Manifesto

By Jonathan Lovell, SJAWP Director

I was drawn into the field of the teaching of writing somewhat accidentally. It was the late 1970’s, and I was slogging through a doctoral dissertation in Victorian Literature at Yale University when I chanced across a job announcement at Teachers College, Columbia University. The job required teaching experience at the secondary level, knowledge of literary criticism and literary history, and a background in the newly emerging field of composition theory and practice. I’d taught 10th and 12th grades at an independent day school before beginning graduate school, and graduate work in English at that time necessarily involved extensive knowledge of literary history and criticism. “Hey, two out of three ain’t bad,” I thought to myself, and so I applied.

The problem came when I was accepted for the job, and actually had to teach a course entitled “Composition for Teachers of English.” Not quite knowing where to start, I initially had my students read short monographs by British researchers at the London Institute of Education. These studies focused on the disconnect among middle school students between their ‘expressive writing’ abilities and the formal essay writing generally required of them in their different school subjects. Good topic; bad way to present it. By the fourth week or so the majority of the practicing and prospective NYC teachers taking my class were in open revolt. One of them had even written a letter to the President of the college, claiming the most decisive way to promote ‘professionalism’ among secondary level English teachers would be to fire a newly hired faculty member named Jonathan Lovell.

I was sitting in my office, waiting for that dreaded knock on the door, when two graduate students I’d been working with to shape a doctoral program in the teaching of writing approached me. Faced with “open university” students with little or no background in writing or confidence in their writing abilities, they had adopted an unusual approach to the teaching of writing focusing on “elbow groups.” While these small writing groups often did sit elbow to elbow, the name actually referred to the author of a book called Writing Without Teachers. The name of its author was Peter Elbow.

They’d brought me his book. Would I like to read it? Why not? What did I have to lose? I read it that evening, fascinated by Elbow’s practical vision of the powerful reciprocity between writers and their ‘listening’ readers. Because we’re not accustomed to being heard in our own voices, Elbow observed, we’re therefore not prepared to listen carefully for the emergence of the voices of others. But this can change by adopting a “writing workshop” approach in our classrooms and following some very practical procedures. Have writers, in small groups of four or five, read their writing aloud to the others. Don’t have these listeners critique what they hear: rather have them simply listen to what is being read, wait a bit, and then listen to this writing a second time around. After this second reading, have the listeners write down the words and phrases they remembered from the piece, a one sentence summary of the piece as a whole, and, finally, what the writing reminded them of as they were listening to it. Unlike the written comments we generally receive on writing, these responses were meant to help the writer see what was already beginning to stand out in his or her writing, what was already beginning to leave a ‘residue’ in the minds of his or her audience. And for listeners, writing these responses was essentially a form of training, educating your ear so that you could become more adept at hearing what your peers were saying. Or not quite yet saying.

It’s as if we’ve spent most of our lives speaking to one another under water, Elbow wrote. We’ve grown used to the experience of hearing others’ words only as muffled and indistinct sounds. And so when we speak or write in our own voices, we half expect our words to largely evaporate before they’ve reached the ears of our listeners. By writing and listening to one another attentively in these intimate and exacting “elbow groups,” however, we can gradually become more adept as listeners as well as more demanding and expectant as writers. We can gradually ascend upwards from our underwater lives, as it were, and begin to hear the boom and roar of one another’s voices.

I entered my classroom in Composition for Teachers of English the next week with a “Composition Manifesto.” We would write together each week, I proclaimed, including your instructor. We would listen to one another’s writing in small groups, responding with the “pointing,” “summarizing” and “metaphorical” responses I’d been reading about in this fascinating book by Peter Elbow. And we’d debrief our experiences week by week, noticing how our pieces of writing changed and developed over time, and what we’d learned by listening to the evolving pieces of writing of others in our small response groups.

Somewhat to my surprise, for those students who stuck with the class, our writing did indeed improve. Slowly, steadily, and pretty uniformly. We began to get better at listening for the distinctive voices of our classmates and to look forward to seeing where their week by week drafts would take them. And we began to expect more of our own writing, learning from the risks that others in our “elbow group” had taken and becoming more confident that own emerging voices would actually be heard, and be worth hearing. I can’t claim this class in Composition for Teachers of English was a rousing success. Those who made up its primary audience, after all, were battle-scarred and weary veterans of New York City’s public high schools. They definitely brought a ’show-me’ attitude to a young upstart like myself. But what I did come to realize was the deep and compelling need we all have for being listened to attentively, for having our own voices recognized as distinct, special, worth caring about, and worth our own respectful attention.