Murray's Reform Agenda

Reform:

Schools

Teaching of Writing in Schools

One of the greatest impediments to effective writing is the way writing has been taught by English teachers. Language is alive. It changes with the seasons. Grammarians try to contain it, but they can not. Language can't be imprisoned in any rule book. There is, in fact, little agreement between some of the principal rulebooks and between the teachers who use them. The writer should not follow rules, but follow language towards meaning, always seeking to understand what is appearing on the page, to see it clearly, to evaluate it clearly, for clear thinking will produce clear writing. ("Write Research To be Read," p. 112)

Framing

In the article "Write Research To be Read," Murray is trying to demonstrate the idea of write to think and he invites the reader to "Look at what is happening in these sentences from successive drafts" (104). The sentence he ends up writing or revising might make for an interesting framing devise for a chapter on reform. Here it is:

One of the principle reasons for resistance to change was the fact that teachers were teaching what they had taught before to students who had learned it before. Everyone knew what was expected of them. Classrooms had a comfortable feeling. There was efficient performance but little learning. (105)

Writing for the general public is not an art, but a craft; not a mystery, but a discipline which can be understood and learned if it is practiced. Then the results of educational research may reach the classroom and improve the education of our children. ("Write Research To be Read," p. 112)

Reform Agenda

I assume that many people in this audience are aware of my obsession with writing and my concern with teaching that began with my early discomfort in school that led to my dropping out and flunking out. My academic writing is clearly autobiographical. (207)

Meta-Reform Agenda: Teaching is an interaction which shapes human lives. Teach accordingly...

I am influenced by Pygmalion in the Classroom, a book that reports on a study in which teachers were told that student who tested poorly had tested above average. As a result of the teachers’ expectations of these poor students, they performed above average. Our terrible power is that students see themselves reflected in our eyes. Your expectations will be fulfilled: expect bad writing and you’ll get it; expect effective writing and you’ll get it. (Instructors's Manual, 6th ed of Write to Learn, p. 15)

Reform Agenda #1: Permit the Pursuit of Obsessions

Again and again she documents the importance of allowing and even cultivating the obsessive interest of a student in a limited area of study. I read that as the importance of encouraging and supporting the exploration of autobiographical themes of individual students--and the importance of allowing ourselves to explore the questions that itch our lives. 

I do not think we should move away from personal or reflective narrative in composition courses, but closer to it; i do not think we should limit reflective narrative to a single genre; i do not think we should make our students write on many different subjects, but that they write and rewrite in pursuit of those few subjects which obsess them. (215 in Newkirk/Miller)

I do not think we should make sure our students write on many different subjects, but that they write and rewrite in pursuit of those few subjects which obsess them. ("All Writing is Autobiography" p. 73)

We are all obsessed. Vera John Steiner in her marvelous book, Notebooks of the Mind, documents and celebrates the role of obsession in the creative process. We should treasure and cultivate our obsessions. We are blessed when we are driven to perform a craft that gives meaning to our lives and, possibly, to the lives of our readers. (Lit of Tom p. 233)

Writing justifies an obsession, and we all need a couple of obsessions or two. My obsession is with how writing is made, and writing allows me to explore that obsession. If sailing or eating or traveling or tennis or photography or hiking or bridge or gardening were my obsession, I would enrich my enjoyment by writing about it. (Nieman Reports, Autumn 1990)

Reform Agenda #2: Permit Writing as a Means of Empowerment (i.e. meaning-making, self-understanding), Agency, and Authority/Identity Construction

The interior view of the writing process makes it clear that the writing course should have one central purpose: to allow the student to use language to explore his world. (The Interior View, p. 24)

You have been writing in your head all your life--rehearsing a job interview, a plea to borrow your brother's car, a proposal to move in together--but you did not apply it to writing. That was my case. I thought daydreaming and night dreaming were more evidence of my stupidity. I did not value my underground river of responses to my life while I was living it. I was also guilty about the uncomfortable observations and ideas that appeared in my underground river of reflection. I certainly did not want my parents, my teachers, my friends to read my uncensored thoughts. One of the great terrors of my Baptist childhood was that God could always tune in to my brain. (Write Before Writing, p. 20)

I stimulate them to write in areas in which they are authorities. The words author and authority have an important relationship. (WTL, Instructor's Manual, p. 15)

I Write to Say I Am

Most of us feel invisible. We are not seen. We wait on tables and the diners do not see us, talking about us as if we didn't exist. When we write we become visible, we are players in the game of life. We--our writings--have to be dealt with. It is far more difficult, unfortunately, to ignore a memo, argument, proposal, published article, than it is to ignore a human being. 

