Last night, I reread the opening chapter of Calkins's The Art of Teaching Writing and immediately I had to close the book. The connections to Rancière were overwhelming. Perhaps I'm a hammer who can only see nails right now, but the parallels were undeniable. Each thinker was making a radical claim about how we should see students as equally capable from the outset, no matter their level of performance, and each writer was raising concerns about how schools can sometimes get in the way of seeing students for who they actually are. Consequently, we confront the problem of passive students who resist learning.
A quick overview of core principles for Rancière's project:
So why bring this up in a post whose title calls for the abolition of paper prompts? And how does it relate to Calkins's opening chapter in The Art of Teaching Writing?
Consider the following two quotes:
The ignorant schoolmaster exercises no relation of intelligence to intelligence. He or she is only an authority, only a will that sets the ignorant person down a path, that is to say to instigate a capacity already possessed, a capacity that every person has demonstrated by succeeding, without a teacher, at the most difficult of apprenticeships: The apprenticeship of that foreign language that is, for every child arriving in the world, called his or her mother tongue (J. Rancière's "On Ignorant Schoolmasters" from Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation).
Human beings have a deep need to represent their experience through writing... But in our schools, our students tell us they don't want to write (Lucy Calkins's The Art of Teaching Writing).
Step back for a second and observe these two fundamental truths about all humans: (1) we learned to do one of the most difficult, complex tasks without the aid of explicit, direct instruction: we learned to speak "the mother tongue" and (2) we have a deeply ingrained need to tell our stories, but schools have a way of making students forget that.
Why is there a disconnect?
Calkins makes the case that, while we're good at stimulating/motivating students to write on certain occasions, we have a much harder time "helping young people become deeply and personally involved in their writing," such that we cultivate the skills necessary for empowering lifelong writers who no longer resist the invitation to write for themselves as well as for others.
Unfortunately, much of what we do with students when it comes to writing in an academic context amounts to inauthentic writing occasions where "we set up roadblocks to stifle the natural and enduring reasons for writing, and then we complain that our students don't want to write" (Calkins 4). It becomes all the more dismal when teachers accept the students' resistance to such occasions as a natural reaction. Rancière would counter such a scenario proclaiming, "we [cannot] accept this passivity as the inevitable context of our teaching" (Calkins 4). All students, says Rancière, are equally intelligent; all students have something to say. Therefore, all students can (and want to) write.
So how do we prompt students to reawaken what we already know to be unmistakably in them, namely the desire to write?
One of the roadblocks that stifles student writing is our tendency to want "to make them into writers" - to assume they're not there yet, but a worse hindrance to our cause is a certain assumption we must unpack that often comes with the good, teacherly intention of providing students with "writing prompts." Consider what Lucy Calkins writes when reflecting on the idea of "motivating writing":
I was being patronizing. In Rancière's terms she had assumed the role of "explicator" which "stultified" any natural inclination on the part of the student to take responsibility for his/her equal capacity to say something and thereby be heard by an audience of equal intellects.
We as teachers know a lot, and can craft a plethora of paper prompts to verify it. However, "our children are no different. They, too, have rich lives. In our classrooms we can tap the human urge to write if we help students realize that their lives are worth writing about" (Calkins 6), which gets me to the title of my blog post. I need to write less paper prompts and start listening more closely to my students' uniquely rich experiences. I need to empower them to learn how to construct their own prompts, albeit ones that satisfy two demands of our vocation. First of all, students need to relate their learning to their personal experiences in ways that make it relevant for them, and secondly, they need to learn to write for informal and professional audiences that demand them to bring their experiences outside themselves and in contact with a world that's beyond their wildest imaginations. This is one way we can make a step in the right direction when it comes to getting students more deeply and personally involved in their writing, but we have to treat them as writers from the outset. It's not a goal: it's a human reality, a natural capacity akin to early language acquisition.
Someone once asked Lucy Calkins What is essential in teaching writing?, to which she responded, "For me, it is essential that children are deeply involved in writing, that they share their texts with others, and that they perceive themselves as authors" (9). I. couldn't. agree. more. We have to write a lot about things that matter to us, and we have to have authentic audiences (beyond the teacher and classroom peers), but for Rancière the third point may be the most essential: Students have to perceive themselves as authors.
When reading this, I was reminded of a passage from The Ignorant Schoolmaster where Rancière discusses the notion that all humans have the capacity to be painters (an obvious analogy to his claim about the equality of all intelligences). Provocatively, he asserts, "It's not a matter of making great painters; it's a matter of making the emancipated: people capable of saying, 'me too, I'm a painter,' a statement that contains nothing in the way of pride, only the reasonable feeling of power that belongs to any reasonable being. There is no pride in saying out loud: 'Me too, I'm a painter!' Pride consists in saying softly to others: 'You neither, you aren't a painter'" (66-67).
