…she doesn’t need to cancel class. Why should she cancel class in order to attend a conference or to give a talk?

If she does cancel her classes when she is unable to attend, then she probably believes that students cannot learn without her, cannot benefit from engaging with one another out of her presence. Or she has a research assignment or the like coincide with her absence, which seems like a valid reason for canceling class–but is it? Why give up one precious opportunity for the group to come together to puzzle out something, and to continue to build the bonds of reciprocal apprenticeships?

If she does cancel class, then she must be making herself mighty indispensible.

If she does cancel class, then her students potentially lose a precious opportunity to explore the course together, richly, without her (whether she likes it or not) dominant perspective and voice and persona.

So, with these thoughts in mind, I did not cancel class when I went out to NITLE’s Conference on Teaching Writing in the Digital Age (I will, btw, post the text version of my talk within the next week–after one more talk). Instead, I worked with my senior tutors to design a class they felt comfortable leading, and that provided opportunities for learning in that moment of the course as we moved from fiction to poetry.

I’ve written before about how bringing seniors who have taken intro courses with me back into those courses a couple of years later, as tutors, to mentor the younger writers, and to have their own intro work showcased in the syllabus as models, examples of the kind of writing we will practice, is one of the best things about my teaching. The seniors act as go-betweens, as translators in a way, as they understand the method to my madness, and they understand the freefall of the students who are thrown into a classroom that values failure, that insists on risk, and aims to travel deeply into the world of reading and writing. They lead the Wednesday evening workshops during which they dream up inventive writing exercises and help model effective workshopping practices (I teach two days a week in a comfortable, computer-free lounge, and then hold a two-hour evening workshop once a week during which we look at things online and/or students workshop their writing in small groups).

And so, I’m delighted to say that from all reports, workshop Wednesday evening and class on Thursday went very well. The students were engaged, lively, interested and probably pleased to have me out of the room for a moment. Does this mean that I think I should absent myself from class more often? Probably not. I don’t think any member of the learning community should be absent unless absolutely necessary. The shared language thins and the collaborative experience cracks if the members come and go too much during a 12-week course. We need to commit to this shared course, to our reciprocal apprenticeships if we are to reap the benefits from the 21 minds, imaginations, lives we represent. But having the person who, until we change our educational system altogether, holds the power of course design and evaluation abssent herself once during the semester, is a healthy thing indeed.

In my ridiculous (and exasperating) fashion, I have two talks coming up, of course during the busiest time of the semester. Fortunately, I don’t need to be in class to be in class (the audio from Thursday’s class meeting–yes, they’re having class without me– will be posted to the blog, and I’ll be interacting with students on their blogs, and who knows, perhaps on mine).

That I don’t give the same talk twice has kept me up late for several nights reading, thinking, designing, creating, as I try to push my thinking. (Another habit I’ve got to do something about, I suppose, but really, if I’m not learning something each time I put a talk together, how can I expect my audience to discover anything?) This time I have pushed myself to get more creative and effective with my media as well as my message–and I walk the edge here trying out something new during a talk that means a good deal to me. Am I crazy? Perhaps. But I’m taking to heart what Yi-Fu Tuan writes in Space and Place: “Experience is the overcoming of perils…To experience in the active sense requires that one venture forth into the unfamiliar and experiment with the elusive and uncertain. To become an expert one must dare to confront the perils of the new.” (p.9)

I don’t really have anything against Powerpoint slides–PPT is a great tool in the right hands and in the right venue. It’s just that anyone who gives keynotes knows that bad slides, even pretty good slides, can induce a Pavlovian response in the audience: slides-right,ok- zone out time. And so all along I have played around with other ways to share visuals: Flickr sets being my mainstay, with a dose of wikis and even the old bgblogging, Slide.com and iMOVIE for good measure. Sometimes I use no media at all –we just have a conversation. Lately, though, I’ve been inspired by some of my mentors in this work–Jim Groom, Brian Lamb, Nancy White, all of the TEDTalks, to name a few–to push beyond the notion of the slide altogether, to be more creative while going deeper. And so, for my upcoming talk at NITLE’s Conference on Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, I have created a collage of links, images, videos, text, you name it, as a way to try to capture the tensions and the promise, the perils and the pleasures, of moving the teaching of writing into this new century. I think the collage-as-presentation makes a lot of sense for what I’m trying to show. We’ll see how it goes, but I sure had a lot of fun (frustrating fun) putting it together with vuvox.com’s new beta collage tool, a fabulous tool in its flexibility and its connectivity. Now we’ll see how it works during a presentation–I designed it for people who wish to go back and spend some time in the collage, exploring the links and media, long after the conference itself has faded away. Ultimately I’d like to add an audio voiceover from my talk, to contextualize and create a narrative flow over the disparate pieces. And I’ll be tinkering, adding more links, more video, more, well… see what you think…