The ability to collect and organize information, discover its significance and make that available to others, gives the writer significance. Through writing the writer can influence and persuade. The writer becomes a presence, existing in a way that he or she does not when silent. (Crafting a Life, p. 2-3)

See also: 

I Write to Understand My Life and I Write to Slay My Dragons and I Write to Testify 

The reasons we don't write are personal--and universal. At the same time, we feel we have something important to say and nothing important to say: Checkmate. We don't think anyone will listen, a feeling often reinforced during childhood and into professional life. This feeling of not being heard is greater for women than for men, and greater for members of racial and ethnic groups that are not part of the political-economic power structure. But all of us question our talent, our creativity, our ability to write well enough to earn a reader's attention. (11)

Some of the qualities that made me different from the people around me were my ability to be deeply involved and distantly detached simultaneously; living my life and observing it; my curiosity about others--call it gossip; my need to shape experience into a story, finding meaning in confusion; my feeling that reflection--remembered and reshaped experience--provies the true reality; my delight in word play; my obsessive need to share what I see, think, feel; my attraction to those human activities, emotions, thoughts that are not supposed to be discussed. These qualities may make me a discomforting friend or an embarrassing relative, but they also make me a writer. As writers, we should accept and develop our own individual, even eccentric, response to the world. (Crafting a Life, 24)

I have many reasons to write the personal essay: To give myself voice. I am heard when I write; I vote in the man community, registering my opinions, what I stand for, what I fear, what I stand against, what I celebrate. (Crafting a Life, p. 55)

Be demanding of your own copy but on your own terms. Realize that every time you write you are developing your own voice, your own vision of the world, your own understanding of what that vision means. Respect yourself. (CAL 142)

And I have found our students must write once they have discovered how writing makes the life they have lived, the life they are living, more meaningful. ("One Writer's Curriculum" p. 18)

Do not minimize the importance of our calling. We have a vocation, and it is to help our students discover, develop and share their individuality. It makes a difference when a person finds he or she can speak, and it makes a difference to others when they speak. Writing is a way of understanding our world and breaking out of our anonymity and isolation by sharing our diverse understandings. (WTW p. 246)

In the process of writing what isn't yet written a key turning point is when I hear a fragment of language or see an image that contains a tension, a conflict, a need, a problem, a doubt, a contradiction. In this case, the fragment was "reconciliation -- ghost." I don't know what the strange phrase meant and didn't need to. The meaning will arise from the writing. ("Reading What I Haven't Written" NERA, 2004, p. 9)--and my comment on this: Just thinking about the idea that, at root, what Donald Murray wanted a UNH writing course to be about was an opportunity for students to use writing (language) to make meaning of their lives. It’s a very humanist goal. Writing for the sake of meaning-making, not preparing for other academic classes or work. It’s not “you’re going to need this for…” It’s simply, “this is one way to live a more meaningful life.”

Reform Agenda #3: Permit Writing as a Means of Healing

The work of writing is my therapy. As I write, defining and describing my fears and joys, anxieties and satisfactions, I begin to understand them and reduce the terrors to the manageable... In writing I visit and revisit my life, living it again, and every time seeing what I did not see before. (p. 77, My Twice-Lived Life)

My writing desk is my therapist. ("Writing After a Career of Writing" p. 17 in folder Murray Personal)

Job is to Heal

She says the approach mirrors the philosophy of Donald M. Murray, a writing teacher at the University of New Hampshire. Murray considers the writing teacher to be more like a physician than a judge--his job is not to punish but to heal.

"We're trying to say to the child, 'As long as I can understand what it is you are trying to convey'--which is the purpose of wdoing the writing in the first place-- 'we can always work on it and make it in a more correct form,'" said Kennedy. ("New approach to teaching of writing," Providence Journal-Bulletin, June 17, 1987)--article in Murray news articles file.