Me too, I'm a writer! That's what I want to hear from every student who enters my classroom. And never will I pridefully say to a student: "You know. Maybe writing is not your thing." What I will be saying more to students is write about something that matters to you. What story do you want to tell and why? But this means I need to write less paper prompts and think of ways to inspire students to frame their own questions.
A quick overview of core principles for Rancière's project:
So why bring this up in a post whose title calls for the abolition of paper prompts? And how does it relate to Calkins's opening chapter in The Art of Teaching Writing?
Consider the following two quotes:
The ignorant schoolmaster exercises no relation of intelligence to intelligence. He or she is only an authority, only a will that sets the ignorant person down a path, that is to say to instigate a capacity already possessed, a capacity that every person has demonstrated by succeeding, without a teacher, at the most difficult of apprenticeships: The apprenticeship of that foreign language that is, for every child arriving in the world, called his or her mother tongue (J. Rancière's "On Ignorant Schoolmasters" from Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation).
Human beings have a deep need to represent their experience through writing... But in our schools, our students tell us they don't want to write (Lucy Calkins's The Art of Teaching Writing).
Step back for a second and observe these two fundamental truths about all humans: (1) we learned to do one of the most difficult, complex tasks without the aid of explicit, direct instruction: we learned to speak "the mother tongue" and (2) we have a deeply ingrained need to tell our stories, but schools have a way of making students forget that.
Why is there a disconnect?
Calkins makes the case that, while we're good at stimulating/motivating students to write on certain occasions, we have a much harder time "helping young people become deeply and personally involved in their writing," such that we cultivate the skills necessary for empowering lifelong writers who no longer resist the invitation to write for themselves as well as for others.
Unfortunately, much of what we do with students when it comes to writing in an academic context amounts to inauthentic writing occasions where "we set up roadblocks to stifle the natural and enduring reasons for writing, and then we complain that our students don't want to write" (Calkins 4). It becomes all the more dismal when teachers accept the students' resistance to such occasions as a natural reaction. Rancière would counter such a scenario proclaiming, "we [cannot] accept this passivity as the inevitable context of our teaching" (Calkins 4). All students, says Rancière, are equally intelligent; all students have something to say. Therefore, all students can (and want to) write.
So how do we prompt students to reawaken what we already know to be unmistakably in them, namely the desire to write?
One of the roadblocks that stifles student writing is our tendency to want "to make them into writers" - to assume they're not there yet, but a worse hindrance to our cause is a certain assumption we must unpack that often comes with the good, teacherly intention of providing students with "writing prompts." Consider what Lucy Calkins writes when reflecting on the idea of "motivating writing":
I was being patronizing. In Rancière's terms she had assumed the role of "explicator" which "stultified" any natural inclination on the part of the student to take responsibility for his/her equal capacity to say something and thereby be heard by an audience of equal intellects.
We as teachers know a lot, and can craft a plethora of paper prompts to verify it. However, "our children are no different. They, too, have rich lives. In our classrooms we can tap the human urge to write if we help students realize that their lives are worth writing about" (Calkins 6), which gets me to the title of my blog post. I need to write less paper prompts and start listening more closely to my students' uniquely rich experiences. I need to empower them to learn how to construct their own prompts, albeit ones that satisfy two demands of our vocation. First of all, students need to relate their learning to their personal experiences in ways that make it relevant for them, and secondly, they need to learn to write for informal and professional audiences that demand them to bring their experiences outside themselves and in contact with a world that's beyond their wildest imaginations. This is one way we can make a step in the right direction when it comes to getting students more deeply and personally involved in their writing, but we have to treat them as writers from the outset. It's not a goal: it's a human reality, a natural capacity akin to early language acquisition.
Someone once asked Lucy Calkins What is essential in teaching writing?, to which she responded, "For me, it is essential that children are deeply involved in writing, that they share their texts with others, and that they perceive themselves as authors" (9). I. couldn't. agree. more. We have to write a lot about things that matter to us, and we have to have authentic audiences (beyond the teacher and classroom peers), but for Rancière the third point may be the most essential: Students have to perceive themselves as authors.
When reading this, I was reminded of a passage from The Ignorant Schoolmaster where Rancière discusses the notion that all humans have the capacity to be painters (an obvious analogy to his claim about the equality of all intelligences). Provocatively, he asserts, "It's not a matter of making great painters; it's a matter of making the emancipated: people capable of saying, 'me too, I'm a painter,' a statement that contains nothing in the way of pride, only the reasonable feeling of power that belongs to any reasonable being. There is no pride in saying out loud: 'Me too, I'm a painter!' Pride consists in saying softly to others: 'You neither, you aren't a painter'" (66-67).
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| There is no pride in saying out loud: 'Me too, I'm a painter!' Pride consists in saying softly to others: 'You neither, you aren't a painter' |
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