{"id":45,"date":"2005-08-11T07:31:03","date_gmt":"2005-08-11T12:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/bonadonna\/blog1\/?p=45"},"modified":"2005-08-27T18:28:04","modified_gmt":"2005-08-27T23:28:04","slug":"it-starts-with-a-poem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/archives\/45","title":{"rendered":"It Starts with a Poem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><html><br \/>\n<head><br \/>\n<title>Untitled Document<\/title><br \/>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=iso-8859-1\"><br \/>\n<\/meta><\/head><\/p>\n<p><body><\/p>\n<p>A few colleagues have been exchanging poems via our English and Foreign Languages<br \/>\n  listserv. The poems have dealt with some less-than-positive learning experiences<br \/>\n  the poets had suffered in grade school: bad methods, bad teachers, all producing<br \/>\n  bad effects on learning&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>The original poem was an unexpected gift from out of the blue&#8212;but from<br \/>\n  a poet who has led us to expect such generous spontaneity. As usual, a wonderful<br \/>\n  read. It was the camaraderie of the poetic response, however, that stimulated<br \/>\n  me to plunge&#8212;somehow&#8212;into this dialogue. What fun&#8230;. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I had several moods leading me in. The poems made me think of grammar school,<br \/>\n  good\/bad teachers, creative writing, personal history, English education, NCATE,<br \/>\n  and a bunch o&#8217; other stuffo. Perhaps foremost of all, I fell into a &quot;what<br \/>\n  I did on my summer vacation&quot; mode, for all my messages were converging<br \/>\n  on a few English Education projects I had been working on lately. But the knot<br \/>\n  of motives pushing me to write was too tangled and thick for a listserv quickie,<br \/>\n  so I instead came to the blog. I wound up not sending a message to the listserv,<br \/>\n  but here&#8217;s how I <em>started <\/em>to write that message:<\/p>\n<p><!--readmore-->Friends, thanks for the poems! You made me think of some writing I did recently<br \/>\n  in a personal response\/literary mode&#8212;literary not in the sense of original<br \/>\n  poetry, :), but at least in the sense of &quot;literary criticism.&quot; I have<br \/>\n  two pieces I want to share, a &quot;reader&#8217;s response&quot; to Larry Watson&#8217;s<br \/>\n  novel, <em>Montana, 1948<\/em>, and another &quot;reader&#8217;s response&quot; to<br \/>\n  Art Spiegelman&#8217;s comic book\/novel\/memoir <em>Maus<\/em>. The responses started<br \/>\n  out as work, but I wound up having some fun with them, and they show some stuff<br \/>\n  about me, just as your poems show some stuff about you. Your poems mix together<br \/>\n  a serious message with a light touch and a pinch of crankiness&#8212;all my<br \/>\n  favorite things! My responses, too, represent a mix of things, most important<br \/>\n  being several English education matters we&#8217;ll be talking about in upcoming weeks:<br \/>\n  the new Young Adult Literature program Norm and I are developing, the new English<br \/>\n  Education Database, the role of critical theory in literature courses, and more.<br \/>\n  I&#8217;ll sort through some of these matters below, but first I&#8217;ll comment on the<br \/>\n  work and play parts behind this message.<\/p>\n<p> <strong>THE WORK PART OF IT<\/strong><br \/>\n  One of my summer projects was to collect exemplars for some of the Young Adult<br \/>\n  Literature assignments Norm and I are putting into place. Over the course of<br \/>\n  the English Ed program, students will now be required to read and write on at<br \/>\n  least 16 YAL novels (these reading\/writing assignments will be done in the context<br \/>\n  of all the English Education courses). Norm and I hope that their responses<br \/>\n  might take various forms&#8212;book reviews, reader responses, applications of critical<br \/>\n  theory, dialogues, MOO logs, etc.\n<\/p>\n<p> I&#8217;m hoping (and confident) the <em>whole<\/em> English major can help students<br \/>\n  learn to &quot;respond to literature&quot; in <em>multiple<\/em> and <em>aware<\/em><br \/>\n  ways. In the methods course, I try to address the range of possibilities, but<br \/>\n  I give special attention to Reader Response, since that theory is so useful<br \/>\n  for secondary instruction&#8212;and also because it features so many key principles<br \/>\n  of &quot;textuality&quot; we are trying to teach our students in many different<br \/>\n  ways. <em>Anyway<\/em> &#8230; This summer, I wanted to generate some practical models<br \/>\n  of a &quot;reader&#8217;s response.&quot; Oddly enough, students often struggle in<br \/>\n  developing their &quot;personal&quot; responses, though I think they generally<br \/>\n  get the <em>theory<\/em> of reader response (if in a too commonsense sort of<br \/>\n  way). Responses tend to dart in with &quot;I liked this\/didn&#8217;t like that&#8230;&quot;<br \/>\n  etc.; they skate over some random feelings; and they exit. These are not <em>responses<\/em><br \/>\n  so much as a type of checking in, or phatic communication, or gesturing&#8212;verbal<br \/>\n  nodding, smiling, frowning&#8230;.