Writing for Purpose and Advocacy feat. Bryn Orum, J.J. Burry, John Warner, Stephanie Hurt, & Dr. Richard Wilkinson

Chris McNutt: Hello, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 7 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration Project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio. In this episode, we're focused on advocacy, getting students motivated to speak up for themselves and change the world. We have so many brilliant voices who feel limited to the classroom, and they're not realizing the power that they hold. Particularly, we're going to look at how writing instruction lends itself to promoting student voices, featuring a variety of English educators, as well as authors, who recognize how important the humanities are to promoting a flourishing democracy. But first, a quick plug for our Patreon, where you can support our podcasts and free resources for as little as $1 a month. A special shout out to three of our supporters, Jeremiah Henderson, Skylar Primm, and Jenny Lucas. Thank you for your support. You can find out more information about what the Human Restoration Project is, and how we're helping to promote progressive ed through entirely free resources, thoughts, and more on our website at humanrestorationproject.org, and on Twitter, at HumeResPro. Whenever I've attempted to rally my students up, to get them to stand up for what they believe in, I'm really honestly not that successful. Certainly, there are some students who take command and advocate, but most just shrug it off. That's not to say that they don't care. Students overwhelmingly care about the problems that they see in the world. They just don't necessarily think they have the power to change things. There's so much untapped potential in today's youth, an entire generation of young adults who care about tolerance, acceptance, they care about the earth, they care about love. Yet schools rarely, if ever, want their students to engage in political discourse, to fight for what they believe in. It makes sense, given how politically volatile the United States is. It isn't an advantageous position to have one's students on the news, for example. However, these issues are core to what students find interesting and important, and seeing that relevance in their work, and most importantly, making the connection that that work is valuable, could literally change the world. Further, our classrooms are places of rank and filing, which frankly is just a reflection of society itself. Our merit-based, consumerist lifestyles don't lend themselves to positive, fulfilling lives, and schools are increasingly intertwined with a belief that success is framed by hoarding a lot of money and obtaining the perfect job. With so much focus on purely capitalist gains, it's no wonder that students feel they lack purpose. Plus, our unjust society contributes to most of our on-paper problems in education. For example, a lack of food, or safety, or just any kind of safety net. For our disadvantaged youth, it means that we'll never really have a human-centered education without making reforms to make equitable communities. If educators aren't demanding political action to help impoverished families, then isn't all of our work just for nothing? Therefore, the question is really two-fold that we're attempting to answer. Number one, how can we encourage advocacy in schools amongst our student body, and is that advocacy appropriate? And two, what is the educators' role in advocating for their students and local communities? Bryn Orum: Raspberry is a project from the Greater Madison Writing Project. I've been a fellow with the Greater Madison Writing Project since it started in 2011, and came to work full-time for three years ago now. At that time, we had been granted a relatively small amount of money to do some work with high school students and advocacy writing.

‍

CM: This is Bryn Orum, director of Rise Up and Write, our summer writing program centered on advocacy in Madison, Wisconsin. She used to teach high school English, and further, she co-founded the Clark Street Community School, who our previous guest, Bennett Jester, attends.

‍

BO: So we designed Rise Up and Write as a two-week summer program, and the pilot year, three years ago, ran with 15 high school students. Each of them came in with an idea of what they wanted to work on, a human rights or social issue, and we worked through a series of mental modeling practices to think really deeply, intersectionally, and then sort of turning towards writing with an audience focus about what they could ask their peers, their community, and change-makers to do. So those are the three pieces of writing that they wrote. Last two weeks, lots and lots of students got published in letters to the editor in our local papers, a lot of them wrote letters to local officials, influential folks who have something to do with their issue and got responses, they all made buttons because that's what you need for a good campaign, and it was really incredible. That first summer, I was a summer camp counselor for years, and I think that I thought it would be fun and they would write some stuff, and then towards the end of the second week, we really realized that this had been a very formative experience for them, that they were empowered by the opportunity, and we knew it was a lot bigger than just those two weeks.

‍

CM: So do you see the future of Rise Up and Write as something meant to be eventually integrated within schools, or is it purely meant to be a summer program?

