only be led by desire" [1977, p. 48].) That "natural
tightness" may well mean the writer feels chosen by the subject rather than
vice versa, but there will have been freedom to refuse the wrong subject,
freedom for reverie, and freedom over the years to choose and abandon many

 

20 ‘ For a useful and insightful discussion of the different parts played by adherence to
principle and to faith or morals, in our centuries-long argument about race, racism, and
democracy, see "What Jefferson Helps to Explain" (Schwartz, 1997).

185

 

 

different verbal forms and topics. All of these freedoms are part of what is
meant by "significant choice." Though "choice" here could nearly be re-
written as "high expectations," in the sense of genuine faith in the capacity of
each individual to "add worth to the world"--a faith which means providing
(Iris) lots of different media and occasions to find and develop her capacities,
to fashion her voice, being available to her work, responding when it has
"spoken." Democratic culture in this sense is both expecting contributions
from her and participating in the meanings of those contributions--those
objectified lives we call poems-—with her.

What, then, of A'dona and her letter to (Iris)? "Is the deer imagining
the inside of his head is joyful and i hope i can be your friend?," she asks.
The effort of faith in her human potential, which she is entitled to, if we are
to take Whitman and by extension the "founding fathers" seriously, is in a
way so easy, here, that it is no effort at all. She has, after all, just sketched a
version of the epiphany offered by the actions of art in life. A'dona, the
imagined deer, the deer of Imagination, and the reader are joined here in a
flash of speculation about the mystery of consciousness, and--and this is what
makes the moment so tender and so "common"--we are simultaneously
present at a gesture of human companionship, an impulse towards the most
ordinary, not symbolic, not metaphorical, desire for human connection and
friendship. Sounding both the poignant and the transcendent, A'dona makes
it impossible not to have faith in her humanity. She inhabits-~in these very
few and I think hard-won sentences--language as a medium of
unquestionable power. Whatever "intelligence" might be, it is surely
glowing here. Whatever good might be expected from our social tendencies
is surely here exemplified. What, then, is to be doubted?

Well, her future. To be a child in mid-nineties America is itself,
statistically speaking, no very hopeful thing (Children's Defense Fund, [1996],
e.g., pp. 6 & 82), (Natriello, McDill, & Pallas, [1990], e.g., p. 31), (also see
[Herbert, 1996]). And to "be" A'dona, from the perspective of demographics,
is to be on the wrong end of the curve (CDF, [1996], e.g. pp. 5, 37, 49),
(Natriello, et al., [1990], e.g., pp. 17ff, 21ff, 23). Usually, when I write about my
teaching and my students, I provide little or no demographic information
about individuals. Such data too often leads to reductionist interpretations;
given our limited and clumsy vocabularies of class and our obsession with
race, providing it for individuals may constitute an unwarranted set of

186

 

 

assumptions and intrusions into children's and families' privacy. Here,
though, these markers are so pertinent to the political points I wish to make
that I am, with reluctance, including them. At the time of these stories, then,
A'dona is one of those marked for failure, deemed "at risk": a black girl,
living in a "non-traditional" family, labeled a "special education" student,
receiving free or reduced lunch, over-weight, somewhat halting of speech
when she entered our school in September, writing and reading at a level that
probably tested about first grade though this is a fourth grade classroom. That
she is female not male is deemed a point in the plus column, or at least not a
minus; all the other factors are, as school and society now go, definite strikes
against this nine year old child. Like Cameron, Candy, and most of the other
children I discuss, A'dona is unprivileged, marked by color, class, or both, one
of those children widely regarded as a drain on the economy and a threat to
the future if something isn't done about them. (She has since gone on to do
very well in middle school, for which she, her devoted grandmother, and her
special education teacher of several years, Barbara Acker, deserve the credit.21)

It is also relevant to say that A'dona had somehow to get to the point of
writing her letter to (Iris). The letter was essentially spontaneous-~a response
to a suggestion of mine, which had in turn been prompted by a student
question--not to mention the big question, "What is the answer?"--that I
could not answer. But the context was not spontaneous or casual. Acts of
faith may be said to have played a part in it. A'dona was in a classroom
where the possibility of a meaningful encounter between her and that least
useful, least economically productive of the arts, poetry, was assumed to be a
possibility. She was in a classroom where the connection of personal
meaning to personal meaning, mediated by cultural products and human
relationships, was offered. She was in a classroom in which the imagination,
so seldom important in the official curricula we try to live by, became a topic
of serious conversation. And she was in a classroom where a teacher, Barb
Acker, was available and willing to help her write a thought too big for her
mechanical skills.

 

21 Barb Acker gives all the credit to A'dona, and mentions that "her self esteem increased as
she became a real part of a learning community" (personal communication, 1997).

187

 

"Sometimes it makes you go insane": Further correspondences

I will return explicitly to the idea of exercising "faith in humanity" in
public school classrooms, and to the connection of that faith to the creation of
democratic culture, but I want for now to let that idea stand as context and to
pick up the trail of poetic correspondences prompted by "Quiet Eye." In class,
and in retrospect, comments by Cameron, Candy, and Jon led to consideration
of imagination and its powers. Those considerations--especially Cameron's
vision of "Mother Nature"--brought Wordsworth, his sense of imagination,
and his democratic address to consciousness to my mind, several years after
the class discussion. Wordsworth in turn recalled me to A'dona's letter and
its calling on ideas of imagination and consciousness. And the equivocal
location of the imagination--in or out of the body, mind, or "self"?--in her
letter, and the fact that Cameron was very much in my thoughts, reminded
me of a startling piece he'd written a month or so before our discussion of
"Quiet Eye."

12—6—94 What Is an idea
a idea is a thought

it is in yo[ur] Brain.
sometime it makes you go inasaine.

it's a thing of the Body.

Pausing briefly to consider an idea as ”a thing of the body--wondering
(with Elaine Scarry again in mind) if that is to make an idea vulnerable,
subject to hurt as well as capable of causing hurt (the hurt of insanity for
example)--I am struck by further correspondences. I’m reminded at once of
the lines, "the pure products of America/go crazy...,” though it is a while
before I can place those lines in William Carlos Williams’ poem ”To Elsie”
(1968, pp. 28-30).22 When I re-read the poem, I am in for several more shocks,
compelling echoes between the themes and images of his poem and the
themes and images and, to quote Winnicott (1971b, p. 43) again, "the ideas
that occupy (the) li(ves)" of Cameron, A'dona, (Iris), among others. The
poem begins:

 

22 © 1938 by William Carlos Williams. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corporation.

188

 

 

 

The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
[ersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mates, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men...
and young slatterns...

...succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum--
which they cannot express...

The pure proletarian products of Williams’ America go crazy, unable
to express the deep emotion of ”numbed terror. ” Williams here seems joined
in spirit to Whitman’s project, urgently wishing for the people a culture--a
literature, let us say, a repertoire of language, symbols, words, images—fit to
express deep emotions, and the deep aspirations that may emerge when form
is put to feeling.

Cameron in his way is a "pure product of America"--a young African
American male, a member of the so-called "underclass," already having had
serious encounters with the legal system, removed by the state from his
home. The "correspondence" between his invocation of an idea that could
make you lose your mind and Williams' lines asserting a general American
descent into madness is not, I think, trivial, not "merely" verbal.23 The
linkage may even be heightened by an important contrast between Cameron
and Williams' subjects: Cameron speaks quite well for himself, he does

 

23 We could remember here, too, Dewey's important reference to "insanity" (1966, Chap. 4).

189

 

 

possess "a repertoire of language, symbols, words, images fit to express deep
emotions," including terror. Consider for example another short poem of his
(written in response to "focus words," presented as he typed it).

FEAR

FEAR IS HERE, AND THE GREAT BIG BEAR.
HE ONLY STRIKES ONCE.
SO DON'T BE AFRAID IT'S JUST HIM!

IT'S JUST HIM GOING ON THE OUTRAGE.
IT'S JUST ANOTHER BIG BEAR.

I was close to Cameron and cannot pretend to read his poem with
detachment. But I do have some evidence that it can function as a piece of
"culture" in the sense of being an artifact that can become semi-independent
of its original context, occupying a public space where it may mediate, express,
and transform the thoughts and feelings of disparate individuals. I read this
poem with some undergraduate teacher candidates, deliberately telling them
nothing about Cameron except that he was a former student of mine, eight or
nine years old at the time he wrote this (journal, 5/ 24/ 96). As intending
teachers, many of these students-~like so many of their elders already in the
schools«were inclined at first to try and read the poem as a simple piece of
autobiography («the tendency I discuss in Chapter 2 in connection with
Brendan). A number of them imagined a menacing father-figure beating a
child. This supposition, as I later told them, was in fact near to the truth.
However, as we talked, we found that others had interpreted the poem as
being about confrontation with and the effort to survive, or overcome, fear
more generally. They recalled some of their own experiences of fear--
ordinary ones as well extreme cases-~and remembered that the first fearful
anticipation of something not yet undergone is so often far worse than the
experience itself (even when that experience is truly fearsome). They tied
these understandings to the lines, "he only strikes once" and "it's just
another big bear." As we talked, more and more of them came to recognize
that, whatever autobiographical roots Cameron's poem might have, the
poem is far more than simply a record of those sources. In its extreme
condensation, in its invocation of "the great big bear" as a well-nigh

190

universally accessible totem of fearful events, in its starkness, in its
contemporary sounding but mysterious "going on the outrage," the poem is
an icon, if you will, of the universal human experience of fear and of the
effort to make oneself into a being who can look fear in the eye and stare it
down«in the acts of imagination at least, and first; in "real life" next, maybe,
we hope. The poem, like (Iris's), is a meeting place, a space for encountering
feelings and ideas, emanating from others, which turn out in a real sense to
be our own, and to offer us, thereby, hope both for communion and for the
survival and perhaps transformation of our own experience. For the poem is
itself and by definition«if it "works," that is, holds pleasure and meaning for
a listener or reader other than its author, independent or partially
independent of personal knowledge of the author--an overcoming of
experience, a transformation of life-facts into something they were in no way
pre-ordained to be, a creation of the unpredictable, the lasting, and the
connecting out of the otherwise mute and transitory facts of personal
experience.

There is more to be said about ”correspondences." (Iris ’3) poem, ”Quiet
Eye” led, among other places, to our class discussion of the ”motionless” deer
”springing/in a field of joy,” to Cameron’s idea of ”Mother Nature” going on
ahead of us, season by season, "in one place where...nobody has discovered, "
to A'dona's speculation about the deer ”imagining the inside of his head,” to
Cameron '5 effort to say something about "what is an idea” and his
proposition that an idea can ”make you go insane," to the lines, "the pure
products of America/go crazy. ” As I read Williams’ poem for the first time in
many years, I continue through his imagining of the birth and meaning of
the child resulting from the rape under the hedges, ”a girl so desolate.../that
she’ll be.../reared by the state” (like Cameron):

voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us...
as if the earth under our feet
were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners

191

 

destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after a deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September...

As if (Iris ’3) deer has gone, in Cameron's way, from winter to spring to
summer to autumn, to meet me in a poem written long before their births
and their several poetries. It gives me a shiver to come across this deer in this
field, to find the "imagination strain(ing)” in these same ways across these
differences in age, gender, color, location, and time. The correspondence
between Williams' deer and (Iris's) is not, in the most profound sense, an
accident, though no plan of biology or economics could ever have predicted
or brought it about. Both express the fundamental human ability to recreate
inner experience in image and symbol, both express the deep need we have of
our imaginative capacities. We notice that ”the imagination strains,” works--
it neither succumbs to the apparent destiny of imprisonment nor idly awaits
inspiration, but works, as A'dona and Cameron have worked--and as we, as
teachers, must work«to broach the field of possibility.

Williams' great and terrible poem concludes,

It is only in isolate flecks that
something

is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

The lack of a final period is not a typo; the lack of witness is not an accident.

I do have a witness. I reported earlier that in the fall, in response to the
assignment calling for "Beginnings," "Desire or need," "Things to bring," and
so forth, Cameron had asked if he could write "a rap." Here is what he wrote.

192

 

 

In the ghetto Days

In the future, when everything is free
I want to get a chance to learn about me.

I only have an house, and five dollars.
I had a magic feather that does not flee.

But one day it went away from me.

Several days before our second "Quiet Eye" discussion (the one in
which Cameron had said that he "still thinks" Quiet Eye "is Mother
Nature...in one place where...nobody has discovered or something"«a "place"
that, years afterwards, made me think of Hamlet's "undiscovered country
from whose bourn no traveler returns"), and a few weeks after our first
discussion of it, Cameron added to his poem:

and then I got mad. and nobody was glad it Flew,
and soared th[r]ough the sky

and it got high and I said Fly, Fly, shed, shed
and then I was Dead.

"Shed, shed ”«yes: "Off, off you lendings,” King Lear's bitter rejection
of the trappings of a corrupt civilization, and a death wish, (the clothes
adorning, concealing, or encumbering the body, the body doing likewise for
the soul) comes inescapably to my mind. Not that Cameron ’5 poem needs
any unsolicited correspondences to strengthen its voice. In any event, it now
seems perfectly probable that Cameron had death on his mind this day—-
reminded perhaps by his own recent thoughts of it, prompted somehow by
the image of Quiet Eye ”springing/in a field of joy, ” an image that led to
Cameron '5 vision of Quiet Eye as ”Mother Nature (who) keeps on going
ahead of us--'she is springing in a field of joy,’ that probably might be like
she's...in one place...where nobody has discovered...”«for surely no one in
this life has discovered "a field of joy. " And so, though I am first (in
November) silent, and then (in January) ”mad" at the prospect, I seem to pray
to set my soul free, to urge it away from this present in which all things--and
all people?«are not free. This also is a present in which I do not ”get a chance
to learn about me. "24 As if, indeed, ”the earth under our feet/were/an

 

24 In a well known passage, W. E. B. DuBois depicts the black person in this country as "born

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excrement of some sky." The imagination here takes on the awful duty of
wishing the self permanently out of the body, out of time: an imagination
which has at least momentarily given up on the world. Is the promised
immortality of the soul a fair exchange?

Cameron returned to his poem, "Ghetto Days," a third time. In the
spring, I encouraged him and Lincoln, the other boy with a notable interest in
poetry (also the respected draughtsman of the account of C.J.), to assemble a
booklet of their poems, which they did. Cameron included both "Fear" and
"Ghetto Days" (subsequently including both of these in the year-end
anthology of the whole class's work as well). Here is the final version, almost
as he presented it.25

GHETTO DAYS

IN THE FUTURE WEN EVERYTHING IS FREE

I WANT TO GET A CHANCE TO LEARN ABOUT IE.
I ONLY HAVE A HOUSE AND FIVE DOLLARS.

I HAD A MAGIC FEATHER THAT DID NOT FLEE .
BUT ONE DAY IT WENT AWAY FROM ME.

THEN I GOT MAD. AND NOBODY WAS GLAD,

IT FLEW, AND SOARED TH [R] OUGH THE SKY
AND IT GOT HIGH. AND I SAID, FLY, FLY.

I cannot be positive that the omission of "shed, shed and then I was
Dead" was a deliberate decision, given the very severe and painful
distractions Cameron was suffering at this point in the year. Several small

 

with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world,«a world which yields him
(sic) no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other
world." His history is in a sense made up of "this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious
manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. And "the end of his striving (is)
to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture" pp. 16 8: 17). A "longing to attain self-conscious
manhood," coupled with a sense that may be impossible in this present, is certainly compatible
with Cameron and the persona he offers in this poem. But is he not already "a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture"? I thank Susan Melnick for sending me back to The Souls of Black Folk (a
book, after all, almost entirely about education) and the idea of life behind "the Veil" after
her reading of "Fear" and "Ghetto Days," though I can't hold her responsbile for the use I have
so far been able to make of that suggestion.

25 He in fact used an extravagantly large, bold face, outlined font; also, he was deeply
distracted in the spring and worked on this only intermittently and with constant urging. All of
this made it difficult to determine where he saw the line breaks in the poem. The lines as
given here are my reconstruction, based on a structural analysis of the poem which makes it
look as if it is made up of 9, 10, or 11 syllable lines, with possibly one 12 syllable exception. (If
the stresses, most of them pronounced, establish a pattern, I have missed it.) The punctuation
and the words are exactly as Cameron had them.

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things point in that direction, though: He has changed "an house" to "a
house," and he has changed "magic feather that does not flee" to "magic
feather that did not flee." (Note too the insertion of a comma after "and
nobody was glad," subtly re-directing the sense of the phrase to refer back to "I
got mad" rather than ahead to "it flew.") These tellingly exact substitutions
suggest that he was able to concentrate on revising this poem«indeed, that
the poem created a relatively safe space in which to concentrate.26 That being
said, I feel entitled to hope that this more ambiguous ending--sounding
hopeful, even though interpretation surely still suggests death as the route to
or price of the soul's freedom«was deliberate.

