Abdicate and Learn?

This term, my grade seven students will be reading and writing poetry in an online community of writers where they will be given electronic portfolios and encouraged to share their own poetry and participate in poetry discussions. As writers, they will receive tremendous support from an experienced and accomplished Canadian poet, Douglas Burnet Smith. He will be our Electronic Writer in Residence this year and will work one on one with each of my grade seven students by responding in detail to their creative work and answering their questions about poetry, creative writing, and the writing process in general. In short, from his office in Antigonish, Nova Scotia he will cultivate a community of poets. I am confident that his presence, although virtual, will be of immense benefit to the students and will have a strong impact on the development of their writing skills. But there is another thing that, I hope, will have a positive effect on my grade seven students. Some of my former students that I mentioned in my previous entry have agreed to participate in this creative writing community as grade nine mentors. They are no longer at my school but have expressed interest in working online with my grade seven students and helping them become stronger writers. Much like Mark Ahlness who has made it possible for his former students to return to their old community as "alumni," I, too, decided to use the energy, the enthusiasm, and the talent of my former students in the new community where they will be able to work with the Writer in Residence and over forty grade seven students.

The reason I've decided to bring in both an accomplished Canadian poet and my former students who have studied poetry with me and have demonstrated excellent writing skills is to create a climate where literacy can flourish. I know that they will enter this community as writers because that is exactly who they are. While Douglas Smith will be both an inspiring and intimidating presence, I hope that gradually, my grade seven students will see that, as a writer, he faces the same blocks and the same frustrations as they do. I am hoping that this will challenge them to function inside their zone of proximal development, which "defines those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation, functions that will mature tomorrow but are currently in an embryonic state" (Vygotsky, 1978). I am hoping that the words of Douglas Smith and of my former students can create a climate that "awakens and rouses to life those functions which are in a stage of maturing" (Vygotsky, 1978). I am hoping that the students will be motivated to write with a poet and a handful of high school students who understand what it means to nurture one's own creative, expressive, and exploratory voice.

So, the question is, How do we do it?

The answer is, quite simply, that I'm not exactly sure how this can be done. However, I am convinced of one thing - I believe that all of the above can be accomplished only if the Writer in Residence and the five grade nine students are not viewed as experts. I don't want them to enter this community and say to the sevens "I've done this before, and now I'm here to tell you everything I know." Instead, I hope that both the nines and Douglas Smith can create an environment that will help the students embrace writing not as something that is done at school but as something that is deeply personal, expressive, and human. In a community of writers, we need writers and not experts. We need inquiring voices and not voices that preach. So, I believe that both Douglas Smith and my grade nine students need their own portfolios in this community. They need their own virtual places. They need to write. The last thing I want to do is ask them to only read and critique. I believe that each participant, regardless of how old or how experienced, can contribute more by writing and engaging in conversations about writing than by merely critiquing. I want all of the participants in this creative writing community to come together through texts. I want every participant to be a writer and a reader. I hope that motivation, knowledge, and literacy will emerge through interaction with and about texts. I hope to see "cognitive apprenticeship" where students are not mere recipients of instruction but developing members whose every text helps them find their own voices (Collins, Brown, and Newman, 1989).

In other words, I want to create an environment where creative, expressive writing can flourish and where texts combine into episodes of interaction and intertextuality. At the same time, I'm trying to find a role and a place for myself. Where do I fit in? What is the role of the teacher in such an environment? What impact will it have on my presence in the classroom? Should I enter the online community of writers as one of its voices, or should I stay away? Should I try writing poetry and engaging with my students and our guests in conversations about texts?

I'm tempted to stay away from the online community and see what happens when the students interact with writers and not teachers.