Balancing Acts: The Collage

I’ve written a few times over the years about how my students actually like to read my blog, and that when former students look for me, they often first head to my blogs to check up on what I’m up to before shooting me an email or picking up the phone. One of my students is now on Twitter with me, though he uses it much less than does Shannon. It’s fascinating to share these spaces with students.

This current group, though, does not often comment on my posts; rather, they tell me at the beginning of class that they caught my latest post, and ask “how do you get to MASSMoCA from here,” or they stop me in the library or come to my office to talk it over. I think this is an interesting intersection of blogged-world and face-to-face world, how our conversations walk right off the screen and into class, into our conversations when we meet. I like that. But I also like it when they try to pull their thoughts together to frame a written response to something I’ve written–it signals a commitment to the conversation, an acknowledgment of being stirred by something. I want them to stop a minute, put fingers to text (or audio or image) to argue or agree, to extend my thinking either here or over on their own blogs when they’re interested. Indeed, over the years, some of the most thought-provoking comments have come from my students; for instance, look at how three students joined the conversation unfolding from an old post (I’m linking to the old bgblogging–still haven’t ironed out the missing links on this blog).

I want them to drop by.

Sometimes they write posts out of the blue, though, that show me the merits of not pressuring students to respond, to be on the blogs, instead being patient as they discover for themselves why we’re blogging as part of the course. Indeed, one student, grappling openly with blogging, has just written a great post in which he answers his own question about the purpose of blogging . You can go read the full post over on his own blog, but I’m also going to excerpt almost all of it here, to weave his thoughts into the conversation over here as well. It’s a treasure:

“Returning to my blog after a brief break always seems to bring novel thoughts about the process of blogging my work and the more general idea of forming and participating in an online community. I am in a constant state of reflection as to how I feel about posting and creating online as opposed to in “the real world.” Practically I suppose it makes sense to use the tools we have available to us - in this case, blogging has been re-cast for me as a source for learning (through communication) to take place within the context of writing courses. And even as I find the blog useful in this context (and also an unexpected unleasher of new creative processes), I am struck by an unwillingness to fully dive into the process of blogging itself… I keep expecting for the “ah-hah!” moment to hit me as I read a comment or make another post (and I admit, there is a certain satisfaction in knowing that at least somebody else is reading my writing.) Yet there is also a state of personal uneasiness that strikes me as I type away in my text-box. In the same way I think Facebook is damaging my generation psycho-socially (have a discussion with me in person about the topic), I wonder if my blogging is somehow removing me from the creative process even farther. Sometimes I feel as though I end up spending hours in front of a screen - writing, e-mailing, blogging - and I can’t help but wonder what I would be doing with my work (and time and creativity) if there wasn’t a screen there for support. (?)

Perhaps I now should admit that even while writing this a miniature “ah-hah” moment has, indeed, occurred. This is what blogging is about. This piece of writing. Reflection and communication and sharing. I didn’t set out to write this piece, I felt compelled to say something about what I’m actually DOING here (eventually posting some work from break) before doing it. And if a whole group of people gets together and starts to use this space to form a sort-of “creative collective,” there might be the chance to grow and create more vividly in the real world from our collective experience in a virtual one.

When BG explained blogging to me in J-Term, I nodded my head in theoretical understanding - I certainly could intellectualize what going online with my writing was supposed to do for me. But it’s not until I have been with my blog for nearly 12 weeks that I have come to understand more deeply how I can use this tool in my creative life. This isn’t to say that I’m totally comfortable with it or that I’m going to be a super-blogger for the rest of my life (or that I think Facebook is creating thriving online communities) but it does point to a rediscovery of what it feels like to learn outside of a classroom setting and the different forms communities can take in our very (post)modern age.”