”The work of creation...always has at its center the work of rescue, "
Scarry asserts ( 1985, p. 276). And Winnicott says, ”Ideas are like breath; also
they are like children, and if] do nothing to them he feels they are
abandoned. His great fear is of the abandoned child or the abandoned idea or
remark, or the wasted gesture of a child " (1987, p. 191). Which would be a case
of, ”No one/to witness/and adjust, no one to drive the car. " And if ”ideas are
like breath” they are like the soul, they are its manifestations. With what
responsibilities are we confronted, against what incalculable losses must we
con tend .7

Culture-making: "No contact of this human sort is replaceable"

Cameron, (Iris), A'dona--and Brendan in his way; even C.J. in his--and
many others can and do produce "vigorous, unsuspected literatures," at times
prodigiously, more often, perhaps, "in isolate flecks." Their work addresses
some of humanity's oldest concerns«how to live in this world, for example,
being afraid; mortality. Most importantly, it demonstrates in practice the
workings and the powers of human imagination. We can see the
imagination as having two essential functions: It is generative, and it is
protective or consoling. (Both sense meet, as Scarry says, in "the work of
rescue") Imagination is expansive, seeks to go beyond limits-~especially the

 

26 And, when he could summon them, his powers of concentration were formidable. Consider
his own definition of the word, offered during a discussion of the purpose of "focus words," in
which one student's suggestion had been, "to concentrate." "'It's like you have the words in your
mind'«[here his] hand gestures and furrowed brow, slightly down-cast [or] inward-looking
eyes, vividly convey[ed] concentration«'and there's a tube from each letter...” (i.e., to the
page, is how I have always imagined his meaning here; he went on to refer some what vaugely
to getting "unconnected" "if it gets noisy") (journal, 10/4/95).

195

 

limit called "the here and now" or the one called "the body"; imagination
shelters, works out of sight and hearing of others, shields one's gaze from the
present. Finally, though, imagination connects: connects a person's inner
and unrealized potential with other lives, other interiors, other selves. In so
doing, it transforms. The artifact--the poem, for example«is the vessel
through which the transformation occurs, both a sign and an agent of
potentiality reaching towards fact. These ("ordinary," unprivileged) children
have, then, been working in the realm of culture-making: creating artifacts,
verbal objects, connections, expressive of common experience in uncommon
ways, capable of renewing that experience as the property of all. And the site
for this creativity has been public school classrooms. Call this some steps
towards the work of creating democratic culture.

Pressing on, we might refer to the criteria of Whitman cited earlier:
How are (Iris), Cameron, and A'dona's "vigorous [I feel]...yet unsuspected [I

H H

claim; I observe] literatures original, transcendental"; how do they, if they
do, "express democracy"? They are original in their unmistakable
individuality, the distinctive "voice" in each of them, their qualities of
freshness or vitality-~"vigor," in fact; they are "transcendental" in their
capacities to transform experience, to propel the deer of Imagination across
boundaries of time, age, class, color, and gender. They "express democracy"«
exude or overflow with it or the spirit and hope of it«in that, as the work of
"ordinary," unprivileged children they answer democracy's claim that "faith
in humanity" is justified. They prove its implied claim that each ordinary
person is capable of moments of transcendent insight; they meet (with each
other, with us, with the past) in those moments. Their achievements are in
some respects small--but they are big with implication, rebuke, and promise.
These claims are brought to the fore in another of Dewey's musings on

the meanings of "democracy."

(T)he word democracy...denotes faith in individuality, in
uniquely distinctive qualities in each normal human being...
(Democratic) equality is moral, a matter of justice socially
secured, not of physical or psychological endowment... Moral
equality means incommensurability, the inapplicability of
common and quantitative standards. It means intrinsic qualities
which require unique opportunities and differential
manifestation... Our best, almost our only, models of this kind

196

 

 

of activity are found in art and science. There are indeed minor
poets and painters and musicians. But the real standard of art is
not comparative, but qualitative. Art is not greater or less, it is
good or bad, sincere or spurious...

Upon reflection, it is apparent that there is something academic
in confining the models of moral equality to artistic and
intellectual pursuits. Direct personal relationships, the
affections and services of human companionship, are its most
widespread and available manifestations... No contact of this
human sort is replaceable; with reference to it, all are equal
because all are incommensurable, infinite. Democracy will not
be democracy until education makes it its chief concern to
release distinctive aptitudes in art, thought, and companionship.

Individuality, Equality, and Superiority, (1969, pp. 174 & 176-177,
emphasis added).

Recall:

Dear Iris,

I want to know what does your poem mean. I like
your poem, Quiet Eye. I don't know what the eye
is. Is it a deer? Is it winter outside? Is the
deer imagining the inside of his head is joyful and
i hope i can be your friend?

your friend,
A'dona

Dewey's humanity and wisdom in locating "art, thought, and human
companionship" on the same moral plane—the place where we are, if we will
secure justice-that is, be democrats«all equal and all distinct,
"incommensurable"«is here confirmed by a nine year old girl who, at once,
ponders the meaning of a poem, conjures up a mighty image of imagination
and of consciousness, and hopes to be a friend. "No contact of this human
sort is replaceable; with reference to it, all are equal because all are
incommensurable, infinite," says Dewey in a Whitmanesque moment.
Cameron, (Iris), A'dona are infinite in those moments when the mediating
imagination leaps all boundaries and borders and joins them with
Wordsworth and Williams and anyone else who cares to listen in on the
human quest for itself, for the heart of humanity.

197

- "c.11-

 

And here we return to perhaps the deepest meaning or significance of
democratic culture«this capacity for connection. When Dewey attributes both
"incommensurability" and "infinity" to each human being, democratically
understood, he takes in the essential paradox: on the one hand, each of us is
distinct, individual, unique (as, say, "a voice"); on the other hand, as
individuals, there is no determined limit to our potential (for, say, "the
affections and services of human companionship"). Because we are both
unique and "infinite," we are capable of being "in agreement or harmony"
(co-responding) (as well as capable of but not fated to be in isolation«
muteness, or inaudability«or conflict). This should feel, I think, like an
unexpected consequence of uniqueness. A democratic consciousness or
education, as I read Dewey and as I see it, is one that recognizes this paradox,
understands that it means "moral equality" (while requiring, for practical
equality, the work of "justice socially secured"), and seeks to cultivate in its
members that recognition and, in that, the full extension of both branches of
the paradox, in each. Or, as Dewey puts it:

Democracy will not be democracy until education makes it its
chief concern to release distinctive aptitudes in art, thought, and
companionship.

A "distinctive aptitude in...companionship" is a warm way of stating
the paradox. "Education" understood in this way is essentially a matter of
cultivating, of culture-making in all the varied senses of the word. That is to
say, it is a matter of eliciting the "distinctive" capacities for "the works and
practices of art and intelligence" (Williams, 1983) from each individual,
finding and sheltering the habits, skills, dispositions, "ways of life" conducive
to the display and development of those capacities and conducive to the
nurturance of "the affections and services of human companionship":
conducive, then, to the mutual recognition and correspondence of
incommensurable human beings. "I think Quiet Eye still is Mother Nature,"

"I think Quiet Eye is the Imagination," "I like your poem, Quiet Eye...Is the

198

 

deer imagining the inside of his head is joyful and I hope I can be your
friend..."

Democracy, then, is "a mode of living" in which people choose to
participate in each other's experience-so, to share responsibility for each
other's experience, to be obliged to be responsive to each other's experience--
in particular, to communicate experience to one another. In so doing, the
experience is transformed--patterned, enriched, signified-~as are both parties
to the communication. The paradigm for such transformative
"communications" is art. But "art, thought, and companionship" are morally
equal«as, democracy claims, are all "incommensurable, infinite" individuals-
-and equally indispensable to "the work of rescue." (What is to be rescued is
meaning, compassion, the sense of "something evermore about to be"--"joy,"
perhaps; what is to be translated is isolation, fear, inaudibility, and hurt.)

Democracy is the practice of hope; public school classrooms«as sites for
culture-making, communication, correspondence--must be laboratories for
that practice (must be places for Cameron and A'dona to hope, to create, to
rescue). These are unfashionable sentiments; like most large
pronouncements they are in danger of becoming pure surface, empty of all
content. For these reasons, I have tried to be concrete and speczfic, to show
how a tiny number of verbal objects-~a few slips of poetry, a letter a couple of
lines long, some remarks rescued from conversation ("ideas are like
breath...")--contemplated with an open mind, have in fact a kind of infinite
fruitfulness and potential for connection. I have tried to point to what Scarry
calls "the generosity of the artifact" (1985, p. 318).

Finally, I recognize that to stipulate hope and correspondence is not to
stipulate a world without conflict. Dewey proposes, both sarcastically and

seriously, that an education for democracy will be one from which a "person

199

 

 

 

[i.e., an "ordinary" person] might grow up to be a conscientious objector or a
social innovator, or to be inclined to demand social recognition for activity in
free scientific inquiry or in art or some other luxurious and ornamental
calling" (1969, p. 173). «We can agree with him that an education in
democracy is an education in dangerous desires, desires that would lead to the
demand for participation in, and recognition in, essential human callings so
long regarded as privileged, even effete and expendable: a demand to write

and read the "vigorous, unsuspected literatures" of hope.

Afterward: Teaching«attending«"forms of life" and the existence of a
fragile community of sentient readers

I have previously (repeatedly) invoked Dewey's interest in teachers'
learning "how mind answers to mind"; more recently, I have borrowed
Winnicott's remark that "ideas are like breath; also they are like children,
and if I do nothing to them he feels they are abandoned."27 I have proposed
that one important meaning of the idea of "teaching as acts of attention," or
an aspect of teaching that that idea calls to the fore, is "making space," in
several senses of the phrase, including: "creating conditions and
opportunities (constraints, expectations, invitations) for children to write,"
and making room in the mind of the teacher for the meanings of the
children's writing to emerge and gather. "Sanctioning the content of the
children's writing" and "Being an audience for the children's writing, being
interested in the writing" are two aspects of the attentiveness of teaching
related to that internal space-making, calling for interpretation and re-
interpretation which finally manifests itself as--and continues long after the

fact, as it were--the work of "sympathetic reading."

 

.27 The "I" here is a psychoanalyst, the "he" is his patient. However I can see no harm«but
considerable benefit—to thinking of the "I" in this statement as a teacher and the "he" as a
stand—in for a student«let us say, for example, Cameron.

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Here, I want to continue using and examining these ideas about
teaching, and to extend their reach, through a revisiting and re-describing of
some of the material in this chapter. This, in turn, should prepare us for the
next and final chapter.

The project of sympathetic reading is continued and demonstrated in
several ways. In the first place, there is the tracing of correspondences. This
enables me as a teacher (and writer and reader) to continue talking with texts I
care about, to continue "playing them off against each other." Hearing
resonance's, echoes, and correspondences28 enlarges--or rather, reveals the
size and scope«of the children's texts; it keeps, or makes, the children's texts
present long after their actual physical presence has moved on. This then
may even be a way of attempting to keep faith with those students.
Convening these texts-~bringing them into each other's company (which has
been done not by seeking the correspondences but by hearing them, and then
pursuing them)--is also an effort to expose some of the meanings and
possibilities of "democratic culture." I mean this in a way no larger or more

complicated (nor less) than something like this:

Great and famous writers (Wordsworth, Whitman, Williams), address
and express certain themes and ideas in forms that are granted the
status of "art." Certain children ("ordinary, unprivileged," virtually by
definition not famous) address and express the same or similar themes
and ideas in forms that I find to deserve the status of art (on account of
their capacity to mediate experience, to connect peOple through
exploratory engagement in the meanings of the created objects, to
inform and inflect the feelings of readers«and this is perhaps just to
begin to recapitulate the list of reasons for granting them, no for
finding them to have, to deserve and to "demand," this status). If
"democratic culture" can translate as something like "artifacts, art
objects or art-like objects of the people, by the people, and for the
people," then I make the immoderate claim that (Iris), Cameron, and
A'dona are members of "the peOple," that they can be shown to have

 

28 "Sympathetic reading" as catching "sympathetic vibrations."

201

 

 

made these objects, with these kinds of power, and that these objects--
the object called "Quiet Eye," for example-~can be shown to have had
power in their several lives, to have been "for" them in significant
ways. And I further claim that (Iris), Cameron, and A'dona while
certainly "unique, incommensurable" are also (besides being "infinite")
representative«that "their capacities to contribute," as I said of
Brendan's at the beginning of this work, are not unique.
"Unsuspected," indeed, these capacities can be sought, elicited, read.
They can be taken to prove the rightness of some of the claims I feel,
with Dewey, are central to democracy's footings, and its promises, e.g.,
"faith in individuality, in uniquely distinctive qualities in each normal
human being," in "moral equality." That "moral equality" is also, or
requires, demands, "justice socially secured" is also the case. These
children's poetries are not offered either as demonstrations of that
security, nor as means of achieving it: they are offered as part of the
demand for it, and in the fragile hope their tiny weight might help
move that demand closer to fact.

Sympathetic reading takes another and more pedagogical form in this
chapter: that of the reading and learning to read that we do in the classroom
together. "What makes it a poem?" was an untimely question--ironically so, I
suspect: for I think one motivation for that question was the teacherly
anxiety I have spoken of, the need to feel that I was "really teaching them
something"29«the class wanted, quite rightly, to talk about what the poem
meant, what it was saying to us, what "the answers" were. (At this juncture,
then, they were teaching or reminding me how to read.) Collectively we read
the poem, that is, we interpreted it, we began to find ourselves in sympathy
with it, we "shared in its consequences," with Candy, Anthony Y., Jon L.,
A'dona, and of course Cameron playing central roles in that reading.
"Teaching" here encompasses the activities of attending to a text, something

we practiced in the context of the Monday assignments and in sharing times.

 

‘29 And, to ask a question I recommend to my undergraduate teacher-candidates, "Had I
thought through--imagined«some of their possible responses?" I can find no evidence that I
had performed this elementary act.

202

 

t. .mL_

 

“silt“

 

The teacher's role here includes eliciting responses, readings, questions; re-
stating responses; juxtaposing one comment to another, asking if or how
they relate; connecting comments to other conversations and other texts we
have encountered together; offering paraphrases, or responses of my own,
that in fact become interpretations. Instances and traces of these aspects of
teaching are visible in my response to Cameron's "text" about "Mother
Nature," a response where it becomes necessary for me to imagine my way
into the meaning he is after, to take a stab at making that meaning with him.
Cameron reads "Quiet Eye," I "read" Cameron, we both«to echo Dewey's
remarks about thinking that I introduced while re-reading Brendan's texts--
share to an extent in the consequences of (Iris's) imaginative act.3O (This
teaching as reading and teaching and learning how to read can also be seen in
the anecdote of my undergraduates' encounter with Cameron's "Fear.")
Here, the "answering of mind to mind," the "giving of the mind without
reserve or qualification to the subject in hand...the first-hand and personal
play of mental powers," "in the minds of a group of persons who are in
intellectual contact with one another," is all actually visible in the discursive
space of the classroom (Dewey, 1974, pp. 324, 318, 325); it is hoped too that we
can see, at least for a brief span of minutes, ideas that are not altogether
"abandoned."

I return now to the idea of making space for children to write, creating
conditions and opportunities«including constraints, expectations, and
invitations«for them to do so, and also to the idea of "helping to make the
writing, co—participating" in it, (which I have touched on briefly in connection

with Brendan and the genealogy, and in connection with C.J.'s attribution to

 

30 And part of the weight I feel writing this is that my sharing in the consequences for
Cameron of the idea of "a field of joy" falls far short of his need.

203

 

 

 

me of "pride" in his stories). I want to look at the commonly teacherly

 

activity of giving assignments, activity that can and often has been described
in terms of the teacher's effort to impose his will on students. That is
certainly one appropriate way to characterize making assignments, telling
people what to do, but it need not be a complete account of that activity, that
"telling" and "requiring." I have deliberately made my giving of assignments
quite visible in this chapter, partly because it seems incumbent on me to do so
when I also assert that "something called genuine choice" ought to be part of
children's intellectual experience in school, especially when I make assertions

such as the following.

One "detail" will involve significant choice: (Iris) could be
commanded to write a poem, to write a haiku even--and conceivably
she was--but she could in no sense be commanded to write that poem,
and a poem of such calm and distinctive personality will only come
about when there is a natural rightness in the fit between writer and
her subject; thus, any "assignment" behind it will have been
experienced as a justly chosen instrument for furthering the student's
purposes or vision.

Only the reader, exercising some degree of tact, can estimate whether
the product of any given assignment has in fact«in the end, shall we say--
been "experienced as a justly chosen instrument for furthering the student's
purposes or vision."31 What I can do«besides offer my own readings of some
such products--is to try and show how some element of choice is bound up

with the assignments I have reported, and to say a little more about how I

 

31 And in making that estimation, the reader will be practicing exactly what Dewey calls for
(in the oft-herein-cited Relationship of Theory to Practice) when he asks us as teachers to
learn to distinguish between children's "inner" and "outer" attentions, calling "inner
attention...the giving of mind without reserve or qualification to the subject at hand." Making
. these distinctions, he insists in his usual ambitious way, "means insight into soul-action,
ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham" (1974, pp. 318-319). The morally charged
nature of teaching is everywhere and inescapable.