On Commenting and Readerly Voice

Once again, I was forced to take a break from blogging to focus on my dissertation. I spent the last three weeks writing about my research findings. It was a great opportunity to carefully analyze all the work that my students have done and also scrutinize my own involvement and development as a teacher. Specifically, it gave me a chance to carefully analyze my personal voice that I used in the class blogosphere when commenting on student work and posting my own entries. It occurred to me that the switch from a teacherly to a personal and writerly voice was crucial in helping me not only create but also sustain my class community of bloggers. I've learned from my study that, in a blogging classroom, students learn when they are allowed the freedom to use their blogs in order to write themselves into existence as individuals. Of course, a teacher can allow that to happen only if he or she is willing to operate at the edge of incompetence, never knowing what the next day or lesson will bring. I haven't met too many teachers who embrace this sense of uncertainty and enjoy what Marie Jasinski calls "facilitating the unpredictable." We seem to think that it undermines our authority and that we are paid to know and to dispense that knowledge with confidence. Not surprisingly, giving my students the freedom to become independent writers and researchers presented me with an enormous challenge of having to redefine my own presence and my voice in the classroom. It took a lot of effort to divest myself of the teacher's voice and acquire a new one, one that helped me function more effectively as a facilitator, learner, and co-participant in the class blogosphere.

When I first tried participating as a reader, I realized that I did not know how to write like a co-participant. I found it very difficult to divest myself of the omniscient and evaluative voice of a teacher. When I first started responding to my students' creative work, I realized just how difficult this process of acquiring a new voice would be. The following is my very first comment posted in my new role as a co-participant and reader:

Vanessa, I have to agree with Jack who posted the second comment. If you were to hand this in as an assignment, I can easily see myself giving you an A+. The characters are very well-defined and the plot moves well. You should also be congratulated on how well you established the setting in the first few paragraphs. It seems very realistic and yet your description is not forced. I think it is also very effectively described through some of the dialogue. Well done!

Needless to say, I was not pleased with what I had written. While the comment is generally supportive and very positive, it is also filled with evaluative comments. There is even a reference to a specific grade! It is clear from my comment that I read Vanessa's short story as a teacher, not a reader. There is nothing here about the impact that the story had on me as a person - I remain emotionally detached, unwilling to comment on the experience of reading Vanessa's story. Implicit in this comment is the suggestion that I "know best" - I focus on literary devices, on Vanessa's technical expertise as a writer. The comment sounds as if I had composed it while looking at a rubric.

I wanted to be able to respond just like Vanessa's classmates who often included specific references to her work but also managed to do it in a more expressive, conversational, and readerly voice:

Vanessa, you already know i love this this is awesome it was so descriptive, and i felt as though i was watching the girl give herself the needle, and trying to blindly find the "items" i love the suspense factor of not knowing completely how the society works, but having little hints all along the way. keep writing!!

Or

Outstanding work! I loved the ending … especially how you just leave the reader with that last sentence … makes you think! It’s like you’re letting the reader make up his own … conclusion or point of view about the society. I like the way you introduce the father's mysterios death without putting it simply. You suggest that there's some kind of scam going on, and that James is really the only remaining person who knows about it. It grabs the reader well, gives hints toward a more dramatic story. I really am looking forward to the next chapter... i loved this one!!

Vanessa's classmates were able to convey a lot of support and, at the same time, engage in some critical analysis of her work. My attempts to do the same seemed insincere and "teacherly."

There were times, of course, when I thought that my attempts to become one of the participants in the class blogosphere were silly. "Is it really that important," I wrote in my research logbook, "to become just another reader, another voice? Isn't it also important to assert my role as that of a teacher and evaluator? Would they not benefit from my guidance and expertise, especially when it comes to writing?"

The answer, I soon learned, was "No." One of the reasons why I decided to establish a class blogging community was to get away from the "fourfold feedback" - the kind of feedback about writing that students in traditional classrooms receive from their teachers. It consists of grades, editing symbols, margin comments, and student-teacher writing conferences. In short, it's a process which encourages the student to write in accordance with the teacher's view of writing and the teacher's interpretation of a given topic. I knew that this would only undermine the class blogosphere and the sense of community that I wanted to create:

Such a process emphasizes the instructor and the instructor's reading of the text at the expense of the student and the student's reading of the text. This current-traditional approach presumes that the student learns best to write perspicaciously by following the precepts of the instructor, delivered no matter how idiosyncratically through the fourfold feedback. What this approach engenders, however, is not emulation of the instructor, but rather a sense of distance from one's own text. In the current-traditional classroom, writing is not so much to be read as to be evaluated; the effectiveness of any text lies not in the power of persuasion and description, but in its ability to trigger highly conventionalized responses from professional graders. (Barker, T & Kemp, F., 1990).

