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Content-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.950912200858.20375B who-is-at tortoise>
Hi Mike and fellow MCA members,
On Tue, 12 Sep 1995, Mike Cole wrote:
> Angel-- Why not send that review to MCA? One of the goals of xmca is
> to provide a productive cross-fertilization of ideas mixing print
> and electronic media. This seems like an obvious example of a natural
> synergism.
> mike
Thanks Mike for the suggestion; I'm now attaching below my review; it's 8
pages single-spaced with tables. I will be very happy to have your
feedback and comments!
Best wishes,
Angel
*****************************************************************
Angel M.Y. Lin
Doctoral Candidate
Modern Language Centre
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada
E-Mail: MYLIN who-is-at OISE.ON.CA
*******************************************************************
The Child-in-the-World-With-Others: Re-Visioning Lensmire's
Critical Re-Visions of the Writing Workshop
Copyright (c) Angel M.Y. Lin
1995
A book review of: Lensmire, T.J. (1994). When Children Write:
Critical Re-Visions of the Writing Workshop. New York: Columbia
University Teachers College Press.
Introduction
What Lensmire's "When Children Write" does to progressive models
of education parallels what William Golding's "Lord of the Flies"
does to eighteenth century romantic models of children as
innocent beings who would flourish into creative beings fully
actualizing their potential and living in harmony and bliss with
one another if only they are left to grow on their own, rid of
the suffocating control and influence of domineering adults and
their corrupted civilization... (e.g., Rousseau's notion of the
"noble savage").
The ethnographic account provided by Lensmire as a teacher-
researcher and participant-observer documenting and critically
reflecting on his own experience of running a progressive writing
workshop with a class of third graders for one school year is
compelling and ultimately profoundly disturbing. As the account
gradually unfolds, the reader is led closer and closer to the
final stark picture which Lensmire forebodes early on with the
sentence, "Everything, in the end, is not for the best" (p. 2).
The book certainly will not make comfortable reading for the
marsh-mallow-minded, or those who refuse to take up the challenge
of striving to understand these at once excitingly and
disturbingly complex beings called humans.
In this respect, Lensmire's candor and both intellectual and
moral courage must be commended. Here, we see how a responsible,
critically reflective individual--an educational theorist and
practitioner at once--struggles in his own physically exhausting,
psychologically depressing, and intellectually disturbing journey
of discovery of the complex, social realities of the writing
workshop which he himself plays an important part in both
bringing into existence and sustaining.
A Methodological Caveat: Warrants for the Claims Made By a
Participant-Observer/Teacher-Researcher
However, some critical readers may ask: Why should we believe in
Lensmire's account of workshop life? Lensmire himself seems at
times to be apologetic about the possibility of not being able to
remain "descriptive" and talks of how he comes to overcome his
problem of tending to shift to write "reflective", "teacherly"
notes when he should have been writing "descriptive",
"researcherly" notes (pp. 34-36). His solution is to collect daily
"packets of data" (e.g., teacher planning notes;
fieldnotes; audiotapes of conferences, sharing time and lessons,
students' texts) which are to be analyzed later and to fill in
the gaps and provide multiple sources of data for a better
understanding of "what was happening in the room" (pp. 36-37).
In this way, he says he can free himself daily to concentrate
more on teaching and writing teacherly notes.
Throughout Lensmire's account in the rest of the book, his
"packets of data" do often come in helpful by serving as concrete
(and at least partial) evidence of some of the claims that he
wishes to make, e.g., pp. 108-109: comparing William's
illustrated text with Carol's to show that William's text does
not have any classmates' names while Carol's does. He goes on to
suggest this as an example of the contrast between low status
students and high status students in the class: low status
students tend not to make themselves or their classmates
characters of their stories. The warrant for claiming William to
be a "low status student" (and also Carol and her characters as
"high status students"), however, has not been explicitly
provided. Nevertheless, we get a sense from Lensmire's narrative
that his ability to tell which student is high or low status
comes from his day-to-day observations of which students appear
to him to be popular among most other students in class.
Besides, Lensmire has also collected audiotapes of interviews
with individual children conducted by other colleagues.
Sometimes he makes claims that are based on correlating the
residential membership of the child with what the child tells the
interviewer, e.g., Robert comes from the trailer park; he tells
in the interview that he would conference with only some
classmates because he thinks they wouldn't tell other people
while others would tease him (p. 81). These trusted friends of
Robert also happen to have come from the trailer park. Lensmire
thus claims that children living in the trailer park tend not to
trust those living in a better residential area (and vice versa,
also drawing on interview data from the well-off kids). Here,
again the critical reader can charge Lensmire as "putting two and
two together" in his claims about the children being "divided
along social class lines".