‍

BO: I wouldn't say that the goal of Rise Up and Write is specifically to become a part of the model. That said, I do wish that students had more opportunity to write to authentic audiences, to choose the topics that matter to them and research and know them deeply, and just be able to participate in the conversation that's happening around those issues. I think that young people have tremendous insight and power, and a lot of the work in learning that's done in schools just stays inside the four walls of the schools, and that's just a significant resource that is underappreciated and is not being tapped into. Rise Up and Write is heavily influenced by a program from the National Writing Project called the College Career and Community Writers Program that supports teachers in helping students write source-based arguments, and that's really rooted in this idea of in order to know a topic deeply, we have to move beyond a pro and a con. We have to listen to people who disagree with us, and we enter into the conversation to listen and then share what we think about it. I think that that's, in a summer camp kind of way, that's the work that kids are doing at Rise Up and Write, but I think kids should be able to do that in, and not even just in English classes, but in every school class that they're a part of.

‍

CM: Something that I've struggled with when working with young people is fostering a sense of advocacy. You know, there's a lot of anxiety and depression, especially among adolescents, which breeds apathy, and while I certainly understand that adolescents are going through these issues and seemingly these issues are worse than ever, it seems like students are less and less inclined to believe that they can change the world. How do you go about promoting that they can be advocates?

‍

BO: I think the first thing is really like what I think your work is trying to do is remembering that they are people and that every person has a story and every person has something they care about, and I think we've really taught young people to be apathetic in school, and therefore like it's a long burn to try to sometimes to break through that because we've taught them really well. I think that moving towards a more student-centered approach in education and communicating to young people that I believe in you, I care about you, what you say matters to me, you might have to say that and show that in like 37 different ways over four, five, six years, but I think believing that students can do it is really the first piece. Another piece that I think is really important is work around youth and adult partnerships, and this is in some ways part of student-centered education, but when youth really position themselves in partnership with youth and not as the knowledge holders, but facilitators of youth inquiry and youth design, I think that once kids are ready to step into that, they just flourish. They have a ton of ideas and they have so much they can do, and it's much more fulfilling to be in that space as an educator and as a student, but it's hard in a traditional school, but I mean, I believe we can get there.

‍

CM: How does Rise Up and Write then create this community that promotes strong writers?

‍

BO: So sometimes I think that when we talk about like student-centered design, people hear that as like letting them do whatever they want to do, like just willy-nilly crazy town, right? But I think there's actually really deliberate design choices that we need to make in order to support, like adults have a role, right? And we can support their thinking. I really think it doesn't take a lot to make students feel honored and important in a space of learning, starting with very simple things like asking them what they're interested in and what they know about it, creating spaces where they can explore that further and share what they know to really crowdsource expertise. I think students often do and learn a lot of things outside of the classroom that aren't honored. And starting with that to say, who are these people and what do they care about and what do they have to offer, I think that's a way to open up and into students really investing and being willing to see the connections between perhaps traditional core content and the things that they really care most about.

‍

CM: So then you're looking at writing activities as well as different types of building blocks to encourage those writing skills?

‍

BO: Yeah. There are some sort of traditional writing project activities that I think actually a lot of writing project teachers use in their classes. We write into the day and we write out of the day together. So that's just like exactly what it sounds like. It's like a quick write and students sign up to bring in a prompt that everybody will write to whether that's like a question or a quote or just like something silly to do. And we spend like five minutes writing. And then at the end of the day, there's a voluntary author's chair where students can come and share their writing. And I think it's both community building, but also confidence building as young writers. Usually in the beginning of the week, people are pretty hesitant to come to author's chair, but by the end, like the last author's chair, we're always running late and we're like, come on, come on, come on, like read faster. So it's cool to see that happen. But then we just spend a lot of time doing like silly sort of camp style, get to know you activities that I think sometimes get squeezed out of school because we don't have enough time for it. But that stuff is really important. And even though the kids coming into Rise Up and Write, you know, have some interest and willingness to do this, it's different than it's not a school classroom. And I totally get that. But everybody still needs those things in order to feel welcomed and seen and heard and ready to do hard things like write and share and respond to other people's projects and feedback, right?

‍

CM: It seems like a huge reason why Rise Up and Write is so powerful is that you're promoting the why of writing. It isn't just the fundamentals or telling someone exactly what to do. Instead you're actually using your writing for some kind of purpose. What changes would you like to see within schools in order to promote that philosophy?