Writing is my way of achieving moments of sanity or understanding. I came from a background that was filled with sin, guilt, and threats of Hell and damnation. I was brought up with a grandmother who was paralyzed when I was young, and it was my job when I woke up early in the morning to see if she was still alive. I was a sickly, only child in a world filled with the threat of disease and death, punishment and retribution, and much of my writing is a psychological necessity. (WTW p. 11)

My writing desk is my therapist. (Nieman Reports, Autumn 1990)

Still I am surprised at the continuing effort it takes to heal the hurts of a childhood lived so very many years ago, a past that is so painfully immediate today. (CAL 74)

Yes, I confess it, I wrote, and write, for therapy. Writing autobiography is my way of making meaning of the life I have led and am leading and may lead. (210, "All Writing is Autobiography" in N/M book)

I meet myself on the page and after decades of writing I have come to accept myself--I'd better--and in the process of writing I have learned who I am--and have found a person with whom I can live and work, a person I keep needing to rediscover. 

More than that, I have discovered my strengths are my differences. Difference is a terrible thing to a child. I hungered for acceptance, to conform, but part of me always stood apart, at the edge of the playground. My imagined or reflected life--my ability to enter the skins of others, my need to construct stories, my compulsion to live in books as much as on the street, my habit of daydreaming, my need to connect, my delight in contradiction, my love affair with language--I always thought a weakness, and so did my parents and most of my teachers. But these "weaknesses" have paid my bills and, more importantly, the opportunity to develop my "weaknesses" through writing has given me a blessed life. (Crafting a Life, p. 3)

I write to Testify

I also bear witness to the horrors of war, to the shame of describing a child who learns differently from others as "stupid," to the wonder of my unexpected life. We can bear witness for as well as against. And as writers we can do it without taking to the streets. Emily Dickinson gave witness from her secluded life in Amherst, Massachusetts. All writers have an obligation to testify what they have witnessed and to testify how they survived. 

I bear witness to how it feels to do badly in school, what it is like to have a child die before I do, how it feels to be old. We all need to tell our stories and our stories need to be told. (Crafting a Life, p. 7)

Donald Barthelme told us to "write about what you're most afraid of." When I do, I survive the terrors that silence me. (Crafting a Life, p. 56)

Writing is my therapy. (Crafting a Life p. 56)

Yes, I confess it, I wrote, and write, for therapy. Writing autobiography is my way of making meaning of the life I have led and am leading and may lead. (All Writing Is... p. 69-70)

I do not think we should move away from personal or reflective narrative in composition courses, but closer to it ("All Writing Is..." p. 73)

---

This is from Richard Wile's review of The Lively Shadow in Fourth Genre:

His voice reminds me of my favorite counselor who facilitated group discussions for grieving parents: wise, able to tell his own story of grief in a way that made the rest of us realize, OK, if he can do it, so can I. Writing 25 years after his daughter's death gives Murray the distance to look objectively at his emotions, separating them, identifying them, holding them up for observation. He wants, one feels, to learn from them, and in so doing to help other grieving parents to learn from their own stories. (190-91)

See "Why Don't You Write About It?" by Art Young, where Murray advises Young, after he's had a heart-attack, to write about his experience. WOE 17.2 p. 29.

I'm a writer. I write to save my life. Recently I've been having some emotional problems that seem to be side effects of drugs I'm taking for physical problems-typical of old people-and now I often write not to extend the scholarship in our discipline but as therapy. Mucking about in language I save my soul. ("Donald Murray Speaks!" WOE, 17.2, p. 3)

These explorations are good therapy for the writer and, if shared or published, for the reader. (Crafting, p. 57)

Wally Lamb on DMM:

The writer and writing teacher Donald Murray once noted that we write to bear witness, and in doing so, we return over and over to the themes that compel us to testify. Murray identified three themes in his fiction, poetry, and essays to which he cycled back repeatedly: the pain of having been labeled “stupid” as a boy, the horror of war (he was a combat infantryman), and the heartbreak of his child’s premature death. As I was writing We Are Water, I was not conscious that I was cycling back to material I had investigated two decades earlier in She’s Come Undone, but perhaps I needed to do so.