A teacherly voice can effectively stifle genuine, personal student voices. The presence of the teacher's voice reminds the students that they are writing for "an examiner audience" (Britton et al. 1975). It tends to shift the focus from reading and composing their texts to "reading" the teacher in an effort to figure out exactly how to appeal to his or her preferences and thus "do well." I realized that my students had learned how to "read" me very well and that their grades depended to a large degree not on what they had learned but on how well they had learned to "read" my idiosyncrasies as a teacher and marker. When reading the teacher becomes more important than reading one's own text, education begins to stifle and not empower.

It was crucial, then, to stop using my teacherly voice and learn to enter the community as a co-participant. Of course, as I found out, it is virtually impossible to outgrow the teacherly voice. It is, however, possible to modify it substantially so that it empowers students to see themselves as writers and contributors, as individuals with unique ideas. I wanted the students to assume the responsibility for generating ideas, expressing their opinions, exchanging views, evaluating them and collaborating to create knowledge. Knowing that a teacherly voice would seriously hamper these efforts, I continued to practice my new voice.

While the initial attempts, much like the comment quoted above, seemed artificial, I gradually developed a more personal and personable voice. I continued to reveal my personality and comment as a reader, as a human being who experienced the writing and not as a teacher who merely reacted to it:

I was reminded of my own childhood when I read your poem. You used very descriptive language and the metaphors make your description truly magnificent – very visual. There are specific images here, such as the bicycle and the fishing rod, that I can almost remember seeing when I was a child. I think it’s very difficult to write a poem in which the reader can see so much of his own life and you did it! You have really grown as a writer! This is an outstanding poem! I’m sure everyone else will agree!

Or:

I felt really sad when I read the stanza about the church. It reminded me of my uncle's death. I remember that it was a rainy day and everything around me - the traffic, my family members, the echo inside the chapel - all seemed somehow muffled and very distant. I guess I was just as absorbed in the situation as the girl in your poem. You conveyed that sense of quiet emptiness so well. If you look at some of the other comments here you'll see that this magnificent detail in your poem had a strong impact on most of your readers. You crafted it very well.

Of course, it would be incorrect to claim that my students ever stopped seeing me as their teacher. It would also be incorrect to claim that I have learned everything there is to learn about becoming a teacher-participant. However, I think I can safely conclude that the new readerly voice that I developed has enriched my experience as a teacher and allowed my students to understand that our classroom discourse includes all writing - not just formal and transactional but also creative, expressive, and conversational.

Notes:

Barker, T. & Kemp, F. (1990). Network Theory: A postmodern pedagogy for the writing classroom. In Handa, C. (Ed.). Computers and Community. Teaching composition in the twenty-first century. (pp. 1-27). New York: Boynton/Cook.

Britton, J. et al. (1975). The development of writing abilities (11- 18). London: Macmillan.

Progressive Discourse Revisited

I received a number of e-mails and comments in response to my entry on Progressive Discourse. Some asked if I could offer an explanation as to why the students switched into the progressive discourse mode. I've been thinking about the reason why it happened and I believe that it had to do with three things: the transformation that I went through as a teacher, dialogical understanding of texts, and writing as the act of community creation. Let me explain. Teacher as Learner

Learning to transform my classroom practice was very difficult and I certainly don't want to sound like someone who believes he has mastered this difficult new role of a teacher in a networked environment. I think I did well but I still have a lot to learn about what it means to be "dethroned" by a community of bloggers. It was a very difficult process and had a profound impact on my understanding of professional development. I had to learn how to learn with my students, how to become a learner and, yes, how to stop teaching. When I say stop teaching, I, of course, refer to the transmission mode of teaching. I was still teaching as a learner/participant but it was very different.

