I would have loved to join the conversation on carnival while it was in
process, but it looks like I missed it (but no regrets, as I was engaged
in a bit of the carnivalesque with family and friends in rural Northern
Wisconsin, fueled by thankfulness to be out of the cold, good people, and
beef-birds and brandy-old-fashioneds-sweet). Just in case anyone is
interested--I wrote a piece entitled "Writing Workshops as Carnival" that
appeared in Harvard Educational Review (1994, V64n4). In it, I identify
four key features of Bakhtin's version of carnival (1. participation [versus
spectatorship], 2. free and familiar contact among people, 3. a familiar
playful relation to the world, and 4. carnival abuse or profanation),
and then look at writing workshops in schools as a form of carnival. I
argue that the metaphor of workshop-as-carnival works well in relation to
the first three features, but not the last. I also examine a shared
shortcoming in both workshop advocates' accounts of workshops and
Bakhtin's version of carnival--an uncritical populism that ignores the
ways that powerful and less powerful groups and individuals use the
openness of carnival to abuse and demonize those less well-positioned than
themselves. I use examples from my first book to show how children silence
other children in the context of the workshop-carnival.
There was a follow-up to the piece in the most recent issue of
Harvard Ed Review (in their "Correspondence" section). John Pryor and
Deborah Ball and I looked at some of the problems and promise of
carnival for thinking about education (Deborah contributing a very
interesting piece on mathematics education). John and Deborah's
comments helped me clarify for myself my sense of workshops as a site of
possibility. Advocates of progressive literacy education (such as writing
workshops and whole language--I include myself as an advocate of progressive
education, in that I am seeking to affirm, criticize, and reimagine
educational practices from 'within' this tradition) too often only point to
the positive potentials of these spaces. But as sites of possibility,
they can go in directions we do not anticipate and that we may not be able in
good faith to affirm.
Tim Lensmire
Washington University in St. Louis
(314) 935-4810