I write to make meaning of my life [...] Writing--in my head and on my page--is essential to my sanity in a surreal world. It gives me what theology I have. (Lit of Tom p. 227)

As you read through these quotations you will be impressed by the personal intensity of the writers. They are hanging on by their thumbs. They need to write. Their primary drive is not fame or fortune--although they will accept a generous serving of each--but a desperate need to understand themselves and their world. By writing they define themselves and make meaning of their experience. (Shoptalk, p. 1)

I am happiest when I sit alone at my desk talking to myself on the page. Writing is my way of celebrating life and my way of escaping despair. When I am having a grumpy day, it is usually because I haven't written. I can turn the day around by spending at least a few minutes lost in an evolving draft. (Shoptalk, p. 1)--use this quote with Pennebaker's research.

In school and at work writing is seen as an act of testing, the way ignorance is exposed. But writing is a way of knowing, and the knowing, the understanding, is healing. (Shoptalk, p. 2)

The following is a lovely description of the "how to" of writing to undestand/heal/make meaning that Murray provides in Shoptalk (p. 2).

Reform Agenda #4: Make Motivation a Critical Element of Writing Instruction

The writing does not have to be personal in tone or subject, but the writer's engagement with the topic should be. (Crafting a Life, p. 37).

Write what you need to write. Write to explore what you don't know and want to know. Write about what makes you laugh or cry, angry or happy, surprised or puzzled, worried or satisfied. And if none of that works, just write. The draft will tell you what you're interested in, what bugs you, what itches, what you need to know. Writing will reveal your subject. (Crafting a Life, p. 37-38)

(From WTL Instructor's Manual, p. 4)

I am weary and bored with all--myself included--who find writing a burden, a duty, an obligation, a guilt; who pity themselves for their self-imposed life sentence at writing. Writing should not be work but play. If the paper does not speak, I will not listen. (source)

Reform Agenda #5: Treat Students With Respect and Welcome Diversity

The student writer is searching for what is significant in his experience. That is what the writer does and that is what the student does. To allow this search to occur the teacher must realize that not all his students will have the same experience or find the same meaning in the same experience. What is meaningful for the student may not be meaningful for the teacher. And what the teacher believes is significant may have little significance for the student. Too often the most experimental composition course is absolutely rigid because it attempts to impose a theme on an entire class. (The Interior View, p. 25)

There is no one way to write and there is no one way for the student to learn to write. We must accept the individual student and appreciate his individualness. No class can move lock step through a writing sequence which is meaningful. The students do not start at the same place and they do not end at the same place. They do not proceed at a similar pace and they do not follow the same path through the course. A student writer may rewrite on the page or in his head; he may write slowly or swiftly; he may overwrite or underwrite. What is even more confusing, the same student writer, just like the publishing writer, may do all of these things at different times on different writing projects. (The Interior View p. 24)

The teacher may comfort and encourage the student with the information that other lonely writers have passed the same way, but the teacher should never make the student feel there is one thing to say, one way to think, one way to speak, one work pattern appropriate for every task. The learning writer should always feel he is working towards the one best way he can say what he has to say, listening to hear his own voice speaking his own meaning. (The Interior View p. 25)

We all have our English Department meeting anecdotes. One of my first was when I heard a colleague say, "We are the defenders of the humanistic faith. We must withhold our knowledge until there is a generation worthy of it." [...] Of course they are uneducated. That's why they are here. It is their job to learn and our job to teach. And to teach them we must respect their potential. (Politics of Respect, p. 1)

Our first task, if we are to build a Freshman English program, is to respect our students' potential so they can begin to believe they have potential, and through the work with us earn self-respect. If we do not respect them they will not be able to do the work that will enable them to respect themselves. (Politics of Respect 1)

We discovered, first of all, that all the predictors of success in composition--test scores, academic record, social-economic background, maturity--simply did not predict individual performance when we responded to the students individually. Our best students were sometimes our colleagues' worst students, and our colleagues' best students our worst. ("Perhaps the Professor Should Cut Class" p. 171)

Today I worry that UNH has become a school to educate the children of the middle--or upper-middle class--but it wasn't then. Most of our parents hadn't been to college or high school. Most of us, like myself, were desperate to get into the middle class. ("To Heck With Nostalgia" p. 9)

The teacher of composition should welcome an age of dissent. He should glory in diversity, and he should discover that by giving his students freedom they will accept responsibility. ("Finding Your Own Voice," p. 123)