 

204

 

_~‘_w1>— ...9..--_. '- ~A

 

think these assignments worked (some of the time, for me, for some of the
students, which is all I hope to do throughout”).

If the reader will mentally revisit the assignments I referred to as
dealing with "structure" or "pattern" or "rule" with these issues in mind, a
few things will be obvious. Constraint, to begin with, is visible in the fact that
students were told they had to do something in writing with these categories
("Beginnings," etc.) and in the various specific stipulations as to use of each
category, how many instances to use of a given category, and to list the
instances, not just incorporate them in the fabric of the story. Within the
boundaries set by the constraints, choice is also visible in several ways. In the
first place, the structure of the charts of examples, as well as the articulation of
the assignments, makes clear that it is up to the student to decide what to do
with each category and that the instances on the chart are exemplary--
possibilities, "invitations" as I will get back to momentarily, but not
themselves required. In the second place, within those examples there was,
as I noted in passing, deliberately expansive provision: Yes, you had to make
your story include a "thing to find," but one suggested instance of a thing to
find was "heart's desire," which is in a way to say, anything you want.

(I would not, of course, rest my case for the importance of providing
something recognizable as "genuine choice" on the rather heavily

constrained "choices" just referred to, no matter how much good may come

 

out of them. Indeed my whole purpose here is to explicate something about
the process of setting constraints as well as invitations«constraints that may

also become invitations«making assignments, into which a limited degree of

 

32 Because I am trying to get at promise and potential, I have mostly selected work and
incidents that in one way or another show the kinds of promise and potential I am interested in
in teaching. A representative account of teaching or even any one teaching epsiode would be a
different thing.

205

choice enters. The big case for choice rests in the provision of ample amounts
of "choice writing time" and the concomitant willingness to "sanction the
content" of that writing.)

The assignments that I refer to for shorthand purposes as "pattern"
assignments were intended to help students notice some of the possibilities of
design in constructing their stories. Of perhaps greater importance, they were
ways for me to experiment with an issue I found somewhat vexing, that is,
just how much conscious attention to such matters is helpful for child-
writers, or, for these particular fourth grade writers. (I have often thought«as
an instance of why this issue was and is for me "vexed"«that I have noticed
that when "revision" becomes a very fixed part of the workshop routine that
the tendency is for successive revisions to become ever more conventional,
often stodgy, sometimes also taking on extra baggage in the way of needless
and distracting "description.") They were also ways of assuring myself (and
any on-lookers who may have needed the assurance) that I was doing
something that looked like teaching. And, certainly, it was often helpful,
interesting, and reassuring to see traces of assignments in choice writings,
which did suggest that occasionally the assignments were approximating their
broadest purpose, which was simply to expand the universe of possibilities.
The assignments were also useful in helping me to structure and assure
continuity in my journal, which was an important«crucial, for me«site for
thinking about the teaching as it transpired.

On reflection and further examination, though, the most important
aspect of these assignments-certainly, the most visible, traceable«did not
have to do with pattern, structure, design, etc.; what was most significant, I
have come to think, were the specific words and phrases offered as examples

of the possibilities inherent in the structures. I now understand the

206

assignment process here to have been one of proffering evocative words
(taking "evocative" literally). Choosing these words and phrases was often a
nearly subliminal process, though not always, nor entirely. Certainly I offered
C.J.'s variation on the classic fairy tale Openings ("A long time ago on the west
side...") quite deliberately, and drew the class's attention to it deliberately: The
intended message was, of course, "This group of people is one resource for all
of you in your writing«a classmate might very well have an idea good
enough to steal«go ahead and steal..."33 That C.J.'s line was a good one«that it
was a rich, suggestive use of language«earned it a place with the others. And
in the column of "Things to bring," I was conscious (as with focus words) that
I wanted a range: objects suitable for use by a range of sensibilities or moods

H H

on a given day, from the mundane and practical ("a knife, a knapsack," to

which the class sensibly added "food") to the magically instrumental ("seven

H H

league boots, a magic feather") meant, as I have said, to symbolize
"anything is possible." And I knew I was calling on recent experience with
The Seven Ravens when I chose "a chair" and later when I suggested "a lost
brother or sister" as an example of a "Desire or Need." But to a considerable
extent, I seemed just to be drawing on the verbal lumber room in my head.
Or, if any deliberative thought went into giving, say, "In the future, when
everything is free," there are now no traces of it. And yet that interior space
where linguistic traces of all the texts one has ever encountered are to be
found is, as I have argued, both an expectant, hopefully "ready" space, and a
very active space«and the feelings I had about my students, their writing, the
states they were in«both known and accessible feelings, and those as yet

fugitive and unvoiced«and likewise feelings I had about myself«would seem

to have entered into the selection of words and phrase that had the potential

 

33 It would have been my custom to ask C.J.'s permission before using his phrase in this way.

207

 

 

 

to be evocative, to call out other voices. Thus the representation of freedom
as distant (but also conceivable) may be an echo of some other thoughts and
feelings occupying my mind; likewise the faint suggestions of "loss" in the
"Desire or Need" column«including even Throreau's horse and dove and
hound«may have echoed some such feeling in the air of the classroom, and
named it, or have introduced the flavor of some such feeling (while,
similarly, Weil's teaching that "the intelligence can only be led by desire" may
lie behind the very selection of "heart's desire").

On the one hand, just these kinds of echoes and traces must be some of
what we mean when we speak of a word, phrase, or line as having the
capacity to be "evocative" or "suggestive"; on the other hand, my suggestions
of these particular possible interplays are, clearly, quite speculative. This line
of thought became insistent, though, when I really took in the fact that
Cameron's to me very evocative bit of poetry, in its last version simply titled
"Ghetto Days," (a response to the assignment given on the day when I may
have had loss on my mind, or sensed loss in the air or both, or neither) took
its first line ("In the future..."), its central image or symbol ("a magic feather")
and a subsidiary item ("five dollars")«a high proportion of the language in an
eight line poem--from the charts used in giving the assignments. (And in his
notebook, in making the required«to him objectionable, I should add--listing
outside of the text of the elements, for "Character" he has identified
"Cameron," while "feather" is listed both as a "Thing to bring" and-~in a
duality, or consequentiality, so characteristic of Cameron's thinking«as
"Trouble" [notebook, 11/ 28 / 94].) It seemed noteworthy that I had in effect
given to Cameron such a large portion of the language with which he then
made up the poem«a poem energetically propelled, let us notice in the

I H

context of whats evocative," by its many and accelerating rhymes. (And

208

 

 

there are a good many other places, in his and others' writings, where these
borrowings, not always so liberal or so powerful, but often as titles or first
lines which seem to initiate an idea, are visible). This is a place where the
teacher's activity can be seen to be a kind of co-participation in or under-
writing of the children's own writing.

Finally, it comes to seem entirely elemental to think of all of this as
sharing language, remembering that "language" is not itself absent its images
and meanings. Sharing words, sharing specific words and particular phrases
(as all families do)«sharing a language: What could be more fundamentally,
recognizably human? «The exchange and reciprocity of vowels, of images, of
strings of sound, of phrases, that suggest fields of meaning larger and more
plural than any one speaker can know. As "specific words and phrases"
necessarily translates as "entailed or evoked, ideas, images, and
potentialities," it would clearly make a difference what those words were.
Why will some be more evocative than others? How much will that have to
do with contexts in which the language users have already jointly
encountered them, and how much to do with the invisible histories those
users bring to them? As this sharing of language seems almost too obvious to
call anything at all (other than, say, "natural") and too profound to even try
and understand, I realize that I must have in mind Wittgenstein and his
well-known characterization of a language as "a form of life." I have him by
way of Stanley Cavell's discussion of him ("Excursus on Wittgenstein's
Vision of Language" in [Cavell, 1979]), from which I will quote fairly
extensively, for I find (re-discover) a number of echoes or resonances--call
them "correspondences"«to some of the themes and ideas I am working with
(harking back to the story of C.J. as well as to the stories that comprise this

chapter). Informed by Freud as well as Wittgenstein, Cavell proposes:

209

 

 

 

When you say "I love my love" the child learns the meaning of the
word "love" and what love is. That (what you do) will be love in the
child's world; and if it is mixed with resentment and intimidation,
then love is a mixture of resentment and intimidation...

(p. 177)

And shortly thereafter:

To summarize...: In "learning language" you learn not merely what
the names of things are, but what a name is; not merely what the form
of expression is for expressing a wish, but what expressing a wish is;
not merely what the word for "father" is, but what a father is; not
merely what the word for "love" is, but what love is. In learning
language, you do not learn merely the pronunciation of sounds, and
their grammatical orders, but the "forms of life" which make those
sounds the words they are, do what they do.... Instead, then, of saying
either that we tell beginners what words mean, or that we teach them
what objects are, I will say: We initiate them, into the relevant forms
of life held in language and gathered around the objects and persons of
our world.... "Teaching" here would mean something like "showing
them what we say and do," and "accepting what they say and do as
what we say and do," etc.; and this will be more than we know, or can
say.

 

(pp. 177-178)

"Accepting what they say and do as what we say and do" strikes me as
another way of describing an important part of sympathetic reading and its
purposes. But what this Wittgensteinian account of language and life«of
culture« brings most strikingly to fore is the very simple and obvious fact34
that "mind answers to mind" in some form and in some place, not nowhere,
not anywhere. The answering-the responding, the corresponding--is
mediated: in conversation, certainly, but more importantly here, in products,
in made things, specifically, in writings. From this vantage point, these

"pattern" assignments«little lexicons, little plots of language«are sites for that

 

3'“ I was once told by someone who should know that Wittgenstein, in fact, declared that
philosophy is the rediscovery [recovery, rescue?] of the obvious.

210

 

answerability. The particular words and phrases, with all their feeling-tinged
colorations and inflections, with whatever residue of their earlier textual
homes they brought with them, with whatever suggestiveness some had
perhaps acquired through centuries or millennia of use by English—speakers
were potential tools, bridges, for achieving that answerabilty. When they
were so used, they then made the assignment itself into something
approximating a "justly chosen instrument for furthering the students'
purposes or visions." But also, more fundamentally, when these kinds of
correspondences are achieved, the need for and the possibility of a fragile
community of sentient readers is announced. And what will happen in such
a community, and what webs of meaning it will put out, "will be more than

we can know, or can say."

211

 

 

 

Chapter 5

Conclusion with respect to teaching

An immodest recapitulation

"Interest," Dewey advises, "requires continuity of attention and
endurance"; "Ideas," Winnicott observes, "are like breath; also, they are like
children, and if I"«the teacher now, also a listener by vocation«"do nothing
to them(,) he"--she, the student, the child, the thinker, the speaker«"feels
they are abandoned." (And the "greatest fear is of the wasted gesture of the
child." How much repetition does it take to establish that our duty is to stop
that waste, to complete and redeem the gesture?) Attention then is the
precondition, the ground, for interest. There is much that may grab one's
attention involuntarily, but not enough of that upon which to build teaching;
so, a chosen attitude of attention-~of readiness and expectancy, of seeking,
cultivating, reading and re-reading words and gestures«will be part of what a
teacher manifests for children within the frame I am trying to deve10p. For
what we originally do with ideas is precisely to be interested in them (or, of
course, to be indifferent to them, or deaf to them; actively rejecting an idea,
on the other hand, can be a form of interest, a sign of engagement). I mean
"interested" in the senses of being invested, of sensibly "sharing in the
consequences of what is going on," of being in "sympathy" or "attunement"
with; I also mean "interested" in the senses of being curious, of inquiring,
and of seeking to "re-create," in Dewey's words, the gesture or idea we
observe in our own interpretive words or gestures, even going so far as to be,
in Scarry's words, re-made by an idea oneself. "Interest" sums up all of these
acts that create meaning and the possibility, however fragile, of
communication («1 ask again, "is there any other way that thought proves
itself as thought except in the answerability of one mind to another?").
Endurance is doubly called for: in that what is of interest will not necessarily

appear quickly, easily, or comfortably-~indeed, the teacher's right and ability to

212

 

 

 

be interested may be, perhaps should be, as I have suggested, doubted;

secondly, in that "ideas are like breath," verbal objects such as poems and

 

utterances are, despite the "generosity" that may be found in them, "fragile."
They may require the enduring, the patient, the holding quality of the human
setting--the audience, the teacher«to preserve their capacity for meaning over
time. They may also, through their very generosity--their capacity to give, to
re-create the feelings and the perceptions of the teacher-audience (and others)
«teach something about endurance. Imagination«"the sense of something
evermore about to be"; the acute perception, rendering of a hope, a need, a
possibility, a terror, in an image, which is also to say the having of an idea;

the deer, the object of desire,1 "going by fields of goldenrod," the deer

"springing/ in a field of joy imagination," a name for the human capacity

 

to see, to hope, to connect, to feel with, to rescue«imagination, the capacity
whose understanding, Scarry proposes, will assist us in the necessary "project
of understanding the nature of human responsibility"«imagination, finally,
is the site, the ability, the boundary condition, the essential undertaking for
both students and teacher within this view of teaching. That view, again,
embraces a set of assertions about aspects we could, I argue, choose to make
central to teaching. Imagination is the capacity depended upon here as the
ground for education. I understand "education" to include, for example, the
transformation of "desires and emotions" into stable forms perceptible by
others, forms that are able to enter into and change the desires and emotions
of others. The cultivation of the imagination, in both students and teacher
(who otherwise are unavailable to anything approaching "complete and
unhindered communication"), is an object, even the central object, of an
education "in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of

experience."

 

1 Thanks to Jessica Howard for reminding me how very far back, in Western culture at any
rate, we can find the deer symbolizing that what is sought, the object of the quest (personal
communication, August 1998).

213

 

In this chapter, I seek to restate and stitch together some of the key
claims, hopes, and suggestions about teaching that I have raised in the
foregoing pages. I schematize those claims within a deliberately plain
framework of four "aspects" of teaching drawn out of the myriad of thoughts
and interpretations of teaching and trying to teach laid out in the Afterwords

to Chapters 2, 3, and 4. I then conclude by acknowledging both what I have

 

tried to do for or about teaching and what is as yet insufficiently done.

Four aspects of "teaching as acts of attention"

I have framed this dissertation in terms of a view of teaching that

 

concentrates upon those aspects of teaching I call "acts of attention," actions I
should like to call both psychological and pragmatic, and also, both detailed,
concrete, particular, and large, expansive, and necessarily incomplete. I have
offered accounts of several children's writings and the worlds those writings
show--Brendan and the "kid" who is "stranded," and "the teenage boy the last
of the family still living," and the classmate who re-creates that boy as
crucified; C.J. and the unsustaining, unsustainable world in which his lost
protagonist asks repeatedly, urgently, "what kind of a place is this?"«like that
of Brendan's characters, it is "a dangerous place," a place where destruction
rules--C.J. also and a protagonist who seems to author his own identity, a
creative child-hero, and finally C.J. and his tentative, fragile artifact of a voice

that does not know itself, that "need(s) a key"; (Iris) and her Quiet Eye

 

imagining a deer "springing/ in a field of joy," an image that seems to lead
Cameron to think that the only place he can "get a chance to learn about"
who he is, can have "a key," is in "some place where...nobody has discovered
or something," some place perhaps where the soul is free, some place of death
perhaps; Quiet Eye and her author also meeting A'dona on the ground of a
reimagined, perhaps renewed consciousness and promise of human
companionship. These are writings I call "unsuspected," writings that do and
set out to do some of what art and literature do, writings that speak to me of

the truth of the faith in the universal capacities of human beings that I take to

214

be one of democracy's central premises. I have attempted, that is, what I call
"sympathetic readings." I have along the way tried to make visible some of
the thinking, feeling, decision-making, and other actions that appear to me
central to the kind of teaching I am trying to do and to understand,
specifically, to those aspects of teaching I call "acts of attention." I want now
to reassemble some of those acts, to be plainer and more compact about what
parts--gestures, ambitions, preconceptions, workings«of teaching I want to
place in the foreground with the idea of teaching as acts of attention, and to
reiterate some of the conceptual, moral, and ultimately political benefits such
a perspective might afford us.

Although I have obviously used my own teaching as the site for this
inquiry (and thus made that teaching susceptible to critique) I do nonetheless
want to make my focus here be on aspects of teaching as such, aspects that
might comprise a greater or a lesser part of any teaching, aspects of anyone's
teaching that might well or only roughly«but still recognizably--be described
in some of the terms I use. I am, that is, trying to understand, show, explicate,
and move into discussion aspects of teaching that I think many of us could
stand to give more thought to, make more important. This work is situated
in writing and the teaching of writing, however, and, though my hopes for
the practice of education go well beyond writing pedagogy, I will necessarily
restrain my discussion more or less to that area«with the proviso that the
larger field of which writing is a proximate part is the human activity of
making, specifically of culture-making and the making of art or art-like
objects. This being said, there are four aspects of the work of teaching as I
have been thinking about and reporting it in these pages I wish to highlight

(each of them having been mentioned in passing in the previous chapters):
0 Creating conditions and opportunities (constraints, expectations,

invitations) for children to write;

0 Sanctioning the content of the writing;

215

 

 

 

 

0 Being an audience for the children's writing, being interested in the
writing;
0 Giving editorial help on the writing, or, helping to make the writing,

co-participating, sharing responsibility.

