A few colleagues have been exchanging poems via our English and Foreign Languages
listserv. The poems have dealt with some less-than-positive learning experiences
the poets had suffered in grade school: bad methods, bad teachers, all producing
bad effects on learning….
The original poem was an unexpected gift from out of the blue—but from
a poet who has led us to expect such generous spontaneity. As usual, a wonderful
read. It was the camaraderie of the poetic response, however, that stimulated
me to plunge—somehow—into this dialogue. What fun….
I had several moods leading me in. The poems made me think of grammar school,
good/bad teachers, creative writing, personal history, English education, NCATE,
and a bunch o’ other stuffo. Perhaps foremost of all, I fell into a "what
I did on my summer vacation" mode, for all my messages were converging
on a few English Education projects I had been working on lately. But the knot
of motives pushing me to write was too tangled and thick for a listserv quickie,
so I instead came to the blog. I wound up not sending a message to the listserv,
but here’s how I started to write that message:
Friends, thanks for the poems! You made me think of some writing I did recently
in a personal response/literary mode—literary not in the sense of original
poetry, :), but at least in the sense of "literary criticism." I have
two pieces I want to share, a "reader’s response" to Larry Watson’s
novel, Montana, 1948, and another "reader’s response" to
Art Spiegelman’s comic book/novel/memoir Maus. The responses started
out as work, but I wound up having some fun with them, and they show some stuff
about me, just as your poems show some stuff about you. Your poems mix together
a serious message with a light touch and a pinch of crankiness—all my
favorite things! My responses, too, represent a mix of things, most important
being several English education matters we’ll be talking about in upcoming weeks:
the new Young Adult Literature program Norm and I are developing, the new English
Education Database, the role of critical theory in literature courses, and more.
I’ll sort through some of these matters below, but first I’ll comment on the
work and play parts behind this message.
THE WORK PART OF IT
One of my summer projects was to collect exemplars for some of the Young Adult
Literature assignments Norm and I are putting into place. Over the course of
the English Ed program, students will now be required to read and write on at
least 16 YAL novels (these reading/writing assignments will be done in the context
of all the English Education courses). Norm and I hope that their responses
might take various forms—book reviews, reader responses, applications of critical
theory, dialogues, MOO logs, etc.
I’m hoping (and confident) the whole English major can help students
learn to "respond to literature" in multiple and aware
ways. In the methods course, I try to address the range of possibilities, but
I give special attention to Reader Response, since that theory is so useful
for secondary instruction—and also because it features so many key principles
of "textuality" we are trying to teach our students in many different
ways. Anyway … This summer, I wanted to generate some practical models
of a "reader’s response." Oddly enough, students often struggle in
developing their "personal" responses, though I think they generally
get the theory of reader response (if in a too commonsense sort of
way). Responses tend to dart in with "I liked this/didn’t like that…"
etc.; they skate over some random feelings; and they exit. These are not responses
so much as a type of checking in, or phatic communication, or gesturing—verbal
nodding, smiling, frowning….
As a remedy, I’ve talked about "tracing a connection" to a literary
work as one way of doing Reader Response. In responding to both Maus
and Montana, 1948, I tried to illustrate this type of response strategy
(I have links below). The Montana, 1948 entry traces a connection I
felt with the adolescent narrator, David Hayden, for the novel brought me back
to feelings of isolation, intensity, silence, and the general difficulty of
absorbing the adult world besieging me as a teen. In Maus, the father-son
relationship reminded me of my father, and, in a way, all fathers and sons,
particularly as the son becomes an adult.
THE FUN PART OF IT
I’m a little proud of my "personal connection" piece on Maus.
For if ever there was a work about which there was "more to say" and
more possible connections to make, it is this work. In that sense I
think my response shows students just how much they, when organizing around
a personal connection, have to ignore, or rather filter into
the background, or rather re-orient into subordinate, but connected,
positions. The tracing of a connection is a deliberate type of tangential thinking.
The strategy involves using the text as a springboard into one’s own story,
or reflection, or soapbox, or reverie. I also try to suggest that this "tracing
of a connection" can be an attitude one brings to literature in
general (not the only attitude, and not always an appropriate attitude).
If this attitude is inhabited long enough, one may find unexpected and compelling—and
occasionally magical—ways out of their own story and back to the text.