This kind of post, this revelation put into words, is one reason why we need continuity and connection with and between and for our students beyond the walls and division of courses, semesters, disciplines. This is a reason for slowing into a practice of writing reflectively online, of connecting the way in ongoing hypertext reflections about their work, their thoughts, their lives, and in the occasional glimmer of a post like this, when a student, for no other reason than to sort things out for himself, reveals his learning, shows something of himself. But it takes time. And space. And for our students in this era, permission of sorts to share with us and one another the stumbling, the discoveries. Nice way to move into spring!

“Imagination, more than any other capacity, breaks through ‘the inertia of habit.’” (Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination, p.2 quoting John Dewey)

“The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.” Pablo Picasso

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.” Flannery O’Connor

A few years after college–after following the temple route through India and a stint running a gallery in pre-cool Seattle–I turned from the visual arts back to writing. As a viewer outside the creative process, I had grown uneasy, even in galleries, even in the gallery I ran. Few people outside the art and collecting world ever stepped off of First Avenue and into our small space, and those who did enter, often seemed not deeply interested in the art at all but in being near it or being near people who liked being near it. I saw little conscious, active participation, just a drifting through.

I began to dislike museums intensely–the formality, the lack of questioning, the spectacle–in spite of my hunger for a creative world. I preferred religious art and public art because at least in Europe and Asia, you could find it on the street and in places people actually went. Art could become something new, different every time you encountered it. Of course that’s not to say that we’re awake to art as we pass it by or that there is no place for the museum and concert hall (as Joshua-Bell-busking-in-the-subway showed), –that’s ridiculous–but are we increasingly immune to the disruptiveness of art because we are not encouraged to develop our creative selves? Indeed, I would argue that we have the creative schooled right out of us. If we, as Maxine Greene argues, release our imagination, we might be ready to have our doors blown open when we encounter art. And perhaps we’ll work towards a better world.

I suppose that’s what I’m doing now as I prepare to leave formal education. I’m heading out of the museum and onto the street. I’m releasing my imagination.

Of course my discomfort hasn’t kept me from going to museums–you’ll find me seeking them out wherever I go. But I still don’t much like them. I just keep hoping I will–I like a lot of the people who work in them– and I need art to startle me and make me question what I know. So it is with interest that I watch Leslie Madsen Brooks and her cohorts trying to transform museums into relevant, inspiring places for people–all people.

But mostly, over the years, I turned to literature, to theater, to film, to music. And I wrote. To make sense of the world, to participate fully in the world, I felt compelled to create stories, and words seemed easier to access than other materials (ha!). I turned to teaching as art–the classroom the canvas, the subject the paint, the students the collaborators, channeling experience and intelligence and imagination towards one another into creating. Classroom narratives. It was deeply satisfying.

But for the past couple of years, as classroom stories have grown pinched by curricular demands and limited by a lack of institutional imagination and the thin expectations of formal learning, I despair of this museum context. I am moving back to creative learning spaces of everyday life. I am as eager to take out my camera as I am my pen. To press the results up against one another. And okay about failing as I learn. To open a center where anyone can come to explore digital expression and connection practices–a place where creativity, imagination and connection are the focus, the raison d’etre, as people struggle to make sense of the world and “to bring better worlds into being.” (Richard Miller, Writing at the End of the World, p.x)

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with my daughter and husband at what I’d almost call an unmuseum, MASS MoCA, with its mix of conventional-looking galleries and raw former-mill spaces, meandering around the exhibitions-finding ourselves offended, amused, moved in turns, arguing, discussing, animated. Then we arrived at the huge former mill building turned gallery occupied by Jenny Holzer’s “Projections,” a work that silences you as you enter, that you become a part of: enormous lines of poetry immersing you, a work that flows words over the floor, the walls the ceiling, bending and distorting as they encounter disruptions–including the viewer–to flat surfaces. We stayed a long time, experiencing it, thinking, talking, being quiet, taking photos–she actually welcomes people playing around with her art this way.

All day yesterday and today I can’t shake the feeling of being inside the artwork, part of the experience for anyone else who was there, and they part of the experience for me. Words, light, space, shapes, people, stories. Fascinating. Jarring. I kept thinking about Nabokov’s words, “Curiosity is the first step to insubordination.”

I came home inspired, surprised, eager, yes, to step out of the traditional walled-off museum once and for all, where as Garrison and Anderson (p.5) contend,”There is far more rhetoric than reality in the assertion that communities of inquiry in higher education today encourage students to approach learning in a critical manner and process information in a deep and meaningful way.” I’m ready to move into the un-museum creative spaces in the world where active participation is a given, imagination is encouraged and creativity at the center of the learning experience.