However, Lensmire seems to be fully aware of all this
interpretive (and sometimes "speculative"!) work that he is doing
and all he claims to be offering is a modest "plausible account
of workshop life" (p. 35). Indeed, Lensmire's recommendations in
his last chapter, and in fact, the entire thrust and moral and
intellectual force of his book hinge on the reader taking his
account of workshop life as a plausible account, if not an
historical account.
However, what makes his account plausible and not incredible?
After all, Lensmire has been doing a lot of interpretive work
(and sometimes speculative work! e.g., speculating why Maya
pairs up Jil's and James' names as lovers in her love story, "The
Zit-Fit") on his packets of concrete data (e.g., interaction
discourse recorded on tapes, children's texts), as well as his
own day-to-day informal observations and impressions of the
children interacting with him and among themselves.
It seems that Lensmire is making a mixture of claims, some of
which have greater credibility than others; for instance, those
based on his observations of a child's concrete sequential
response to another child's action: e.g., Karen abruptly stops
sharing her story as soon as Ken comes into the circle of
audience; Lensmire can credibly claim that Karen seems to be
unwilling to share in Ken's presence. However, when Lensmire
goes further to probe into the child's "intentions" (e.g., she
fears that he will tease her), he begins to make a lot of more or
less speculative claims which are more or less plausible.
On the whole, Lensmire lives up to his own self-claimed modest
task of furnishing a "plausible account" of what happened from
his position and perspective as both a teacher running the
workshop, and a researcher trying to document and make sense of
what happened in the process. In fact, whether he is being
"descriptive", "interpretive" (though unlike Lensmire, I think
that the so-called "descriptive" is in fact also "interpretive"),
"reflective", or "speculative", he always alerts his readers by
meta-commenting on the nature of the claims that he is making.
In this way, he always leaves open the possibility of having
alternative interpretations of what really happened (based on the
available evidence) to the readers while offering his own
preferred interpretations for reasons he provides which the
reader can in turn evaluate for her/himself.
What Happens When the Teacher's Power is Decentralized?
Lensmire's Critical Re-Visions of the Child and Texts:
Lensmire's account can be summarized as: What happens when the
teacher relinquishes a lot of her/his power to the students,
e.g., the power to determine what topics to write on, what
characters to include and exclude, what genre to use, which peers
to conference with, whether to share one's story with others or
not, to publish it or not... etc.. What happens in Lensmire's
workshop, according to Lensmire's account, turns out to be far
from the rosy picture often painted by progressive writing
workshop advocates. It seems that while the progressives
conceive the child as a basically good-intentioned, individual
being, Lensmire finds that children are capable of being hurtful
to others (other students and teachers) and are "worldly students
pursuing social projects" (p. 138). To Lensmire's dismay, he
finds that children are not romanticized innocent beings
concerned with using texts only for the expression of individual
creativity and intentions, but can be calculating, untruthful,
and adept in exploiting the new-found freedom to use texts to
hurt, to dominate, to assert social status and boundaries, to
represent the world to one's own advantage, and to gain and maintain
social power and control over others.
I have constructed Tables 1 and 2 to compare and contrast the
different visions (or models) of the child, society and texts
that seem to be put forward by the progressives and Lensmire
respectively:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Table 1. Comparing the Progressives' and Lensmire's Visions
(Models) of the Child and Society:
Good-Intentioned With Social Projects
Individual P, L1, L2
Child
Society P(?), L1, L2
Child Influenced
By Society L1, L2
Key: P = progressives, L1 = the early Lensmire (before the
workshop experience), L2 = the later Lensmire (during and
after the workshop experience), (?) = not sure if it belongs
here.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Table 2: Comparing the Progressives' and Lensmire's Visions
(Models) of Texts:
Progressives &
Early Lensmire: Texts as individual creations and artistic
products, and as expressions of individual
intentions
Later Lensmire: Texts as social acts with consequences, as
weapons in power struggles
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The progressives focus on the child as a good-intentioned,
individual being who is independent from the society and not
influenced or constituted by her/his social relations and
position in the world. Texts are solely the innocuous creative
expressions of an individual child's intentions and are artistic
products to be appreciated and celebrated.
