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INTENTION, RISK, AND WRITING

IN A THIRD GRADE WRITING WORKSHOP

presented by

Timothy J. Lensmire

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Ph.D. Teacher Education

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INTENTION, RISK, AND WRITING

IN A THIRD GRADE WRITING WORKSHOP

VOLUME I

3:!

Timothy J. Lensmire

A DISSERTATION

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

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Teacher Education

1991

583—37ax

INTENTION, RISK, AND WRITING
IN A THIRD GRADE WRITING WORKSHOP
by
Timothy J. Lensmire

ABSTRACT

Writing workshop approaches to writing instruction emphasize
providing opportunities for students to engage in and practice the
craft of writing. A central theme within such approaches is student
ownership: students have wide powers to determine the topics,
audiences, purposes, and forms of their texts. Such control is in the
service of student voice. With the support of the teacher and
numerous opportunities to collaborate and share texts with peers,
children are supposed to gradually become more and more able to
realize their intentions in text. Relatively little is known,
however, about what actually happens when teachers and students try to
teach and learn writing within writing workshops.

Throughout the 1989-90 school year, I taught writing five days a
week in a third grade public school classroom using a writing workshop
approach. I also researched my teaching and student learning as a

participant observer.

Timothy J. Lensmire

Children and their experiences--their intentions, their relations
with each other, their texts--are at the heart of my dissertation. As
I shifted control over aspects of the work of literacy to children in
the workshop, their relations with each other became extremely
important for their experiences and writing there. These relations
included the rejection, by children, of members of the other sex as
partners in collaborative work, and peer hierarchies granting those
girls and boys at the top status and influence, and those at the
bottom the brunt of teasing and exclusion. This Ihidden curriculum“
of the peer culture asserted itself within and helped to shape the
classroom's official work of producing and sharing texts.

Hy dissertation analyzes children's experiences and texts against
the backdrop of the classroom's social life and micropolitics, and
then eXplores what these analyses mean for teaching and learning
writing. Two reavisions of writing workshop approaches are offered:

a transformed conception of teacher response to children's texts as
critically pragmatic and concerned with encouraging an engaged,
pluralistic classroom community; and an increased curricular role for

teachers in the construction of collective writing projects.

Copyright by

TIMOTHY J. LENSNIRE

1991

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Graduate school and writing a dissertation, whatever their
intellectual and social rewards, are awful things to do to yourself
and those you live with. I want to thank some of the people who
sustained me and made them worthwhile, nonetheless.

Susan Florio-Ruane put me on a good path, helped me look at
classrooms and writing in ways that I find generative and powerful.
David Labaree always made me feel like a fellow traveler, and he
invested my little stories with importance by seeing big issues within
them. Toward the end, Deborah Ball and Suzanne Wilson read my work
with care and found ways to affirm and question in helpful ways.

I would not have risked writing this dissertation without David
Cohen. I made up my genre and perspective as I went along and was
often scared witless. Only my trust in David's judgment enabled me to
continue writing and exploring.

Finally, two friends. My bru, Jeremy Price, supported me and my
work in ways theoretical and practical. Our conversations have
enlarged my world and strengthened my courage; when I was feeling

desperate, he took me swimming and did a lot of typing.

And Jane. I have grown up with Jane across nearly 10 years
together. Somehow, despite our work and children and writing, we have
continued talking--usually for hours after we say that we need to get
some sleep. My art fails me, as always, when I try to express her

importance to me.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

M
LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
CHAPTER I: THE DREAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER II: TEACHER RESEARCHER PRACTICE . . . . . . . . . . 33
CHAPTER III: STUDENT INTENTION AND RELATIONS, AND
WM 71
CHAPTER IV: PEER AUDIENCES AND RISK . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
CHAPTER V: FICTION, DISTANCE, AND CONTROL . . . . . . . . . 152
CHAPTER VI: TEACHER RESPONSE TO CHILDREN'S
TEXTS AND IflE_ZII_f1§ . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
CHAPTER VII: THE DREAM (cont.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
APPENDIX.A: ADDITIONAL NOTES ON METHOD . . . . . . . . . . . 268
APPENDIX B: CHILDREN'S INTERVIEW QUESTIONS . . . . . . . . . 272
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Grace's letter .

James and Ken's W: .
WW (cont.) .
W: (cont.) .

Karen's WW .

Guidelines for peer conferences

Fran John's mm .

Ideas for topics handout .

From Michael '8 Wm
From Carol's Spies .

From.Jil's Kittens .

List of characters for Mary and Suzanne's play .

Story from wastebasket .

Haya's W .

viii

43

75
76

77

120
134

143

155
182
183
186

188

200

207

CHAPTER I

THE DREAM

I thought my story would be a different one. I would teach
writing for a year in-a third grade public school classroom,
struggling a little at first to get a writing workshop running with
children who had only exercised their pens filling in worksheet
blanks. I would research my own teaching and students' learning.
But the workshop would run, and I would focus my attention on what I
took to be the heart of the workshop: talking with individual
children in relatively iSolated, intimate conversations about their
writing--what they were trying to do, what they needed help with.
Occasionally, I would have to engage a child's text in a sort of
ideological critique, pointing to traces of classism, sexism,
racism, fighting society's impress on their.meanings and values. In
the freedom of the workshop, children would choose their topics and
purposes for writing, develop their ways of working texts, and
write. They would go to each other, they would come to me, for
help. My third grade students would write themselves on the page,

move, be heard, in a place that habitually constrained their voices

and bodies teacher questions, to desks. Our workshop would be a
little Emersonian democracy; Dewey's embryonic community.

I did teach writing for a year, and the children and I did
struggle to find a way to go about our work. I talked with children
about their texts, and important, fascinating, funny, worthy-of-
telling things happened. The children flexed their muscles, wrote,
were heard. All of this happened, and I could have told this story
without lying--but I would have been lying. Lying because children
are not 9311 the Romantic, innocent little beings that appear in the
stories of workshop advocates. Lying, because neither workshop
approaches, nor the role they envision for teachers, are so
innocent.

Children and their experiences--their intentions, their
relations with each other, their texts--are at the heart of my
story, not teacher-student writing conferences. As I shifted
control over aspects of the work of literacy to children in the
classroom, their relations with each other became extremely
important for their experiences and writing in the workshop. These
relations included the rejection, by children, of members of the
other sex as partners in collaborative work, and peer hierarchies
granting those girls and boys at the top status and influence, and
those at the bottom the brunt of teasing and exclusion. This
‘hidden curriculum' of the peer culture--a hidden curriculum that I
had experienced as a child on the playground and on the bus to
school (and had forgotten); that I had experienced as a junior high

teacher around the edges of my English class, when I turned from the

blackboard in time to see the love letter passed, or saw the tears
in Darrel's eyes after another round of whispered abuse from his
classmate, Luc (and had forgotten)--this ‘hidden curriculum' of the
peer culture asserted itself in important ways within the official
work of our third grade writing workshop. And, I suppose, it was
supposed to. Workshop approaches liberate student intention and
association, and invite the lives of children into the classroom.
Children's lives include their relations with each other, in and out
of school.

In some sense, my story works for a recovery of memory, by
asking (and helping) us to remember what it was like to be a child,
have friends and enemies, play, tease and be teased. Many other
stories in books and movies invite us to remember. But my story
also asks us to look to the future, especially to our futures in
classrooms, and ask: What do our experiences and those of the
children in my classroom mean for how we teach and learn? I ask
this question with reference to a progressive and increasingly
popular approach to the teaching of writing that I largely embraced

at the beginning of this project--what I call writing workshop.

Typically, children compose very little in schools. The
writing that is done is tightly controlled by the teacher who
initiates writing tasks; determines audience, purpose, and format
for the writing; and acts as the sole audience and evaluator.

There is little opportunity for revision, and the purpose of such

school writing is often to display academic mastery in evaluative
contexts. In such situations, students' technical competence to
write, and their motivation to use writing in ways that enrich and
transform their lives, suffer (Applebee, 1981; Doyle, 1986;
Florio-Ruane & Dunn, 1985). Traditional writing instruction
functions, then, much like other traditional forms of pedagogy to
silence students, deny student experiences and meanings, and
alienate students from the teaching and learning they encounter in
schools (Everhart, 1983; Freire, 1970, 1985; Waller, 1932).

In contrast, writing workshop approaches to writing
instruction, made popular by educators and researchers such as
Graves (1983) and Calkins (1986), emphasize providing opportunities
for students to engage in and practice the craft of writing. A
central theme within such approaches is student ownership: students
have wide powers to determine the topics, audiences, purposes, and
forms of their texts. Such control is in the service of student
voice. With the support of the teacher and numerous opportunities
to collaborate and share texts with peers, children are supposed to
gradually become more and more able to realize their intentions in
text. This is the primary goal of such approaches.

Workshop approaches are part of a more general and varied push
to teach writing ‘as a process' (Hairston, 1982). Process writing
approaches conceive of writing as a complex cognitive and
communicative act, framed by a purpose, and made up of various
recursive phases or stages, such as drafting, revision, editing, and

publishing (Applebee, 1986). Within such approaches, teachers focus

on helping children work through the writing process. Willinsky
(1990) provides an even broader home for writing workshop and
process approaches within ‘The New Literacy,’ his name for
approaches to the teaching of reading, writing, and literature, that
share a commitment to increased control by students over meaning and
texts in the classroom, with consequent changes in the roles and
activities of teachers and students there.
I remain sympathetic to, and see my work as contributing to,
‘new literacy' efforts. It is important to put meaning-making at
the center of literacy work with children, to enliven and transform
classrooms with the voices and texts of children. But we need to
critically appropriate workshop approaches, something I had barely
begun to do as I started my teaching and research at Clifford
Elementary School in the fall of 1989. Looking back, I would say of
myself and my assumptions something like William Morris said of a
fellow 19th century socialist, Sidney Webb, who thought evolutionary
processes assured the coming of socialism:
He is so anxious to prove the commonplace
that our present industrial system embraces some
of the machinery by means of which a socialist
system might be worked . . . that his paper tends
to produce the impression of one who thinks that
we are already in the first stage of socialist
life. . . . [Webb overestimates] the importance of
the neghgnign of a system of society apart from
the and towards which it may be used. (cited in
Williams, 1983, p. 183)
I put too much faith in.a workshop ‘system,’ in its processes

and routines, and had not worried enough about its content and ends.

Or, perhaps more correctly, it was not until I had lived and worked

in a writing workshop with young children for an extended period of
time that I realized there was reason for worry. The third graders
in my class--James, Maya, Jil, Karen, Jessie, and the rest1--taught
me much about workshop approaches, much about themselves and writing

in classrooms, about teaching and its responsibilities.

My history as a writer might best be traced to writing
conferences (actually, usually, arguments) I had with my mother at
the kitchen table. I remember writing a paper on William Faulkner's
A§_1_L§y_ny1ng (Darl Bundren was my hero) for an American literature
class I had as a junior in high school, and a short, short story
about mutant life forms growing under my bed when I was a seventh
grader at St. Mary's Catholic school. I would take them to my
mother and always get more help than I wanted. She would read my
texts, point to a place on the page, and say, “What does this mean?”
I would grudgingly explain, and then defend the adequacy of my
written words against any changes. I am certain that these
arguments, focused on meaning rather than punctuation or spelling,
were a healthy training ground for becoming a teacher of writing.
But I hgggmg a teacher of writing when I read Donald Murray's (1968)

A_H:1§§;_I§§§hg§_flxiging the summer before my second year as a 7th

grade English teacher in Northern Wisconsin.

 

1Pseudonyms are used throughout the text. See Appendix A.for a
discussion of the use of pseudonyms in reproductions of children's
texts and other classroom documents. Appendix A also specifies the
length of the study.

I had been teaching English with little preparation for it (I
had started as a music major in college, then went into elementary
education), and knew I was supposed to teach writing to my 7th
graders, but was in the dark about how to go about it. I got
Murray's book from a colleague, studied it, and from that point on
thought of myself as a writing teacher who happened to have other
required duties-~some I deemed worthy and others not so--in his
English classes. Worthy ones were sharing a novel or two, short
stories, and plays and poetry with my 7th graders; not so were
weekly spelling lists and grammar usage exercises in preparation for
district tests.

Murray seduced me. His descriptions of engaged students
writing about what they cared about, and teachers helping them,
coaching them, spoke directly to disappointments and hopes I had
collected in my early teaching experiences. Later, when I read
Murray's (1979) "The listening eye: Reflections on the writing
conference," the teaching of writing seemed to return to the kitchen
table: Murray waits in his office, winter and dark outside, for
Andrea and her rough draft and "this strange, exposed kind of
teaching, one on one.”

Willinsky (1990) is absolutely correct when he claims that the
primary appeal of ‘new literacy' approaches like Murray's is less
any new teaching techniques and materials, and.much more a vision of
teaching and learning with students. Their appeal is in the
transformation of teacher and student roles, in relations that grant

students a more active place in their learning and teachers the

chance to stand beside and help students, rather than lord it over
them. My turn to writing workshop approaches was a response to
alienating student and teacher work. These approaches offered a new
way to work literacy in the classroom.

This response is properly termed Romantic. I wanted students
to be alive rather than deadened by mechanical, boring school tasks.
Murray's approach asked individual students to look to their own
experiences and imagination for material. For myself, I wanted to
transform the opposition between students and teachers. I am sure
that part of my motivation sprung from the isolation from other
adults I felt as a teacher. I was also the only young teacher in a
large junior high school (over 1000 7th and 8th graders). I was
literally closer in age to my twelve or thirteen year old students
than to the rest of the teachers and administrators in the building.
Declining enrollments and layoffs in years past had pruned less
experienced teachers from the staff, and in my second year of
teaching, the colleague nearest my age had twelve years teaching
experience in the building.

So that year I began to teach writing in ways that approximated
writing workshop approaches. My primary moves were to grant
students increased control over the topics and purposes of what they
wrote, and to increase access to each other as collaborators and
audiences. And they (most) responded. They wrote. They laughed at
each other's pieces. I got tired rip-offs of Star Trek, and dutiful
(this still was school, after all) reflections on ‘my favorite pet.’

But I also got Jenny's ”Lyon, Lyon," a parody of Blake's ”The

Tween" I was using Kenneth Koch's (1973) MW
£h££_l§§1. and had some of my classes write poems and stories in

response to Blake's poem. Jenny appropriated Blake's unusual
spelling, his use of questions to describe the cat and wonder at
creation, and the repetition of the first stanza at the end of the
poem; she inverted most everything else. Instead of Blake's tyger,
and its ‘fearful symmetry' and ‘deadly terrors,‘ Jenny's peers and I
encountered a beer-guzzling lyon, overweight and unfit to be king of
the jungle. At times, I persuaded myself that my classroom hustled
with properly-irreverent Romantic poets.

I would take their work to other teachers, and most would look
at me with puzzled faces. Their glances, and sometimes their words,
would ask, "So? What is this for?“ I was often puzzled (and hurt)
by their responses. I had already accomplished the primary goal I
had for my writing class: simply to get children to pick up a
pencil and write, and then share their work with others. The
satisfaction I felt did not inhere so much in the texts themselves
or what was said, but simply in their presence. They excited me
because they represented a way of being with students that I
preferred to the didactic, authoritarian ways fellow teachers seemed
to embrace.

But my colleagues' glances and questions haunted me. They
haunted me in the classroom sometimes, when I faced a student who
wanted help, and I didn't know what to say, at least partly because

I didn't know what I wanted the student to do, other than write.

10

I went to graduate school for many reasons, but among them were
the isolation I felt teaching, wanting to learn more about teaching
writing, and hoping to learn to write myself. Questions about the
goals of writing instruction followed me there. As I studied, I
began to find some answers. I gradually developed two broad goals
for teaching writing within writing workshops that I would bring
with me to my work at Clifford Elementary School. These goals can
be usefully elaborated around the concept of voice. Actually, two
related senses of ‘voice': one artistic and aimed at naming
yourself; the other political and focused on naming the world.

The first ‘artistic' goal developed originally in my readings
of Graves (1983), Calkins (1986), Murray (1968, 1985), and others
advocating workshop approaches. Later, this goal would be partially
reformulated as I embraced less Romantic, more materialist
conceptions of language and writing put forth by Bakhtin (1981,
1986) and Volosinov (1973, 1976). I gave the second, ‘political'
goal less attention, except in my conceptions of teacher response
discussed later in the chapter. I more or less assumed that
workshop approaches assured the sorts of political goals for writing
I was developing in my study of critical pedagogy, as presented by

Freire (1980, 1985; Freire & Macedo, 1987) and hooks (1989).

Children want to write. They want to write
the first day they attend school. This is no
accident. Before they went to school they marked
up walls, pavements, newspapers with crayons,
chalk, pens or pencils ... anything that makes a
mark. The child's marks say, 'I am."

11
”No, you aren't,” say most school approaches
to the teaching of writing. (Graves, 1983, p. 3)

My first broad goal focused on the individual's expression of
gubjgggixity, leading, on the one side, to the production of a
verbal object of art, and on the other, to self-understanding and
self-creation. It emphasized the private work of finding your own
voice in your writing, a voice that says, as Graves puts it, ”I am.”
Writing, here, is the expression of something inside with the help
of external signs. Finding your voice involves looking to your own
experiences for what it is you want to say. Writing is conceived of
as the process (sometimes the struggle) of expressing and organizing
personal experience:

By articulating experience, we reclaim it for
ourselves. Writing allows us to turn the chaos
into something beautiful, to frame selected
moments in our lives, to uncover and to celebrate
the organizing patterns of our existence.
(Calkins, 1986, p. 3)

There are strong affinities here to Emerson, Thoreau, American
Romanticism--a celebration of experience and an individualistic,
non-conformist strain-~evident in Calkins' call to make something
beautiful out of ‘moments in our lives,’ and Graves' affirmation of
the child's ‘I am' against the erasing institutional forces of
schooling.

Like Thoreau (1960), workshop approaches would have young
writers

. drive life into a corner, reduce it to
its lowest terms, and, if it proved mean, why then
to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the world; or if it were

sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to
a give true account of it. (p. 66)

12

Graves and Calkins seem seldom to consider that life might be
mean at its ‘lowest terms,’ but Thoreau's rhetoric is appropriate
for workshop approaches. The image is one of burrowing deep into
subjectivity, past ”the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and
tradition” to discover your authentic nature, and a voice that
expresses who you are. When you do, the words on the page are your
words, not someone else's.

But your words, of course, are always someone else's words
first, and these words sound with the intonations and evaluations of
others who have used them before, and from whom you learned them.

As Bakhtin (1981) reminds us, the Romantic poet "is not, after all,
the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the
universe” (p. 69); and our poet learned her words from others,
indeed, became a self she could point to and ask questions of in
this sharing of words and gestures.

The shift here is from what Berlin (1988) calls an
‘expressionistic' rhetoric, characterized by Romantic and idealistic
conceptions of mind and language, to a ‘social-epistemic' one, in>
which language mediates a dynamic interrelation of the individual
with material and social aspects of her environment. My
introduction to this rhetoric was provided by Vygotsky (1978, 1979,
1981). Within Vygotsky's social-psychological framework,
consciousness emerges out of social interaction. Speech is
fundamental to thought for Vygotsky, with higher mental functions
developing in its context, and with the structures and processes of

thought conceptualized in relation to the structures and processes

13

of speech. Internalized (inner) speech, for Vygotsky, is the very
fabric and process of thought itself.

But I soon grew frustrated with the seeming neutrality and
emotional flatness of social interaction in the hands of Vygotsky
and some of his interpreters (especially Wertsch, 1979, 1985; see
Faigley, 1986, pp. $37-39, for discussion of problems with ‘neutral
social relationships'). Where were heated arguments at the kitchen
table or in the classroom, ideological conflict, power, passion?
Social interaction was smoothed out, and so was much of the
complexity and emotional toil of inner speech, of thought, of
writing.

I turned to the work of Bakhtin and his circle of friends and
colleagues. Like Vygotsky, Bakhtin and his circle asserted a
materialist account of mind in which consciousness emerges in our
relations with each other (see Volosinov, 1973). But unlike
Vygotsky, this process, and consciousness itself, is charged with
emotion and struggle over meaning and values. Our days and our
consciousnesses are filled with living language, with the words of
others.

The word in language is half someone else's.
It becomes ‘one's own' only when the speaker
populates it with his own intention, his own
accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it
for his own semantic and expressive intention.
. . . And not all words for just anyone submit
easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and
transformation into private property: many words
stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound
foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated
them and who now speaks them . . . it is as if

they put themselves in quotation marks against the
will of the speaker. . . . Expropriating

14

[language], forcing it to submit to one's own
intentions and accents, is a difficult and
complicated process. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 294)

As Bakhtin became more and more important for my conceptions of
language and writing, I did not lose the goal for my students of
helping them find individual voices--the goal just looked a little
different. When consciousness is viewed as developing through
social interaction--when thought is ‘inner speech' that emerges as
the child engages others in investigations of the world-~then
finding your own voice is less burrowing to some authentic nature,
and more appropriating the myriad voices and words surrounding you,
and forcing them to your own purposes. I assumed, like Graves, that
children wanted to say, ‘I am.’ My students would write texts that
expressed this uniqueness. I assumed with Rorty (1989) that

. the conscious need of the strong poet

to demonstrate that he is not a copy or replica
[is] merely a special form of an unconscious need

everyone has; the need to come to terms with the
blind impress which chance has given him, to make
a self for himself by redescribing that impress in
terms which are, if only marginally, his own. (p.
42)

My classroom would be a place for children to begin the work of
reworking the blind impress, a place to look to their experiences,
and in remembering them and reworking them in their writing, to name
themselves rather than be named by others. My first goal for
workshop writing, then, emphasized a private project in which young
writers were increasingly able to find their voices--to find what

they had to say and wanted to say--in their texts.

15

A second, related sense of ‘voice' adds an explicitly political
goal for workshop writing. This sense of voice emphasizes an
individual's or group's active participation in the world, an active
part in the production of knowledge and texts. If the first sense
of voice is evoked with the contrast, ‘my words versus. Another's
words,’ then the contrast to this second, political sense of voice
is giigncg, where silence points to oppressive conditions that keep
certain people from participating in decision-making, storytelling.
Voice, here, stands for active engagement by a given speaker or
writer in her community and society. Rather than emphasize the
individual's attempts to gigginggigh herself from others with her
texts, this sense of voice emphasizes writers inserting themselves
and their texts into public spheres.

Freire's (1970, 1985) work was most influential for my sense of
this political connotation of voice. His critique of traditional
schooling practices emphasizes the passivity of students in
traditional pedagogies, the reduction of learners to objects, when
they should be subjects of their learning. He names this sort of
education the ‘banking conception of education':

This is the "banking“ concept of education,
in which the scope of action allowed to students
extends only as far as receiving, filing, and
storing the deposits. . . . In the last analysis,
it is people themselves who are filed away through
the lack of creativity, transformation, and
knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For
apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, people
cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only
through invention and reinvention, through
restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry

people pursue in the world, with the world, and
with each other. (1970, p. 58)

l6

Freire's pedagogy, what he calls ‘cultural action for freedom'
in his Ih§_ngii§ig§_gf_fzggggn (1985), emphasizes engaging students
in dialogues focused on their existential situation, an ongoing
inquiry into their world in which they formulate increasingly
critical interpretations of that world and their place in it. From
this perspective, the power to name the world and order it has
rested, in society, with the elite, and in the classroom, with the
teacher and textbooks. Freire's pedagogy seeks to upset this power
relation.with figgdgngiggiggg, and help students actively participate
in making sense of the world around them. hooks (1989) captures
this sense of voice as an act of individual and collective
resistance to domination by others in her discussion of the
importance of ‘coming to voice' in feminist work.

Feminist focus on finding voice may seem
cliched at times, especially when the insistence
is that women share a common speech or that all
women have something meaningful to say at all
times. However, for women within oppressed groups
who have contained so many feelings--despair,
rage, anguish--who do not speak, as poet Audra
Lorde writes, "for fear our words will not be
heard nor welcomed," coming to voice is an act of
resistance. Speaking becomes both a way to engage
in active self-transformation and a rite of
passage where one moves from being object to being
subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As
objects we remain.voice1ess--our beings defined
and interpreted by others. (p. 12)

In my classroom. I wanted students to come to voice, in both
the sense of a private exploration and ordering of experience in the
expression of a unique self, and the sense of greater public

participation in the cultural work of naming and renaming the world

and their places within it. Both senses of voice suggest

l7

resistance--the first resistance to Dewey's ‘crust of convention,’
the second to power relations that silence.

I wanted to set up and work in a transformed classroom
community. My dreams for that community emphasized the presence of
student voices where there used to be primarily the teacher's, and
constrained, lifeless student responses to alienating material. I
envisioned a miniature Emersonian democracy, a marketplace of ideas
and stories, in which strong individuals asserted themselves, and
continually provoked and enhanced each other in their interactions
(West, 1989). My classroom, like Dostoevsky's novels, would
celebrate heteroglossia: unofficial voices, the polyphonic
confusion of voices sounding with the characteristic words and
intonations of different social groups, and the idiosyncratic twists
of speakers and writers attempting to force shared, given words to
individual, particular purposes and situations (Bakhtin, 1981;
Pechey, 1986).

My role as the teacher was to encourage, orchestrate, and
support this heteroglossia, finding ways to help each student sound
and be heard. More concretely, I saw myself as pursuing primarily
two teacherly tasks. One was creating a classroom environment that
supported children's writing. The second task was responding to

children's texts in writing conferences.

I planned to teach each day for approximately 45 minutes. The

workshop would follow a three-part routine, with an opening meeting,

18

writing time, and sharing time. The first part of the routine, the
opening meeting, would last approximately 5-10 minutes, and was
modeled after what Calkins (1986) calls 'mini-lessons.’ I would use
this time to teach, often in a whole-class situation, procedures and
norms of the writing workshop, and aspects of the craft of writing.

For example, I would discuss the purposes and handling of the
writing folders children and I would use to collect children's
writing across the year and to monitor their progress. Or we would
discuss procedures for working with and maintaining writing ‘tools'
in the workshop: pens, markers, staplers, paper for rough drafts,
scissors for cutting and pasting texts during revision, etc. I
would also engage children in activities to help them support and
encourage each other as writers in the workshop, particularly in
their responses to other children's texts in peer conferences.
Workshop approaches encourage teachers and children to think of
children as teachers of writing in the classroom. One of the
responsibilities of workshop teachers, then, is to ensure that
children respect and help each other in their interactions with
peers. I would also teach children about how to find topics and
brainstorm for ideas, how to draft, revise, edit, and publish pieces
in the workshop. I would read.books by adult and children authors,
and engage them in discussions of what we enjoyed and valued in the
books we read, and what we might learn about crafting texts from
other authors. 9

The second part of the routine, lasting approximately 30

minutes, would be called writing time. This was the part of the

19

workshop where children would exercise the greatest control over_
their own.work and movement. This autonomy was to serve their
writing, allow them to engage in topics and stories that they found
meaningful, and to engage their peers and me in ways and at times
that suited their work and the problems they faced as they wrote.

If a child needed to talk with someone about an idea she had for the
revision of a story, for example, she would have the freedom to do
so. She could go to her peers, or, if I was not talking to another
child at that moment, to me. Primary activities for children during
this time would be brainstorming, drawing, drafting, revising, and
editing texts; conferencing with peers and the teacher; publishing
selected texts (including putting together books and illustrating
stories); and reading. Children would make choices during this time
as to what they wanted to work on, with whom, for how long, etc. My
primary activity would be talking with children about their writing.
I would help them identify important stories, revise, and get their
drafts ready for typing and publishing.

The final ten minutes or so of the workshop routine would be
sharing time (modeled after Graves and Hansen's (1983) ‘author's
chair'). Sharing time would be one of two primary ways for
children's texts to ‘go public' within the classroom, to reach a
larger audience than those in teacher and peer conferences. During
sharing time, one or more children would read their texts in front
of the class, and then receive response from classmates and adults
in the room. The texts would often be finished pieces, typed,

illustrated, bound between cardboard covers. Other times, an author

20

might want response to an earlier draft of a text, perhaps seeking
specific help with a writing problem he had.

The second official way for children to reach the classroom
audience would be the workshOp library--a few shelves somewhere in
the room that housed children's published pieces. Children would
donate the books to the library for certain amounts of time so that
other children could check them out and read them during writing
time and other parts of the school day.

This was my workshop architecture and system. It provided
spaces, in writing time, for children to pursue important individual
projects, and in sharing time and the workshop library, to make
those projects public. The workshop would be alive with student
voices in the hum of conferences and collaboration, and the dramatic
reading of important texts by child authors. I would support these
voices by providing opportunities to write on meaningful topics, by
helping children acquire skills of the craft of writing, by shaping
a supportive physical and social environment.

My real work, however, and what I looked forward to most in my
teaching, was talking with children about their texts. My first
conception of response was to follow the child. It drew heavily on
Murray, Graves and Calkins, and their ideas on response. But even
before I started teaching at Clifford, I began developing a second
conception that attempted to address problems the first ignored. My
second conception of response recognized that there would be times

when children's writing should be questioned, not followed.

21

The purpose of teacher response within writing workshop
approaches is conceived largely in terms of helping students to
realize their intentions in text. Teacher response aims at helping
children improve the texts at hand and engaging children in
conversations that will eventually be internalized and allow them to
deal more effectively with text on their own in the future. The
teacher, once the sole initiator and audience/evaluator of student
writing, now fgiiggg_§hg_ghiid (Graves, 1983, p. 103) in her/his
writing processes, watching carefully for ways to encourage,
support, model, and coach at appropriate times, through response.

A.major concern of Murray, Graves, and Calkins, is helping
teachers avoid falling into traditional, teacher-dominated ways of
talking with students and responding to their writing. With
reference to Graves, Murray (1986) presents the following basic
pattern for writing conferences.

The student COMMENTS on the draft.

The teacher READS or reviews the draft.

The teacher RESPONDS to the student's comments.

The student RESPONDS to the teacher's response.
(p. 148; author's emphasis)

Graves and Murray assume that both teacher and student are
writers, and the above pattern seeks to shake up typical classroom
talk in which the teacher leads, the student responds, and the
teacher evaluates student response (Cazden, 1986). The goal in
writing conferences is to engage in a conversation about the craft

of writing, a ”professional discussion between writers about what

works and what needs work“ (Murray, 1986, p. 140).

22

Calkins (1986) brings similar goals and concerns to her writing
about teacher response, but tends to emphasize teachers responding
to the meaning, the content, of what children are writing. She
asserts that teachers must really listen to what children are saying
so the children know that they have been heard.

Our first job in a conference, then, is to be

a person, not just a teacher. It is to enjoy, to

care, and to respond. We cry, laugh, nod, and

sigh. . . . Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes

the purpose of a conference is simply to respond.

Other times, if the moment seems right, we try, in

a conference, to extend what the youngster can do

as a writer. (p. 119)
Calkins wants teachers to become a genuine audience for students, an
audience that is interested in.what young writers have to say. She
is responding to the pervasive role of teachers as evaluators of
student writing for grading purposes, in which teachers read student
texts as tests of students' subject matter knowledge and/or their
ability to produce well-spelled words, well-punctuated sentences,
well-organized paragraphs.

With Graves, Murray, and Calkins, I was developing the notion
of teacher response I call following the child. This notion
suggested beginning assumptions and commitments for the pedagogy and
curriculum of the writing instruction I would provide in my work
with 3rd grade writers. If we think of pedagogy as a ”deliberate
attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are
produced within and among particular sets of social relations“
(Giroux & Simon, 1989, p. 239), then following the child, as a
pedagogy, seeks to radically upset the micropolitics of language in

the classroom. The commitment to student experience and

23

meaning-making lets students speak fizgg, metaphorically (and
sometimes literally in writing conferences), in their texts, and in
their talk with teachers. Following the child, then, suggests a hgg
of writing instruction and teacher response. It also points to the
whag, the curriculum, of writing workshop approaches, and this was
where my problems with following the child, as a conception of
response, began. Eventually, these problems pushed me to a second
conception of response, response as socioanalysis.

The primary curriculum of writing workshop approaches is the
purposes, content, and genres students bring to their writing.
Children make curricular decisions, and teachers follow them.
Teachers engage children in conversations focused on the craft of
writing which agggng, ggggpg, the purposes and content children
bring to them. The primary goal of these conversations, remember,
is to help children realize their intentions in text, now and in the
future.

But what about situations in which student intentions are
questionable, such as when a racist joke represents the authentic
voice of one of our students?

Willinsky (1986, 1990) frames the problem as one in which the
pursuit of art, with an emphasis on self-expression, comes in
conflict with the demands of education. He argues that writing
workshop approaches have their roots in Romanticism, and that the

. . educator drawn to the aesthetic of
Romanticism must ultimately bring together the
opposing moments of art and education, providing
the opportunity and motive for unfettered

expression and then the imposition of reflection
upon it. (1986, p. 13) '

24

The moral Willinsky draws for writing workshop approaches above
emerges from his research with a teacher colleague in a grade one
and two classroom in Canada. When given the chance to write on
topics and in genres of their choosing, the boys in the class wrote
violent story after violent story, "until, it seemed, their pens
dripped with blood and not an illustration passed without the
tell-tale scar of the red marker" (1990, p. 128). The girls wrote
of beautiful gardens for mother and daughter to walk in (after doing
the dishes), or stories where ”princesses wake up, dance with
princes all the night long, and the woods laugh out loud" (p. 130).
He concludes that to be responsible in our teaching, the progressive
commitment to student expression and meaning must be met by an
equally progressive commitment to ”educate what is traditionally
given in gender and identity" (p. 126).

Traditionally given. Willinsky is making two sensible demands
here. First, he asks us to recognize that children's stories have
conggng, that children's texts represent more than just vehicles for
discussions of prggggs. Second, he wants us to remember that
children work with material from their experiences; or, as Bakhtin
might put it, children's material is half someone else's, and
appropriated by children for their own purposes. Student
experience, what writing workshop advocates want to bring into the
classroom, encompasses not only values and knowledge supportive of
our goals for learning and moral and political development. Our
children grow up in a sexist, racist, classist society. They bring

this with them as well.

25

Writing workshop advocates ignore such issues in their talk
about teacher response. Children's stories remain cozily wrapped in
a Romantic rhetoric emphasizing personal artistic creativity, "the
innocent perceptions of children making individual sense of the
world and their role in it” (Gilbert, 1989, p. 199). Graves and
Murray focus on crafting texts and avoid the content of student
writing, except to say that we should validate it and help students
express it more effectively. Calkins emphasizes the content of
children's writing more than Graves and Murray in her writing on
response. But if you remember the possible responses Calkins lists
above--enjoy, care, cry, laugh, nod, sigh--it seems that children
will always work with material we should want to support and extend.

My conception of teacher response as following the child was in
trouble. It depended on the assumption that children would choose
writing tasks that were appropriate for their development as writers
and as future citizens of a society with democratic and egalitarian
ideals. I needed a conception of teacher response that would retain
the commitment to student experience and meaning-making, but that
did not place the teacher in an uncritical stance in relation to

student intention and content.

As part of another project investigating the concept of
resistance in various disciplines and practices, I began reading
Freud and other writers on psychoanalysis. I was soon struck by

similarities in method, material, and social setting, between

26

psychoanalysis and the workshop approaches and conceptions of
response I was studying.

As to method, London (1986) notes, in his discussion of
‘insight therapies' (of which psychoanalysis is the charter member),
that the

. patient initiates the talking and
assumes responsibility for it. . . . Therapists

guide, as it were, by following the patient's
lead. (p. 55)

All insight therapy therefore involves an
insight bearing sequence of 1) exposure by the
patient, 2) therapist operation on the exposed
material, and 3) consciousness or insight,
intellectual or emotional, growing in the patient.

(p. 57)

The pedagogical sequence here is very similar to that in Graves
(and Freire)--London even uses similar language when he writes that
therapists ‘follow the patient's lead.’ In the workshop, student
experience is elicited, followed by conversations around this
material, leading to greater control over writing, understanding (in
Freire's work, critical consciousness).

For material, psychoanalysis turns to the past, to memory, in
order to rework powerful childhood experiences. Writing workshop
approaches make a similar turn in their emphasis on children telling
personal narratives, and writing on topics they find personally
meaningful. Freud asked his patients to free associate to generate
this material; Elbow (1973) asked his readers/writers to free
write. (See Belsey, 1986, for discussion of Romantic origins of
Freud's ‘unconscious'; and Willinsky, 1990, p. 204, for common roots

of psychoanalysis and ‘new literacy' approaches).

27

And in the social setting of psychoanalysis, we return to the
isolated pair, alone with their words, Murray's "strange, exposed
kind of teaching.” Calkins certainly wants teachers to be warm and
supportive in their writing conferences with children, in contrast
to the neutral, scientific stance Freud endorsed for analysts in his
writing, if not in his own practice (Flax, 1990). But the image is
powerful--writing conferences and psychoanalysis are enacted by two
people, removed from the everyday, focused on the verbal and written
texts at hand.

But it was a crucial diifgggngg between psychoanalysis and
‘following the child,’ amid the similarities, that made their
juxtaposition especially sweet. That difference was the analyst's
critical stance in relation to the patient's material. Analysts,
unlike workshop teachers, assume that the ggnggn; of their patients'
stories demandes questioning and response.

I began thinking of response as a type of analysis, but not one
supported by Freudian theories of the unconscious, repression, and
resistance, and emphasizing sexual life and infantile experiences
(even though some researchers and teachers of composition at the
college level have done so; see, for example, Brooke, 1987; McGee,
1982; Murphy, 1989). I looked to the ‘socio' rather than the
‘psycho,’ to the workings of language, culture and power in the
lives of speakers and writers and conceived of teacher response as
socioanalysis. Response as socioanalysis assumed that traces of
racial, class and gender oppression would, at times, find their way

into the stories children told. Children's texts are, in part,

28

artifacts of US society, just as the stories patients tell their
analysts in therapy point, if obliquely, to their origins in Oedipal
conflicts.

Freire's (1985) notion of dialogue helped me elaborate what
response as socioanalysis might entail. Within teacher-student
dialogues, the teacher's role was to “propose problems about the
codified existential situation in order to help learners arrive at a
more and more critical view of their reality“ (p. 55). Students
come to these dialogues not empty, but filled.with stories of the
world. These stories, however, are formed within repressive social
relations that privilege some individuals and groups and their
stories over others. Freire's notion of dialogue insists on the use
of student stories and the questioning of those stories. The first
move validates the learner as a knowing person and.makes available
the learner's insights into the conditions of her existence
(insights that may well challenge and teach the teacher). The
second move, however, refuses to accept the learner's stories as
given or final, and helps her to critically appraise them.

It was Habermas' (1984, 1987) work on communicative action,
however, that proved most useful for the development of my revised
conception of response. His focus on the various claims that
utterances raise--claims that are taken up by a bearer (or reader)
and accepted or rejected--he1ped me to specify what it was I would
follow and/or question as I responded to children's texts. His work
also helped me sharpen my critique of following the child as a

conception of response.

29

At the core of Habermas' project is a theory of communication
that emphasizes the cognitive-instrumental, normative, and
expressive functions of language. His analysis focuses on the
speaker's utterance and the response to that utterance by the
bearer. With any utterance (spoken or written), various claims are
raised. In fact, any utterance 311313 raises, explicitly or
implicitly, at least three sorts of claims: claims as to what is
true or effective (cognitive-instrumental claims), what is right
(normative claims), and what a person's feelings, beliefs, etc., are
(expressive or sincerity claims). In response to the speaker's
utterance, a bearer evaluates these claims and judges them to be
valid or invalid, or decides to suspend judgement for a while.

Perhaps an example will help here. A teacher walks by the desk
of one of his 7th grade students and observes her completing the
following written utterance on her desk top in red magic marker: "I
hate teachers, they should be shot.“ In terms of Habermas'
communication theory, the student, as a speaker/writer, is raising
claims as to what is true or effective, what is right, and what her
personal feelings are. The teacher, as bearer/reader, in his
response to her utterance, can accept or challenge various explicit
and implicit claims made by her text on the desk.

In the expressive realm, he might ask, ”Do you really feel that
way?" In the normative realm, if he is a little too literal-minded,
he might ask, ”Do you think it is okay to do physical violence
against those you dislike?“ More likely. He will respond to the

implicit normative claim made by writing gn the desk and say, ”It is

30

inappropriate to write on school property." (He may remind his
student of the conventional, ‘appropriate' ways of using the comma.)
In the cognitive-instrumental realm, he might ask, "If you have a
problem, do you think that this is a very effective way of handling
it?"

This last question is fairly close to the sort of response
‘following the child' might suggest. Murray and Graves want
teachers to engage their students in discussions of what does and
_does not work in their attempts at expression. In other words,
teacher response would remain in the instrumental realm and focus on
effectiveness.