It started with facilitation. I spent a lot of time guiding and assisting my students. This involved class discussions about individual posts and blogs as well as conversations that began to develop in response to specific entries. Gradually, however, I began to realize that I needed to become more than a facilitator (hence my previous entry) and tried to enter the community as a learner, writer, and contributor. This proved to be very difficult because I did not want my students to know that I also had gaps in my knowledge and that, as an individual, I also wanted to spend some time reading and writing about topics that we were exploring - that I didn't have all the answers.

It was difficult not because of my students (who, by the way, thought it was the most natural thing to do) but because I kept thinking that by engaging myself in the process of learning I was neglecting the class. I thought that it was irresponsible to read and post about the Potsdam Conference, for example, while my students worked (seemingly) unsupervised. I abandoned many drafts of my own entries just because I felt the need to "move around" in the class blogosphere, to see what the students were doing, to comment, assist, and oversee. It took me a while to realize that I could contribute more as a learner than in my capacity as a teacher. It gave me an opportunity to immerse myself in the cognitive current that my students had created through the simple act of writing to learn. I found myself linking to their work, while my own entries, filled with links to numerous online resources, showed them one possible way of cognitive engagement with the chosen topic. In some cases, the work of my students aligned so closely with my own interests that an interesting partnership was formed whereby we learned from and through each other's writing. I was able to model reflective thinking and writing, and I saw that many of them followed my example. I did not know it at the time but I now realize that by entering the community as a participant, I was setting the stage for semantic apprenticeship or "instructional conversation" - a dialogic process of meaning-making that emerges from the student's engagement with a particular task.

The Role of Texts

The second reason why I think the class eventually switched to the progressive discourse mode was our new understanding of texts. My challenge was to create an environment whose structure would make it easy for my students to see that every text is, as Gregory Clark argues,

suspended in an exchange of texts in which it contributes to the collaborative process through which the knowledge that constitutes the community that comprises its writer and readers is continually reconstructed (Clark 1990, 68).

I also wanted my students to understand and see through everyday interactions that writing and reading are not private acts and that

every text is necessarily public and political as it contributes to the perpetual process in which the values and beliefs that sustain community life are modified and revised, that writing and reading are both public acts that carry with them significant social responsibility (Clark 1990, 69).

In short, I wanted to create a community that would instill in my students the understanding that texts are dialogical, that they construct social knowledge, and that texts are never individual in nature but are threads in a complex fabric of social interactions. The role of the student in this space changed from that of an “imitative apprentice to that of critical collaborator” (Clark 1990, 69). In short, there was a strong emphasis on reflection, questioning, and conversation.

Writing Ourselves into Existence

Finally, I need to stress that as a group we had a clear purpose and that, in my opinion, is what really helped us see ourselves as a community of learners. This community emerged not because we were all writing together in the same online space. It did not emerge because some of our interests happened to coincide. The community emerged because there was one overriding purpose - to learn more about the key themes of the course. The purpose was to build and contribute knowledge, to learn together - engage in the process of "purposefully knowing together" (Wells & Haneda, 2000).

This ongoing exchange of ideas (centred around one clear, collective goal) helped all of us see that we were contributing to a larger whole. This was not in addition to class work or some preconceived, carefully delineated curriculum. No. This mesh of interactions was the curriculum. Unlike the environment in a typical LMS where the discussion forum is an additional space where students can interact, this community was written into existence by contributions made by every single student. This was our space. There was nothing else; no resource collections or teacher-generated lesson plans. It started with an idea which grew through individual contributions and a growing network of interactions.

Notes:

Clark, G. (1990). Dialogue, dialectic, and conversation. A social perspective on the function of writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Haneda, M & Wells, G. (2000). "Writing in knowledge-building communities." Research in the teaching of English, 34 (3), 430-457. (PDF available here).