These four points do not, of course, amount to an exhaustive or
inevitable synopsis of the manifestations of attentiveness I have been trying
to draw out. They suit me because they have, I believe, a certain tangible,
down-to-earth, in some ways simple quality, because there is logic to their
selection and their ordering, and because they fit well with the constructs I
have variously referred to as "making space," or, with Dewey, "determining

the environment of the child."

Creating conditions and opportunities

Creating conditions and opportunities for children to write is, as I have
said, in many respects convertible with the architectural metaphor of making
space«for it is, in this image at least, not only the room to move, work, play,
come together, be alone, that "space" implies, but also the boundaries and
enclosures that make of this place "a space" set apart from other spaces.
"Space" implies at once opportunity, protection, and limits. And,
importantly for me, what the idea of attention does to space is to invite the
theatrical metaphor, the attitude that says, "into this space something or
someone of importance or interest will emerge," those persons or things
being of course the children and their writings. Concretely and literally, the
space made«the conditions set«is, in the first place, temporal: the setting
aside of six or more hours a week (in Jane Boyd's classroom) for writing
workshop, with the bulk of that time devoted to "choice writing" and "quiet
work time," that is, time when children were responsible for selecting themes
and forms and were free to work cooperatively, to consult with each other or
,me, and so on. The opportunity here extended over time as well, in that, as I

have said, I permitted a great deal of repetition within any child's body of

216

 

 

 

writings, not only permitted but encouraged the borrowing of ideas from
others, and in general did not, as I think of it, make a fetish out of
"originality"«but rather allowed near endless re-workings even to the point
of obsession. In this context, "choice" operated both as an opportunity, an
invitation, and as an expectation and a kind of constraint. For choice is by no
means always easy. It was often a challenge for Cameron, for example, to
settle upon a theme or idea that absorbed him for more than a few moments,
and, while I provided help, including individual help coming up with ideas,
and certain escape hatches were available (e.g., if it was fairly close to the end
of the session and you were "stuck," you could read a book), the basic forces
were simple: Either you found or were found by an idea or image that
absorbed your energy and led you on, or you kept experimenting, seeking
such an idea«or you were, simply, bored, a decidedly unsatisfactory state.

The opening meeting, sharing time for much of the school year, and, of
course, the assignment structures, all operated as both constraints and, much
of the time, as I have endeavored to indicate, invitations. The sharing time,
meetings dedicated to discussion, and the regular display of student work on
the walls of the classroom and on a bulletin board in the hall, are all also
readable as efforts to create a kind of public space for, ideally, by no means
always, the vigorous and visible answering of mind to mind, for the
formation of a "fragile community of sentient readers" in which texts are
jointly engaged, entering into and transforming the experience of the readers.

«Thus we have the discussions of "Quiet Eye," C.J.'s gradual move from

 

asking me to read his stories to asking Marcus to read "Street Ball" in which

 

he is a player, and we have Lincoln's comment to how well and "musically"
Cameron read his poems, for example, and as well my anonymous
interpretation of C.J. peeing on the bathroom floor, and my "reading" of
Cameron's "Mother Nature" comment. All these are instances of actions that
make sense only as public gestures witnessed, potentially, by the whole group,
not just the individuals directly concerned. The aim with all of these

structures and actions was, of course, to make the classroom "hospitable for

217

imaginative activity, safe for dangerous ideas," understanding (trying to
learn to understand) the risk that "an idea can make you insane." An integral
piece of those efforts was, as I have said at length, recognizing the "play space"
of fiction, honoring both its claims and the distinctions between it and "real
world" action (you may write stories in which you shoot your mother in the
rib; you may not hit Eric with all your might; you may include a classmate or
teacher in your story if they consent, not otherwise; etc.). A contributing
element to this effort to create a kind of safety in order to entertain a kind of
risk-taking«to create a setting in which "desires and emotions" are displayed,
formed, shaped, and re—worked, not walled off«has to do with evaluation and
the forms it did and did not take. I did not grade any pieces of writing, ever
(though I did, at Jane's request, participate in the end of semester grading, a bit
of work I kept as unobtrusive as I could, though certainly not secret);
however, I often evaluated the writing in written or oral comments ("I like
how you just told us it was later without having to tell everything that

H H

happened in-between, I'm noticing the girls and women don't get treated
very well in your stories," "I think it's a sad poem," "That's a beautiful idea,"
once, "I do not want to be killed and you may not include me in your story,"
etc.). So, while I strove to make the workshop a site in which children could
explore the pleasures, possibilities, and dangers of the imagination, a setting
in which they learned and excercised a significant degree of genuine authority
and authorship in their encounter with those possibilities, with each other
and others' imaginative possibilities, and with me, it was also a setting in
which I exercised many of the traditional, authoritative, direction-giving and
limit-setting roles of the teacher. That is almost certainly to say that

ambiguity was one important feature of the workshop (and its place within

the larger context of the school and of schooling).2

 

2 An element of attending that I believe I often shortchanged, was being conscious of and

, sensitive to those qualities of ambiguity, being aware at once of the ways in which what I
offered and expected did and did not map cleanly on to the students' usual experiences of school
and of teachers.

218

 

 

 

Sanctioning the content

Sanctioning the content, a crucial move in the teaching I am
attempting to do and to understand, can in fact be understood almost as a way
of declaring ambiguity. This is the move I discussed at some length in
connection with Brendan, the giving of "the neutral, apparent non-response"

amounting to a "tacit (provisional) nod of...acceptance, addressing the
behavior surrounding the text rather than the text itself." Ambiguity is
signaled by the still somewhat mysterious matter of how Brendan intuited
that he might "get away" with the story of "the Garbage Can Seller" and "the
kid (who) killed two guys" in the first place. We can observe C.J., better
documented, exploring and testing the scope of acceptable or tolerable written
activity from the start. In any case, "sanctioning the content," which might
also be expressed by Coleridge's well-known phrase, "the willing suspension
of disbelief," is an essential move, and not merely a negative one. It is not
merely the deferral, for example, of a negative judgment; it is rather the
"effortful patience" characteristic of attention, the holding faith with the child
that "something of importance may emerge." It depends on, as already
suggested, but exceeds the reach of, the acknowledgment of fiction as a "play
space," (as C.J.'s work, in particular his notebook work, illustrates). And, as I
have recently suggested, although the reach and willingness of this move is
great, it is not without limits of its own ("No, you may not include me in
your story if I am going to get killed;" "No, you may not use her name
without permission freely given;" "No, no swear words, though you may use
asterisks and exclamation points"). This is again to notice that ambiguity is a
feature of what is going on in the workshop. Nonetheless, at root, the
sanctioning of content is important precisely because of the possibility of
distress: Brendan's, and even more, C.J.'s, stories disturbed many people,

including my colleagues and hosts, and teacher-education students.3 Iwas

 

3 And there are of course many ways in which children's writing and other behavior can
disturb, as Lensmire so skillfully relates. Doubtless I walled some of this off, and was deaf to

219

 

 

under some pressure to limit the amount of "violent" writing. On the
principle of not getting "stuck in a rut," I occasionally did impose such limits,
though on the whole I was fortunate in the skeptical forbearance of my
colleagues on this score.

Sanctioning the content is, finally, a key early move in the effort to
teach attentively: Allowing something to happen--to appear, to transpire--
that might not otherwise happen in the space of school, or at all--something
that might disturb, unsettle, be dangerous. This gesture, though it is space-
creating, necessarily entails teacherly activity of a special sort: "effortful
patience," waiting, watching, having faith, not concluding prematurely.
Interested in potentiality, possibility, and imaginative range, it is, then, a

gesture and a stance that necessarily entails some risk for all concerned.

Being an audience, being interested

The step that immediately and necessarily follows is what I have
referred to as "letting the child and the work of the child preoccupy the mind
of the teacher, that mind also being a made space, the space that was made
"empty, detached, and ready" just in order to be so occupied. This
preoccupation is a step in the process of becoming, of being an audience for
the children ’3 writing, being interested in that writing. The capacity for
interest is what the attentive stance in general and sanctioning of content in
particular presuppose; "interest," again, identifies the conditions "where
faith in a fact can help create the fact"; it must be assumed, offered in
advance. Interest is the predicate on which the whole structure rests. It is, as I
have said, the teacher's job within this framework to cultivate the
answerability of his mind to the mind of the student; it is the teacher's job to
learn how to provide as well as to perceive "the inner attention...the giving of

the mind without reserve or qualification" of which Dewey speaks. Just so it

 

some of its manifestations. I am reminded, too, of the black fourth grader«not a player in these
' accounts«who, on a field trip to a reconstructed 19th century village, observed a horse whip on
the wall of a "general store," and, interpreting it differently, confided to me, "that's why I

220

 

turned out that the teacher is needed to provide as well as seek out "affection
and sympathy, the keynotes of the child's being," just so it turns out that the
teacher '5 handling of the cared-for objects«those possibly dangerous or simply
discomforting verbal objects«is centrally at issue in the matter of faith and
doubt and trustworthiness. "Learning to like" the children's writing, as I
have discussed with C.J.'s observant help and interest, is the formative
activity of attention (and affection). That, in turn, is the activity that leads
into the more extensive project of sympathetic reading, all the while, as I said
at the outset of this dissertation, being a critic of the sort that artists in all
fields want, one willing to be guided by the traditions, conventions, and
prejudices the writer subscribes to without promising, finally, to acquiesce in
every particular: but taking the chance of doing so, "sharing in the
consequences" as far as imagination permits, making meaning with the child-
writer / maker. I want to repeat that we may well, with Cavell and
Wittgenstein, call this the gestures of "treating what they say and do as what
we say and do"«that is, live, see, try to render sight in speech, conjure up the
possible-for better or worse-from the actual, make and re-make the world
into a habitable one, into a home of sorts. That will not be a place where "you
can do anything you want," but it will be, at the least, a place where "things
can really happen," a place where we might dare imagine ourselves
"springing/ in a field of joy," a place where all speakers can author themselves

and the dangerous desires of art, of democratic culture deeply understood.

Giving editorial help, helping to make the writing

The place we are trying to establish and inhabit then is one where we
are joint makers and thinkers, where the thinking activity of the student and
the teacher--one's imaginative projections reciprocated in the other«struggle
to find and answer each other. That is to say it is a place where the work and

the satisfaction of each is to be transformed by the educative encounter of

 

hate white people."

221

 

mind with mind mediated by cultural product«that poem, for example, that
is but "the midpoint in the total action," the fulcrum by which the maker
seeks both to relieve herself of the "burdens of sentience," to "rescue" herself,
and to transform the eye and the soul, the sentience, of her audience. It will
be appropriate and desirable, finally, in this setting, with these ambitions, to
see one task of the wishing-to-be-attentive teacher to be giving editorial help
on the writing, or, helping to make the writing, co-participating (sharing
responsibility). This activity would include what I have described as the
"meddlesome" response to a text (pressuring Brendan to create a genealogy)
and the more extensive job of co-editing I describe more fully elsewhere (see
Roosevelt, 1995). Most substantially this sharing of responsibility for making
of the objects is evident when the assignment structure works, when it
justifies itself by, in fact, as far as we can tell, having "been experienced as a
justly chosen instrument for furthering the student's purposes or vision."
This is what I believe we confront when the "forms of life" suggested by such

slight phrases as "In the future, when everything is free, magic feather,"
"heart's desire," even the one word "I," are taken, inhabited, re-invested with
meaning by the child writing, thinking, imagining. Finally, this set of
gestures is announced-~is said to have arrived, to have found what it was
seeking without knowing this is what it was seeking-when C.J. announces
that he writes his stories "because Mr. Roosevelt likes to read them," is

indeed«as if he shares responsibility, or at least fortune-«"proud of them."

Coming to closure

What is at stake here; what possibilities of teaching are we trying to
grasp«not pigeonhole, not reduce, but begin to locate and to value«with the
idea of "teaching as acts of attention"? It is of course to address and to call
upon the vulnerability and the subjectivity of the teacher, it is, borrowing
Dewey yet again, to ask of the teacher that she or he become a mind capable of
receiving and answering other minds, a soul willing to engage in and seek to

foster "soul action" in the lives and imaginations of young makers who may

222

 

or may not find that this world is "a dangerous place," a place that is, or is not,
suitable to their coming into being, their theft and gift of voice, their capacity
for responsibility unfolded by others'--elders'--capacities for being responsive,
responsible, that is, in sympathy, imaginatively and practically active in the
seeing to, the making of, and the care for objects«here, verbal ones«they
value, need, entrust, and, in deep senses, give. "The art product is finally
what the work of art does in and for experience," as Dewey teaches, "the
creative act always has at its center the work of rescue, as Scarry similarly
teaches, also advising that "the project of understanding the nature of human
responsibility will be assisted by coming to understand the human
imagination" (for which we need a new, an expanded, vocabulary«which is
to say, an expanded "form of life," a new way of living). There is danger here,
as well, danger of "whim," of "ideas (that can) make you go insane," of desire,
of "unsuspected literatures" "fit for and fruit of democracy," of the impudent
actions of and demands to participate in "art, free scientific inquiry, and
human companionship." What we are engaged in is no less than making, re-
making, here on the ground of our common experience a community of
hope, of possibility. Surely this is an insupportable set of questions to pose to
teaching? Yes. Except for this: teaching knows only two faces: It can be an act
of despair (an effort to civilize the savagery native to humankind) or an act of
hope (an effort to rescue the warmth, the possibilities of "affection and
sympathy" native to humankind). Each of us must choose a stance; a
personal danger in this will be this discovery: "The anxiety in teaching, in
serious communication, is that I myself require education" (Cavell, 1979, p.

125). How will I learn to be this teacher, to choose hope?

Only imaginative vision elicits the possibilities that are interwoven

within the texture of the actual. The first stirrings of dissatisfaction and

the first intimations of a better future are always found in works of art.
Dewey, Art as Experience

223

 

 

 

"Interwoven within the texture of the actual" is the possibility of
becoming, of authoring an identity, a self "capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts," (Keats, 1959, p. 261), that is too, the possibility of learning
to become human (cf Oakeshott, 1990), for none of these are given, they must
be taken, ("stolen"), and made into fact. What is at stake here is
simultaneously the child's possibilities and needs of coming into being and
the teacher's possibilities and needs of becoming the teacher that the child
needs, the teacher, for example, who "likes to read" the texts of the child.
"Attending" is offered here as a trope for the effort to become that teacher--
efforts that will necessarily be incomplete but that are, as gestures of the
imagination reaching out to re—make the world into an hospitable home,
humanly demanded of us. Like the rhetoric of this piece as a whole, the
figure of attention is, I suspect, both tactful and excessive: for obviously the
teacher is not in certain basic senses "necessary" at all; this teacher is a
voluntary construct, one small set of gestures in the larger human effort to

H H

avoid "waste, to rescue." At the same time, accepting these responsibilities,
striving to be present in the theater of the child's becoming, nothing less than
an excess of human ambition is called for. I have discussed at length how the
teacher I am trying to imagine, to will into being, is a maker of "space," one
who "holds" and "sanctions," one who "determines the environment"; what
I have perhaps not stressed sufficiently is the "effortful" nature of the activity
and indeed the struggle of that teacher to become, to engage, to be interested,
to help the child come into being directly by responding, refusing, rejecting,
accepting, interpreting, directing, sharing responsibility for and helping to
make the work that enacts the child's needs and desires to, again, relieve him
or herself of the burdens of sentience and enter into the sentience of others.
Like reading and "sympathetic reading" these efforts are "transactional" not
solitary; they initiate as well as respond; as "attention" says, they "stretch

. towards" as well as await. If I have not adequately described and

conceptualized the effort they call for from the attentive teacher, I have

224

‘- lint-4.

 

perhaps at least begun to dramatize them in these pages. In different and
complementary ways, the child and the teacher on this stage, are, as Cameron
envisions, "going ahead of us...in one place...where nobody has discovered or
something." On the plane of possibility always residing somewhere amidst
the sometimes desperate, sometimes beautiful, "texture of the actual," there is
a job of instructing--re-shaping the interior«and of educating--Ieading forth--

to be done.

225

 

 

 

 

Appendices

226

 

 

 

 

Appendix 1

227

 

 

Appendix 1: Notes on Method

How the study emerged

To name a starting point, this study began, we will say, in 1991-92. The
selection is not exactly arbitrary, as that was the year I taught Brendan, whose
writings are central to Chapter 2 ("'There the kid was, stranded in a car':
Reading the Fictions of Children as if they Mattered"). On the other hand, I
did not at that time think of myself as being occupied with a research project,
far less a dissertation, so it would not be unreasonable to be asked, "How can
you have begun a study without knowing you were conducting a study?" An
answer to such a question would include the thought that my whole
education and development as a teacher has been organized around the idea
or principle of conceiving of teaching itself as a kind of inquiry (and certainly,
to state the lesser claim, to conceive of teaching as entailing inquiry into its
own practices and "objects," and into its subject matters--all of which for some
temperaments, such as my own, will necessarily mean, into its
presuppositions and ambitions or purposes). When I would first have said
that my pedagogical upbringing was organized around such a principle, I am
not sure (though I was content enough with the phrase I learned at Prospect
School, "examined practice"1)«but I say it with conviction now. I will return
to this idea from time to time as I proceed.

