Remembering C. A. (‘Dinger’) Bell

 

 

Melbourne Grammar School, where 'Dinger' Bell taught English from 1957-1973

 

My English teacher in 1965, C.A. (‘Dinger’) Bell, was a man of few words, and I remember only four of them being addressed to me.

“Not without merit, Shann,” he said one day as he handed back a piece of writing I’d done on one of Milton’s poems. That’s all. No explanation of what was good about it, no indication about how it might have received higher praise.

He must have said other things on other occasions, but they’re the only four words I remember.

They made an impact, though, those four words. I remember feeling I’d made a step through what had up until then been an impenetrable barrier. Dinger might not have said much to me directly, but he had written pithy reports that made me wonder if I’d ever succeed as an English student. “He has much to learn about keeping ‘on the beam’ and making effective use of his points,” he’d written in the first one. “He is not in danger of over-confidence,” he said in another. And then, half way through my second year with him: “Carrying on steadily from last year, without showing yet the rigour born of confidence.”

So, ‘not without merit’ sounded promising, especially given the hint of surprise in his voice, as if I’d unsettled a few of his doubts. I looked forward to what he might write in the end-of-year report.

This is what he wrote at the end of my two years in his class:

His sincerity and good sense are more than adequate compensation for any lack of facility. He does not have easy successes; but application, honesty and good taste are a very effective combination.

Digger’s words were uncomfortable. They had a penetrating quality. I thought about them a lot.

Dinger was in his sixties when he taught me, and died in 1988 aged 81.

***

Last week my cousin sent me a copy of a new book about Dinger Bell. (Remembering C.A.Bell, by Michael Dan, Ian Rutherford and David Castle). As I’ve been reading it I’ve been asking myself a number of related questions:

1. Why did Dinger’s words penetrate? Was it because he was good with words? Was it because they came out of a penetrating gaze?
2. How did someone so immersed in the world of literature, who seemed only aware of my presence on the periphery of his awareness, come to perceive certain things about my ability and my character?
3. Dinger was an authentic personality; we all knew this. I’m at present discussing ‘the ethics of authenticity’ with Michael Umphrey and others in an online discussion. What was it about Dinger that was patently authentic?

***

It turns out (I’ve discovered, from reading this book) that Dinger thought a lot about education, and in particular about the importance of English Literature. I don’t remember him talking about this; in fact, he said very little in class. He would make a few comments about our work, he would ask some questions after we’d read something and make terse and mildly discouraging comments about the superficiality or slickness of our responses, and he would read out loud poems and passages and grunt and chuckle and leave significant pauses at various places, as if to ask, “Well, what do you say to that? Is that not wonderful! Does that not make you stop and examine the nature of things! No? Nothing? All the worse for you then!”

He didn’t talk much about these things, but it turns out he wrote about them. Reading literature had, for him, a moral purpose. The books we read in our final year were chosen to

add to their (the students’) experience some knowledge of an Englishman of the sixteenth century who was forced to choose between principle and expediency (Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons); an Englishman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who had to try to reconcile the two sides of his own nature (David Cecil Lord M); a black man of our own century who failed to understand the ‘civilization’ of white men (Joyce Cary Mr Johnson); a group of French Algerians exhibiting th tension between religious faith and materialism or skepticism (Camus The Plague). We are human beings first, revealing, some believe, a touch of the divine; after that we are permitted to be scientists or humanists. (quoted p202)

The English course needed to be a course of substance:

English has the right and the obligation to draw for its content upon the best writing in the history of man and in the history of science. In exercising this right and duty, it at the same time offers, like the classics of old, a context, a synthesizing, and a background, which. However blurred or inadequate, is better than vacuity. Some progressives, the fun-and-games school, will deplore this obsession with the past, even though the past may include the recent past … Our experts in English have been extraordinarily fearful of putting too great a strain on reading from the past with children whose minds are dominated by the present and the immediate future, obsessed by the apparently useful and profitable. Some experts seem to have been afraid that the children would take it as an affront to be asked to read anything better than ephemeral and tabloid stuff. In the natural reaction from the dreariness of imposing classics on the unwilling, the unready and the unable, we are apt to lose sight of the fact that intelligent and interested senior students can have their development starved by lack of nutriment as surely as their less literary fellows can be sickened by surfeit. (quoted p204)

The study of literature was, for Dinger, a way to understand better “human nature, human aspirations, and human achievements in contexts richer and more ennobling than those of party politics and of ‘business’” (quoted p201), and he valued above all things honesty and a seeking after the truth, both in what we read and in what we wrote. In some notes distributed to us boys he wrote:

Try to tell what seems to you to be the truth. (There is truth even in fiction.) Do not pretend to know: you are not likely to be convincing. Say what you have to say as clearly, economically, and effectively as you can. Spare occasional thoughts fo the person to whom or for whom you are writing. Look for the word which may penetrate to him. Let ‘style’ look after itself.

This attitude towards literature determined his views about essay writing. He detested the formulaic or the flash.