\n<\/p>\n<p> As a remedy, I&#8217;ve talked about &quot;tracing a connection&quot; to a literary<br \/>\n  work as <em>one<\/em> way of doing Reader Response. In responding to both <em>Maus<\/em><br \/>\n  and <em>Montana, 1948<\/em>, I tried to illustrate this type of response strategy<br \/>\n  (I have links below). The <em>Montana, 1948<\/em> entry traces a connection I<br \/>\n  felt with the adolescent narrator, David Hayden, for the novel brought me back<br \/>\n  to feelings of isolation, intensity, silence, and the general difficulty of<br \/>\n  absorbing the adult world besieging me as a teen. In <em>Maus<\/em>, the father-son<br \/>\n  relationship reminded me of my father, and, in a way, all fathers and sons,<br \/>\n  particularly as the son becomes an adult.\n<\/p>\n<p> <strong>THE FUN PART OF IT<\/strong><br \/>\n  I&#8217;m a little proud of my &quot;personal connection&quot; piece on <em>Maus<\/em>.<br \/>\n  For if ever there was a work about which there was &quot;more to say&quot; and<br \/>\n  more <em>possible<\/em> connections to make, it is this work. In that sense I<br \/>\n  think my response shows students just how much they, when organizing around<br \/>\n  a personal connection, have to <em>ignore<\/em>, or rather <em>filter<\/em> into<br \/>\n  the background, or rather <em>re-orient<\/em> into subordinate, but connected,<br \/>\n  positions. The tracing of a connection is a deliberate type of tangential thinking.<br \/>\n  The strategy involves using the text as a springboard into one&#8217;s own story,<br \/>\n  or reflection, or soapbox, or reverie. I also try to suggest that this &quot;tracing<br \/>\n  of a connection&quot; can be an <em>attitude<\/em> one brings to literature in<br \/>\n  general (not the <em>only<\/em> attitude, and not always an appropriate attitude).<br \/>\n  If this attitude is inhabited long enough, one may find unexpected and compelling&#8212;and<br \/>\n  occasionally magical&#8212;ways out of their own story and back to the text.<br \/>\n  This attitude, in other words, (to use a favorite metaphor of people in our<br \/>\n  business) can lead to <em>interwoven<\/em> responses and texts. Or another metaphor:<br \/>\n  Internal private resonances striking a chord back in the text&#8212;the whole of<br \/>\n  which is sharable by a larger chorus of readers: a wonderful dialectic simultaneously<br \/>\n  beyond and within the text. That was the fun of it, a mighty synthesis, or mystic<br \/>\n  collapse of text reader and community in meaningfulness.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Here are links to the two YAL responses:<\/p>\n<p><em>Montana, 1948:<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/bonadonna\/blog\/?p=42\">http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/bonadonna\/blog\/?p=42<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Maus<\/em>: <a href=\"http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/bonadonna\/blog\/?p=44\">http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/bonadonna\/blog\/?p=44<\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>BACK TO THE WORK PART<br \/>\n  Introducing the English Education Database<\/strong> <strong>(<a href=\"http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/eedb\">http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/eedb<\/a>)<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n<p>The upshot of all this is that I have placed the responses (or rather links<br \/>\n  to them) in the newly-created (drum roll, please) <strong>English Education<br \/>\n  Database<\/strong>. I&#8217;m pumped about the possibilities of this new resource&#8212;not<br \/>\n  only for its uses in the EE program, but also for the English major in general<br \/>\n  and for others as well (IATE, alumni, the professional community):\n<\/p>\n<p><strong>The English Education Database<\/strong>: This database may be found<br \/>\n  at <a href=\"http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/eedb\">http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/eedb<\/a>. It<br \/>\n  will consist primarily of student artifacts&#8212;e.g., student Webfolio pieces<br \/>\n  (lesson plans, units, responses to YAL, research, professional issues, resources,<br \/>\n  etc.) that show excellence in one way or another. It will be searchable according<br \/>\n  to meta-tags of our own design. The database will grow over time.We could implement<br \/>\n  a vetting process for artifacts to be included, and this process could provide<br \/>\n  instructors an opportunity to enforce and encourage standards in the creation<br \/>\n  and dissemination of English Education resources. The database will serve as<br \/>\n  a resource for future students, and ideally, future teachers, as it will be<br \/>\n  public, for the most part (but not totally, depending on our wishes), and it<br \/>\n  will function as an indexed, dynamic repository for exemplary work in various<br \/>\n  useful categories.