This attitude, in other words, (to use a favorite metaphor of people in our
business) can lead to interwoven responses and texts. Or another metaphor:
Internal private resonances striking a chord back in the text—the whole of
which is sharable by a larger chorus of readers: a wonderful dialectic simultaneously
beyond and within the text. That was the fun of it, a mighty synthesis, or mystic
collapse of text reader and community in meaningfulness.
Here are links to the two YAL responses:
Montana, 1948: http://english.sxu.edu/bonadonna/blog/?p=42
Maus: http://english.sxu.edu/bonadonna/blog/?p=44
BACK TO THE WORK PART
Introducing the English Education Database (http://english.sxu.edu/eedb)
The upshot of all this is that I have placed the responses (or rather links
to them) in the newly-created (drum roll, please) English Education
Database. I’m pumped about the possibilities of this new resource—not
only for its uses in the EE program, but also for the English major in general
and for others as well (IATE, alumni, the professional community):
The English Education Database: This database may be found
at http://english.sxu.edu/eedb. It
will consist primarily of student artifacts—e.g., student Webfolio pieces
(lesson plans, units, responses to YAL, research, professional issues, resources,
etc.) that show excellence in one way or another. It will be searchable according
to meta-tags of our own design. The database will grow over time.We could implement
a vetting process for artifacts to be included, and this process could provide
instructors an opportunity to enforce and encourage standards in the creation
and dissemination of English Education resources. The database will serve as
a resource for future students, and ideally, future teachers, as it will be
public, for the most part (but not totally, depending on our wishes), and it
will function as an indexed, dynamic repository for exemplary work in various
useful categories.
At present there are only a few records in the database, just some sample starter
stuff to illustrate possibilities. (Click on the title link of an entry to go
to the resource; click on the "Full Record" link to the right to read
the description of the resource.) The records are editable by administrators;
or we could create a student panel to vet submissions, compose the text for
records, and maintain the database.
But the resource has possibilities—in areas of assessment, student accountability,
and more. For instance:
- The database might well serve as a site for storing and organizing student
portfolio work required for NCATE (e.g., 207 and 395 papers). - The database might store papers completed in literature and writing courses,
and thus become a publication venue for all EFL students (for instance, sample
student essays illustrating appropriate tactics of different critical theories
could be stored in the database). - The English Education Database might morph into an EFL Database; we could,
perhaps, create an EFL Database Committee to establish criteria and standards
for submission and acceptance of artifacts into the database. - In connection with the two previous points the EE Database might help coordinate
the EFL major by creating an "institution" across courses that invites,
archives, organizes, and publishes student work that exemplifies the department’s
learning objectives…
I want to close this entry on a strand that leads perhaps to another entry
(and thus I will inhabit a bit the chaos of blogging). I’m thinking of the EE
Database functioning as a kind of "program archive." But what of the
students individually? Where are their archives? What about the notion
of "blog as archive"? What if we gave each student a blog at the start
of their program, and asked them to use it as a kind of writer’s notebook for
their time here at SXU (and beyond). I think that would be cool, and I say that
on the basis of becoming a blogger (if a somewhat lumbering one) myself. Writing
in a blog has helped me grow more reflective about purpose, audience, process,
and medium. In courses, faculty could use the student blogs or not for assignments,
as they saw fit. But the students would always have the space as a place to
record, gather, and grow their thoughts over time.
There is, of course, always a down side. For instance, consider the "looseness"
of the blog as a medium for responding to literature. There’s a point in my
response to Montana, 1948 where I confess I can’t remember the narrator’s
name (Later in the same entry, I find the name out when I have to search the
book for a quotation). That kind of writing in student literary analysis papers
might be most disturbing. The blog encourages "processy" mess, randomness,
informality. It’s a double-edged sword: loosening students up in regards to
expression. On the other hand, as an example of a new positive potentiality
that blogging opens, I’d point to the part in my Maus entry where I
create a link to my brother’s memoir on my father. In an instant, through hypertextuality,
I am able to create a full-blown counter-statement (as a needed layer to my
argument) without any of the distraction that would come from doing the writing
myself. Brother Joe, writing so lovingly—and my hypertext link pointing
that way approvingly—enable me to write cantankerously most efficiently
without fear of impiety. Blogs encourage and support this kind of intertextuality
(such links functioning as a kind of footnotes on steroids).
Certainly, the medium of blogging opens new potentialities/problems/issues
that need sorting out. Even at this early phase, though, I envision so many
different uses of blogs, and I am so impressed at how many of these uses strike
a chord with the most established principles of rhetoric and composition.