The word ‘essay’ was appropriately applied in the first place to literary exercises written in meditative or philosophical moods by people who chose topics on which they felt impelled or qualified to write. Many of the essays written in schools and examinations on casually set topics are word-spinning without motive. (quoted p202)

In children’s eyes, it is sensible to explain why they are being called upon to write on a topic; and it is sometimes politic to suggest ways – not the way – in which a topic may be handled. I am glad to state again my prejudice against the accidental essay. If the writers know that they are working in an actual field of experience and that they are practising a particular kind of writing for a particular kind of public, they are less likely to disintegrate as writers into aimless nonentities. If also they are told that there is not set formula requiring an ‘introductory’ paragraph and a ‘concluding’ paragraph, that there are several points at which the may break into the topic, that it is their privilege to choose their own point of penetration, then they may writing as self-respecting people who assume responsibility for their thoughts. (quoted p206)

It is important for the teacher to realize that the use of the sentence as a unit of expression is conditioned to no small degree by intelligence and maturity. Sentence patterns represent ways of thinking, not merely ways of writing and speaking. (quoted p212)

Dinger’s commitment to the moral purpose of the English discipline shaped his views on the teaching of vocabulary, grammar and assessment:

… the young writer should fairly soon become aware that the meanings of a surprising number of works are tinged with emotional colours and that these colours are often fast colours which defy the efforts to remove them of bleaching ‘clear thinkers’. There is rich wisdom in that knowledge. (quoted p207)

Grammar should not be taught merely as a pedantic exercise or as an end in itself. We should be trying to induce, for example, a respect for the really effective adjective or adverb, a consistency in construction and in the use of tense, an awareness that phrases and clauses can be moved about inside a sentence with varying results; and, above all, we should be trying to kill invertebrate jumbles of words. (quoted p216)

If short-answer ticking and crossing becomes the dominant practice in English examinations, then short-answer ticking and crossing will also become the standard practice in English teaching … The supreme form of creation will be the making of convulsive jabs at little squares with ball-point pens….
There is no need for defeatism. Even modern children do not resent writing if they are allowed to preserve their integrity and are not called upon to perform tricks (quoted p209)

I suppose what I loved about reading this book on Dinger Bell was the revelation that what we experienced as authentic, impressive, slightly fearsome and full of authority came from a deeply held philosophy about the nature of the subject. He thought deeply and had deep convictions. He had no need to talk about these convictions in the classroom: they seeped out of him in his grunts and silences and questions and asides. He was a senior teacher at our school not because he knew how to play the political game, but because he was a master teacher who knew his discipline.

I have this sense, looking back, that there is a connection between his deep knowledge of the discipline and his penetrating comments about his students. He saw us as apprentices, struggling with what many of us yearned to, but did not yet, understand. He knew us not because he took time out from his disciplinary business to ‘get to know us’: he knew something significant about us because he watched as we struggled to become more adept in his discipline.

Thanks to some folk I’ve never met

I’ve just this minute finished marking the 90 submissions written by my postgraduate students in the Literacy Across the Curriculum unit. This is the final task in what has been an intense little unit.

There is so much that I want to write about this experience. I’ve set aside time in December to do this writing.

Before then, though, I wanted to say a public thankyou to those people who helped me put it together.

Of course the main ones are my colleague, Kaye Lowe, and the students who gave such useful feedback as the course unfolded and who (whether they know it or not) influenced its shape and direction as we got under way.

But this thankyou is for a number of people I’ve never met in the flesh: Karen La Bonte, Teresa Bunner, Elfarran, Susan Carter, J. D. Wilson, Dan Sharkovitz.

During the middle months of this year, and then again in September, I mulled in my blog about where I was going with this unit. The people above encouraged, nudged and challenged that thinking. In particular Karen underlined the importance of challenging the students, Teresa helped me find a fertile question that worked (and it did work – more on that in December), and Elfarran gave me some ideas about thinking about our core discipline which I used in the course and which many of the students found took them right into the heart of things.

Thank you all. One of the joys of the internet is the way it helps break down the feeling of isolation in the classroom.

How to improve literacy rates: a simple plan

The government is considering a simple plan. To improve literacy you mandate regular high-stakes multiple-choice national testing in our schools. This keeps teachers on their toes and students focused on what matters most.

I’ve just come out of a classroom where literacy rates seemed to have improved quite unexpectedly and dramatically. For eight weeks, a group of 90 postgraduate students, all of them training to be teachers in secondary classrooms, have been doing a course called ‘Literacy across the secondary curriculum’. At the end of the course, the students were asked to respond to the statement ‘My own literacy skills have improved.’ 18% strongly agreed, 39% agreed, 28% were neutral, 13% disagreed and 3% strongly disagreed.

It’s hardly hard-data research, but something of significance appears to have happened. Here are 90 students who have each had at least 15 years of institutional learning, and nearly 60% of them think their literacy skills have improved over eight weeks.

What did we do?

