Learning to write
As a third grade student in Linda Cassidy’s inquiry-based humanities classroom, in the basement of a K-12 public school nestled between Eastern Long Island’s Moriches Bay and the potato farms of Manorville, I was offered the opportunity to write for my own enjoyment. While filling the pages of my first journal with looping, primary-school cursive — interspersed with long periods of sitting, thinking — I experienced a sense of personal freedom and flow that that was uncommon in my experience of school. And I was encouraged to bring that journal, and the sense of self-discovery that came with the experience of writing, beyond the classroom and into the world. While I may not have written more than a couple times each week, writing became personal, a part of my person, and a matter of the everyday.
So too was teaching. My father and mother, several aunts and uncles, and the closest friends of our family were all educators: when I wasn’t in a classroom during the daytime I was home overhearing conversations amongst teachers, and family and community gatherings alike found me swimming in a sea of discourse about schools. Even my parents’ five-piece wedding band was comprised entirely of teachers: after weeknight rehearsals in our basement they’d all emerge in conversation about what they’d be teaching or administrating the next morning. By age twelve I was tutoring elementary school students. And I was writing with them. The rest, as they say, is history.
Learning was the air I breathed and, over time, writing became my lungs. Immersive experiences of learning — listening to music, viewing and sketching fine art, discussing the emotional experience of a character in a novel — enlivened me. But writing about these experiences brought me into intimacy with ideas and learning such that as I set words down on paper they were integrated into my person. My recall was better when I wrote about things and looking back I realize that what I wrote about — particularly the things I chose to write about — I came to feel a sense of agency over. And though I did not realize it at the time, as I wrote, reread my words, and rewrote again and again I was becoming aware of my thoughts and my habits of mind as both became visible on the page in front of me. Across years of being encouraged to write freely, I was exposed to experiences of writing not for the sake of producing a text — but as a powerful tool for thinking, reflection, and inquiry. Writing was the place where learning and being met.
As I reread my first journal again today a sense of awareness is reignited: for many of the entries, I can recall the place I was and often the sensation of writing. And even if I do not recall the feeling of the moment, upon reading an old entry I still experience a vague sense of recognition: “I remember that person”. When I brought my experience into language through writing I was transmuting something from from immaterial to material, not known into knowing, from thinking into being. In this way, writing became a recursive process of inscribing identity. Helene Cixous’ feminist conceptions of writing perhaps reflects my experience best: “It is as if — what is imperative for me, without my formulating it — it is as if I were writing on the inside of myself. It is as if the page were really inside. The least outside possible. As close as possible to the body. As if my body enveloped my own paper” (Rootprints, 105). Or, as Paul Grosskopf wrote in his reflection on personal and transformative experiences of writing, encouraging teachers of writing to do the same:
“And if you try it yourself, even if you’re a student about to leave home for the first time, or a worker jammed down by memo wars, or a parent dealing with kids who yell all at the same time, you too may find that you can write yourself awake.”
Education, writing, and, now, writing about learning to write and learning to teach writing — all feel like home. Writing was not natural, but naturalized through a process of learning in community, in contexts that supported the integration of writing into my daily life. Through learning, writing became, in a word, a way of being (Yagelski, 2015).
But for many this is not the case.
As a full-time High School English teacher and a teacher consultant for the Capital District Writing Project over the past ten years, I have had an enduring interest in how students learn to write and how teachers learn to teach writing. I hope that students and teachers alike who feel little sense of agency in education might discover that writing is not only a way to develop a sense of agency and perhaps purpose, but a birthright in a literate, democratic society. That feeling a sense of agency and purpose in both is closer at hand than they might think. And I think that this is all dependent upon how we, as educators learn about the teaching of writing in community.
Finally, I’ve wondered often about the role of my learning to teach in my students’ experience of learning to write. As a teacher I am continually developing my understanding of writing, the teaching of writing, and how best to support students in building knowledge of, skills in, and their own understandings about writing. Over time this has necessitated that my learning be reflexive, reflective, collaborative, and responsive. Reflexive: learn about writing and the teaching of writing by doing both. I learn more deeply from reflecting on these reflexive experiences, often in writing. This recursive process is only one half of the learning, however: I learn more about the teaching of writing from my students’ experiences of writing and their feedback than I do from my own reflection — and certainly more than I do from coursework in pedagogy or journal articles written on the subject. As a teacher, I learn through my practice. This experience of learning to teach is foundational to my interest in, and approach to, research on how we learn to write and how we learn to teach writing. In 2013, I began collecting data on student writing in my classroom to discern whether or not it was related to anything I was doing as a teacher. Over the course of four years I watched how students learned (or did not learn) to talk and write about writing — specifically how they learned to offer feedback on peers’ writing — and I eventually analyzed their writing, conversations, and independent reflections on learning to offer feedback. What I found was that they possessed a treasure trove of information: they knew how and what they were, or were not, learning about learning to write. For these past few years I have been learning with my students what it means to learn how to write. And this approach to learning — side-by-side, from those-in-the-know — informs my own inquiry as a part of the ECLI.
ECLInstitute - HVWP 2019-2020 