Freedom, creating possibility, to open up space (not pushing back)--but making other ideas possible or permissible.
Trying to understand things through the eyes...
Productive skepticism
other ways to do it... people doing other things...
balance between an argument and narrative
On Pushing Back
Was Tom’s book More than Stories, in which he made the claim
that young children were capable of more than expressive and narrative writing
one of the first times he made this move of taking accepted wisdom and
challenging it and offering different ways to think about a concept or
phenomenon (what he likes to call “opening up”)?
An observation: Newkirk pushes back from within and from
without. For example, in essays like “Popular Culture and Writing Development,”
“Sentimental Journeys” “The Dogma of Transformation,” “Selfhood and the
Personal Essay,” he pushes back from within the tribe of writing educators,
encouraging us to take another look at the things we take for granted. In much
of his late-career work, but in his earlier years, as well, Newkirk pushes back
from without—against, for example, education reform, education research, etc.
It’s interesting to think about the WAYS that he does this similar work
differently, from within and without…
---
In "Unbalanced Literacy: Reflections on the Common Core" Newkirk writes,
Liben began his session by establishing the ground rules for
con- structing these questions:
[Mr. Liben] reminded the participants that the common
standards “virtually eliminate text-to-self connections,” meaning they focus on
getting students to gure out what the text means, rather than how they feel
about it. That, he said, better prepares them for college and jobs.
“In college and careers, no one cares about how you feel,” Mr.
Liben said. (p. 20)
The splitting of “meaning” and “feeling,” especially when
discussing a poem, is deeply troubling. A poem evokes feeling—that is one of
the major reasons we read them. Understanding a poem is surely analyzing
that evocation, that response. In fact, John Dewey (1910) claims that all
analytic thought begins in a “felt dificulty” (p. 72).
Might this be a useful tool for writing about Tom's writing? The Dewey resource? This is the source:
Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston, MA: D. C.
Heath.
From “Speaking Up and Talking Back”
When we speak up, we disrupt a seeming consensus—an
expectation that we are in agreement, that we are on the same team, on the same
page.
To speak up violates a desire, which I think we all have, to
be cooperative human beings, to perform in an agreed-on way.
When I
speak up, when I say, “It will be a mistake if we go in this direction,” I have
come to realize that people in the room don’t think I’m a bad person, although
possibly they think I’m an annoying one. In fact, it may open up space for them.
I often don’t carry the day, but I have come to feel better in the long
run.
Open any newspaper and you are likely to find a story of some school whose students have read a million, two million—some big number of pages. As a payoff, the teachers wear pajamas for a day, or the principal shaves his head or agrees to eat worms, a reward to the delighted students. Then Pizza Hut or some other franchise that sponsored the event hands out coupons for nonnutritious food to the voracious readers.
It's all great fun, a good story, a terrific photo op. But something bothers me about this picture—it's as though reading has become a form of fast food to consume as quickly as possible, just one more cultural celebration of speed.
I'd like to explore what we miss when we define good reading as fast reading and to argue for what Ellin Keene has called "dwelling" in the texts we read.
This association of good reading with speed permeates our schools, from the hugely popular Accelerated Reading Program, to "nonsense word fluency" tests in which young children have to decode "words" at a rate of more than one per second, to standardized tests in which reading is always "on the clock." To be quick is to be smart; to be slow is to be stupid.
From "Looking for Trouble: A Way to Unmask Our Readings" (1984)
The past decade has seen an attack on the myth of the inspired writer.
Less attention has been given to myths of "inspired reading." (756) ... So long as the process of interpretation is unrevealed, myths of inspiration can persist; students will claim that they cannot read poetry because they are not good at getting hidden meanings. (756)
The conventional wisdom is that we employ radically different reading skills when we read (or write) texts that are variously called informational, analytic, or argumentative— indeed, that moving toward these texts (and away from narrative) should be a feature of high school and college reading. The clear message in the common core literacy standards is that narrative reading is to be reduced in the upper grades and that college-ready students need to master the more demanding tasks of reading texts that are not narrative (see Coleman & Pimental, 2011)...
But when I read the best analytic writing—the work of Michael Pollan, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Jay Gould, Jonah Lehrer, Elizabeth Kolbert, my favorite columnists, even Plato for that matter—it often feels like a story to me. The writing unfolds. I enjoy the playing out of ideas and positions, the ways they conflict, the ways questions are raised and explored—the way they are narrated.