At this juncture, the main consequences of the idea of inquiry in teaching
as part of teaching are as follows. To begin with, though I did not think of
myself as undertaking a study while teaching Brendan, I did maintain a
teaching journal that included notes about individual students and the
group, curriculum plans and thoughts, musings about what I was doing and
why and where I thought it might be going wrong or right, occasional
quotations from things I was reading that seemed relevant to children in that
class or to me as a teacher, etc. I also kept most of the more ephemeral traces
of my teaching such as charts and posters, planning notes, notes to me from
students or my colleague and host, Alyjah Byrd, and the like. I saved
photocopies or typescripts of a large proportion of the children's writings;
and, certainly, I saved the "Fable Book" produced by the class. So there is a
good deal of data arising directly from my teaching of this class. The
collection of that data is explained by the preexistent assumption that teaching
entails inquiry in two ways.

One, my education prior to certification and as a novice at Prospect set
in place (and my continuing work there confirmed, challenged, and
elaborated) two key practices: the collection and preservation of children's
work products in order to allow study of individuals' modes of thought,

 

1 See for example, (Prospect, 1984), and its reference to "an emphasis on reflection and
discussion as vital to the role of the teacher" (p. 2).

228

 

characteristic imagery, and the like (see, for example, Alberty, 1987; Carini,
1987, 1991, 8: 1995); Prospect, 1984 8: 1985); the regular maintenance of
narrative records on each student and on each group (mixed-age group
combining several "grades"), in order to document and appraise learning and
the curriculum. These were two habits I valued deeply«a valuation largely
due to my experience with "Descriptive Process" as developed and practiced at
Prospect by Patricia Carini and other colleagues (see, e.g., Carini, 1975;
Changing Minds, 1998; Prospect, 1986), about which I will have somewhat
more to say subsequently«and it is hard to imagine that I would not have
continued them in one way or another under any circumstances.

Two, the school in which I taught Brendan was a professional
development school (see, e.g., Holmes Group, 1990 8: Navarro, 1997); also see
[Roosevelt, 1993a 8: 1993b] committed to practice-based research and to on-
going dialogue between school and university based participants in the
partnership. So, part of the context for my work with Brendan was my
regular conversation with Alyjah Byrd about students, writing, evaluation,
writing across the curriculum, and other topics of interest to each of us. Thus
a dimension of publicness«"reflection": the looking at and talking about
teaching that is so often not a part of teaching«was deliberately built into this
setting. It was, in turn, logical for me to seek to work in such a place upon
entering graduate school: having made a commitment to not stray too far
from actual classrooms, having the commitment to "examined practice" as a
critical element of teaching (and as a necessary part of school reform), and
having the related idea of teaching as inquiry latent and developing, all of
this enhanced by being in a doctoral program, a place where "research" is the
institutional norm and desideratum.

In addition to the data just referenced, available data concerning
Brendan includes an interview with a former teacher of his ("LG"). This is
data of two kinds: One, it is data I use to support some of my statements
about how Brendan's writing is "likely" to strike some or many teachers (and
it gives evidence that I was not alone in judging Brendan to have made
significant progress, substantively and technically, as a writer); Two, it is part
of the trail of signs that something I will recognize as a research project is
taking shape: A proposal to AERA for a paper about "distressing content" in
children's writing, taking Brendan's as the focus of the discussion, in the
summer of 1993; the interview with LG in the fall of '93, followed by a paper
(unpublished) analyzing that interview; the presentation of the proposed
paper at AERA in the winter of '94 (Roosevelt, 1994); subsequent submission
of that paper for publication (Roosevelt, 1998); etc. My key themes were
emerging with greater clarity and complexity over this process«this now quite
lengthy process«of re—visiting the same material repeatedly, re-reading and
re-writing, with all the accruals of relevant fragments from the rest of the life
that is going on at this time. (With Brendan always in mind, when I come
across letters by Elizabeth Bishop in The New Yorker, they speak to me about
Brendan and the process of revision, how his texts relate to each other, as if
they have been waiting for me; several years later, her phrase, "you have

229

 

 

 

worked hard and felt deeply" comes back into mind as a description, for me,
of the inquiry process itself«in the moments when it seems to be making or
to have made any progress.) This entailment of most of the themes of a life
in an on-going and expansive writing project is, for me, itself an element of
the research method.

Conceptualizing the study, data collection and analysis

By the time I taught C.J., Cameron, A'dona, and others discussed in
Chapters 3 and 4, in 1994-95, I not only knew that I had a study project in
motion, I knew I was working on a dissertation. My procedures for collecting
data then properly became more systematic, and my strategies for analysis also
became more systematic and more deliberate. It is true, though, to say that
this dissertation wasn't then envisioned: it grew out of a process of
reiteration, a discursive process of bouncing between the need to figure out
what to do tomorrow or to get a grip on today, the need to admit or
acknowledge but not be overwhelmed by the often emotional fluctuations of
teaching and critically reflecting on teaching, the need to give the mind room
to follow fancies and hear allusions in the effort to gain some grasp of the
meanings of the inexhaustibly rich field that daily teaching presents. All
these needs were brought into sharper focus by the decision to ground the
dissertation in that year of teaching and data collection«though I'd argue,
with Wilson (1995, November) that the conjunction of the teaching and
research, while it complicated life for me in some ways, benefited both
activities. (Indeed, this research could not have been conducted in any other
site but my own teaching.)

Data I collected, then, begin with my journal«as stated earlier, "the
journal was for me a recording space (my major way, in addition to collecting
work, of keeping track of what children were doing, what plans and
agreements we had made and so forth), a reflective space (a place to raise
questions and to critique my practice; sometimes, a place to let off steam), and
a place where I did some but not all of my planning."2 There are
approximately 200 pages of such data; I'll have more to say about the uses of
the journal in a moment. Additionally, I collected student work (generally in
the form of photocopies) amounting to about 1000 pages (which is virtually
the entire workshop output of those students featured in the dissertation, the
same for a good many others, and a large sampling from everyone in the
class). Liberal use of both of these data sources is evident throughout the
dissertation. I also made something close to 60 hours' worth of audio tape of

 

2 I do not have "fieldnotes" as such, though the journal includes many passages that are
equivalent to them. The journal is both a means of documenting and, as I will further develop
below, a place for hypothesizing, seeking patterns and linkages across events, framing and re-
framing issues of concern or interest—beginning the analytic process, in other words, while
continuting to accumulate material. In Erickson's terms, the journal was one place for
"converting documentary resources into...data" (1986, p. 149).

230

__ .-l

 

 

classroom discussions (generally, of the beginning meeting; occasionally of
sharing time and some conferences), and I have approximately 25 hours'
worth of interviews with students, conducted by colleagues, outside of my
presence. These data sources have been used more sparingly, generally, to
enhance, corroborate, or correct information gleaned from other sources.
Finally, the data set includes a modest amount of video-tape, occasional
interviews with colleagues, and observation notes by outside observers.

My teaching journal is a repository of significant data about what
children did and said and how they appeared and sounded, about colleagues'
remarks and opinions, about my actions, my thoughts and plans and
misgivings and moods. More even then these, though, it was itself a
conceptual-analytic tool, a way not only of registering but of trying to use self-
consciousness, a place to work«in rough and unfinished, preliminary,
tentative ways«on identifying, using, re-casting central ideas. (A set of
procedures about which my consciousness was certainly heightened by the
knowledge I was in fact conducting "a research project") As Erickson put it in
his seminal essay on qualitative method:

In fieldwork, induction and deduction are in constant dialogue...
(T)he researcher pursues deliberate lines of inquiry while in the field,
even though the specific terms of inquiry may change in response to
the distinctive character of events in the field setting... (T)erms of
inquiry may also be reconstructed in response to changes in the
fieldworker's perceptions and understandings...

(1986 p. 121)

Ideas that shaped and in turn were shaped, repeatedly, discursively, by my
project are held in key "terms of inquiry"; the often subtle changes in this
vocabulary, and the changes in the objects of the key words, record much of
the history of the inquiry and illustrate something of the "dialogic" method
spoken of by Erickson. Consider, for example, this excerpt from my teaching
journal of the year before I taught C.J. et. al. It was late May, I was looking
back over the year, and over my journal for the previous few weeks, and
looking ahead to 1994-95«a year in which I wanted to improve my ability to
create for myself a teaching "space" within the larger environment, the year
that would be my principal year of data collection.

I think there are a couple of big issues troubling me about this year:
It's been a lousy year in many respects, very little feeling of
accomplishment, little to show for it, and still unable to count on a
modicum of quiet, decency, and concentration...

...Weds., I said something to K about needing to do the
writing part of the collaborative assignment3 (he'd been out Mon.,

 

3 An unsatisfctory assignment in which everyone in the class had to make a drawing and / or

231

 

 

eager on Tues. to do the drawing/ directing part)«interrupting him
while he was, as usual, drawing Mortal Kombat type stuff«he was near
to tears [at being diverted from what he was doing]--"but remember,
you just have to work some of the time today on the assignment, not
the whole time" [I said]«which is not a new rule and has often been
stated before (though as suggested in Descriptive Review4 it may be he
doesn't think of it as applying to him unless he and his situation are
specified, named). Again,5 I thought of that, not really as a lack of trust
in me, but a lack of trust in the situation to be workable, sustainable,
maybe pleasurable for him...

Also on Weds, T_ complained to me that N__ was on the
computer (they are to be sharing one of them) and he hadn't had a turn
for a while. I asked if he'd talked to her about whose turn it was, asked
if it could be his turn now, etc.; he hadn't, I urged him to do so, to
make an attempt-«"No," [he said,] "she'll just say no...," again a little
teary / whiny, as he gets«frustrated with me. I didn't do it for him; I
did say something about how he had to trust that sometimes things
could work out, and at least to try. Next day, he did«on his own?«talk
to her, "N_, can I have a turn tomorrow?" "Sure." I said
something to him / looked questioningly at him-~he to me, with his
most babyish (but real, and really doubtful), winning smile,
"...sometimes things do work out."6...

I think the incident with K___ marks the point of going from
having started to explicitly perceive the issue in terms of "trust" to
using trust as a way of interpreting something (K__'s tears); the
T_ story is another one of using trust to interpret, and to perceive,
but comes as confirmation that trust is the (an, a major) issue.

It took me a few more days to realize that, of course, if they can't
"trust in the situation," the way they then act--act in constant

 

write a set of "instructions," all of these going into a box, and everyone then drawing one out,
and composing a story to go with the drawing / instructions made by a classmate.

4 We had conducted a "Descriptive Review of a Child" (one of the Propect Center
"Descriptive Processes," see below), on K_ several weeks previsously.

5 I had just been reflecting on an incident, too long to quote here, but sadly symbolic: There
had been a partial eclipse of the sun a few weeks earlier. To my amazement, school district
policy was that children could not be outside during this time and all blinds had to be drawn«
no attempt was made to employ safe methods of observing the eclipse, it was just to be shut out.
I had planned to have the class write about the eclipse; failing that, I meant at least to say
something about it«and to see if there was a way I could bend the rules a bit to take some
advantage of the remarkable occassion. While I was writing something on the board, right at
the beginning of the workshop session, lots of students had jumped up and "snuck" over to the
window to peek out. This had seemed to me to reflect a lack of trust«less a lack of trust in me as
an individual than a conviction that the setting, the situation as a whole, would not be in any
way responsive to their interest in the phenomenon occurring right outside the windows.

6 A statement eerily anticipating C.J.'s conclusion "that things really do happen."

232

 

 

anticipation of things going wrong/unremedied/etc.--will make it
extremely difficult for me to trust them...
(Journal, 5 / 26 / 94)

The reference to "trust in a situation" is to the following comment of Dewey's
which I had been turning over and over in my mind for some time.

Confidence is a good name for what is intended by the term directness.
It should not be confused, however, with self-confidence which may be
a form of self-consciousness«or of "cheek." Confidence is not a name
for what one thinks or feels about his attitude; it is not reflex. It
denotes the straightforwardness with which one goes at what he has to
do. It denotes not conscious trust in the efficacy of one's powers but
unconscious faith in the possibilities of the situation. It signifies rising
to the needs of the situation.

(1966, p. 114)

In the journal entry, I am trying out the usefulness for me of an idea
about "trust," having some time previously thought that "confidence" would
be a key word. (The difference may appear slight, and the "faith" which is at
the heart of "confidence" will reappear; however, the shift from confidence
to trust was also a shift away from the word that so readily takes "self" as a
prefix-~thus to focus on me as the teacher«to the word that points a little
more generally to the totality of a situation and the interactions within it. I
was not entirely clear on this at the time, though I was much absorbed with
the idea that the students needed to feel "faith in the possibilities of the
situation," needed, in fact, to feel, as I sometimes put it, that "the situation
would rise to meet them.") Thinking back to observations and perceptions
that have been troubling me, looking ahead to working in similar
circumstances with a new group of fourth graders«similar but changed
circumstances, as I will be conducting the dissertation--I am both sensitive to
manifestations of the idea that has been "occupying my life" (in Winnicott's
phrase)«trust in one variant or another«and attempting to use that idea to
interpret, to further my understanding (and perhaps that of the boy who
wanted to use the computer) of situations. There are many more such
instances, and examples of efforts to use the Dewey quote; here, I am not
trying to trace their entire history, but to give the reader a view of one
important way I used the journal-~specifically, and other writing occasions
(analytic memos, email correspondence, proposals, papers)«for conceptual-
analytic purposes. (This usage was furthered by and examined in the many
important conversations that were also very much a part of the method of
designing and doing the dissertation. I will return to these.)

‘ Over the next five to six months (and beyond), still thinking about
"trust," and picking up in connection with that questions about the teacher's

233

“I ll"
. ._‘_-_

 

 

need, as I saw it, to be "responsive" (a term key to my initial thinking about
my actions and obligations in connection with Brendan's writing7),
wondering how we learn to be responsive and how we judge the obligations
and limits of responsiveness, I was focusing particularly on an idea that had
at one point been in the title of a draft of a dissertation proposal, the teacher's
"construction of a necessary self" (see Goffrnan, 1959). This focus was
continuous with the interest in "self-confidence" mentioned in passing
above: that is, I asked, how did I, as someone who often thought of himself as
lacking in self-confidence, create a persona or "self" displaying enough
confidence to (sometimes) get the job done? (Was this a matter of
"straightforwardness" or what Dewey in that same context«a chapter titled
"The Nature of Method" [1966, emphasis added]«refers to as
"wholeheartedness"? ) And how might learning about this illuminate other
ways in which I, and other teachers, shaped or constructed a self, identity,
persona, suitable for the work, work in which one's personal preferences,
needs, etc., are by definition are not primary? Noting that Dewey seemed to
be cautioning against prefixing "self" to confidence, I took some support for
this line of inquiry from another educational philosopher, Israel Scheffler,
who argues that "the teacher is not reducible to the operations he
performs...," going on to propose that:

The teacher in a free society...influences students not only through his
[sic] activity, but by his identity... (C)ommitted to honoring the
student's quest for understanding...the teacher is...forced to a
heightened self-awareness.

(1967, pp. 86-87, emphasis added)

Ideas about the construction of self in teaching continue to be of
interest to me, and they have to some extent reappeared, in changed form,
towards the end of the dissertation work, as I find myself more and more
dwelling upon children doing a kind of work deserving of the name
"artistic," with art imp1ying«entailing«transformation both in the self of the
maker and in the self of the viewer/ reader, one of whom in this context is the
teacher.3 However, for the very reasons that the construction«and the
stepping aside from-~self is of interest, it was not a suitable«nor even a
possible--focus during the teaching, precisely because if teaching becomes too
self-referential, solipsistic even, it fails as teaching«instrumentally, as well as
morally. Aligned to this fact is another: When teaching, if afflicted by self-
doubt, the most important remedy I have found is to concentrate your

 

7 The version of Chapter 2 which I presented at AERA was subtitled, "Dilemmas of Teacher
Responsiveness in a Writing Workshop."

8 And this has recently prompted me to ask, to be the kind of teacher I aim to be, to do the
kind of teaching I aspire to do, do I have to know, from experience, that art can be
transformative? And what kind of knowledge, short of religious experience, is that? (And how
would such knowledge be verified, "validated"?)

234

 

 

 

thoughts, powers of observation and description, not on self but on the
students and their workings.9 The time to "interrogate" the self of the teacher
is not when it is altogether hesitant and unsure (though that position may
usefully prompt interrogation), but when some quality of robustness is
present in the teaching-learning relationship(s).