‍

BO: And this is a place where I want to acknowledge that Rise Up and Write is not a classroom. And so there's no one gets a grade at the end. You know, I'm accountable to them, like having fun and feeling great, which like we could argue that that's what classroom teachers should be held accountable to. But that's maybe a separate conversation. I am super into thinking about different styles of writing, different types of language, as well as different formats for writing, especially in the space of writing for change and writing as advocacy or activism. They're just like phenomenally cool things going on that people are doing with words and language to cultivate change. And kids get super jazzed looking at those things. I think there's so many things they didn't even know were possible, whether it's like super old school, like writing zines or like culture jamming, like sort of guerrilla style writing projects. I just think it's super important to bring the creativity into the writing that way. Like we are not sitting down and writing five paragraph essays. They do often write like formal letters and obviously that kind of writing is super important. But I think being really flexible and dynamic and really thinking about one of the things we really want students to think about is that advocacy and activism should be strategic. There's often a lot of emotion that goes into it and that's really important, but we should very carefully understand what is the change we want to see? Who are we talking to? What is the right medium to converse with that person? What is the point of intersection that we're dealing with? We spend a lot of time dissecting and really thinking through those things. I think in a critique of some activism that is happening, I think sometimes without that our energy can be like shouting into a void or shouting into the choir. I really want to raise up young people to think very carefully and creatively and strategically about how they're using words and language to make the world a better place. And it's so fun. They do such cool things and come up with really creative and incredible ideas.

‍

CM: If you want to see Rise Up and Write's work, I highly encourage you to follow their social media, which we've linked in the show notes. I've also linked the Greater Madison Writing Projects blog. There's so many awesome things going on there, highlighting grading and portfolios and writing advocacy. It's really worth checking out.

‍

Jess Houser: I was offered a job in the special ed department and I got to sit in on a writing class as Inclusion for Inclusion. And that's where I kind of fell in love with just teaching writing in general, just writer's notebooks. That's where I learned about them. And so that particular teacher, everything that he did, it kind of showed me, hey, I could do that. And I already like writing, so why not?

‍

CM: This is author J.J. Burry, or as her students know her, Jess Hauser, who teaches at a small public school in Texas. Jess is an aspiring writer who advocates for the use of writer's notebooks in the classroom.

‍

JH: Basically any kind of notebooks that you can throw all of your ideas into or lack of ideas. You might just want to write about it, nothing or anything. You can write down random things that you hear, things that you see, words that you encounter every day, ideas that you have as far as fictional ideas or even nonfiction. It's really anything. It's a collection of just your brain. I have a separate journal that I keep as well. So that's more for my daily thoughts and my emotional dump, I guess you could say. And then I have my writer's notebook that I write in to keep my, it's just practicing writing and it could be a prompt. It could just be something that I heard that day. It could be the story I'm working on. It could be anything.

‍

CM: So what's the status then of your personal writing?

‍

JH: Working on my first novel. It's in the, I'm on the third draft and the third round of revisions, which are taking forever. And then I've written several short stories that I have, most of them are published, most of the good ones are published on my blog. I've entered a couple into contests and won a couple contests, not for any money or anything, just for bragging rights and poetry. I write a lot of poetry. The micro poetry gets put up on Twitter most of the time.

‍

CM: And do students have access to that writing? What do they think of it when they see that?

‍

JH: Oh yes. They have access to my blog. When we write in class, I'll put my writer's notebook, which I mean, I know it's going to be a shirt. This is my seventh one since I started them and they're all full of different random ideas. I'll put that up on the overhead and they can see what I'm doing as they're writing too, kind of as a mentor, especially if we're doing a specific style of writing that they haven't encountered yet, or if they have questions and I can answer it on the board, or I can show them something I've written and how we're going back into it to find that grammatical structure or to look for it in their own writing, because if they can't apply whatever the skill is to their own writing, it's going to be a lot harder for them to learn.

‍

CM: Do you find that it's sort of an inspiration in a way, not to really sound like too cocky or anything, but does the fact that the adult in the room is an active participant in the field, does that make them feel more inspired?

‍

JH: I think for some of them it is, but I think it's more inspiring for them to see each other writing and share more with what they're writing personally, because they can't always connect with when an adult is writing. Some students are in that level of, well, of course you're writing, you're a writing teacher, and they can't really connect with the fact that I'm writing all the time, so it's more important to me to have them sharing their own writing with each other and showing each other what they're doing, whether it be the grammatical structure that we're working on or the format that we're working on, they can see it in each other's writing, and that's more encouraging for some of them.