This is not necessarily an inappropriate teacher move in any
given occasion for response, as long as we understand that this
focus leaves unchallenged, and therefore tacitly endorses, other
aspects of a text's content. When Graves (1983) applauds a
teacher's efforts to help a child improve his story on military
_ weapons and killing by asking for more detail (pp. 120-123), he
(like the teacher) is taking a position on the content of the story,
even as he seems to ignore it. This is following the child, which,
as Willinsky (1990) notes in.his own response to this example of
‘appropriate' response in Graves, "seems a little odd in the case of
an excited description of the damage the weapons of war can cause"
(p. 49).

Habermas' work helped me conceptualize responding to the
content of children's texts by pointing to the various claims any

utterance raises. In addition to responding to children's texts in

31

ways that helped make them more effective, I also would engage
children in discussions of the moral and political aspects of their
texts, in conversations about truth, and how their texts did and did
not represent who they were and what they wanted to become. My
students and I would critically examine the ‘traditionally
given'--the words, the stories, cultural resources-~that community
and society gave children to work with, and challenge and transform
them. There even are possibilities for my 7th grade desk-poet and
her teacher in the example above. We might ask them, "Must teachers
and students engage in classroom warfare? Can you imagine working
together in ways that would be more supportive and beneficial for
you both?“ Here, we are questioning the normative claim-~learned by
reading Waller (1932), if we do not come to it sooner in schools--
that teachers and students need interact in certain ways.

The shift from following the child to socioanalysis is
well-delineated with reference to Habermas' distinction between
reflexive and non-reflexive learning.

Non-reflexive learning takes place in action
contexts in which implicitly raised theoretical
(technical) and practical [ethical-political]
validity claims are naively taken for granted and
accepted or rejected without discursive
consideration. Reflexive learning takes place
through discourses in which we thematize practical
validity claims that have become problematic or
have been rendered problematic. (cited in YOung,

1990, p. 42)

Following the child is partially committed to a vision of

reflexive learning. It does engage children in discussions of

technique. And in the context of traditional, teacher-dominated

discourse, its emphasis on student voice and experience challenges

32

the normative claim that teachers should talk and students listen.
But in its conception of response to the content of children's
texts, it remains non-reflexive, and ignores what their texts have
to say about how it is we should live together and what it is we
value as members of a classroom and society. Response as
socioanalysis would aspire to reflexive learning, and problematize
claims embedded in the material children and we work with as we

write our stories.

With dreams of children writing themselves and their worlds on
the page, and of me supporting and challenging their visions, I
started teaching writing in Grace Parker and Ruth Meyer's third
grade classroom the last days of August. Grace and Ruth each taught
half-time, Grace mornings and Ruth afternoons. I visited and talked
with Ruth occasionally, but taught mornings, and spent most of my
time that year with Grace. I taught five days a week, for
approximately 45 minutes each day, but was at the school two to
three hours each morning, and most of that in Grace's
c1assroom--planning opening meetings, gathering materials, writing
notes, typing children's stories, meeting with children who needed

some special help, teaching, researching.

CHAPTER II

TEACHER RESEARCHER PRACTICE

Nothing we do goes as planned. Before I started this project,
I had largely thought of myself as a teacher and a researcher, as if
I were two different people at different times, or as if in my
day-to-day work there would not be overlaps and conflicts among
these roles. It was not until I actually started to do the work
that I seriously considered some of the problems and issues that
attended the research side of teacher researcher practice. My
methodology--as "a theory and analysis of how research does or
should proceed" (Harding, 1987, p. 3)--fell easily within
interpretive research assumptions and methods (Erickson, 1986). My
actual methods, however, as well as my analyses, were greatly
influenced by aspects of my teaching and by my commitments as an
educator.

Teaching made demands that conflicted with research demands.
And as I struggled--as a teachero-to understand and respond to the
actions and texts of children in the classroom, the original focus

of my research gave way to a new one. I began with an emphasis on

33

34

my own teaching experiences, and on student experiences in relation
to the teacher and a teacher-manipulated environment. But children
were also engaged in social relations with each other, and these
social relations were extremely important for children's experiences
and writing in my classroom. Eventually, my research concentrated
on student experiences and writing in the social context of the

workshop, with particular attention to peer relations.

I left the house with my one year old son, John Jacob, on my
shoulders. I had a meeting with Bill Johnson, the principal at
'Clifford, at 11:00 AM. It would be my first official contact with
the school, other than the phone call to set up the appointment.
There were two ways for John Jacob and.me to walk the four or five
blocks to the school. One way took us up our street (mostly rental
properties) and over to the school on a gently curved lane past
well-kept lawns and houses--a fairly representative section of the
predominantly white, middle class neighborhood the school served.

We took the other route, which was a little shorter.

We walked across the street, through a parking lot, and
alongside the eight or nine foot wooden fence that separated a large
trailer park from the well-kept lawns. We turned with the fence at
an alley that ended near the school. The entrance to the trailer
park opened to the alley and the backsides of a liquor store and old
motel. The entrance offered the only look at the trailer park; the

fence kept it entirely hidden from view. I was always surprised at

35

how close together the angled trailers were--just enough space, it
seemed, to park a pick-up truck or car. The trailers were mostly
white, dusty, some were peeling. There was no grass, only white
stones and dirt, as far as I could tell. I knew a few children who
lived here. They sometimes played with John Jacob and me on our
front lawn.

The meeting with Bill went well. John Jacob sat quietly, and
Bill and I decided I would meet with the teachers at Clifford the
following week.

I was consciously trying to present myself to
Bill as someone who was a teacher. I told him I
wanted to teach writing, that the legitimacy of my
research depended on my actually teaching, since I
wanted to write about it from that perspective.
He was surprised when I said that I would teach
every day for the entire year. He called it
‘ambitious' and then added that he meant it in a
good way. (Fieldnotes, 5-25-89)

I talked with the Clifford teachers at their final staff
meeting for the year. I told them I wanted to teach writing in
someone's classroom for about 45 minutes every day, and that I would
write my dissertation about what happened. I also told them that it
would be up to the person I worked with to decide how much she or he
wanted to be involved in the work.

Seven teachers wanted to talk with me about my project, and I
met with each of them individually over the next week as they
wrapped up their teaching for the year and straightened their rooms
for the summer. I declined offers from several teachers who wanted

me in their room, but could not promise me that I would have time

each day to work with children on writing. The daily schedules of

36

the 4th and 5th grade teachers seemed especially prohibitive this
way. A few teachers had envisioned a sort of tutor role for me with
children who had trouble with class writing assignments. One
teacher asked me if I would like to help her in her writing
workshop. She had been experimenting with workshop approaches for
several years. I told her she had probably faced and resolved many
of the problems and issues I was interested in learning and writing
about. We agreed that we would talk to each other the following
year about what we were trying to do.

I realized as I talked to the first several teachers that it
was very important to me and my sense of this project that I have
control of a classroom for a period of time each day. I wanted to
be in; writing teacher, even if the regular classroom teacher worked
collaboratively with me in various ways. I decided to work with
Grace even before we had finished talking.

Grace told me that she was ‘stuck' in
writing, that she had.been able to get kids to
enjoy writing and to write in response to story
starters, but she didn't know what to do next.

She said she wanted to have children talk to one
another about their writing, but wasn't sure about
setting it up. She was wondering how to manage
all this. As I listened, I thought that this
would be a good place to be. I will have enough
autonomy as the writing teacher to set up a
writing workshop, but Grace also wants to learn
more about teaching the way I am going to try.
She seems to have similar interests and concerns
to me. It feels like we could learn a lot, since
we are at similar places in our thinking.
(Fieldnotes, 6-7-89)

I talked with Grace several times during the summer on the

phone. She told me that, at the beginning, she wanted to watch what

37

I was doing. Her primary interest, she said, was learning how to
manage a program like the writing workshop. She said she had read
Graves (1983) and Calkins (1986) in masters classes she had taken,
but still had trouble envisioning what such teaching would look
like. She also told me that she would be job sharing with Ruth. We
decided that she and Ruth would introduce me to the class on their
first day of school, and that I would start up the workshop the

following morning.

Grace and Ruth were going through the different schedules,
rules, and routines for the class when I walked into the room. I
waved to Grace and quickly sat down at a round table at the side of
the room, near the door. I would do most of my conferencing with
children at this round table. .

Grace stood at the front of the room. There were bulletin
boards on each side of a large green chalk board in the center of
the front wall. Grace's desk was in the front corner, opposite me.
Ruth was in the other far corner, near her desk. She was pointing
to a bulletin board on the back wall, and telling the children about
classroom jobs each of them would perform at different times
throughout the year. There was another large chalkboard on the back
wall, with an off-white closet that looked to be portable next to
it. The room had a small bathroom in the corner to my right; and a
bookshelf, cupboards, and a faucet and sink filled the wall behind

38

Soon after I arrived, Grace introduced.me.
I am sure I didn't sound too confident. It
is not the kids-~I do not feel easy talking to
students with other adults around. I said that I
was going to be their writing teacher, and that we
wouldn't be working on handwriting, but on
stories, poems, reports--I stumbled sort of here.
I couldn't use words like ‘composition' to
contrast handwriting. I probably will fumble like
this a lot, not knowing the right words for third
graders. I told them a little about the workshop
routine before Grace took over again. (Fieldnotes,
8-29-89)
I started teaching the next day, and it, and the month, and the
year were harder than I had expected or wanted. I soon found myself
fantasizing about writing a dissertation that only required I sit in

the library and read books.

I had expected some difficulties with getting the writing
workshop off the ground and running. The workshop called for new
participation structures, new “rights and obligations of
participants with respect to who can say what, when, and to whom"
(Cazden, 1986, p. 437; see also Philips, 1983). The opening meeting
would be closest to traditional classroom lessons, with the
discourse largely controlled by me, the teacher (Mehan, 1979, 1982).
But writing time and sharing time would call for discourse patterns
breaking with the typical sequence of teacher initiation, student
response, and teacher evaluation. During writing time, much
classroom talk would take place among children with limited teacher

surveillance. And sharing time replaced the teacher at the front of

39

the room with the child-author who reads books and solicits
responses from students.

In other words, I expected confusion as the children and I
attempted to do something new in the classroom. We brought old
how-to knowledge to a situation in which I hoped to upset
traditional procedures and rules. Furthermore, these children were
working with two other teachers in the room-~Grace and Ruth--for
much longer periods than they spent with me. These teachers
organized their lessons at least slightly different from each other,
as well as differently from the writing workshop. Finally, given
social class and ethnic differences, as well as individual
differences, the children themselves brought diverse competencies
and assumptions to their work with me on writing (Heath, 1983;
Michaels, 1981). There would be plenty of occasions for confusion,
as children and teacher brought what they knew and.were learning
about how to participate in school from a variety of settings.

But this is a very friendly interpretation of possible sources
of difficulty in the workshop. It assumes that everyone, more or
less, is interested in doing things in these new ways but gets hung
up when they use old knowledge in a new setting. It forgets
conflict. It ignores that teachers and students sometimes take up
adversarial roles. Children's ‘old knowledge' of school certainly
includes knowledge of how to help things go smoothly, how to
cooperate, but it also includes knowledge of how to disrupt, resist,
engage the teacher in classroom warfare. If the writing workshop

loosens the lid on tightly controlled classrooms, it loosens the lid

40

up; gniy on repressed.pg§i§ixg possibilities. If we assume that at
least some children are alienated from school work (as in Everhart,
1983), and /or engaged in resistance to teacher authority and
control (Willis, 1977; Connell et al., 1982), then loosening teacher
control in the workshop may well engender an avoidance of writing
and work, and increased-~or at least continued--student attempts to
subvert teacher authority. The workshop becomes a place, in a
child's school history of alienated labor and teacher domination,
for increased Opportunities for rest, for avoiding work, for
opposing the teacher, even as the teacher embraces a ‘gentle
pedagogy' that avoids overt displays of teacher power (Hogan, 1989).
This was a tough class of children to work with, at least
partly because a number of children actively resisted teachers in
the classroom. You will get some sense of this in the chapters that
follow. Ruth, a competent teacher with seven years of teaching
experience, tried (and failed) to get out of her teaching contract
after struggling for little over a month with this group of
children. substitute teachers made a special point to walk over to
my round table where I waited to teach writing, to tell me that this
was one of the worst classes they had ever subbed in--one substitute
teacher sharpened her evaluation by pointing out that she had worked
in some of the toughest urban elementary schools around, and never
had she met a more difficult group of children to handle. As I
talked with other teachers in the building, I learned that the
children in this and the other third grade class (taught by Samuel)

were generally recognized as an extremely difficult group of

41

children to teach. Samuel and Grace eventually attempted, with the
support of the school's parent-teacher organization, to get another
third grade classroom at Clifford, in order to reduce class size
(Samuel had 28 students; Grace, 27). They were unsuccessful, even
though a third fourth grade teacher was hired for this group of

children the following year.

I faced confusion and conflict in the writing workshop. The
first month was especially frustrating and emotionally draining.

This is getting a little tiring, feeling so
frustrated and depressed after teaching (what
teaching?). I can't seem to get done the things I
hope to. I an angry. James, Suzanne, Robert,
Bruce, Ken are getting me angry. They are testing
me. And I am feeling humiliated in front of
Grace. (Fieldnotes, 9-11-89)

I felt vulnerable in front of Grace, and in front of the
children as well. I worried about what this meant for my teaching
and my students' experiences in the classroom.

When I taught junior high, there were one or
two classes each year I didn't feel good with--for
some reason, 6th period my second year sticks in
my head. I didn't d9 the same things with that
class that I did with other classes, because I
didn't feel I could trust them. I think I felt
too vulnerable in front of them, I kept a
difigance. The problem is that I am feeling this
way about this class. I feel vulnerable in front
of them. The bigger problem is that 1 won't take
risks with them. I won't do the special things
that maybe would really get them interested.
We're tied in a bad circle. I begin trying to do
interesting things. For whatever reasons, the
students (some) don't cooperate, don't make me
feel they are with me. I then adjust, and my
adjustment is to worry more about making children

42

behave. This of course backfires, and causes some
to resist more; others, who weren't resisting
before get sick of me talking about people
misbehaving. Pretty soon, we're sick of each
other. Obviously, I'm the one who has to bust out
of this. I need to figure out how. (Fieldnotes,
9-15-89)

In early October, I had a particularly bad day. The confusion
got to me.

Rajesh probably came and talked to me four or
five times during writing time. He got on my
nerves. One time he said he didn't know what to
put down on his sheet of Ideas for Topics.

Another time he said he didn't know what to write

about. I felt as if he was always tugging on my

arm as I tried to help other children. I remember

Rajesh and how I felt because I usually enjoy him

so much. I didn't today. (Fieldnotes, 10-2-89)
As did the conflict.

I said that it felt like they were fighting
me. The word ‘fight' must be too vivid or
exciting. James sat in the back of the room,
saying over and over, "We're fighting you, we're
fighting you,” swinging his fists in the air.
(Fieldnotes, 10-2-89)

The emotional, physical, and intellectual demands caught up
with me. I did not have it within me to go to school the next day.
I talked to Grace in the morning on the phone, and she suggested we
talk that afternoon after she finished teaching. We met in the
teachers' lounge, which was empty. She gave me the letter
reproduced in Figure 2.0.

In her letter, Grace gave an analysis of what she thought had
been happening in the workshop: seven students were not handling it

very well. She also shared her own teacherly response to this

group, which was to not do certain activities (presumably less

43

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letter.

Figure 2.0. Grace's

44

‘structured') with the class because she believed they were not
ready for such activities. She related her own version of what I
had been going through: ”pulling out my hair and downing bottles of
Pepto.‘

I talked with Grace about what she meant by ‘special needs.’
Her use of the term had little to do with psychological or
intellectual deficiency on the children's part. She meant what she
said at the beginning, that these particular children, in her
opinion, needed "lots of structure,“ “one task at a time,” "quiet.”
She saw these adjustments as at odds with a sort of official version
of the workshop--'the real thing'--I was trying to set up. Grace
asserted that seven specific children needed something a little
different from.what ‘the writing workshop program'--as interpreted
by her in her own readings of Graves and Calkins, and through her
interactions with me--offered. But she also believed that the
workshop was a good thing to do, and that these children would
eventually function well within it.

I should note that Graves and Calkins are quite clear about
there being no one right way to do writing workshops. Their books
are filled with stories of many versions of workshops that they
applaud for their responsiveness to children and for how they draw
on the particular strengths of individual teachers. Still, these
approaches assume that if you.giigg children to write, they will do
so (and, it seems, not do other sorts of things, like throw paper or
hit people). Related to this is their conception of traditional

approaches to the teaching of writing, which function to actually

45

produce resistance to writing as they “take the control away from
children and place unnecessary road blocks in the way of their
intentions (Graves, 1983, p. 4). Grace, at different times in the
year, questioned the control workshop approaches granted children.
Similar to Delpit (1988), she believed that this control actually
allowed some children to avoid (or prevented them from) learning
what they needed to. Grace was also concerned with things going
smoothly in the classroom, and increased levels of student autonomy
tended to make things jagged and noisy. Her letter expresses, if
faintly, some of these doubts and beliefs.

But Grace's letter was important that Tuesday afternoon for the
support, affirmation, and solidarity it offered me. Grace
recognized my struggle (“are you having fun yet?'), affirmed my work
'with children in the room ("you have a wonderful way with
children”), and expressed her willingness to work with me in the
future ("Let's [let eel put this program to work em; way”). Her
offer came at a crucial time, and I gratefully accepted.

The workshop routines and norms, and my work there, did not
change drastically. I still did the planning (sometimes in
consultation with Grace), conducted the opening meetings, worked
with children at the round table—-in other words, I was still
largely responsible for the shape and content of the workshop. But
Grace became an important part of the day-to-day experiences of the
children and me there. She helped me most during writing time. She
usually circulated around the room, helping children write or

remember they were supposed to be writing (or reading or

46

conferencing). Grace and I discussed what we saw happening and what
we should do about various children and problems in the few minutes
we had around the edges of teaching and family demands--sometimes we
talked a little longer over lunch, but not as often as we would have
liked.
Our relationship was transformed under the pressures of working
with children in new and demanding ways.
Grace gave me a note to read, written in blue

magic marker. I told her how I tried to respect

what teachers knew, but that deep inside I must

have thought that I really had been learning how

to do this stuff in graduate school. I didn't

expect it to be this hard. (Inside, that morning

while I was thinking about talking to Grace, I had

been humbled, and it freed me. Maybe this was

necessary. I would start over, with more respect

for how hard this was and for what Grace knew.

Maybe I would learn more.) (Fieldnotes, 10-3-89)
Grace's help allowed me to become a teacher in the classroom, rather
than.;he teacher. Her participation in the workshop, especially
during writing time, allowed me the luxury of talking with children
about their work at the round table with fewer distractions and
responsibilities for the rest of the class. Grace's help allowed me
to become more of a student of writing and its instruction, a
researcher. I turn to this aspect of my work at Clifford in the
remainder of this chapter.

But before I do, I want to note that Grace's participation in

the workshop did not suddenly remove confusion or conflict from the

room. She joined the ongoing struggles I had been experiencing more

or less alone--or, more appropriately, she joined the ongoing

47

struggles my students and I were experiencing as we tried to go
about teaching and writing in a writing workshop.

In an early memo characterizing my study, I wrote that ”two
broad areas for investigation and analysis . . . linked to the
writing workshop approach's conception of the teacher role“ would
guide at least my initial research in the field (Memo, 7-27-89). I
noted that the emphases were tentative, since one of the purposes of
the project was to identify the special problems and issues that
attended teaching and learning within writing workshop classrooms.

I characterized the first broad area of concern as follows:

A key task for writing workshop teachers is

establishing a classroom environment that supports
growth in writing. What is involved in setting up
such an environment? Graves and Calkins, of
course, offer practical suggestions, but what
actually happens when a teacher attempts to teach
in this way? What enables and constrains teacher
efforts to establish such an environment? What
materials, routines, and classroom norms are
involved? What (if any) changes in materials,
routines, and norms occur across a school year?
(Memo, 7-27-89)

This first group of questions was largely informed by
ethnographic and sociolinguistic reports of classrooms in which
teachers and students misunderstood each other because they were
acting on different assumptions of what was appropriate behavior and
speech. I discussed this concern earlier in relation to the idea of
eenfeeien. Misunderstanding was likely as my students and I groped
to figure out how to do things in a classroom with new materials,

routines and norms. The last two questions, especially, show an

ethnographic interest in describing what patterns of interaction

48

actually emerged, and possible changes in these patterns as the year
progressed.

But there was also a fairly strong teacher researcher flavor to
these questions. As Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1990) note:

The unique feature of questions that prompt
teacher research is that they emanate solely
neither from theory nor from practice, but from
the critical reflection on the intersection of the
two. (p. 6)

I was interested in.what actually happened when I tried to
enact a certain vision of teaching and learning writing in the
classroom; I was interested in the “discrepancies between what is
intended and what occurs” (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1990, p. 5). In
a later proposal, I appropriated Berthoff's (1987) notion of the
classroom as a philosophical laboratory, and said that the strength
of my work rested on bringing "theory to bear on practice even as
practice corrects theory" (Proposal, 11-89).

My second broad area of concern looked to the writing
conference:

The primary instructional strategy within the
writing workshop approach is the writing
conference, a teacher-student conversation about
student texts and writing processes. What happens
within these writing conferences? From the
teacher's perspective, what difficulties are
involved with responding to young writers"written
texts? From the students' perspective, how do
writing conferences help or hinder their writing?
How do these conferences influence the writing
that children do in the classroom? (Memo,
7-27-89).

These questions, especially the first three, were informed by a

small body of research on teacher-student writing conferences that

49

suggests that breaking out of traditional teacher-dominated
patterns, and embracing the models put forward.by Murray, Graves,
and Calkins, may actually be quite difficult. Jacob (1982), for
example, in a study of writing conferences in a junior college
setting, found that teachers controlled writing conferences much as
they did traditional lessons; Jacob described the discourse as
“unilateral, from instructor to student" (p. 386). Michaels,
Ulichney, and Watson-Gegeo (1986), and Freedman (1987), found that
teacher goals and implicit expectations for children's writing tasks
over-powered student intentions in the writing conferences of sixth
and ninth grade students.

Florio-Ruane (in press) suggests various sources of
difficulties in transforming writing conference talk: contextual
constraints such as limited time, mandated curriculum, and the
school's evaluative climate; the knowledge (often limited) that
teachers and students bring of writing processes, schooling, and
each other, to their conversations; and traditional discourse
patterns that make it difficult for students to "assume rights to
initiate talk, determine topic, or serve as ‘experts' even about
their own writing problems and purposes" (p. 12). Ulichney and
Watson-Gegeo (1989) point to mandated writing tests, minimal support
for teacher efforts to transform practice, and pressure to improve
achievement test scores as factors that undermine workshop and
process writing efforts and goals.

I was interested in what would happen when I tried to enact a

different sort of school talk in writing conferences. I was

50

particularly interested in the difficulties attending response as
socioanalysis. Why? Supporting student intentions and material in
writing conferences appeared to be hard enough to accomplish.
Response as socioanalysis required me to support egg question
student material. In.geeeeiening that material, from my position of
authority in the classroom, I once again ran the ziek of shutting
down, silencing student voice in the classroom. In other words,
supporting and geeeeiening student voices might often be at odds
with or entail risks for our efforts to, as Willinsky (1990) put it,
encourage ‘unfettered expression' in the classroom. The classroom
has not been a friendly place for student expression. Rather than
pushing our thought and action forward to a more critical evaluation
of our situation, response as socioanalysis could encourage students
to not speak their mind, or to look for the correct thing to say to
please the teacher.

The final question above, about the influence writing
conferences had on student writing, was motivated by my growing
theoretical interest in Bakhtin. I was interested in examining how
children appropriated what was said in the writing conferences for
their future efforts at writing and revision. How would children
(if they did) appropriate teacher words for their own purposes in
their texts? Would they appropriate the teacher's words, or would
the teacher's words appropriate them? The teacher-student writing
conference seemed a particularly interesting place to ‘test'

Bakhtin's work, and see what purchase it provided on a complex

51

speaking/writing situation involving participants who brought
varying purposes and unequal power to their talk.

In order to research these questions, I proposed collecting
(and I did collect) the following sorts of data: eeeehe:_eienming

mites and various W. fieldnotes written after each
day's teaching, emeieeemee of whole-class activities and writing

conferences, and photocopies of ehiiemenie_gzieimg. The planning
notes and classroom documents (such as posted lists of classroom
rules, peer conference guidelines, activity sheets, etc.) would
provide written records of teacher intentionality (Burton, 1985).
That is, such data would help me investigate what I had hoped would
happen, in order to juxtapose these hopes against what actually
occurred in the classroom. I wrote my planning notes separate from
my fieldnotes, even though, as I discuss below, I sometimes used my
fieldnotes to think about future teacherly action. My planning
notes usually contained sketches of opening meetings, time
allocations of various activities, and reminders to myself about
specific children I needed to work with on any given day.

The remaining types of data would allow me to explore what
became of teacher (and student) intention in the writing workshop,
at various levels of description and in various situations. My
fieldnotes included general narratives of the day's teaching and
learning, as well as methodological notes to myself, and expressions
of the sense I was making of my work as a teacher and how I felt
about it. The audiotapes of opening meetings, writing conferences,

and sharing time, were essential for a close analysis of the shape

52

and content of classroom talk in which my students and I engaged.
Copies of the children's writing were important for clues to
children's learning about writing process, and for my interests in
children's use of teacher suggestions and questions in writing
conferences. Children's texts, examined in relation to the
audiotaped talk of writing conferences (and opening meetings and
sharing sessions), would enable insights into the sense children
were making of their writing and the classroom talk surrounding it.

Although I talked about my classroom as a philosophical
laboratory in early memos, and my data collection was fairly
well-tuned to the goal of examining critically the intersection of
theory and practice in my teaching, I had not seriously considered
the conflicts and issues that might attend actually pursuing teacher
and researcher roles simultaneously. I have identified four
important conflicts that shaped my work as a teacher researcher at
Clifford. The conflicts were eventually ‘resolved' with a group of
research methods I followed consistently in my daily work. I began
these day-to-day methods in early November, and pursued them until
the end of the school year.

The first conflict arose out of demands for my attention in my
everyday work as a teacher researcher. Being a teacher put demands
on where and when I could look at things while I was teaching.
Whereas the traditional ethnographic researcher can sit at the back
of the room and make decisions as to when and where to attend, my
vision and attention were often tied to my activity and

responsibility as a teacher. A researcher, for example, might

53

purposely ignore John biting Suzanne in order to listen carefully to
a peer conference between Carol and Maya, but a teacher will feel he
cannot. At issue was my ability, as a teacher researcher, to engage
in data collection as a type of progressive problem-solving
(Erickson, 1986), in which what I attended to (and then wrote about
in my fieldnotes) represented a deiihemeee process of testing
emerging theories by gathering evidence to support and challenge
those theories (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Hammersley & Atkinson,
1983). I often felt more reactive than proactive in my decisions of
when and where I would ‘look' in the classroom. The problem of
‘bounded rationality'--simplifying complexity because of limits of
information-processing capacity (Simon, l957)--takes on a
socially-constructed twist here. I was bounded, as a qualitative
researcher attempting to describe and understand a complex classroom
situation, not only by processing capacity, but also socially, in my
role as the teacher.

A second conflict pitted my emotional responses to my teaching
experiences against research demands that I write fieldnotes each
day as an important source of data, and as part of an ongoing
process of data analysis and methodological problem-solving. My
emotional responses to teaching, especially how well or badly I
thought things went,.affected my notewriting. At the extremes of
magnificent and devastating experiences as a teacher in the
classroom, it often seemed harder for me to get myself to write
fieldnotes. If things went well, I would rather celebrate and talk

about it with friends; if badly, I wanted to forget about what

54

happened rather than dwell on, relive for the purposes of
notetaking, what had caused me distress in the first place. I
usually overcame these responses, but I often noted how depressed I
was, how tired, how my feelings discouraged note writing.

This is not to suggest that the only reason I resisted writing
fieldnotes was because of my teaching--sometimes, like most
qualitative researchers, I simply did not feel up to the
intellectual and physical labor writing notes demanded. I am also
not suggesting that more traditional researchers are never depressed
or tired or giddy, or that such feelings, in my case, only related
to my teaching and not other aspects of my life. My point is that
as a teacher researcher, I had a certain emotional investment in
what happened in the classroom that more traditional researchers
would usually not have, and that this investment affected data
collection, in as much as it made writing fieldnotes more or less
difficult for me to do.

One way I attempted to help myself overcome resistance to
writing fieldnotes was to experiment with various ways of recording
them. I began the year typing my notes at a computer. A half-month
into my teaching (and remember, I was struggling in my teaching
here), I bought an artsy blank book with an illustration every few
pages and short quotations from ‘real' authors for inspiration.

I wanted to have an inviting place to write
my notes--we'll see if this thing does the trick.
I wasn't planning on getting anything this

gimmicky, but the other blank books I saw were

either too small or too impressive and expensive.
I wouldn't want to write in them. (Fieldnotes,
9-15-89)

55

At the bottom of this very first page was a Jack London
quotation: "You can't wait for inspiration. Ybu have to go after it
with a club.” Just the sort of thing a slightly battered teacher,
looking for a safe, peaceful place to write, needed. For most of
the fall, I went back and forth between.handwritten notes in this
blank book, and typed ones on my computer, not very pleased or
comfortable with either. After Christmas, I found some inexpensive,
large, hard-covered blank books (no illustrations or quotations) and
wrote my fieldnotes in them consistently to the end of the year.

The third conflict I encountered in my roles as teacher and
researcher concerned the content of my fieldnotes: what sort of
notes would I write? When I wrote fieldnotes for my first day of
teaching, I already realized that research goals of description--”to
capture the slice of life” in order to provide "the clues that you
begin to put together to make analytical sense of what you study“
(Bogdan & Biklen, 1982, pp. 84, 86)--were in conflict with more
teacherly goals of reflection and planning that I might press my
notes toward. After three pages of mostly descriptive material, I
wrote :

,/ Ideas for teaching tomorrow keep

intruding--for instance, I just dazed off and was
thinking that I need to express to the kids
tomorrow that the workshop is a chance to write
about things they care about, think about things
ehey want to think about . . . (Fieldnotes,
8-30-89)
I continued for a page and a half, before pulling myself back

to description with: "Back to notes.‘ Teacher reflections were

often sparked by my attempts to describe what happened in class that

56

day. But as a teacher, I often felt the need to move beyond
description to an.exeiee§ien of what happened, in order to formulate
for myself what needed to be done in the future.

Again, I do not want to suggest some absolute break between
what I faced as a teacher researcher and the problems other
qualitative researchers encounter. The content of qualitative
fieldnotes includes both descriptive and reflective material (Bogdan
8 Biklen, 1982). Descriptive material attempts to record details of
the people, conversations, physical setting, events, activities, and
researcher behavior that make up the research setting. Reflective
material expresses the ”more subjective side of the researcher's
journey," and contains speculations, hunches, impressions, as well
as methodological notes for future research in the field (p. 86).

Any qualitative researcher, then, faces decisions of balance
between these different sorts of material. The problem was
intensified for me, however, since the initial questions guiding my
research emphasized investigating how teaching writing was
experienced by me, the teacher. In other words, the reflective
material, in which I mulled over teacher problems and.how I was
feeling, was an extremely important part of the study as I began my
work. At the same time, however, I knew I needed rich descriptions
of classroom life in the workshop in order to investigate what was
happening there and what this meant to other participants. My goals
for the study went beyond teacher autobiography. I wanted to study
what happened in the c1assroom--not just to me--when I tried to

teach writing in a writing workshop. I wanted to ground the

57

teacherly issues and problems I was facing in a plausible account of
workshop life.

‘Teacherly' notes, then, were important both as a tool for
improving teacher practice through reflection, and as a record of my
thinking and experience in the classroom. ‘Researchly' notes,
focused on description, also remained important. In an ideal
situation in which I would.have unlimited time and motivation to
write fieldnotes, I could pursue both sorts of notes without
conflict. But in the actual situation I faced, the two were often
in competition for my time and effort, and any act of notetaking
represented conscious and unconscious choices of emphasis.

.A fourth and final conflict arose as I thought about ways to
narrow my research focus in order to gain a depth of data and begin
the gradual process of confirming, revising, and disconfirming
various assertions I was formulating in relation to what was
happening in the workshop, and.what problems my students and I faced
there in our work. A common way to focus data collection and
analysis in studies of classrooms is to eventually identify and
concentrate on a limited number of children. These children become
key informants (Bogdan & Biklen, 1982, p. 63) as well as fool for
observation and collection of documents. I considered this move
throughout the year, but could not shake the worry that such a
research commitment would also entail a teacher commitment--that is,
that the goal of learning more about particular children for
research purposes would in some way affect my teacherly decisions,

and ultimately privilege some children over others.

58

My discussions of the other conflicts I faced have tended to
emphasize teaching demands constraining or complicating my research
efforts. Here, the problem was my research affecting my teaching.

I was aware that my research goals sometimes pushed back on my
teaching. For example, after a discussion with Grace about how to
manage both writing conferences with individual children.ene keeping
the rest of the class on track, I noted:
If I weren't doing research in the workshop,

I probably wouldn't conference with children at

the round table at the side of the room, but do it

at the children's desks, moving around the room.

I feel the tug as a researcher to stay close to

the tape recorder. (Fieldnotes, 12-13-89)

I was concerned about a similar research ‘tug' toward certain
children, and not others. The writing workshop, especially during
writing time, was a fairly open place in which children and teachers
were making decisions to do this and not that--to work with this
person and not that person--on an almost moment-to-moment basis. As
a teacher, I worried about more or less unconscious preferences I
might be expressing for certain children in these decisions. Within
the first month of my teaching, I created a weekly schedule that
assured that I talked at least briefly with each individual child in
the room on a regular basis. A research focus on certain children
may have encouraged me to attend to some children more than others,
even as I consciously sought to work with children according to
their needs (and not my own).

By early November, I had come to a way of proceeding in my work

that ‘resolved"these conflicts; resolved them, not in the sense of

59

making them go away, but in the sense of dealing with them more or
less effectively. The ‘resolution' had two aspects: a daily routine
of data collection, and a relative emphasis on writing conferences
to focus the study.

I started collecting what I called ‘packets of data' each day.
At least four types of data made up my ‘packet of data' for any
given day: I would have teacher planning notes and classroom
documents; fieldnotes; an audiotape of the day's opening meeting,
teacher-student writing conferences, and sharing time; and
photocopies of any children's stories I came in contact with that
day, in conferences or whole-class sessions.

Collecting ‘packets' did several things for me. The collection
of audiotapes, children's writing, and planning notes each day eased
my concerns about my ability to capture rich detail and important
events in my fieldnotes (because I attended to certain things and
not others, because I was too depressed to write a lot, because I
wanted to use my notes to figure out a pedagogical problem, etc.).
What I did not cover with fieldnotes could be partially filled in,
if need be, with audiotapes and the others. And, of course, the
collection of four sorts of data rather than only fieldnotes gave me
multiple sources of data with which to understand what was happening
in the room. Children's writing and the audiotapes, for example,
were less constrained in what they ‘1ooked at' than I was in my role
as teacher in the classroom.

As I realized that my daily data collection would support my

research interests, I became more comfortable with using my

6O

fieldnotes, when I wanted to, for reflections on my teaching. And
the fact that I photocopied children's writing that I came in
contact with each day proved crucial for these reflections.
Originally, I had planned to collect classroom sets of children's
writing at periodic intervals. But without a child's text in front
of me as I wrote notes, it was difficult to write about what
happened and what I was thinking about as I responded to the child
and her text, even with an audiotape of our conversation. Having
children's texts also allowed me to begin the work of connecting
writing conference talk with the writing children did in the room.

My daily methods served my research and teacher interests
fairly well. I was collecting the sorts of data that would allow me
to write plausible accounts of what was happening, as well as using
my notewriting and the data I collected to reflect on and inform my
teaching practice.

My methods also served a more or less explicit research focus,
but not one focusing on certain children. From the beginning, a
teacher experience I wanted to write about was responding to
children's writing. My packets of data were well suited to such a
focus. Each day, I had fieldnotes, photocopies of children's
stories, and audiotapes that addressed, largely or in part, such
experiences. I had solved the problem of focus not by looking to
particular children, but by looking closely at a fairly compact
event and location-~the writing conferences with children at the

round table at the side of the room.

61

In the end, responding to children's texts did not turn out to
be the primary focus of my work and writing. My eventual focus did
emerge, however, out of my experiences with children in writing
conferences. I became fascinated.with the sense they were making of
the workshop and their work with me, and more and more interested in
their work with peers. In my conversations with children about
their writing processes and texts, I began learning about the
importance of peers to the writing they did, and that in order to
understand and respond to their writing, I often needed to know
about peer relations. My focus shifted from a primary concern with
teacher experience (my own) to the experiences of children. From my
current vantage point, this shift seems quite appropriate for a
eeeehe; researcher interested in making children's experiences

central to the official work of his third grade writing workshop.

My earliest memos and proposals show a strong emphasis on my
experiences as a teacher in setting up a workshop and responding to
children's writing. Eventually, children's experiences and problems
became more important to my research, but, at least initially, I
thought of children's experiences in relation to me and a
teacher-manipulated environment, and ignored influences of peers on
children's experiences. For example, in a proposal for funding I
wrote in early November, 1989, I said that the following three

questions would guide my research:

62

1. What problems and difficulties do children
encounter as they attempt to become authors
in classrooms?

2. What pedagogical problems and difficulties
arise when teachers take seriously the notion
of student ownership?

3. What is involved in establishing and
sustaining a classroom environment that
supports children writers?

Children's experiences received a more prominent place here
than they had in earlier lists of research questions. In my
discussion of the sorts of difficulties children were likely to
encounter in their writing, I emphasized authority relations between
teachers and students and the pervasiveness of evaluation in schools
as situational constraints that might undermine children's efforts
to take control of their writing in writing workshops. In other
words, I looked to teacher-student relations as an important
determinant of children's experiences in the classroom. I wrote
that “part of the problem for children writing in classrooms .
is exactly that they are writing in classrooms in which teachers and
students take up certain roles and relations with one another"
(Proposal, 11-89).

In order to investigate children's experiences more thoroughly,
I added interviews of children, by outside researchers, to the
research methods I was already pursuing. I attribute the absence of
interviewing before this proposal to two factors. The relative

emphasis on my own teaching experience at the beginning of the

project made data collection on children's experience less crucial.

63

But more importantly, I had considered writing conferences important
sources of information on children's experiences in the workshop.

And they were. My conversations with children about their
texts often functioned much like interviews: I asked children
questions about their writing, how they did it, what special
problems they were having, why they did what they did, etc., so that
I could understand how they were attempting to solve writing
problems, and support them in their efforts. These conversations
were being audiotaped, and provided a valuable source of data on
children's writing and how they thought about it. By the time of
this proposal, however, I recognized that, at least for some
children, 1 may have been one of the problems or difficulties they
were experiencing in the writing workshop, and that students may
very well be reluctant to talk about problems they were having with
the teacher when the teacher was also the interviewer. I planned
for colleagues to conduct extended interviews of children towards
the end of the school year.

Gradually, I started noticing and becoming concerned about peer
influences in the workshop. I realized that peers were extremely
important for--and not necessarily in positive ways--the experiences
of children in the workshop and their writing there. Toward the end
of my teaching at Clifford, and then into my analysis and writing,
this aspect of children's experiences and writing in the workshop
became more and more central to my research.

I became interested in figuring out how peer culture

intersected.with the official work of the writing workshop. One of

64

the key incidents that taught me about the importance of peer
culture for understanding what happened in this classroom is
explored in detail in Chapter VI. There, I tell the story of my
response to Maya's text, Ibe_Zie_fie, and my struggle as a teacher
to respond to her story responsibly, given its participation in the
social life of children in the room, and the moral and political
issues it raised for me.

In late March and April, I began developing a list of interview
questions that would help me understand the sense children made of
our writing workshop (see Appendix B for interview questions). I
wanted children to talk about what they thought typically happened
in various parts of the workshop, and how they felt about what
happened, as well as comment on particular incidents or aspects of
the workshop and their work that caused them trouble. There were
questions about their relations with me, as well as their relations
with other children. Children's responses to questions about their
relations with other children were extremely important for my later
analysis and writing. Some of the questions used to explore peer
relations were:

Who are the people in the class you like to be
with and work with? Why? Are there people you
don't like to be with and work with? Why?

What usually happened in conferences with
classmates? What sorts of things would they say?
Did you always use their advice? Why or why not?
What did you say in conferences? Did you like

peer conferences? Have you ever had bad
experiences in conferences with classmates?

65

What was sharing time like? How did you feel
about it? Are there people in class you would
rather not read your stories in front of? Who?
Why?

Did children ever tease one another during the
writing workshop? When/how/why did they do it?
Did students ever use writing to tease one another
or hurt someone else's feelings? How did they do
it? Why is that ‘teasing'?

Who are the popular children in class? Why are
they popular? Who are the unpopular children?
Why are they unpopular?

In May, I arranged for three colleagues to conduct one to
one-and-a-half hour interviews with all but three children in the
classroom. I instructed my colleagues to emphasize to the children
that the purpose of the interviews was to learn about what children
thought of the writing workshop, with the goal of making the
workshop better in the future. The interviews were audiotaped, and
the tapes were transcribed that summer.