Indeed, even in the context in which I quoted Scheffler, a proposal to the
Spencer foundation, the question of investigating the construction of
teacherly identity is so clearly only accessible--only of interest, certainly—in the
context of the relationships, that it is in retrospect clear I had at that time no
very clear idea of a method for that investigation--a method that now seems
to me must be, at least initially, one of indirection. In the proposal, in the
early stages of teaching and trying to figure out how to teach C.J., I describe his
"violent" stories, and his "cold" demeanor, his reputation for "lying and
denying," his apparent untrustworthiness, etc. I ask,

How am I to read (C.J.'s) stories? What kind of an audience-disturbed,
skeptical, patient, critical, curious«ought I to be? What kinds of
commentary, or silence, might be constructive, towards what end?
What degree of understanding must I achieve to be the right reader--
hence, teacher--for these texts?

Spencer Proposal10 (Nov. 1994, p. 3)

These are in fact good questions, ones which helped clarify some of the
available teacherly choices and their entailments, and they're certainly related
to questions about "constructing a necessary self"«however, the last question
clearly takes me away from introspection and into the texts themselves, and
there, not at the entire expense of introspection and self-conscious fashioning
of an attitude or persona but as their context, is where, as the reader has seen,
I spend a good deal of both my pedagogic and my analytic energy.

In the same essay, I continue as follows:

...(T)here is the child with a reputation for lying and the teacher
explicitly confronted with questions of when to present trust or good
faith, when to manifest doubt, when to disbelieve. Here, I face, in a
small arena, a moral choice akin to that identified by Vaclav Havel
when he distinguishes between optimism, "the conviction that
something will turn out well," and hope, "the certainty that something
makes sense, regardless of how it turns out" (1990, p. 181).

(1994, p. 3)

 

9 This in turn«this form of attending--is to be open to the possibility of "transformation" I
have just mentioned, the same possibility both Scheffler and Dewey in their ways speak of as a
necessary possibility.

10 "Constructing a Self: Studying Trust and Responsiveness in Teaching."

235

 

 

 

Here I am visibly using a good deal of the vocabulary that will indeed come to
dominate this work; equally clearly, in choosing "hope" as characterized by
Havel, a preoccupation with self is likely to interfere (in that hope is an
attitude towards the world, in that it is a choice, if it is a choice, like the choice
of "wholeheartedness"). As I have attempted to show, in choosing hope of
this sort, in focusing on C.J. and his texts, I eventually come across the idea
that it is his doubting of me that is centrally at issue here. Coming to that
realization, with the journal as a vital tool for the arrival (cf. those "frequent
ruminations on trust" earlier referred to and the many journal entries cited
in telling of C.J.) and trying to make something of it, in turn become for me
the idea of "teaching as acts of attention"«work in which "using the self" is
indeed very important, but no more so than "stepping aside from self."

Although the last several extended quotations have not come directly
from my teaching journal«these being more accessible and ready to use than
relevant passages in the journal--they are illustrative of the larger point I am
trying to make, which is simply that certain key words and ideas were
regularly turned over in my mind, the journal, conversations with others,
and various formal writing projects along the way«papers, proposals--being
the sites for that turning over, a turning over which was always checked,
prodded, obscured, helped by the daily activities of teaching and of data
collecting or documenting through descriptive journal entries and through
early readings of the children's work.

As data, per se, the children's work is self-evidently the most
significant resource for the dissertation. From it, and from my attempts to
engage with it, the central narratives, images, and themes«e.g., of morally
effective action, of identity, of self, of hurt, of consciousness, of
transformation-~are drawn, and the most crucial evidence for my arguments
and suggestions is always to be found in the children's actual words, usually
their written words ("objectifications," "artifacts"). Obviously, I have tried to
make some of my readings of that work visible, and to invite the reader into
that activity conceptually (through the idea of "sympathetic reading") and
practically (e.g., through the tracing of "correspondences").

But I should say a little more about some of the "schools" in which I
have learned "how to read." One way is through my high school and college
education as a reader of English and American literature (as well as a person
with aspirations to write literature, specifically, poetry). My teachers«in
particular Robert Pack (see for example, Hall, Pack, 8: Simpson, 1957; Pack,
1980; 8: Pack 8: Parini, 1991), who was not only my teacher, adviser, and thesis
director in college, but also the teacher of my most influential high school
English teacher, Kurt Heinzelman«were for the most part direct and largely
undogmatic, slightly conservative, adherents of "new criticism" (see, to cite
only a sample, Brooks 8: Warren; 1943 8: Brooks, 1947); sometimes, as in the
Cases of Pack and Heinzelman, they were poets themselves. From these
people, and others too numerous to mention here, I learned a great deal
about how to do "close readings" (also see in respect of this, for example,

236

 

 

Abrams, 1971; Booth, 1988; Frye, 1957; Kermode, 1983; 8: Nemerov, e.g., 1978)
and was almost entirely ignorant of the heavy winds of "theory" then
beginning to blow in this country. I have tried to apply much of what I
learned from them, for which I am deeply grateful, to my readings of the
children's writings. Another place of learning to read was Prospect, and the
methods of close description initiated by Pat Carini (1975, 1979, etc.) who cites
the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in particular as one of her primary
influences, and developed by her in association with others. These are
methods«attentive ones, I should like to say«that emphasize patience and
taking care. Acknowledging that of interpretation there is for humans no
end, they nonetheless begin by attempting descriptions«of pieces of work for
example; the process originated in processes for the description of children
and their modes of engagement in the world«that stick at first as close to the
literal and the "merely descriptive" as possible, a process which urges the
observer to be as immersed as possible in the "facticity," the present actuality,
of the work, before entertaining, and as a means towards entertaining, the
more imaginative and evocative activities of interpretation. One way of
doing some of this with writing is by copying it, transcribing it, a process I will
touch upon later. My continued efforts to "learn how to read" have also
benefited from Dewey (e.g., 1960 8: 1966), Rosenblatt (1938 8: 1978), and
Scholes (1989). Finally, a school from which I have benefited greatly is a now
long established custom of wandering the museums and galleries and once in
a while artists' studios of New York City with my friend, the artist Steel
Stillman, looking at and talking about the art«a process that has educated my
eye and helped my tongue make better connections with eye and ear.

What kind of a study is this?: "First-person" inquiry in teaching

How can we know the dancer from the dance?
W. B. Yeats, Among School Children (1956, pp. 212-214 [VIII, 64])

My study, then, belongs to and is informed by a broad family of
interpretive work in "the human sciences"--which is certainly not to claim
that the study is informed by all members of that now very large family: a
small subset only.11 A particularly clear and concise characterization of a
fundamental way of thinking about inquiry in this tradition is offered by
Clifford Geertz when he distinguishes between "experimental science in
search of law" and "interpretive science in search of meaning" (1973, p. 5,
emphasis added). Geertz's work and his Wittegenstein-influenced emphasis

‘

1 1 I am by no means attempting to review or do justice to the many fields of research within
this family; I am trying, rather, to identify those resources which, by dint of long exposure or
engagment, or by virtue of timeliness or serendipity of encounter, have been especially
important to me; at the same time, I maintain that the resources I cite are significant members
of this "family."

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on "finding our feet with others" (in 1973, p. 5)«which necessarily includes
finding our way about in the language which lies between us, the language in
which we make some kind of abode«as an essential ingredient of the inquiry-
-inquiry not, as it is perhaps no longer as necessary to insist upon as it once
was, for the purposes of prediction and control, but for the purposes of
understanding and relating«has been an important source of conceptual
reassurance as I have worked on this project, not to mention a source of
inspiration for the quality of his writing and the bold tactfulness of his
insights. And "thick description" is a practice I hope now and again to have
performed. But the fundamental challenge and the risk in this sort of work is
not of course, as Geertz knows and repeatedly reminds, strictly procedural: it
is, rather the desire and the willingness to go after "meaning, that elusive and
ill defined pseudo-entity" (1973, p. 29). Patricia Carini, trained as a
psychologist and philosopher rather than an anthropologist, a student of
children and childhood, will say, in a similar spirit, "...meaning is not a thing,
an object, or an entity itself. Rather, meaning designates the experience of
relatedness which enhances and makes more vivid each of the events or
persons it joins. For meaning to arise, there must be recognition. Hence,
meaning addresses an underlying unity among persons..." (Carini, 1979, p.
15); she goes on to make the important qualifying statement that "(t)he effect
of recognition is to articulate the distance of the person from the thing... That
is, unity is not identity" (p. 16).

The reader will hear echoes of my earlier discussion of "sympathetic
reading" as, for example, entailing being "vulnerable, subjective," and of it
and "thinking" as requiring a "sense of sharing in the consequences," and
being dependent upon "recognition." Certame reading and re—reading have
been important methods of study--of seeking meaning«in this project. In
addition to reading the children's work, though, there is the reading and re-
reading of my teaching journal. For its existence and usefulness I am again
indebted to Carini (see, for example, 1979; 1982; and Prospect Center, 1986)--
who has taught me just about everything I think I know about observation--
and to the tradition of "interpretive fieldwork research" in education, in
particular, to its ways of working and its theoretical and epistemological
assumptions and ambitions as articulated in Erickson's seminal essay«taking,
for example, "the nature (and content) of the meaning-perspectives of teacher
and learners as intrinsic to the educational process," as I do, locating a "central
research interest in human meaning in social life and in its elucidation and
exposition by the researcher" (1986, pp. 121, 120, 119, etc.). Carini speaks of and
instructs "the reflective observer...(one who is) simultaneously receptive and
evocative," going on to reiterate that "(a)ll observation...is an act of
interpretation" and that "the [i.e., written, represented,] observation is
necessarily and always a narrative, or a fiction, which, no matter how well
buttressed, is one among many such possible accounts" (1982, pp. 7 8: 8). The
observer Carini depicts, to be a human being engaging in other humans'
possibilities of meaning, must try to practice looking as "a devoted
immersion and concentration..." in the persons and activities of interest (p.

238

18). This is a tricky stance, in which the self must be quite fully invested, yet
also disinterested: seeking to learn and to "recognize," not seeking to benefit,
taking care not to project one's own actualities and acuities onto those
observed. As Carini writes, observation of this sort "is to discover what you
recognize in the world, and, in discovering it, to find a part of yourself and
your thought mirrored back through the world" (p. 15)«a great benefit for the
observer and indeed a kind of validity check, but not the purpose of the
observation; again: "The effect of recognition is to articulate the distance of
the person from the thing... That is, unity is not identity” (1979, p. 16). And,
in terms echoing the Kantian imperative that persons be regarded as ends not
means: "(F)amiliarity is, generally speaking, a block to visibility... To the
degree...that people are viewed as familiar objects, interesting only in terms of
what they have to offer in fulfillment of personal need, they cannot truly be
recognized or seen" (p. 26). Thus the methodological requirements of
observation are at root ethical as well as practical: the repeated injunction to
oneself as an observer to describe, to be patient, to try and defer the more
active forms of interpretation, and to subsequently go back and describe the
interpretations themselves«all these, and the familiar strategy of
"triangulation," (see, e.g., Bogdan 8: Biklen, 1982), juxtaposing and
challenging any one observation with other data (an outsider's observation,
an interview, a piece of child work, a subsequent observation by me)--the
reapproach through re-description and re-interpretation to open up
possibilities of meaning rather than to close them down or seek to fix them
unshakably--all of these are, of course, efforts to do justice to the integrity and
indeterminacy of the other, to assert distance and open-endedness in the
midst of seeking recognition and relatedness. One word for summing up
these requirements is to say they call for "tactfulness" (van Manen, 1990; also
see 1991); another«a way of trying to enact tact through process--is say they
call for being "as deliberative as possible" (Erickson, 1986, p. 140), for instance,
through the "dialog" between data collection and terms of inquiry earlier
discussed, for "the central issue of method is to bring research questions and
data collection into a consistent relationship, albeit an evolving one"
(Erickson, 1986, p. 141).

All of this is to identify some strong individual strands in the broad
field of interpretive inquiry into human affairs and meanings, strands or
voices that provide me theoretical context and methodological direction--
particularly, perhaps, with reference to shaping and disciplining the attitudes
with which data is collected, pondered, and asked to speak. All of the scholars
just cited discuss ways of thinking about and conducting inquiry into human
affairs«however, it is clear that there is a branch of this research family not
yet mentioned, a branch that more immediately locates my project, the
branch concerned with inquiry that is itself a doing larger than inquiry alone,
an inquiry within "doing." I am referring in general terms to the body of
first-hand, first-person accounts of teaching from the practitioner's point of
view, a still-emerging genre that encompasses a large array of works over the

239

past 30-40 years,12 many of which are increasingly interested in identifying
themselves as forms of "research": that is, among other things, to claim a
rightful place in the arguments of theory. This "first-person" work--
sometimes journalistic or autobiographical, sometimes akin to "qualitative
case study," sometimes in the manner of an essay, sometimes polemical«that
looks at practice "from the inside" (Ball, in press) proposes that
understanding of teaching and knowledge about its premises and possibilities
can singularly, distinctively (but not solely) be generated from a point of view
interior to the design, execution, and perusal of that practice. Within this
genre, in turn, are bodies of work that is not only retrospective, work that, as
inquiry in teaching," is, in Ball's terms "planful," (p. 4)«here, we hearken
back to the traditions of the "lab school" and other deliberative settings
designed to learn from and about and to improve practice while
simultaneously conducting, documenting, and studying it (see for example,
Mayhew and Edwards, 1936; DeLima, 1942; Pratt, 1990, and, again, Carini and
the Prospect School, as well as the professional development school
initiatives previously referred to). Shulman spoke to current scholarly
interest in this particular part of the family at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the
American Educational Research Association when, honoring the work of
Deborah Ball, he characterized her research as, in Dewey's terms,
"experimental" (in the sense of being rooted in questions and investigations,
while involving real purposes and genuine interactions amongst
participants) and "naturalistic" (occurring in authentic settings, reported in
congruent ways) (Shulman, 1994). Ball herself speaks of "an epistemology of
practice which structures and examines the work [of teaching] from the
inside" (in press, p. 17)«thus (framing it in this way) to draw attention to the
teacher-inquirer's opportunity to "design«not just...the methodology but...the
phenomenon and its context as well" (p. 34); her statement also repeats the
proposition that knowledge generated from within this intimate nexus of
pedagogical aim and act and intellectual curiosity and study will have a
particular character, a particular claim on its audience, not to be found
elsewhere. Research of this sort--perhaps because it is aware of, and
unashamed of, its contingency; perhaps because it knows it will only begin to
find its way, its voice, in the act of relating itself«finds itself favoring
narrative modes of representation, Shulman suggested, a point taken up by
Jerome Bruner later in the same AERA meeting. Echoing Geertz's distinction
between the search for "law" and the search for "meaning," Bruner proposed
that narrative is especially apt for inquiry in the human sciences because it
seeks understanding rather than explanation (I do not look to say why C.J.
writes as he does but rather to enter in to the worlds and the meaning-

 

12 See, for instance: Ashton-Warner (1986), Ayers (1993), Ball (e.g., 1993), Ball 8: Wilson,
(1996), Branscombe, Goswami, 8: Schwartz (1992), Cochran-Smith 8: Lytle (1993), Duckworth
(1987), Goswami and Stillman (1987), Heaton (1994), Hoffman (1996), Howard (1989), Kohl
(e.g., 1967), Lampert (e.g., 1985, 1990), Lensmire (e.g. 1994a), Paley (e.g., 1995), Richardson
(1964), Streib (1985), (Suzuka, 1996, April), Traugh et. a1. (1986), Wilson (e.g., 1993).

240

structures offered by those writings) (Bruner, 1994). It is in the spirit of these
ideas about what constitutes viable first-person inquiry into the human
processes of teaching and learning that my own project is conceived, and that
my choice of "story" as a mode of representation~~as a form both of reporting
and of analysis-sis defended. Finally, though, the "ways of seeing" I find
myself relying upon most heavily are underwritten by Dewey (as far as I read
him) and by the Romantic tradition (as far as I know and read it).

I suggested, of first-hand inquiry in teaching, that "knowledge
generated from within this intimate nexus of pedagogical aim and act and
intellectual curiosity and study will have a particular character, a particular
claim on its audience, not to be found elsewhere"--what are some facets of
that character? Most obviously, as the researcher within the practitioner, I
have access to intention in a way that an "outsider" could not. In a related
point, as Ball stresses, I am in the position of designing my own practice--
albeit within the constraints of familiarity, that is, the far more extensive
practices around me in which my students are most of the time immersed--
and thus can pursue questions, interests, and purposes (deeply personal,
deeply practical) that unmistakably belong to the practice, rather than, as an
"outsider" bringing those questions, interests, and purposes to a practice
which they likely would not fit. It is not pure access that I have to my
purposes and interests, for I can be as dishonest with, or blind to, myself as
anyone else; still, I live with these intentions as the teacher«and my hopes,
fears, disappointments, pleasures--in a way no other researcher could.
Indeed, duration is a key factor: As the teacher, I live with the practice and
the students more intensely, over a longer period of time than any other
observer, no matter how dedicated, possibly could; as the researcher, I choose
to "live with" the students, their work, my records, my thoughts and moods
and efforts, long after the "real time" of the teaching is over. Cochran-Smith
and Lytle maintain that "teacher research makes accessible...unique
perspectives on teaching and learning" (1993, p. 23, emphasis added), and in
this sense they are surely correct: no else can live "in-there," nor see from the
vantage point of "in-there." I do not, however, wish exactly to claim a
privileged position for my study "from the inside." There are sound political
reasons for doing so (again see Cochran-Smith 8: Lytle, 1993; 8: Traugh et. al.,
1986) with which I am entirely in sympathy, bub-perhaps naively--those do
not seem to me to be at issue in this work.

