Constructing Trust

open to interpretation

As I browse through The Annotated Emma, Jane Austen’s novel annotated and edited by David M. Shepard, I pause longer than usual over his Notes to the Reader, where he signals plot disclosures and literary interpretations. He explains that Austen “developed … with great skill” several “mysteries … crucial to the story”, and I lean in to listen more carefully, because I have settled on this novel for an upcoming high school English course. Then I come to a complete halt, since I need to see him face to face as he tells me this: “Comments on the techniques and themes of the novel … represent the personal views and interpretations of the editor.” I realize that such a disclosure may be one of the most helpful aspects of my own instruction that I can offer to my students.

open to question

I have mentioned elsewhere how as a sophomore I asked my own teacher “How do you know?” What I was really wondering was, “What tools can I use myself to construct meaning, notice an author’s craft, or spy a symbol embedded in a landscape of detail?” I may have been curious about how much of what had been placed before us was open to question. As I design my course, it may be beneficial to students if I publish similar disclosures at the outset. I appreciate the way Shepard expresses himself, stating that while his views will “provoke disagreement”, he hopes that “in such cases the opinions expressed [will] provide useful food for thought”. And I sincerely trust that my students desire to think critically, needing only to be shown both where and how such questioning can be most productive; their questioning demands my openness to disagreements.

out of a job

I am describing a process by which students learn to be resistant readers. A full menu of theory and procedures for care and feeding of confident and resistant readers may be explored in Gordon Pradl’s Literature for Democracy. What I glean from Pradl’s work, including his NCTE session several years ago on a texts’ authority and context, is that authority, whether of a text, a teacher, or an interpretation, must be allowed to withstand scrutiny.

In a classroom, what would it look like for the teacher to invite questions about her, his, or their own interpretive process? When does a young reader become confident enough, feel free enough, to enquire of the instructor or tutor? It happens best when the younger apprentice sees themself supported by the tutor who guides, but who necessarily does not do all the leading.

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I have heard it said that teachers hope to become obsolete – once our students think, write, and read independently, there is no longer any need for us. I want to revise this commonplace. There shall always be a need for experienced readers in a community of readers. If we press toward ensuring shared authority of both co-leaders and co-learners in our interpretive communities, anyone might feel not only welcome at the conversation table, but also enfranchised: having a sense that their full participation as members of such a community is worthwhile. The conversation should feel so lively, unplanned, visceral, and thrilling that no one wants to miss the new revelations or discoveries that might happen there.

a shift in control

Where discussions are thought-provoking and texts are inviting, according to Judith A. Langer, students learn literary language, with support of a teacher, from their involvement in “discussions that matter”. The focus of the course must be on readers developing their own changing perspectives and interpretations; she argues that “a shift in control from teacher to student is a necessary first step for the social interactions to shift from recitation and guesswork (What is it the teacher wants?) to substantive thought and discussion that can extend students’ range of understanding.”

Learning to listen to students’ ideas and to base instruction on students’ responses is a difficult shift to make. (99)

What can I do in September this year to make the shift easier for my own students?

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For one thing, I can take a lesson from Shepard and demystify my own interpretive processes, by being transparent at the outset of year that my own analysis of a book such as Emma is not the content of the class; rather, their own emerging understandings will be.  I can focus less on homework and grading policies and be more upfront about shifting toward assessments and feedback designed with student thinking, social contexts, and multiple readings and texts in mind.

trust and voice

I have felt at my most vulnerable before students when sharing my writing with them: writing before them, or reading a poem or homework assignment I have written alongside them. Such openness to criticism was presumably a signal of my trust in them to be respectful of my fragile creations and ego. Yet a stronger and more intentional invitation of their trust in me would be issued by course disclosure of expectations at the outset.

A Star Is Born 2018 Trailer – at smooth.com

You have a voice. The opinions expressed here are open to question, provoking disagreements, providing food for thought. Your thoughts matters. I will support your learning purposes. The texts we explore are avenues down which we walk together. There are also some great stories here. And we will get to know some people; and wherever avenues are explored, we’ll encounter more mysteries – “mysteries crucial” to our stories.

Recommended Reading

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. 1980. Harvard University Press.

Langer, Judith A.  Envisioning Literature 2011. Teachers College (Second Edition).

Pradl, Gordon. Literature for Democracy Reading as a Social Act. 1996. Boynton/Cook [Heinemann] .

 

 

Will this be on the test?

I was momentarily stunned last week when a student voiced the desire for me to teach only what was necessary to pass the end-of-year (standardized? common assessment?) test. Because of Obama’s recent discovery that children are being over-tested, I am choosing to concentrate for a moment on this student’s request. What does it mean? 