One of the first things I did after my teaching was over was
read through the transcripts of children's interviews, paying
particular attention to children's responses that commented on peer
relations within the room. This first look at the interviews, in
which I investigated children's experiences of each other in the
workshop, was informed by my previous work with them. As I worked
with these children across the year--as well as watched them play on
the playground, vote for student council representatives, decide who
to sit by in the cafeteria, etc.--I began noticing patterns of

association among children that divided them along gender and social

class lines (if we take the fence separating the children living in

66

the trailer park from those living in the surrounding suburban
community as a rough social-class line).

Several teachers in the building told me that children from the
trailer park formed their own subculture in the school, and tended
to only have friends from the trailer park. There were five black
children in the room (one whose parents were from India), but they
each associated primarily with other white children of their own
gender, and did not form a subgroup. In the workshOp, girls worked
with girls, and boys with boys; and the boys and girls who lived in
the trailer park seemed to be at the bottom of informal peer
hierarchies of status and power in the classroom, even though
several children who did not live there also’occupied similar
positions.

With some sense of gender divisions and peer hierarchies in
mind, I began reading children's interviews. In the beginning, I
concentrated on children who were at the extremes of the informal
peer hierarchies I had observed. My hunch was that the workshop
might have afforded rather dramatically different experiences for
different children, depending on who they were in relation to other
children. Gradually, I began looking to other children's interviews
for commonalities and contrasts, and began reading fieldnotes and
listening to audiotapes in order to investigate what peer relations
meant for children's experiences in the room, and for how they
affected children's writing processes and texts.

I also began examining children's texts. I drew on Bakhtin

(1986) and Rristeva (1986), and found their work extremely helpful

67

for making connections between children's texts and their social
contexts. For Bakhtin (1986), texts respond to preceding and
anticipated texts and are sensitive to audience and social context.
Texts are ‘dialogic,’ in that they are responsive to others and to
their texts. Kristeva (1986), an early interpreter of Bakhtin in
the West, characterized the dialogic nature of text in terms of
horizontal and vertical relations.
The word's status is thus defined

hexizeneeiiy (the word in text belongs to both

writing subject and addressee) as well as

xeieieeiiy (the word in text is oriented towards

an anterior or synchronic literary corpus). (p.

37)

Any text is written in relation to some audience, however
broadly conceived. That audience shapes the content and form of the
text--the text ‘belongs' to both the author and audience. But texts
also draw on and anticipate other texts. In my analyses, I began
doing interpretations of children's texts where peers (not only
teachers) were important audiences, and in which child authors drew
on not only their conversations with teachers and their readings of
books, but also the words, meanings, and values of their peer
culture to construct their texts. In other words, I have tried to
place child authors in a social context in which peers were
important audiences and sources of material.

In the four chapters that follow, I discuss children's
experiences in the writing workshop, and their work and writing

there. In Chapter III, I focus on a small group of boys and their

leader, James, who were at the top of the classroom's pecking order.

68

In this chapter, I have not tried to characterize typical
experiences or writing in the workshop--instead, I examine
particular authors and texts in order to dramatize problems and
issues that workshop advocates such as Graves and Calkins have
ignored. In Chapters IV and V, I concentrate more on the
experiences of children with little status and power among peers,
but use discussions of their experiences to characterize more
general responses by children to the writing situation they faced in
the writing workshop. I draw heavily on children's interviews in
these chapters, as well as on their texts, in order to investigate
the risks they attached to writing about themselves for multiple
audiences, and their preferences for fictional narratives over the
personal narratives and topics I was encouraging them to write. In
Chapter VI, 1 provide an interpretation of a particularly difficult
occasion of teacher response to children's texts. The case
emphasizes the connectedness of texts and teacher response to the

social life and micropolitics of the classroom.

My work as a teacher researcher has developed throughout this
project. I called myself a teacher researcher two years ago, but
the term meant little more to me than the same person embracing two
different roles. The development of my teacher researcher practice
'was characterized by the progressive integration of my teacher and

researcher roles. The activities, content, and purpose of my work

69

increasingly reflected both teacher and researcher demands and
commitments.

In the beginning, I separated my teaching and research
activities. Setting up the tape recorder, photocopying children's
stories, writing fieldnotes at night-~these were research activities
I pursued in_eeeieien to my activities as a teacher. By the time I
started collecting daily ‘packets of data' in November, my research
and teaching activities had become more integrated. I used my
notewriting for descriptive purposes, but also to think about my
teaching and future action. I knew the audiotapes and photocopies
of children's stories were essential for later analyses, but they
also became essential for day-to-day assessments of what was
happening and what to do about it. My research methods became part
of my teaching methods, part of the movement from action to thought
to action that I brought to my work with children.

By spring, not just the activities, but also the objects or
contents of my teacher and researcher activities had begun to
converge. In my teaching, I had a problem, and this problem became
an important focus for my research and writing. The problem was
reading, understanding, and responding to children's texts, when the
meanings and functions of these texts were at least partially
dependent on a peer culture to which I had limited access. In my
day-to-day work as a eeeehe; researcher, I paid increasing attention
to what I knew and observed of children's relations with each other;
as a teacher meeeexehez, I planned for extended interviews of

children.

70

Finally, I began this work with traditional interpretive
research goals: I wanted to provide a plausible account of what
happened in my third grade writing workshop. The purpose of my work
and writing has shifted to one that better represents my interests
as a teacher and a researcher. In what follows, my purpose is to
provide compelling descriptions of what happened in my classroom in
order to call into question certain assumptions and practices of
workshop approaches. My goal is to illuminate complexities and
problems in the teaching and learning of writing that workshop
advocates have largely ignored. I could not avoid tangled
intellectual, moral/political, and aesthetic issues in my teaching,
and I have not avoided them in my research and writing about that

teaching .

CHAPTER III

STUDENT INTENTION AND RELATIONS, AND

FAKE IN LEAD R FROM ALAB

James caught my attention quickly. I knew him by name after

the first day of the workshop.

James is going to be trouble for me--I didn't
handle things well today. During writing time,
after I explained that the children could choose A
what they wanted to write about, James first told
me he didn't have anything to write about, then
that he was going to write about vomit (other
children snickered when he said this), and finally
that he needed a new sheet of paper because he had
messed the other one up. He approached me later
and said that he didn't like writing. My
response: ‘Well you are going to do some writing
in here.’ Nice guy--understanding, patient, eager
to learn about and help children. I need to get
more sleep. “(Fieldnotes, 8-30-89)

You might say James awoke me rather abruptly from my dreams of
children writing themselves onto the page and into a community of
authors. James also served notice that he was a force to be
reckoned with in the classroom, both in his relationship with me as
the teacher, and in his relationships with other children in the

room. Among the boys, James was at the top of the pecking order,

71

72

and commanded high status and influence among them. Of course, I
did not know this then, not yet.

James (or rather, James and I) found something to write about
the next day before class. Grace had asked me to come with her to
get the children from gym class. As Grace and the gym teacher
worked to quiet the children down and get them into a line, I-
realized that I was surprised and disappointed that children still
had to get in lines, be absolutely quiet (though it seldom
happened), etc. I had not taught in schools for several years, and
I guess I had assumed they had changed while I was gone.

Kurt and James interrupted my musings. They were arguing about
Kurt's placement at the beginning of the line. Kurt claimed that he
was supposed to be the line leader; James, that Kurt had led the
line the day before from art, so someone else should be the line
leader. I entered their conversation, partly to disrupt such a
serious discussion of what I considered an arbitrary school
procedure. I questioned Kurt as to whether he really, really was
the line leader or not. James seemed to have caught on that I was
playing, and soon was calling Kurt an impostor, and then a fake line
leader. At the end of the year, James still remembered the origins
of his first story:

He [Kurt] said I'm the line leader and I go
no he's not, he's a fake line leader. And then I,
then I looked at his colors [reference to
University of Alabama sweatshirt Kurt was wearing]
and I go the fake line leader from Alabama. And
Mr. Lensmire goes yeah, maybe you could write a

story about that, and I did, and I put Kurt as the
main character. (Interview, 5-24-90)

73

James soon enlisted Ken as a collaborator on the piece, and
they could be seen working together most days in the workshop.
James often kneeled in his seat, leaning over across Ken's desk top
as they worked. They seldom asked for help from Grace or me. I
stopped in one day to see how things were going.

I bent down by them, and Ken asked James if
they should let me see a certain part of their
story. James said, 'He can read it.’ I didn't
read the whole story, only to the middle of the
page where the female and male lead characters
meet on a train in the dining car. The next line
said something like: ‘Then they went to bed.’

The ‘they' was Kurt and another character named
after someone in the c1ass--Lisa. I asked them if
that was the part. They said yes. I asked if
their story was like a James Bond movie (I was
thinking of their spies and romantic liaisons, but
didn't say this), and they said no, and seemed
confused by the question. I got up and walked
away.

Later, I saw them in the front of the room
with Grace. She had their paper in her hands and
I saw her write something on their paper.
(Fieldnotes, 9-15-89)

James and Ken decided to publish the story, and they shared
their typed and illustrated book with the class toward the end of
November. Just before they were supposed to share, they came to me
in a panic--they could not find their book. Soon, Ken had the
contents of his desk on the floor as he looked for the book. James
told me that I must have lost it; he was holding me responsible. I
was surprised at how desperate and engaged they seemed. Usually,
James was ‘cool'--a word used by other children to describe James
and his friends in interviews--distant, somewhat aloof, above
showing too much visible emotion or interest in school activities.

They finally found their book at the back table where Ken had worked

74

the day before to finish the illustrations. They walked to the
front of the room. .

James sat in the author's chair, and Ken stood behind him and
to his left with his hand resting on the back of the chair. They
were cool again: James seemed at ease in the author's chair, arms
resting on the sides, looking over the class. Ken had put on
sunglasses with mirror frames. James read to a classroom audience
that was unusually attentive and settled (at least as he began to
read). James would read the text of one or two pages, and then
pause to hold up the book so that his classmates could see the
illustrations. When he held up the book for others to see, he often
commented about the text or illustrations (Ken joined him on two
occasions). He soon had large numbers of the class laughing and
calling out responses to his reading and commentary. (Their title
page, text and illustrations are reproduced in Figures 3.0, 3.1, and
3.2.)

James commented twice, during his performance, on problems with
the typing I had done for their book. Once to say that what I had
typed throughout the book as ‘Rubert' was supposed to be ‘Robert'
(we corrected this later), and a second time to say that I had
omitted a word. His comments were: “Mr. Lensmire typed it wrong.
It says Robert,“ and, while reading page five, "Wbuld you like to
get a hair cut' . . . a fzee hair cut. Mr. Lensmire typed that one
too“ (Audiotape, 11-28-89; quotations in this section come from
11-28-89 tape). These comments did not evoke audible response from

the class. Nor did other comments James made about illustrations,

  

...... _

 

Figure 3.0.

 

 

75

lure called his boss. Ill
50" II“. 'Too are going to
llchign so he I Has leader.
mum's can anyone name!
On the train so lichigan he

1
I,
/

 

 

, Is set down for “use: and the

up to him and said. 'Is

a lo they had dinner together --
this s::t.::smzb . .o she ..‘ sushi with hot fudge sauce The
the said :lelle name is lost naming they were in lichigsn.
uu'- and s. .51: 'Iy Ill: 1. lwrt.‘ n” h' 3" °" “° m“ h “n"
' ' 2 his boss. In boss's use ll lobe".

James and Ken's Ihe Eake Line Leadeg.

76

 

 

 

Ross said. 'Iollo. lobsn.‘

'Ars liehigsm?‘ Robert So he walked and ssw hippies.
ssksl. lust said yes sud Robert They said. Won]. 4 you like! so get s

'Iowyou we so go so Mites
Clifford “heel." Run II“. '“J sud he got s
n. » lohswt and he had so stsy on the

so“ anything about going anywhere street (or the night In!“ the
but Michigan. lot you' n the boss. loin-k wu am. When the haircut
so hys. So he we on: so get s tsxi. was gone he was at the school
but than was no: any lot: i

   

 

 

  

When he went into the school '-{‘,:¢'—--'_ -- , -¢..._ - .1 .
hsesllod his boss lis boss soil. ’1 , - _ 1.9-1- 1
so so In. I'- a ho " ‘.:.‘:~ . _. .
m In. I'- elsss he saw Lise. ,flz; .. -- ....._ ”W," .. .. __,_, ._'
They were getting sosdy for tench. ”W
Inn «at to liss and ms. Line In .. You. ' ‘
'Issssbos at' lunch with as. so the won 0
g inch and they had sushi with hot

fudge sales .

Figure 3-1. W (cont).

77

 

 

 

Io on the train to Alabama
After lush M celled 3“ they set down for dinner and had
has. lis he” said, '9“ M “0 sushi with hot fudge sauce. After
Liss.‘ dinner Russ said, 'I really don't
'Iow did you how" like sushi with hot (edge «at'
-ss. is my other ogoss.‘ . '1 don't either,“ said Lisa.
9

 

When they got of! at Alabama
use said, 'couo to my house. I
will cook you something good.

hd
The ‘0

 

Figure 3-2- WW (cont-)-

78

such as, with reference to page one, "That's Kurt calling his boss,
and he's slipping on a banana peel,” or "There's the train,” on
page nine.

James performed and interpreted Ihe_£eke_Line_Leeeez_fxem
Aieheme, while most other children who shared in front of class
simply read their texts. He spoke with energy and expression, and
children responded overtly to his intonation and pitch, especially
in his voice characterizations of Kurt. For example, James read
Kurt's line in the illustration on page five--'Oh no my hairl'--with
a high pitch and breathy quality, and stretched out the word ‘hair'
so that it reminded me of how cartoon characters stretch out "I'm
falling” as they drop from a plane or a cliff to the earth. Loud
laughter followed. On page six, he read, ”Remember me?” with an
exaggerated rise in pitch on ‘me' to the seeming delight of his
classmates.

James also found humor in the execution of one of Ken's
illustrations. After reading page eight, James commented on the
size of Kurt in the illustration. On page four, Kurt appears to be
about the same size as the phone booth, but in the second
illustration he is much smaller. James, pointing at Kurt in the
second illustration, said, ”He's on thephone. Ken kinda got, kinda
shrunk him.“ Ken did not appear upset by this comment, and smiled
as the class laughed. (The comment seems, however, to have spurred
a revision of the illustration. I discovered this, by accident,
when looking at two different photocopies I had made of their

book--one on the day they shared it in November, and another I had

79

made at the end of the year. The later version has Kurt slightly
taller than the phone booth on both pages four and eight.)

But some of the loudest responses from classmates, including
laughter and student comments to each other and the authors,
occurred when James and Ken discussed illustrations that implicated
girls in the class. The first such response came as James showed
the class the title page and said, "Lisa is the big one.“ Later,
after James read page six, he and Ken gave names to characters
illustrated on that page. More specifically, they said that the
drawings were of girls from the class. Their comments provoked a

loud response from the class.

James: (pointing at illustration) There's,
there's, um, there's people in the
class.

Ken: This one's Sharon (some laughter) and,

um, what's the other on --

James: Yeah, this one's Sharon and this one,
this one is Suzanne

(followed by laughter, general hubbub, student
comments such as "Let me see, let me see' and "A
nice green face” [one of the character's faces was
green in illustrationl)

James seemed unsure, at first, about what to say about the
illustration. Ken helped him out by suggesting one person in the
illustration, and James followed up on Ken's lead. The two
collaborated, again, in their response to student questions that
followed the presentation of their book.

Paul asked James and Ken, “How did you think of the story?

That would have been hard for me.“ James responded that they first

80

'thought of the people, and that once they had the people, they just
‘chought of the story. Suzanne, one of the girls identified as ‘in'
‘the illustration on page six, followed this question up with one
about consistency in the story.

Suzanne: But I don't get it. The boss said do
not tell anyone his name and then, then
Kurt told Lisa that.

Lensmire: That's one of the jokes, right?

James: That was one of the jokes because he,
because he likes her so much that he
forgot (student laughter, talking; one
child said "00000” with rising pitch, as
if surprised or pretending to be
surprised at revelation of Kurt's

desire)
Ken: (over student noise) Yeah, they get
married at the end. (Volume of

laughter and talk increased)

I responded first to Suzanne's question. I will discuss this
later, especially since James turned my contribution in a direction
I had not expected. For now, I will note that James and Ken
elicited response from classmates by suggesting a romantic
relationship between the characters of Lisa and Kurt in the story,
emnd that Kurt and Lisa were also children in this classroom,

In response to Suzanne's question, James explained that Kurt
:Eorgot his instructions because of his feelings for Lisa. By this
ipoint, the children were fairly agitated. .Ken's comment was heard
clearly above this talking and motion. He followed and extended
James' comments on the relationship of Kurt and Lisa, by stating

that the two were later married.

81

Ken's cement and the class's response ‘ended' sharing time,
both because we were running out of time, and because sharing time
had broken down into a number of conversations and some shouting. I
iquickly walked to the front of the room, and gave instructions over
the excited talk and movement of children in the room to put away
writing folders and get ready for lunch. Many of the children
continued talking about sharing time as they left for the cafeteria
a few minutes later.

My story about the writing and sharing of W
foreshadows several points about who James was and what he was about
in the classroom, that I develop later in the chapter. One is that
James saw himself as .the ‘funny' person in the classroom, and that
the objects of his humor were often found in his immediate
surroundings--other children, teachers, classroom situations.
Another is that James and his friends often included other students
in their fiction, and that these inclusions were informed by
texisting social relations among children in this classroom. At this
point, I will briefly comment on a few of the ways that James and
Ken's writing and sharing responded to the particular social context
within which they were working by discussing the social origins of
‘this story, the influence of teacher interventions, and the function

of heterosexual meanings in their text.

James and Ken's text had very ‘social' origins (beyond social

origins in shared language, conceptions of story and particular

82

genres, etc.). Kurt and James had argued about who should be first
in line. Their argument assumed a social (school) practice--lining
up to walk back to c1ass--in which they were, at the moment,
participating. I joined their conversation at least partly to
disrupt their seriousness and poke fun at that school practice.
When James called Kurt a fake line leader, I responded that James
might want to write a story about that. His comment had suggested
something like a spy/secret agent story or maybe a story about an
impostor--in my fieldnotes that night I wrote that I might want to
help James find news stories about impostors.

My response to James' comment--you could write a story about
that--makes sense in the context of our relationship as writing
teacher and student. An important role I played in the workshop was
helping children identify meaningful topics. In this case, I had
already identified James as someone who might need some help. In
fact, I was anxious to help since I anticipated problems with James
in the classroom if he went long without something to write about.
In other words, I embraced two important teacher roles in my
conversation with James. One was helping him find something to
write about. The other was keeping order in the classroom, an order
that I thought might be upset if James did not find something to
engage his attention.

I do not know what sort of weight James ascribed to my
suggestion that he write a story about a fake line leader. When he
talked about it at the end of the year, he said that I told him

‘maybe' he could write about that. James did not, by the end of the

83

year, believe he was required to follow such suggestions from his
writing teacher (discussed later in chapter). He took me more or
less at my word that he had a large amount of control over what and
how he wrote. But at the beginning of the year, when student
control over text was perhaps not an assumption James made, my
‘maybe' could have meant ‘should' to James. Even if James heard
‘maybe,’ my power as a teacher to assign work to children was part
of the origins of this story. I had told James the day before that
he geeie be doing some writing in my classroom. Whatever the
personal meaningfulness or interest he found in such a story, James
had the problem, by virtue of being a student in this writing
workshop, of needing something to write about.
In the beginning of the year when the writing
workshop came we were like, yeah, it's going to be
great, it's going to be great, we're going to have
lots of time to write and stuff. But than.when we
really got there most, most of us we were like
stumped on what to write about, and we couldn't
figure out what to do. (Interview, 5-24-90)
James asserted that children had a great deal of control over
their work, but a basic requirement was that they write.
Like, some of the people would go out in the
hall and some people would go in the classroom.
But Mr. Lensmire, he doesn't care where they are,
what, and who they're working with, and if they're
working with anybody, he just wants them to write.
(Interview, 5-24-90)
My suggestion, then, provided a possible response by James to
the problem of identifying and writing about something he chose, a

problem he had not solved the day before.

84

James found an idea for a story in a conversation with Kurt and
me. The idea for his story depended on a school practice (lining up
children) and emerged in anticipation of a school class--writing
workshop. The conversation James participated in, as well as the
story he eventually wrote with Ken, were shaped by me, a teacher who
wanted to help James find something to write about, and who used his
authority to keep order and require children to write in his
classroom.

Besides my early influence on the story, the text of Ibe_£eke
Line_Leeee1_fmem‘Aieheme was also influenced by Grace, the regular
classroom teacher. As I noted above, I had seen Grace talking with
James and Ken, and writing on their paper, on the same day that
these young authors allowed me to read their ‘going to bed' line.

As you probably noticed, this line does not appear in their story.
Grace had replaced the line that would have read, '80 they went to
bed,“ with ”(So they) had dinner together, sooshi with hot fudge
sauce.“ Grace's handwriting is on the rough draft, and James
confirmed, in his interview, that ‘sooshi with hot fudge sauce' was
Mrs. Parker's idea.

From an examination of the rough draft, it is clear that James
and Ken had not written as far as the second reference to ‘sooshi'
(page seven in their book) before Grace's intervention. In the
rough draft, the next reference to ‘sooshi with hot fudge sauce' is
not set off in any way from its surrounding print--the handwriting
does not change, it is not written over any visible erasure, and it

fits the spacing created by surrounding sentences.

85

Thus, Grace's intervention influenced the future development of
their text. Minimally, it removed the event of Kurt and Lisa going
to bed, replaced it with a dinner entre, and provided a phrase,
sushi with hot fudge sauce, that is repeated three more times in the
story (pages seven and nine). It is possible that her intervention
also influenced the plot of the story: that Ken and James included
‘eating events'--lunch at school and lunch and dinner on the
train--in order to use Grace's unusual suggestion. I am
particularly interested in how Grace's intervention seemed to have
shaped the ending of the story, which I interpret as a subtle
resistance to the content and function of Grace's intervention.

I assume that Grace intervened where and how she did because of
the sexual connotations of a line such as, ‘they went to bed.’ She
intervened at no other point in their text. Ken and James
themselves had identified this very line as a risky one when they
wondered aloud whether or not to let me read it. The ending of
their story is interesting, then, exactly because it re-introduces
the sort of sexual connotations Grace had sought to remove.

On page nine, Lisa and Kurt finish their third meal of sushi
and hot fudge sauce, and then say that they do not really like it.
This makes sense, I suppose, and we might leave it at that. But on
the last page, after Kurt and Lisa get to Alabama, Lisa did two
things: she rejected (again) sushi with hot fudge sauce with her,
”I will cook you something geefi,” and she invited Kurt to her house.
The authors seem to be resisting or undoing Grace's intervention

here--at least, reasserting their own intention that a romantic

86

relationship exists between Hurt and Lisa. For if we extend the
story a little beyond the ending, we find Lisa and Kurt in a
situation similar to their first meeting on the train: having
dinner together, alone (we do not hear about any other people on the
train). The first time around, in the rough draft, dinner led to
bed for the characters James and Ken created on the page. This is
exactly the place Grace intervened. She frustrated Kurt and Lisa's
desire--and James and Ken's desire to represent it on the page--but
not for long.

James and Ken's appropriation of ‘sooshi with hot fudge sauce'
was a perfect example of how Bakhtin (1981) conceived of language
learning and use. Originally, as I discussed in Chapter I, all
words are someone else's words. Gradually, we take them over for
our own purposes, but these words are ‘dialogic,’ they retain the
intonations and evaluations of others even as they are used by us in
new situations and transformed. In this case, ‘sooshi with hot
fudge sauce' were Grace's words, and used for the purpOse of erasing
a sexual relationship between Kurt and Lisa. Grace's words were
heard in Ihe_£eke_Line_Leeee;, and they influenced James and Ken's
story. But by the end of the story, James and Ken seem to have
largely appropriated Grace's words to their own ends. In the
rejection of sushi with hot fudge sauce by the characters of Lisa
and Kurt in the story, James and Ken created a space for the sort of
romantic dinner and evening that Grace had sought to prohibit with

her words.

87

Whether or not James and Ken.were resisting Grace's
intervention is less important for interpreting their text than the
presence of romantic meanings in the story. Parts of James and
Ken's text, and the sharing of their text, drew on common forms of
teasing to elicit response from the class--a form of teasing that
depends on typical gender arrangements among children in schools, in
which ‘girls and boys are together, but mostly apart' (Thorne,
1986).

Heterosexual meanings could have found their way into James and
Ken's text for a number of reasons. One reason might be that James
and Ken.wanted to test teacher boundaries of permissible content in
their stories. Their bed line went over the line for Grace, as they
assumed it might with me. Heterosexual meanings, then, might
function like James' first choice of a writing topic (vomit) did--to
challenge teacher and school norms of appropriate talk, writing,
etc.

A second reason for the presence of heterosexual meanings might
be the perceived demands of genre. Ken and James, in their readings
and viewings of spy and secret agent stories, TV shows, and movies,
might have acquired a sense that the male lead needs a love
interest. 80, Kurt, on the way to Michigan, meets Lisa. (In
something of a reversal of stereotyped moves by men and women, Lisa
initiated contact and later took the lead in getting Kurt to her
house. Of course, the way to Kurt's heart was through his stomach.)

But another genre--often an oral one particular to

children-~might be more important. Thorne (1986) notes that,

if
in
SE]
Pa)
tEa

int!

Von.

88

although Western culture tends to define children as relatively
asexual, heterosexual language is sometimes used by adults and
children to describe cross-sexual relationships. Furthermore:

In everyday life in schools, heterosexual and
romantic meanings infuse some ritualized forms of
interactions between groups of boys and girls
(e.g., ‘chase and kiss') and helps maintain sex
segregation. ”Jimmy likes Beth” or "Beth likes
Jimmy“ is a major form of teasing, which a child
risks in choosing to sit by or walk with someone
of the other sex. (p. 177)

Girls and.boys did not work together in the writing workshop
when given the choice. In interviews, girls said they worked with
other girls, boys with boys. I have only one example of a girl and
boy working together, by choice, in my fieldnotes and the
interviews. Suzanne and Rajesh collaborated for a short time in
writing a story. Otherwise, all peer conferences and
collaborations, as far as I can tell from my data or remember, had
children working with other children of the same sex.

Thorne (1986) collected her data on playgrounds, in cafeterias,
and in classrooms, and was especially interested in gender
arrangements and their maintenance. She found that certain
interactions between girls and boys seemed to lessen sex
segregation, but that "gender-defined groups also come together in
ways which emphasize their boundaries" (p. 172). The form of
teasing mentioned above--'Beth likes Jimmy'--was one of the types of
interaction that emphasized and maintained gender boundaries.

Children reported in their interviews that students in the

workshop sometimes engaged in similar types of teasing in_ehei;

89

xxieing. For example, Ken reported that someone (he did not say
who) had written a story in which a child in the class, Bruce, “had
a Barbie doll and he sleeps with it” (Interview, 5-31-90). The
story achieved its provocativeness for young boys both from the
sexual connotations of sleeping with a female, and from the
suggestion that a boy would have a doll. And not just any doll, not
a GI Joe, for example, but a Barbie doll. The story made fun of
Bruce by suggesting a romantic relationship between him and a ‘girl'
(Barbie doll), and by suggesting that he possessed a doll and played
with it. In other words, Bruce ‘associated! with girls in the
story--something these third grade boys avoided in the classroom
--by having a relationship with one, and by doing something that has
been traditionally labeled as a girl's activity, playing with dolls.
Carol and Sharon (named with Suzanne as one of the children

illustrated in the Lime_Leeee; book, page six) provided another
example. They said that one way to tease a classmate was to use
his/her name in a story, and then to link that person to someone of
the other sex.

Sharon: He used my name.

Carol: And my name.

Intr: Really? Who did?

Sharon: Well, it was Bruce, Troy, and Ken, they
used our name.

Intr: For what?

Sharon: They used girls' names that, that liked
other boys.

Intr: Oh, and if-

90

Carol: I think they used me with David, I'm not
sure.

Sharon: They used me with um, Ken.

Intr: How do you feel about that?

Sharon: I didn't like it.
Intr: Why?

Sharon: Because you don't like somebody to use
your name.

Intr: What, what can we do about that to
change that?

Sharon: I told them not to write it and I told
them, and they, they kept on writing and
then I told Mrs. Parker and they erased
my name out of it. Then they would
write the story, they kept on saying
that, um, that somebody in the story
liked another person. (Interview,
5-30-90)

Stories that included characters named for children in the
classroom, and that suggested or stated romantic relationships among
particular boys and girls, were a problem for the children involved.
Sharon and Carol considered them a form of teasing. Sharon took
action to make sure she was not implicated in such teasing, but it
seemed, if I interpret her last comment correctly, with little
success. Apparently, if the written record.was changed, such
teasing could then be sustained orally, with utterances such as,
‘this character really stands for Sharon, even if the name is
different.’

There are several aspects of the text and sharing of Ihe_£eke
.Line_Leeee; that suggest James and Ken's text participated in and

responded to the gender arrangements of children in this classroom,

91

and oral and written forms of teasing arising within those
arrangements. First, characters in the story had the same names as
children in the class. In fact, the school and classroom Kurt
visited were explicitly linked to Grace's classroom. And as I noted
above, a romantic relationship was strongly suggested in the story:
on page two, Lisa used a common opening line (in the illustration):
'Is this seat taken?'--and then she and Kurt had dinner together.
They later ate lunch and dinner again, and Lisa invited Kurt to her
house.

Second, there was James' response to Suzanne's question as to
why Kurt revealed his name to Lisa. I was actually the first to
respond to Suzanne's question: “That's one of the jokes, right?" I
said this because James and I had talked about this aspect of the
text before. While typing the story for him and Ken, I noticed the
inconsistency Suzanne had noticed. When I asked James about this,
he seemed alarmed--it was clear that this was not an intentional
aspect of the story. I suggested he just leave it, because the
inconsistency contributed to the humor of Kurt, who seemed generally
incompetent, and to stumble about and have things happen to him. I
was surprised, then, when I transcribed the audiotape of this
sharing session, to see how James explained Kurt to Suzanne (I
missed this shift as a participant in the classroom.) James
repeated my comment, and then said that Kurt forgot because of his
infatuation with Lisa. Ken affirmed the romantic relationship
between Hurt and Lisa by extending the story even further into the

future than I had above--in the end, Ken said, they got married.

92

I am not saying that the only intention or purpose Ken and
James had for writing their story was to tease Hurt and Lisa, or
that it even was necessarily one of their intentions. Kurt's
inclusion in the story, especially, could have been largely
accidental--the product of being at the head of the line with James
and me. Still, Kurt was not a member of James' close group of
friends, and, as will become evident later in the chapter, James and
his friends were not always on the best of terms with girls in the
class. There may have been some conflict between Lisa and the
authors I do not know about that encouraged James and Ken to single
Lisa out and include her in the story. Or, she may have been
included because she, with Suzanne, was one of the most popular
girls in the class. (And remember, Suzanne was also ‘included' in
the story, when James and Ken said that she and Sharon were in one
of their illustrations.)

I am also not saying that gender divisions and romantic
meanings exhaust what James and Ken were doing in their story and
their sharing of it. I have already discussed Grace and my
interventions into their work, and the authors' responses to those
influences. On page five of their book, James and Ken evaluate,
negatively it seems, ‘hippies' and their hairstyles--in the
illustration, Kurt cries, "Oh no my hair!” And during sharing time,
James poked fun at one of Ken's drawings, and James and Ken got a
laugh by connecting two girls in the class with more or less

well-executed (supposed) drawings of them in the book. Of course,

93

this may very well have been teasing across the gender divide--two
boys scoring off two girls by making them ‘look silly.’

I em arguing that James and Ken, in their attempt to create a
funny, entertaining text, drew on heterosexual meanings to provoke
response, both from teachers and students. Even if Kurt and Lisa
were not specific targets of teasing, the story drew on the
suggestion of a romantic relationship among real, third grade
children for effect. James and Ken were writing in a social context
in which teachers suppressed references to sex, and boys and girls
separated themselves from each other in their work in peer
conferences and collaborations. Children avoided situations (and
worked to change texts) that might suggest they liked someone of the
ether sex. In such a context, this story--with its real children
and romantic liaisons--could stir things up, bringing laughter, more
teasing, denials, speculation. And Ken and James seemed to know
what they were doing, to know what would provoke response,
especially as they shared their text.

At the time, I did not know what they were doing, did not
understand much about the sorts of cultural resources they were
drawing on, and the possible consequences for other children of
their story. If I had, instead of recording descriptions of this
sharing time such as “children were laughing," and noting that
“things went well” (Fieldnotes, 11-28-89), I might have noticed that
certain children were laughing, and others were not.

I have shown some of the ways that James and Ken's work on.Ihe

Ehk£_L1n&_Lflfldfll,W33 affected by the social context within which

94

they were writing and sharing. I have looked to the social origins
of the story, teacher interventions, and a gendered, divided student
culture to make sense of aspects of their written and oral texts.
But we must be careful not to let considerations of social context
over-determine our conceptions of who James and Ken were in the
workshop, and.what they were about. In the relative openness of the
workshop, James and his friends asserted themselves and their
intentions in the activities they pursued and the texts they wrote.

In what follows, I examine some of the intentions James and his
friends pursued, and some of the consequences of their actions. I
look to their relations with each other, with other children in the
room, and with teachers. In these discussions, I focus on James,
for at least three reasons. First, his responses in.his interview
were often quite revealing. Second, and more importantly, James was
a prominent figure in the student culture, and especially within the
small group of boys--including Ken, Bruce, Troy, and Paul--he worked
and played with in the workshop, and in and out of school. He
represented the values of this group of boys well, and, through him,
a sense of the workings of student intention and peer relations, and
their influences on children's writing, can begin to be developed.
(Chapters IV and V extend this discussion.)

Finally, the story of Ihe_£eke_Line_Leeee; is not over yet,
neither for James nor for me. James made Ihe_£eke_Line_Leeee; into,
basically, his life work in the workshop. With Ken, he wrote a long
sequel to their first text ifie;§_21, and then with Paul, Troy, and

possibly Ken and/or Bruce, he wrote Ze;;_1 (on the rough draft of

95

the third installment, Bruce was listed as one of the authors, and
his name was written over Ken's name, which had been erased). In
his interview, James mentioned only one other piece of work, a text
he was writing with Paul about their favorite college basketball
team, which they did not finish (and of which I was not able to find
a copy). I attempt to make sense of James sticking with Ihe_£eke
Line_Leedez, and argue that the series of stories became one of the
ways that James and his friends asserted their positions at the top
of the peer hierarchy in the classroom. Eventually, they took the
story of Ihe_Eeke_Line_Leeee;_£;em‘Aieeeme away from Kurt and Lisa,
and put themselves at the focus of the fictional worlds they

created.

Intr: Tell me James, who are the popular kids
in class?
James: Um. Popular kids in the class. I

wouldn't know. I would probably be one
of the more popular kids in the class,
but.

Intr: Why are you popular?

James: I don't know why I'm popular. Because
of . . . And Suzanne is one of the
popular girls. Robert is pretty
popular, but not as me. I'm probably
the most popular boy in the class,
probably.

Intr: Um. Why do you think you're more
popular than Robert?

James: Robert? Well, because Robert tries to
be funny when he isn't funny.

96

Intr: And you?

James: Well, I basically an funny. Most of the
time I am funny.

Intr: Funny about what things?

James: Well, it depends what kind of things are
happening. I can make like most serious
things funny.

Intr: People like that in class?

James: Some people do.

Intr: Why are you funny?

James: I don't know why I'm funny, I get,

sometimes I'm in the mood to be funny,
so I get funny, I just say OK, I'm going
to be funny now, so.

Intr: What are the times that you feel in the
mood to be funny?

James: us, the times, when the day's kind of
going slow, and it's really not going,
nobody's really having any fun.
(Interview, 5-24-90; unless noted,
quotations from James that follow are
from this interview)

James characterized himself as funny. In fact, he seemed to
link his popularity to being funny: he was more popular than
Robert, who was ‘pretty popular,’ because Robert tried to be funny
(but failed), whereas James really was funny. His performance in
the sharing of Ihe_£eke_Line_Leeeer showed his ability to make other
children in the class laugh. His performances were not limited to
sharing time, however, or to the writing workshop. James hinted at
the sorts of school situations he liked to be funny in above--he
liked to “make serious things funny,“ “when the day's kind of going

slow,“ when “nobody's really having any fun.“ At least one sense of

 

97

being ‘funny' for James, then, was responding specifically to school
and its boredom or demands. Or, put another way, being funny was
one of the ways James resisted teacher and school attempts to
control him.

James was one of three children I took to the principal's
office during the school year, exactly because he was ‘funny.’ One
such time was when Grace stayed home sick. I had watched the
substitute teacher struggling to conduct his lessons because of
children's behavior. Many children were involved, including Troy
and Bruce, who tried several times to get ‘the wave' started from
their positions at the corner of the large half-square of desks that
formed_the outer boundary of student desks that day--they became
quite angry with Lisa, the next person in line, when she did not
follow their lead and throw her hands into the air at the
appropriate time. But James was prominent in the substitute
teacher's struggle. When it was time for the writing workshop to
begin, the substitute teacher left the room to talk to the
principal.

I told the class that I had been watching
what they were doing, and that I was ashamed of
them and angry. I told them that they had been
running the substitute teacher around like (and I
stumbled here for words) one of those moving
targets at a carnival booth, where, in cartoons,
the target is a person or animal who moves one way
until it gets hit, and then goes the other way,
and on and on. I had their attention. There was
silence, then.James, with enthusiasm: ‘Yeah, that
would be neat.’ I gave him a warning, and

continued my sermon, but some of the children.were
smiling. (Fieldnotes, 11-30-89)

98

James did not get sent to the principal's office for his
comment--that happened a little later when he were me down with
continued commentary. James also were down Grace a few times, and
from what I heard around school, the music teacher and the art
teacher. At least some of these troubles were linked, I am sure, to
times when James said to himself, “OK, I'm going to be funny now,“
and was a little too effective.

James also thought of himself as quite popular, and this self-
characterization matches well with what other children in the room
said about him and my own sense of who he was among peers. In the
interviews, most children identified him as one of the popular boys,
if not the most popular (I should note that some children made a
distinction, saying that James was popular, but not with ehem). In
various fieldnotes across the year and for various reasons, I wrote
of James as having a ‘high status among the children,’ being part of
the ‘in-group,’ that he was ‘cool,’ ‘powerful,’ etc. In his
interview, Rajesh identified James as the leader of a secret club
whose members made up the group of boys James worked with in the
workshop.

Intr: Who are the popular kids in the class?
Rajesh: James, Bruce, Paul, and Ken.

Intr: Why do you think people are, why do you
think-

Rajesh: Well, James, James, I'll tell you about
the boys. I know a lot about the boys
and I know how they got famous too.

Intr: How do they get famous?

99

Rajesh: Because of that stupid club. They
belong to a secret club. (Interview,
5-18-90)

Rajesh apparently got his information first hand. According to
him, James and his friends asked him to be in their club at the
beginning of the year, but later rejected him. James was the leader
of that group, and he and Ken formed the core of the ‘club, ' with
Paul, Troy, and Bruce becoming more closely associated with them as
the year progressed, at least in the workshop. Bruce was tied to
’ the group primarily (it seemed from his interview) through his close
friendship with Troy. He said he also liked to work with Ken, Paul,
and sometimes Rajesh, but not with James. Bruce said he could not
trust James with secrets about his stories, and that James did not
tell him, as Paul and Troy did, that his stories were good. Rajesh
reported being a part of the group early in the year. My fieldnotes
have him writing collaboratively with Troy and Bruce in early
December. After the winter holidays, he worked with Kurt, who was
not part of the club.

James and his friends conferenced almost exclusively with each
other in the writing workshop; Rajesh even claimed in his interview
that James demanded such exclusivity from members of the club. The
primary reason James and the others gave for working with each other
was friendship. Often, these friendships were described in terms of
relationships that were developed and maintained outside of the
writing workshop, and that involved trust. Bruce, for example,
said, “Troy I trust the most because he's been my friend for a long

time, since pro-school. Actually longer than that“ (Interview,

100

5-21-90). James, Ken, and Troy played on the same local youth
soccer team, and James noted that as one reason he liked to work
swith them in the workshop. James also said that “Troy likes most of
the same things that I like,“ and that he liked to work with Paul,
‘"because he does a lot of sports and we can talk about stuff like
sports.“

James valued the chance to talk with his friends in peer
<=onferences and collaborations, and valued the advice and opinions
Isis peers shared there. In fact, from what he said in his
interviews, it appeared that what peers said to him about his texts
seas just as important as, if not more important than, what I said to
111m in teacher-student writing conferences. James discussed his use
(sf teacher suggestions:

Intr: If he [Mr. Lensmire] gave you advice or
a suggestion on how to make things
better, did you always follow the
advice?