While I’m sorting out my problems with archived posts’ broken links (argh), wrestling with upcoming talks, and complaining about Vermont’s never-ending winter, I thought it would do me and you good to move to a more positive outlook and point to some extraordinary work my students are doing with Web-based practices. (This is what I will miss next year.)

Even though Alex has taken three classes with me, I cannot say that I have taught him much of anything. He’s just plain old inventive, daring, creative, talented and willing to find the rules for himself, for each experience, rather than conform to some static set delivered to him. As has been true with a long line of students, I’ve been learning a good deal from him, as are my current crop of creative writers, for they have the good fortune to have him as one of their senior writing tutors. He was blogging well before he met me, and has continued blogging, folding into his own brand of link-blogging his creative and reflective writing on all manner of topics, currently on Mongolia (where he spent last semester) and heavy metal. He receives comments from people all over the world who share his particular interests, as well as from former teachers, family members, classmates and friends. His is truly a dispersed, loosely-knit, ever-fluid network. He is also a truly amazing photographer and one of my favorite Flickr commenters and cohorts (just look at this image, for instance), and so I am glad, also, to point to his new photoblog.

Some of this output is connected to his coursework (the more formal pieces on Mongolia and metal are part of the independent study he’s doing with me right now) but most of it is not. There’s no place in our courses for this kind of expressive work (he’s had to resort to an independent study), and that’s sad. But he perseveres, and makes the connections between his courses, his interests and the world on his own, because he’s that kind of learner.

My intro-creative writers are also exploring online expression in interesting ways, using a range of tools and practices to find form and meaning, moving away the now-traditional CDS-style digital-story. A few examples: Lois moves her own paintings, music and video into her story. In a quick in-class exercise Kyle creates a Flickr poem, which changes the entire experience of engaging with the text. Clare makes a hypertext creative nonfiction using only image and sound and requiring the involvement of the viewer. All of these projects underscore the students’ understanding of a degree of reader choice and involvement in the writing of the piece. They are writing for more than themselves, actively immersing their reader into the making of the work. And none of them had ever done any of this kind of writing before.

When students have opportunities to find their own forms while contextualizing them within their own lives, their own means of solving the problems we set out for them in our assignments instead of having them adhere to well-oiled formulaic structures and expected outcomes of our disciplines, what might they teach us and themselves? What might they break through to in making connections? In his ELI talk last month, George Seimens quoted historian William Cronon: “More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections so as to be able to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways.” This, this is what my students are trying to do, and in spite of some hefty impediments in their path, in their hypertext reflections on writing creative nonfiction, they show that they get it. They are connecting, and learning to connect, and learning to make connections. I see it in how they see the importance of learning to read as a writer–from the inside–instead of as a scholar only–from the outside. They are trying to connect to their readers as well as to their subject matter, to themselves as well as to some abstract notion of academic excellence. And playing around in this connected medium really helps them to do just that.

How many teachers can say that a first stop on their online daily tour is their students’ blogs, not to check up on them, but to learn from them?

Although I’ve been blogging with my students on WP for a couple of courses and have bgexperiments for my creative-writing exercises, bgblogging has heretofore lived, and quite happily so, on Movable Type. But in six weeks’ time I will be leaving the faculty of Middlebury College and thus must start now to pack my bags and books and blogs. So here I am. (The new) bgblogging. Welcome!

Come June I plan to push into new kinds of topics (for me) while I explore ways in which collaborative and creative Web practices in concert with a physical lab/gallery/classroom/gathering spot located in our county seat can enhance the connectiveness, life-long learning and deep creative spirit of rural communities. This kind of community-based/Web-centric space for creative expression and lifelong learning practices doesn’t seem to exist in many rural communities in this country–certainly not in this state. Now that my departure from the college is certain, I ‘m ready to share the center’s mission and design — details in a coming post.

In the meantime I will be trying to capture practices emerging in my formal classroom one last time, pulling together the work of the past seven classroom-blogging years into some posts about the process, the students, the outcome, and the reasons for heading out.

It will take a couple of weeks to sort out all of the bugs (tags did not make the export) in this blog, so please let me know if something isn’t working or you can’t find what you came here for.

I know that I have been hammering away about grading in the new classroom, student responsibility, and faculty resisting substantive change to the way they teach and therefore use grades, but I’m doing it again here, because of an amazing class yesterday during which I watched my students connect with one another in authentic, deep-learning ways.

