Community = Communication

I’ve been reading a lot about the good and the bad of blogging this week.

Jeff Plaman shared these two articles from The Atlantic: Why American students can’t write and How Self-Expression Damaged my Students. Both articles present a general position about the dangers of a learning environment in which there is too much freedom for students and too little direct instruction from teachers.

These articles are in contrast with Jeff’s own writing about our digital identity and that of my colleagues Paula Guinto and Jabiz Raisdana. If I can grossly simplify the collective position of Jeff, Paula and Jabiz, I think it is that blogs provide a space for students to explore and develop their sense of themselves as writers and that a certain amount of “freedom” is absolutely necessary for this to occur.

Central to this discussion is the concept of “freedom”. For Peg Tyre and Robert Pondiscio, the two writers from The Atlantic, freedom seems to represent an abdication of responsibility by teachers. Pondiacio argues that giving students freedom to explore their identity as writers through the “Writers Workshop” model is to ignore a more important responsibility we have as teachers: direct instruction.

…at too many schools, it's more important for a child to unburden her 10-year-old soul writing personal essays about the day she went to the hospital, dropped an ice cream cone on a sidewalk, or shopped for new sneakers. It's more important to write a "personal response" to literature than engage with the content. This is supposed to be "authentic" writing. There is nothing inherently inauthentic about research papers and English essays.

[…]

…at present, we expend too much effort trying to get children to "live the writerly life" and "develop a lifelong love of reading."

You're not going to get to any of those laudable goals without knowledge, skills, and competence. For every kid who has had his creative spark dimmed by "paint-by-numbers" writing instruction, there are almost certainly 10 more who never developed that creative spark because they grew up believing they can't write and never learned to adequately express themselves.

Whether Pondiacio’s depiction of the “Writer’s Workshop” method is accurate or not (and my own recent training in Writers Workshop would suggest not), he nonetheless represents a concern about the failure to teach “basics” which rings many chords. It takes little time surfing the net to discover waves of disgruntled writers concerned about the loss of basic skills in the education system.

As I’ve written elsewhere, this concern seems to reflect something much more pervasive than just the teaching of writing. A general concern about a lack of disciplined teaching in schools is pervasive in the popular press despite a lack of evidence to this effect. In western countries, the massive increase in participation in post-primary education over the last 50 years has lead to a concomitant increase in literacy. The population of today is without doubt more literate than that of yesterday. What this has also meant is that instead of a small group of the educated elite defining the lingua franca, there are increasingly diverse groups contributing their ideas and their voices to the discourses of power.

It seems important to me to remember that the whole project to fix language into one definable form is not only political but also very recent. The project to “fix the English language” which Samuel Johnson began 250 years ago in the writing of his dictionary, reached its apotheosis in the creation of The Oxford English Dictionary in the mid-19^th Century, a project which was not finished until early in the 20^th Century. We think of English language and grammar as being largely fixed and unchanging but they never have been and the idea that they might be fixed is essentially a modern one. Shakespeare did not have a standard spelling, grammar or lexicon and, arguably, could not have written Hamlet if he did. A freedom to play with language is at the heart of most great writing and particularly poetry.

My argument is not that I think language should be loose or that any form of communication should be fine, but rather that it is important to understand that all decisions about which words, grammar and spelling are “right” are conventions and that these conventions should and must evolve. We do need to understand the conventions of our day, but we also need to stop and ask ourselves why we want to communicate and it is this question that I think is missing from the “back to basics” agenda.

We communicate to create communities.

Language is, at its most basic level, communicative and our identities are the consequence of this communication. What I find unsettling about articles such as the two which began this post is that they almost see writing as combative; the desired outcome is to conquer, not to communicate and successful writing is that which is “better” than others. The idea of a polished prose based in a view of potential perfection is anathema to communication because communication is a negotiated medium in which meaning cannot be static.

One’s prose is important, but far more important is the connection between interlocutors and the possibility of building and evolving a better understanding of self and others. Respectful communication is first and foremost concerned with forming connections to the interlocutor – not with evaluating the status of their prose.

Which brings me back to what I think is a good blog. First and foremost it is one which communicates. Language can facilitate communication in a range of guises. At times it works best when it is well-dressed in black tie or ball gown; at other times board-shorts and “T” shirt fit better. It is absolutely the responsibility of the teacher to bring students to an understanding of what clothing will gain them easiest entrée to which venue but a far more pressing need in any society is to teach them to look for the person beneath the veneer and to truly communicate.

What I find truly inspiring in the work of my colleagues is that they are giving students the space to find themselves and each other in their writing. Part of the mission of our school is to “make education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future”. Such an important task must begin with communication.