James: Not always, because sometimes I would,
he said, you don't have to do this but,
all the time he says, you don't have to
do this but I think it would be better.

And I felt the other way would.be better
so I didn't do what he told me.

Intr: But aren't you supposed to listen to a
teacher?
James: Yes, yes, I am, but, um, most of the

time, if the teacher says something, yet
I don't think it's the right thing to
do, so I don't do it.

Intr: Right. Why isn't it the right thing to
do?

101

James: Because sometimes, like one time he
said, um, I think you should change this
in the story, but really when I kept
that people really liked that part of
it.

As a teacher in writing conferences, 1 was worried about
overrunning student ideas and intentions because of my institutional
authority. James related one of the ways that I displayed this
worry in conferences--I told him he did not have to do what I said,
‘but that this or that might be helpful. James tested my suggestions
against his own sense of what would work best. In his last comment
above, however, he referred to his peers, and justified not using my
suggestion, in part, by saying that his peers really liked what he
did not change.

With teacher suggestions, James talked about deciding for
himself whether or not to use them. He talked quite differently
about how he dealt with peer comments.

James: The conferences with classmates. Um. I
would ask them questions say, should I
keep this, do you like this, what don't
you like so I could take it out. But I
didn't really take it out until like two
people said it wasn't good.

Intr: Why two people?

James: Because you know one person might be

like, you know, not like it, but another
person might really like it.

Intr: So then what would you do, if one did
and one didn't. How would you make this
decision?

James: I would ask another person.

102

I do not know if James actually followed such a procedure in
his writing process. That is not as important for my purposes as
the weight James appeared to give his peers' suggestions. James
seemed much more comfortable ignoring my suggestions than he did his
peers'. Even if he did not go from boy to boy within his group of
friends, checking off who did and did not like something, it is
clear he attached great significance to his peers' opinions.

One of the things this group of boys valued were entertaining
stories. In response to a question about what kinds of writing he
liked to do, James replied, “I like to write the comedy stuff like,
like one of my books was the Fake Line Leader from Alabama. . . . It
was a funny book because he said they were eating sushi with hot
fudge sauce, and he was a line leader, but he was a spy really and a
fake.“ Ken reported he liked to write funny stories as well. Paul
said he wrote fantasy; Bruce, action stories.

The titles of some of their stories suggest this demand for
entertaining, exciting, sometimes humorous texts: Ihe_flegie
W. by Troy; Wesson: and W
,zg;;_11, by Ken; The_§xehe_fleee_£;ienee by Bruce, Troy, and Ken.
Some of these and other texts written by James and his friends
included, in fictidnal narratives, the names of children from the

class (and sometimes adults from the school). We saw this in James
and Ken's Ibe_£eke_Line_Leege:, Ken wrote one story called, Ail
,Abee§_fieni_1;eyi_eng_lemee; and collaborated with Bruce and Troy on

,Qmehe, which featured the three authors as crabs in the ocean.

Early in the year, Rajesh wrote a story in which Clifford's gym

103

teacher was actually an alien from outer space. Rajesh's final line
was: “And so I, Rajesh, stabbed him in the heart.“ (This was the
final line of the zexieeg version. Rajesh's original version had no
ending. I talked with Rajesh about his story in several writing
conferences, and he said his story-without-an-ending was exactly the
way he wanted it. Then he took it home for his mother to type.
Mothers, sometimes, are powerful contextual influences.)

I have been characterizing James and his friends' work in the
classroom in terms of what/who they included and valued. They were
a small group of friends who worked together in conferences and
collaborations on stories. They wrote and.enjoyed funny,
entertaining fictional texts that sometimes included children from
the classroom as characters.

But as Sellers (1990), writing on ethnicity, notes, groups are
defined not so much as things-in-themselves, but in relation to
other groups, by way of contrast. In other words, a significant
aspect of a groups' identity rests in its exclusions, by its members
doing or being nee_§hie. In what follows, I sketch some of the
exclusions this group of boys made in their work with peers. I
focus on James, again, as an articulate member of this group and its
leader. Then, I conclude the chapter with an examination of the
sequels to W, especially m2, and
how these texts draw on social relations among children in this

workshop for their meaning.

104

I have already suggested, in my discussion of the group's
composition and boundaries, some of the most obvious exclusions
James and his friends made in their day-to-day work in the writing
workshop. James did not work with most of the boys in the class, or
with any of the girls.

Intr: Is there anyone you really don't ever
want to conference with?

James: Yeah, most of the girls.
Intr: Most of the girls? Why?

James: I don't know. I just. . . . Because I
think they, they'll have. I don't know.

James would not elaborate here, but suggested a reason he did not
want to conference with girls when.he talked about sharing his texts
in front of the class:
Most of the girls I don't want to read in
front of because they have probably different
opinions and they don't, some of the, most of them
probably don't like me. I mean I don't care what
they say, I like my piece.
James seemed to expect conflict with girls--they would have
different opinions and they would not like him or his work.
Several, though not all, girls did single out James as someone they
particularly disliked in their interviews. Often, they reported
that James teased girls, in and out of the workshop.
Besides gender, social class seemed something of a boundary for
James and his friends. 0f four boys James specifically mentioned he
would not like to be with or work with in the writing workshop,

three were from the trailer court--Robert, Bartleby, and Leon. The

fourth, John, was often unable to deal with his frustration and

105

anger with teachers and classmates. He cried often, and, on
occasion, bit classmates who seemed to enjoy provoking him. John
also happened to be one of the most talented writers in the room.
Intr: Why wouldn't you like to work with them?
James: Um. They just, sometimes, you know how
John, you’ve seen John and um, and Leon

is just, he tries to do stuff that he
really can't do, and he tries to do more

than he is.
Intr: Why does that bother you?
James: Because I mean, I like people because

they be themselves, and I don't care how
they, if they try. If they try and act
what they aren't then I don't like them
because they are just not the person
that they really are.

From his privileged position in the social hierarchy of boys in
the room, James identified four children much lower in that
hierarchy as undesirable to work with. James had opposed himself to
Robert earlier in the interview, because Robert tried to be funny,
but was not, according to James. James had linked his own
popularity to being funny, and Robert seemed to represent some sort
of competition for him. Here, James suggests that Leon was acting
in ways inappropriate for his location in the peer hierarchy. James
specified the problem with Leon a little later in the interview.

He tries to be real, someone he isn't, and
really that is he tries to be, tries to be really
cool and stuff, you know, and he's not.

Obviously, social class was not the only thing at work in

excluding boys from J ames' group--many of the boys excluded were

also from middle class backgrounds. But James' comments suggest

106

various distances among groups of boys, or different permeabilities
of boundaries. Someone like David, for example, who played soccer
with James and Ken, and lived in their neighborhood, crossed the
group's boundaries on occasion to work with Bruce and Paul in
conferences. This seems much less likely to happen with Robert or
Leon.

Before I move to James and his friends' texts, I want to make
one final point about the exclusions James and his friends made in
their day-to-day work in the writing workshop: other children felt
them. James and his friends acted out these exclusions, acted out
their evaluations of other children in the room; they did not just
express them in interviews. So Robert complained about James and
Troy bragging that their clothes were better than his: "They think
their clothes is one of the best things in the world" (Interview,
5-24-90). Sharon talked about James and his friends giving her ”bad
feelings. . . . They laugh at your stories, because they just
think they're more powerful and they have better stories and stuff
like that" (Interview, 5-30-90). And Rajesh came to me at the round
table, keeping his back to the rest of the class:

Rajesh told me he had something "very
important” to talk about with me. He said the
words with feeling, and his voice broke several
times. It didn't seem easy for him to talk to me
about what he wanted to tell me.

I like Rajesh a lot. He was one of the first
kids I really started liking in the class. He was
the first one to play with my long hair and tell
me I should put it in a pony tail. He used to
come over by me and sit on my leg while I talked

to someone else at the table. So seeing Rajesh
hurting hurt me too. But there was also a

107

strategic, serious aspect to his words and tone.
It seemed he felt he needed to persuade me of what
he was saying.

What he was saying was that James was trying
to get Paul to "turn away" from Rajesh, to not be
Rajesh's friend anymore. He said that he didn't
have many friends, and now James was trying to
turn Paul away from him. Paul had been
collaborating with him, but now Paul was working
with James. And he didn't think that Paul would
ever conference with him now, even if he asked
him. This seemed to be the thing that upset
Rajesh the most, that Paul wouldn't conference
with him if he asked him to (another risky moment
in the safe writing workshop). (Fieldnotes,
2-23-90)

In this case, I was able to help Rajesh a little, by talking
with Paul with him. Paul said he would conference with Rajesh if
Rajesh wanted him to. But, of course, children lead lives outside
of the classroom, and if more direct action than.whispered words
behind the teacher's back is needed, there is always the playground.

Sharon: Outside today James was, James and Bruce
were pushing Rajesh.

Intr: Why?
Sharon: Because he's an Indian.
Intr: What's it? I don't understand.

Sharon: Neither do-

Carol: He's just an Indian.

Sharon: They want to have a reason.

Carol: They tease Rajesh because Rajesh
believes in different gods.

Intr: Really?

Carol: I think that's part of the reasons,

stuff like that.

108

Intr: Uh huh. And um, any other reasons?
Carol: They think he's a wimp so they-
Sharon: Push him.

Carol: Yeah.

Intr: And what does Rajesh do?

Sharon: Just stands there, let them push him.
Intr: Does he have any friends?

Carol: Yeah I think he has a couple.
(Interview, 5-30-90)

The interview segment is, of course, somewhat unfair to James,
Bruce, and Rajesh, and depends on the careful lifting of this and
not that from the transcript, and a tiny substitution, for effect.
The last word of Sharon's first utterance above was actually ‘him,’
instead of ‘Rajesh,’ because Sharon's ‘first utterance' was, of
course, not her first, but one in a longer conversation on children
teasing one another and how this teasing might work its way into the
writing workshop. Other children were teased (our informants
mentioned Jil, Jessie, and John), and other people besides James and
Bruce picked on Rajesh.

These bits of editing cast James and Bruce as third grade
bigots and Rajesh as a passive victim. Quick (simple) accusations
of racial and ethnic/religious intolerance, however, should not be
made against James and Bruce. One of James and Bruce's best
friends-~Ken-«was black. And Rajesh had once been a part of their
group. In the end, it was Sharon and Carol who attributed racial or

ethnic motivations 59 James and Bruce. This does not mean they were

109

not correct, or at least partly correct in their assessment of the
situation. But whatever the reasons Rajesh got pushed around, he
got pushed around. And his struggles to make and keep friends, and
have someone to conference with--struggles that involved James and
his status and influence--affected Rajesh's experiences in the

workshop.

James and his friends also ‘acted out' their relations to and
evaluations of other children in the room in their texts. Above, I
argued that gender arrangements of girls and boys in this classroom
were important for understanding the meanings of James and Ken's
first E§k§_Lin§_Le§ggr story. In their future work, they continued
to draw on this aspect of the student culture, but it became less
prominent. In Parts 2 and 3 of James' W trilogy, status
differences among children in the room take on much greater
importance for interpreting what is happening in their fiction.
These stories were a place for James and his friends to comment on
social relations in the class. Given their position at the top of
the informal pecking order, it was fitting that they soon wrote
themselves into their stories as the main characters, and placed
themselves at the center of attention of the fictional worlds they
created.

One of Ken's stories, We, will
serve as an introduction to the later Line_Lg§gg; stories. Ken's

story set up a hierarchy of characters based on size and strength.

110

The title and the action of the story affirmed the solidarity of
Ken, Troy, and James, who were dinosaurs in the story. They
confronted, in the first scene, three other (smaller) dinosaurs who
had the names of three other boys in the class:
He and Troy and James were running after

three Pterodactyl. Their names are Robert and

William and Bruce, and Robert and.William and

Bruce flew down. And then James ran up to get

William and Troy ran up to get Robert. And Ken

went up to get Bruce. And James said, "Look who I

caught, a little squirt."

Robert and William were from the trailer park, and Robert was
singled out, by James, as someone he did not want to work with.
Bruce was a somewhat ambivalent member of James' group, especially
at the beginning of the year--very good friends with Troy, but not
so good with James. It may be that nothing insulting was intended
by Ken.with his text. In fact, there may be some status attached to
being included in one of Ken's stories. I had asked Ken once during
the year to work with William on a story William was revising, and
he had agreed to do it with no visible resistance. Still, the story
pits three friends (with superior size and strength as dinosaurs)
against three other classmates with lower status in the room.
'William is called a "little squirt" (he was one of the smallest boys
in the class). Whatever Ken's intent or the positive significance
of being included in one of Ken's texts, his story reproduced, in
text, social relations among boys in the classroom.

James and Ken's sequel to their first L1ng_Legdgz story also

participated in and commented on social relations in the room, but

‘was often much less straightforward. All the characters in the

lll

story were named for children in the class. There was no mention of
Robert as Kurt's boss this time: the character was referred to only
as ‘his boss.’ There was a residual connection between Kurt and
Lisa, but romantic aspects of their relationship were not
emphasized. In fact, the first page and a half (of four handwritten
pages in their rough draft) seemed less a story and more a vehicle
for mentioning popular children's names. Kurt got a phone call from
his boss, and was told to report to Clifford again (there was no
specific reason or task given for going there). You are not missing
the plot in the two excerpts below--the only action in nearly the
first half of the story was the introduction of different people to
each other:
Soon he [Kurt] was at school. He found Hrs.

P's class and found Lisa. Lisa said, "Meet some

of my friends, like Sharon, one of my best

friends.”

'Hi Sharon, nice to meet you.“

”Nice to meet you Kurt. Oh Lisa, there is
Suzanne."

“Oh yes, how could I forget Suzanne, one of
my best friends."

And a little later:

Kurt was walking alone and saw Troy. "Hello,
my name is Kurt. What is your name?“

“My name is Troy. Nice to meet you."
“Nice to meet you too.“
"I am sort of a bully.”

”Oh you shouldn't be."

112
-o.x. I won't be. I like you, you're sort
of funny."

I do not know enough about the details of friendships in the
room at the time this was written to understand what a text like
this might mean to Lisa, Sharon, and Suzanne. All three of the
girls were quite popular, but I have no record of them working
together in the workshop. It is possible that Ken and James knew
they were no; friends, and hoped to provoke response by making them
best friends in the story. (It is also possible that these girls
would simply object to being in the story in the first place,
perhaps because they viewed it as a type of association with boys
that they were trying to avoid. Eventually, a rule emerged in the
workshop that required authors, before sharing or publishing their
stories, to get the permission of children whose names appeared in
their stories. I discuss this rule and the issues surrounding the
use of others' names in Chapter VI).

It is also interesting to speculate about Troy's inclusion
above. When James and Ken started writing this text (early
October), Troy had not yet begun collaborating with them in the
workshop. He had written alone and with Bruce and Rajesh. This
text could represent something of a bid for him to be their friend:
don't be a bully, be our friend.

In a slightly revised version of this story that I photocopied
in February (the above was typed from a rough draft from November),
Troy's name had been erased, and David's name put in its place. By

this time, Troy was working with James and Paul on the third part of

113

the trilogy. I do not know who changed the name from Troy to David,
or why it was changed, but a few scenes involving the character of
David/Troy a little later in the story might provide a clue.

At the end of the school day spent introducing (popular)
children to each other, Kurt, Lisa, and David/Troy boarded a plane
for Hawaii (that they thought was going to Tennessee). On the
plane, David/Troy met Carol, and started talking to her.

Eventually, they and Hurt and Lisa went to Carol's house.
”What makes you go so far from home?"
"Oh, I'm going back to Hawaii.”

'Ybu mean this is the plane to Hawaii and not
Tennessee?“

”Yes!“

“Oh! Can we come to your house?”

“What do you mean, ‘we'?'

”Oh, I mean Kurt and Lisa.”

“Oh, I like Hurt and Lisa.”

'Well don't you like me?"

“Yes, I love you!“

They landed in Hawaii and got off. They went
to Carol's house. When they got to Carol's house
she opened the door. The house was pretty. Kurt
said, "Who was your decorator? Are you rich

Carol?“

Carol said, ”No, er, yes. Would you like to
come in my bedroom?"

“No way!“
"Just kidding, just kidding."

“Whoa!”

114

My guess is that when Troy started working with James and Paul
on.£§1;_1, he had access to £§;£_2, and that he objected to the sort
of romantic relationship suggested between him and Carol by ‘I love
you,' and the bedroom talk that followed. The bedroom talk was
interesting, and its meaning(s) not at all clear. Carol seemed
thrown off-guard, or at least made uncomfortable, by Kurt's question
as to whether or not she was rich. She eventually admitted she was,
and then asked someone or all of them if he/she/they would like to
come into her bedroom. Her question could be interpreted as a
continuation of showing the house to her guests: this is the living
room, and would you like to see my bedroom? Kurt, or David/Troy, or
Lisa answer quite vehemently, 'No way!“.responding to the possible
sexual connotations of the question. James and Ken seem to have
been playing with double meanings and the embarrassment or humor
that could result.

In any event, this and the earlier scene suggested a romantic
connection between David/Troy and Carol. (They also associated
Carol with a fine house and money.) David may have seemed an
appropriate replacement for Troy in the story--he was not unpopular,
but he was also not immediately involved.with James, Paul, Ken, and
Troy when they were writing and rewriting their L1ng_Leadgz stories.

A strange thing happened next in James and Ken's story. Our
main characters went to a Taco Bell in Hawaii, where they found
their teachers and almost all of their classmates from Clifford
happily chomping on nachos. The authors listed all the children and

teachers (Grace, Ruth, and me) who were there, and missed only two

115

of the twenty-seven children in the room in their list--William and
Bartleby (children from the trailer park). They wrote: ”The whole
class was there. Rajesh, Leon, Maya," and on and on. It is
difficult to understand why James and Ken would list all these names
in their story. If I were feeling generous, I might interpret their
inclusion of all these children and teachers as a recognition, on
their part, of other people's feelings--that they recognized that
their classmates and teachers might feel left out if some and not
others were included in stories told in the workshop. In Chapter V,
I discuss a sharing session in which Lisa told her classmates that
they should not worry if they did not appear in the story she was
reading to them that day, because she had not finished yet, and she
would eventually write everyone into it.

I lean toward a different interpretation. I think that James
and Ken needed all the children and the teachers at the Taco Bell so
that their classmates and teachers were present to acknowledge the
rightful place of James and his friends at the top of the classroom
heap. Let me explain. When the main characters of the story thus
faro-Kurt, Lisa, Carol, and David--arrived at the Taco Bell, James
and Ken listed themselves, as well as Troy and Paul, with the other
children already there. This was the first time that James wrote
himself as a character into one of his stories (Ken had already done
this in A11_Ahgn§_fien‘_1121‘_§ng_1§ng§, discussed above). Soon
after Hurt and the others arrived, the characters of James, Ken,
Troy, and Paul, left for the beach to do some surfing. They also

took control of the story, became its main characters.

116

Hours passed. Paul came running up to the
Taco Bell. He was yelling. "Ken, Troy, and James
got caught by a humongous wave. They did a
backwards flip in the air. And that's the best
anyone has ever done before!"

The whole class said, "Hey, how do you know?“

Paul said, “I know. I own a surf shop."

“Hr. Lensmire said I could write a story
about this.”

“No way, I'm getting out of here.” So James,
Ken, Troy, Paul went .

TO BE CONTINUED

And the story was continued, in £§;§_§. There, James and his
friends were the main characters from the start. They were the ones
flying in airplanes (to Florida this time) and going to fast food
restaurants (McDonald's). Hurt and Lisa were heard from.briefly (it
seemed it would not be a Line_Legggr story without them), but the
story focused throughout on James, Ken, Troy, and Paul, with
appearances from Bruce, at the beach, and Rajesh and David, at
McDonald's.

But the important shift had occurred in £§;§_2. There, the
boys left their classmates and teachers at the Taco Bell, and went
to the beach. Paul came back with a story about them, and made the
assertion, in front of everyone, that his friends had surfed better
than anyone else ever had. This assertion was questioned by the
whole class, but Paul answered, '1_kngg.' James and his friends, in
their fiction, asserted their place in the classroom. They were the
best. Children in the room might question this, but James and his

friends knew. They were the best.

117

Actually, James and Ken had not waited until the second Ling
Leader to proclaim this in print. After their first story had been
typed and bound, they added an "About the Authors” section, printed
in black magic marker, on a blank page at the end of the book.
This is what James and Ken wrote:

We
their relly Hip
nobody can be better
than them dude
their tubylr to the max!
So their the best!!!

At the end of £§;§_2, James and Ken even got a little dig in at
me and the writing workshop. An unidentified speaker reported that
I had said, again, what I had said to James at the beginning of the
year, and at the beginning of WW:
you could write a story about this. Another unidentified speaker--I
assume, with no evidence, that it was James--answered.back, 'No way.
I'm getting out of here.“ James would rather be at the beach than
in school, rather have experiences than write about them. (Of
course, like other American Romantics who worshipped experience in
the real world and belittled book-learning, James wrote this in a

book. Then again, Thoreau and Twain were not third graders who had

little choice as to whether or not they would write.)

The structure and norms of the workshop were explicitly

developed to allow children to choose and pursue meaningful projects

118

across the school year. James and his friends did this, and they
brought meanings and values from the playground, the cafeteria,
their own histories, into the workshop. But it would be wrong to
see James' project as "something which, having in some way taken
shape and definition in the psyche of an individual, [was] outwardly
objectified for others with the help of external signs of some kind"
(Volosinov, 1973, p. 8b). A Romantic conception of James and his
friends' writing and its meanings is wholly inadequate. Their
projects were determined both from within and without, and emerged
within relations with classmates and teachers, in the clash and
sharing of values and meanings, expressed in oral and written texts,
in inter-actions.

James and his friends were powerful figures in the peer
culture. Their projects were strongly defined by their efforts to
exert control in their relations with other children and their
teachers. A major theme of the writing they produced, especially
James, was social relations-~commenting on them, working them out,
excluding and including certain children, resisting teacher
authority to demand.work and control their texts and lives in
school. James and his friends enacted their projects from the top
of a peer hierarchy of boys, and largely in opposition to the girls.
Their projects were disturbing for their influences on other
children and the boys themselves, for their inclusions and

exclusions, for their nascent politics.

INTENTION, RISK, AND WRITING
IN A THIRD GRADE WRITING WORKSHOP

VOLUME I I

By

Timothy J. Lensmire

A DISSERTATION

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

DOCTOR OF PHIIDSOPHY

Department of Teacher Education

1991

CHAPTER IV

PEER AUDIENCES AND RISK

I asked Karen if she would like to share her
recently published book, Mrs, E, and He; Lovepizd
(See Figure 4.0). Karen has never shared her own
work in front of the class--I even had to
half-drag her over to Jil once to get her to have
a peer conference. Karen shook her head no. I
enlisted the aid of Kurt and John, and told her
they would like to hear her story. They
immediately caught on and played their part, asked
her to please read her story to them. I suggested
we go out into the hall, possibly a less
threatening place for Karen to read. Karen went
to get her book from the library, and Kurt, John,
Jessie, and I went into the hall.

We all sat on the floor, in a sort of
semi-circle with Karen in front of us, with her
back to the brick wall of the hallway. She was
still hesitant, but with encouragement from me and
the other children, she picked up her book and
read her title. She was a little agitated, and
occasionally rocked, with legs crossed, from her
seated position almost up unto her knees, and back
down again.

As she started reading her story, Ken quietly
joined our group. I remember being impressed with
how Ken did it. He walked behind the semi-circle,
and sort of crawled in right beside me, on my
right. I briefly put my arm around him and gave
him a little hug as he sat next to me. I was
impressed because it was almost as if Ken knew
that Karen was a reluctant sharer, and was trying
to be as unintimidating and undisruptive as
possible. I was very pleased with him.

119

120

   

U ‘ . ...-

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W, .
.... .. ...- - ,’ neee nee Heeev. (very eev the Iet Me eutelee. he
he would hen-I. he one day ehe let Me out he hen-lee
One day there nae e little on! «one. are. P. ...“, m u- ...”- that yore nest te he; Moe.
W "'00." 0' "'0‘ "0‘0 WW” 9" I'M". N N 0 they tellee the eeute. One they teen Me e-ev. Awe
teacher. let her real name te Irate. .p“. .... ...", ...,

 

 

.
1.“. I“ ‘ ,

  

he eey Crete eet tMe at". he he ”tee her e
30‘0““. 0"“ W W"“"" V‘" "” "‘ "" let. one one use Mm tee. end than they got to eta
“'0 0'0.” once. he he eeceee her mus-0e. .

Figure 4.0. Karen's MW

121

Karen was not. She immediately stopped
reading, rocked forward, and handed the book to me
and said, ‘You read.’ (Karen moved to a method
she had used before to get her piece heard--she
wanted someone else to read it, almost as if she
didn't want to use her own voice--was it too
close? too vulnerable? or was it facing an
audience, being too present?--Janis had read
Karen's first published piece earlier in the
year.) I tried persuading Karen to continue
reading, but she shook her head no. It was fairly
clear that Ken was the reason she wouldn't read.
While Ken.was there, I couldn't get Karen to read.
Ken seemed to know this. I didn't tell Ken to
leave, but very quickly he did, and soon Karen was
reading again. A little later Janis slid into the
semi-circle where Ken had been, but Karen kept
reading. She soon finished her book.

I was proud of how Karen's classmates
responded to her text--they really seemed to try
to make Karen feel good after she read. John, of
course, picked up on what I thought was a
wonderful problem at the beginning of the
story--Karen is writing about Hrs. Parker as a
little girl, and starts her story with, “One day
there was a little girl named Mrs. P.“ Then,
Karen tries to write her way out of a child being
called Hrs. P: “She thought of that name because
she wanted to be a teacher. But her real name is
Grace." John doubted that Hrs. Parker, as a
little girl, would call herself by her married
name. I thought it was pretty impressive to pick
this up in an oral reading. Karen didn't seem
threatened, and she was soon telling us that she
was going to write her next story about her baby
bird dying.

I wanted to find out why Karen wouldn't read
in front of Ken, so after the workshop was over, I
asked Karen to go out in the hall with me again.

I asked her why she wouldn't share with Ken there.
At first she said, ‘Too many people'--when I
questioned this, saying that Janis had come out
later, replacing Ken, and she still read, Karen
said, ‘I don't know.’ I asked her if she had been
worried that Ken wouldn't like her story, and she
nodded her head yes. But I couldn't tell if she
meant it or if I had just given her a way to
satisfy me and she took it. She seemed nervous,
so I stopped asking her questions and we went back
into the classroom.

122

A little later, as I sat at my round table,
Karen walked up to me, carrying a large sheet of
construction paper, folded in half and stapled to
form a sort of envelop/pocket. Karen often does
stuff like this with paper, and has given me such
pockets as gifts. On one side was written, ‘I'm
sorry Ken.’ (Maybe she would give it to Ken.) As
she showed it to me, she said, ‘Look what I wrote
and I wasn't even looking.’

I don't know now (and didn't then) what the
‘not looking' part meant, unless its meaning is
not at all connected to the message, and simply
comments on performance, on a physical feat like
riding a bicycle with no hands (or did she not
‘look' when she was writing ‘I'm sorry' to avoid
seeing in front of her, in print, a reminder that
she had done something wrong?). I interpreted the

- ‘I'm sorry' as meaning that Karen had thought I
had been reprimanding her in the hall before--that
I was saying she had done something wrong to Ken
by not reading in front of him.

I quickly told her I wasn't yelling at her,
that I was ‘just wondering' about why she didn't
want to share with Ken there. I tried to reassure
her--I really hadn't been angry or disappointed in
her--because her sharing in front of a few people
and getting their response was a breakthrough for
her, I thought. Karen was standing next to me,
and I grabbed her shoulders and told her that she
hadn't done anything wrong and that next time she
wanted to share I would ask her who she would like
to read to. She responded that she didn't like
reading to the whole class, and that she was going
to start a new story the next day. (Fieldnotes,
3-22-90)

I develop two themes in this chapter. One theme, rather
dramatically represented in Karen's story, is the influence multiple
audiences, more or less desirable and trusted by individual authors,
exerted on the experiences and texts of children in this classroom.
In the sharing session with Karen, I had selected Kurt, John, and
Jessie as an audience for her story exactly because I had guessed
they represented a fairly safe and comfortable group for her. Janis

also seems to have been a trusted audience--Ken, apparently not.

123

When Ken joined the group, he effectively silenced Karen in the oral
sharing of her text, despite what I perceived as his efforts to not
disrupt her reading. One of the subtexts of my discussion of James
and his friends was how their intentions and actions-~constrained
but also set free within the workshop setting--might make the
classroom a less supportive or comfortable place for others to write
in. In what follows, I look especially (but not exclusively) to
children on the other end of the peer hierarchy for their
perceptions of peers as audiences for their work. The classroom
seems a riskier place to write for some of these children than it
did for popular, powerful children.

As a teacher, I had limited access to and influence over the
workings of these multiple peer audiences. Above, I tried to find
out why Karen did not want to read in front of Ken. I was quite
interested in what Karen would say, both as a teacher worried about
helping children to be comfortable writing and sharing their work,
and as a researcher interested in the sense different children were
making of the workshop. Was it important that Ken was a popular,
middle class boy, and Karen a quiet, unpopular, working class girl?
Was it important that Ken and Karen.were two black children in a
predominantly white classroom? My role as a teacher probably
contributed to Karen's seeming interpretation of my words as
scolding. Questions like, "Why did you do that?', asked out in the
hall by an adult and teacher, may very well signify to a student

that she is in trouble.

124

But more important than issues of access to information and its
connection to the teacher role, is that children come with
playground and cafeteria experiences, individual and collective
histories in and out of school, that contribute to their evaluations
of each other as friends and audiences. As teachers of any
particular group of children, we have limited control over important
aspects of peer relations. I am certainly not saying that we can do
nothing to influence (enhance) these relationships. Only that, at
any given moment, children are working out their relations with each
other, and they are doing it from their pasts, behind our backs, and‘
outside the room, as well as within situations we have greater
access to and upon which we exert greater influence.

Consider Jil, who mentioned James, among others, as someone she
did not want to work with (ever) in the writing workshop. After
also rejecting John as an audience in peer conferences ("He's biting

me, he's scratching me, he's throwing his pencil"), she said:

Jil: Um, Robert, Suzanne, James, William, um,
David, Ken, did I mention Suzanne?

Intr: Hm hm. Why do you not like to work with
them?

Jil: They tease me all the time, they're my

(inaudible). I will never, I haven't
liked them since I met them and I will
never like them. (Interview, 5-23-90)
A common, often accurate, prediction made by teachers at
Clifford on pleasant, warm mornings was that the children would come

into school worked up and difficult to handle. The reasoning was

that children seemed to come to school earlier on nice days and have

125

more time outside with each other before school started. This often
led to fights, which came into school with children as they began
their day in school.

A second theme of this chapter, then, is how the routine and
norms of the writing workshop helped and hindered children in their
efforts to work and share their texts with desirable audiences. The
openness of writing time in the workshop routine (as well as Grace's
presence) allowed me to arrange for a sharing session for Karen with
a small group of children she appeared to have trusted. But Ken
also took advantage of this openness, and chose to join us there.
Ken's freedom of movement affected Karen's experience in the sharing
session. The writing workshop gave children access to each other,

and this appears to have been, for most children, a mixed blessing.

In my story of James and'his friends, I told.how important
peers were to their experiences within the classroom.‘ James
collaborated with one or more of his friends throughout the year,
and placed great value in his peers' comments in peer conferences
(to the point that he seemed to worry more about pleasing them than
me). Although he expressed some apprehension about reading his work
in front of girls who he thought probably did not like him and his
stories, he clearly relished the opportunity to perform for the
class during sharing time.

But other children had greatly different experiences in the

workshop, and defined themselves quite differently in relation to

126

peer audiences in collaborative work, peer conferences, and sharing
sessions. Perhaps the greatest contrast is provided by Jessie, who
largely rejected peers as audiences for her work (with, from what I
could tell, good reason).

Jessie was the classroom's ‘female pariah' (Thorne, 1986), a
local representative of the cootie queens or cootie girls found in
schools and classrooms, ostracized by nearly everyone “by virtue of
gender, but also through some added stigma such as being overweight
or poor“ (p. 175). Jessie was not small, and she came from the
trailer park. Nearly everyone in the class, in their interviews,
said that she was the least popular person in the class, and the
least desirable to work with. Bruce, for example, called her
‘idiotic, dumb,’ John said that she stunk, and Mary that she never
brushed her teeth. Only a few children--Janis, Karen, Jil--said
that they had worked with her in the class. Grace and I often
intervened in verbal fights between Jessie and other children (I
discuss one such incident in Chapter VI). Jessie was by no means a
passive victim-~she fought back (and probably started a few fights
herself) with volume and sarcasm.

In her interview, Jessie said that she had only a few friends
in the class, Janis and Karen, and a few others in the other third
grade class. She said she sometimes conferenced with Janis and
Karen and shared her finished pieces with them, but usually she kept
her work to herself. When asked, "Who do you write for?” she said,
'Um, myself. I just write for myself. Or sometimes I'd write a

story to somebody, and let them read it“ (Interview, 5-30-90).

127

Although she published four books across the year, she did not share
her books either during sharing time or in the writing workshop
library. She did conference with me, Grace, and the teacher aide,
often. In contrast to James and his friends, she seemed to look
much more to adults than peers as audiences. For example, when
asked what she did not like about the workshop, she said, ”Some
times I didn't like it was when Mr. Lensmire couldn't get to me [for
a writing conference]. I didn't like that.“ Another interesting
bit of evidence for the importance of adult audiences for Jessie
came during her interview: of all the children interviewed, Jessie
was the only one who insisted that the interviewer talk to her a
second time so that Jessie could read her stories to the
interviewer. Other children occasionally read and discussed their
work in interviews--Jessie ended up reading and commenting upon
three of her four published stories in an extra half hour session
with her interviewer.

Several other children seemed similarly oriented toward adults
as audiences rather than peers. Karen, for example, gave a
surprising answer, at least in relation to other children's answers,
to the question used to gain information about what peers she liked
to work with in the room: 1

Intr: Who are the people in your class that
you like to be with and.work with?

Karen: Um, my teachers. (Interview, 5-21-90)
Later, Karen expanded her answer to ”sometimes my friends, and

sometimes Hr. Lensmire.“ Karen also looked outside the classroom

128

for an important audience. When describing what she did with one of
her texts after it had been published, she said that she read it
over first, took the bus home, and ”I give it to my mom and she
reads it and then she'll probably say, that's good, very nice, very
nice." Sharing her work with peers did not appear in her story of
what she did with her published work. When asked who she wrote for,

she replied, “He, Mommy, and some people.“

Janis, a friend of Karen and Jessie, talked about teacher and
peer conferences in ways that were almost perfectly opposed to the
ways James discussed them. James had said that he sometimes took my
advice on his writing, depending on his own assessment of its worth.
But, at least in his interview, he gave peers' advice much more
weight, saying that he would change his text if two peers said they
did not like something. Janis, on the same topics:

Intr: If he [Hr. Lensmire] gave you advice or

a suggestion on how to make things
better, did you always follow his

advice?
Janis: Yes I did.
Intr: How did you feel about the conferences

with Mr. Lensmire, did they help you
become a better writer?

Janis: Yes, they did and I felt good about

them.
Later:
Intr: Did you always use the advice of other
classmates?
Janis: Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't.
Intr: And.what made you choose, how did you

decide?

Janis:

129

Well when a person's like, why don't you

add on to the story like make it, make

it more adventurous and that made me go
ahead and make it more adventurous, but

when a person said.why don't you cut
down the adventure and make it more
dramatic, and I'd say no, I don't want
to do that and then they say, well you
can't do that, there's no other way to
make--I know I'm not. (Interview,
5-21-90)

And John, a student teased perhaps as much as or more

Jessie, said that he liked talking to teachers better than

about his papers.

John:
Intr:
John:
Intr:

John:

When asked why, he said:

Well, I trust teachers.

Really? You can't trust students?
No.

How come?

Because they're younger. (Interview,
5-21-90)

John later linked his preference for teachers to what

knew, saying, ”Because the kids, I, the kids don't know as

One interpretation of John's comments is that he preferred

wiser teachers, perhaps with a certain disrespect for what

children knew and their value as an audience.

than

students

teachers
much.”
older,

other

His comments, then,

might be interpreted as expressing something which traditional,

teacher-centered pedagogy often ends up doing--encouraging children

to not trust themselves or other children as sources of knowledge

and insight.

But we need to take John's first comment-~‘I trust

teachers'--more seriously.

A common response by children in sharing

130

sessions to John's work was that they could not understand his
stories. They would voice these complaints in ways that made it
difficult for me to decide if comprehension of John's often
difficult, adventuresome texts was the problem, or if difficulties
understanding his stories were just excuses for giving him a hard
time. Suzanne, who John claimed often ‘tormented' him, hinted at
both of these possibilities in her interview. First she said that
John was ”smarter than the rest of us and doesn't really make sense
to the rest of us." Then, “he doesn't know how to write right, I
don't think . . . he just doesn't explain his words, his sentences
too good.” Later, she linked children teasing John to not
understanding his work: 'a lot of people tease him and say I don't
understand the writing, I don't like the writing.“ Finally, when
asked.ghy children teased John and said that they did not understand
or like his writing, she replied, ”He is really obnoxious“
(Interview, 5-18-90). Her responses suggest that criticism of
John's work might have had as much to do with children's attitudes
toward John as it did with their perceptions of his texts.

At the end of this chapter, I tell the story of one of John's
sharing sessions. It will demonstrate some of the risks John faced
when he shared his texts with peers. My own interpretation of
John's comments, above, is that he could trust teachers as audiences
for his texts because they brought more knowledge and patience than
peers to him and his texts.. He was more confident, with teachers,

that he would be understood--his texts comprehended and appreciated,

131

‘but also understood in terms of an acceptance of him as a writer and
a child.

Both Janis and John reported conferencing and collaborating
(occasionally) with other children. They also were frequent readers
during sharing sessions. Jessie was not. She had decided that it
was too risky to share her stories with most of her peers in
conferences, sharing time, and the workshop library. After
identifying children she did not want to conference with, Jessie
described how she would feel if she were forced to conference with
them:

Intr: What would they do with your writing?
How would you feel if you had to

conference with them?

Jessie: I would feel like a jar of slime. Being
sat on.

Intr: So maybe they don't treat you.very well?

Jessie: Yes. No, like getting cut in half.
(Interview, 5-30-90)

Later, she said that she never shared in front of the whole
class because they would make her feel the same way in that
situation (she resisted several attempts by me to have her share, as
Karen did, with small groups of friends). Her description of how
her peers would accomplish making her feel ‘cut in half' during a
sharing session surprised me. I had expected her to predict verbal
attacks on her work when she finished sharing a story. Instead:

Because, cause, for some people, it, nobody would,

would mu. m. or W. I know
that. (Interview, 5-30-90; my emphasis)

132

Jessie feared silence, a rejection expressed not with words but
with no words, when there were supposed to be words; an active
silence. Jessie's comments assumed aspects of the sharing session
that Grace and I had worked hard to put in place. If an author
asked her classmates for specific help in relation to the piece she
wwas reading, then we expected children to respond to the author's
request in their response before going on to other topics--‘nobody
would answer.’ If the author did not set up the sharing session
this way, we expected children to first talk with the author about
what they liked, and then move to questions that they had about the
work--‘or ask them questions.’

From the beginning, I worked to make the writing workshop, and
its conferences and sharing times, a safe place for children to
write and share their work. In the opening meeting of the second
day of the workshop, I talked about risk and the need for a
supportive audience:

I talked about how confusing things might be
for a while, and I said that two important things
authors do are write about things that they care
about and take risks. I then gave some examples
of students who had taken risks. I started with
William, who I had talked to the day before when
he said he had nothing to write about. I said
that he had taken a risk and wrote a rough draft
even though he didn't know how to spell every
single word. I told them that that was fine in a
rough draft, that they could worry about spelling
later if they wanted to publish the piece. I
watched William as I said this--I wondered if I
embarrassed him when I wanted to compliment him.
Later, he came up to me and said that tomorrow he
was going to write about baseball, so I don't
think he is too damaged.

I said that John, in his piece, “He,“ had
taken risks, since he was writing a sort of

133

autobiography. I said that maybe he should read
it to the class-~he said he would when.he was
finished. Finally, I said that Robert (is that
his name?--black hair, crew cut, round face) had
taken a risk when he wrote about something sad. I
said that we would have to respect him and not
make him feel embarrassed if he wanted to read his
story to us. He seemed pleased, and told me later
that he was drawing a picture to go along with his
story.