So, I claim that the perspective provided by my location on "the inside"
is different--superior for some purposes, inferior for others, it does not take
the place of other perspectives, other ways of generating knowledge and
understanding about teaching; it does, finally, provide and stem from the
personal in ways other research cannot. And yet the study is not intended to
be about me as an individual, no matter how much it draws upon particular,
concrete, actual moments of my teaching life, and this in two ways. First,
while I have special access to my "interior" states of willing, fearing, seeking,
intending, attending, and so forth--I can "interrogate" these differently from
an outsider; as a researcher choosing to live with them over time, I can shape

241

and name and re-name and seek to understand those states in way no
external observer could«but, I am trying to learn about, and learn how to
represent and speak about, such states as ones which any teacher inhabits,
inevitably, versions of, and I am trying to understand, represent, and
illuminate "attention," for example, as an aspect of teaching that I argue
many teachers and students of teaching could benefit from understanding
better, thinking about, being more conscious and deliberative about. Thus my
"self" and my "interior" are tools or means for getting at those issues, not
ends presumed to be of interest or significance in themselves. Second, every
argument I make or speculation I hazard is, to the fullest extent of which I am
capable, contextualized, bounded, and governed by representations of the
children and their work. They are the point and the boundary condition;
"the Case," as Dewey concludes The Child and the Curriculum, "is of Child."
Ball, echoing or mirroring Carini's statement that "unity does not
equal identity," stipulates that "this kind of research requires...an unusual
concentration on and use of self, combined with an almost unnatural
suspension of the personal," going on to ask, "(h)ow can distance and insight
be composed in...this genre of research such that the inside view is coupled
with analysis, that belief and conviction born of intimate involvement is
threaded with skepticism and critical perspective?" (in press, pp. 46 8: 60);
Heaton points out "the fragility of studying one's own practice" (1994, p. 58,
emphasis added). The "suspension of the personal" and the "composition of
distance," echoing Keats on "negative capability" (1959) and Kohl on "the
suspension of ego in teaching" (1984), point to special challenges and
possibilities of this kind of research and, not surprisingly, bring us again to a
juncture where the vocabulary of inquiry and the vocabulary of pedagogy
merge: for the effort to "step aside from the self" is necessary equally to
teaching that treats students as "ends in themselves" and to inquiry that has
the possibility of coming upon the unforeseen, unanticipated, and even the
unwelcome. At the same time, the self is the lens through which any seeing
is done at all. Heaton's comment speaks to the two-ended vulnerability here:
on the one hand, the inquirer working "from the inside" is subject to self-
regard in all its thousand variations, always in danger of trimming the
evidence to suit the self and so on; on the other hand, this self is also
exposing itself to others' gaze, seen as well as seer. Two traditional means of
mitigating these vulnerabilities are, one, to collect and present plenty of
plausibly "clean" data--descriptions, quotations, work samples, etc.«in
sufficiently generous manner that the reader has some opportunity to reject
interpretations based on that data, to test interpretations against the data, and
to begin to devise alternative interpretations or hypotheses. Two, there is the
qualitative research strategy of "triangulation" : providing multiple vantage
points on any particular phenomenon, for example, mine in the "real time"
of teaching and reflecting on the teaching, a child's (through quotation,
through work sample, even, more tenuously, through my description of
demeanor, etc.), an outside observer's or colleague's, mine in retrospect.
Acknowledging both that I could have made greater and more deliberative

242

 

use of, especially, the second of these, and that no measures will guarantee
the soundness of the work, I will say that I have attempted all of these
safeguards, I have searched my data for disconfirming material and
"discrepant cases," and I have deliberately tried to make my processes of
interpretation visible in the text itself. Finally, of course, the reader will have
to do what she or he can to judge the internal as well as the external validity
of the work.

Verbal activity in general, writing in particular

In the book sub-titled "the anthropologist as author," Geertz, finding
himself usefully irritated by Foucault, tries to talk sensibly about what kind of
a text a piece of ethnography is.

Two questions, or perhaps the same one doubly asked, immediately
pose themselves: (1) How is..."the author"...made manifest in the text?
(2) Just what is it«beyond the obvious tautology, "a work"«that the
author authors? The first question, call it that of signature, is a matter
of construction of a writerly identity. The second, call it that of
discourse, is a matter of developing a way of putting things«a
vocabulary, a rhetoric, a pattern of argument«that is connected to that
identity in such a way that it seems to come from it as a remark from a
mind.

Works and Lives, (1988, pp. 8-9, emphasis added)

Without a signature, there would be no warrant offered for the work, no
reason to listen to it as if it were indeed another mind (abstracted and then
embodied again in the text); without discourse (a way of going back and forth
to arrive somewhere, a way of being in language, a way of being in-between),
there would be no particular promise of anything actually to hear. For the
reason given-~not, I hope, in my hands a mere rationale--I have allowed
myself the idiosyncrasies of style, not randomly or aimlessly, but in an effort
to find a tone and a rhetoric suitable to what I am trying to say, and
minimally adequate to the children whose voices I call upon so liberally.

As for "discourse" and the etymologically identical "discursive": I
could without much exaggeration say that the entire method of this
dissertation has been verbal. I have already spoken of how I used my
teaching journal, and various other writing opportunities (e.g. AERA
proposals), as a discursive tool, as sites for the "dialog of induction and
deduction" recommended by Erickson. It remains to expand somewhat on
the role of writing and to re-insert writing where it belongs, in an often
erratic, wobbly, cycle of reading, writing, and conversing. I am fond of
quoting Forster's rhetorical question, "How shall I know what I think until I
see what I say?," and have long taken it to heart; in a recent appropriation of

243

that line, I added some remarks of my own, that "writing is not first of all a
tool for recording, or representing thought so much as a tool for sparking it
and bringing it to the surface; speech then is a way of expanding, clarifying,
and/ or muddying further; writing then builds upon talking and listening,
and upon itself«or perhaps it would be better to say writing delves deeper in
the space made by the preceding literacy activities."13 The dialogue then
involves many speakers:

Children, colleagues, and myself in actual talk in the classroom (found on
tape or in observer notes);

Children, colleagues, and myself in remembered talk of the classroom
(found in the teaching journal);

Children in actual talk outside of the classroom (in taped interviews);

Colleagues and friends in talk (mostly not recorded) outside the
classroom«most particularly Deborah Ball as my director and Jay
Featherstone as a member of my committee;

Colleagues via email, analytic memos, and various drafts of the
dissertation proposal«again, Deborah Ball figures most prominently in
these;

Myself at earlier moments,“ as captured in the journal, to a much lesser
extent in my planning notes and self-made classroom materials (charts,
etc.), and also in the writings just mentioned, as well as others recently
referenced (e.g., AERA proposals, Spencer proposal);

Children, through their writings;

The particular authors in whom I have been engrossed, who have seemed
most to speak to what I was trying to do at various times, such that I
have--doubtless more than I am aware«appropriated shadings of their
speech (e.g., Dewey, Scarry, Winnicott);

Myself, developing accruing, growing, and forgetting, through the many
drafts of most portions of this dissertation;

Colleagues and friends through written and oral comments on many of
those drafts«again, Deborah is the author of most of these comments,
she and Jay being the longest term participants in this "conversation."

My first and most important, perhaps too obvious to need making, point is
that all of this verbal activity constituted an effort to make sense out of what I
and my students were doing and saying; the many, many layers of my
writing were all efforts to grasp hold of, to portray, and to understand those

 

13 In a memo for teachers in a professional development summer institute ("Writing for
understanding: a few suggestions," 6/ 98).

14 I have in mind here«though I am not making of it the elegant use that she did«Ruth
Heaton's (1994) distinctions between herself at different times in the history of her teaching
and her analysis, captured by the device "Ruth 1, Ruth 2, Ruth 3." It is the striking usefulness
of this device in her hands that encourages me, with far less clarity or precision, to lay out
what might seem obvious.

244

 

 

doings and sayings. The journal is in many respects the foundational layer
(though the work with Brendan preceded the journal on which I rely most
heavily; though a goodly number of the emails, analytic memos, proposal
drafts, and actual conversations referred to preceded 1994-95, the year of the
journal)«it was at once a form of writing where the stakes were low«no
particular entry would necessarily ever be read by anyone else«and a crucial
site, both because it was a major source of documentation--I would have been
highly poor of data without it«and because the on-going work in it of
hypothesizing, speculating, trying out interpretations, using and shifting key
"terms of inquiry" was directly influential both on the teaching and on the
argument(s) of the dissertation. At many times, it was important to direct
myself towards highly descriptive, minimally interpretive recording in the
journal; at many other times, it was important to direct myself to engage in
interpretive play«often very serious play«with the material I was collecting.
Emails, analytic memos, and actual conversations were the least high
stakes, in that no permanent commitment seems to be made in those venues
«or rather, conversation being potentially a very deep commitment indeed, it
is expected that the verbalizing that goes on in those venues will likely be
exploratory and tentative, necessarily and properly full of mistakes, false
starts, promising trails abandoned for no reason other than the on-going press
of circumstance. Exchanges in person and via email etc. provided often
crucial moral support; more to the point here, though, they were forums for
developing and testing key ideas, they were structural elements of the
intellectual, analytic work of the dissertation (elements too easy to slight
when confronted with another basic truth, the pervasive loneliness of
writing, such that it seems like a long solitary wrestling with oneself and with
the ghost-inhabited language). One example will have to stand for a
multitude here: I had many conversations and other exchanges with
Deborah as I was deve10ping my thoughts about not only the reasonableness
of doubt but of its possible educative value. Those exchanges«and this of
course is not to hold Deborah in any way responsible for the inadequacies and
flaws of my argument«were essential to the development of the ideas. Of
course this was in part because the effort to put an idea (or for that matter, an
observation) into words inevitably involves a certain amount of defining, of
fixing in place, of holding still (with both the advantages and the weaknesses
of that "fixity"), so that I can look at "what I think"«but it was also because
over time the conversational "space" acquires a certain sturdiness, a reliability
if you will: It becomes known as a dependable laboratory for ideas. As a
researcher, I can anticipate--in, in this example, the exchanges with Deborah--
certain kinds of questions, eventually can almost predict certain questions,
and I also know there will be questions, comments, and observations I cannot
anticipate. I can know that my thoughts will be both appreciated and
challenged. Over time, as this site becomes itself ever more layered with its
own history, I can be sure I will exit from it knowing or seeing something I
did not know or see before. At the same time, I am not using "conversation"
lightly: Of course I was student and learner in these exchanges; but they were

245

also truly exchanges of ideas, experiences, guesses, observations, and
recollections, sometimes sticking closely to the text I was working on,
sometimes moving far afield from it. In the course of the work on "trust and
doubt," we eventually began to contemplate our relationship as director and
student through the lens of "doubt." It was in the course of this
contemplation that Deborah became enough persuaded there might be
something to the notion that the doubting is an active search and potentially
productive«and began to try the idea out for herself; this, in turn, greatly
helped me in persevering in what was in several ways a risky and vulnerable-
feeling part of the project. I suppose I could simply say what people generally
say in the "acknowledgments" section of a dissertation, that I have managed
to get many people to help me in my analysis«to my benefit when it works,
in no way to their discredit when it does not. But I think I mean that
sufficiently fully to make it deserve saying here. Perhaps because this is work
entailing so many "themes of a life" that conversational setting and activity
have been essential, as if I myself have had to test that setting repeatedly in
order to give the ideas breathing space.

Related, perhaps, to the last comment, is the role of time and repetition
in the doing of this dissertation. I have referred earlier to a certain obsessive
quality in writers, and of the need, as I see it, to grant some room for that
quality in child-writers if we wish to allow them the potential of doing
writing that seeks and achieves some of what'art generally seeks and can
achieve. I must also have been referring to myself«for indeed the endless
revisiting of some of my themes, the allowing or even developing of a style
which re-uses key words repeatedly, often juxtaposing them«for dimension,
for effect-~with like words that are not exact synonyms, has something of that
quality. All of this is perhaps most easily seen in a small matter of method
that I have not mentioned, and that is the transcription of the children's
works. Each piece of child writing that I have included (and many that I have
not) has been transcribed and transcribed again by me, repeatedly--sometimes,
as in the case of Brendan, in the course of teaching; always in the course of
working on drafts of various parts of the dissertation itself. (I have also
transcribed the small amount of interview data that I have made significant
use of«that incorporated into the dissertation and some lying just outside its
margins.) Repeated transcription, another technique learned from Pat Carini,
enables those words to enter into the transcriber, to be absorbed so that it is as
if in transcription I am re-speaking (and re-thinking and re-feeling and re-
meaning) them for their original speakers. That process, like all the process
of re-writing and revising that have gone into this, is of course a way of
rebuilding and restructuring the memory and the mind of the writer so that
in the vicinity of doing this work these become the essential features or
inhabitants of mind and memory--these, that is, many "speakers" I have
alluded to. This perhaps makes clear-«if clarity is needed«why it is important
that there be a goodly number of speakers, as there have been, and not just
multiple versions of the writer's own voice.

246

Another way of illustrating time, repetition, process, and method--
"interest," Dewey says, "requires attention and endurance"«is this: The
children I discuss are now to me most vivid in their pseudonyms, not their
birth names. When I first noticed that this was happening, it alarmed me; I
now accept and indeed welcome the fact, for it reminds me that I am not and
am not attempting to offer a full and just portrait or biography of the actual,
individual children:15 I am offering the most just account of which I am
capable of those places where our lives and potentials for meaning connected
which is, for the purposes of this work, largely in their work. I could not do
or aspire to do justice to their full lives; I can and do aspire to doing justice to
some dimensions of their lives in company with others' lives and works. So
when I am reminded as I write that "Cameron" is not that young man's birth
name, the reminder is salutary: "Cameron" is the assemblage of his words,
inflections, gestures, suggestions, and meaning-potentials that I have
attempted to grasp and to narrate. I have done that as honestly and truthfully
as I know how, but the actual person is of course larger and more other than
that. Those occasions when we may approach some of that "unhindered
communication" of which Dewey speaks are vital and necessary: they cannot
be total. To quote Carini again: "The portrayal of the child that emerges from
the repeated reworking of this material according to a systematic procedure is
a story, a fiction, a narrative, complex but also unfinished-~and deliberately
so" (1982, p. 20).16 "Unfinished" to remind us that this narrative must try and
resist all of what "fiction" entails; in particular, it must resist as best it can
"beginning, middle, and end-ness," leaving the reader to know and believe
that a "real life" continues on beyond these pages with whatever degree of
privacy and integrity it can manage (as Carini also says, "The person's life is
never complete nor is it incomplete..." [p. 19]«which is, again, one reason we
have stories, for this fact is at once a promising one and a tragic one).

If "method," then, understood as processes and procedures, techniques
and habits, underwritten by a deliberately shaped attitude and by accepted
ways of seeing, conversation«discursive, retentive, and repetitive«can
accomplish anything in the way of honesty and validity«truthfulness, even--
then it may not be unreasonable to hope that the work sometimes succeeds in
coming "as a remark from a mind," interested as the work is in attending to«
encouraging, investigating, illuminating--"how mind answers to mind."

 

15 To remind the reader of this same fact is doubtless why Prospect adopts the convention of
placing the pseudonym within parentheses, as in (Iris).
16 She continues in words especially apt for my readings of Brendan's work: "Finally, the
individual portrait is placed in the context of the larger myths and stories which most fully
illuminate its meaning....the myths are placed as reflectors, mirroring facets of the child's
destiny in their largest and least particular terms, and therefore, their fullest and most
collective terms" (1982, pp. 21-22).

I should also say that my procedures are not as "systematic" as the ones Carini refers to.

247

Appendix 2

248

Appendix 2
Brendan's final version of "The Garbage Can Seller," March.

part 1. the garbage can seller

Once upon a time in a very small take out store there was a man
selling garbage cans. The man that owns it is poor. He lives in a
small box. He is rich compared to his friends. He has a wicked step
brother that is rich. He owns a store that sell's everything, even
boxes. That's where henry got his box. It cost $5.99. He could afford
it because he owns a business. He has no employees because he is very
poor. One day he went to his brothers store to buy some thing for his
wife. He had no money until he got his half time job at McDonalds. His
pay is $4.69 an hour. He worked a week so he has 25.99. He bought a
can of beans and 2 boxes of cheese. He went home and when he got there
it was all wrecked and on the side of the box it said, "your mean
brother ha ha ha!" He dropped his groceries and ran to his shop and it
said the same. He ran to his brothers store to get him back but, when
he got there they got him instead.