Did we make sure the students focussed on their reading and writing by giving them a test? No.

Did the university tell me that my job was dependent on whether or not literacy rates amongst the students improved? No.

Instead we did what I think much good education has done in the past: we wrestled with an unsettling series of questions, and we tried to get our heads around a challenging body of knowledge. We read a great deal (a textbook and, between us, over 300 shorter texts); we wrote a great deal (each student reported on two significant pieces of original research and most made substantial written contributions to over a dozen online discussions); and we talked a lot in our weekly tutorials. Because the content was, for most of the students, relevant and disturbing, it stimulating a great deal of thinking. A number of the students found themselves mulling over issues as they cooked their dinner or walked the dog or stood in the shower.

The government has a simple plan. Unfortunately it is missing the point about how people learn to read and write.

If we want our young to become better readers and writers, we need to make sure that they do lots of reading and writing. The government’s plan will reinforce current pressures to narrow the curriculum. There won’t be time for wide reading and creative writing. Worse, there will be less and less time for talk, which is where so much fruitful engagement starts, and less time for meandering and mulling. Test scores might go up, but real literacy will be a casualty.

***

In a future blog post I’ll write more about our ‘Literacy across the secondary curriculum’ course. It’s been highly stimulating and intense.

ELPC 4: And finally, a rubric

This morning I’ve been working on a rubric for the journals referred to in the earlier posts in this series. I don’t like marking with rubrics (but then I don’t like marks much!), but I do find rubrics useful as a way of exposing my values and criteria to my students. It’s good to talk about draft rubrics.

So here’s the one I’ve come up with this morning.

This is going to be of more interest to my students than to other readers, though Karen, Dan and Elfarran will notice their fingerprints on this one.

Sorry about the size of the print.

And here are the notes I want to attach to this rubric, for us to talk about in our first tutorial.

Notes:

1. The final journal submission has a word limit of 2000 words. This is twice the word limit of the last journal assessment submission.2. Your 2000 words can be in the form of extracts culled from your ongoing journal, or in the form of a 2000 word paper, drawing ideas and material from your journals, tutorials, reading, interactions with students and teaching practice.

3. I will be asking myself a series of specific questions when I read these 2000 words. These are:

• Has this student made it clear what he/she sees as his/her ‘core disciplinary business’? Does he/she see this in terms of (i) the traditional historically approved version? (ii) his/her personal heart-of-heart version? (iii) the radically transformed literacy landscape we now live in version?
• Has the student made it clear that he/she has become informed about the current debate about literacy in general and writing in particular?
• Has this student thought through any implications a redefining of writing would have on his/her philosophy and pedagogy?

4. You’ll notice that this time I’ve put ‘contact with staff’ in with ‘reading’. Last time ‘contact with staff’ was in with ‘interactions with students’. It didn’t sit well there, as many of you wanted to talk about Tovani and Prof Lowe together.

5. It is my hypothesis (obviously shared by many of you) that feeling a sense of belonging to a vibrant and stimulating community is a key in the development of successful literacy skills. Criteria 3 is there to give you an opportunity to reflect on this aspect. If the ELPC G2 community has been stimulating, here is an opportunity to discuss this. If, on the other hand, you disagree with my hypothesis, here is an opportunity to challenge it.
6. Criteria 4 & 5 are not compulsory. You do not have to address these in your 2000 words. But they have been included in the rubric because, for some of you, the teaching practice and/or the Writing Skill Task will have made a significant contribution to your thinking about literacy.

ELPC Part 3: Redefining writing? What next!

I used to think that I worked best on my own, down at the coast with my own emerging thoughts and the world shut out. It was never true, I now realize. Even when I was writing my PhD thesis down here, I was reading books and articles and drawing on long conversations with my supervisors. I was also sharing chapter drafts with them. That’s the way it’s been over the past couple of days, too, but now I’ve got a PLN for the sharing of ideas. As I walk along the beach or jot ideas down, I have Teresa’s voice quietly urging me to be more controversial, Elfarran reminding me that my own preoccupations are not necessarily the same as my students, Susan and J.D. letting me know that they’re enjoying reading my stuttering thoughts, Dan taking me back to the connection between love and literacy, and Karen (as always) making the view of the territory clearer. You’ve all helped me sharpen my focus question and also given me ideas for the structure of the course.

I’ve settled on the following as the focus question:

Redefining writing? What next! Is this just a distraction from my core disciplinary purpose?

In our first lecture or tutorial, I’ll mull aloud about the various parts of this. How is writing being redefined? The history of passing fads in education. Elfarran’s breakdown of the question ‘What’s my core disciplinary purpose?’ into three parts:

• in its traditional historically approved version,
  
• in my personal heart of hearts version and
• in the radically transforming literacy landscape we now live in version.