At the end of my little lecture, I said that
if we were going to be authors, we needed a safe
place to write. To have a safe place, we needed
to respect one another and be patient with one
another. I told them that we would work on ways
to help and support each other as writers.
(Fieldnotes, 8-31-89)

As the year progressed, we did many activities to help children
respond to each other's writing in helpful ways. Grace and I held
‘peer' conferences in front of the class in which we talked with
each other about our own writing; I led discussions of student
texts I had placed on the overhead; we developed guidelines for
response that children kept in their writing folders (See Figure
4.1); and children role-played peer conferences in front of the
class, which we then discussed and assessed. Grace and I were quite
active, at times, in sharing sessions, both reminding children
before we started that we needed to respect and support our fellow
writers, and intervening during sharing sessions when children
seemed unsupportive. Perhaps Jessie's fear of silence reflected her
knowledge of the active role we took during sharing--she may have
known we would address hurtful student comments, but she was less

sure (as I am) that we could address no comments, no answers or

questions.

134

PEER CONFERENCE GUIDELINES

1. Find a spot away from the QUIEI_ZQNE.

2. The author reads out loud.

3. The listener responds: tell the author what
you liked. Tell the author what you remember
about her or his writing. Tell the author what

-

you thought was interesting.

4. The listener asks some questions about the
author’s writing: let the author teach you about

his or her topic.

5. The author and listener talk about what to do
next. Will the author make changes? What will

the author do next? How will she or he do it?

Figure 4.1. Guidelines for peer conferences.

135

Obviously, these teacher efforts were not enough to make the
classroom a safe place for Jessie to share her texts with peers.
Jessie's peers were a significant part of her not feeling safe.
When asked why other people felt comfortable sharing their stories

in front of class, Jessie said, "Because they have lots of friends."

Jessie systematically avoided peer audiences in peer
conferences, sharing sessions, and the workshop library. Most
children in the room, however, reported that they ggggb;_gnd_aggidgg
specific peer audiences in their daily interactions in the
classroom. A primary way children accomplished this was in their
selection of who they peer conferenced.with on their texts. Some of
the patterns documented in the chapter on James and his friends
characterized the workshop as a whole. Children conferenced with
friends within gender boundaries. All children identified other
children they did and did not want to conference with#-in other
words, they made inclusions and exclusions, and these
differentiations were, as they were with James and.his friends, at
times associated with social class and gender differences. Karen,
for example, spoke for boys and girls when she stated that ”the boys
like the boys, but the girls like the girls' for peer conferences
(Interview, 5-21-90). In.Hary and Lori's interview, Mary was quite
explicit about who she did and did not want to work with: 'I like
working with Carol, Lisa, Marie, Sharon, Emily, Julie, and Suzanne.

And I don't like working with the boys." Mary's list of girls,

136

except possibly for Emily and Julie, is a fairly complete naming of
the most popular girls in the class. She also was forthcoming about
girls she did not want to work with, and.why. Mary said that some
of them had lice, they stunk, she did not like their ‘styles' or
their personalities.
Mary: Most of them, and some of them are from

the trailer park and I don't like

working with people who are from the

trailer park. . . . Like at first I

thought that Lori was from the trailer
park before I went over to her house the

first time.
Lori: Thanks a lot.
Mary: Well I did. (Interview, 5-31-90)

But friendship and trust (or lack of it) were the most common
reasons given for their decisions, especially when children were
asked why they did not want to work with certain children. I
reported in the last chapter that Bruce did not want to work with
James because he could not trust him to keep secrets about his
stories. James had expressed apprehension about conferencing and
sharing his texts with girls in the class because he believed they
would not like his work, and assumed that they did not like him.
Robert, one of the boys from the trailer park of whom James was
critical, said in.his interview that he had conferenced with Leon,
his ‘friend William,’ and Rajesh. When asked why he conferenced
with them, he responded:

Robert: Well, I know they wouldn't like tell
everybody, you know?

Intr: No, tell me. Tell everybody what?

137
Robert: Well, they wouldn't tell, they wouldn't
go off telling everybody what you wrote.
Intr: Yeah. Is that important to you?
Robert: Yes it is.
Intr: Why is that?

Robert: Well, because, sometimes they laugh at
you, they tease you.

Intr: What do they laugh or tease you about?
Robert: Well, what you didn't write and what

they didn't write, like the same, like,

they would think that theirs, theirs was

better than the others. (Interview,

5-24-90)

Marie, one of the more popular girls in class, said that she
did not want to read her pieces to "people who pick on me, make fun
of me,“ because they ”probably would say, that story is bad, and
stuff, they'd try to make fun of stuff" (Interview, 5-16-90).
Marie's use of ‘probably would say,’ instead of something like,

‘they said that,’ is indicative of children's reports of their
experiences in peer conferences. Alng§§_ng_ghildzgn reported bad
experiences in peer conferences-~most anticipated bad experiences if
they conferenced with certain children. The few exceptions focused
on difficulties children had working with other children on writing,
not with instances of children teasing or hurting each other in
conferences. Rajesh, for example, reported getting into arguments
with other children as he tried to revise texts with them. Rajesh
refers below, I think, to moving a bit of text around to see where

it should go (I had shown children how to cut up and physically

manipulate their rough drafts during revision):

138

Why would I get into arguments? Because, I
was like just really mad, I was like, why don't we
put it here, and he was like, no, no, no, no, it
was right here, here, here. (Interview, 5-18-90)

I partly attribute the success of peer conferences--success in
terms of their being safe interactions--to the work Grace and I did
to help children interact in positive, supportive ways. But I
attribute much of their success to children's opportunities to
select their first audiences in peer conferences and collaborations
during writing time. The norms of this part of the workshop
routine, especially the relative freedom of movement and
association, granted children an opportunity that we adult writers
often take for ourselves: the chance to share our texts with
friendly, trusted audiences before sending them on to, perhaps, less
friendly ones.

But as I noted in relation to Karen's sharing session above,
and as should be apparent from the previous chapter and some of
Jessie and Robert's comments above, the openness of writing time
sometimes made it difficult for children to avoid audiences (and
authors) they wanted to avoid. There was underground.writing: when
asked if children ever used writing to tease one another, Bruce
replied, "Yeah, but they, but then they crumpled it up and threw it
away" (Interview, 5-21-90). There was underground talk: in the
last chapter, for example, Sharon and Carol told about trying to get
their names out of boys' stories, and then suggested that even if

they succeeded (often with the help of the teacher), the boys could

keep them ‘in' the story orally, by telling their friends who the

139

characters really were. Children could read a child's story over
his back when he did not want them to, did not ask for their
comments: ”You were writing, they'd come over to your desk and
they, they say like their story's so big and neat“ (Robert,
Interview, 5-24-90).

Writing time gave children the chance to connect with people
they needed or wanted to connect with. It also provided
opportunities for confrontation, fighting, and teasing.
Furthermore, except when such ‘problems' made themselves known-~by
being loud, named by a child, accidently or purposefully observed by
teachers--I had limited access to and influence over these
interactions. This was a risk I was taking as a teacher in order
for children to have access to each other when they needed it and
wanted it.

Sharing time also made it difficult for children to avoid
undesirable peer audiences. The most common form sharing time took
was an individual author reading her text to the entire class.
After some of the children's comments above, perhaps it seems
unlikely that anyone would want to share under such circumstances.
But actually, many children did share pieces with the class, and
reported it being, overall, a positive experience (if a little
scary) in their interviews. Of course, as I have already noted,
some children did not want to share, and sometimes children would
ask friends to read their texts to the class-~they would stand next
to or behind the author's chair as their friends read their texts.

Karen, Emily, among others, did this.

140

I tried, with Grace, to make these sharing sessions safe places
for children to read and receive response from their classmates. I
drew heavily on Graves (1983) and Calkins (1986), and other workshop
advocates, for guidance in how to go about this in the classroom.
But workshop advocates overestimate, as I did, the extent to which
teachers can smooth over peer conflict with interventions such as
teacher modeling of response and rules for behavior. Imagine Rajesh
coming to the writing workshop after being pushed around by James
jand Bruce on the playground. What sort of audience for his texts
are James and Bruce, nhaggxgI_ghg1;_1n;glgsfi_hghfigigz? If they tell
Rajesh, very politely, during sharing time, that they did not
understand the meaning of parts of his story, what does that mean?
What does it mean for Rajesh? What does it mean to me, as the
teacher, especially if I do not know that Rajesh got pushed around
at recess? Does it mean that they were genuinely puzzled by
Rajesh's story and offered their observations in hopes that it would
help him improve his text? Or was their question a subtle put-down,
voiced, of course, in appropriate language and tone, that made fun
of Rajesh and his story? How do I know? Carol and Sharon said that
James would not ask questions about boys' stories, but ask them
about girls' stories. They believed he did this to tease girls. In
other words, even the presence and absence of seemingly appropriate
responses might be meaningful (and hurtful).

These children had histories, individual and collective. They
were working out relations continuously, in and out of the workshop,

in and out of school. As a teacher, it was difficult to learn about

141

these relations, to follow them, understand their significance for
idlat was (and was not) said and written in the classroom. I had
invited these relations in, had wanted to give them bigger play. I
‘had.hoped to capitalize on the interest and value children placed in
each other as friends, authors, audiences.

Because of my efforts--and despite them--peers were at once
trusted and risky audiences for each other. In the next chapter, I
discuss the writing of fiction as a response, in part, to risky peer
audiences. Before I do, however, I want to tell the story of one
more sharing time, and then briefly examine the writing situation
children faced in the writing workshop. The story is about John and
his interactions with multiple audiences--in this case, peers,
teachers, and even the principal. It demonstrates some of the
difficulties I encountered and the errors I made in my attempts to
understand and influence peer relations. The story reminds us that
writing is risky, involves an exposure of self that can leave us
vulnerable.

Robert provides an appropriate introduction to John's story.
Robert said that he was ‘very nervous' about sharing his first
published book in front of the class (he was one of the first
children to do so):

Robert: And I, I didn't know what they were
going to do.

Intr: Who?

Robert: The people, I thought that they were
. going to boo it and all that stuff?

Intr: Did they?

142

Robert: No, no. You never know what's going to
happen. (Interview, 2-24-90)

Indeed.

John shared his Elegagg; story today (see
Figure 4.2 for the beginning of John's story). As
Grace said later, the workshop had been going
fairly smoothly up to that point. Most kids were'
calm and writing (or at least looking like they
were writing).

John shared his piece. He has a certain
pxgggn g when he shares. He seems very
self-assured, not very nervous. He takes his time
reading, shows his pictures slowly to the class,
first to the right side, then middle and left,
slowly rotating his body. He seemed so
comfortable today that his pacing seemed a little
slow--especially since the illustrations were too
small for the kids in the back of the room to see
anyway. I saw Carol turn to Marie several times
and raise her eyebrows in what I interpreted as a
sort of do-you-believe-this-guy look. Maya also
made eye-contact with Carol while John was reading
with a similar facial expression.

I had conferenced with John about the
piece--it had been confusing, but I thought the
part he added helped explain things. I really
wasn't thinking any of this would create a
problem.

After John finished sharing, I started
clapping (as has become the custom), and several
children joined me. John stopped us, saying he
hadn't shown the final illustration yet. I don't
know who started the questioning, but soon
Suzanne, seated just to John's left in the first
seat of the middle row, became the point person
for a group of at least three--Carol, Maya, and
Suzanne--telling John that they didn't understand
his story. I quickly moved up to the front of the
room, near John. I squatted down next to him as
he sat in the author's chair. I put my right arm
around him. I guess, more or less instinctively,
I wanted to be by John and support him as he got
some hard questions, possibly tinged with a little
malice. I considered stopping sharing, but I
wanted to continue. On the one hand, this might
have been.a sort of attack on John, coming from
people who he often fought with (especially
Suzanne). On the other hand, what they were
saying was true in some sense, and I thought that

 

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144

it might be helpful to John to hear what they
couldn't understand.

So, I went up by John. With my arm around
him, I asked his respondents to respect him and be
nice in their responses. Suzanne started
again--she even said something like ‘no offense'
and ‘I'm sorry if I offended you,’ which struck me
as a little funny--and proceeded to say she didn't
understand the story and that it had a ‘nothing'
ending. A nothing ending--I can't remember how
she explained it. Carol and Maya offered
responses around Suzanne's, and added that his
previous work suffered from similar problems.

John tried to respond, more or less defending his
piece, and I did the same, trying to keep them
specific and stop them from exaggerating.

We were quite engaged. At one point, I had
to hold John in his seat--my supportive arm became
a restraining one--I thought he was going to jump
up and hit Suzanne or Maya. I stopped sharing
time, saying that perhaps John, Suzanne, Maya, and
Carol could have a small group discussion some
time if they wanted. I was thinking that this
might be less threatening to John, and the girls
would have less of an audience to nail John in
front of (if that is what they were trying to do).
John went to his seat, and I started telling the
class to get ready for their next class with Grace
as I walked down the middle aisle to the back of
the room.

I turned around in time to see John jump out
of his desk, rush Maya and then Suzanne, and pound
each one of them on the hand with his fist. I
trotted up to hold John. This was when the
fireworks began (or the first explosion anyway).
John and Suzanne were struggling with each
other--a constant verbal struggle as well as
grabbing each other and trying to scratch each
other. Soon Grace and I were both in on the
dance. At one point John and Suzanne were locked
to one another, each not letting go of the other,
and Grace and I were each holding a kid
(Grace-Suzanne, me-John) trying to pry them apart.
It was a circus--almost funny, since here were two
adults, I think both not trying to yell too loud
and not trying to handle the struggling kids too
roughly. But the children were thoroughly engaged
with each other. That's probably not very
accurate. John was immersed (over his head).
Suzanne was in control--she knew how to score off
John. John was basically out of control. What I

145

like about Suzanne--her sharp wit, her perception,
her courage--were put to use against John, and he
was no match.

Eventually, John and I went out into the
hall. I just wanted to let John cool down. Carol
told me later that Grace talked with the class
about how scary it could be to share, and how the
class would have to do a better job at making the
author feel comfortable and supported. Meanwhile,
I was out in the hall with John. The principal,
Bill, just happened to be nearby (he was talking
to this little guy from the special ed. room--it
seems like he talks to him every day). John was a
little hot yet--I wanted to calm him down, tell
him it wasn't just his fault, and apologize for
not stopping things sooner.

Bill came over. I didn't feel it was
necessary, but he must have. I quickly tried to
explain what had happened. John interrupted with
yells and bursts. Bill put his hands on John's
shoulders, trying to get John to settle down.

This was when the next round of trouble started.
Bill told John to quiet down, that he was
disturbing other classes (I doubt it). John
responded with ‘I'm just telling you how I'm
feeling,’ again quite loud. This escalated--Bill
citing rules of politeness, John expressing his
feelings--until John said, ‘Sometimes I think that
you are a bad principal.’

Bill had been standing in front of John, bent
over at the waist. Now he put each of his hands
on each side of John's face to talk to him. He
told John, with his face about three inches from
John's, that he had the choice of settling down
and.being quiet or going to the office with him
where Bill would call his parents to have him
taken home. John is not very good at being
silent, especially when he is agitated. He again
said--not quite a shout, but loud enough--that he
was just saying how he was feeling. Bill, who was
very serious, but not enraged or anything like
that, simply said, ‘That's it,’ and started
walking to the office with John, holding his hand.

What has happened? A small child-~a third
grader-~shared his book in front of the class. A
small group of children who probably don't like
John (Suzanne told me later that day that John
really bugs her) criticized his work as not being
understandable. They not only criticized this
text, but also named 2 or 3 others, saying that
all of his work is like this. As a teacher, I

146

made an error in thinking that something
constructive could come of this--I intervened,
tried to support John, get his critics to be more
specific and (ha) help John understand
specifically what,they don't understand. Out of
this-~an engaging, vital discussion, I
suppose-~John got in trouble with the principal
(when things matter in schools, bad things can
happen; honesty—-John was being very honest
throughout--doesn't necessarily do well in
school).

I followed John to the principal's office. I
didn't want John to get in all sorts of trouble.

I went into the office with them, and quickly
explained that John had been sharing a story, and
that Suzanne and some others had criticized his
piece, and that he and Suzanne had gotten into an
‘argument.’ Bill's line with John was that he had
to control himself. John's consistent line was
that he was just saying how he felt. I really
admired John. Here was this little 3rd grader,
sitting in the principal's office with two adults,
and he wasn't backing down or cowering--he was
much calmer by now, which made things easier for
Bill, I think.

Then, John pursued the ‘bad principal' thing
again, just when I thought this was about over.

He made both a more general and specific critique,
saying that kids, not just him, thought that Bill
was a bad principal because all he did was say hi
to them sometimes. Now I felt a little bad for
Bill--my presence might make this harder for him
to take than if it was just John and him. But
Bill handled it well. He told John that he
thought John had said what he did because John was
angry. John eventually apologized on his own,
sort of--he said that he was frustrated and said
what he said when he was angry. But he never said
that what he said wasn't true. It didn't seem to
matter to Bill. I took John back to the
classroom.

Before we left, I told Bill, in front of
John, that he might want to talk to Suzanne, since
she had.been part of this as well. I didn't
really want Bill to talk to her, but I wanted John
to know that we weren't coming down only on him.
Bill has had many dealings with Suzanne--she seems
to get in a lot of fights before school. He said
that he would talk to her sometime at lunch.

147

Before I took John into class, I apologized
to him. I told him that it was partly my fault
for letting things get as far as they did, and
that I shouldn't have let Suzanne and the others
criticize his work that way. I told him that I
thought his revision had made his story much
better, and that his other work was really very
good work (the truth). At issue here for me--I
want John to keep exploring, to keep taking risks,
and not write boring, more understandable stuff
because of what some children who don't like him
anyway say about his work. John said that it
wasn't my fault at all, and walked into the
classroom. (Fieldnotes, 3-25-90).

Elbow (1987) relates how he often, when struggling for words in
speaking situations, involuntarily closes his eyes. He interprets
this behavior as an

. instinctive attempt to blot out
awareness of audience when I need all my
concentration for just trying to figure out or
express what I want to say. (p. 50)

From this personal start, he goes on to examine different
rhetorics and psychologies, and their implications for the
manipulation of audience, by teachers of writing, for the benefit of
student writers. Elbow is concerned that current theories and
practices put too much emphasis and faith in audience awareness, and
ignore how audiences can push back on writing and make it defensive,
tangled, absent.

Elbow argues that two ‘pieties of composition theory' are often
in conflict. One, from the classical rhetorical tradition, would

have writers think about audience as they write. The other, which

Elbow associates with a ‘newer epistemic tradition' grounded in the

148

work of Berthoff, encourages writers to use writing to make new
meaning-~and, as Elbow notes, ”it's often difficult to work out new
meaning while thinking about readers” (p. 53).

This conflict is visible in my fieldnotes of John's sharing
session, especially toward the end of my story. I am worried that
John will lose his creativity and uniqueness if he bends his work
too much to peer audiences. But my words and actions, that day at
least, functioned to force John to face his audienceo-keep his eyes
open, even as I tried to support him and shape audience response.
(At various times earlier in the year, I had John read to older
children in Clifford--according to John, these sessions were quite
successful.) I wrote that ‘it might be helpful to John' if he
understood what his peers did not understand about his piece. In
other words, I wanted to socialize John, and use peers to do it.

My stance has support from current psychological models:

From one side, the Piagetians say, in effect,
”The egocentric little critters, we've got to
socialize 'em. Ergo, make them think about~
audience when they write!” From the other side,
the Vygotskians say, in effect, ”No wonder they're
having trouble writing. They've been bamboozled
by Piagetian heresy. They think they're solitary
individuals with private selves when really
they're just congeries of voices that derive from
their discourse community. Ergo, let's intensify
the social context--use peer groups and
publication: make them think about audience when
they write. (Elbow, 1987, p. 57)

The image of me crouching with my arm around John as he sat in
the author's chair is a powerful illustration of the writing
situation children faced in the writing workshop. My arm around

John was supportive and coercive. I used it to express solidarity

149

with John, so that he knew he was not alone in a difficult
writing/speaking situation. I also used my arm to keep him in the
situation, a situation constructed of talk, rather than let him
transform the situation by possibly expressing his frustration or
disappointment physically (or was he just trying to run away?). As
far as I can tell, I was a safe audience for many children in the
room, even preferred by some over peers. I worked to help them find
topics and purposes for their writing; I supported their efforts.
At the same time, I made them write, and in a social situation in
which peers were purposefully-prominent audiences.

One of the responses children made to the presence of multiple
peer audiences in the writing workshop was similar to Elbow ‘closing
his eyes.’ They avoided certain peer audiences and turned to other
ones for support. These alternative audiences were other peers,
teachers, sometimes parents.

Writing is risky, and children in the workshop experienced
writing as more or less risky. An important part of what made
writing risky to them was sharing their work with peers. In this,
these third graders joined other writers in their ambivalent
relations with audiences. On the one hand, we risk exposing
ourselves and our work to criticism when we share our texts with
others. On the other hand, audiences are sources of support, and we
often write exactly because we want others to read our
textso-sharing our work is part of a communicative transaction in
written language. Richards (1986), a professional sociologist and

writer, discusses risk in these terms:

150

For me, sitting down to write is risky
because it means that I have to open myself up to

scrutiny. . . . Every piece of work can be used as
evidence about what kind of a sociologist (and
person) you are . . . I cannot face the

possibility of people thinking I'm stupid.
(pp. 113, 114)

Audiences are sources of risk in the chance that they will
reject the work and the author. But audiences are also sources of
affirmation, of encouragement, that cannot be tapped until something
is written and shared.

So there I am, faced with the blank page,
confronting the risk of discovering that I cannot
do what I want to do, and therefore am not the
person I pretend to be. I haven't yet written
anything, so no can help me affirm my commitment
and underscore my sense of who I am. (p. 117)

Richards ‘solves' this problem much like my students did in the
workshop--by sharing her work, especially her working drafts, with
people she trusts, people she has a common history with, who have
seen ”early attempts to write and think . . . and believed there was
something lurking there beneath all the confusion” (p. 116). This
does not remove risk--other audiences may be on the horizon, we may
still worry about sharing texts even with trusted friends, may still
fail to do what we had hoped in our writing--but it often helps us
to write, to risk.

But we should not forget John in the author's chair. Children
in the workshop were often confronted with audiences they were less

than comfortable with. Furthermore, they had to write. The blank

page, if they wanted to do as their teacher asked, could not remain

151

blank for long, whatever the risk they felt at exposing themselves
to others.

A second response to this situation, besides seeking desirable
audiences, was writing ‘desirable' texts. Fictional narratives,
rather than the personal narratives and topics I was encouraging
them to write, were ‘desirable,’ for reasons I explore in the next

chapter.

Lensmire:

Emily:

Lensmire:

Emily:

Lensmire:

Emily:

Lensmire:

CHAPTER V

FICTION, DISTANCE, AND CONTROL

Emily, why do you think that everybody
in the class writes fiction, instead of
writing like, you wrote a couple stories
that were really about yourself, you
know, like you and your dog and stuff
like that. But most people write
fiction.

Well, it's probably because they really
make up things to make it more
interesting, that's, it's mostly why
they, it's mostly why they write about
different people, like James, the story
he wrote about Lisa.

Uh huh.

Well he, like, I think he just wanted to
have the story more interesting.

More interesting than what? So, are you
saying that stuff that happens to people
isn't interesting?

Well, not really, but if you make it
more exciting like sort of add more
things to it, it can be kind of
interesting, it's not--

Do you, I've been wondering if you think
sometimes people are a little bit afraid
of, of talking about themselves in front
of classmates, and so they--

152

153

Yeah, that's, that's mostly it. They're
probably afraid of talking about

themselves .

Emily:

You think so? I mean, you don't have to

Lensmire:
believe what I say.

Yeah, that's, that's what I thought at
the beginning because no, mostly nobody
was writing about themselves, they were
writing about, stories about like,
James, he wrote about Lisa and Kurt.

Emily:

Did, so you think that they're, you
think they're, some kids just don't want

to write about--

Lensmire :

They're just scared that people will
laugh at them because they're writing
about themselves. (Audiotape, 3-29-90)

Emily:

1

Near the end of my teaching in the writing workshop, I became

especially interested in how risks associated with writing were

related to the writing children did in the classroom. A week and a

half before the above conversation with Emily, I had asked, in my
fieldnotes, ‘who writes personal narratives?’ as I puzzled through
the incongruence between the writing topics and stories I discussed

with James, Ken, and Bruce in writing conferences, and what they

actually wrote about in the workshop (Fieldnotes, 3-19-90). In these

notes and others like them, I named and brought to my own attention

an aspect of the writing children did in the room that I had noticed

before, but had not considered seriously: almost all the texts

children wrote, and especially those they published, were fictional

narratives. And this was despite the fact that, in whole group

activities and writing conferences across the year, I had

 

 

 

154

consistently attempted to help them identify and write about topics
and stories that rather directly expressed their own experiences.

In what follows, I argue that fictional narratives offered
children several advantages over personal narratives and other topics
and genres. One advantage fiction offered was distance. By writing
fiction, children could avoid directly exposing themselves and their
experiences and values to the scrutiny of peers and teachers. Emily
said that children were ‘just scared that people will laugh at them
because they're about themselves.’ A second advantage was control.
Children seemed to value fiction for the control it gave them over
their material. Emily noted that writers of fiction could ‘make it
more interesting.’ Children felt less restricted by their material,
felt they could shape their texts in ways that would please their
audiences, and felt that fiction was more enjoyable to write than
nonfiction. Fiction helped children avoid risks associated with the
presence of more and less trusted audiences in the classroom, and
allowed them to manipulate their material in ways that satisfied

their audiences and themselves as writers.

I used the handout reproduced in Figure 5.0 with children early
in the year to help them find things to write about. I did not
expect that they would fill in all the spaces, only that they would
use the sheet as a tool for identifying meaningful topics. The
handout captures, in fairly stark fashion, the type of writing I was

encouraging children to do--writing that Britton (1978, 1982) would

155

 

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156

label ‘expressive'. Temple et a1. (1988), with reference to Britton,
characterize expressive language as
. language that is close to the self,
used to reveal the nature of the person, to
verbalize his consciousness, and to exhibit his
close relation to the reader. Expressive language
is a free flow of ideas and feelings. (p. 131)

Britton identifies two other functions, in addition to the
expressive function, that language can serve: transactional and
poetic. Language serving a transactional function is used to do
something; for example, inform, persuade, problem-solve, theorize.
Within the transactional function ”an utterance . . . is a means to
some and outside itself, and its organization will be the principle
of efficiency in carrying out that end” (1978, p. 18). In contrast,
language serving the poetic function is used to make something with
words. In this function, language itself becomes the focus of
attention, as when.we gossip, tell stories, or write novels for the
enjoyment and satisfaction they give us as verbal objects.

Expressive writing often precedes, in a child's developmental
history, writing in transactional and poetic modes (Temple at al.,
1988). Within such a conception of writing development, children
gradually gain control over their expressive writing and shape it
toward the demands of transactional and poetic functions, as well as
continue writing for expressive purposes.

This progression can be used to characterize a child's overall
development in writing, but can also be used characterize the history

of individual texts. As writers, we may identify important themes

and stories for future development through expressive writing, with

157

writing that is "informal or casual, loosely structured” (Britton.
1978, p. 18)-—perhaps by brainstorming, writing letters to friends,
doing some ‘free writing' (Elbow, 1973). And then, we may gradually
build on and manipulate these earlier texts, and shape them toward
more public and formal ends in transactional and poetic discourses.

My teaching assumed similar progressions. The handout in Figure
5.0 anticipates poetic and transactional functions fairly directly,
asking for stories (things that have happened) and topics that could
be identified and gradually shaped toward poetic and transactional
ends. But the handout begins with and emphasizes the expressive
function. These stories will be things that happened to ‘me,’ topics
that ‘I' know a lot about.

Many children noted problems with exactly this sort of
expressive writing, exactly because it was 'close to the self' and
revealed the 'nature of the person.’ Some commented, as Emily did
above, on the risks of talking about yourself in front of classmates.
Marie, for example, said that ”maybe people would come up to me and
start laughing at that,” if she wrote about herself (Interview,
5-16-90). William wrote several stories about himself playing sports
at the beginning of the year, but went on to publish only fiction.
When I asked him about this, he responded:

William: I don't know, people would probably
laugh at me.

Lensmire: You think so?

William: Yeah.

158

Lensmire: That's, I was always worried about that.
So you, do you think other people felt
that way in class?

William: Maybe, maybe not. I don't really know.

Lensmire: Yeah, because some other people told me
that they were scared to write about
themselves because they were worried
that other people would laugh at them or
not like it.

William: Me too. (Audiotape, 5-18-90)

Other children seemed less afraid of peer response, and more
concerned with keeping private things private. In other words, fear
seemed less a motivation than a wish to protect their privacy.
Suzanne, a child who moved with power and confidence among children
and her teachers, and who did occasionally write personal narratives,
said that she did not like to write about herself because it was ‘too
personal.’

Like if I were supposed to write about when I

grew up, when I was born and things like that,

sometimes I think that's personal. (Interview,

5-18-90)

But often, the wish to keep private things private was linked to a

fear of exposure. Rajesh attributed such a fear to Jessie and her

‘bad past.’

Rajesh: Because somebody might have had a real,
a bad past, and so they didn't want to
tell about that past and so they just
want to write about fiction.

Intr: Don't you share things like that with--

Rajesh: Everybody, almost everybody in that
class, including me, knew it.

159
Intr: So you don't think she [Jessie] would
like to write about herself then?
Rajesh: Yeah, she just writes sequels of
Sleeping Beauty. I mean, she is more in
her own group. (Interview, 5-18-90)

In his last comment, Rajesh suggests the isolation Jessie
experienced in this class: ‘she was more in her own group.’ He
attributes to Jessie a ‘bad past,’ and gives this as a reason for her
to write fiction instead of personal narratives. Rajesh was correct
that Jessie wrote her own version of ”Sleeping Beauty”--I discuss it
at the end of this chapter--but he was incorrect in his suggestion
that Jessie typically wrote fiction. Jessie published four books
across the year. One of them was her retelling of ”Sleeping Beauty,”
and another was a retelling of a scary story called ”The Big Toe,”
that she found in a book from the school library. But two of her
books were personal narratives: Misty told about adventures with her
dog, and My_£;1§nd§ told the story of her rather rocky friendships in
kindergarten and later grades with Jil, from this class, and Barbara,
from the other third grade. One of the ironic ‘benefits' of Jessie's
alienation from and rejection of her peers seems to have been the
opportunity to write some important stories from her own past. In
other words, one way to solve the problem of exposing yourself to
peers was to not let them see your stories.

Jessie seemed to be following the advice Jil offered to children
who were afraid to write about themselves. Jil believed ”it was good

to write about yourself. It's fine.” If you were afraid of people

160

making fun, ”Keep it in a safe place, take it home, put it in a
combination steel safe” (Interview, 5-23-90).

Most children, however, did not do this. Most children wrote
and published fiction. Perhaps the easiest way to suggest the
prevalence of fiction in the room is by categorizing and counting the
books that children made available to each other in the writing
workshop library. I have records of what books were checked out of
the library from the sign-out book. Although it is possible that
there were books in the library that were never checked out, the list
of books I compiled from the sign-out book should be fairly
representative of the books in the library across the year. Of 21
books checked out of the library--representing 20 different authors,
with collaborations and more than one book for a few authors--l7 were
fictional narratives, 2 were personal narratives, l was an ABC book,
and another a book of jokes.

In the workshop library, fictional narratives clearly
outnumbered other genres. I have not tried to categorize and count
all the rough drafts and texts children wrote during the year (I do
not have all the drafts, and the effort is unnecessary for my
purposes here), but my impression from watching the children write
across the year and casually perusing their writing folders in
preparation for this writing, is that there were more personal
narratives, proportionately, written across the year than would be
suggested by the workshop library. Some children, such as William
and Robert, wrote rough drafts of personal narratives they never

published or shared; others, such as Suzanne, wrote and shared

161

personal narratives, but did not publish them; and still other
children, such as Jessie, published personal narratives that they did
not share with peers in the library or in sharing sessions. (Of
course, there were other genres written that were not represented in
the library--poetry we often published by giving the poets ten
photocopies of final versions for them to distribute to whom they
wished; Sharon, one of the authors not represented in the library,
wrote a series of biographies of children and teachers in the room.)

The workshop library, however, is a good place to look at for a
sense of what sort of texts children valued in this room. Children
with books in the library made at least two major decisions that
suggest the desirability of fictional narratives to them. One
decision was to publish a specific rough draft, often from a number
of other drafts. A second decision was to put the published piece in
the library. In making these decisions (as well as in their
decisions of what to write in the first place) most children chose
fictional narratives.

One reason children.chose and valued fictional narratives was
the distance it afforded them. By writing fictional narratives, they
could avoid the close identification between author and story that
personal narratives involved. Fictional narratives offered them a
way to distance themselves from the experiences and values expressed
in their stories. Britton (1982) discusses a key way this distance
is accomplished: ‘

. literary discourse . . . IS concerned

with the private thoughts and feelings of the
writer, but in ”bringing them out of hiding” he

162

objectifies them and may explore them through the
creation of a personae, so that ”we cannot assume
that when a literary writer uses the first person
he is describing his own experiences or making a
confession.” (p. 158; quotations are from
Widdowson, 1975)

Fiction lessened, for children, risks associated with
self-exposure. As Britton notes above, we do not assume, when
reading fiction, that an author is necessarily relating her own
experiences in a direct way, or making a confession, when she tells
her story. We assume that she is EIEEEIDE. making up characters
(their experiences and values), events, and things. In other words,
the author is engaged in creating an acceptable sort of lie. Authors
of fiction tell, as David said in his interview, ‘fake stories'
(5-25-90).

The distance that writing fiction accomplishes is similar to
Elbow 'closing his eyes' and Karen asking someone else to read her
text to classmates--it involves placing something between author and
audience so that the author does not have to {gee them directly. In
expressive writing, authors face their audiences in the fairly direct
expression of their experiences and values in texts. One of James'
comments about a problem he had while writing the third part of The
Eeke_L1ne_LeeQe; (he probably meant 2e;§_2) seems particularly
interesting in relation to this discussion:

Yeah, in my, in my like, my third edition of
it, it was really, I mean, I wrote something that
wasn't, I mean I wrote myself into the story, and

I'm like, wait a second, that can't happen.
(Interview, 5-29-90)

163

Unfortunately, the interviewer did not pursue the problem James

raised here. But James seems to have been worried about violating

the convention Britton discusses above: that authors of fiction
objectify their experiences and thoughts in indirect ways that do not

speak directly to their audiences. James said, ‘I wrote myself into

In m2 of W. he was a

character in a fictitious series of events, along with other
What is most

the story,’ and he did.

characters named after children in the classroom.

interesting to me is what James could have meant when he said, ‘that
can't happen. ' Obviously, it did happen so he was not saying it was

an impossibility. He seems to have had a sense for the conventional

disjunction in fiction between author and personal experiences and

values, and was concerned that writing himself ‘into the story' would

in some way violate this convention. Why would he be concerned about

this? Was it simply that he did not want to be unconventional in his
writing, or, was he perhaps concerned that James, the character,
would be perceived as a rather direct representation and expression
of meg, the third grader? In other words, would writing himself

into the story be similar to writing personal narratives, with its
risk of self-exposure?

In any event, James and other children wrote predominantly

fiction, and, apparently they were not alone in their preference for

fiction over more expressive writing. Barnes and Barnes (1984), in

their study of English classes in British secondary schools, found

that many students responded to requests for what they called

‘personal writing' with fiction. The reasons students gave for

164

avoiding personal writing and embracing fiction were similar to those
given by my students. Barnes and Barnes concluded that students used
”fiction as a way of dealing with first hand experience, since it
freed them from the danger of giving too much away or of adopting an
unacceptable persona” (cited in Willinsky, 1990, p. 168). These
students, as well as my third grade writers, were aware of, and
depended on, the partial disjunction between author and material
fiction provided.

But children valued fiction for more than its avoidance of
identifiably personal material. In fact, the most common responses
children gave to questions about why they wrote fiction were similar
to the initial ones Emily gave above: fiction was more exciting and
interesting than nonfiction. I will explore these responses in
relation to children's control over their writing, and argue that
fiction afforded them a degree of control that they did not believe
they had in other genres. They used this control to satisfy
themselves as writers and to satisfy their audiences. I should note
that distance and control are not unrelated. In my discussion of
distance above, I emphasized the relation of writer to audience, and
argued that fiction distanced authors from audiences in a way that
lessened risks of exposure. In what follows, the relation of writer
to material is an important aspect of control. With distance from
the material, children enjoyed a control over their material that
they did not enjoy with material more closely tied to what ‘really

happened' in their lives.

165
Suzanne: It [Fiction] is, it's more interesting,
because some people have boring lives.

Intr: Do they?

Suzanne: And they don't like, I think fiction is
more exciting because you can write
about anything you want. (Interview,
5-18-90)

Suzanne suggests several themes that run through children's
comments on the relative superiority of fiction over nonfiction. The
dominant theme is that fiction is more exciting and interesting than
nonfiction. Sometimes, personal narratives were denigrated because
the lives themselves were deemed inadequate as materia1--people have
boring lives. William said that ”nothing really happened” that was
worth writing about (Interview, 5-18-90). Other times, the
inadequacy seemed to result from children's not being able to
identify, from their own histories, things worth writing about.'
There were probably things that would be good to write about, but as
Ken said, ”it's pretty hard to remember . . . I couldn't think of
anything to write about myself” (Interview, 5-31-90). I am reminded
here of Dewey's comment that there is all the difference in the world
between having something to say and having to say something./
Children had to say something, and it might have been easier to move
to fiction than to find something in their pasts or ‘presents' to
write about. 1

But the adequacy of lives or memories cannot be divorced from
children's sense of what their peer audiences might want or enjoy to

read. As I noted above, a consistent response across interviews to

questions about why children wrote fiction was that fiction was more

166

exciting and interesting than nonfiction. Below, I discuss this
response as a positive affirmation of fiction by young writers,
because it was more enjoyable for them to write than nonfiction. But
this response has something of a defensive posture in it as well;
that is, real life was not interesting eneggh for peer audiences who
would be reading and responding to those texts. There is a sense of
this posture in Emily's comments that introduced the chapter--she
talked about spicing up personal narratives to make them more
interesting to read. Part of the risk of writing about themselves
was that their lives would not be interesting enough for peers. In
their conferences with me, Ken, James, and other children often told
me stories that I thought would be great to write down, and I told
them so. But children often did not write them down, and if they
did, they usually did not publish or share them.

Another theme that ran through a number of children's interviews
was that nonfiction (including personal narratives, but also
transactional writing such as reports) was more restrictive than
fiction. Part of the restrictive nature of nonfiction for children
seemed to come from a perceived restriction of possible material. If
you wrote about yourself, they seemed to reason, you were limited to
things that had happened to you and to things you knew. In other
words, you had to use your memory instead of your imagination. John
thought that, in contrast to nonfiction, ”you have a lot of ideas

with fiction . . . you can.have more creations” (Interview, 5-21-90).

167

A.re1ated reason children thought that nonfiction was
restrictive was because children saw nonfiction as demanding a
fidelity to the truth and to what really happened that fiction
obviously did not. They expressed a rather strongly referentialist
stance to the relation of language to the world in nonfiction, in
which.the words used had to match up fairly directly with what really
happened. I had the sense, from their interviews, that my students
might very well believe that there would only be one correct way to
tell a personal narrative, and that the challenge of telling such a
story was to get it right. John, for example, asserted that ”with
nonfiction you‘ve got to be stricter with things that happened.”
Marie said that she did not really like writing ‘real stories':
”because, um, if I'm writing something that happened a long time ago,
I could be close to the, like in the middle, and then I could forget
something and that could ruin the story” (Interview, 5-16-90).

Sharon stated that

. it's funner to make, um, things that
aren't true because it, you

W
WW2. If they are true.
then you have to make it zeally_§zee. (Interview,
5-30-90; my emphasis)

Children felt that they could manipulate their material, that
they were in control, when they wrote fiction. But some felt that
the material controlled than.when they wrote (if they wrote)
nonfiction. They seemed to have little sense that they could shape

personal narratives or expository topics to different ends, or that

the ‘same story' could be told many different ways.

168

I am struck here by the resonances between my students' self-
descriptions of what it felt like to write nonfiction, and the way

that Calkins (1986) described third grade authors writing personal

Calkins observed that third grade writers seemed unable

narratives.
to jump out of any chain of events they happened to be describing:

”they rarely interrupted themselves to reflect on their subject or
or to consider alternative paths . . writing was a

their text . .
Calkins explained these

continual process of adding on” (p. 86).
observations with reference to cognitive psychology (specifically,

Bereiter, 1982), and argued that third graders seemed to lack a
”‘central executive function' that would allow them to shift

attention back and forth between reading, writing, talking, thinking,
writing, and so forth” (p. 86). I cannot help wondering if what
Calkins observed was at least partly a function of the genre and

material her third grade research subjects were pursuing- -personal

Perhaps these students were just trying to tell the

narratives.
truth, enacting a sort of intuitive philosophical stance on the

relation of language to the world, and in so doing, they were

restricted by their material and task in ways that did not allow them

to be more flexible. Would Calkins have observed the same ‘continual
process of adding on' and moved to the same inference of limited

mental functioning if she had watched children writing fiction?
They

Children at least felt in control when writing fiction.

consistently noted that they could ‘write anything' they wanted,
And this sense of

could do anything they wanted in their fiction.
There were numerous

control seemed to give them pleasure in writing.