Initially, Lensmire follows the progressives' advice "to follow
the child" in writing conferences, i.e., to listen to and
encourage the child to express their intentions, and to support
the child by providing her/him with the necessary crafts and skills to
realize their intentions into texts. Soon he finds
that children (and also their texts) may have been under the
ideological influences of the society, e.g., they may have
unwittingly appropriated some racist, sexist, classist language
from their larger community. So, Lensmire finds it necessary to
see his role as a "socio-analyst" (parallel to the "psycho-
analyst"), having the job of unveiling and alerting children to
the society's negative influence on their text production (pp.
18-19).
The later Lensmire, however, comes to the stark realization that
the child is not always innocent or good-intentioned. Worse
still, they are not merely copycats or unwitting recipients of
the larger society's unfavorable ideological influences. The
stark picture unfolds which shows to Lensmire that these children
can themselves be highly sophisticated, calculating and
manipulative in using texts in very artful and creative ways to
achieve "social projects" (e.g., Maya's "The Zit-Fit" love story,
p. 122); texts are social acts with consequences for others (pp.
133, 135) and are weapons in power games, in both domination
(e.g., Mary and Suzanne's play, p. 110) and resistance practices
(Jessie's "Sleeping Beauty" story, pp.94-95) with a greater or
lesser degree of social success, e.g., the "high-status" students
such as Mary, Suzanne, and James assert their superior social
position by publicly circulating their books while the "low-
status" students such as Jessie do not have the social capital
(e.g., popularity among the majority of classmates) to feel
secure enough to do so, and thus keep their written books
unavailable to the public, ultimately achieving more self-comfort
than any real social influence.
Lensmire's Critical Re-Visions of the Teacher's Role in the
Writing Workshop:
Towards the end of the book, Lensmire puts forward two critical
re-visions of the writing workshop in which he proposes the
teacher's role should be changed: (1) "a new conception of
teacher response to children's writing, one that recognizes the
connectedness of response to the social life of children in the
classroom, and that actively strives to create a classroom
community in which children accept and learn from each other's
differences"; (2) "to strengthen the role of the teacher as
curriculum-maker in the writing workshop, by having teachers
engage children in collective writing projects focused on
important texts in children's lives" (p. 143).
In the first re-vision, Lensmire quotes Benhabib's two moral
visions--one of justice and one of care (p. 145). The task at
hand for the teacher then becomes that of building an "engaged,
pluralistic classroom community", a notion that Lensmire adapted
from Bernstein's pragmatic vision of a "community of inquirers"
in philosophy (p. 147). Practically that means a greater
normative role for the teacher, e.g., to critically respond to children's
texts with an eye to their consequences for the class
community as a whole, i.e., does the text threaten the fostering
of a just and caring class community?
In the second re-vision, Lensmire proposes that the teacher may
engage students in genre studies and to "focus on producing some
type of group product, such as a student magazine, or focus on
individual products connected by a common theme or problem" (p.
151). In this way, Lensmire believes, the focus of text
production efforts will shift from individual self-exposure to a
common project, and children can be led to recognize and
appreciate the contribution of each and every classmate to the
common project, thus helping to foster a sense of community.
Like every good recommendation-maker, Lensmire is concerned that
his proposals might be misused as an excuse for a return to the
traditional, teacher-centred classroom (p. 158). In the last
words of his book, he stresses the importance of striking a
balance between the need for adults to responsibly direct
children's lives and the risk of over-directing them (p. 159).
The-Child-in-the-World-With-Others: Re-Visioning Lensmire's
Critical Re-visions
The re-visions put forward by Lensmire are sober, courageous,
moral visions: the need for the teacher to help her/his students
to build a class community in which everyone treats everyone else
fairly and caringly, and everyone respects and learns from
everyone else's differences. Lensmire also proposes some
practical ways in which the teacher may go about doing this: by
critically responding to students' texts, and by engaging the
whole class in genre studies and collective projects.
These practical suggestions notwithstanding, we cannot forget the
disturbing image of Maya saying to Lensmire, as she walked away
grumbling (though eventually subdued by her teacher's serious
tone: about her need to remove Jil's name from her story which
seems to cast an embarrassing role for Jil in "The Zit-Fit" love
story), "(Jil is) not such a nice person at all." (p. 135).
What makes a child (or an adult) respect another child (adult)?
How does a teacher explain to a child why s/he should be just and
caring to another child, even when that other child is held to be
"not nice at all!" by this child? Why should we be nice to those
whom we think are not nice at all? Why should one be fair to
those whom one thinks are not fair at all? Why should we respect
and care for those who are different from us, who are not funny
or interesting (e.g., James' comments on Robert in his interview,
p. 57), who smell with filthy clothes and bodies (e.g., Mary's
comments on those who live in the trailer park, p. 81), who are
perceived as "obnoxious" (e.g., Suzanne's comments on John, p.