So I’ll say a bit to begin with. But the main business of the four weeks (it’s a ridiculously short time!) will be the students themselves exploring the question, in a number of related ways:

1. A literature search, based on Michael Wesch’s How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class. One of the comments on Michael Wesch’s post has described how Moodle might be used for this project, and later today or tomorrow I’m going to post a couple of examples to guide the students. In Week 1 of our month the students will find, read and create an abstract of (say) 3 articles, in Week 2 they will read the extracts created by their colleagues, and in the Week 3 tutorial we’ll have a discussion centred around our focus question and drawing on the ideas generated by all this research. I think this will be manageable, stimulating and (most importantly in a teacher-education course) repeatable in the students’ own classrooms.
2. Again later on tonight I’m going to create a Ning for us to use to share ideas. We’ve been using Moodle, but there are three reasons why I want to add a Ning to our box of tricks. Firstly, I want to explore with the students the idea that we stimulate writing by belonging to a stimulating community (thanks, Dan, for your comments on this aspect), and Nings work particularly well in creating an online community. Secondly, the Moodle blog feature doesn’t allow students to read others blog. And thirdly not all schools have Moodle, and Nings are free and easy to set up, and so again will add to each student’s repertoire.
3. All of the formal assessment for this part of the course will come from the students’ blogs. This is what we decided at the beginning of the course, and though I’m not sure I’d do it this way if I had my time over, the students have understandably resisted the idea of changing what we originally agreed on. I’m going to construct a rubric for this. I’m not a big fan of rubrics as marking devices (that’s a whole other story), but I do like the kinds of conversations that occur when a rubric is produced. Rubrics help clarify expectations and surface values, even if they don’t help assign marks in any objective way. The focus in the rubric is going to be on how deeply the student has researched and thought through the issues raised by the focus question. Karen la Bonte’s response to my last blog post is going to be especially useful here, and I’ll be pinching some of her words for inclusion in the rubric (which won’t please Karen, given her own distaste for rubrics!).
4. Each student will be required to work on one writing-related (defined broadly) skill, a skill that is going to be useful for them as a teacher. I’m going to do one too. I’m going to create my first digital narrative. (Karen has recommended Voicethreads as a good digital narrative tool, so I’ll be investigating this.) The subject of my digital narrative is going to be connected to this part of the course. In Week 4, those students who would like to share their little projects will do so in the tutorial. All students will write about their developing skill in their blogs.
5. In Week 2, my colleague Assoc Prof Kaye Lowe will run the tutorial on ‘Writing and Spelling’.  This will give us more food for thought as we think about the relevance of rethinking our attitudes towards the teaching of writing.

So, five interconnected elements, all revolving around the question ‘Redefining writing? What next! Is this just a distraction from my core disciplinary purpose?’

ELPC Part 2: Inching towards a more charged focus question

So. Here I am, at the coast on my own for three days. Time to think and read and write. Bliss. It’s 7.30 at night and I’ve finished dinner (but still got my apron on); a salmon and bean frittata with an avocado, pea and olive salad. A glass and a half of cheap but pleasant red wine. I’ve been for a walk on the beach during a break in the wet weather, there’s a fire on, and I’m like a pig in poo.

I’m planning to write a short blog post each day. I’m here to sort out the focus and structure of the second half of our ‘literacy across the curriculum’ unit which I wrote about in my last post. The focus for our final four weeks is writing.

I’ve just re-read the post, and Teresa’s comment.  She wondered about my proposed research questions, and very politely suggested that they didn’t quite hit the mark. She’s right. They lack punch. They have no real charge, they don’t challenge pre-conceived assumptions. I need to work on them.

My students come from all the secondary disciplines, and they’re in the middle of a five week block in schools, where I’m guessing some of the bigger educational questions will be subsumed by concerns about classroom management and finding the time and energy to prepare properly.  Some of the students may well be wondering about the relevance of four weeks back at university thinking about writing.

And while they’ve been out in schools, I’ve done my own wondering. I’ve been thinking and writing about the many different tacks that we might take when we’re looking at writing.  What is the function of writing? Does writing imply an exclusive focus on the written word? What about multiple modalities? 21^st century literacies?  Literacies in the digital age? There are so many potential tacks that it’s easy to get lost.

So today I’ve been trying to find a charged and challenging question that cuts through some of this. Something that takes us into the heart of all this complexity and tension.

How about something like this:

Writing-as-composing, Multiple-modalities-in-writing, writing-for-web-2.0. What Now? What Next? Is all this distracting me from my core disciplinary business?

I like that this one acknowledges the skepticism, then asks us to examine it. I also like the way it invites us to think carefully about what our core business is, and to see if re-thinking aspects of writing fit into this core.

And it doesn’t have a simple answer, like my earlier version. There’s a strong debate going on in educational circles about this very question.

How does it sound to you Teresa? Others? Better?

****

Finding the right words for our focus question is just one part of the planning. There’s also the students’ reading (I’m going to adapt Michael Wesch’s idea on ‘how to get my students finding and reading 94 articles before the next class‘); the development of a composing skill (I wrote about this in my last blog post);  the way we might use the University Moodle and a Ning; the content of the tutorials; and so on. In some ways, the precise wording seems such a small part of what needs to be done. But (because I’m going through a bit of a Dickens-phase in my reading at the moment), I’m reminded of the way Dickens used to spend weeks playing with titles for his books before he could begin the real creating. The title often held some kind of essence for him. That’s how I feel about the focus question.

