Thinking Out Loud About Donald Graves' Project

Just trying to wrap my head around Graves’ vision/big picture.

It seems that, at root, in the Atkinson study, Graves’ purpose was two-fold:

• to describe children’s development as writers
• to suggest implications of their development for teaching

This quote captures it:

All during the study at Atkinson we wrote mostly about the children and how they developed as writers; I had said nothing about teaching. (“Write With the Children,” in A Researcher Learns to Write, p. 130)

To Describe Children’s Development

• our New Hampshire study of what children do when they write.
• to record the details of what children do when they write.
• a detailed study of how writers developed.
• Our research tries to make sense of that jungle by showing what the writing process is, what problems children solve when they write, and the rough orders of the writer's development.

Implications for Teaching

• We wanted our information to aid teachers to give more timely help at all stages of the writing process.

Things I’m confused about—it seems that the teachers in the school they chose had a very unique method of teaching writing BEFORE Graves arrived. In this way, he was seeing what was possible with teaching children to write—seeing a new or different or unique way. Is it possible to generalize from what he saw at Atkinson to elsewhere?

Within this very specific and unique context, he was also trying to map or understand a developmental process. But is it possible to extract a process, to remove it from the context? Graves writes:

The purpose of research is to make generalizations, to find something in one human being that can be used with another. We did come up with information that would help teachers know generally where they were with the children in the midst of the process. But as the study progressed, individual exceptions within the data increased. In short, every child had behavioral characteristics that applied to that child alone. At first I was discouraged until I realized that the deeper the data got, the more the differences would be highlighted. Every child had similarities with others, but the differences were very important.” (“Don't Underestimate What Children Can Write,” in A Researcher Learns to Write p. 169)

Individual exceptions within the data increased. The deeper the data got, the more differences would be highlighted. Every child had similarities with others, but the differences were very important. These seem like key phrases. I need to learn more about this and understand it better.

One of the depressing things about looking over our data to this point had been the incredible range of exceptions that each child presented in the study. In short, the more I focused on each child's data, the more exceptions the child presented. Somewhere around February 10 (and I didn't notice any entry about this in my journal) I suddenly realized the purpose of research. Heretofore, I had always thought that the purpose of research was to show similarities in human beings. That is, if I saw something in John, I would look to see if the same was true in Alison and Henry. After all, isn't the purpose of research to generalize? Well, it is, but that is only half the contribution to research. My big insight at this point was that research enables us to see similarities in human beings, but only as a first step to seeing the true differences that are present in every person. My hunch is that this finding is anathema to statisticians and experimentalists. Such findings (in the line of exceptions) are only seen when human beings are observed over long periods of time. I am sure that many will debate this, and the debate could be very healthy. To this point, however, this single finding about research itself is shaping more of my future views of research than any other. (from A Researcher Learns to Write p. 143)

So Graves goes to Atkinson and learns about teaching writing from this group of teachers, tries to describe how the children are learning and what they are doing, and then suggests implications for other teachers?

To ask the question: What do children do when they write? seems to beg the question: What they do when they write…what? Different genres require different processes, right? Do children write a letter to a friend the way that they write an essay about a family pet? Isn’t “what children do when they write” a highly variable activity, dependent on genre but also on the classroom conditions that structure and make possible their writing in the first place? What children do when they write is, in large part, what their teachers have told them to do, right? So if they imagine a process of choosing a topic, then that’s because they have learned to do so. If they engage in revision, the same. Is there some essence of what children do when they write? Is there some essence of development, apart from genre and context?

Other things I am thinking about:

• Writing research for non-specialists is a big priority for Graves

Furthermore, I wanted to write the report in simple, direct prose for a wide readership. (A Researcher Learns to Write p. 141) 

• Modeling his own writing process is a big priority for Graves
• Attending to methodological issues is a big priority for Graves

Traditional research in literacy has not had, however, great influence on classroom practice  because researchers have seldom looked at the classroom context in which learning takes place. As a result, teachers have had difficulty applying research findings to the problems they face each day. The proposed program will attempt to bridge the gap between the researcher and the classroom teacher. Students in the program will be expected to master not only traditional research methods, but also to learn to conduct research in naturalistic settings rather than laboratories. (from "Proposal for a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Education: Reading and Writing Instruction")