169

comments that fiction was more exciting and interesting than
nonfiction. Both James and Sharon, in their interviews, said that it
was ‘funner' to write fiction than nonfiction; David and Leon used
the word ‘enjoy' when talking about why they wrote fiction. When
asked why so many people in the room wrote fiction, Robert replied,
”Well, maybe they just wanted to have fun with what they wrote”
(Interview, 5-29-90).

Britton (1982) suggests one source of pleasure for children
writing fiction that seems in tune with the sense of control my
students valued:

It has often been pointed out that in one
sense a tiny infant is lord of his universe, and
that growing from infancy into childhood involves
discovering one's own unimportance. But the world
created in the stories children write is a world
they control and this may be a source of deep
satisfaction. (p. 165)

When we, and children, tell stories, we are taking on a
‘spectator role' (Britton, 1978; 1982), an evaluative stance, in
relation to our own, others, and imagined experience. In stories, we
evaluate that experience according to our interests and values, and
express those interests and values in the stories we tell--in the
objects and events we focus on (and ignore), in the stance we take in
relation to those objects and.events. With stories, we attempt to
make sense of our experience in the world.

The human capacity to tell stories is one way
men and women collectively build a significant and

orderly world around themselves. With fiction, we

investigate, perhaps invent, the meaning of human
life. (Miller, 1990, p. 69)

170

At least part of the pleasure my students took in writing
fiction was related to the chance to ‘build their own worlds,’ to say
for themselves, in stories, what the world is like and/or what the
world should be like. Fiction allowed children to express personal
visions of the world and their places in it.

Sometimes the worlds children created in their stories were very
similar to the worlds they lived in and experienced. Marie's The
Clegfl_1he§_§m11eg, for example, described the everyday life of its
main character (not a cloud) in some detail, and this everyday life
had a strong basis in Marie's own experiences. As in some of James
and his friends' texts that I discussed earlier, Marie named several
of her characters after children in the classroom. In fact, along
with Carol, Marie herself appears in the story as a secondary
character and friend to the main character, Lisa (who, if you
remember, also appeared in.Ihe_£eke_Line_Leegez). In her interview,
Marie said that she liked to work with Lisa during the writing
workshop, and that Lisa was one of her friends. In addition to
appearing in Marie's story as a character, Lisa had another role in
this story--she drew the illustrations for the final published
version of Marie's book. ‘Through Lisa, as a character, and.with her
as an illustrator, Marie looked at and evaluated the world around

her.

Once there was a girl named Lisa. She was 8
years old. Something strange was going on that
day because nobody would smile or talk to her.
She would smile at them but they just wouldn't
smile at her. So that day she went to the
playground. She sat on the twirly-slide steps

171

thinking about why people won't smile at her or
talk to her. She looked up and thought she saw a
cloud smiling! She was amazed.

Then her mother called her and she ran to her
mother. She looked up again. She didn't see
anything but a cloudy sky. Then her alarm clock
went off, then she woke up.

Getting Dressed

But once she woke up she remembered it was
Saturday. She was relieved. She looked at the
clock--it was 11:00! She quickly got out of bed.
Then she went downstairs to eat breakfast. No one
was down there, so she figured that they were
still sleeping. But it was 11:00.

Oh! She heard a noise outside. ”What if
it's Freddy Krueger?” she thought, but she looked
anyway. ”Thank heavens!” she said. Her parents,
her little brother, and.her dog were out there
having a snowball fight.

Then she went to the table so she could make
herself some Cheerios. So she made herself some
Cheerios. After that she went upstairs to get
dressed. She was going to wear her jeans and her
smiling face shirt. So she got her jeans and she
got her smiling face shirt. Except when she got
her smiling face shirt it was frowning. ”Am I
missing something?” she thought. ”This better not
be a joke.”

So she put on her smiling--or frowning shirt
and her jeans. After that she went outside.
Carol and Marie were playing in Marie's backyard.
She asked them if she could play with them. They
said no. And after that they said, ”Get out of
here.”

”What's wrong with them?” she thought.

So she went back inside. Then she sat down.
She turned on TV. Ninja Turtles were on. She
didn't want to watch that. She looked out the
window. She couldn't believe her eyes. She saw a
cloud smiling! Just like in her dream! Her
parents, her brother and her dog interrupted her
as they came in. ”Who won?” I asked. *

They giggled. Then finally her dad said,
”The dog did.” She started to giggle too. Then
she remembered tomorrow was Christmas Eve.

”Mom!” I yelled. * ”Can I wrap presents?”

”Sure!” she yelled back.

172

She wrapped the present that she got her
little brother. She got him a remote control car.
By the time she finished wrapping presents, which
took her 4 hours, it was 8 o'clock pm, time to
have a bedtime snack. After she finished her
bedtime snack she went to bed.

The Next Day, At Night

Finally it was Christmas Eve night. It was
dinner time. They were having Chinese, her
favorite. Once she was finished with dinner, they
went out looking at Christmas lights. When they
got back it was time for Lisa and her brother Phil
to go to bed.

RINGGGGGGGG!

Her alarm clock went off. She jumped out of
bed and ran downstairs. She looked at the
presents--there were a lot of them. She opened
most of them. Finally she got her last one. She
opened the present. It was a crystal and a
smiling face was carved in it. Her mom said, ”How
do you like it?”

The End!

In her story, Marie drew on and responded to objects, people,
and events from her own experience: the twirly-slide steps on the
playground behind Clifford School, Carol and Lisa and her family,
Cheerios, figures from popular culture (Freddy Krueger, Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles), school (‘it was Saturday. She was relieved'),
traditions surrounding Christmas. One of the reasons I find Marie's
story so attractive, I think, is exactly because she created a
believable world with her details of and observations on the
experiences of an eight year old girl. This believable world was the
counterpoint to the world of dreams she began with, and then

sustained with inversions--friends that would not talk or play with

her, a shirt with a smile turned upside-down--and repetitions of the

173

dream world in real life--a smiling cloud, a crystal with a smiling
face.

My sense that the world Marie created in her story was closely
modeled after her own is strengthened by my knowledge of the rough
draft of her story. I starred (*) several places in Marie's final
text where, in.a break with the point of view of the rest of the
story, first person rather than third person was used. In her rough
draft of the story, Marie had used third person consistently, until
the beginning of the second section entitled, ‘Getting Dressed.’

From there on, she wrote in first person. The first sentence of that
section in her rough draft read: ”But once I woke up I remembered it
was Saturday,” instead of ”But once she woke up . . .” In fact, the
main character of the story shifted in the second section of the
rough draft from Lisa to Marie herself. In addition to the shift to
‘I' to refer to the main character, Marie wrote the following, which
displaced Lisa as the main character:
So I put on my smiling--or frowning shirt and

my jeans. After that I went outside. Carol and

Lisa were playing in Lisa's backyard. I asked

them if I could play with them . . . (Rough

draft, ”The Cloud”)

I take this as an indication that Marie identified quite closely
with her main character, Lisa; she even became the main character as
the story went along. Once I pointed this out to Marie, she decided
she wanted to do the entire story in third person. The mistakes in
the final version are mine--I had typed and saved.Marie's rough draft

on a word processor, and then printed a copy for Marie to edit. When .

I entered Marie's editing, I missed a few of her changes.

174

Marie's story told a very ‘personal' narrative, even though it
was done in third person and contained improbable elements. In a
fictional narrative, she named and evaluated important aspects of her
experience. The world she created in her story strongly resembled
the world she experienced each day.

Many children, however, used fiction to create imaginary worlds
and play with magic, horror, even, in John's case, time. Of all the
children in the room, John pursued some of the most divergent
themes-- his Ihe_§eeene_§ge;1ee_glgh is an excellent example. From
the title, you might expect a story about a group of children who
meet in the second story of a building, or something like that (there
was a movie about teenagers called.Ihe_figeekfee§_§1eh). Actually,
John's book was a collection of five short narratives. The five
narratives shared a common theme: a specific duration of time-~the
second. Thus, his book was a collection (the Club of the title, I
think) of narratives (Seeziee) about a duration of time (Ihe_§eeen§).
WM.

Each of the five narratives in his book was followed by an
interpretation of that narrative, written by John.~ When John first
wrote his rough draft, I was already aware that his classmates often
complained to him that they did not understand his writing. In a
writing conference, I suggested that John accompany each of his
narratives with a brief discussion of the joke or trick he was
playing with that story. I told him that his stories reminded me of
abstract paintings, and that artists sometimes included written

material with their paintings that discussed what they were

175

attempting to do on canvas (and that some artists considered this
written material part of the art work itself). From this
conversation, we decided he would write accompanying material for his
narratives, and call these discussions ‘interpretations.’ As you
will see, John could not resist being playful even in his

interpretations.

l. Rosie's Long School Holdup

One day Rosie's mom said, ”It takes longer
time to get there than you'll be there.” So, it
took a year to get there ‘cause of the swirling
road. They were there for one second. So Rosie's
mom didn't see her for two years and one second.

1. Interpretation

Why doesn't Rosie take a short cut! It would
only be one year and one second until Rosie's mom
saw her.

2. The Very Short Lesson

”Oh silly,” said Tom's father. ”Ybu won't
take lessons from A1 Sekind.”

”I don't follow directions.”

So the next day he took lessons from A1
Sekind. It was like here, snap, go ahead.

2. Interpretation
The ‘from' acts like a ‘for' in ”The Very
Short Lesson.” ‘Ai Sekind' acts like ‘a second.’

3. A Lot in a Second

One day a baby scribbled all over everywhere.
Two judges erased and the dumb, idiotic baby
scribbled all over the judges and he ended up as a
naughty 6 year old. Even though that was a lot in
a second, he ended up in the juvenile home.

3. Interpretation

You know the secrets: a baby cannot hold a
marker without getting very messy. And, it would
be impossible to scribble that much in a second.

4. The One-Second-Year Old
”Oh no. I'm pregnant. I'm.having a baby
boy.” So eight and a half months went by and he

176

was born. One second after someone else was born.
He was a one second year old.
4. Interpretation

It is funny to think of a one-second-year
old.
5. A Long Time to Wait

”Well, this is a long time to wait.”

”A second?”

”No. A day.”

”A day and a second?”

”No. A day.”

”You've got to have some second doing.”

-o.x. 1 day and 59 seconds.”
5. Interpretation

The guy said, ”some second doing.” So that's
why he did one day and 59 seconds.

John drew on aspects of his experience in his narratives. For
example, school and music lessons (John was a serious piano student)
figure in his first two stories. He played off a fairly common
expression in #1 with his ‘It takes longer time to get there than
you'll be there,’ which he pushes to an extreme. He told me in one
of our writing conferences that he thought that ‘Ai Sekind' (#2)
looked like Arabic names he had seen. And the inspiration for #3, I
think, was a story I told in class about my one year old son, John
Jacob. I had left John Jacob drawing pictures in the middle of the
living room with washable magic markers one morning before school,
while I took a shower. When I got out of the shower, I found he had
filled a portion of our hallway wall, approximately three feet high
(his reach) by six-feet wide, with broad, graceful lines in black,
not-so-washable (we found out) marker. My third grade John draws the

morals for me in his interpretation for #3: a baby cannot hold a

marker without getting very messy, and I also thought it impossible

177

that my son could ‘scribble that much' in the time I was in the
shower. As for #5, even with John's interpretation and several
discussions about it, I still have not figured out what he was trying
to do.

In other stories, John played with numbers (Ibe_Ihzee_Iheeeeng
Musketeexe) and with human nature (Ibe_neg_flgnen), and wrote of
above-ground elevators to Miami and Tampa (Ibe_fileye§er). He
inspired a host of haunted house stories by other children in the
room before Halloween with his book, fleeneee_flezxez, which, among
other things, told the ghastly story of the newspaper man:

One day a man sneaked in for a report. He
was a newspaper man. He pushed the button, the
house laughed, and a bat went out. The cats
opened the gates and chased him. A.witch answered
the door and the vampires got him and he was never
seen again.

In his fiction, John could create worlds held together by
idiosyncratic interests in time, word play, numbers, Halloween. This
was what he valued about fiction--as he said in his interview, ”you
have a lot of ideas with fiction . . . you can have more creations.”

Personal creations. Above I argued that one of a complex of
reasons children wrote fiction was because of the disjunction it
afforded between author and material. Fictional narratives lessened
risks of self-exposure because they were ‘fake stories,’ lies.
Within them (and behind them) children could explore real and

imagined experiences through the creation of characters who might or

might not speak for them.

178

But fiction also afforded children control over their material,
a control they appropriated more and less effectively to express
their individual interests and values, to do ‘what they wanted to' in
their writing within constraints set by, among other things, the
perceived expectations of peer audiences for interesting, exciting
stories. Thus, fictional narratives could also be very personal
narratives, offering, in the selection and affirmation of this and
not that, an expression of the writer's vision, her thoughts and
desires.

Children knew and depended on the distance from self-exposure
fiction provided. They also knew that they were exposed in their
fiction, that they put themselves at risk in the telling of even
acceptable lies. The words of children I quoted above--speaking of
trusted and untrusted audiences, how it felt to be teased about
stories--came from children who wrote primarily fiction. Karen
stopped reading a fictionalized account of Mrs. Parker's childhood,
not her own, when Ken joined us out in the hall. John ended up in
the principal's office for reading and defending a story he wrote
about an imaginary elevator that transported people to Florida.
Jessie would not share her retelling of ”Sleeping Beauty,” despite my
efforts to create a classroom in which young authors trusted their
audiences.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful
princess, and her name was Jessie. One day, she
was sleeping, and she heard a noise so she got up

and went upstairs to the room upstairs. When she
opened the door she saw a spinning wheel.

179

When she was spinning at the spinning wheel,
she poked her finger. Suddenly she fell asleep,
and everyone fell asleep too. Just then a prince
came.

He snuck into the castle and found the
princess and kissed her. And suddenly everybody
awoke and the prince became an empire.

Bruner (1990) believes that the stories we tell and write
”mediate between the canonical world of culture and the more
idiosyncratic world of beliefs, desires, and hopes” (p. 52). If I
understand him correctly, Bruner is saying that our stories represent
a sort of compromise between how we think the world.13 (given to us
in the ‘canonical world of culture') and how we, as individuals,
would like the world to be. When we tell stories, we both draw on
given, cultural narratives about the world and our place in it, and
manipulate and twist them in ways that express our ‘idiosyncratic
worlds.’ The twists Jessie gave to a more canonical version of
”Sleeping Beauty,” from the Grimms, for example, are charming, and
suggest self-importance, youth, movement. Her princess is named
Jessie, instead of Rosamond. Jessie, the author (as well as Jessie
the character), avoids altogether the angry witch who casts a death
spell on the young princess, and the good witch who transmutes that
spell to sleep. Jessie seems impatient with sleep, so instead of one
hundred years of it, she ‘suddenly' falls asleep, only to be awakened
almost immediately by a prince who ‘just then' arrived. In the Grimm
version, the two live happily ever after together. Jessie's princess

and prince may do likewise, but Jessie leaves this open. Jessie,

however, is not content with some sort of romantic bliss for the two.

180

Her version ends with the rise to power of her prince: he became an
empire.

Jessie's story may also be read against another ‘canonical world
of culture'--the peer culture Jessie participated in. The rift
between canonical peer world and Jessie's ‘more idiosyncratic' one is
wide, and leaves the peer one looking anything but charming, a little
grim, for Jessie. In that culture, Jessie was not beautiful in the
stories others told about her. She labored to avoid those who would
cast spells to ‘cut her in half' or turn her into a ‘jar of slime.’
The school year was long, and she had little chance of association
(nor did she say she wanted it) with the powerful.

As it does for me, writing felt risky for children in the
writing workshop, and it seemed riskier to some than others.

Children responded by seeking out trusted audiences, be they peers or
teachers, and by turning, often, to fiction, with which they wrote
themselves onto the page from a slight distance.

Jessie wrote herself and a vision of the world on the page,
sometimes through personal narrative, other times through fiction.
But others seldom heard her voice or saw her vision, at least not in
the public spaces the workshop provided. Jessie thought that those

spaces were for people with ‘lots of friends.'

Jessie did not assert herself, with her texts, in the public
spaces of sharing time and the writing workshop library. Other

children toward the bottom of the informal peer hierarchies, however,

181

did. Janis and John were among the most frequent readers during
sharing time. William had two books in the library, and Jil's story,
Riggene, and Janis's book of riddles and jokes, Ihe_£enny_§eek, were
among the more popular books in the workshop library (in terms of the
number of times they were checked out during the year).

But there was an interesting, and ultimately disturbing,
difference between the public texts of these children, and the texts
written by children with more status and power in the room. Children
with little status in the room tended.ne§ to write themselves or
their friends into their stories as characters. Children with more
status did. The result was that only certain children regularly
appeared in the stories read by children during sharing time and
housed in the workshop library--children with the most status and
power in the room.

The contrast can be sharply represented with the opening pages
from books written by children toward the bottom and the top of the
informal pecking order in the room. The first two pages of William's
book, Ihe_lynk1e_flegee (‘junkie' from ‘junk,’ not a reference, at
least not a direct one, to drug users), are reproduced in Figure 5.1.
The opening page of Carol's book, Spiee, appears in Figure 5.2.

William does not name the main character in his story after
himself or anyone else in the room--in fact, in this instance
William's main character is referred to only as ‘a person,’ ‘the
person,’ and ‘he' throughout the story. In Carol's story, the main
characters are named for children in the room; specifically, a group

of four girls of relatively high status, including Carol herself.

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It was time for the club.
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went to the door that led them to
the laboratory under the ground.

Figure 5.2. From Carol's finiee.

184

Three of the children's names are shortened and stylized, with the
effect, for me, of suggesting characters who are tougher or more
sophisticated than characters named by the full names: Car (from
Carol), 'Zanne (from Suzanne), and Lis (from Lisa). (Several
children in interviews mentioned that high status boys and girls in
the room had better clothes than other children in the room. The
attention to clothes and hair in Carol's illustration is striking,
especially in contrast to William's illustrations.)

The situation, of course, was more complex than is suggested by
the juxtaposition of William and Carol's stories, in at least three
ways. First, children of relatively high status and influence in the
room did not always write stories that included themselves and their

friends as characters. Troy, for example, who worked with James on
one of the W sequels, wrote an extremely popular book

entitled, Wm. It's main characters were a

dinosaur and a boy named Chang; none of the characters in the story
were named explicitly for children in the room.

Second, children with little status did occasionally write
themselves and/or friends into their stories. As with Jessie,
however, most of these stories did not go public. Robert, for
example, wrote a fictional narrative about his cousin and his
'adWentures on Halloween night. He had his text typed, bound, and he
drew illustrations for the book. But he never shared it in sharing
time or put it in the classroom library. He did publish, however, a

Story about pirates and skeletons, in which the characters were named

.J\Ast that--pirates and skeletons.

185

John, however, did write and share some stories that at least
seemed to place him as a main character in his own fictional,
narratives. I say ‘seemed' because, unlike stories by James and
Carol, John's stories never explicitly named him as a character in
his stories. He often wrote in first person, leaving it unclear as
to whom the ‘I' referred: the author, or a personae created by him.
For example, John's Ihe_£1ezetet began:

One day me, Jimmy, and our two American

Saddle horses, Joe and Jack, started a club. We

had a secret clubroom, and we two lived there

except when visiting our parents.
As in Carol's story, Spiee, the characters in John's story belong to
a club, have an underground meeting place, and are soon engaged in an
adventure. Unlike Carol's story, none of the characters (not even
the horses) are explicitly named for children in the room. John and
his friends in class, in other words, were not present in his stories
in the same way that James and Carol and their friends were.

Of the children with fairly low status in the room, only Jil
seems to have explicitly named herself as a character in a public
text (I assert this after a close examination of the books that
appeared in the workshop library and after a less systematic perusal
of fieldnotes and audiotapes pertaining to sharing time across the
year). In her book, Kittene, Jil wrote in first person, and does not
identify the ‘I' of the story as ‘Jil' anywhere in her text. But she
does name the main character ‘Jil' in an illustration on page eight

of her fourteen page book (See Figure 5.3). But that is the only

place she does so.

186

 

 

 

 

 

 

. Then when he woke up we gave him a
treat. The next day I took Snowy to school.
We brought him in a cage and when I took him
out I didn't let him out on the floor. I let
him out into a box. and as soon as he was in
the box I picked him up.

Figure 5.3. From Jil's Kittehe.

187

Finally, we must remember that simply being included (or
present) as a character in a story is not necessarily a positive
thing. In Chapter III, I discussed several texts in which characters
named for children in the room were portrayed negatively, and I noted
Sharon and Carol's sentiments about being included in boys' texts.
The point here (as well as the thrust of this discussion) is perhaps
most starkly illustrated with the list of characters Mary and Suzanne
drew up for a play they had written (See Figure 5.4). In the column
at the left margin are the characters' names in the play. In
parentheses next to this column of names, are the names of children
Mary and Suzanne thought should play those parts. I did not ask them
what the Y's next to some of the names meant, but I am guessing that
they signify a ‘yes'--that the children indicated.had agreed to
participate. Except for Joshua, who was Suzanne's 5th grade
neighbor, all the children listed were from the classroom.

Not all characters in plays are created equal. Three characters
had no lines in the play: Tower 1, Tower 2, and Tower 3. They were
to stand on the stage from the beginning to the end of the play,
pteeent throughout, but mute. These roles were assigned, by Mary and
Suzanne, to John, Leon, and Robert, three boys at the bottom of the
pecking order and two with whom Suzanne had an ongoing-fighting
relationship (John and Robert).

So where does this leave us? In general, children of high
status and influence in the room appeared as characters in the public
stories of the writing workshop; other children did not. When these

other children did appear, their inclusion did not necessarily

188

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189

suggest positive regard. Certain children were privileged in the
content of the public texts of the workshop. The micropolitics of
peer relations played itself out not only on the playground and
behind the back of the teacher, but in the writing children chose to

make public in the spaces created and authorized by me, the teacher.

It is disturbing enough to realize that children's texts might
reflect, in some way, differences in status and power among children.
But we must also consider the active role these texts might play in
maintaining these relationships. Texts are rhetorical; they can
influence how people think, have effects in the world. When a child
is not chosen to play baseball by her classmates during recess, this
not only tefleete their evaluations of her as a player or friend in
some passive way. It also actively produces (and reproduces) those
evaluations for the child and her classmates. The classmates'
decisions have effects, make a difference for the future, maybe make
recess less joyful, and the child more anxious and clumsy the next
day when she is picked to play, and evaluated again.

On some level, children knew this about their texts, knew they
were rhetorical. It took longer for me to understand. Witness Lisa
during sharing time as she introduces her ‘soap opera' about children
in the workshop in November; note my response that pursues
socioanalysis and abstracted relations among women and men, and
ignores the immediate relations of children in the room:

Sharing time: Grace gave a little speech
about what kind of behavior we expected, and then

190

Lisa shared her piece. I thought it was
interesting that Lisa, before reading, said the
piece was about people in the class, and that if
anyone wasn't in her piece yet, they shouldn't
worry, they probably would be later. What does
this mean? Is she recognizing the importance of
being included in these stories for feelings and
status?

She read quickly, and students and Grace
asked her to read more slowly (Jil told her if she
felt ‘hyper' she still should still slow down the
next time she read her piece). Suzanne said that
she thought the piece was ‘excellent' (quite a
contrast here to how she opened her response to
Emily the other day--social class, status stuff
going on?), but that she didn't understand the
part where Jessie and Paul were talking about
‘caring.’ Suzanne asked, ‘Caring about what?’ In
the story, I think Jessie says to Paul, ‘I didn't
know you cared,’ and Paul says, ‘I don't.’ When
Lisa explained, Robert started razzing Paul,
pushed his shoulders. Paul looked down, seemed
embarrassed, but was smiling. Somewhere in here
Grace said, ‘Soap operas come to Mrs. P's class,'
or something like that. And she was right. Given
this, some sort of examination of what female and
male characters are doing in Lisa's story, and
maybe a discussion of this with her and the class,
might be important (look at anti-sexist pedagogy
material). I could do this with Lisa when she is
revising. If women and men take on stereotyped
roles, we could play with reversing roles and see
what happened. Another issue here, of course, is
that Lisa has been working on this piece a long
time, and I don't want to discourage her.
(Fieldnotes, 11-20-89).

I was starting to wonder about peer relations among children
lmere, but primarily in relation, not to texts, but to their talk and
Imehavior in class (as when I questioned Suzanne's motivations for
IDesponding positively to Lisa, and negatively to Emily). Lisa raised
tflhe issue of the inclusion and exclusion of children in stories, but
11 did not develop it here. And at this point in my teaching and

research, I do not appear to be very sensitive to the embarrassment

191

and hurt Jessie and Paul might have experienced from Lisa's textual
teasing, and the ensuing discussion of it. Particularly Jessie: in
Lisa's soap opera, Jessie assumed (and seemed to desire) a romantic
relationship with a boy, assumed wrong, and was put down. It seems I
reported this episode only to set up Grace's characterization of
Lisa's story as a soap opera, which sets up the need for a little
socioanalysis. I considered problems Lisa's material posed for my
response to her, but I did not consider problems Lisa's material
posed for other children in the room.

I do not know why John, Janis, William, Karen, and others, did
not publish fictional narratives like Lisa's, with themselves and
classmates as characters in the story. If they had reasons they
could articulate, I did not ask for them. I discovered this aspect
of their texts long after I was done teaching. My first guess would
be that risks these children associated with writing about themselves
in personal narratives attended writing themselves into fictional
narratives, and that they judged these risks prohibitive. In this
interpretation, they were less extreme versions of Jessie, but living
with similar concerns. They did not remove themselves from the
public spaces of sharing time and the library, as Jessie did, but
they did remove their names. The conventional disjunction between
author and material in fiction was not quite enough to make them feel
comfortable putting themselves back into their texts as characters.

This would.net explain all their decisions. Sometimes, perhaps
many times, they simply were interested in writing about other

characters in other stories: Mrs. Parker as a little girl with a dog

192

and a boyfriend; music lessons from (for) Ai Sekind (a second).
Children with more status and influence, from this view, felt less
vulnerable. They wrote fiction, but were more comfortable with
placing themselves in their stories.

Or, perhaps, the children at the top were also uncomfortable in
the workshop, but for different reasons. Sharing time and the
library offered other children in the room numerous public
opportunities to impress peers and teachers with their wit, to
influence opinion on what 12511! was scary about Halloween. Unlike
the playground or the cafeteria, or before and after school, these
public spaces were fairly closely watched over by teachers who would
not allow these other children to be shouted down or pushed around.
Perhaps the pecking order was a little more up for grabs than I have
suggested, and the workshop was an open but structured place in which
there was an

. exchange of evaluations between authors
and their readers, an exchange in which
reputations are made and lost, influences wax and
wane, values gain and lose currency, and the
cultural pattern of a social group is sustained
and evolved. (Britton, 1978, p. 17)

Children at the top wrote themselves into their texts as an
assertion (and reassertion) of their importance, their rightful place
at the front of the room and the focus of attention. From this
perspective, they named themselves in their texts in the name of

order, in defense of hierarchies that were continually threatened by

upstart writers like Jil and John and Janis. Remember James'

193

comments, in Chapter III, about Leon trying to be someone he was not,

not staying in his place.

A story is a way of doing things with words.
It makes something happen in the real world: for
example, it can propose modes of selfhood or ways
of behaving that are then imitated in the real
world. It has been said, along these lines, that
we would not know we were in love if we had not
read novels. Seen from this point of view,
fictions may be said to have a tremendous
importance not as the accurate reflectors of a
culture but as the makers of that culture and as
the unostentatious, but therefore all the more
effective, policemen of culture. Fictions keep us
in line and tend to make us more like our
neighbors. (Miller, 1990, p. 69)

It would be difficult to characterize all the ‘lines' fictions
in the workshop would keep children in. The texts shared by children
from the author's chair and in the workshop library pursued multiple
interests and values. Most children, regardless of their place in A
peer hierarchies, shared their texts in the workshop's public spaces.
They chose material that they more or less effectively bent to their
wills, and they shared those texts with others.

Still, in their inclusions and exclusions, in their evaluations,
these texts valued certain children more than others. And the
children receiving valorization on the page were children who did not
live in the trailer park, were children who already enjoyed status
and influence within the peer culture, even if they had to work to

keep it.
In my thinking about teacher response to children's texts, I had
realized that children in writing workshops made important curricular

decisions for themselves, and that some of the material they might

194

work with required critical evaluations by them with my help. I had
thought, however, of children's decisions about curriculum as private
ones, affecting only individual children's work for the duration of
individual projects. I had not considered how children's stories
became curriculum for other children in teacher-sponsored events and
classroom institutions that encouraged (and required) children to
listen to and read carefully the texts of other children. I had
thought of ‘questionable' material in children's texts as the
unfortunate traces of societal politics of class, race, and gender.
I had not considered how children's stories might participate, for
better and for worse, in the micropolitics of the classroom.

But I would learn.

CHAPTER VI

TEACHER RESPONSE TO CHILDREN'S TEXTS

AND THE 2;: fit

When my younger daughter made disparaging
remarks about Billy fiudd I rushed to Melville's
defense with a speech on the conflict between the
rule of law applied generically and the merits of
individual cases. Billy Bud struck a superior
officer, I reminded her; according to the letter
of the law, he must hang. And yet, and yet, we
cannot quite swallow it. . . . I ended in a glow
of ambivalence. ”It wasn't that he struck him,”
she murmured. ”He killed him.”

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, ”True Confessions of a
Reader”

The last three chapters have been true confessions of a reader.
I read the nonverbal, oral, and written texts of third graders in my
writing workshop, and told stories about student intention, the
risks of writing for children, the lure of fiction. I warmed myself
a little (and you, I hope) in the glow of ambivalence, that pleasure
we get from playing with complexity and contradiction when we do not
have to decide what is to be done with Billy Budd, or James, or

Jessie. Lynne Sharon Schwartz's younger daughter murmurs in this

195'

196

chapter. Here are the confessions of a teeehe; struggling with
complexity and contradiction, warmed by nervousness, frustration,
and the heat of confrontation between actual people, not just the
clash of meanings and interpretations.

Maya's text. WWI. Provoked
oral responses to Maya on two successive days, and five pages of
written notes on the night in between--five pages written after I
seemed to be wrapping up my notewriting with this comment: ”I'm
running out of gas very quickly (it's after 12:00AM). Some brief
comments on Maya's text” (Fieldnotes, 3-8-90). The comments were
not brief. As I read Maya's story and wrote and thought about the
problems and issues it confronted me with, I worried more and more
about what a responsible sort of response would look like in this
situation.

In what follows, I offer an interpretation of my writing
conferences with Maya, and the fieldnotes I wrote in response to her
text and these conversations. I use ‘interpretation' here as
Scholes (1985) uses it: interpretation ”depends upon the failures
of reading. It is the feeling of incompleteness on the reader's
part that activates the interpretive process” (p. 22). The
conceptions of response I developed in Chapter I--following the
child and response as socioanalysis--are inadequate for reading
~(making sense of) what happened and what was at stake in this
occasion for response. As I develop this interpretation, I also
'begin a critique of these conceptions of response that I continue in

the final chapter. At times, following the child.may be morally and

197

politically irresponsible. And response as socioanalysis ignores
the connectedness of teacher response to the immediate discourse
community --the writing workshop-~within which it occurs.

Children's writing activities and texts were part of the social
life of the classroom: they responded to the workshop context, but
also partially constituted that context and shaped future activities
and texts. Teacher response to children's texts also participated
in this social life. The fact that children and their texts
influenced one another meant that my response to a particular child
and his text might, in small or big ways, influence other children
and texts, and contribute, for better or worse, to the quality of
life and learning in the writing workshop. My response to
children's texts, then, had to be critically pragmatic
(Cherryholmes, 1988): I had to consider the fruits (intellectual,
moral/political, and aesthetic) of my response, and not only for the
individual children I was talking to face-to-face.

My story begins at least a month before I saw Maya's Ihe Zit
fit, with a flurry of oral and.written texts involving and
surrounding Jessie, the classroom's ‘female pariah' (Thorne, 1986).
Some of these texts taught me about the word ‘zits' (slang for acne)
and the local uses it was put to by these third graders. Other
texts suggested a possible friendship, or at least some connection,
between Jessie and Jil that I had not picked up on in the classroom,
and that would become important for my later response to Maya's

story.

198

On.a Wednesday morning in early February, I got to school
before the children were allowed into the school building. Groups
of children often met me as I walked from the parking lot to say
hello, tease me--‘Hello Mr. Lens-exeftet' (the eyeglass specialists)
was an enduring favorite--or, on cold mornings, to complain about
having to wait outside. On this day, I saw Suzanne and Robert,
among others, yelling at Jessie, calling her ‘zit face.’ I told
them to stop it, and made a point to walk up to Jessie, touch her on
the shoulder, and say good morning. Jessie paused long enough to
say hello before continuing her own verbal defense and attack.

These verbal fights continued over the next few days. I wrote
in my notes that ”Jessie has been doing battle with Mary, Suzanne,
Carol, and even sometimes, it seems, her friends Karen and Janis.
But primarily with Suzanne and Mary” (Fieldnotes, 2-9-90). Friday,
during writing time, I talked with Jessie about a book she had
recently published. She refused to share it with any of her
classmates.

I went out into the hall with Jessie, we sat
on the floor, and she read her fly_£:1enee story.
She smelled strong, like she had not washed. She
had on outrageous tights (white with big black
polka dots) and a polka dot dress, pink. The day
before, she came to school with two piggy tails
that stood straight up in the air. She complained
about them to me, and dared me to say she didn't
look awful. When I said I thought her pigtails
looked interesting, she walked away. (Fieldnotes,
2-9-90)

Jessie's book had two chapters. The first chapter was entitled

‘The Fight,' and read:

199

When Jil and I met each other we fought a
lot. But the second day at school we were
friends. Then the third day at school we were
best friends. On the fourth day we never played
with anyone else. We were in kindergarten.

I found another text connecting Jessie and Jil a little later
that same day, in the wastebasket (See Figure 6.0). I noticed it
when the children left for lunch. In the story, Jil, Jessie, and
Paul sing a ‘dumb' song together before Lisa shoots Jessie in the
back. I do not know who the author was, or why he or she threw it
away. (It may have been a remnant from Lisa's soap opera that I had
not seen.)

Actually, I have a guess as to at least one reason it was
thrown away. The attack on Jessie was not the only one accomplished
with the piece of paper I found in the wastebasket. Below the
printed story reproduced in Figure 6.0 was a message, written in
cursive. The message read: ”Mary you'r stupid!” It was written
twice, once in pen and once in pencil. On the back of the paper
was: ”To: Mary.” Maybe the author of ”The Killers” ran out of
paper, and used the empty space beneath the story for a message,
which Mary received and then threw away. Or perhaps the story
itself was the first message, and was given to Jessie, Jil, Paul, or
maybe even Lisa, by Mary, who then received a critical response to
her work--you'r stupid--which she threw away. In any event, the
story again suggested some connection between Jessie and Jil; and
Jessie was being attacked in real life and as a fictional character.

When I was writing my notes that night, I remembered that I had

run into ‘zit face' in the workshop even before I had heard it used

200

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201

orally on Jessie. Suzanne had been writing a rather impressive text
inspired by a novel her grandmother had given to her, Ihe_£1!e
W. Suzanne's book was entitled. The
Higging_21eee, and told stories about a family of sisters and
brothers and their father. She had written chapters A through F,
and had shared two of the chapters with the class earlier in the
week. When asked about the ‘missing piece,’ she said that the title
did refer to the mother (who had died), but that there was much more
to the idea she was still thinking through (Fieldnotes, 2-8-90).
One of the chapters she had not shared orally with the class
(Chapter E), but that I had read in a writing conference, was
entitled ”Zit Face.” This particular chapter involved Kim, her
father, her brother Thomas, and her older sister Elaine (who was the
main character and heroine of Suzanne's book):
Kim was getting so much zits she did not want
to go to school. Nobody liked Kim. Her new name
was Zit Face. Her friends said, ”Run, run, as
fast as you can, you can't catch me you're the Zit
man.” They called her Zit man because all the
boys in 5th grade had Zits. Thomas would sing the
song on the bus and on the playground and at home.
Dad would ground him if he was around when he
would sing it by Dad. Dad was very strict. ”Run,
run, run, as fast as you can, you can't catch me
you're the Zit man, Zit, Zit, Zit, man, man, man.”
”Stop it!” outbursted Elaine.
Suzanne seems to have appropriated and transformed (a la
Bakhtin) a children's song about the gingerbread man for her own
purposes. The song usually goes, ”Run, run, as fast as you can, you

can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man.” The residual influence of

the traditional song might account for the shift from ‘Zit Face' in

202

the title of the chapter and the beginning of the story (‘Her new
name was Zit Face'), to ‘Zit men' in Thomas' song--also, ‘Zit man'
completes the rhyme with ‘can;' ‘face' would not.

But the song also shows traces of the sort of chasing games and
teasing Thorne (1986) described in relation to ‘female pariahs' in
elementary schools. These girls were often called ‘cootie queens,’
and cooties, a sort of imaginary social virus, could be spread with
physical contact. Chasing games, where the person caught and
touched got cooties, and elaborate rules for avoiding and passing on
cooties, revolved around these unfortunate girls labeled as ‘cootie
queens.‘ Such games functioned to isolate these girls from other
children.

Suzanne's story suggests that ‘zits' might have served similar
functions to ‘cooties.’ Thomas' song in the story sets up a chase,
and expresses the perspective of the one being chased. The song is
directed at the Zit man (Kim in Suzanne's story), perhaps called
over the shoulder during the chase, and tells her that she can run
as fast as she wants, but she will never catch him. The song
instructs the one with zits on the futility of trying to make
contact with others--they will continue to actively avoid her, try
as she might.

Suzanne's use of ‘zit face' and ‘zit man' in her written text
paralleled oral uses of such words, by her and others, to tease and
isolate Jessie before school. Suzanne may have had Jessie in mind
when she made up the character of Kim. I found it interesting that,

given what I saw of Suzanne's treatment of Jessie in real life, her

203

story included a condemnation of just this sort of teasing by two

important characters in her book, the father and Elaine. I had

written in my fieldnotes at the time that ”while the character [Kim]

is cruelly treated in the story, the father does not condone it”

(Fieldnotes, 2-9-90). This was significant to me because it

suggested some recognition on Suzanne's part that such teasing might

be morally questionable .

The father's actions in Suzanne's story were not so
surprising- -we might expect a child/author to portray a parent as

censuring such teasing, even if the child/author herself did not see

any problem with teasing other children. But having Elaine

‘outburst' ”Stop it!” was different. In the other chapters, Elaine

18 presented by Suzanne as an intelligent, caring older sister.
That: Suzanne had Elaine object to Thomas' teasing suggests an

evaluative position, on the author's part, that at least recognized
the questionable nature of such teasing and its possible

consequences for the person teased. This recognition was absent in

“ya” 3 W, and was one of the things that concerned me in

my response to it.

I had collected some records of what individual children were

working on at different times during the year. In early February.

at the same time that Suzanne and Jessie were producing the oral and

written texts discussed above, Maya was working on W

W.

‘Zit face' and ‘zit man' and ‘zit fit' were
in the air and on the page.

204

Maya had been asking to share the last couple
days. She got put off on Wednesday because, with
the shortened period, we didn't have any sharing.
Today, I intended for her to share, but several
obstacles arose. I wanted to conference with her
about what she was going to share. The sharing
sessions haven't been going well--because of long,
boring texts, ineffective reading, the arrangement
(kids too far away to see illustrations), maybe
kids are alienated from the particular author,
busy writing/reading themselves, etc. And.Maya
has some confusing texts which are hard to follow.
Maya couldn't find her text at first--I
conferenced with other people first, and finally
got to Maya a little before sharing time.
(Fieldnotes, 3-8-90)

I called Maya over to the round table toward the side of the
room. As she sat down, we started talking.
Lensmire: Okay, what do you want to share?
Maya: It's only chapter one.

Lensmire: Okay, what is this zit fit thing, what
is this about?

Maya: Her name is Jil and she loves Jake,
okay? You want me to read it to you?

Lensmire: Let me read parts and you can explain it
to me. (I start reading) ‘Once there
was a girl named Jil. One day she wanted
zits to get a boy friend.’ What does
that mean?

Maya: She wanted zits.
Lensmire: And then she could get a boyfriend?

Maya: Yes. (Long pause, about 8 seconds. I
read a few more lines silently)

Lensmire: How do you think Jil's going to feel
about her name being in it? we should
talk to Jil.

Maya: Oh we told.her, we already told her.