Lanny Arvan’s excellent post on personal responsibility in the face of our full-on financial crisis, and what it should mean to us and our students, reminds me of something Harry Matthews said in his “Excellence without a Soul” speech here a couple of months ago (and in his book): academic institutions have basically abdicated the responsibility to teach integrity, to teach values, to talk about the pressing questions of being human right now right here as we mentor our students along their way to responsible citizenship. We are distracted by our own research. By the lack of time. We complain that here isno time for anything, not as things stand now with our major requirements for graduation, our singular focus on only whatare doing in our own classrooms. We’re afraid to change. We’re afraid of change.

One of my students in a recent post wrote,

Indeed. If we do not give our students time and space to contextualize their learning, time to contemplate who they are and what they are doing, then how do we expect them to do anything but find the quickest avenues to “success” ?

Lanny writes:

It takes time and a concerted effort to help students to slow down, as Mark Edmundson also urges, though I do not agree with his top-down approach. I want them to come to these conclusions themselves, together, looking at one another across the circle, listening, and entering the contact zones, wrestling for themselves with the questions of whether to have laptops in class, for instance, or how grades are going to figure into the learning experience. Have we forgotten the whole student?

I have written a bit about my current creative writing class, about the fabulous work they have done in multimedia expression, and just now in creative nonfiction, and some, too, about how long it has taken them to come together as a group, to trust one another, to open up to one another–to trust me and this process of participating in a learning community where learning to read one another’s work-in-progress and commenting on it is an important part of the course. I’ve blogged about the shift I have seen lately, how they are now coming together. They are beginning to care about each other as writers, and as complex people, not just fellow students who happen to be taking the same class.

Our three-part conversation about grading has played a role in this shift, I believe. During the initial discussion we decided upon the areas that should be assessed: risk, effort, improvement and quality.

During the second conversation, we discussed percentages to be given each of those areas, as well as how to consider the individual’s writing, and the individual’s contributions to the group, and the balance of self-assessment and outside assessment.

Yesterday we voted on the percentages to be given to each area.

The discussion explored the relationship between the various parts of the course to the whole–what does quality mean exactly, how can effort and risk be separated–doesn’t effort lead to improvement automatically? And questions about the individual’s responsibility to the self and to the group. I wish I had recorded the discussion–they wrestled with the urge to do their own work, to focus on their own writing projects versus the urge to spend time helping each other out, reading and responding, commenting and discussing, and participating in the group conversation. This is what happens, I believe, when we take grades out as much as possible–meaning, stop grading individual assignments, and yet discuss assessment to push their thinking about why they are here in the first place, and what it is they can get out of this course, and how. And what it means to balance self-interest and group-interest, and how serving the group is to serve the self, ultimately. Now, when they walk into class, the chatter subsides, and they move with excitement into a world where their contributions count and are counted on, where they have a say in the process and the outcome. This is not me being a magician, a guru, a cult figure. This isn’t about me at all–and that’s been the hardest piece of the puzzle to fall into place for them. For the most part, they know only classrooms dominated by the teacher.

Every year, it gets a little harder, I think, to pry the kids out of themselves (their in-the-moment needs and desires) and out of the rut of the way they have been conditioned to experience a formal learning environment while getting them to take their own work seriously (deeply, over time). Another student wrote recently,

Now we’re getting somewhere.

The first thing our architect did when designing our house was ask each of us to write a narrative about our relationship to space–what kinds of spaces we felt drawn to, how we felt in various spaces, how we felt about colors and textures and memories of spaces and places we loved. He didn’t want to know what we thought our house should look like, or what rooms it should contain–he wanted to know how we felt, what we believed about the world, who we were. After he read our four narratives, he sat down in front of us and made a quick sketch of the exterior of what now looks very much like our house. It was remarkable. And it was us. It surprised us to discover things about one another through these narratives (it’s a terrific exercise for families, and communities of practice), and through talking through the design of the house. When we built the house, our architect made plaster casts of our faces, and embedded them into the gable ends. I look out over my garden, my husband to the sunrise, one daughter to the sunset and the other to the mountains. We are the place, the place is us, quite literally, as the impressions of our faces, the narratives we wrote weave us into the fabric of the house. We thus also connect deeply to one another, four points on our home’s compass. We like to think that our faces give the house personality, our collective, complex personality.

