I still intend to respond to Russ' review of our book (Worlds Apart etc.);
however, the question about real writing situations reminds me of Anna
Freedman's analogy in her provocative paper, "Anyone for tennis?" -- I have
watched an exchange of shots, some of them have been returned, others have
whizzed by, and I no longer want to remain a spectator, but take up my
racket and make a few telling returns (really write, for all real writing
is consequential -- something gets done, something happens).
For one, most school writing is not real writing (it is of course, real
school writing), though we would very much like to make it so, because, I
suspect we believe there is no learning without engagement. As Russ has
suggested, real writing occurs in anticipation of a response, is dialogic
(in the Bakhtinian sense). In Anna Freedman's tennis analogy, the shot must
be returned or conceded. A grade is not a shot in response (the evaluator
is on the sidelines, like a coach perhaps, shouting "good shot!" but there
is no one on the other side of the net to return that shot -- that
well-crafted wrist shot, the elegant rhetorical turn, goes into empty
space); a grade is not even feedback -- in the sense of an ongoing
dialogue, a speaker, or an actor, or a performer picking up from an
audience; the institutional setting defines the act of writing: what is
good writing (earns a good grade)? and how do I make this good?
But enough of analogizing. As the other Freedman (Aviva) has said, school
writing goes nowhere; once it's graded, it's filed away, discarded,
forgotten. At the end of term, so many of those well-bound reports are
left behind, and end up in the recycling bin. In our research on academic
and workplace writing, most workplace writers asserted that they had
learned to write at work. We might claim that we prepared them to write at
work, but they certainly did not see the link. Rightly so. Workplaces are
complex settings, hierarchical, with long institutional histories,
organizational cultures, and a lot more (not unlike our own institutions
and departments, one has to live a long time in them to learn their ways);
so such settings and the exigencies that arise within them cannot be
simulated in classrooms. As Aviva Freedman puts it so succinctly, you
write where you are.
I have argued elsewhere that so much of school time is spent preparing for
the life after, whether that be Grade 3, Junior or Senior High, Community
College, or the University; and at each level, there is the perennial
complaint: Didn't they teach you anything in ........? Students need to be
writing for the here and now, from their own needs, as defined by them. It
is only then they will be able to judge for themselves if they are
accomplishing what they set out to do, and what remains to be done. It is
the need to say that ineffable "such and such a thing" that James Britton
said is worked out in the saying, is discovered or realized in the writing.
Real writing serves intention, is goal-directed, is motivated by will and
desire. Good writing, real writing, I believe, is an outcome of our using
language as a tool, as an extension of ourselves, and not as something "out
there" that we somehow appropriate and model. Classroom communities are
just as real as any workplace setting for writing. I know from much of this
discussion and from past issues of Inkshed that places for such writing are
always in the making.
Patrick Dias
518 Montford Drive
Dollard des Ormeaux, QC
Canada H9G 1M8
Phone: 514-626-3605 (Home)
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