Manifesto

By Marie L. Milner

Voice - that ineffable something that allows us to read a piece of someone’s writing and see his or her very soul reflected there. As secondary school English or Language Arts teachers, if we have just read 52 essays one rainy weekend, and we come upon that paper with “voice,” we send up a little shout of thanks to the writing gods and goddesses. Why? We are celebrating that rare student writer whose face immediately floats before ours as we respond with respect and affection, because everything that student is in his or her very being is reflected in the piece, be it poem, essay, memoir, narrative - or yes – even expository essay.

Over the past few months the San Jose Area Writing Project has been sponsoring inquiry group sessions where teachers from the educational spectrum have come together to research and reflect upon the notion of helping students develop “voice” when writing. We have decided that with so many prescriptive and proscriptive forces virtually demanding that teachers “teach to the test,” “follow the standards,” and embrace the No Child Left Behind governmental mandate, the challenge of encouraging students to “write with voice” has become an even greater one. Indeed it has never been easy to teach the concept of voice, and I’ve learned that many teachers cannot even agree on a definition. M.H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms states the concept thus: “We have the sense of a pervasive authorial presence, a determinate intelligence and moral sensibility, which has invented, ordered, rendered, and expressed all these literary characters and materials in just this way.” Oh, my. I prefer to think of it as, “Wow! Here’s another super paper from Trieu! I just knew it was her paper after the first few lines!”

Recently, I was struck by an analogy between the art of writing with “voice” and the art of teaching with voice. Just as a writer cannot be an effective and passionate one if he or she has not been encouraged to develop writing voice, so too, a teacher cannot be an effective and passionate educator if he or she has not been allowed to develop “voice” as a teacher. I think students should be able to overhear other students describing a lesson learned in my classroom and without having heard my name, say eagerly to one another, “That must be one of Ms. Milner’s lessons or classes. That is just SO Ms. Milner!” If we don’t teach with “voice”, we may as well just hook students up to a video or computer and let them “mainline” data

My students know that I value equality, diversity, justice, and progressive thinking and that these values will be reflected in everything I teach them and help them discover for themselves. They know that I will use literature to promote these values, film to illuminate them, and class discussion to analyze them. They can count on me to encourage them to write with voice and passion about these notions, and to share my own writing with them. In keeping with the concept of social justice, I don’t think I can ask a student to do anything I would not be willing to do, and writing with them helps me put my “philosophical” money where my “voice” is, so to speak.

I don’t mean that I should be an ideologue in the classroom, implying that students embrace a particular political philosophy or they will be traveling down the Super “F” highway in my grade book! I just mean that students ought to have a committed “voice” modeled for them in order to empower them to be agents of change in their own worlds and to not feel so powerless in the face of various injustices in the world. Teaching students that the world exists beyond their neighborhoods, and that they can affect that world once they grasp the potential of leading an educated life, is critical to being an educator with voice. A graduated senior, who had nothing to gain from “kissing up to the teacher” told my class that his whole view of women had changed for the better because of a unit I taught using literature that revolved around the oppression of women. He said he never again would look at his sister, mother or female friends in quite the same way. I also had a student write me a letter saying he had never enjoyed English class until he took my American Lit class because his former teachers had never shown anything akin to what the student termed my “passion” for my job and for literature. I’d like to think Scott was responding to my teacher voice when he wrote this.

But sharing a passion for social justice and literature is not all that my voice entails. My students know I will share my own writing process with them in order to empower them to improve their own. They know I will enthusiastically read aloud any piece of literature I have chosen to share with them and that I will love doing so. They can count on me to sing a song if it appears in a novel, and I am familiar with the tune. They know I will use humor every chance I get if it will help them understand a concept, but never if it is at a student’s expense. They know I love to laugh at myself and share my many foibles. They know that I love primatology and incorporate that love into the teaching of grammar, a fundamental, but often rather dry aspect of a language arts curriculum.

