What do I believe as an English
teacher?
I am a teacher in the British Columbia public school system, and I continue to wrestle with my craft. Here is one way I find myself looking at teaching English at the secondary level.
This was first published as "Belief in the English Classroom" in the BCTELA Update 38, no. 3 (June 1996): 16-17.
Content knowledge? Pedagogical strategy? Classroom management? Lesson and unit planning? Evaluative methods? How do I know who I am as an English teacher? How can I reconcile the expectations of parents, students, teachers, and the community? In the end, it comes down to belief.
I believe in what I do as a teacher of English and as a teacher of writing. Aidan Chambers offers a wonderful definition of the kind of belief to which I ascribe in his novel Now I Know. He separates the word into BE and LIEF -- be, meaning "to have presence in the realm of perceived reality; exist; live," and lief, meaning "gladly, willingly (related to the Old English word for love)." These definitions are intriguing on their own, but when Chambers adds the notion of will, and combines his definitions, this is when I begin to see how I am as a teacher. "So belief means your will to give all your attention to living with loving gladness in the world you think really does exist."
This is what teaching writing means to me, choosing, willing, to live with loving gladness in the world which exists for me, the world of words, the world of creation, of expression, of transaction. Being a writing teacher involves more than passing on form and content; it involves believing that writing can enhance living, that being a writer broadens one's participation in the world, in all of the meaning-creating, character-creating, life-creating world. And being a writer does not mean toiling in isolation, it means joining a community and engaging with that community, trading and exploring ideas -- writing the world.
But what of reality, you ask. What of hundreds of students a day? What of curriculum, and bells, and desks, and minutes, and marks, and parents, and, in the end, what of students? Can belief sustain a person in the chaotic, stressful, demanding world of the classroom? It has for me, and I would like to share a bit of how that has worked.
During my five years of teaching, I have taught English at all secondary grade levels. I am currently teaching English eight and English ten, along with Social Studies eight. I have arranged my English classes to exist according to the spirit set out in Nancy Atwell's book In the Middle: Teaching and Learning With Adolescents. I run a writing workshop on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with a reading workshop taking up Tuesday and Thursday. My classroom provides an environment conducive to writing and reading, an environment which encourages risk and ownership and honesty, an environment based on conversation and the interaction of peers, an environment which is not tied to prescriptive curriculum or to restrictive evaluation, but which uses curriculum and which uses assessment to reach learners, to reach writers and readers.
I have suffered through times when I questioned my decision to teach according to a workshop paradigm. I wondered whether what I was doing was best for students. I doubted myself, I doubted my students, I doubted the system. Many hours of discussion with colleagues, many, many hours of reading, and much reflection convinced me that students deserve more than working through pre-set assignments, worksheets, and teacher thought. Students deserve an invitation to learn with a community, to be autonomous writers and readers. Students deserve the opportunity to experience writing as a way of ordering their lives, in addition to communicating their ideas with others, in addition to relating an argument, in addition to preparing a report, in addition to copying convention, in addition to filling in blanks.
We need to be clear about what we are about as teachers of English. Is it our job to prepare students to write in a variety of contexts? I think we can agree that this is so. Should we focus on academic writing? on responding to literature? on argument? on reporting? Should we be responsible for the way our students compose scientific reports, business letters, and social studies inquiries? There are so many forms, so many conventions, so many rules and regulations attributed to writing; we simply cannot cover them all. We need to decide. Do we choose certain forms, certain conventions, certain rules to pass on, or do we invite students to become writers, to write authentically, to make mistakes, and to learn? Is there a balance?
I think there is a balance. I think that writing, in essence, provides a way to structure thought, and in this way it is useful for internal and external communication. James Britton offers the model of all writing beginning as expression, then moving to the poetic or to the transactional as context demands. I think we can help students to acquire basic skills which will enable them to turn their writing to their purpose. If students are encouraged to think of themselves as writers, to have faith in their ideas and images, if students are exposed to audience, to the demands of purpose, then convention follows. Through inquiry, the reasons behind convention are examined, are made explicit. I believe that my students will arrive at appropriate forms for their writing given experience and given practice. I believe that this type of learning will become lifelong, that this type of learning is generative.
There are those who view student writing quite differently from this. Some would hold that we must take an inventory of what student writers can do in their writing based on an examination of published forms of writing,, that we must measure the skills of a student writer based on some generalizations we can make about good writers,, that we must check student writing against lists compiled to reveal deficiency. This view of teaching writing is mechanistic in that it assumes that student writers can be fixed, that gaps in student writing can be identified and filled, and that available standardized measuring tools can be widely applied with predictable, valid results. The problem with this method of approaching the teaching of writing is that it presupposes the existence of some commonly accepted ideal model of a writer. Diagnoses of student writer weaknesses implies that a working model is available for comparison. I do not think that writers can be treated in this way. Do we have a model of an ideal student writer, of ideal student writing? If we do look to some models, aren't we limiting the potential of each individual? How can we allow for genuine invention or unconventionality in this model? It seems to me that we must approach the idea of success in writing differently. What measures can we use to claim that our students are becoming better writers?
My experience with workshop classes has offered other measures of success. In my classes, many students maintain writing journals. Students go beyond course requirements and purchase or make a book in which to keep personal writing. I keep a journal and I write in it daily. I have made a few trips to Granville Island to pick up journals which students have ordered. Students are making special places for writing in their lives. And students are not just acquiring blank-page journals, they are choosing and experimenting with writing tools, with fountain pens, and with coloured ink. It is this choice, to make writing special, to make writing a part of living, which convinces me that my belief is well held, that I have identified the reality of the world in which I live, and that students can gladly, willingly exist with me.
My junior high school held its first-ever Coffee House. Over fifty students attended this evening event, from a population of just over 450 students. The event was planned and hosted by the school's Writing club. We served beverages and snacks, and we listened to stories, to songs, to poetry, to people telling who they are. Teachers, students, and other members of our community joined in reading aloud, in creating a literary culture. This Coffee House will likely be followed by others, and all student and teacher work is welcome to be shown here or to be printed in our school's Literary Magazine, which is created, edited, and published by students, led by the Writing Club. Last year's edition of the magazine has over 150 copies in circulation.
What I am describing is the result of an active writing community, a literate community, a community immersed in and creating its own culture. It is from this cultural foundation that we, students and teachers, can look at writing, that we can look at words, analyze them, and examine their effects. It is from this solid position that I draw confidence when I ask my students to undertake some writing which is not fun, which involves monotony, which involves drudgery. I ask students to practise certain forms they will need to have mastered when they move on to high school, or to university. Not all writing is enjoyable; some writing is tedious. This is okay because students must understand that writing well is hard work, that writing requires organization of some sort, and that writing requires attending to the delicate balance between writer and reader. The point is that this type of writing, the kind of writing which has been traditionally esteemed by academia, follows our class belief in the value of writing, in the value of creating, in the value of making meaning. Students see that context is important and must be considered. Students gladly and willingly live in the world that really does exist.
In the end it is belief that sustains me. I live gladly and willingly in the world of school with all its promise and contradiction and chaos. I live with students who do not eat properly and students who have needs which differ dramatically from my own. I live with a system which seems to challenge much of what I do, or if not challenge, at least make it difficult to proceed as I would like. I live with students, with words, with enlightenment and disappointment. But after all the theory, after all the strategy, after all the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, after all the measurement, I live with surprise. I live with the surprise of opening my journal to a poem placed there by a student. I live with the surprise of finding words scrawled on my watering jug. I live with the surprise of poetry read aloud at lunch time. I live, gladly, to inspire and to be inspired in the company of language.
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