1. Students have been brainwashed to think of learning as acquisition of facts or skills to serve as an arsenal against the day of judgment, arrows in their quiver for the last days of the year. The purpose of learning is to pass a test the teacher has neither designed nor seen. In the rare instance where I know the specific content of an end-of-year exam, I am ethically bound not to teach to that specific prompt and its text. 

2. Students have not changed since I was in college. I still recall my British History professor, Dr. Arthur Mejia, at San Francisco State, responding mid-lecture to a student’s question, “Will this be on the test?” with a well-considered look of dismay. “It’s all ONE HISTORY.” How I hope I too can shape a response with the same power. “It’s all one literature”? “It’s all one story.”? 

3. Education has reverted to the Gradgrind School of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. I am Sissy Jupe (see photo) and my students are the schoolmasters driving imagination out of the classroom. Evidently the rewards have been great enough for responding with the rote answer that a horse is a quadruped (denotative meaning) that they have bypassed any love for bread, circuses, and horses as beautiful creatures with a host of connotative resonances. [Me sneaking a photo in Dickens’s kitchen at Doughty Street] 

 Just when I thought the US-UK push for creativity, innovation, imagination, flexible mindset, individualized learning, curiosity, and inquiry must necessarily have produced a generation of young learners unique in the annals of education, I am forced to rethink my task. 

I need to acknowledge the voices filled with hope that I can prepare them for tests. But I want fill them with hope beyond tests, beyond this year, and into a distant future where they see themselves as dreamers, makers, community members, readers, writers and thinkers. 

I need to remind them that English Language Arts is a humanities class; we read and write about human beings, because people are inherently valuable. Reading, writing, and thinking about people both real and imagined offers us contact with and contemplation of lives that matter. We become more valuable, interesting, and effective persons by coming into contact with them: we are changed. 

I need to continue this conversation with colleagues at the NCTE convention in Minneapolis, including the CEL workshop. When I speak at roundtables and sessions on writing hope, establishing empathy, and close reading for “wonder and awe”, I await suggestions from participants that redeem our students from a culture of pragmatism and restore a sense of awe at beautiful language, strong characters, and words that evoke lasting imaginative impressions, whether “Fourscore and seven” or “Call me Ishmael.”