‍

CM: So what you're talking about here surrounding writing speaks a lot to me. I think we need to focus a lot more on teachers embracing their passions. Teachers in general seem to be some of the worst offenders to not practicing what they preach. I talk all the time about the importance of taking time for yourself, creating things, embracing your hobbies, but most of us get wrapped up just teaching. We don't do those things that we tell our students to do. It's important, obviously, that we care about education, but there's a lot to be gained by embracing our other passions. What are your thoughts on this?

‍

JH: I think part of it is just sanity. If I didn't have something to do outside of teaching, then I probably would feel that burnout. So yes, writing is what I teach, but it's also, I'm not just writing the stuff that I teach. So I can work on my novel, I can work on my poetry, and I don't have to tie it in any way to teaching. And really it's about, I guess, personal goals. The students, they'll ask me how my novel's going, they'll ask me if I entered any contests or things like that. So it encourages them because then they can see, hey, we can do that too. We can enter these contests, we can publish on the school blog, we can do these things. So I guess that's tying it back to school too. So it's really hard to disconnect.

‍

CM: For sure. That's a great point. What kind of struggles do you then face when it comes to work-life balance?

‍

JH: I think my biggest struggle is grading, as far as that goes. Writer's notebooks at first were a huge struggle in grading because they all say, don't grade everything, you don't have to read everything. But I really feel like if a student wrote it, I should read it. And it feels personal to them, so it should be personal to me as well, especially if they want my feedback on it. So I've gotten a whole lot better at that since I started writer's notebooks and the feedback is kind of built in and it allows them to get feedback as they go through the writing process. They get feedback with a peer and they get feedback with me as they go through. So then when they're done with their writer's notebooks, when it's time to turn them in, they've already gotten feedback on almost everything that they're turning in, except for just a few things. And reading just a few things from every student may seem a little overwhelming, but it's not near as bad as reading everything from every student because I've already done most of it. So that allows me to have time to do my writing or I also crochet as well. So it allows me time at home, especially with my kids in the evening, because they don't want to see me grading all day.

‍

CM: Our next guest is John Warner. John is an author, editor, speaker, and professor focused on writing instruction. Recently John's work has been focused on writing instruction through the books, Why They Can't Write and its companion book, The Writer's Practice. To start us off, a major theme of why they can't write is choices versus imitation or students are often not asked why they write, but simply taught how by following a set formula. Could you start by elaborating on this difference?

‍

John Warner: The danger of the kind of imitation that I think we need to be cautious about is that it gets a kind of prescriptive process where we'll say, start your first paragraph, make sure your thesis is the last sentence in the first paragraph, support that thesis with three body paragraphs, start with a paragraph with in conclusion a paragraph essay, and then we just have them sort of filling in these blocks to produce an artifact, a product that resembles writing. And if we saw it in isolation, we'd say, yeah, that looks kind of like a piece of writing. Unfortunately, the process used when it's highly prescriptive doesn't engage with the kinds of skills we need to actually be able to write, to create meaning, to work through ideas, to have half an idea and develop it into a whole idea. I think imitation, real imitation can have a place in writing. I remember when I was young, A Bridge to Terabithia, if you know that book, that was like my favorite, favorite book of all time when I was probably about eight, nine, 10 years old. And I tried to write a book with a slightly different plot in the same style, imitating it. But in doing that, I was actually learning how to express myself. I was making choices about language and story and character and this kind of stuff. That imitation is okay. It's where we're trying to create and control the performance in order to produce this artifact The flavor can be judged off and on criteria that does not reflect the kind of process we want students to go through when they're making meaningful writing.

‍

CM: All right. That goal of authenticity is so important. Throughout your book, you focus on the issues of standardization and testing, how they basically destroy the purpose of writing. And therefore, you advocate for a lot of writing, not combed over with a teacher's red ink and taking a lot of time for mental breaks and mindfulness and purpose building. How would you then respond to the idea then by critics that would say standardized testing actually breeds a more equitable school system as it's going to force educators to all teach writing to everyone because it's going to make their schools quote-unquote competitive?