205

Lensmire: Let's, let's ask . . . Jil? (Jil walks
over to the table) You're in this, or
your name is in this zit fit thing. Is
that all right with you? If it's not
then we'll have to, we'll ask Maya to
change the name. Tell you what, Maya--

Maya: It's not true.
Lensmire: Let's do this Maya--
Hays: I'm not changing--

Lensmire: Maya, Maya, this is what we need to do.
Uh, let's let Jil read it, okay? Jil
doesn't agree to it, you'll have to go
back and change the name of it, okay?
I'm a little worried because I don't
want people's feelings to be hurt by
this.

Maya: Hey, I've already changed James' name.

Lensmire: Uh, huh. But we just have to, we just
have to be careful, okay? So this is
what we're going to do. I'm going to
ask Lisa to read her story today and I'm
going to write ‘Friday' here, for Maya.
(1 write ‘Friday' in the left margin of
Maya's text. In the background, Grace
is bringing the writing time segment of
the workshop period to a close, and
asking the class to get ready for
sharing time) Then, what we're going to
do is let Jil read it and then I'm going
to read it, and hopefully you'll be able
to read it tomorrow in class. Do you
have another piece you'd like to read in
case this one doesn't come through?
(Maya nods) Okay, all right, can you
give this to Jil then?

Maya: Yes. (Audiotape, 3-8-90)
1 had not read the entire text. Maya gave it to J 11, who took
it ba¢k to her seat to read. After sharing time, Jil gave me Maya's

Story. Jil had written, in the left margin in pencil, “change the

206

name from me to someone else” (See Figure 6.1 for Maya's rough
draft). That night I read Maya's story through (I have done some
editing in the version below):

Once there was a girl named Jil. One day she
wanted zits to get a boy friend. When Jil went to
school there was a new boy. He went to Jil and
said, ”Would you like some drugs (? ‘draich') for
zits?” Well Jil said, ”Sure.” The new boy said,
”Here's the drugs for zits.”

With that going on, another new boy comes to
another class. There in the class was Jake
Dallas, the boy Jil loved and (who) had zits.
Then Jil stared and stared until Hrs. Parker said,
”Jil, are you all right?”

Jil said, ”Hu hu.” Everybody started
laughing at Jil. She was so embarrassed that she
ran out the door screaming to go to her mom.
Finally Jil stopped and went back to school. She
got in the door about 11:50. That meant it was
lunch time. After lunch it was recess. Jake
wanted Jil to play with him. Jil knew she could
not let Jake down, so Jil went to Jake and Jil
said, ”Would you like to play with me?”

Jake said, ”Sure, if you want.”

Jil said, ”I didn't have anyone to play with
so you were my last hope.”

Jake said, ”OK, let's go play with the fat
boys.”

Jil said, ”They always beat me up.”

Jake said, ”I'll make sure they won't.” Jil
could tell Jake loved her. When they went to the
fat boys they did beat Jil up. Jake scared them
away. After that Jake turned around and kissed
Jil.

111 the conference, I began reading Maya's text as a fictional
narrative. There were common markers for the beginning of a
3t°r3‘- ‘Once' and ‘One day'--and a main character and the problem
She faced were established (J 11 wanted a boyfriend). I was puzzled.
and a little repulsed, by the idea that the character of Jil would
m2 Zita, and I asked Maya, ”What does this mean?” I was trying to

make 8ense of the fictional world Maya was creating. After she

207

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208

answered with, ”She wanted zits,” I made a sort of prediction to see

if I understood how things worked in this strange place: ”And then

she could get a boyfriend?”

After Maya answered, there was a pause, and when I began
talking with Maya again, my reading of what sort of text this was
had shifted from a fictional narrative to a written version of the

verbal attacks children subjected each other to on the playground

and in the classroom. I now read the text as an utterance that

participated directly in the immediate social relations of real

children in the room. I was worried about people being hurt by this

text : ”How do you think J il's going to feel about her name being in

Ethical and political issues were at stake: how we would

it?"
treat each other here; what rights people had to control an
important part of their identities--their names; what part texts
such as this one played in establishing, maintaining, and changing
social relations among children.

Why did my reading of Maya's text shift in the conference? And
was the shift justified? I am guessing that during the long pause,
I read at least to the line where ‘Jake Dallas' was introduced.

”3373 had erased, incompletely, the name ‘James' and written ‘Jake'

over it, leaving ‘Jake Dallas. ' This did not conceal who she was

refarting to very effectively, since James Dallas was a child in the

class: our author of WW- This. plus

the unusual spelling of ‘Jil,’ with Jil in the class spelling her

name that way, probably moved me to my second reading. As to

209

whether or not the shift was justified, that was one of the things I

tried to figure out in my fieldnotes that night.

Maya never gave any indication that ‘Jil' did
not refer to J11 (J11 is usually spelled with two
1's, connecting ‘Jil' to Jil--of course, a third
grader might not have experience with another
spelling). In her response, Jil says ‘change the
name from.m§.' Does this mean Jil did read it as
a reference to herself, or is it that writing
something like ‘change the character's name of Jil
to another name' is more difficult? But both
Maya's revision (changing ‘James' to ‘Jake') and
Jil's use of ‘me' suggest that Jil and James are
in the story. (Fieldnotes, 3-8-90)

I ignored, in the above, a fairly obvious clue that located
this story in this c1assroom--Maya uses the regular classroom
teacher's name, Mrs. Parker, in her story.

I also tried to justify my second reading of Maya's text as a
verbal attack with reference to what I knew about the word ‘zit,’
and by contrasting it to Suzanne's chapter, ”Zit Face.”

The zit thing is troubling, especially given
the import of the word ‘zit' in the class. It was
the word used to ostracize Jessie. And whereas
Suzanne pulls it off, Maya doesn't. How doesn't
she pull it off? She doesn't recognize and note
how hurtful this could be. (Fieldnotes,.3-8-90)

I made an explicit connection.between.Maya's use of the word
‘zit' and the teasing I had watched Jessie endure. I do not
explicitly link Jessie and Jil as friends anywhere in these notes,
but I think that the texts that I had read and shared above,
connecting the two, strenghtened the association I made between what

was happening to Jil in Maya's story and what had happened with

Jessie.

210

I also invoked Suzanne's chapter in this note, and attempted to
criticize Maya's text through contrast. The ‘this' in the final
line clearly referred to the use of the word ‘zits' in Maya's story.
Suzanne's story had characters that voiced objections to verbal
attacks on another character. She had ‘pulled off' telling a story
about children teasing one another using the word ‘zits,’ without
making their behavior seem entirely acceptable. That seems to be
what I was concerned with here. Maya, however, apparently does not
pull this off, because she ”doesn't recognize and note how hurtful
this [using ‘zits'] could be.”

But this evaluation of Maya's text was a little wrongheaded,
barely developed, and missed the way Maya's text worked, even if it
was on the right track. Suzanne could have characters tease and
object to teasing-~cou1d ”recognize and note how hurtful this could
be”--because these things happened within the fictional world she
had created. Maya's text was different. Verbal attacks using the
word ‘zits' do not occur in her story (although other sorts of
attacks did-~I address this later). In fact, one of the things that
bothered me right at the beginning of our conference was the seeming
pggitiyg evaluation of zits by the characters of Jil and James.

Maya said that Jil wanted zits so she could get a boyfriend.
Consequently, it makes little sense to demand that Maya somehow
object, in her story, to teasing involving ‘zits,’ since that does
not occur there.

What I interpreted as a verbal attack on Jil was not

accomplished by having one character in the story call another

211

character ‘zit face' or ‘zit man' (as had happened in Suzanne's
story). Instead, the attack depended on attributing to Jil (and
James) a desire for something most people seek to avoid: zits. I
may have been more repulsed by this attribution to Jil than third
graders would be. That is, I might bring meanings to ‘zits' (acne)
as an adult--adolescent memories of pimples that sprouted before
important dates, or the association of acne with infection--that
younger children would not bring. Still, the uses of ‘zits' by
third graders for exclusion and hurting others made it a potent
word, and one I doubted Jil or James would want to be associated
with.

In the first moments of our writing conference, I shifted from
reading Maya's text as a fictional narrative to reading it as a
verbal attack on children in the room. Whatever the reasons for the
shift and its reasonableness, my response assumed that the text
would be read by children in the class as involving Jil and James.
With this assumption, my response became caught up with local

meanings. W. m. and the W within

the writing workshop.

Important local meanings I drew on in my response have already
been suggested. ‘Jil', ‘Jake', and ‘Mrs. Parker' referred to real
people in the room. The uses of ‘zits' have been discussed. I am
not sure what ‘draich' meant. I translated it above as ‘drugs.’ If

you pronounce the ‘a' in ‘draich' with an ‘ah' sound, it sounds

212

close to ‘drugs.’ I encouraged children not to get hung up with
spelling when writing rough drafts, to simply approximate the sounds
of words. If Maya intended ‘drugs,’ then she may have been playing
with the idea of acne medication. In her story, however, ‘drugs for
zits' produced them for you, rather than made them go away. I do
not know if ‘fat boys,’ used toward the end of Maya's story, had
some special meaning in the classroom or school.

My response was also caught up in the social relations of
children. One of the reasons Maya's story disturbed me was because
I associated it with the verbal attacks I saw Jessie encounter.
Jessie was not a passive victim, nor did she think of herself in
those terms, but she often fought back alone against groups of
children. Jil was also often alone in the workshop, although not as
unpopular as Jessie. My sense of who the underdogs were among the
children, and wanting to insert myself in these relations of power
for their benefit, influenced my response. My sense of such things,
of course, could have been wrong.

Carol, on several occasions and in relation to Maya's story,
told me just that. It turned out that Carol was something of a
secret collaborator with Maya on this text, probably the other of
the ‘we' Maya referred to in our writing conference when she said,
”Oh we told her, we already told [Jil]” about the story. When Carol
found out later that I wanted Maya to change the character's name
from Jil to something else, she told me that Jil just had us
teachers fooled, that she was ‘not such a nice person at all'

(Fieldnotes, 3-13-90). I recorded my perceptions of who I thought

 

213

ya. James, and Jil were in the classroom comunity and how this
1
“fluenced my reading of Maya's text in my fieldnotes:

The story can be read as a double-pronged
attack on Jil and James, with different intents.
The story is insulting to both Jil and James.
Both read it that way themselves (or at least Maya
anticipated James would and changed his first
name). Unless you argue that they just wouldn't
want to be in any text that Maya wrote, which is
possible.

The story is insulting on one level because
of the boy/girl thing (teasing might be a better
word). It's also insulting for Jil because she
‘wants zits,’ she embarrasses herself in front of
the teacher, she doesn't have anyone to play with
except for a boy, Jake/James, she gets beat up,
and she gets kissed.

For James, besides the insult of interacting
with a girl, defending her, and kissing her, there
is a status thing. Jil is not in the in group
(does not play or work, as far as I know, with
Lisa, Mary, Carol). Therefore, to be associated
with Jil might be especially insulting.

Maya's position seems closer to James than
Jil-sis this a sort of high-status teasing by
suggesting a cool person likes an uncool person?
Perhaps Maya is scoring points with friends for
teasing a popular boy and slamming an unpopular
girl. (Fieldnotes, 3-8-90)

I was assigning motives here and reading for children- -highly
speculative activities. Maya's text, with its references to zits
and J 11 and James, had forced me to consider the rhetorical effects
°f fl.cnmild's story. This was the first time during the year that I
had tried, in any sustained way, to do such a reading. In an
1”POI-Tam: sense, I began this, dissertation with the attempt. From
my Work with these children across six or so months, I was trying to
detelznine possible meanings of the text in this particular setting.
I did not necessarily feel confident in my assessments of social

relations and local meanings at the time. And besides this

SEE

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211+

“certainty, I was wrestling with the ethical and political aspects

‘f
Man's text and my response.

Would my response have been different if a different group of

011
11dren were involved as author and characters? I am sure it would

have been. I might have attributed, for example, a defensive
posture to Jessie if she had authored the piece, instead of what

seems the attribution--correct or incorrect--of an offensive,

aggressive posture on the part of Maya. I worried a little about

this attribution in my fieldnotes, both for what it meant for my

future relationship with Maya, and for what it said about me and my

past relations with her.

So, ultimately, I'm thinking of censuring
this piece because it feels ugly and hurtful. How
do I say that to Maya? What effect does this have
on her when I encourage her to write about things
that she cares about, is interested in, etc.?

And, to be truthful, I also have to ask about how
my response is affected by my own relationship
with Hays-~I am often frustrated with her behavior
in class, so am I using this text to get back at
her a little, even if ‘justified'? (Fieldnotes,

3-8-90)

But it is unlikely that any author would have been allowed to
Share W that day in class. Why? My response to Maya's
t3)“: depended upon one of the ways I had previously inserted myself
into the social relations of children in the writing workshopo-a

“113 about names--and that rule would have been in effect whoever

the aAuthor was .

as

1111

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215

Almost from the beginning of the year, children wrote
themselves and their friends (and enemies) into their texts.
Students soon began voicing complaints, and Grace and I also became
concerned as we read children's texts. Eventually, Grace told the
children that they could not write anything mean about others. I
agreed with Grace's intent--she wanted children to respect and not
hurt one another--but not with the rule. I had two concerns. One
was preserving the norm of student ownership. I wanted children to
be able to write what they wanted, to control their own texts as far
as was possible. And, at times, this might include writing mean
things about others. This was connected to my second concern.

Given my experience with children, I was worried about how they
would interpret the word ‘mean.’ I wanted to leave a space open for
anger and criticism in their writing-- directed, perhaps, at
authority figures, bullies.

The rule eventually put in place was more specific, and
specific to our classroom. I invoked it with Maya immediately after
the long pause in which I shifted my reading of her text. I said,
”How do you think Jil is going to feel about her name being in it?
flg_§hggld_talk_£g_gil.” I interpret some of Maya's responses--”Oh
we told her” and ”I've already changed James' name”--as at least
partial acknowledgment of this rule, if not agreement with its use

in this case. I gave a rough statement of the rule in my notes that

night:

216

I immediately invoked the rule that has
emerged. To go public with a text, the names of
characters must be approved by people in the room
who have those names. (Fieldnotes, 3-8-90)

Quite a bit was at stake here. The rule attempted to balance
protecting children's feelings and establishing a supportive
classroom environment against student control of text. The rule
assumed a private/public distinction: children had control over
writing they kept private (they could include other children's names
in their stories). But if those stories were to go public, the use
of children's names had to be approved by the children involved.
Student control, versus W control, was served by this rule in
another way. The rule did not depend on the teacher to determine
the ‘meaning' of a particular author's use of a child's name. That
determination was left to the child. As a teacher, I enforced the
rule, lent my institutional authority to its enactment.

Another issue was involved. The rule gave children control
over the stories that were told m; them, at least in public.
Writing workshop approaches are based on the idea that children's
own VOices and stories should be heard in writing classrooms. But
Graves . Calkins, and Murray do not seem to worry about children
Vtiting stories for others. The issue is: who gets to tell whose
Story? The workshop provided a public sphere in which various
1m“Viduals and groups defined themselves and others in their
"tiring. Much like the struggles women, people of color, members of

the Working class, and others, have taken up to define themselves,

to haVe their own tell their own stories (instead of white, elite

1111

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chi

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217

. there were struggles for definition of self within the

with the rule about names, I tried to intervene in these

lth’Bgles in order to give individual children control over the use
of their own names in the workshop. Who threatened individual
children's control of their names? Who threatened to silence
certain children by making them the ‘objects' of someone else's
stories, rather than the subjects of their own? My discussion, in
Chapter V, of who did and did not write themselves explicitly into
fictional texts as characters, provides an answer. Other children.
And in particular, children with high status and power in the room.
My examples there came from texts that were made public before I
understood much about children's responses to seeing their names in
other people's stories. The most striking example of children
Silencing other children, of reducing other children to ‘objects, '
was Mary and Suzanne's casting” of John, Leon, and Robert as towers
in their play. I shared Mary and Suzanne's text in the context of a
discussion of public texts, so I probably misled you. That text did
“0‘3 80 public.

And if I remained silent here, I could mislead you again, for
800d effect. But the rule about names did 11m-g impede their play's
pr°8ress to larger audiences. When they first showed it to me, I
did not pay much attention to their list of characters. Mary and
Suzanne wanted to enter their play in a contest sponsored by a local
tme‘lter group, and needed my signature on an application form that

-°°rt1fied, among other things, that the play was the original work

218

of the authors. With pen in hand, I learned that Suzanne and Mary
had copied their play out of a book in the school library.
Actually, they had condensed the adult author's play quite
skillfully. Or, if you prefer, they had appropriated her words for
their own purposes. But that is another story.

But not entirely. The rule about names was supposed to give
control over certain words--children's names-~to the children who
claimed them as their own. It was supposed to keep an author from
appropriating other children's names for her own purposes, unless
those children went along with the author's purposes. The rule had
emerged, and I had enforced it, before I understood its
significance. It ‘assumed' what I was just beginning to articulate
for myself in my response to Maya's text--that children could turn
their texts to purposes I had not anticipated, and that I could not
support if I wanted all children to ‘come to voice' in the writing
workshop. Jil must have thought something was at stake when she
wrote, ”change the name from me to someone else.”

There were problems with the rule. The public/private
distinction was shaky, especially in a writing workshop in which
children continually talked and shared their writing in
collaborative projects and peer conferences. According to Maya, she
and Carol had already told Jil about Ihg_21§_£1§, and possibly James
as well. This could have been done during class, on the playground,
or on the way home from school.

So the rule could not stop children from hurting each other.

In.fact, one thing I realized in this case was how, if Jil somehow

219

had been isolated from Maya's story before, invoking the rule made
her read the story. Jil's control over her name was bought at this
price. And this was placed against her hearing the story read in

front of the class, or seeing it published in the classroom library.

There were two primary ways for children to go public with
their texts: sharing time and the writing workshop library. My
response to Maya's text anticipated sharing time in at least two
senses. First, I was talking to Maya just a few minutes before
sharing time was to begin, and the conference was supposed to help
Maya get ready for sharing. I had little time to read and figure
out what was going on. Second, my response anticipated sharing time
in the sense that I was worried (in my notes I said that the title,
Ihg_21;_£1;, ‘scared me' when I first saw it) about how children in
the class would respond to Maya's text. Sharing time was a public,
teacher-sponsored event. My response to Maya's text cannot be
separated from my sense of responsibility for what happened there.

In an ideal writing conference, as in Habermas' (1970) ideal
speech situation, we would expect an open-ended conversation between
teacher and student in which various claims are raised and
discussed, by both parties, in relation to the text at hand. The
conference with Maya did not look much like this. I quickly decided
that I could not allow Maya to read her text without Jil's response,
and time for me to look at her text more closely. Most of the

conference has me telling Maya what will happen: I told her Jil

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220

would read the text, that I would read the text, and that Maya could
share tomorrow. There was little exploration of what Maya wanted to
do with this piece, what she thought of it, or what she needed help
with. I attribute this to the time constraints I felt, to my
determination that a classroom rule applied in this situation, and
to my own struggle to figure out what the responsible thing to do
was. My power as a teacher and adult enabled me to dominate the
conference as I did.

We were working under severe time constraints, when perhaps
more time was needed in order to unravel and.work through what was
for me a puzzling and emotionally-charged text. When I decided that
the rule about names was important in this situation, that also
constrained Maya and my talk. One way it did this was by increasing
the number of people who were involved in the situation, and whose
perspective would have to be taken into account. Instead of just
Maya and me working something out between the two of us, I had
decided that at least Jil and James needed in on the conversation,
if not literally, then at least their interests considered. And in
some sense, the function of the rule about names was to stop talk
between the teacher and student, since the rule referred the
question of whether or not a child's name appeared in a story to
another child. That is, the rule called for a conversation among
children, not necessarily one between teacher and student. In my
conference with Maya, I looked away from Maya and our discussion, in

order to bring Jil into our conversation.

221

Finally, I faced a great deal of uncertainty in relation to the
meaning of Maya's text, and what I should do about it (beyond
referring the question of names to children involved). I was faced
with a text that drew on slippery, shifting things like social
relations among children and local, timely meanings of words like
‘zits' and ‘fat boys.’ Furthermore, if I was at least partially
correct that Maya's intent was to hurt or tease other children, then
it seems unlikely that our writing conference would be the place to
expose and construct meaning in polite conversation. Maya would
have good reason--given her knowledge of teacher disapproval of
children hurting one another, and given her position of relatively
little power in relation to me--to conceal, not reveal, possible
meanings of her text; it would make sense for her to conceal her
intention(s), rather than help me understand what her text and she
were about.

That night, when I was no longer under the same time
constraints or pressure to make a decision--when the situation was
less ‘forced' (Scollon, 1988)--I could interact with and respond to
Maya's text in ways that I had not earlier in the day.

I hadn't noticed at first that it is,

formally, a fairly well-structured story. The
boy/girl relationship sets up a series of problems
that are eventually resolved with a man saving a
woman and the woman getting a kiss (sounds like I
should be objecting to this on feminist grounds as
well). (Fieldnotes, 3-8-90)

I noticed how the story depended on the sorts of cultural

knowledge I had anticipated questioning in my conception of response

as socioanalysis. At the beginning of the story, there was the

222

suggestion that a physical characteristic of Jil (acne), rather
than, for example, her intelligence or courage, was what would make
her attractive to the man of her choice. Later, against what her
own experience told her, she believed Jake when he told her that the
fat boys would not beat her up. Jil got beat up--this was a common
occurrence, the author did not seem to take a moral stance against
it, and Jil was unwilling or unable to fight back (something the
third grade girls I worked with were usually quite able and willing
to do in fights with each other and with their third grade male
classmates). At the end, she was rescued (a little late, like in
Charles Bronson movies) by Jake, and was kissed.hy him. There was
much in Maya's text (more than I have noted) that is ‘traditionally
given in gender and identity' (Willinsky, 1990), and that could have
become the focus of response and conversation.

But I did not pursue this line in my second conference with
Maya the next day. I was more concerned about the immediate
consequences for Jil and James of this story going public. I was
also concerned about how to talk with Maya about this, since I
anticipated violating a norm of the workshop that many children and

I took quite seriously--student control over their own texts.

Maya sat back in her chair, arms at her
sides, hands pressing against the seat of her
chair. I tried to look at her, but sometimes had
trouble looking her in the face. I was fairly
sure my reading of her text was a good one, but I
didn't like confronting Maya about it.
(Fieldnotes, 3-9-90)

223

I opened the conference with a sort of good news/bad news
scenario. The good news was that the story had a good structure-~it
set up problems for the characters and resolved them by the end.
The bad news:

Lensmire: The problem I have with it is this, it's
really mean. It's really mean to the
characters, it's really mean to Jil.

And she, she, she said that you can't
use her name in it. I think people--

Maya: What am I supposed to do, use an alien's
name? It's not fair. I want it to be
somebody's name in the class.
(Audiotape, 3-9-90)

I had said what I thought the meaning of Maya's text was for
Jil and the class. Maya bristled. She returned to ”I want it to be
somebody's name in the class” repeatedly in our conference. At the
time, I could not figure this out. One guess now is that she was
using the word ‘somebody' to say she wanted to keep Jil as the
character's name. In other words, it was a way of resisting my
request that she take out Jil's name. Another guess is that James,
and not Jil, was a primary target of Maya's text, and that she knew
that in order for James to be properly teased by the story, there
had to be a girl from the class in the other character's position.
In other words, Maya knew what James himself knew when he wrote his
first Egke_Line_L§5§§; with Ken: she knew that she could provoke
response by suggesting a romantic relationship between boys and
girls in the room. Perhaps Maya had learned this in part from James

and Ken. In order to involve James in such a provocative situation,

a girl from the class was needed.

224

In the conference, I answered her by saying that the story
would be hurtful to whomever she placed in Jil's role. I listed the
things that happened to the character-~she liked zits, was
embarrassed in class, beat up by boys-~as reasons someone would not
want to be that character. Finally, I asked her directly about her
intentions, if she wanted to hurt someone's feelings with the story.

Maya: It's just a story.

Lensmire: But what were you trying to do in this
story? Why did you write that story?

Maya: Because I liked it.

Maya answered and defended herself (and her text) against my
questions with two short utterances that invoked powerful literary
and workshop assumptions. Her first response, ”It's just a story,”
points to the disjunction between author and material in fictional
texts that I discussed in the last chapter. There, I emphasized how
fiction lessened risks of personal exposure for authors, because
readers of fiction could not assume that the author was expressing
her own experiences or beliefs and values. But there is another
consequence of the ‘distance' between authors and their material in
fiction, one that Maya seemed to count on here. Britton (1982),
again with quotes from Widdowson (1975), provides part of Maya's
defense:

The literary writer, in fact . . . is
”relieved from any social responsibility for what
he says in the first person.” (Love letters, he

notes, count as evidence in a court of law, love
poems don't!) (p. 158)

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Maya did not write her story in first person, but with her
first statement above, she asserted that her text was fictional, and
by implication, that certain demands should not be made of it or
her. It was jug; a g;gzy--she was not trying to tell about things
that really happened to real people, so she should not be held
accountable for lying or slandering. She was engaged in an
acceptable sort of lying, and that lying included making up settings
and characters and events. Maya had not written, to draw on
Britton's example above, a letter to a friend, or to Jil herself, in
which she said all sorts of nasty things about her. From this
angle, my questions for Maya were inappropriate--I wanted to connect
her story too closely to real children and real feelings, and hold
her responsible for the effects of her story in the classroom.

At the heart of our conflict at that moment in our second
writing conference, was the status of Maya's text in the world and
her relationship to it. Maya and I represented two major opposing
positions in literary theory on such questions, positions suggested

by the traditional distinction between rhetoric and poetry:

. .rhgtgzig and.pgg§;x, the text that
nggng and the text that is, the text for

pgzggagign and the text for ggnggnplggign
(Scholes, 1985, p. 77)
My position was one that emphasized the participation of Maya's
text in the social life of the classroom. I asked Maya, ”But what
were you trying to do in this story?” I was emphasizing the

rhetorical consequences of her text, and wanted to make sure she

understood her text had effects on others. I aligned myself with

226

literary theorists such as Bakhtin (1981), Said (1983), and others,
who conceive of texts as ”something we do, and indissociably
interwoven with our practical forms of life” (Eagleton, 1983).

Maya's position, expressed in, ”It's just a story,” removed her
text from the social life of the classroom, and removed.her social
responsibility for her text. Her position has a long tradition-~in
Romanticism (Williams, 1958), as well as support from more recent
literary theories such as New Criticism and certain versions of
deconstruction (such as de Man, 1979). Here, texts are creations of
imagination, self-referential and solitary objects, sites for the
play of indeterminate meaning, removed from the struggles and
responsibilities of everyday life:

. at the center of the world is the
contemplative individual self, bowed over its
book, striving to gain touch with experience,
truth, reality, history, or tradition. (Eagleton,
1983, p. 196).

Maya's second comment, in response to my question as to why she
wrote the; story, needs much less attention, not because it is less
important, but because it assumed a commitment of writing workshop _
approaches that I have already developed in some detail--individual
student control of texts. Maya justified her text by saying,
”Because I liked it.” She asserted her right, in the writing
workshop, to choose the texts she would.write. In a setting in
which children were encouraged to make their own individual choices,
and the teachers worked to support student intention, Maya's text

(usually) would need little more justification for being written and

shared than that she liked it. The workshop's commitment to

227

individual student intention, to 'unfettered expression,’ has roots
in Romanticism (Willinsky, 1990). Thus, Maya's first and second
comments express different aspects of a ‘poetic' conception of
texts, in which the texts authors write are abstracted from the
contexts of their production and consumption.

Maya and I had reached an impasse. Maya was set on having the
character's name be someone in the class, if not Jil--this was her
piece, she had the right to control it. And she wanted to share it.

This was exactly what I felt I could not allow. I rejected the

 

notion of Maya running from girl to girl in the class, looking for
someone to take Jil's place (if nothing else, making the text public
that way).
Lensmire: Well, I'm not going to let you share

that story as it is right now, because

I'm afraid it would hurt people's

feelings. But if you want to try to

make changes to it that you think would

make it better, that way, you can, okay?

Or, you can find, I know you have a lot

of other stories, because you write a

lot. So what are you going to do? What

do you want to do?

Maya: I have to change the name. I suppose I
have to change the name.

Maya said this slowly and grudgingly. She gave into me--I do
not believe she had been persuaded--and agreed to not name the
character after Jil or other children in the class. I talked to her
about the first part, about the zits. Maya told me that Carol had
named it Ihg_21§_£1§, so I told her that she could just name it
something else then and change the first part. I ignored the other

aspects of the text I found questionable; I even said that the rest

228

of the story was fine, which was not necessarily true. I wish I
could say that I had made a well-reasoned decision that we had dealt
with enough for one conference, but I just forgot. Maya did not
look too pleased as she left the table; I did not feel too happy
myself.

The story is not over, but not because Maya continued to pursue
this text. The next time I conferenced with her, she was working on
a text describing a game she and her brother played together. It
was Carol's turn.

Alongside each utterance . . . off-stage
voices can be heard. (Barthes, 1974)

After Maya and I finished our conference, I worked at the round
table. I looked up when I heard Carol, two rows over from me with
_Maya just behind her, fairly shouting at me, ”That's unfair!” She
said this several times before I understood what she was talking
about. Then she said, ”It's just a name.” I ignored her and looked
back at my work.

The next Monday, I overheard Carol and Maya attempting to
enlist Grace's support. Carol told Grace that Maya should be
allowed to use Jil's name in the story. Grace left them and walked
over to me. Before Grace got to me, Carol called out after her,
”Jil is a popular name.” Grace told me that she had told them they
had to respect their classmates. I told Grace that I wanted the
same thing. While we were talking, Carol said, ”Okay, then we'll
just put it backwards--LIJ.” Carol and Maya continued talking, just

loud enough for Grace and me to hear, and probably Jil as well, who

229

sat a few feet behind them. They seemed to be accomplishing orally
what I was not allowing them to do with Maya's written text.
Tuesday:

The Carol and Maya ”It's just a name” saga
continues. Today the attack shifted. Somewhere
in here, Carol and Maya noticed that Jil had
written on Maya's text--‘change the name from me.’
Now Carol said, ‘Mow dare Jil write on Maya's
paper' (she actually said, ‘How dare.') She was
about three or four feet away from me, arms at her
side, fists clenched, with a lot of indignation on
her face, body slightly bent forward from the
waist. I didn't get it right away, but I soon
realized what she was talking about. Today I took
her on. I told her that I wasn't going to back
down. That it was a classroom rule that people
could take their names out of other people's
stories before the stories went public. Carol
responded that it still was not right for Jil to
write on Maya's paper. I told her that 1 had
asked Jil to respond, she had, and that it
wouldn't happen that way again. She said it still
wasn't right. As she walked away, she said that
Jil wasn't the nice person we teachers thought she
was, ‘not such a nice person at all.’ But she
seemed somewhat subdued. Maybe from my tone of
voice she realized that I was serious.
(Fieldnotes, 3-9-90)

Whatever purposes Carol had for arguing with me, she assumed
that a student's text was her private possession. She assumed
student ownership. And she used this norm as a resource to argue
with me--how dare Jil write on.Maya's paper. Graves (1981) had
introduced his concept of student ownership with a little story
about how renters and owners acted differently toward the houses in
which they livedo-owners took better care of them. He believed
student ownership of texts resulted in better quality products
because, like homeowners, students who owned their texts would care

for them more, in the crafting of their material

230

 

and their attention to surface features. Apparently, Carol and Maya
looked upon Jil's comment, written in the margin of Maya's paper, as.
an unsightly bit of graffiti.

Carol also suggested here that she and Maya may have had
something against Jil--in other words, that my sense of their
intentions was correct. Of course, this might have been the product
of their battle with me--they resented Jil because I said they could
not use her name--rather than something that informed Maya's story
initially. Carol also seemed to interpret Grace and my actions as
siding with Jil against Maya and her. And she was correct, in the
sense that we were thwarting Carol and Maya's wishes on behalf of
Jil.

In any event, this was the last time Carol confronted me about
this issue. Conferences with Carol about her work seemed, to me at
least, largely unaffected by all this. Carol continued writing long
texts and talking with me regularly.

I talked with Maya's mother, Lauren, at parent-teacher
conferences at the end of March. I knew Lauren better than most of
the other parents. For the first few months of school, Lauren had
helped children put together and publish their books in the
workshop. We had had the chance to talk about what I was trying to
do in my teaching, and Lauren responded positively to what I said
and what she saw happening in the classroom. During our conference,
I told Lauren that Maya and I had had a run-in over a text I thought
would be hurtful to others. Lauren's response was supportive. She

told me that she had been concerned, after talking with me about

231

 

writing workshop approaches, that children would be granted control
over their writing without taking on any responsibility for what
they wrote. Her only question for me was, did Maya understand why I
had questioned her piece? I told Lauren that I had talked with Maya
about how I thought her story would hurt other children's feelings.

But Lauren's question cannot be answered quite as simply as I
answered it that night. If by ‘understand' we mean something
approaching Habermas' (1984, 1987) notion of reaching agreement, I
doubt that Maya understood. I depended, ultimately, on my
institutional authority to settle what would happen. I had begun
questioning student intention and material with Maya, and she and
Carol questioned my intervention in Maya's writing. But the process
was most likely terminated long before Maya and I had talked enough
to explain ourselves to each other.

‘Lflmited time constrained us. And, given the lengths I have had
to go here, for an adult audience, to explain what was at stake in
this case, part of the problem was figuring out how to talk with
children about complex, sensitive issues. Finally, I simply had not
known the implications nor figured out much of what was happening,
as it happened. My interpretation of this case has the benefit of
time and the study of notes, texts, and audiotapes.

But I do not want to imply that all difficulty in this case
arose from complexity and misunderstanding. That only if we had had
the time and the knowledge, everything would have run along
smoothly. This story was also about a conflict of wills and beliefs

.and values. I think that, in some ways, Maya and Carol and I

232

understood each other quite well; that Maya understOod my concerns
about her story, but rejected the normative claim I was making that
it was not all right to share that sort of story. And if her
intentions were not entirely honorable, then she had reasons for
hiding those intentions and not engaging me in an open discussion of
her text.

I acted to keep a text that I decided would be hurtful to other
children from going public. My response was caught up in questions
of how we should treat one another, who gets to tell whose stories,
and social relations among children. I decided that following the
child would be morally and politically irresponsible.

But response as socioanalysis suffered here as well, for at
least two reasons. First, the commitment to looking to the past, to
addressing the distorted stories children.bring with them from
outside the classroom, ignores the life, the culture in which
children participate in schools. Maya's text included material
worth examining for what it said about women and their relations to
men in our society. But in this case, the immediate relations among
children were more pressing. Second, the image of response as
involving only two people and a text ignores all the ways response
participates in the social life of the classroom. In this instance,
my response to Maya's text included conversations with Jil, Carol,
Maya's mother, and Grace; it responded to a text written by Suzanne
and the teasing Jessie encountered; it drew on readings of who

children were to each other, and classroom norms; and it

233

anticipated the responses of future readers of Maya's texts, as well
as Maya's responses to what I said.

I have tried to suggest throughout my discussion the
tentativeness of my interpretation of this case and the meanings of
what people said and did. If things were tentative here, they were
even more so while I was teaching, and that was an important problem
in this occasion for response. My decision to not follow Maya's
lead was based on a reading of her text that I simply could not be
certain about, since that reading included attribution of intent to
Maya and the meanings of this text to other children in the class.
It represented a fairly hard stand on soft ground. Following the
child would have been easier; treating the text as a cultural
artifact of US society would have been easier. Reading and
responding to Maya's text in relation to this particular context was

much harder.

CHAPTER VII

THE DREAM

(cont.)

[Writing workshop teachers] want the child to
control, take charge of information in his
writing. Their craft is to help the child to
maintain control for himself. That is the craft
of teaching. They stand as far back as they can
observing the child's way of working, seeking the
best way to help the child realize his intentions.

Donald H. GraveS. HEW
W

Perhaps we need to turn to the unsung sisters
of these cherubic boys for redemption. But in
order to discover how our daughters redeem us, we
must forsake the innocent child, free of knowledge
and guile, for the one who lies. ”A child should
always say what's true/And speak when he is spoken
to,” chides Robert Louis Stevenson. Both the act
and its admonishment testify to the contrivance
that is the innocence of childhood.

Madeleine R. Grumet, Bitter Milk; Womeg end
Isa—Chins

James, Maya, and their friends, were worldly children pursuing
social projects.‘ They were sophisticated and strategic, with

complex and sometimes questionable intentions. From their position

234

235

within the peer culture, they often looked to the immediate
classroom and its participants for material--they laughed with and
at their peers and teachers, affirmed friendships and divisions
among children with their talk and texts, and accommodated and
resisted teacher interventions into their projects. They were the
”wily, winsome, wise, wild, and.whining creatures who are our kids”
(Grumet, 1988, p. 156). They were also more or less hostile
audiences for other children, and their projects, in and out of the
classroom, were partly what made them so.

Writing workshop advocates such as Graves (1983), Calkins
(1986), and Murray (1985), need to forget James and Maya, as well as
Jessie and John, in order to write their howhto books. They
remember and narrate innocent children pursuing private projects.
Innocent, not so much in what they know (for these writers know that
children have experience in the world), but in their actions and
relations with others--simple, straightforward, transparent, and
with the best of intentions. These children pursue private
projects, projects of personal interest, usually pointed at objects
outside the classroom, to personal pasta and interests: to family
and pet happenings, and to topics like the space shuttle and record
collections. In Graves and my dreams of ‘heteroglossic' writing
workshops, sounding with the unofficial voices of children, the
voices of children are like oblique lines in geometry, connecting
children to objects with straight lines that never intersect and

that exist on alternative planes.

236

‘Heteroglossic' needs the quotes, because such a vision is a
rather strange appropriation of Bakhtin's (1981) concept of
heteroglossia. Heteroglossia ie the presence of unofficial,
divergent voices, but with these voices in constant contact and
interaction, involved in a struggle for meaning that began when we
mouthed our (parents') first words. Bakhtin's ‘line' from author to
object (to audience)--the word--is tangled with others' words,
stretched at times to breaking:

The word, directed toward its object, enters
a dialogically agitated and tension-filled
environment of alien words, value judgements and
accents, weaves in and out of complex
interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from
others, intersects with yet a third group: and
all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave
a trace in all its semantic layers. (p. 276)

Traditional writing instruction, paralleling usual classroom
discourse patterns, locks the student into a teacher-controlled
interaction in which the teacher assigns writing, the student writes
in response, and the teacher evaluates. Werkshop approaches attempt
to disrupt this pattern in at least two ways. Through student
selection of topics, the child makes the first move in an
interaction sequence that places the teacher, ideally, in the
response slot. But workshop approaches also break a
teacher-dominated pattern by allowing and encouraging children to
turn away from the teacher, front and center, to each other. In
place of a traditionally inauthentic, fault-finding

teacher-audience, workshops promote an authentic, meaning-finding

one, and peers are a significant part of that audience.

237

Workshop approaches flood classroom discourse with the voices
of children, as children write, talk to the teacher and to each
other, read and respond to each other's texts. Graves and Calkins
attempt to capture these very real, vigorous children on the page
with a Romantic rhetoric that tends to abstract authors and texts
from their social contexts. Children.write from their personal
experience, and the choices of how and why to write, and on what
topics, are assumed to be made on the basis of personal interest and
meaningfulness. Children need an authentic audience so the writing
is real, but workshop advocates seldom consider the ways audience
can shape and constrain the writing of even young children (Berlin,
1988).

For workshop advocates, the writer's struggle is the effective
expression of something that is inside. They have ”happily taken
the personal and public aspects of literacy to consist of a one-way
street: the individual finds a vehicle in writing for those deep
and hidden thoughts at the core of the self and goes increasingly
public with them” (Willinsky, 1990, p. 208). Lost in such a
conception of written literacy is the sensitivity of authors to the
social contexts within which they work. We forget that all of this
writing is going on in schools, in which students are expected to
work and teachers are expected to make sure they do; forget that
peers are purposely- significant audiences for the writing done by
children in writing workshops.

When I loosened the lid on student intentions and association

in the room, peers became extremely important influences on student

238

experiences and writing in the workshop. These influences were not
all positive. Peers were sources of support and confidence. They
also were sources of conflict and risk, and pushed back on the
writing children did and did not do in the classroom. Children
evaluated and excluded each other--by gender, by social class, by
personality--in ways that echoed some of the worst sorts of
divisions and denigrations our society boasts. Children divided
themselves up, sometimes in less disturbing, more temporary ways, in
ways that allowed for changing evaluations, new friends and enemies.
But they did, at any given moment and with more or less permanency,
differentiate among their peers in terms of who was and who was not
a friend, a desirable collaborator, a trusted audience in
conferences and sharing time.

Peers, as audiences for children's writing, brought with them
friendship, trust, a ‘social energy' (Dyson, 1989) that could
empower authors and their writing in the classroom. Peers also
brought with them teasing, risk, and conflict. Both aspects of
peers-as-audience were important for student experiences. I have
tended to focus on the later, since so little is said about this
aspect of children's experiences in writing classes.