Henry got slaughtered and his wife got killed. Before Henry's
wife died she delivered a baby.

chapter 2
14 year's later their son was fourteen and he went to the police
office to find out who killed his mother and father. He lived with his

relatives. It was his mother's sister and her husband. When he got to
the police station they gave him the files. It was a small mug shot.
The boy said "this is my next door neighbor!" 18 hour's later after

asking lots of questions the police followed him home. They went in to
the neighbor's house and found him dead on the floor the boy yelled,
"grand-pa!" The boy said "are you the dead man's dad?" The old man
said "yes." The boy asked "why did the dead man kill my dad?" The old
man said, "because he was jealous. He had no friends and your dad was
married.” Then the boy asked, "why did he kill my dad?" The man said,
"I told you he was jealous!" So, the old man said "come on let's go to
my house you can live there. Thank you Margerie." the old man was
talking to the boys aunt. It was a twenty hour drive on the way there
the old man told the boy that "the man that I killed had a gang it was
called the maaaaahb"....(sigh) It was the mob they killed the old man.
There the kid was stranded in a car with a dead guy on the driver's
seat. The kid moved the guy in the back seat and tried to drive the car
first he went backward then he went forward and there was blood all over
the windshield the kid put on the windshield wipers and said "I killed
2, guys!" the kid yelled he didn't know how to drive. the car was a
Lamborghini so he went as fast as the car could go he got there in 6
hours.

249

the garbage can seller chapter 3, the Final Fight

They brought the dead guy to the hospital but they took the
police car and forgot the car that the dead guy was in so they went back
and the car wasn't there so the police man said "the mob took em.“ It
took hours for the police to find the mob's hide out. And when they did
find it they peeked in and saw the mob having a feast the police man
said "they're eatin em“ and the boy said "no they're not stupid he's
over there," he was tied to a wood cutter the police man said "it don't
matter he's dead," the police man pulled out his walkie-talkie and was
guna call the other police men. the boy snatched it away and called in
backup. They got there in an hour and crashed the party some police men
got killed and some didn't but they got the mob. And locked them up
for 2,240 years without bail or parole.

The Inc!

(Part 2 with a different family)

Once upon a time in Chicago 1947, on the very poor side of town
was a little store owned by a man named Joey Wilcox. He lived in a very
small house with his wife. That night he dreamed that a bunch of
ruthless bandits came and burnt his house down. They were hired by his
brother Brian. Joey woke up with sweat all over him he was scared to
death. He was so scared that he went everywhere with his wife, even to
work. But they didn't care he needed an employee.

Chapter, 2 the funeral

That night they came home and Joey opened the door and BOOM Joey
got burned down to bone. When his wife got home she ran to the
neighbor's house and called the Fire department and then the cops. When
the police and the fire department got there they saw a bunch of guys
carrying Joey away in a van.

One week later Elinor wilcox was in the hospital with the doctor's
delivering a baby.

25 years later, in 1972 the baby was all grown up. He had a job
at the power plant, he worked there for a year but then he remembered
what his mom had told him about his dad, then he retired and became a
cop. 4 days on the job but then BOOM. 4 days later his funeral was
arranged 7 days later his mom got married but they didn't go on a honey
moon. that night Joey jr's ghost came back and went into his mother's
body and when her husband came home she was talking she said: "I Knma
WHO MY sow's KILLER IS GO TO THE POLICE AND TELL THEM that, " instantly her

250

husband pulled his gun and shot the woman in the head BANG but the woman
still was talking the man said im outta here. when he left he threw a
match and burnt the house down. the next day the woman was investigated

Chapter 3, Fire place,

The Fire Engines rolled in like 1,000 horses running through the
wild west.

One of the fire chief's on the scene was fire investigator Bill
Morgan.He pulled up and said, ”Okay what's the disturbance," A police
officer ran up to him and said "no sir this house was burnt last night
and a lady got shot in it. The man that shot her was friends with

Henry's brother,” "Whose Brother?" "Henry's sir." "Oh Henry's
brother, who's henry?" "He was a garbage can seller sir, and he was
homeless."

Meanwhile in the alley.

"Come on stupid rrrrh. Help me with this lady." "Uuuuuuuh, God,
what does this lady eat."
"Come on it's only a little way to the garbage can then we can split to
Saudi Arabia or Iraq we can dress like nuns and join the Iraqi army
after that grow a beard and escape then go back to New York and appear
on America's Most Wanted."

Chapter 4, the Chase

Once the fire department put out the blaze they sent the police
and the detectives, the swat team and the undercover cops the way that
the husband and his friend went. They chased them to the middle of
china town and then the two friends got on a criminal boat that was just
leaving to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a very small island with
more criminals to kill. Or maybe to kill them.

The End

251

Appendix 3

252

Appendix 3
C.J.'s "Gang War" Story (in two parts)

[Sept. '94]'

[title p.] GANG
WAR

[illustration: boy w/ brown skin, in red shirt, green
(baggy) shorts, black high tops, black cap, gun (?) in waist

band, seemingly waving.]

by C.J.

[p. 1] A long time ago on the west side. Little kids did not
like them self. Because there parent was on drugs. So one
day a little baby parents died from drugs. The baby was
threw in the river. It travaled for two weeks. He ended up
in LA. So two men came and got it. And took it home. They
already had a little boy. He was a gangster. He named the
baby Warren—G. Tryon[e?] and G liked it.

10 years later

Now he is ten years old. So him and snoop went to a dangerous

place called gang war. This is where I grew up at said snoop.

 

t

Brackets = My insertion. I have occasionall made non-italicized but still bracketed in-text
insertions when I am virtually positive insertion lea s to phonetically or otherwise more accurate readings.
Otherwise, s elling, punctuation, and capitalization are C.J.'s. Spacin throu hout is approximate. Pacge
breaks are where he made them (leading to line breaks unlike those in '5 text . This text, like most of .].'s, is
semi-corrected by him

253

 

Warren you have to take a test. What kind of test said Warren.
A test that you have to take if you want to be hard. After he
got his test they gave him a tour around the gang war. After

Warren took

his test they went to robb a store

[p. 2] Put your hands up. OK! OK! said the man take it BAM.
Warren shot the man in his head. Their the cops. Put your
hands up. I didnt do eny thing. Get in the car thanks for
geting me out. You are stupid said G. What did you do to get
in jail. Robbed a store. I shouldna got you out of the river.
now we got to leave. Come on said Tryon[e?]. What kind of
place is this now you are tryna get high. Put your hands
behind your head. Run bang bang bang bang Tyron[e?] snoop G was
dead. Warren was lonly. But he saw this African man. Him and
Warren was talking. In two weeks Warren was not a gangster. The
guy gave him a home. He got married. He had a baby boy. I
don't want Dre to grow up like me. Warren went to jail the

african man came to visit. He said I will never
help you again.

[p. 3] Warren's Wife took Dre to day care. There were a car

comeing it start shooting Warren was dead

'PHE Emu)

[p. 4]

[illustration, full page: house (blue), pockmarked with lots
of bullet holes (pencil holes through page), boy lying on

ground, clouds.]

254

[p. 5]

WARREN—G
1984 - 1999

shot 3
times
1 in the leg
2 in the heart

[illustration: the words are written in what looks like a
grave stone, at the bottom of which——on it? in front of it?-

-are 4 flowers, the right hand one lying down.]

 

[title p.]

639%} II VHUR

[illustration: little brown baby, white diapers, red cap, gun

in hand.]

[page 11

Clarence

255

When Lori got home she saw Warren was shot up.
9/22/94 She cried and criedfl’ The ambulauce came. Im sorry
he's dead. Warren had a funeral There was over 2 million

people there.

Now Dre is 7 years old. Mom do I have a dad
yes said lori. Where is he he died when you were 5 months
9/22 old. Don't crie mom. I loved him very much said Lori.
9/23 Can I go out side and play yes. Dre had a friend named
Michael. He told Dre to go look at this car. Dre went to
look. Someone snatch em. Help called Dre. who are you im
the guy who killed your father. Why do you want me. So you
can work for me Do I get money. Yes you get money. What
kind of place is this this is where your dad yous to
[page 2]come all the time. Wy he was a ganster. What is a
9/23 ganster something you are geting ready to be.
Heres a gun for what. Come out side see that guy go shoot
him OK. Oh no said the guy he ran after him. Dre ran up
stairs of the building the man kept runing. bang bang. Dre
shot the man twice in his head. Good job. Her 2000 dollars.
Dont !*!* up or you will die. Hi mom were have you been I
been out you got a prolblm. Yes bang Dre shot his mom in the
rib. Dre ran. I shot my mom in the rib. Good now you are
9/26 a ganster. What does that meen you can do eny thing
you want. You meen I have to live on the streets. Yea wy
you scared. wy should I be working for you if you killed my
father.

[page 3]Because If you dont the same thing will happen to

you. I got to go somewere. Were to see my mom now let me
go. Hi mom I'm sorry I shot you. Get out of my room. OK
when you get home you will be suprised. You been gone for

two hour. So what thats my mom. Come on lets beat him half

 

Allignment of marginal dates 8: text is approximate.

256

the death. Now how do you feel like this bang bang. He shot

the 2 guys.

Dre grew up and had a little bit better life than
his dad. He got married to a gril named Wendy. He had twin

boys. After he got out of college he died from canser.

[page 4]

boy (?) leaning over wall (possibly,

[illustration, crayon:
seemingly holding a kind of banner

looking down on to floor),
reading "WARREN-G." (Could this be the kind of sillouette

drawn on the sidewalk--in movies & on TV'anyway--after a
killing?) In bottom third of page, either a door or a grave

stone, with a female (?) figure, pencil, looking at it.]

257

Appendix 4

258

 

Appendix 4
C.J.'s "Street Ball"

@finmsfi
Bfihfli

[illustration: large basketball almost

coming at the Viewer, with, probably, by

marks indicating.motion & speed Clarence
streaking behind it.] James Dawson

[April 1995]

-1-

Once there was a boy. He thought of a word. And the word
was street ball. And he wonderd what does that mean. So he
made something called a basket ball. He went out side and
said, "streetball" "I need a street." And he found a street
and said, "How do I play street ball?" And He saw something
on the ground and he named it a chain.

-2-

And he saw a lot of wood and built something and named it a
rim.And he took his ball and shot it and it went in the rim.

50 years later

"Hey ya'll want to play some ball?" [Wesley?]
"Yeah, what teams?" [Gideon?]

"You, Shorty, C.Jl and.Michael." [Wesley?]
"OK What we going up to?" [Gideon?]

"15. Ya'll take ball." [Wesley?]ii

 

‘ This is an edited text. I have laid out the dialogue in conventional format (the only discernible
paragraph-like interruptions in C.J.'s text are his usual markers of time assed, and page breaks, which may
or may not serve this function, some or all of the time-I have indicated t ese), I have shown in brackets my
best estimate of who the speaker is, and I have sometimes added or omitted uotation marks when I believe C.J.
has used a pair too many or too few. In all of this, of course, there is room or error. Many of the character's
names are reco izably those of C.J.'s classmates (6: it seems quite likely all the characters have real life
referents: one c aracter, for example, bears his younger brother's name)-when I can identify a character as a
member of the class I have given him the same pseudonym used elsewhere in the dissertation, and have put the
name in italics.

259

 

 

"OK" [Gideon?]
Michael passes it in to Shorty and Shorty shoots a
three. "All chain fool." [Shorty?]

-3-

"It's winners give me the ball." [Shorty?] Shorty goes up
for a dunk but he throws it back to.Michael and.Michael dunks
the ball.

"The score is 4 to a big Fat zero." [Michael?] .Michael
throws ally to Shorty and Wesley packs Shorty's mess.

"Now we get ball." [Wesley??] something wrong
here?

Gideon throws it to C.Jfl and C.J. hits a three. The
score is 0—7. C.JL passes the ball to Michael for a ally but
it is packed

but this "but" makes Wesley seem correct
after all but then is there an action by his team
missing?

-4-

by Joniii and the score is 7—0. C.J.,.Michael, Gideon, Shorty
is leading. Gideon takes it out shoots a 20 feet jumper and
now the score is 9-0. They need 3 more p[o]ints to win.iv
Gideon passes it in to Michael and he passes it to Shorty.
Shorty passes it and C.Jl shoots a three. The game is over.
C.J., Gideon,.Michael, Shorty wins the game. A man was coming
up to the court

And said, "Is any of ya'll any good?"

"Who are you?" [Shorty?]

"My name is Corey. I'm a coach in Long Beach
California."v "Yeah Im pretty good" [Shorty]

"You ain't no good Shorty." [C.J.?]
"forget you." [Shorty?]“

"what is your name" [Corey]

"C.J. ll

"And who are your friends here?" [Corey]

 

ii For example, C.J. punctuates what I have just rendered as two lines like this: "OK" "What we going

up to?" "15" "Ya'll take ball." This could be correct, but it would mean that Wesley, or whoever the first

speaker is, sudden] switches from taking the initiative to follwin Gideon, or the second speaker's, lead.
er-punctuating ialogue is common in C.J.'s work at this point and indeed in many young writers' work)—

still, my rendering is conjectural.

l“ Jon C., I presume.

w Why not 6?

V And C.J. punctuates this as: "My name is Corey" I'm a coach in Long Beach California"

Vi Alternatively, "You ain't no good Shorty, forget you," [CH

260

"This is Gideon, Michael, Shorty, Wesley, Lincoln, Jon
and Marcus." [C.J.]
"Who is the 4

best people?" [Corey]

"Me, Michael, Gideon, JOn." [C.J.]

"Do ya'll wanna play in California in a 4 on 4
tournament." [Corey]

"I don't know man but I'll think about it." [C.Jl]

"My number is 394—4835. Call me" [Corey]

"Hey Hey I changed my mind, I will play." [C.J.]

"I will too" said Gideon. C.J;, Gideon, JOn and Michael
decided to play in California in

 

-7-

the tournament. Who ever wins will be drafted to te-play in
college or NBA. C.J. allways wanted to play for Indiana.
..2 weeks
Later
The first team they will play is the Hogs.And their team is
called the Hooppers. "There are no calls in this game."
[Corey??]
The teams had to shoot to see who got the ball.

—8—

C.JL will get to shoot first and he makes it. Now it will be
the Hogs turn to shoot and they miss. The Hooppers will take
the ball. JOn passes it in to Gideon and Gideon. [sic] And
he drives down court and passes it to C.Jl a[nd] C.JZ hits a
three now the score is 3-0. The Hogs passes it in way down
court it is stolen by Michael

-9-

He takes it down court and dunks it the Hooopers take a 5 point

lead.
2 minutes later

The Hoopers win 15~O. Marcus and the other guys that did not
make the team made there own team and signed up to play.
Their team's name is the Spurs. Marcus, Lincoln, Shorty and
Wesley are a team. And the first team they will play is the
Warriors.

-10..

261

The team that wins the tournement will be drafted to a
college basket ball team. The spurs will play the hooppers in
the finals. If they can go underfeatded for two game
straight. The spurs will play the Warriors in the first
round today. Marcus comes [in] to shoot for the ball. He
takes the shot and misses. Here comes Little John to shoot
and he makes

-11—

it. The Warriors will take the ball. Reshaud passes it in
to AnthonyVii and And tries to pass it to John but it is stolen
by Marcus. He take it down court and slams it in the hoop.
The crowd goes crazy. Spurs lead 2-0.

8 minutes later
Spurs beat warriors 15-4. The Spurs need to win one more
game to play Hooppers.

-12-

2 weeks
later
The Spurs went underfeated For two game and they beat Suns
they are [in] the champion chip with Hooppers today. C.JL
comes in to shoot he makes it. Shorty come into shoot and he
misses. So The Hoopers get ball..Michael passes it in way
down court to Gideon and he dunks Hooppers lead 2—0. Marcus
is driving down

_13-

court and passes it to Lincoln and Lincoln shoots it. And it
gets blocked by JOn and JCn runs down court and throws a
alley oop to C.J. and C.Jl makes it.

3 minutes

Later
It is tied at 13 and Hoopers get ball. C.JL passes it in to
Gideon and it is stolen by Anthonywiand.Anthony'passes it to
Marcus Marcus dunks the ball. The Spurs

-14-

win the tounement! They will get drafted!
1 Month later

 

Vii The perils of assigning seudonyms at many different points in time. This Anthony is neither of the
"Anthonys" who were in .].'s c ass.

Viii Not to be confused with the Anthony on C.J.'s p. 11.

262

Marcus gets drafted to North Carolina. Lincoln get drafted to
Oklahoma State. Anthony get drafted to Purdue. Shorty gets
drafted to Arkansas. C.JZ went to the NBA in the year 1999
and played for San Antonio Spurs.

'PHE EEK)

[p. 15]

[illustration: boy (young man?) looking up at basketball
hoop which may be in flames at base, or.may have a very thick

thicket of tall grass growing there, or..., basketball at his
feet.]

263

 

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264

 

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