‍

JW: Well, so part of part of what I would say is those problems exist even in the universe for standardized testing is ubiquitous. So that part of the there that argument, if somebody gave it to me, is not that convincing to me. There's also all kinds of equity issues bound up with the use of standardized testing in terms of the kinds of artifacts students are instructed to produce and are judged as worthy. In the book, I talk about Christopher Emden, an education professor who was once a grade school teacher, and his concept of reality pedagogy that starts where students are. He thinks of the students' indigenous traits and how you work within those and standardized testing essentially forces every student to flatten themselves into a very, very generic version of quote unquote students, and they have to have to sort of perform the students. The trick is to free students up to develop their voices and express themselves in ways that are rooted in the communities and natural to them that are engaging with audiences. If we can do that, we can't expect perfection, right? Like teaching is hard. It's always a fraud and difficult thing, but we will get, in my view, at least in my experience when I've done this with my students, you get better effort, you have a more conducive atmosphere to teaching and learning, and the entire project just seems suddenly more interesting and doable. So the notion that we're going to give up on students if we get rid of this sort of equity check aspect of standardized testing, which as I said earlier, I don't particularly accept, but let's say for argument's sake, I think the increased enthusiasm engagement on all parts, teachers too, will more than make up for that. We still have to know what students are doing. I'm a believer in students producing work that has been read by their teachers and seen by parents and other stakeholders, but it doesn't all have to be the same thing. Not every student has to be producing the same artifact, responding to the same prompt, reading the same thing. This is just not how we engage with the world as readers, writers, and thinkers. And to force students in that box for these tasks, for the purposes of standardization, I think is harmful. It hurts not just their learning, but their spirits, their enjoyment and engagement when school goes down.

‍

CM: I love what you stated in the last two answers, but I do know the bureaucratic and testing machine are really hard to beat. So a personal example for me is that at our school, all college entry courses require the ACCUPLACER exam. And I know you're a critic of educational technology. The ACCUPLACER is kind of like the worst offender, at least at our school. The writing section of the test is graded robotically. It doesn't matter what you write. It's literally checking for word counts, grammar, word complexity, just a bunch of set algorithms. And that's how a student actually gets into a college credit course. So it matters a lot. How do you go about advocating for what you're saying when you have these huge barriers that teachers have to meet?

‍

JW: This is really tough. I mean, there's many, many systemic and structural issues that make helping students perform well on things like ACCUPLACER worth classroom time. If students are going to be judged by those things, then we should help them do well on those things. To do otherwise is to probably do them a disservice. So a big part of the book, as you know, since you read it, is me challenging those frameworks, really saying, we have to dismantle these things that are distorting the kinds of writing we ask students to do. Algorithmic grading would be maybe at the top of my list, if I could be the Thanos of education and snap 50% of what's going on into non-existence, algorithmic grading would probably be at the top of my list. That said, even in a world where ACCUPLACER is going to continue to exist, my experience, and this is backed up by talking with other teachers of writing, particularly in middle school and high school, is if you can get them building what I call the writer's practice, the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of writers, so they really have a deep understanding of what writers are trying to do. When it comes to those ACCUPLACER type exams, they will still do well because they will recognize the type of BS they're supposed to produce to do well on. The way that your fellow teacher could defeat the algorithm, right, by writing syntactically and grammatically correct sentences that seem to relate to each other but don't, because as we know, algorithms cannot read, they can only count, and what it's counting is those syntactical and grammatical structures that are used. Once students realize that, you can actually get them engaged with writing the sorts of things that defeat the algorithm, and understanding how that relates to a more authentic, audience-driven purpose-driven piece of writing, and they'll do fine anyway, and they'll feel smug and superior about it, to boot, which is, I'm going to be honest, not a terrible thing for students to feel, given that school is so often presented as this kind of game, or worse, like a gauntlet they have to run, for them to be able to understand the game, to defeat it by opting out or tricking it, maybe I'm a masochist of helping students see the great house behind the curtain, but I think that's valuable to them. I think that's part of them building agency and understanding how these things work, and that maybe you do occasionally have to toe the line of the system that you're expected to perform within, but you don't have to like it, you just have to sometimes do it, and I think they still can do well on those things in that context. We don't just have to train them all semester long for that Accuplacer, because they are going to go to college, where they're going to run into an instructor like me, who then tells them, you can't do this, and expect to do well in college, because we don't have rules like that, so the longer we delay them thinking and behaving as we expect writers to do in the world, we're doing them a disservice. 

‍

CM: Another question that I have that's sort of in the same issue with standardized testing is how equitable our writing classrooms are. When students come into the classroom who speak English as a second language, or perhaps they're expected to code switch to quote unquote meet the needs of the education system, how do you deal with those situations?