What does this anecdote have to do with writing, teaching and the teaching of writing? For me it suggests how I try to teach writing. I have to reveal my beliefs about writing, and the students do, too. We have to think about ourselves as points on the compass of this writing experience. I have to be available as a writer. Show them how I read as a writer. Show something of my struggles with writing, with writing digitally, with the decisions only I can make about and for my writing–all without imposing myself on the community. (I highly recommend Teaching One Moment at a Time, in which Dawn Skorczewski explores “the delicate negotiation” in writing classes.) Teachers, in my experience, tend to over-articulate or under-articulate–but do little modeling, have little self-awareness about how their own beliefs and attitudes are affecting the course experience, all while holding set (and rather mysterious) expectations for outcomes. We are, for the most part, terrible listeners. How are students to know what it is they are supposed to be creating if they have never seen one of these beasts before? Where is there room for student innovation? Beliefs? What does excellence look like at the intro level? The advanced level? Why? The University of British Columbia Murder, Madness and Mayhem Course Wikipedia project, described here so well by Brian Lamb, gives students real-world experience finding their way, collaboratively, to high standards of content and writing in their field. It’s an incredible example of what college students and their inspired teacher can do, collaborating, reflecting, listening, revising.

Today my creative writing class had our second discussion on grading. The group proposed and discussed percentages to assign the various areas of the course to be assessed–areas they had decided upon in the first discussion; after narrowing the field down to three proposals, they asked for a couple of days to reflect before we put it to a vote and finalized the balance between self and external evaluation.

This group has slowly, slowly come together, much more tentative about group practices than other classes, quieter in discussion, and uncomfortable with the need to comment on one another’s work. It is a situation that comes close to unnerving me, so delicate is this balance between all the learners and their writing journeys, so strong are my beliefs about what a good writing community looks like. Some days I have wondered if we’re getting anywhere, if I have stunned them with such newness that they cannot take the first steps, even. But things have shifted. As they do. Especially when I relax, when I become more self-aware. As I have increasingly pulled out of discussion, letting them wrestle with reading-as-writers after having modeled for them how I read, and then scaffolding the process, they have gradually gained confidence in discussion, on the blog, in conference and in workshop–and in their writing. Coming over to my house last week for food, laughter, collaborative writing exercises, and a glimpse of my life as a person with a house, a husband, a dog and some weird stuff around the walls helped them feel the power of the collaborative. They were ready to tackle the insides of the course, what we mean by taking this course.

And indeed, today’s discussion on grading was lively, provocative and meaningful–it belonged to everyone. They spoke out for what they believed, listened to one another, moved towards consensus. I asked tough questions. They asked tough questions. And they wanted more time–to go deeper, to think about it. They slowed down on their own.

The same thing is happening on the blog, where I am one writer among many; rather than primary respondent and feedback-giver. After a few weeks of fumbling with the blog, looking for me to take the lead, they are starting to take it over. After hearing their voices in writing and in recordings, they are losing their shyness. And they see me as a writer in action, playful and experimenting, sometimes writing well, sometimes missing my mark, struggling to find meaning and then to convey it in a way that moves my reader. I know how hard it is to write well. And they are learning to trust themselves, one another, and me. When I do give them feedback, it is always in response to specific questions they ask about their writing. They come to one-on-one conferences prepared to critique their work before I do. And when I give them feedback, they really take it in, and then I promptly narrate my thinking process for them, to show them how I read their writing. That’s the best part of the one-one-one conference, watching them learn how to ask good questions of their writing, watching them gain control of their writing.

I’m the architect, I suppose, of this course, but a resident, collaborative one, who tries to listen to their narratives about what they need to learn and why, connecting our points on the compass through the bones and veins of the coursework, weaving our personalities and beliefs and writing styles deeply into the story of this course.

In spite of my heritage, I don’t really celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Green beer is a bit much– they also dye the Liffey green, I know (my brothers and friends once dyed the milk of the school we grew up in, yup, green…). The funniest run-up to St. Paddy’s I ever experienced was flying back to the States from Ireland for my father’s 80th (I lived in Ireland that year); the plane to Boston was loaded, absolutely to the gills with bands heading to the U.S. because THAT’s where the St. Patrick’s Day action was, not in Ireland. Tin whistles, bodhrans, fiddles, button accordions were played up and down the aisles, and the Guinness vanished before we had left Irish airspace. It was, well, hmmmm, wild.