ELPC Part 1: A fertile research question

When it comes to learning something new, just listening to an expert is usually not enough. Nor is passively reading. Usually we need to do something, to actively construct the knowledge ourselves, from a number of different sources and for a particular purpose (often to teach or explain it to someone else).

This seems to be the principle driving the inspirational Michael Wesch and his university class. It’s the principle behind the structure of our postgraduate course called ‘literacy across the curriculum’ in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. (The course acronym is ELPC, hence my title.)

For the first four weeks of this literacy course, the students each had to do their own piece of research. In our last four weeks (in October, after the students have spent time in schools), I’m wanting to again have them actively constructing knowledge from a variety of sources and for a particular purpose.

I’m writing this blog post to help me find the words to describe this proposed project.

****

I’ve already discovered that these are quite remarkable students. Ranging in age from early 20s to mid 50s, from all kinds of disciplines and walks of life, many with their own families and the perspectives that come from being a parent, they’ve begun to challenge or extend accepted definitions of literacy.

• Michele and Renee were struck by the usefulness of reflective writing and blogging, and wondered how this might become a part of their teaching in the humanities and the arts;
• Niomi, Matthew, Adam, Pip and Rob wanted us to include aspects of ‘mathematical literacy’;
• Jane, Leigh and Alison urged us to include the ability to read images;
• Terry described the experiences of a friend of his who struggled with reading but came to know the world profoundly through talking, acting, role-playing and discussing, or what Terry called his friend’s advanced  “vocal, aural, relational and dramatic literacy”;
• Sarah wrote, “Literacy is about using our hands, our voices, our expressions, pictures, words and emotions.”
• Brett wrote a wonderful blog post about ‘reading the environment’, in which he told the story of a group of scouts going out into the bush.

Rachel eloquently summed up this desire to think more extensively and inclusively as follows:

everything can be read: … the world is made up of signs. Thus, in order to be truly literate, we need to be able to actively participate in multiple mediums. Yes, we need to have an deep and intimate understanding of written text and to be able to produce text in a way that precisely communicates our intentions. I don’t believe that imperative will ever go away. However, it is increasingly clear that, in order to survive and to make survival meaningful, our children need to be able to “read” technology, visual media, numerous intellectual disciplines, the non-human environment and one another. It’s knee-knockingly intimidating but as I write this, I’m also excited by the possibilities. Imagine being able to train our brains to easily roam over so many dimensions of existence, and to competently convey our insight to so many diverse beings. Truly mind-blowing.

****

I want to try to build on this kind of thinking in our last four weeks together. This time though, instead of having each of them do his or her own research project (as in the first four weeks), I’d like us all to be working together on a single project.

The focus, this time, is writing or composing (thanks Karen!).

So right now I’m trying to find the words for a fertile research question that would help us explore writing in a way that had the students constructing meaning for a particular purpose.

My friend Karen La Bonte has already suggested a couple of questions around which we might focus our work.

Do we express ourselves only to reflect what is already known (which we have recently digested), or are we creating new knowledge in and via our composition?

Does the act of composing have to be language-oriented to be valid?

These two questions connect very nicely with the kinds of questions the students have been raising.

But there’s more I’d like this research question to encompass. When the postgraduate students recently reported on their own research, many made the point (explicitly or implicitly) that literacy and love are connected, that literacy development is excited by exciting relationships, that a person is motivated to become literate through a desire to belong.

Reuben described the secure and stimulating emotional climate in which he gained his insatiable love of reading; I’ve quoted his words in an earlier blog post. Coming at it from the opposite direction, Geoffrey wrote about the effect his father’s sudden death had on his literacy learning as a 5 year old.

Geoffrey’s father died suddenly when Geoffrey was 5, and this had a profound effect.

What my own experience as a child of 5 and 6yrs old highlights for me is what a huge impact one’s emotional state has on one’s ability to read and comprehend and find joy and pleasure in literacy. Powerful emotions such as trauma, grief, anxiety and inadequacy may make it impossible for a student to learn anything, let alone enter into a text and gain some pleasure from it. I was unable to learn some of the basic building blocks of literacy because my consciousness was flooded and overloaded by some very powerful emotions. I think there are many young people in a similar situation as I was but for other reasons no doubt. Martial breakdown, domestic violence, homelessness and sexual abuse, would I believe all have a similar debilitating impact on a student trying to comprehend a text. For them as well as for me, it would not be before these intense emotions have dissipated that I or they could begin to enter into the other world that unfolds in literature. I was never [at school] able to go back and relearn or learn for the first time the things that I had been too engulfed in pain to absorb.

As Jane put it:

If the context we live within is fractured or unsupported, absent or indifferent, volatile or dormant, then the chances are that we will struggle to make any connections that are meaningful and⁄or insightful.