‍

JW: Sure, yeah, I mean, to me that gets down to the core of all writing, which is the rhetorical situation, right, message, audience, purpose, and I think a big part of starting with English language learners or writers who express themselves in non-standard English is to first respect that, that they are expressing themselves well in the language with which they are culturally familiar or comfortable or is meaningful to them. If you can respect that and get them to understand that, to have them see how they are working with message, audience, and purpose in their own language or particular culture, and then to help introduce them to this other culture while recognizing and acknowledging the occasionally, let's say, often messed up parts of this other culture, acknowledging that this may cause them to not question their own culture, but have to at least temporarily perform some other role. I think that kind of, essentially it's a form of transparency, right? I believe in transparency in teaching to help students understand what they're being asked to do, and more importantly, why. It's why I'm very upfront about sort of the limits of what I can teach in first year writing and why I'm against education technology as it's often used in all of these things. If you can get the trust, if you can respect students where they're coming from, I think you can move them towards this other realm and you will find students, you've probably looked at some of the scholarship or read about code switching. You'll find students start to code switch very, very quickly with English language learners or in developmental English, which I've taught a fair bit of, it does take time, right? There is a familiarity that has to come in, but they will at least understand that what they are doing is translating where they're coming from as opposed to setting aside where they're coming from and substituting this whole other person that they have to be. They don't have to set themselves aside to be able to do this. When I find with students get more comfortable, they get to then retain some portion of themselves even when communicating in this other realm. They get to move that other realm closer to where they were to begin with and that is kind of just the home run if that happens because now we're cross pollinating and we're moving the dominant discourse in culture towards one that's far more inclusive.

‍

CM: My next question then relates to how we can bring all these ideas together. How can we enable teachers to have the time and resources needed to understand what you're talking about and why they can't write as well as being actually able to implement them in the classroom?

‍

JW: Yeah, so one of the things I would say about the book itself is that it is a reflection of my own journey down this path, right? We're talking about, you know, if we have like teaching as a graduate student teaching composition, I have taught college 20 years all told, the journey, the sort of active purposeful journey that's reflected in the book and its companion book, The Writer's Practice, that's 10 or 12 years of thinking and iterating and changing. So I think the first step is to really encourage teachers, whatever grade, whatever level, whatever subject, to do a kind of inventory of their own experience, a kind of reflective process. And what it was for me was I knew that there was a disconnect between what I thought was important and what I valued and what I was doing in class. And a lot of that was rooted in what I call the book, what I call teaching folklore. Teaching college, I had the disadvantage of nobody ever telling me anything about teaching. And so I basically started by doing what had been done to me, even though I had not been a good student, even though I did not thrive under those circumstances, I thought, well, I was defective. I was a bad student. So I need to teach and help the defective students like me become less defective. I don't know why I didn't question it sooner, but once I started questioning it, it really started crumbling really, really quickly, which opened me up to reading a lot of books about this stuff. The very first book that was really important to me was a book called What the Best College Teachers Do by a guy named Ken Bain, who really, it was like a work of anthropology. He went and observed good teachers and describe what they do. And I read that and I'm like, I want to be like that teacher. I don't want to be like the teacher I am. I want to be like that. So the first step really is that reflective is what you're doing really consistent with what you think is valuable and not what works, what's valuable, what's important. Once that process starts, then it's the journey of bringing your practices, your pedagogy in line with your values. Not everybody needs to share my values. The reason why my guess is, the reason why they can't write resonates with you is because we probably share a lot of values in terms of our teaching. You can have different values, but until your teaching is in line with your values, you will feel this disconnect, a certain amount of cognitive turbulence and emotional turbulence that will keep you from doing your best work. I wish that I could, I was at the disposition where I could say, buy Why They Can't Write and then adopt the writer's practice as your classroom text and all will be revealed and everything will be solved and the heavens will open and unicorns will dance and gold out of their horns. But this is not how teaching works. It's a process. And the first step in the process is to really start questioning the process. Don't accept the folklore. The second step is to be forgiving of yourself. One of the things I realized as I went through this process over probably 10 or 12 years was that I started to get very hard on my past self as I felt that I was opening up and evolving. And I wondered, like, why didn't you do this earlier? And the answer was because I didn't know. That's learning. So embrace the process. Bring it in line with your values and don't beat yourself up if you realize what you did in the past and it's not what you want to do in the future.