My dad loved St. Patrick’s Day. So in his honor, I’m marking this day with a list of Irish fiction from the past ten years or so that people on this side of the Atlantic might not have read (but should). I am an avid student of Irish literature, film and music, and though it is challenging from so far away to keep up with emerging writers, I do what I can. I’m not including Edna O’Brien, John Banville, Julia O’Faolain, Patrick McCabe, Roddy Doyle, John McGahern, or the late Clare Boylan, not because I do not love their writing, but because I figure their books have made their way into many collections on this side of the Atlantic.

In no particular order and certainly not an exhaustive list by any means, but some real treasures:

Seamus Deane Reading in the Dark
Anne Enright The Wig My Father Wore (you probably know her new, Man Booker Prize winning The Gathering–simply wonderful)
Colm Toibin The Blackwater Lightship
Clare Keegan Antarctica
Joseph O’Connor The Salesman
Colum McCann Everything in This Country Must
Robert McLiam Wilson Eureka Street
Eoin McNamee The Last of Deeds
Sean O’Reilly Curfew and Other Stories
Sebastien Barry A Long, Long Way
Dermot Healy A Goat’s Song
David Park Stone Kingdoms
Deirdre Madden The Birds of the Innocent Wood
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne The inland Ice

That’s a start, and who first comes to mind this Oirishy morning.

My daughter, Nora, playing the accordion with her school band, in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, in Westport, Ireland, 1998.

Oh right, and the poets. Listen to Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland and okay, Yeats growling his way through his poems–and Joyce reading from Finnegan’s Wake–all stunning!

And for sheer fun, watch a snatch of The Commitments

Slainte!

Heart and mind swell with memories of my father. He’d be ninety today and pretty pleased about that. (Of course he was aiming for 100.) I always loved that our birthdays were exactly a week apart, separated appropriately by St. Patrick’s Day. This week right now feels unbalanced, shifted, torn open. Precisely the edge on which I should write, continuing to explore my reasons for leaving formal education while lauding the good teachers who find ways to work from the inside. I will celebrate his life, then, today by exploring this new space through writing a coda of sorts to my talks at University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy and at Exeter, both talks inspired by him. I write, too, with a nod, of course, to Rilke and to Kozol and to all of my students, past and present.

Blogpost to a Young Teacher

Dear M-,

Thanks for your recent email–how lovely to hear from you a good dozen years or so since you found your way into one of my courses. I do remember you well, and am glad to have played some small part in your journey to teaching though I know it is an unnerving, difficult time to be in this field. That you have reached back into your learning past to call out touches me.

I know you are surprised by my decision to leave teaching. I have received emails from teachers across the world in response to my announcement about leaving my teaching position. The solidarity of the response, the support for my move shows me that yes, we have reached a dark time indeed inside our schools. So many are feeling discouraged if not downright distraught by the lack of vision, courage and commitment to deep learning in their colleagues, their institutions and communities. But do not let my decision lead you out of your classroom. We need teachers like you. Right where you are, calling out for better, insisting on change.

From your letter, and with your permission, I excerpt the following paragraphs, for they bring home the reality of imaginative, talented, committed teachers throughout this country, and of the students they teach.

M-, what a time, what a time. What madness. I worry for these kids. But before talking about shifts of the 21st century, I have to ask, has deep learning ever been found regularly in school settings? Even in elite private schools? If we’re honest? We’ve all had those remarkable teachers who managed to pull us out of the mist of mind-numbing repetitive drill and lecture and into active discussion and collaboration. We remember the great lecturers. The teachers who listened. The inspired teachers. But mostly, they were the exceptions. Mostly I remember dully competent teachers. And in my evil moments I love to remember the worst teachers– my senile third-grade teacher who would teach the same drill lessons, hand out the same worksheets repeatedly for days on end while we snickered nervously and passed notes and sank into boredom and, some of us, into rebelliousness and trouble; and the eighth-grade English teacher who kept a flask of whiskey in his top drawer, to our wonder–it helped us make sense of his absence from class when he sat right there in front of us. I’m sure you can recall the ill-placed teachers in your life, too. They’re terrific story-writing material, and that’s at least something. Many say that all it takes is one great teacher, but I find that sentiment a condemnation of our schools’ general mediocrity. Why does so much depend on a teacher’s ability to transcend the inertia, the territoriality, the fear the fear the fear embedded in our schools?