Literacy develops within a context, within an emotional climate. My own hypothesis (obviously shared by many of the students) is that we’re barking up the wrong tree if our literacy strategies continually focus on the individual, and in particular on what skills he or she lacks. We need to be thinking more about creating the environment, the culture, the community, the relationships, in which a desire to become literate can and will grow.

I want our final four weeks together to explore and reflect this. I want our research work to be vibrantly collaborative, conducted partly online and partly face-to-face in our four tutorials (three of them taken by me, one by Kaye Lowe).

So what’s the research question that captures all of this?

I feel blocked.

****

I’ve just been for a walk. Walking usually helps. On the way home I had a thought. I think the research question might come in two forms.

First there is the research question which we as a group would be working on. It might be worded as follows:

Do current theories and practices take too narrow a view of what constitutes ‘writing’?

This would involve some review of the literature, lots of discussion, some tutorials and some composing by each of the students.

What kind of composing?

Well, perhaps a second research question might guide the students’ work. Something like the following:

Given that writing (composing) (1) functions both to express and to discover and (2)  has many forms (not just word-focussed), what writing skill (traditionally associated with my discipline or inspired by a different discipline) might I develop over the next four weeks which will improve my teaching and⁄or my students’ learning?

I like the direction that this question would take us (though it feels too wordy). The students would each find a skill that they wanted to develop, and over the four weeks would work to develop it; lots of scope for variety and creativity, but lots of cross-fertilisation as well. I’ve already begun to think about what skill I might work on in the next couple of weeks, to model the kind of approach I’m thinking about. The student journal (blog) would become the place both where the student experimented and developed the skill, and where he or she reflected on the progress being made. The progress would be shared informally in the tutorials and online. Each student would leave with a useful skill honed, and Kaye Lowe and I would be left with lots of raw material for some useful reflection and writing of our own.

****

I have a test that I like to use for research questions. It’s based on the work of the Israeli educationists Yoram Harpaz and Adem Lepstein, who suggest that a good research question must meet the following six criteria:

OPEN: The question had no simple single answer, but probably several, different from and even contradictory to each other.
UNDERMINING: The question undermines or challenges the basic assumptions and fixed beliefs of the student; cast doubts on the ‘self-evident’, on ‘common sense; uncovers basic conflicts lacking a simple solution; and required thinking about the roots of things.
RICH: The question requires grappling with rich content indispensable to understanding humanity and the world, that is impossible to understand without careful and lengthy reflection and/or research.
CONNECTED: The question is relevant to the life of the student, and to the society in which he lives.
CHARGED: The question has an ethical dimension, a strong emotional and ethical charge which motivates further inquiry, reflection, discussion and/or research.
PRACTICAL: It is a question that lends itself to further to exploration, about which information is available to the student.

I’ve managed to negotiate (with work and family) three days at the beginning of next week when I’m going down to the coast (this time with broadband USB stick!) to think some more about these questions and to begin to put a firmer structure to these final fours weeks in October.

So I’d be interested in your thoughts. Do the questions meet the criteria? Does the approach make sense?

Some thoughts on the fly

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. A lot has happened, is happening, and I keep trying to find time to write about it. There’s no substantial time right now, with journals to read, schools to visit and lessons to plan and follow up. But I don’t want too much to slip by without at least a mention. So here are some thoughts on the fly.

Heloise and Abelard

My Year 11 Extension class are studying the connections between text, culture and value and are currently working on a text of their own choosing. I especially enjoy this part of the course, especially when a student discovers a text that opens up worlds. For Will, strange and compelling worlds have been opened up in his reading of the letters of Heloise and Abelard, and his study of two appropriations, Pope’s poem and the film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

If you’re interested in what a 21st century 16-year-old might see and feel as a result of reading this story, I warmly recommend taking the time to browse through some of Will’s blogs on our class Ning. His writing describes his struggles to understand how such a tragedy could take place. Will is drawn deeply into the story of the two lovers, he’s appalled by the punishment dealt out to Abelard and the tragedy of their enforced separation, and he is profoundly curious and puzzled by the question of whether a commitment to the church and God can ever wipe clean the memory of a passionate love.

In the last week or so, Will has written a series of letters, in the form of poems, between Heloise and Abelard. All of them are published on the Ning. Here is the second one:

To Abelard, my lord,

My love I write to you at last,
Although I thought these passions passed.
Like a phoenix from the cinder,
Love returns again to hinder
This process of forgetfulness,
And draws me from my dark recess.

This letter comes from painful tears,
Forgotten in these silent years.
Unsettled by your words and woes,
That stirred me from my sweet repose.
Sadness flows and blots the page
As I write from holy cage.

I cannot rest within these walls,
These rugged rocks and hallowed halls.
Pensive in my own bastille,
Locked away with holy seal.
My mind does stray to thoughts of old
As passions come and then unfold.

They told us love should come through trust,
But what is love if without lust?
Infatuation takes command,
With trepidation hand in hand.
Look past these consecrated vows
And find the place where passion grows.