Canon of communication

Erasmus: Do you see that burning boat, the Emile?
Anthony: See it!? Its smoke is clogging (sputter!) my lungs.
E: Let’s steer toward her and offer assistance.
A: We are nearly there.
E: Ahoy, there. Is anyone hurt?
Captain: We have lost our compass, and don’t know which direction to take.
E: Whither are you bound?
C: We have been foundering on the Sea of Learning, but are destined for the School of Athens to replenish their supplies, and to carry tidings of recent innovations. To be blunt: they’re doing it all wrong.
Erasmus: Wrong? This is serious. How may we help you?
Anthony: Your vessel is taking on water. Be brief or risk losing the entire cargo.
Captain: We bear three great chests, each filled to capacity with valuable books and instruments.
E: Our boat is small, and yours will rapidly vanish beneath the waves under excess weight. Quickly explain the provisions you bear to Athens, and we shall determine which may be thrown overboard in order to save the rest and transport you to safety.
A: I see that one is stamped FRAGILE. What does it hold?
C: That most precious of cargoes is the sea chest of common core standards. We can’t get rid of them. Without such standards, each tutor in the School of Athens might be subject to her or his own whims. Aristotle, that infamous pupil of Plato, is said to have become so independent that he prefers to found his own academy on different grounds! Such independence and strong-headedness in a pupil defeats the purpose of the school. It is beneficial to require uniformity and conformity with a proper set of standards so that all the educated people of Athens may enter into dialogue about ideals, politics, religion, literature, and philosophy. In truth, there is a rising fear in Athens that if we cannot supply the relief that these standards represent, the administration risks students making their own uninformed decisions about learning, the tutors risk losing resistance to the growing student forces, and the parents — adamant that their children grow up to become well-remunerated and famed gladiators in the Arena; or masters of practical arts such as accounting and reinventing wheels — threaten to remove their children from the School of Athens and place them in trade schools!
A: Such fears are not without foundation, Erasmus. Clearly, Captain, you cannot do without that chest.
E: We shall see; it certainly appears important. What about that trunk off to the starboard, which looks a bit like a theater trunk. Are those handbills pasted on it?
C: Certainly! Handbills from recent productions of Antigone, The Frogs, Oedipus the King, and Medea. You also might see a few smudges of theatrical powder, greasepaint, and the soot from a stage explosion or two to set off the imaginations of the audience, slightly singeing the back portion of the dancers’ costumes. This trunk comes direct from the Fringe Festival at Thebes with the most recent imaginative writings, paintings, scultures, masks, and poems; traditional and recent musical instruments are included, along with plans for creating one’s own. The trunk also contains pigment, parchment, canvas, clay, textiles, and toys. Its direction label reads simply PLAY.
E: I am surprised your crew has not been tempted to open the trunk and inspect its contents to relieve the boredom of a long voyage.
A: Is that a feather boa peeking out from under the lid there?
C: May I say, sirs, the evenings do get long, and the men need a bit o’ fun. No harm done to the contents, mind you. In-tact! In-tact.
E: It certainly seems a shame to cast that trunk overboard.
A: What is in the third and last casket, over to portside?
C: It’s a bit of a jumble, really. Telescopes, lenses, magnifiers, mirrors, measuring tapes, cooking ladles, teaspoons, beakers, scales, pencils, ink. Tools for measuring the intensity of light, of color, and thickness of the blood, one’s temperament or the temperature of the air; it contains the means for assessing, exploring, experimenting, and discovering things about the material world, and even a few spells and such for transforming elements of one sort into another. TOOLS FOR DISCOVERY it’s marked.
E: It seems we have a dilemma. If any of these chests is not delivered to Athens, we risk opening a Pandora’s box, and education might run amok.
A: It is a choice between “what is important to learn”, “tools for learning”, and “imaginative play”? It seems easy to cast away the first trunk, which contains mere standards, for it is obvious to anyone that Greek, Latin, and the modern languages are the foundation of all learning. You needn’t have a box o’ books to tell you that.
C: And as to tools, Greek and Latin again, that happy couple, taught me all the grammar and logic I ever got; I put my bid in for the trunk with the instruments, though. Where would I be without my navigation equipment?
E: It doesn’t appear to have helped you in this instance. We must think quickly. What are the true essentials of learning? What can no pupil do without, if he is to learn?
A: A pair of shoes; a good meal.
C: Curiosity, an adventurous spirit!
A: The ability to make connections between the schoolroom and the real world.
C: he should know enough about the past and present to make predictions about the future–
A: …Know who we are, where we came from, where we are headed–
C: …Ancient wisdom, new ideas, the tradewinds; if there is no understanding of tradewinds, there is no commerce; without commerce, you may as well scrap any ideas of work and finance. We’d all be slaves.
E: You are saying that a kind of freedom depends on our choices here. Without freedom, students are condemned either to serve others, or to make decisions without any knowledge. Their hands would be tied. Further, certain dispositions must exist in order to learn: a pupil is fed, clothed, and curious. Which of the trunks contain apparel, nourishment, or curiosity?
C: None, I’m afraid, except PLAY. But those are only costumes.
E: And it is Curiosity that determines whether a student opens the sea chest of learning in the first place. If we could discriminate between the items in these trunks most likely to invite learners and their pedagogues to open the lids and discover for themselves….
Captain: I have it! Rename the caskets MYSTERY, PUZZLES, and DANGER!
Erasmus: You may be on to something. But we still have too much weight; you may solve the Athens problem, but not the immediate one. See those rain clouds? In a moment they will hover above both our vessels, sinking yours and drenching everything. We must get at least one trunk stowed away in our own ship or else this entire colloquy will have been pointless.
A: What if we reorganized the caskets, so that the learning standards incorporated certain tools, and play? For instance, Captain, suppose I was curious to learn how to reach the nearest shore from here. Which equipment would I require?
C: Well, the spyglass for one. And I’m not sayin’ a well-thumbed copy of the Good Book wouldn’t harm ye none. A current map, showing the reefs nearby. Some astronomy charts, and an atlas. It helps to know which way the wind is blowin’. You also want to be able to imagine yourself arrivin’ alive. That means planning out your water usage, figgerin’ out how long the journey will take. Lots of planning involved. And teamwork. You wouldn’t want to have to do it all alone.
E: What if we send only a token to Athens. A symbol of imagination, a symbol of technology, and a symbolic standard? It seems we are saying the best pupils will make what they must out of a few ideas. Necessity and curiosity will urge them to utilize any tools and talents they can bring to a problem. Won’t the tutor offer them the incentive to learn?
A: One can only hope; my own pedagogue offered me the switch more often than the carrot.
E: We might reassemble a mixture, as you say, in a single trunk, emptying the other two. What if we labeled one TRANSFORMATIONS, filling it with costumery, cookery, alchemy, metaphysics, and Ovid?
A: I see, and another DISCRIMINATIONS — filled with tools for making fine distinctions BETWEEN books, animals, stars, and trade routes? That would teach pupils to listen to senators’ arguments and determine their validity and truth.
C: But don’t you see, we would still be missing the point of it all, “Explorations!” I would include philosophy, literature, music and art, as well as shipbuilding.
E: Effective, but we are back to the problem of 3 trunks again. It seems an impossible task.

[Part 2 to follow in the next post]

WHAT PLAN WOULD YOU SUGGEST FOR SAVING THE Emile?

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