So here is my modest proposition—that narrative is the deep structure of all good writing.
All good writing. We struggle with writers who dispense with narrative form and simply present information because we are given no frame for comprehension.
So rather than pretending to move beyond narrative, we should be teaching students how it works in their reading— and how to employ narrative in their writing.
It is a truism that we read informational writing for ... information. It is the antithesis to literary reading. It is the sober, rational, practical, and duller older brother. In the classification schemes of the most respected literacy educators— Louise Rosenblatt (1994), for example—informational reading is "efferent" and functional, a carrying away, in this case, of information. We build our store of knowledge with it.
But my own reading of excellent nonfiction doesn't work that way.
Take, for example...
From "Archimedes' Dream" (1984)
A number of recent studies (Bissex 1980; Gunlach 1982; Taylor 1983) that examine children's writing in home settings have documented the pervasiveness of this type of discourse. These studies raise questions about longstanding assumptions concerning the development of written language, particularly those of James Britton and his colleagues at the University of London.
I will examine two of these assumptions, testing them against the spontaneous writing my daughter produced at home between the ages of five and six years, a collection of signs, letters, notes, lists, stories, and badges, 130 pieces of writing in all, totaling approximately fourteen hundred words. This body of writing will be used to test two assumptions:
1. Children's early writing is relatively undifferentiated in function...Early undifferentiated writing is "expressive" and resembles "written down speech.";
My examination of Sarah's writing does not support Britton's contention that children's early writing is undifferentiated as to function. Even within the category of conative writing, Sarah is able to write for a variety of purposes and shows some awareness of the appropriate conventions for each. She lacks the skill and range of a mature writer, but it is misleading to suggest that she is not making distinctions concerning the function of written language. (344)
While Sarah draws on the oral language around her, a more powerful resource seems to be the "demonstrations" of written language that she imitates and appropriates. She is particularly attuned to demonstrations that show the power of written language to control behavior. (345)
2. The primary starting point for young writers is the story; children who learn to write between the ages of five and six do so by writing stories (341).
Britton (1982) has recently claimed that he was aware of no case where a five or six year old learned to write by writing anything other than stories. Yet only 7 of the 130 pieces of writing Sarah produced were stories - even though she's been read bedtime stories every night since she was two. Other researchers who have examined early literacy in home settings (Bissex 1980; Gunlach 1982; Harste, Burke, and Woodward 1983; Taylor 1983) provide conclusive evidence that children learn to write by attempting a wide range of functions and genres and not exclusively by writing stories. (346)
Britton's claim for the primacy of the story fits more closely with reading and writing instruction in schools. Students learn to read by reading stories; they learn to write by writing stories. Should they need help getting started with their writing they are given story starters (but never argument starters). The road to literacy, they soon learn, is paved with narratives.
It is little wonder, then, that young students consistently write narratives when given a choice. As insightful learners, they perceive the narrative as the expected mode of discourse in the school setting - and they meet that expectation. They avoid persuasive writing not because they are suddenly "developmentally unready" for it or because they are suddenly uninterested in using language to change belief and behavior. (346)
THE POINT: If written persuasion is to flourish in the elementary school we also need a better understanding of how persuasive ability develops. I have tried to argue that early persuasion grows out of the regulative language the child learns from environmental sources and that regulative language shifts to persuasive language as children begin to use the etiquette of the request and to give reasons. (349)
THE LARGER POINT: But no argument for persuasive writing in the elementary school can rest solely or substantially on its value in preparing students for high school writing. Too many sins have been justified in that way. Persuasive writing is as much the "language of being and becoming" as the story writing so highly valued by Britton and his colleagues. We learn who we are, in part, by learning what we can do, by learning how we can "disturb the universe." Persuasive writing is not a concession to the demands of society, but a way of establishing our social identities. (349-350)
From "Sentimental Journeys: Anti Romanticism and Academic Identity"
I want to stress my thesis that
we academics pay a huge price for this "othering" of sentimentality. We can lose touch with the way discourse operates in the wider culture and, most tellingly, fail to recognize how it operates in our own lives once we leave our offices and listen to the radio or attend the graduations of our children. Our allegiance to the Doubting Game can leave us alienated not only from popular culture, but from our own emotional responsiveness. (25)
To this point I have tried to suggest, if not thoroughly argue, that the culture of English Studies creates its own sense of elitism and professionalism by treating as a defective "other" the popular discourses—particularly sentimental discourse—in the wider culture. (28)
From "Literacy and Loneliness"
(here, it seems that Tom is asking folks who are "readers" to try to imagine the experience of non-readers and to understand their experience of reading and how it is different...and to consider the implications accordingly)
“Literacy and Loneliness”
Loneliness, it seems to me, is too rarely considered in
discussions of literacy. Most of those who hold the floor are, obviously,
committed readers who have difficulty understanding the resistance of most of
the population to an activity we find intensely appealing. (65)
Nothing seems more unnatural to the nonreader than the
isolation reading seems to demand. To concentrate, a reader of longer texts
must have relative quiet, uninterrupted stretches of time. If we are in the
presence of others we expect them to respect the private space we have created,
something the young child does not understand when she pulls the newspaper
down. While many of us have come to love this private space, many others, and
not just children, find this isolation difficult, unnatural, and ungregarious. (65)
What, after all, does a reader reveal? Virtually nothing.