77), who are ugly, who are poor, who speak a different language,
belong to a different race, culture, gender, living area..., etc.. If we
adults cannot provide ourselves with convincing
answers to these questions, how can we expect children not to be
asking and grumbling with these disturbing but very real
questions?
Another troubling image that haunts us is the one of Mary and
Suzanne's play, in which the two girls have assigned the role of
"towers" to the three most unpopular classmates (p. 110). We are
left with the troubling question of why and when we reduce our
fellow living persons to non-living "its"?
In other words, how does a teacher go about convincing her/his
students that building an engaged pluralistic caring community is
indeed a worthwhile goal for all of us? What vision can inspire
us to such a goal in a world that so often seems to be cold and
uncaring?
We have seen above that Lensmire has come to the stark
realization that children are not romanticized, innocent, good-
intentioned beings; he is almost repetitive in describing how
hurtful and sophisticated these "worldly students" with "social
projects" can be in the many concrete examples he has witnessed
and recorded. And how texts have become, in the hands of these
children, hurtful weapons in their power games (e.g., p. 70).
So, what kind of vision (or model) of children are we left with
after reading Lensmire's candid account of workshop life that
will still instill or inspire hope in us that indeed it is
possible for a teacher to help build such an ideal community as
proposed by Lensmire at the end of his book?
If our vision (or model) of children or humans is one of power
game player who sees and uses texts as social weapons, whether
for domination or resistance purposes, our vision is still a
limiting one: it defines humans (or children) as beings driven by
the "will to power".
The picture that Lensmire has so candidly and courageously
unfolded for us indeed presents precisely such a vision: Children
as power game players who are adept and creative in using texts
for power-asserting purposes, just as adults are (i.e., "worldly
students pursuing social projects", p. 138).
What is also needed, it seems, is a vision of humans as beings
with the will and the right to human dignity and human
connectedness, even under the most shabby circumstances (poor,
ugly, "not nice", "not funny", ... etc.). Similarly, we also
need to explore a vision (or model) of texts as ways to dignity
and connectedness, not just as social weapons in power games.
Our educational discourses have long driven away any existential
assertions of the unconditional dignity and will to connectedness
of humans. Human rights education curriculum often seems to be
conceived as a specialized component of a larger curriculum.
However, if we have a higher vision of humans, and if we consider
the building of a caring community (as the goal suggested by Lensmire) is
indeed a worthwhile goal, human rights education
should be implicit in every part of our curriculum.
Jessie's "Sleeping Beauty" and "My Friends" stories remind us of
how a child ostracized by her classmates seeks a glimpse of human
connectedness in the stories she creates. To see her as doing
resistance would be to seriously misunderstand her: she wills
human connectedness, as any other dignified human being does.
John's extremely intelligent "Second Stories" (p. 104) remind us
of how an unpopular child explores and plays with the concepts of
time, space, and life in his creative writing efforts, and
perhaps, thereby finding his self-worth and dignity, and when he
perceives his classmates as deliberately criticizing his serious
efforts, he gives in to uncontrollable anger (pp. 84-85). Yes,
we have James, Mary, Maya, who seem to be power game players;
still that is not the whole picture of the human child: they too
seek human connectedness and dignity, though in ways that seem to
have become seriously distorted and hurtful to others.
The writings and visions of thinkers like Viktor Frankl (e.g.,
1984) and Martin Buber (e.g., 1958), who dare to assert a vision
in which humans have unconditional dignity and the will to
connectedness, have not been trendy or influential in our
educational discourses. But if we do not see the child as the-
child-in-the-world-with-others, if we lose sight of the vision of
a human or a child whose primordial need is not pleasure or
power, but unconditional dignity, and connectedness with others,
we limit what we and our children are capable of coming into
being, for we become what we think we are. And what we think we
are is our vision.
The greatest challenge then is not so much one of how teachers
can strike a balance between teacher control and student control
over the curriculum as what vision of students teachers come to
have, and how teachers can inspire students with her/his vision
of what they can become in connection with one another. If
Lensmire does not seem to have tackled all these yet, he has
nonetheless made an invaluable contribution to disturbing us and
starting us to think about all these important issues.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank James Heap and Edouard Lagache for their
helpful comments and suggestions.
References:
Buber, M. (1958). I and thou. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Frankl, V.E. (1984). Man's search for meaning. New York: Simon &
Schuster.
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