Recently I read an article in the Chronicle by Mark Edmundson that at once seemed so right on the mark–so much like my father, in fact– and so out of touch–also like my father– that it embodies for me this uneasy time and my reasons for leaving formal higher education at this juncture. He writes: “It’s this kind of dialogue, deliberate, gradual, thoughtful, that immersion in the manic culture of the Internet and Adderall conditions students not to have. The first step for the professor now is to slow his classroom down. The common phrase for what he wants to do is telling: We “stop and think.” Stop. Our students rarely get a chance to stop. They’re always in motion, always spitting out what comes first to mind, never challenging, checking, revising.”

Yes, we’re caught on the barbed wire of confusion, of unsettled, unsettling times. We blame students and their IM-ing, texting ways for their inability to focus, and yet, look at us. We have fossilized learning–taking quick impressions of the works we’re studying, rather than digging down into them to see what they’re trying to tell us. We careen through novels, plow speedily through dense texts, through labs, through lessons, taking snapshots along the way, as we prepare students not for active, thoughtful citizenship but for performance, as you point out, a mad dash to acquire higher scores, better grades, resumes, jobs, more more more. And don’t we do that with publishing, racing to conferences, getting noticed, on committees? How much attention do we really pay to our students? Deep learning strategies?

You might be surprised to learn that bgblogging, the passionate blog-based teacher, still teaches two of three class days a week in a lounge with no computer access at all, just a small portable blackboard and a circle of comfy chairs, so all we have is one another and the materials we have explored. We have to talk, to turn over and over and over again the concerns of the writer. Sometimes class discussion is quite awkward, stiff, stuttery–this is hard hard stuff. Students do not want to feel exposed. No one has asked them to talk about what they have read as writers–I’m not looking for “smart” responses; I’m looking for discovery.

I worry that Mark Edmonson’s article will be used as fodder by teachers and others who out of fear, or ignorance, dismiss the computer in learning, holding it solely responsible for the way students live “to multiply possibilities. They’re enemies of closure. For as much as they want to do and actually manage to do, they always strive to keep their options open, never to shut possibilities down before they have to.” (Edmundson) Come on. Weren’t you like that? After college I felt free to wander about Asia, move to a surfer town and then an island, get to know myself outside of school before I settled down into anything. Everything was possible. Anything. But I was not pressured by my schools, by my parents to be something I was not. Vietnam had ended years before–things were pretty easy really.

They are not now. And to turn from computers as though that will solve our classroom problems is downright reductive. We know that computers used well in education, deepen and extend and slow down the thinking, the reflecting, the connecting and the communicating–students come to see that in addition to the delights of grazing the possible, we can use the connective, collaborative practices of the Web to dig far more deeply into subject matter by moving laterally and associatively across it instead of just chronologically and hierarchically. We can say things we couldn’t before when we can use image and sound as well as text; when we can shift between screens, use hyperlinks; when our viewers participate in the writing by deciding order, elements, options and responding. Why don’t we help students harness the power of connectivity and collaborative creativity to “stop and think.” In writing blog-letters, we can learn to engage in sustained, ongoing, unfolding, emergent dialogue with one another about our subject matter. We can slow down the chatter.

Chris Dede in a recent essay, writes, “…the primary barriers to altering curricular, pedagogical, and assessment practices towards any ICT-based transformative vision are not conceptual, technical, or economic, but instead psychological, political and cultural. The largest challenges in changing schooling are people’s emotions and their almost unconscious beliefs, assumptions and values.” p. 11-12 in “Reinventing the Role of Information and Communications Technologies in Education” You’re feeling that right now.

For me, it’s time to try a different approach, one anchored in the community instead of a school, a place where I can help the people of my lived community access the new ways of connecting and creating, across all the divides that separate us from one another, and from deep creative expression and learning. You are young. You have time to work from within to help your fellow faculty, parents, administrators and students come to their senses.

I’m optimistic when I hear that students such as you have become teachers, or students such as Piya and Remy are willing to teach into a school using new ways of expression. I am optimistic when I have students over from a J-term class and I watch seven of them plan out a new online magazine that they hope will engage their peers in creative expression. It is worth it. You’ll see when you receive an email a few years down the road from one of those Jane Eyre essayists.

Be brave. Speak your mind. Model great teaching and learning. Show them how computers are not the enemy. Laugh a lot. And breathe.

Stay in touch.

Slainte,

Your old teacher