You have proven me your affection,
And love has seen its resurrection.
Now memory takes authority,
When emotions claim priority.
We can hope to fight desire,
But we will never quench Love’s fire.

Involving university students in research

For the past fortnight I’ve been mulling over a dilemma.

My university students are currently out on a five week stint in schools, so our ‘Literacy across the curriculum‘ unit is on hold. We’ve had what I think is a highly stimulating first month, looking in particular at the question ‘I’m not an English teacher: is literacy really my business?‘.

But what do do when the students return for our last four weeks together?

I’ve suggested to my students that we vary the original plan and have them doing some research on a literacy-related topic of interest to each of them; but they have let me know that they’re worried about workloads and they’d prefer it if we stuck with the original plan which had me sharing with them some of my ideas about writing. I’m worried that the final four weeks will be too passive (teacher presenting, students absorbing); they’re worried that the final four weeks (if we follow my later suggestion) will be too over-loaded given the workload they’re expecting.

So what to do? How to find a way through this dilemma?

A discussion with my colleague Anita Collins and some mulling over the example set by the wonderful Michael Wesch has given me the beginnings of a glimpse of a way through the fog.

Michael Wesch organises his Digital Ethnography course so that he and his students are involved together in some authentic research. As he writes on his wiki:.

Our goal in this course is to work together to complete the best research project possible. Therefore, given the dynamic nature of ethnographic research, there is no fixed schedule. Even the points below are not fixed. We can redistribute point values at any time. We are simply using points to motivate us all to stay on track and work as well together as we can. Ultimately, our success will not be measured in A’s and B’s but the quality of our work and its impact on the world.

Could I set things up for the final four weeks so that the students and I are involved in a piece of authentic research together, with me as the co-ordinating spirit (setting the question, suggesting resources, setting up the structure for student inputs), but with the students exploring the question in diverse yet connected ways? I would draw things together, write up our final report, broadcast it to relevant places in the world; the students would contribute their own thinking coming from their diverse disciplines and perspectives. This would give a focus to their journal writing and so wouldn’t vary expectations or add to the volume of their workload (and so would meet some of their concerns about my most recent suggestion); yet it would inject into our final four weeks the necessary element of students actively using what they coming to understand (and so would meet the concerns that I had about the possible passive nature of our original plan).

I think this could work. I’ll mull some more.

I’ll need to think, for example, about what our central research question might be. In a sense, I think that’s the easy part. We’re studying literacy across the curriculum, we looked at reading (defined broadly) in the first four weeks, and we’re planning to look at writing (again defined broadly) in our final month. So our research question would be something like this:

How does each of the disciplines write? That is, how do the disciplines communicate their knowledge, within the discipline and to outsiders? And can the disciplines learn from the writing modes of each other?

This probably needs work (thoughts or suggestions anyone?), but it’s a start.

Why Shakespeare? A student perspective

Recently folk at the English Companion Ning discussed the question ‘Why teach Shakespeare?’ from the teachers’ perspective. A week or so ago, my two Year 10 classes (in Canberra) joined with Jenny Luca’s Year 9 class (in Melbourne) to discuss the same question from a the students’ point-of-view.

The full discussion can be found on our Ning. Here is a summary.

… because of its relevance to modern life (Charlotte)

I can’t think of any good reason (quite a few students!)

… because the English Department is either lazy or unimaginative (Adrian, being provocative but stimulating too)

… to develop and broaden our interest in literature (Angus)

… because I love Shakespeare (Linda)

… to further consolidate themes and ideas taught in English classes (Josh)

… because it speaks to our age group [we're currently studying Romeo and Juliet] (Christian)

… to learn about love (Mayank)

… to find out where our language came from (James)

… to prepare us for Years 11 & 12 (Max, Kurt)

… to separate the students planning to do Advanced and Standard English in Year 11 (Angus)

… because it has a timeless quality (Nick, Christian)

… because it is magic, it makes me smile and it captivates my mind (Sam)

… to understand and appreciate why there’s so much respect for Shakespeare (Amber)

… to understand the links between our culture and the play  (Amber)

… so you can get better at analysing symbolism and studying techniques (Jack)

… because you can learn about life from studying classics like this  (Laura)

… to become competent at extracting meaning from texts  (Gurtej)

… because we are now old enough to be able to handle a challenging text (Eliot)

… because it is so famous, and there are so many references to it in modern culture  (Rachael)

… to broaden our knowledge of the English language (Alex, Nick)

… to learn about other times and other lives (Taylia)

… because the twists and turns fo events that lead to pure tragedy is great (Elsa)

… because it’s a challenge (Will)

… because the play has everything: drama, comedy, action, suspense (Jo)

Soon after these thoughts were posted on our Ning, I made cards out of the summaries, and in one of my Year 10 classes I got each of the students to ‘adopt a card’, which they then used as a starting point to explain their point of view. We had a terrific discussion, with those saying that studying Shakespeare was a waste of our precious time more prominent than the above summaries would suggest. Then, after I’d listened to all the very eloquent arguments on both sides, I announced to the class:

Well, I’ve listened carefully to what you’ve all been saying, and frankly those arguing that there are better ways we should be spending our time have been surprisingly convincing. Therefore, starting from next lesson, we’re going to abandon Romeo and Juliet and do other types of English work. That’s it. That’s the end of our time with Shakespeare.