\n<\/p>\n<p>At present there are only a few records in the database, just some sample starter<br \/>\n  stuff to illustrate possibilities. (Click on the title link of an entry to go<br \/>\n  to the resource; click on the &quot;Full Record&quot; link to the right to read<br \/>\n  the description of the resource.) The records are editable by administrators;<br \/>\n  or we could create a student panel to vet submissions, compose the text for<br \/>\n  records, and maintain the database.\n<\/p>\n<p>But the resource has possibilities&#8212;in areas of assessment, student accountability,<br \/>\n  and more. For instance:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The database might well serve as a site for storing and organizing student<br \/>\n    portfolio work required for NCATE (e.g., 207 and 395 papers). <\/li>\n<li>The database might store papers completed in literature and writing courses,<br \/>\n    and thus become a publication venue for all EFL students (for instance, sample<br \/>\n    student essays illustrating appropriate tactics of different critical theories<br \/>\n    could be stored in the database).<\/li>\n<li>The English Education Database might morph into an EFL Database; we could,<br \/>\n    perhaps, create an EFL Database Committee to establish criteria and standards<br \/>\n    for submission and acceptance of artifacts into the database.<\/li>\n<li>In connection with the two previous points the EE Database might help coordinate<br \/>\n    the EFL major by creating an &quot;institution&quot; across courses that invites,<br \/>\n    archives, organizes, and publishes student work that exemplifies the department&#8217;s<br \/>\n    learning objectives&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I want to close this entry on a strand that leads perhaps to another entry<br \/>\n  (and thus I will inhabit a bit the chaos of blogging). I&#8217;m thinking of the EE<br \/>\n  Database functioning as a kind of &quot;program archive.&quot; But what of the<br \/>\n  students individually? Where are <em>their<\/em> archives? What about the notion<br \/>\n  of &quot;blog as archive&quot;? What if we gave each student a blog at the start<br \/>\n  of their program, and asked them to use it as a kind of writer&#8217;s notebook for<br \/>\n  their time here at SXU (and beyond). I think that would be cool, and I say that<br \/>\n  on the basis of becoming a blogger (if a somewhat lumbering one) myself. Writing<br \/>\n  in a blog has helped me grow more reflective about purpose, audience, process,<br \/>\n  and medium. In courses, faculty could use the student blogs or not for assignments,<br \/>\n  as they saw fit. But the students would always have the space as a place to<br \/>\n  record, gather, and grow their thoughts over time.\n<\/p>\n<p>There is, of course, always a down side. For instance, consider the &quot;looseness&quot;<br \/>\n  of the blog as a medium for responding to literature. There&#8217;s a point in my<br \/>\n  response to <em>Montana, 1948<\/em> where I confess I can&#8217;t remember the narrator&#8217;s<br \/>\n  name (Later in the same entry, I find the name out when I have to search the<br \/>\n  book for a quotation). That kind of writing in student literary analysis papers<br \/>\n  might be most disturbing. The blog encourages &quot;processy&quot; mess, randomness,<br \/>\n  informality. It&#8217;s a double-edged sword: loosening students up in regards to<br \/>\n  expression. On the other hand, as an example of a new <em>positive<\/em> potentiality<br \/>\n  that blogging opens, I&#8217;d point to the part in my <em>Maus<\/em> entry where I<br \/>\n  create a link to my brother&#8217;s memoir on my father. In an instant, through hypertextuality,<br \/>\n  I am able to create a full-blown counter-statement (as a needed layer to my<br \/>\n  argument) without any of the distraction that would come from doing the writing<br \/>\n  myself. Brother Joe, writing so lovingly&#8212;and my hypertext link pointing<br \/>\n  that way approvingly&#8212;enable me to write cantankerously most efficiently<br \/>\n  without fear of impiety. Blogs encourage and support this kind of intertextuality<br \/>\n  (such links functioning as a kind of footnotes on steroids).\n<\/p>\n<p>Certainly, the medium of blogging opens new potentialities\/problems\/issues<br \/>\n  that need sorting out. Even at this early phase, though, I envision so many<br \/>\n  different uses of blogs, and I am so impressed at how many of these uses strike<br \/>\n  a chord with the most established principles of rhetoric and composition.\n<\/p>\n<p><\/body><br \/>\n<\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few colleagues have been exchanging poems via our English and Foreign Languages<br \/>\nlistserv. . . <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-education-planning","category-on-blogging","category-thoughts-on-teaching-and-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}