But if James and Maya taught us anything, it is that authors in
the workshop were not just pushed around by their audiences-~they
pushed back. As writers, children were not enly vulnerable
(susceptible to influence, confronted.with risks), they were also
assertive. ”They took evaluative positions, expressed interests,

valued this and not that. Their texts were not just more or less

239

well-executed expressions of personal experience and objects of
contemplation; they were rhetorical, had effects, did work.
Children's texts could influence others' conceptions of themselves
and their worlds, could make them laugh, hurt them, make them feel
connected to others, safe or unsafe, encourage them to speak and
write or remain silent.

The rhetoric of workshop approaches does not entirely ignore
the rhetorical nature of children's texts. Calkins (1986) asserts
that a ”sense of authorship comes from the struggle to put something
big and vital in print, and from seeing one's own printed.words
reach the hearts and minds of readers” (p. 9). But it seems that,
for Calkins and the others, the words from children that reach
others' hearts and minds will never be false or hurtful or ugly.
Their teaching depends on it, since workshop teachers follow
children, support their intentions.

Gilbert (1989) aligns writing workshop approaches with
child-centered commitments, and Romantic conceptions of creativity
and imagination. She argues that the

. seemingly innocent discourse about
student authorship, student literature and student
ownership of texts needs much closer scrutiny. By
constructing an elaborate edifice of personal
artistic creativity over school writing, the
discourse masks the ideological nature of the
production of school texts. The act of creation,
the individual expression of personal experience,

becomes the focus of attention. . . . The messages
these texts carry are incidental. (p. 199)

240

I learned about the rhetorical nature of children's texts because
the messages they carried for children in my room were anything but
incidental.

I opened this chapter with quotes from Graves and Grumet.
Grumet (1988) has a less Romantic view of children than Graves. But
her solution to the problem of schools ”requiring order and
stillness, replacing touch with the exchange of performance for
grades” (p. 162), and aimed at producing ‘child redeemers,’ the
innocent sons who would liberate us adults from our adult world, is
similar in tone to that of writing workshop advocates. Grumet looks
to the possibilities of daughters' lies, their fantasies of how
things could be, for their redemptive power, and couches at least
parts of her proposal in the most Romantic of imagery--gardens and
growing plants:

In showing us the world as they would have
it, they reveal the world that we fled because we
were not brave enough to pitch our tents and raise
our flags there. Their lies can become our
knowledge . . . the child's fantasies can flower
in the fictive ground of the curriculum.

School is not the real world, and so it shares the
property that Marianne Moore attributes to poetry:
”imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” (p.
162)

Grumet is responsible enough to remember that, if we want
children to transform our world, ‘we had better transform theirs.’
She is honest enough to remember that all lies are not ‘pleasant and

pastoral,’ but says little about what to do with such lies when they

grow in the garden of lies you are tending. And what about lies

241

with vines and leaves that choke other lies and keep them from the
sun?

It is time to look to the future, to our futures in classrooms,
and ask what the experiences of children in my room mean for how we
teach and learn writing. If my classroom was a philosophical
laboratory in which I brought theory to bear on practice, it is time
for practice to bear down a little on theory. In the remainder of
this chapter, I suggest two re-visions for the work of teachers and
children in writing workshops. The first is a new conception of
teacher response to children's writing, one that recognizes the
connectedness of response to the social life of children in the
classroom, and that actively promotes a classroom community in which
children accept and learn from each other's differences. The second
resvision is to strengthen the role of the teacher as
curriculum-maker in the writing workshop, by having teachers engage
children in collective writing projects focused on important texts
in children's lives. My purpose is not to provide full-blown
discussions and evaluations of these proposals, but to offer them as
possible directions for the future development of workshop

approaches.

Workshop advocates conceive of response as something a teacher
does in relation to a particular child and his oral and written
texts, as an action taken in isolation from the immediate context

within.which teachers and students work. The goal of response is to

242

help the child be better able to realize his intentions in text,
both immediately and in the future. I had a slightly more
complicated vision of response when I started my teaching. I
realized that there would be times when it would be irresponsible to
support student intentions, in as much as children would sometimes
draw on materia1--such as racist or sexist stereotypes--that needed
to be questioned.

I had appropriated and developed rules for response. Rule one:
follow the child, support her intentions. Rule two: when the
material was questionable, question it without taking away control
of the writing from the child. I brought these rules for response
with me to my work with children, and found they provided me
precious little guidance in the blur of children, texts, and
classroom situations. I learned the inadequacy of following the
child and response as socioanalysis, as conceptions of response, for
capturing what was involved when teachers and children talked about
texts in writing conferences.

Children's intentions for writing are neither necessarily
transparent, nor supportable. If we locate children in a mix of
social relations and texts that influence their work, then to
conceive of an individual child as somehow having a simple,
clear-cut intention that we can identify and follow is a problem”
Authors pursue many intentions in their writing that are more or
less conscious to them-~a student writer may, simultaneously, hope
to tease her friends, want to become a better writer, and try to

please her teacher (Hulbert, 1987). Writers are influenced by

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audience, their intentions are shared with them, in some sense.
Romantic conceptions of writers and writing simplify intention by
assuming an isolated, pre-existent self with pre-existing
intentions, rather than a social, emerging self, appropriating this,
objecting to that, constructing it-self and its intentions as it
goes along: ”Writing is not simply a tool we use to express a self
we already have; it is a means by which we form a self to express”
(Harris, 1987, p. 161). Consequently, as teachers, we continually
shape children's intentions, not just follow them. And our
influence can point intentions in different directions, toward
varying ends.

Furthermore, children's intentions, even emerging ones, may not
be transparent because children want to keep them hidden from us.
Workshop advocates assume that children always want us to follow
them, to understand what they are up to. Or put another way, they
assume that children will never pursue intentions in writing that
children would not want to explain to us, and that we Could not
support when they finished explaining.

I assumed that there would be occasions in which I could not
support student intentions, and such considerations led to my
conception of response as socioanalysis. But the critical stance I
created there abstracted children's texts from the immediate
classroom community within which they actually operated, and
proposed reading them as artifacts of a classist, racist, sexist
society. This sort of response is important if we want to help our

children avoid modes of thought and action that perpetuate these

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aspects of our society. But socioanalysis is inadequate, because it
does not concern itself with local politics, the micropolitics of
the classroom, and how children's texts might operate there.

A more adequate conception of response, then, would address two
aspects of writing workshops that have been largely ignored. First,
it would pay more attention to the immediate peer culture, to social
relations among children and the meanings and values they assign to
each other, texts, and teachers. The peer culture is an important
backdrop upon which children's texts are written and given their
local, particular meanings. Wbrkshop approaches encourage teachers
to know children, but this is usually thought of as knowing
individual children, as if these individuals were not caught up in
relations with each other. I am not denying the need for knowledge
of individual children. I am arguing that such a focus can blind us
to the ways children are connected to each other, blind us to the
more or less shared meanings and values children bring to their
activities and texts.

Second, an adequate conception of response would include goals
for response and the workshop that went beyond supporting (and/or
questioning) student intentions. It would include a vision of the
type of classroom community in which we want our children to write
and learn. Workshop approaches have aligned their goals with
individual children's intentions, without considering that the ends
some children pursue may not be beneficial for other children (or
even themselves). There are bullies on the playground, and peer

cultures maintaining divisions among children by class, race, and

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gender. We affirm these aspects of children's lives when we commit
ourselves to supporting student intentions.

My students and I created a community within the writing
workshop, and children's writing emerged from and contributed to
that community. The community we created was important for the
experiences and learning of the children and teachers there. I have
discussed some of the disturbing aspects of that community. If, as
Harris (1989) asserts, we ”write not as isolated individuals but as
members of communities whose beliefs, concerns, and practices both
instigate and constrain, at least in part, the sorts of things we
can say” (p. 12), then we had better pay attention to the
communities we create in classrooms.

I propose that teacher response to children's texts be
critically pragmatic, and aimed at promoting an engaged, pluralistic
classroom community. Critically pragmatic response is concerned
with the intellectual, moral/political, and aesthetic fruits of
children's texts, both for authors and audiences (Cherryholmes,
1988, 1990). An engaged, pluralistic classroom community is one
that recognizes and affirms differences among children, and
encourages children to learn from, be enhanced by, those
differences.

This conception of response has strong affinities to my
previous conceptions of response, especially response as
socioanalysis. Critically pragmatic response emphasizes engaging
children in serious conversations about the content of their texts.

It calls for the examination, with children, of what their texts

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have to say about the world, our relations to it, and to each other.
Unlike socioanalysis, which looked only to an oppressive US society
for questionable material, a critical pragmatic response would pay
attention to local, classroom relations and meanings. Furthermore,
since texts go public in the writing workshop, the rhetorical play
of a child's texts in the classroom community would be an important
consideration and topic of discussion in writing conferences.

Maya's story, Ihe_215_£1§, forced me to consider the rhetorical
effects of her text on other children. I had to decide whether or
not I would, above all, support individual student intention. I
decided that there were other things to consider, such as how Maya's
text would make Jil feel. The worth of Maya's project, then, was
not judged solely on its importance or meaningfulness to Maya. It
was also judged for how it participated in the classroom community.

Critically pragmatic response to children's texts would be
guided by a sense of what sort of community we wanted to encourage
and support in the classroom. I have adapted the notion of an
engaged, pluralistic classroom community from Bernstein (1988). In
his text, Bernstein characterized what he called the ‘ethos' of
pragmatism in the writings of Pierce, James, Dewey, and others. An
important theme of the pragmatist ethos, for Bernstein, was the
vision of a community of inquirers that supported critical thought
and action by its members. Bernstein addressed his text to the
community of American philosophers (his text was a presidential

address to the American Philosophical Association), and argued that

247

their community would do well to attempt to live out this pragmatist
vision of community. ”
The central characteristics of an engaged, pluralistic
classroom community are suggested by its name. ‘Pluralistic'
recognizes the diversity of children in classrooms, along lines of
class, race, and gender, as well as more personal attributes. It
recognizes the heteroglossia of the voices of children in the
classroom, the multiple social and personal intonations and
evaluations that attend children speaking and writing. But the fact

that a community is pluralistic is less important than how it

responds to that pluralism, what it does with it:

For there is a danger of a.£:egneneing

pluralism where centrifugal forces become so
strong that we are only able to communicate with
the small group that already shares our own
biases, and no longer even experience the need to
talk with others outside this circle. . . . There
is a nelemieel pluralism where the appeal to
pluralism doesn't signify a genuine willingness to
listen and learn from others, but becomes rather
an ideological weapon to advance one's own
orientation. There is defieneiye pluralism, a form
of tokenism, where we pay lip service to others
”doing their own thing” but are already convinced
that there is nothing important to be learned from
them. (Bernstein, 1988, p. 15)

An engegee, pluralistic classroom community embraces a
different, more desirable, response to pluralism than those
responses listed above. I use the word ‘engaged' to suggest three
characteristics of the work and lives of children and teachers in
such a community.

First, engaged refers to the participation of all children in

the important activities of that community. It carries, then, the

248

political connotations of voice that I discussed in Chapter I.
Being engaged, like coming to voice, refers to children asserting
themselves in public spaces, having their stories told and listened
to by the class. Teacher response, here, would look for ways to
help and encourage children (such as Jessie and Karen) to make their
texts available to larger audiences.

Second, engaged refers to children paying attention to each
other, caring for each other. When I talked with Maya about her
story, I was asking her to consider the consequences of her text for
other children. I was asking her to listen to and be concerned for
another child--Jil--who Maya apparently did not feel she had to
consider.

Finally, engaged refers to the teacher's participation in this
community, and recognizes the teacher's responsibility for
encouraging and sustaining this, and not that, classroom community.
It recognizes that the teacher will use her power as an adult and
teacher in the classroom to influence the beliefs, concerns, and
practices of the members of that community. At times, as in the
Maya case, the teacher will restrict student action that could.harm
other children, and undermine the goal that all children actively
participate in the making and remaking of the classroom community
through the stories they tell and the responses they give to each
other.

But teacher engagement, like student engagement with each
other, also refers to the teacher being open to, caring for,

learning from the children he works with. When the teacher is

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engaged with children, he is enriched by the fictional worlds they
create on the page, and gains insights into his own and others's
lives as he listens to children talk and interpret their own. He
has a responsibility to care for children and enrich their lives.

Critically pragmatic response to children's texts would concern
itself with the consequences of children texts, both for the
children.who write them, and those who read them. Such response
would seek to support a classroom community

. based upon mutual respect, where we are
willing to risk our own prejudgments, are open to
listening and learning from others, and we respond
to others with responsiveness and responsibility.
(Bernstein, 1988, p. 18)

I have proposed critically pragmatic response to children's
texts as one re-vision to writing workshop approaches. A second
re-vision is greater teacher participation in the determination of
the writing projects children pursue in the classroom.

Specifically, I suggest that teachers frame (possibly in negotiation
with students) collective writing projects focused on important
texts in children's lives. Our goals to support student voice and
to create engaged, pluralistic classroom communities with children
may be well served by such projects.

Workshop approaches have largely abdicated teacher
responsibility for curricular development to children. What remains
of this responsibility for writing teachers is sharing technical,
craft aspects of writing with students. In what follows, I first

discuss Scholes's (1985) notion of textual power. I argue that

textual power is an appropriate focus for our work with children in

 

250

writing workshops. Then, I criticize the curriculumwwork.writing
workshop approaches have envisioned for teachers in the past, and

briefly discuss an alternative vision.

Scholes (1985) writes of textual power as ”the power to select
(and therefore to suppress), the power to shape and present certain
aspects of human experience” (p. 20). In the selection of this and
not that, in the particular slant and tone a writer takes to her
text, she is valuing certain things over others, saying this is (and
this is not) important, correct, beautiful. Scholes argues that
textual power should be the focus of our work with students and
texts 2

We have always known this, but in the past we
have often been content to see this power vested
in the single literary work, the verbal icon, and
we have been all too ready to fall down and
worship such golden calves so long as we could
serve as their priests and priestesses. We must
help our students come into their own powers of
textualization. We must help them see that every
poem, play, and story is a text related to others,
both verbal pre-texts and social sub-texts, and
all manner of post-texts including their own
responses, whether in speech, writing, or action.
The response to a text is itself always a text.
Our knowledge is itself only a dim text that
brightens as we express it. (p. 20)

I like Scholes's conception of textual power primarily for its
location of meaning in the interaction of texts and people. He
avoids, as I often did not in my early appropriations of Bakhtin and
Freire (evident in parts of my Chapter I), the Romantic move to

locate meaning primarily in.the self-expression of an isolated

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author. The author is always writing in response to the texts she
was born into and within which she learned to think and speak. In
response, she selects and appropriates others' texts, and gives,
with more or less effectiveness and courage, the texts of others her
own characteristic slant or ‘intonation' (Bakhtin, 1981).

It is also important that Scholes uses the word ‘power.’ Texts
have effects in the world. They can shape our conceptions of the
world and our relations to each other. Their power is tied up with
seeing the world in some ways and not others. Writing workshop
advocates have largely avoided considering the good and bad such
power can work. One way they have done this, as I have suggested in
earlier chapters, is by construing the child as capable of only
innocent intentions and content. They would have teachers efface
themselves before children's texts, rather than truly engage them by
considering their content. A second way they have avoided questions
of power is to focus on the authors of texts, and not their
audiences; to treat texts primarily as expressions of personal
creativity, rather than rhetorical objects. One gets the sense that
children's texts in workshops are important, but primarily to the
people who write them, not to those who read them. It is important
that other children read these texts, but not because they might
enjoy them or learn something. Rather, the author needs an
audience. Workshop approaches ignore the work texts do in the
world:

We care about texts for many reasons, not the

least of which is that they bring us news that
alters our way of interpreting things. If this

 

252

were not the case, the Gospels and the teachings
of Karl Marx would have fallen upon deaf ears.
Textual power is ultimately power to change the
world. (Scholes, 1985, p. 165)

My stories of James, Maya, and others, were stories about
textual power put to various ends. One moral of those stories is
that teachers must participate in shaping the ends toward which
textual power is put by children. A laissez-faire attitude toward
these ends may very well allow status and power differences from the
playground and society to assert themselves in the official work of
the writing workshop. Children who are still learning about the
consequences of their actions may hurt themselves and others in the
process. Teacher response to children's texts is one way to
influence the ends of children's textual power. Another is
curriculum.

Workshop approaches have traditionally focused on individual
children pursuing individual projects. I have learned from friends
with connections to Calkins and the Teachers College Writing
Project, however, that Calkins and her colleagues have recently
begun to experiment with what they are calling ‘genre studies.’ In
genre studies, the teacher and children in workshops focus, at
various points during the year, on reading and writing a particular
genre (for example, biography). Genre studies are examples of what
I am calling collective writing projects. By collective writing
projects, I simply mean projects that a teacher and students pursue

more or less together, as a class. They could focus on producing

some type of group product, such as a student magazine, or focus on

 

253

individual products connected by a common theme or problem. Genre
studies place a particular genre of texts at the center of the work
of teachers and students in the writing workshop.

I think the idea of genre studies is an important development.
It recognizes that there may be genres children may benefit from
being able to produce that they would not choose or even have access
to without teacher intervention (Florio-Ruane & Lensmire, 1989).
Writing workshop approaches have traditionally assumed that teacher
determination of topics and genres for student writing necessarily
undermines children's motivations to write and their development as
writers. Hogan (1987), a teacher researcher strongly influenced by
workshop approaches, argues against such a view. In her work with
college freshmen, she found that some students tended to fall back
on what they could do or knew well, and seldom challenged themselves
with new topics or forms. My work, which highlights the importance
of risk and peer influence in children's writing processes and
texts, cautions us from assuming that children are unconstrained in
their writerly decisions once teacher restrictions on topic or form
are removed. Thus, teacher-assigned genres and topics may not be
limiting, but actually expand student chances for growth in writing.

Genre studies are a new, positive development for workshop
approaches. But they also are not new at all, from the standpoint
of the purposes curriculum might serve in writing workshops. For
workshop advocates are again avoiding the content, the messages of
texts. Students have been the determiners of content in the

workshop. Teachers have been responsible for a craft curriculum,

254

for sharing tricks of the trade with young writers. The move to
genre studies simply continues this emphasis: now, part of the
curriculum teachers would be responsible for is teaching children
about formal aspects of texts and their production. This is
important, and is surely part of helping children acquire textual
power, helping them understand how texts are put together, how they
work. But what is missing is any real concern with content-~the
ideas, values, interests expressed in texts. ,Literature, and its
reading, interpretation, and criticism, must become a more important
part of workshop approaches.

It is not that literature has not been a significant part of
the curriculum of writing workshops. Graves and Calkins want
children to be surrounded by literature written by children and
adults. But for what purpose(s)? An extended quote from Graves
(1983) should help here:

At every turn the teacher seeks to have
children live the literature. The most important
living occurs at the point at which children make
literature themselves through writing.

Teachers try to make the literature ”live” by
bringing in authors, showing drafts and the
processes by which authors write. They share
their own writing and the drafts used to arrive at
final products. They read about how authors
compose, finding drafts of their work, or
statements by children's authors about how they
compose their books for children. . . . The
mystique of authorship is removed that children
may find out the beauty and depth of information
contained in literature itself. It is removed
that children might learn to think and experience
the joys of authorship themselves. (PP. 75, 76)

This quote from Graves captures some of the most progressive

aspects of writing workshop approaches. The idea that teachers

255

should ‘demystify' authorship is crucial for our attempts to help
children take on the role of author, and assert their power to shape
and order the world in that role. Graves and workshop advocates
want to share the ”beauty and depth of information” of literature,
its cognitive and aesthetic power, with children; a vision that
stands in stark contrast to the piles of worksheets children face
each day in reading and language arts classes.

But I am frustrated with Graves's discussion of literature,
here, for similar reasons that I was frustrated with Murray's (1985)
discussion of writing conferences. Writing conferences, if you
remember, were supposed to be ‘professional discussions' among
writers about ‘what works' in the texts students produce. Don't
professional writers argue about ideas, values, politics? Where is
criticism? Werkshop advocates embrace only the most limited senses
of the term--a piece's effectiveness in relation to its intentions,
or its success or failure in relation to ”literary norms of its mode
or genre” (Scholes, 1985, p. 23). Writing is a craft, granted. But
writing is also an ideological activity, in that it involves
meaning, world views, moral and political positions that select and
bend facts toward particular ends (Eagleton, 1991).

Workshop advocates sometimes make it seem as if the only reason
one would read literature is to be able to write. And this is not
so surprising, I guess. This is process writing, and literature is
used to help children with the process of writing. It inspires them
with its beauty, and then can be used to show children how to go

about the process. But this is unnecessarily limited. We read

256

books and stories for reasons other than so we can write our own.
We read to learn about ours and others worlds, for guidance in our
action, for pleasure.

Lost, then, in workshop approaches uses of literature, is any
real concern with ideas, values, and their relation to what sort of
world we hope to live in and how we want to treat and be treated by
others. Lost is any serious attention to criticism, as a ”critique
of the themes developed in a given fictional text, or a critique of
the codes themselves, out of which a given text has been
constructed” (Scholes, p. 23). Criticism involves evaluating a
text's themes and codes against a system of values. It involves
”human, ethical, and political reactions” to the meanings of texts.

A second type of collective writing project, then, is needed.
In addition to those projects, such as genre studies, focused on
helping children produce certain forms or genres of texts, children
should also have opportunities to read and write 1n_reenenee to
texts. And that response would include taking critical positions in
relation to the content of those texts. In other words, children
would read biographies not only in order to write them, or to learn
skills of the craft of writing (as important as this work is); they
would read biographies in order to write responses to the subject's
treatment of children, or critiques of the biographer's treatment of
the subject. The purpose for bringing these texts into the
classroom, for making them an important part of the curriculum, is

expressed by Grumet (1988):

257

Curriculum expresses the desire to establish
a world for children that is richer, larger, more
colorful, and more accessible than the one we have
known. (p. xii)

Writing workshop approaches have sought to enrich children's
(and teachers') lives in schools by allowing children to bring their
pulsing worlds into the mechanical, dry space. What these
approaches have largely ignored is how to enrich children's worlds
with curriculum, with texts that would enlarge, affirm, and call
into question the experiences children bring with them from family
and community. Teachers of writing should embrace the curricular
task of identifying texts upon which (and against which) children
and teachers will work. These texts would be at the center of at
least some of the collective projects children pursue in classrooms.
Other projects would focus on producing (reproducing) certain genres
and forms--as in genre studies.

Where do we get these important texts, and how do we know one
when we see one? Part of the answer for the second question rests
with who gets to say a text is important or not. Adults and
children are two groups with consequential assessments of the
relative importance of various texts, and of course, these
assessments are often at odds. One of the difficult tasks of
curriculum-making (the difficulty of which Dewey (1956)
underestimated in his Ihe_ehile_ene_the_egrrienlnn) is finding texts
that both groups deem worthy of attention and labor. I do not

underestimate the difficulty of this task, but will only note here

that workshop approaches have solved this problem by largely giving

258

responsibility over to children for selecting important texts.
These texts are drawn primarily from children's memories and
interests-~from their own experiences. But there are at least two
other sources teachers and students might draw on for important
texts. These sources are what I will call official and unofficial
canons (see Carroll, 1988, for his discussion of the unofficial
canon and its uses; his term is ‘vulgar canon').

The official canon is made up of the texts that are often
already in schools, that have already been certified as important
for children by teachers, parents, university experts, state and
federal policies, etc. This canon is represented by children's
books in the library, reading basals, and language arts, math, and
history textbooks. There are, of course, continuing struggles over
this canon on many levels within the educational system and across
society--from parent efforts to censor novels for young adults in
the library, to the adoption by teacher and administration
committees of this and not that basal series, to Hirsch (1987)
defending the story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree and the
Great Books against charges that the content of his ‘cultural
literacy' is quite white, male, and Eurocentric.

The unofficial canon is made up of texts children encounter in
their homes and on the streets--movies, cartoons, TV shows, song
lyrics, jokes, magazines, stories told them in catecisms and by
their parents and grandparents. These texts are, as Carroll (1988)
notes, often much more important to students than texts from the

official canon. It might seem strange for teachers to appropriate

259

some of these texts for the curriculum, especially if our goals are
to enlarge and transform the everyday worlds of our children--these
texts are part of the everyday. But the inclusion of texts from the
unofficial canon is important for at least three reasons.

First, these texts are important to children. TV.shows about
Freddie Kruger and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Mom's story
about accidently popping a wheelie on a motorcycle, are texts
children choose to bring into the writing workshop themselves,
exactly because these texts interest them and are important for
their experiences. This does not mean that any particular text from
the unofficial canon.will be important to all children--severa1
children in my class, for example, were much more interested in the
chapter in their science textbook on the solar system than they were
with the Ninja Turtles. Second, as unofficial texts, these texts
sometimes contain oppositional elements important for criticism of
more official ones (Shor, 1986). That is, the clash of meanings and
values that occur as unofficial and official canons are brought into
interaction has promise for helping us and children understand both
sets of texts better.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if our goal is to
enlarge and transform the worlds of children, then one of the ways
we can do this is by helping them learn to read and question the
everyday texts of the unofficial canon. Scholes (1989) provides
stunning examples of such reading and criticism in his analysis of a
beer commercial that sells its beer as we root for the black

baseball umpire in his showdown with a grizzled, white manager,

260

”because we want the system to work-~not just baseball but the whole
thing: America” (p. 123); and in his analysis of magazine
advertising that ”goes for the sexual jugular” (p. 118). My point
is that we do not want the textual power of these pervasive texts
from the unofficial canon to overpower our students. I should
emphasize, however, that we want to take a shmilar stance to the
texts of the official canon. The texts of the official canon wield
considerable textual power, particularly with the various
institutional endorsements that make them official. We do not want
children to give themselves over to these texts too quickly or too
easily--to their ‘beauty and depths of information.’ (Help the
official canon become the official ‘cannon.')

Collective writing projects with important texts as ‘problems
to be solved'--either in the production of certain genres of texts,
or in the reading, interpretation, and criticism of texts-~hold
promise for our goals of helping children empower themselves in
relation to the texts they read and.write. The expansion of the
curriculum of writing workshops to include important texts from
official and unofficial canons could enlarge children's repertoire
of forms and purposes for writing, and enrich and transform their
conceptions of themselves and the world around them. In addition to
these possible benefits, I see at least three other reasons for
considering collective writing projects.

The first is that such projects may reduce risks associated
with writing and self-exposure for student writers. Writing

workshop approaches have focused on personal narratives and topics.

261

Collective projects, while allowing for and encouraging personal
stances and individualized solutions to textual problems, would
focus on texts and their production and criticism, rather than on
children's personal lives. The risk of exposure, on some level, is
unavoidable: when we write or speak we make assertions and express
interests and values, and these can be discerned and criticized.

But in collective projects, children's gexge would be shared and
exposed, not necessarily their personal lives. Children may feel
more comfortable asserting themselves in the public spaces workshops
provide, if the demand is not made that they put so much of
themselves there. (Obviously, the study and.writing of
autobiographies, for example-~formalized personal narratives-~would
reintroduce risks related to exposure of personal material, as might
biographies of parents, relatives, etc.)

Second, there seem to be greater possibilities for
community-building in workshops with collective projects than in
workshops with individualized ones. I associate these possibilities
with the focus for children's activity that collective problems
provide. The focus on producing and/or criticizing specific texts
may lessen chances for children to turn on each other. Children's
activity can turn to many ends, some of which we want to support,
others which we do not. With collective projects, we support
certain peer relations, not by intervening at the level of outward
behavior, but at the level of curriculum, by directing their
attention to a common problem to be solved. Furthermore, collective

problems at the center of activity may mean that individual

262

contributions can ‘add up,’ contribute towards the knowledge of the
group as it tries to solve textual problems, in ways that individual
solutions to individual problems do not. There seems a better
chance that children themselves will see and acknowledge the
contributions of others when those contributions help in common
efforts to produce or respond to important texts.

Finally, and related to possibilities for community-building,
collective projects assume and project a vision of empowerment--
specifically political empowerment--that I find more in line with my
own notions of change as a product of individual and collective
struggle. Workshop advocates, when they consider the relation of
their work to larger societal and political issues (which is
virtually never for Graves and Calkins, as far as I know), tend to
conceive of change in terms of individual action and dissent.
Berlin (1988) provides a powerful reading and critique of workshop
approaches firmly embedded within what he calls an ”expressionistic
rhetoric.” He argues that this rhetoric, represented most ably by
writers such as Murray and Elbow, does provide a powerful
”denunciation of economic, political, and social pressures to
conform” (p. 486). The problem for Berlin is that while this
rhetoric champions resistance to dehumanizing forces and conditions,
it is always (and only) individual resistance:

The only hope in a society working to destroy
the uniqueness of the individual is for each of us
to assert our individuality against the tyranny of
the authoritarian corporation, state, and society.
Strategies for doing so must of course be left to

the individual, each lighting one small candle in
order to create a brighter world. (p. 487)

263

Grant Berlin his sarcasm, and his point. Workshop approaches
emphasize individual voice and projects, and, as I learned in this
third grade classroom, these projects can pursue ends in conflict
with our hopes for a classroom community in.which children respect
one another, and all children feel safe and supported in their
efforts to acquire power over the texts they read and write.
Collective classroom projects offer the possibility that children
will learn how to work together, and learn the value of such
collective efforts in solving problems that they face. I am not
envisioning some always-friendly, smooth classroom of consensus. I
am envisioning an engaged pluralistic community, in which
differences among children are learned from (not necessarily
resolved). Collective projects hold out the possibility that
children will recognize the power of joining together and sharing
their knowledge and strength; they hold out the possibility of
undermining some of the individualism and competition our schools

and society often engender.

Possibilities. I have suggested two re-visions for writing
workshop approaches: teacher response to children's texts that is
sensitive to the meanings and consequences of those texts for the
immediate classroom community, and collective projects in which the
production and criticism of important texts serves to focus children

and teachers' work in the workshop. Both re-visions call for

264

increased teacher intervention in the lives and work of children in

writing workshops.

If I erred in my attempts to influence children's writing and
peer relations in my teaching at Clifford, I erred on the side of
trying nee to overdetermine children's actions in the room. This
entailed its risks, and consequences, which I have explored in
previous chapters. But teacher moves to take greater control of the
shape and content of children's literacy work have their own
dangers. If writing is messy, purposeful, ‘novel' (Doyle, 1986)
work, then, with increased teacher control, we risk denying children
the chance to find reasons to write that motivate and sustain them,
and the space to maneuver and work out creative and divergent
responses to textual problems.

A story told.by Oliver Sacks (1990) about his early work with
patients suffering from migraine will sharpen my point and deserves

extended quotation.

My first thoughts were that migraine was a
simple pathology . . . which would require a pill,
a medication, and that the beginning and end of
medicine was to make the diagnosis and to give a
pill. But there were many patients who shock me.
One in particular was a young mathematician who
described to me how every week he had a sort of
cycle. He would start to get nervous and
irritable on Wednesday, and this would become
worse by Thursday; by Friday he could not work.
On Saturday, he was greatly agitated, and on
Sunday he would have a terrible migraine. But
then, toward afternoon, the migraine would die
away. . . . As the migraine and the tension
drained out of this man, he would feel himself
refreshed, renewed; he would feel calm and
creative. And on Sunday evening, Monday, and
Tuesday, he did original work in mathematics.
Then he would start getting irritable again.

265

When I ”cured” this man of his migraines, I
also ”cured” him of his mathematics. Along with
the pathology, the creativity also disappeared,
and this made it clear that one had to inspect the
economy of the person, the economy of this strange
cycle of illness and misery each week, culminating
in a migraine and then followed by a wonderful
transcendent sort of health and creativity. It is
not sufficient just to make a diagnosis of

' migraine and give a pill. (p. 45)

The pill I want to avoid in relation to writing workshops is
reinstating traditional teacher control over meaning and texts. One
way to stop possibly harmful elements of children's experiences and
relations from influencing the texts and processes of writing
classrooms is to relegate children's lives to the playground and the
edges of tightly-controlled classroom activities. But we must avoid

this response. Increased teacher control may discourage attempts by

children to hurt other children with the writing they do for class.
It may also discourage the writing of Ihe_§eeeng_§§eriee_gleh or

W or W. The ”teacher control” pill.
like the pill Sacks gave his patient the mathematician, may very

well cure the children's active engagement and creativity as it
cures other pathologies.

We should not give up goals of helping students develop their
voices in ways artistic and political. But we must recognize that
such goals require us, as teachers, to engage children's texts in
critically pragmatic response, in response that worries about the
cognitive, moral/political, and aesthetic consequences--for
children-- of children's texts in the classroom community. Thus

far, workshop advocates have emphasized the craft of writing and how

 

266

we as teachers can support children learning this craft. Little
consideration has been given to the content, the messages, of
children's texts.

A focus on craft, without serious consideration of the various
intentions writers pursue, and the material they appropriate and
develop, is irresponsible. It ignores the rhetorical consequences
of children's texts fe;_eh11ezen as audiences and members of a
classroom community. It also denies children, as authors, the
opportunity to engage in serious conversations about the knowledge,

beliefs, and values they draw upon and express in their texts.

My son, John Jacob, is now three years old. My experiences
with him, and my experiences as a teacher with my third grade
students in the writing workshop, have confirmed me in the belief
that children need help from adults--they need help organizing their
lives, in and out of school. But I also know that schools have
traditionally over-organized children's lives and work. ‘Writing
workshop and Freirian critiques of schooling have responded exactly
to the reduction of meaningful, complex work with texts, to dry,
routinized tasks that deaden and routinize children themselves.

What I have struggled to express here, in writing, is what my
students and I struggled for in the writing workshop: some sort of
balance. We must recognize that children need room to talk and act
in order to learn and develop. We must also recognize that

children's talk and actions can be turned to worthy and less worthy

267

ends, and that as teachers we have the responsibility to push for
worthy ones.

Worthy ones, for me, are those that envision classroom and
future communities for children in which all members participate in
the creation and recreation of the forms of life that constrain and

sustain them.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX.A

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON METHOD

APPENDIX A

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON METHOD

I was concerned that the following discussions-~of the use of
pseudonyms and the length of the study-~would disrupt the narrative of
Chapter II. Consequently, I have included them in this appendix, as a

supplement to that chapter.

The Use 0 seudon s

Pseudonyms have been used for all children, staff, and parents
who appear in my text (except for my son, John Jacob, and me).
Pseudonyms have also been used giggle reproductions of children's
original texts and other classroom documents. The procedure was to
either white-out the actual names of the participants or cover them
with a small piece of paper and then hand-write/type pseudonyms in the
blank spaces created. Photocopies of these ”original” documents were
then made.

Children often used the names of classmates and themselves in
their texts. I argue in Chapters III-VI that the meanings of
children's texts were often heavily dependent on this use of

children's names. I ”doctored” original documents in this way, then,

268

269

in order to aid readers' understanding of children's texts and my
interpretations of them.

.At times, I had to be creative in my use of pseudonyms in my text
and in quotations from my fieldnotes. For example, in Chapter VI, the
unconventional spelling of one of the children's names was important
for my interpretation of another child's story. Thus, I used an
unusual spelling of the name Jill (”Jil”), as a pseudonym throughout
my text. I also altered fieldnotes that I quote in that chapter to
fit the pseudonym-~instead of the original discussion of how the
child's actual name was unconventional, I noted how ”Jil” was spelled
with only one ”1” and how this might provide a clue to the

interpretation of another child's story.

WM

At several points in Chapters I and II, I comment that I taught
writing five days a week throughout the 1989-90 school year. I want
to provide a bit more specification of the length of the study,
however, since I do not report on the entire year's teaching in this
text.

My study focuses on the students' and my experiences of the
writing workshop. Our writing workshop ran from the beginning of the
school year (late August) through the end of March. There was one
extended break from the writing workshop during these months.
Children left for the winter holidays on December 20 and returned the

second week of January. But the workshop did not begin again until

270

the first week of February, for several reasons. I wanted to
concentrate for a few weeks on an undergraduate course for future
teachers that I was teaching at the university, and I had some writing
I wanted to finish. In addition, Grace had several weeks' worth of
standardized tests to administer in January and had been concerned
about finding time for them. Consequently, when I suggested in
December that I might not begin the workshop immediately after the
holidays, Grace readily agreed. She used writing workshop time for
these tests. She also used the break from writing workshop to catch
up in other subject areas.

Thus, the writing workshop ran for approximately five and-a half
months of the school year, and my text is based primarily in the
teaching and data collection I pursued during those months.

The workshop was officially ”shut down” just before the
children's spring break. Our work together after the break.was
organized differently than it had been in the writing workshop. In
fact, during April and May my students and I pursued what I call a
”collective writing project” in Chapter VII. Children wrote
biographies of important women in their lives (mothers, grandmothers,
aunts, teachers, etc.), after a series of experiences including
reading published biographies and interviewing women from the
community. Individual biographies were collected and published in a
volume entitled Lm2er;en§_flemen_in_Qez_Lixee. Each child received a
copy, and a copy was also given to the Clifford library--the librarian

attended our presentation of the volume to the school principal and

271

attached an official call number and check-out card to it as part of
the ceremony. Around the edges of these activities, colleagues and I
prepared for and conducted extended interviews of children. These

interviews focused on children's experiences of the writing workshop.

APPENDIX B

CHILDREN'S INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

APPENDIX B

CHILDREN'S INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

e B nd
Tell me a little about your family.

What are some things you like to do when you are not in school?
(At home, with friends, sports, etc.)

Who are the people in the class you like to be with and work
with? People you don'; like to be and work with? Why?

Do you enjoy reading? What are some of your favorite books and
authors? (After initial response, probe for in-class authors
and books if they are not mentioned initially. If they are not
mentioned initially, ask them why they didn't include them.)

What is writing?

Do you write outside of school? How often? What kind of
writing? (Stories, letters, poems, lists, etc.)

How do you feel about writing? Do you like it? Do you like
certain kinds and not others? Certain places to write and not
others? Are you a good writer? Why?

Do you ever run into any problems while you write? How do you
get ideas? What is revision? Is revising hard or easy? Does
it depend? What is editing? Is it hard or easy?’ Why?

W r ° Ge 0

Tell me about the writing workshop: What was it like?

How did you feel about the writing workshop? What did you like
most? Least? Why?

Did the writing workshop change throughout the year? If yes,
when did you like it best? (probe: What was it like then?)
When didn't you like it as much? What was different? (probe:
teacher role, student role, increased structure, rules,
specific rules, etc.)

272

 

10.

273

How was the writing workshop different from:

Science class Language
Math class Spelling
Reading class Handwriting

Do you write in these classes? How is it different? I£_£h£

eeeehe;_eiffe;en§, does s/he do different things? How? 13
How? (going after,

among other things, whether children perceive different teacher
role in workshop, and whether they think that academic tasks
are different within workshop.)

Why did you write in the workshop? Who did you write for?

Wu

What were conferences with Mr. Lensmire like? What happened in
them?

What was Mr. Lensmire trying to do in the conferences with you?
What did he say in the conferences?

If he gave you advice or a suggestion on how to make things
better, did you always follow the advice? If no, why not?
Aren't you supposed to listen to the teacher?

How did you feel about the conferences with Mr. Lensmire? Did
they help you become a better writer, improve your writing?

Did you ever have problems in the conferences with Mr.
Lensmire? What kinds of problems? Did Mr. Lensmire ever not

'understand what you were trying to do? Did he ever give you

bad advice? (probe for specific examples).

What usually happened in conferences with classmates? What
sorts of things would they say? What did you say in
conferences? '

Did you always use their advice? Why or why not?

Did peer conferences help you become a better writer? How?
Who have you conferenced with? Who did you like to conference
with? Why? Is there anyone you really don't ever want to
conference with? Why?

Have you ever had any bad experiences in conferences with
classmates? If yes, what were they? What happened?

274

Sharing
What was sharing time like? What happened?

How did you feel about sharing time?

Did everyone get to share? How did you go about getting the
chance to share? Did anyone get special privileges?

Have you ever had any bad experiences sharing?

Are there people in the class you.would rather not read your
piece in front of? Who? Why?

Winn:

Most people in the class wrote fiction (made-up stories). Why
didn't more people write about things that really happened to
them? Or things that they knew a lot about?

Who are the popular kids in class? Why are they popular? Who
are the unpopular kids in class? Why?

Did kids ever pick on each other or tease one another in the
writing workshop? How did they do it? When did they do it ~-
during the opening meeting, during writing time, during
conferences. during sharing? WM
;:3' 0". .‘ 0 Q 501‘;O.‘. ' .‘L': L; Q': '0. I_

Q-

        

What was the 'opening meeting' like in the workshop?

People often complained about the opening meeting. They would
call it the opening hour or the opening eternity. Why did
people complain or tease Mr. Lensmire? Isn't the teacher
supposed to talk a lot? Don't teachers talk a lot in other
classes?

Did you ever collaborate (write stories with another person)?
How did you do it? Did one of you dictate? Did you both try
to figure out what to say and then write it down? Did you
divide up parts? All of these at different times? Other ways?

How did you feel about collaborating? Did you like it?
Did you get to collaborate in other classes, like Language or

Science or Reading? If not, why didn't you get to collaborate?
Would you like to have?

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