There was a shocked silence in the room. Some of the boys looked genuinely upset, others disbelieving. Of course I then told them that I’d been joking and that they might each reflect on their gut reaction when they heard the ‘news’.

Discussing classic texts with Year 11 students

My year 11 Extension class is doing a course called ‘Text-Value-Culture’, and last term we read ‘The Odyssey’ and talked about the way this story has been appropriated by different writers for different purposes. This term each of the students has chosen a pre-WW2 text and a couple of appropriations to study.

You can read about what the students are doing on our Class Ning.

Some of the students have expressed an interest in finding people from outside our classroom who share their interest in a particular text. Shannon is exploring Poe’s ‘The Raven’. Tom is looking at how the story of Tarzan has been adapted by different cultures. Will started with the story of Heloise and Abelard, and that has taken him to a poem by Alexander Pope and the film ‘The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. And Michael is reading The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

If you are interested in reading what these students have written about their texts,  then feel free join our Ning and to join the conversations.

The mystery of learning to read

My colleague at the university and in our course on ‘Literacy across the curriculum, Associate Professor Kaye Lowe, has talked with our students about the essential mystery of how we learn to read. It’s often impossible to pinpoint what it was (if it was any single thing) that led to us ‘getting it’.

It seems to me that this applies to all kinds of learning, that the successful classroom is essentially a mysterious place, though I’ve tried to put my finger on some of the essential elements in a series of earlier posts, culminating in On the nature of literacy (with a nod to Spinoza).

It’s a mystery that many of my postgraduate students are wrestling with at the moment. They’re wondering both how they themselves learned to read, and how they can set up a classroom environment of deep learning when they graduate.

One student, Reuben, has done a particularly fine job at capturing the learning environment in which he learned to read. He has given me permission to quote from his online journal:

I have always had an insatiable appetite for books and reading and I have been attempting to recall or understand my motivation as a young reader. What was the cause of this appetite, where did it come from? There are a few elements that I believe contributed; I was often read to by my parents, and the material that they read to me was often above the expected level of comprehension so that I had to struggle to understand it. It is my hypothesis that the link was formed in my mind between information and books – and I have always desired information. I think, developmentally speaking, this is true of most children (as anyone who has had a chain of endless “why’s” from a toddler can testify). However I was indulged in the aspect by my parents and in particular by my father on the topic of ecology, which is a large part of his work. He would never shy away from complex, involved answers which I found fascinating.

Once I was able to read reasonably well, my parents also made a point of frequently taking me to the public library or secondhand book stores, and allowing me to make my own choices. I can still recall the first secondhand book that I chose for myself, and took immense pleasure in reading.

The title of the book was “How Things Work” and featured diagrams and explanations of the scientific workings behind a range of otherwise mysterious devices and phenomena such as telephones, radio-broadcasts, weather patterns and geological formations. Obviously, it was adapted for a child’s level of literacy, but I believe the title is a very telling statement on my personal motivation as an early reader. I was driven by a desire to learn ‘How Things Worked’.

This desire was very much a natural phenomenon – how then to capture some practical application of the same enthusiasm. Can it be engineered in students? Cris Tovani discusses this, with the anecdote regarding the teaching of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although I remain a little apprehensive about my own skills in the area, I am convinced of the importance of modeling as described therein. There is no more powerful motivator than a confident display of skill, as long as it is tempered with the information that it is entirely achievable.

Another vivid memory that I recall when considering my personal history as a reader is an incident involving my Grandmother’s second husband Trevor, who I quite admired because of his own proficiency with language. As a child and a young teenager I would often visit them for holidays, and reading would be a primary entertainment. At this particular stage, I was obsessed with the technical skill of reading, and the speed at which I could accomplish it. I would work my way through a huge stack of library books, proclaiming to anyone within audible distance when I had finished a book. Trevor must have been watching this behavior, because he began to quiz me on details from the books whenever I finished one. Without explicitly stating it, I was made aware of a large deficiency in my understanding of the books. Though I am sure it was not his intention, I can recall feeling ashamed to discover that I had not really been reading the books at all, but just mechanically processing the text with my eyes.

The exercise that we completed in the tutorial this week made me recall this memory and I am sure there in a profound lesson there, though I am still not certain how to explain the sensation of sudden realization, the radical change in thinking and perspective that I experienced.

*****

Kaye Lowe has been reminding us that where we once tried to understand the reading process by seeing what struggling readers had difficulty with, we now understand more about how to encourage literacy by observing how good readers came to read. It seems to me that Reuben has described some of what’s essential.