My students realize fairly early in the year that if a work of literature moves me, I will freely show my tears and share my profound dismay at the injustices represented in the work and in the world. One day in class, I stopped an honors class cold when I overheard a student using the term ghetto to describe something he thought was stupid. I grabbed the so-called ‘teaching moment” to address how personally offended I am by the use of a term that holds so much emotional impact for people who know its connection to the Jewish Holocaust. The students were rapt in their attention, but not a one looked surprised. This is just part of Milner’s “voice.” My students know I am willing to learn from them and that I have learned far more from my students than I will ever teach them.

They know I set very high standards for them, and I don’t mean the sort handed down by the governmental powers that be. My “voice” is one that says even when I’m not speaking aloud, “How can you become educated enough to protect yourself from social injustice and work to correct those injustices in the world if you don’t take pride in your work? How can our class of mere mortals affect positive change in the world if you won’t come to class each and every day (and on time) in order to avail yourself of the opportunities afforded you by public education? (And it’s not just the students who must come everyday and on time. I’ve missed approximately 12 days of school in 17 years of teaching because I want to model respect for students and self-respect.) How can my voice in the classroom be one for social justice if I allow a student, male or female, to refer to a grown woman as a “girl,” or a person of color by a racist term? How can I allow a student to use the term “fag” in my classroom or the terms gay or ghetto as supposedly derogatory terms for something they find to be unpleasant, ugly or stupid? How can I model an ideal of equity and equality in the world if I treat my students unfairly or with bias? How can my students learn to love themselves if I don’t admit my own inadequacies and learn to face them?” And finally, “How can I expect them to write with honesty, passion and voice if I don’t teach the same way?”

To these ends, my students examine through literature the oppression of contemporary women and other oppressed groups of people around the world and throughout time. I model effective writing for them as we write an entire essay together based on our reading of a moving short story about the degradation of the homeless entitled, “Waiting for her Train.” Not only do the students learn the nuts and bolts of writing an effective analysis of a literature, but, as we go, I am able to shed light on some of their prejudices about homeless people. I also model poems such as “Where I’m From” and Linda Hogan’s “Heritage” with students so that when they create their own poems, they will be validated in their diversity and identity. The power of both personal and literary voice in these student poems is often humbling.

There are probably students who despise my voice in the classroom and wonder when I’m going to let up on all this “injustice, oppression, racism and inequality stuff!” They may think I’m an idiot when I sing in class. I’ve even been known to illustrate a dance or two if dance is mentioned in literature, and I’ve seen a few students looking mightily embarrassed about that. But what’s important is that it doesn’t bother me, and at least they know I’m the “real thing!”

Just as a student will never develop voice if the only way he or she learns to write is by following a formula; just as a student will never develop voice in writing if all testing is inauthentic and focuses on bubbling an answer sheet; just as no student will ever develop voice if he or she is never given anything authentic to write about; so too, the teacher who is compelled to follow a lock-step, standardized, de-politicized curriculum will never achieve a recognizable “voice” in the classroom. Instead, someone could just pick us up and swipe us over one of those grocery store scanners. I don’t think we want “scan-able” teachers and I’m quite sure we don’t want scan-able students either! One of the most satisfying aspects of working on this piece and sharing it with others has been having other teachers tell me, “I’m starting to wonder now, ‘What is my voice in the classroom? Who am I when I’m there?’” My dearest hope is that you will reflect upon that question yourselves.

We’ve all had the experience of having students express shock when they see us at the movies with a tub of popcorn in our hands. They look taken aback and say something like, “What are you doing here?” When this happens we often joke with colleagues that students must think teachers are stored in a closet over the weekend and during the summer months and then wound up like a wind-up toy on Monday morning and set loose on the students. I hope my students never perceive me as a wind-up toy teacher and that my “voice” as a teacher helps them develop not only their voices as human beings, but “voice” in their writing. I love it when I see some “singing and dancing” in their written work. I’m sure we would all like to see a lot more of it!