The reader is a picture of immobility. She is motionless, not even the
occasional twitches or tap pings that most humans need to maintain attention
when they are sitting for long periods of time. Only the turning of pages every
couple of minutes. The reader’s face is impassive — there are no noticeable
signs of response, no laughter, rarely even a slight smile. And what is it that
so stills this reading figure; printed words, thousands of them, maybe forty or
fifty lines per page, also immobile. No pictures, no sound, no color. Endless
combinations of 26 letters. And in this almost complete absence of stimulation,
the reader can remain for hours at a time. (67)
The great dividing line between reader and nonreader may be
more than what are considered skills; rather, readers know what it feels like
to enter a state of engagement, and they want to reenter it as often as they
can. The nonreader is mystified by the attraction of reading, having never
felt it. It would seem to follow that the goal of reading instruction is not
the mastery of specific texts, but that of enabling students to enter the
reading state. (68)
Few areas of education have been studied as relentlessly as
reading. A research industry has been at work now for almost a century, and one
might imagine the reading act to be transparently exposed by now. Yet for many
students the very attraction of sustained reading is baffling. Nonreaders see
it as a form of isolation and immobility that runs counter to every social
instinct they possess. It calls for an unimaginable disciplining of the body;
consequently, it’s the perfect tool for a school system which must keep them
still. Exhortations that equate reading with job success, civic duty, or
cultural patriotism are not likely to be convincing in the long run. The
transformation will not come from dubious elitist claims that reading makes us
better, more sensitive people. Instead, the habit of reading comes from the
desire to enter and reenter a state of attention, from the pleasure we gain in
the encounters with characters and storytellers who become as real, sometimes
more real, than actual people we know. It is not, after all, a lonely act. (69)
From “Popular Culture and Writing Development” (2007)
…this essay will examine two legacies of that work—an
anti-developmental bias and a resistance to the visually mediated narratives of
popular culture. I will try to identify adult-centric, often gendered
expectations for “good writing” that underlie much current writing pedagogy.
(540)
…by failing to even engage the issue of popular culture in
children’s lives (and literacies)… (543)
Popular culture is the “elephant in the room,” the presence
that cannot ultimately be ignored by literacy teachers. (544)
Essentially, Lucy Calkins’ vision of literacy instruction
comes in for criticism, Ann Dyson is praised, and newkirk asks us to confront
and consider the “elephant in the room” of popular culture in literacy
instruction…
Did Calkins or Dyson respond to this article and if so, how?
From “Speaking Back to the Common Core” (2013 post-script in Holding Onto Good Ideas…)
But I’m left with the question: Who watches the watcher? Who
assesses the assessor? That’s our job. We’ve come too far, learned too much,
invented too much to diminish our practice by one iota to accommodate the
Common Core. When and if we see it impeding our best work, it is not too late
to speak up.
In a democracy it is never too
late to speak back, to question, to criticize. As Martin Luther King Jr. argued
in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” it is never “untimely.” We simply
cannot give up our democratic birthright and settle into compliance, not on
something this important. We need to pierce the aura of inevitability that
promoters have woven around the Common Core. We have to “follow the money” and
ask who benefits financially from this initiative (especially important
considering the financial scandals that occurred with Reading First several
years ago). We need to ask about the role of unaccountable think tanks, testing
agencies, and foundations in driving this initiative—have we outsourced reform?