They accept and even seek students who are uneducated; students who are slotted into remedial programs; students who do not know they have anything to say and a voice in which to say it; students who are making their second, or third, or fourth attempt at an education; students who are anxious and unsure; students who do not fit normal academic patterns. (WTW 2)

The composition profession--to its enormous credit--does not focus its energy on the elite but on those students who have often been ignored in educational systems. (WTW 2)

We do not teach writing effectively if we try to make all students and all writing the same. We must seek, nurture, develop, and reward difference. The rich diversity of our students is to our advantage. There is no single kind of person to teach, no one reason to write, no on message to deliver, no one way to write, no single standard of good writing. [...] The world is complex and diverse, and writing can thrive in such ever-changing and ever-varying soil. We should not just accept diversity but also seek it and make use of it in our writing and our teaching. (WTW p. 5)

If acceptance is hard for the writer, it is harder still for the teacher, for education is geared up for sameness. We want our students to perform to the standards of other students, to study what we plan for them to study, and to learn from it what we or our teachers learned.

Yet our students learn, at least in writing, if they experience difference. The curriculum calls for sameness, and we unleash them into an activity that produces difference.

...We must learn to accept and delight in the difference we find in our students, for surprise is the most significant element in writing. ("Writing and Teaching for Surprise" p. 7)

In closing I would like to go back over this expedition and point out some things I see that may have implications for the classroom. I expect you will see others--and not agree with all of mine. Good. My theology is based on difference. (emphasis added, "A Writer's Geography" p. 193)

See draft of "The Good Old Days Weren't" in WTW p. 36

Each class will be composed of individuals whose diversity will be a challenge and delight. The satisfactions of teaching will come as you confront and confirm that diversity, sharing with your students their excellent in hearing the voices they did not know they had rise from the page. (WTW p. 246)

He should glory in diversity, and he should discover that by giving his students freedom they will accept responsibility. ("Finding Your Own Voice" p. 123)

Reform Agenda #6: Take Pride in Our Work and Find Pleasure in Teaching Writing or, Teaching Writing is Valuable and Pleasureable Work (Empower writing teachers)

It is time to give away the secret: teaching writing is fun. 

For decades composition teachers have hidden behind the wailing wall crated by literature faculties which have complained about the burdens and frustrations of teaching composition. Their complaints are understandable. They have ben trained to teach the best writing of the centuries and then are assigned, without special training, to teaching beginning students who do not even want to write. (WTW p. 1)

But for all the scholarly apparatus there is a mood unusual in education: most of the scholars in this field delight not only in their scholarship but also in their students. (WRT 1-2)

Really, most of ch. 1 in A Writer Teaches Writing (2nd edition) is useful for this

But the composition profession--to its enormous credit--does not focus its energy on the elite but on those students who have often been ignored in educational systems. 

The reason is selfish as much as it is altruistic. Composition teachers all know the thrill of hearing--with a student--that student's voice for the first time. (WTW p. 2)

Reform Agenda #7: The Relationship Between Teachers and Students Should be Inverted

I'm thinking here of all the stuff I wrote in my autobiography about professors profess, they don't listen or follow, etc.

The best instructors you have, however, are your own students. If you get your best students--and in every class there are students who are better than others--to tell you about their writing experiences in conference and class, and by writing about these experiences, you will learn how writing is made. (Write to Learn Instructor's Manual, p. 3)

Reform Agenda #8: Don't Just Teach Students to Write, Teach them To Reflect on Their Writing (so as to Gain Greater Metacognitive Awareness About Writing)

The best instructors you have, however, are your own students. If you get your best students--and in every class there are students who are better than others--to tell you about their writing experiences in conference and class, and by writing about these experiences, you will learn how writing is made. Students may think they work instinctively, but writing is an intellectual process, and when invited to reflect, they can articulate what they have done and why. In doing so, they teach themselves, their classmates, and their instructors. (Write to Learn Instructor's Manual, p. 3)

Once I found another way to write with MY students. I had the students write a few paragraphs each week on their own writing experiences. I did the same, and we shared them. This evolving classroom textbook supplemented our other texts and allowed me to speak on the issues that are important to me as a fellow writer. (Write to Learn Instructor's Manual, p. 8)

I assign my students to write brief commentaries about their writing, saying how they wrote it and how they read it: what works and what needs work. I ask them in conference--and at workshops--to speak first, set the agenda, and talk of what they did better than last time and what they expect to do next time. When they define a writing problem, I ask them to suggest solutions. Often they share their solutions with the class. They are astonished at how much they know about writing. (Write to Learn Instructor's Manual, p. 16)

Students have to learn that they can think about writing, that they have the experience and the common sense to make use of the writing process in their own way, for their own purposes. (Instructor's Manual, WTL, p. 25)

See p. 23-27 in WTL Instructors' Manual for more on reflection/meta-cognition.

Reform Agenda #9: Teachers must be writers, too. 

I'm thinking here about Murray's disappointment and frustration that his own professors at UNH were not really writers. Bingham, hardly anything. Daggett, even Towle. Not really writers and he writes about this a bit and I need to find where. But his belief that writing teachers must be writers came early and it was personal. He was a writer and they were not, and yet they were making decisions about the teaching of writing and actually keeping him away from it (i.e. Freshman English) and that must have felt very much like a personal slight.

It is important for beginning writers to see experienced writers solving the problems they face in their own writing. (Introduction, WTL, p. 7)


Reform Agenda #10: Teach by Praise, Not By Criticism, Use Success to Teach

Find your own way but remember how we learned to walk. When we made a successful step we received laughter and applause; when we fell, laugher and just enough encouragement so that we attempted another step. Remember that as you teach yourself and your students to write. (Instructor's Manual, WTL, p. 18)

My students also discover that effective revision and editing--two separate activities and two separate chapters in this edition--are accomplished more by extending the strengths of the draft than by correcting its errors and weaknesses. "What works?" comes before "What needs work?" In the beginning, what works may be off the page, in the research or the concept; in the information; in the central tension or potential meaning of the draft; in the way it serves a reader; ints form and structure; in its evolving voice. All you need is one thing that works to know you have a writer who can write and a draft worth revision. (Instructor's Manual, WTL, p. 16)

The instructor should take advantage of a successful piece of writing by a student. At that moment the teacher should have the writer share the procedures that produced the success. This both educates the class and reinforces the positive experience of the student. (Instructor's Manual, WTL, p. 26)

...your students will teach you how to teach writing. If you continue asking your students when they write well how they did it, they will teach you how to teach. (Instructor's Manual, WTL, p. 27)

Reform Agenda #11: Invert the Tradition Way We Teach in School (i.e. replace deduction with induction)

The traditional way of teaching (i.e. Teach-Write) is to give instruction and then have the students follow that instruction. This is the normal way that all subjects are taught in school, and this text can be used with that teaching method. [...] I've just tried to read the manual for a new computer, and then use the computer. That is the normal pattern of teach-write. It works for many people, and it is no surprise that it works best for those who do well in school. Their cognitive style allows them to learn in the abstract and then put into practice what they have learned.

However, I will not learn to use the computer until i start writing on it, make a mistake and find a solution to that problem. I have to write-learn. Many of my students learn the way I do. They have to mess around in the kitchen, on the basketball court, in the shop, in the library, at the writing desk, and then learn from what they had done, what works and what doesn't work. (Instructor's Manual, WTL, p. 19-20)

Responsive Teaching, p. 20 in Instructor's Manual, WTL.

Reform Agenda #12: We Must Take Students Backstage so They Can See How Writing Is Made

Write to Learn takes the reader backstage to reveal how writing is made. (Instructor's Manual, WTL, p. 23)

Vision of Himself as a Reformer/Evangelical (self-awareness)

We escaped the Evangelical Church to become evangelicals of a different order, preaching through editorials and textbooks. (p. 226 in Newkirk/Miller)

My folks starting me out in life to be a boy evangelist. I rejected that to find myself becoming a sort of educational evangelist. (Sabbatical Report, 1969/70, p. 2)

I evangelize. I wish you failure. I hope you have not yet learned to write but are still learning. If you are confident of your craft and are writing without terror and failure, I hope you will learn how to escape your craft and write so badly you will surprise yourself with what you say and how you are saying it…. (Writer in the newsroom: A lifetime apprenticeship), link here