We have to determine what value to place on local control and teacher decision
making. We have to ask about the usefulness of the “data” that tests provide
and whether these data may be crowding out the richer, contextual observations
of teachers. And we have to look at the limitations of tests them- selves, what
they can illuminate and what they must ignore. Can they test the complex,
integrated, and creative skills that students will truly need—not only to be
better workers but more fully realized human beings? (6-7)
From “The New Writing Assessments: Where are they Leading Us?”
It and the other
state-mandated writing assessments are also intended as a message to
high schools about
the importance of writing instruction. It is worth asking, then, what kind of
message these assessments will send. What kind of writing will they promote?
(21)
One unintended
consequence of the new SAT writing section may be this reversion to an outdated
view of reality, a hyperstable, universalized view of human experience that has
been under attack for the last century. It is a form of assertion that simply
no longer rings true (and that will be hammered by college writing teachers). (22)
George Hillocks Jr.
has shown that another persistent problem with these types of prompts concerns
evidence--the writer must
develop instances or examples to be used for support.
(22)
My more reasonable,
judicious, sensible colleagues point out that this new attention to writing is
healthy, that teachers who had avoided writing will no longer be able to do so.
They say writing prompts are not all bad. They remind me that there is a place
for formulaic writing. They encourage me to sympathize with the difficulty of
developing these writing tests. They say that the ETS is being a responsible
force for educational improvement.
I'm taking the opposite position, though you'll excuse me if I invent the
evidence for my case. (22)
From “A Mania for Rubrics”
This movie's warning is relevant today because we are now in
the middle of a resurgence of mechanical instruction in writing. Driven by
state testing, teachers are being pulled toward prompt-and-rubric teaching that bypasses the
human act of composing and the human gesture of response.
The crux of the issue is this: Do rubrics clarify the process of sensitive response? Or do they
distort, obscure, or mystify that response? And to answer that question, we
need to think carefully about what we do when we read student work (when we are
at our best)--and what we want from an evaluator.
Rather than reveal processes like the one I have described, rubrics conceal or mystify them…Rubrics fail to provide a
demonstration of the reading process that can later be internalized by the
writer.
From “Teachers: Know When
to Stop Talking”
When students do speak, there is often a recitation pattern
that goes like this: (1) Teacher asks question; (2) student is recognized by
the teacher; (3) student answers; and (4) teacher evaluates the answer of the
student. Then on to the next question, the next student.
So what is wrong with this picture? This pattern works if
the purpose of classroom talk is to have students share fully formulated
responses—and to be judged by the teacher. But this doesn’t work if the purpose
of talk is to develop that response. The response can convey understanding, but
it can’t create understanding.
How many of us, after all, say what we
really want to say on
the first try? Rather,
exploratory talk loops back again and again,
as we
formulate a thought, refine it, extend it, and complicate it. It’s messy. And
we usually do this exploration in the presence of a sympathetic and interested
audience that is not pressed for time. In this inviting space, our memory seems
to work better—details are recalled, stories and other points of view
mysteriously become available. That’s the gift of talk.
But teaching, I am convinced, is not about us being
brilliant; it is about students being brilliant. It’s about them, after all.
And the only way they can do this is to give them that generous gift of time
and receptivity. There are few generalizations that hold for all good teachers,
but I will hazard this one: Good teachers never appear rushed. Or make students
feel rushed.
So, in this age of high-tech and expensive teaching
programs, let me offer up this simple and powerful intervention: the blank
turn. It costs us nothing but our attention. It is built on the rock-solid
principle that we need talk, and a receptive audience, to build understanding
and to know what we know.
From "Unbalanced Literacy: Reflections on the Common Core"
Here, Tom pushes back against two concepts:
Text Dependency: the expectation that readers stay within the “four corners of the text,” at least in initial readings. The focus should be on “the text itself,” and readers should avoid making judgments, personal associations, or impressions—all of which take attention away from the text and bring in outside information.
Text Complexity: a
measure of the difficulty a text poses for a reader. As de ned by the CCSS, it
has three components: the nature of the text (e.g., the demands of modern
poetry); the appropriateness of the text for the reader; and language features
that can be quantified in lexile levels. Lexile levels are given great
importance in the CCSS, thus increasing complexity expectations dramatically
for elementary-age students.
His argument:
I won’t mince words here—I believe that the ELA CCSS, particularly as proponents want them implemented, constitute an imbalanced intrusion into literacy edu- cation. They depart from a robust transactional view of reading, and they set standards nearly as unre- alistic as the “100% pro cient” expectation of No Child Left Behind. (305)