‍

CM: It's interesting that you bring up that you were a poor student. Deborah Meyer talks a lot about how she targeted hiring teachers who weren't fond of the school system and perhaps didn't really do that well.

‍

JW: Yeah, school. School. I mean, I wasn't like a horrible student because I didn't like to get in trouble, but I knew I was not doing as well as I could, knew a big reason why was because I was bored by what they were asking. I didn't care about what they were asking me to do. It wasn't that I was too smart. It was just like, why would I want to do that? And then when I started replicating that in my own classroom, I did it because I thought it was what you could do. I'm thinking, as you were talking, I was thinking of the epiphany I had about college being different than middle school or high school with attendance policies, right, where I would get so upset when students would be violating my attendance policy and they would get to like the limit of the number of absences they could have and not get their grades reduced and would start like ranting and raving to the students in class about how important attendance is, even though they were in class and the student I was upset wasn't. And then I read what the best college teachers do and he said all of the best teachers that he went and observed, none of them have formal attendance policy. And I just said, I'm going to try it. And my mood improved, my attitude improved, and attendance got better. And students, we know like college, like when you have these attendance policies and they really, really care about not losing induction in the grade, they will show up even if they're half dead. And so I didn't have like a zombie sitting in my class who's just there because I asked for their physical presence. And my teaching improved. I knew I had to give them something that was worth coming for. So yeah, what you say resonates so strongly with me and that's part of what I was talking about earlier, your values, bringing them in line with your values. 

‍

CM: As sort of a last grandiose question, what does the perfect classroom look like in your eyes? You tackle so many important issues in this book, grading, discipline, mindfulness, critical pedagogy, but it's really hard to envision without a tangible example. Would the classroom have multiple instructors across the curriculum? Is it PPL based? Are students self-directed? I realize that's really subjective given the community and student body and where you're at, but given your circumstances as a college classroom teacher, what does that classroom look like?

‍

JW: I like this question because when I saw it, I had an immediate image of a moment in class that hit me as an epiphany, even in the moment, which is rare. Often my epiphanies come with hindsight, but I had this in class and it was a classroom where it had this interesting conference table that was sort of shaped like a wave, it kind of curved and all 20 students could sit around the table, but it also had a ring of tables around the room where there were 20 computers where students could go work. And students were working on an assignment and often class, I don't think I ever lectured. I would occasionally talk for like 10 minutes to introduce something, but that would be the most, we're just working on stuff and class could be, some days it might be them silently writing, other days it can be them consulting with peers, other times it might be like they're in groups of three and I'm circulating around the room talking to them. But in this particular class, they were working on a project towards the end of the semester and it involved them identifying something, it's what I call the, this makes me mad argument in the writer's practice, it's in my other book. And the first step in the, this makes me mad argument is to prove this thing that makes them mad as an actual problem. And there were two students, two young gentlemen, one of whom had been doing pretty well, the other of whom had not been doing so well. And they're sitting next to each other at the computer station and the student who was not doing so well, his topic, I just don't remember this so vividly, his topic was on golf because the only thing he was interested in was golf. So he was upset that professional golfers were hitting the ball so far that the courses they played on were no longer difficult and he had to prove this. And he was compiling statistics, he was trying to do like a graph in Excel that he was going to put in his paper and the student next to him was like steadily leaning over, leaning over, you could tell he was like eavesdropping on what he's doing and then said, no, no, that's not going to work. He's like, you can't just show how far the longest driver of the year hits it. He was graphing like the leading driver by distance, like you need the average distance because the problem is not if there's some big dude who can hit it a mile, it's can even an average golfer hit it further than an average golfer should be able to hit it. And all of a sudden, those two were working, the student who had intervened had temporarily abandoned his work to become as interested in the work of the other student and to aid him with his expertise, it turned out he was a math major, so he helped them do this really cool logarithmic graph, ultimately, that the first student never would be able to do, that's fine, I don't care, right, that's awesome. One student intervened to help another using their expertise that was unique and part of themselves to improve this other person's paper, and I in that moment am on the periphery of the room, totally unseen by students, which gave me a moment to have a little tear come to my eye and trickle down, so I didn't know I was getting emotional in the moment. But to me, that's the goal. By the end of the semester, I want to disappear, only to reappear when I'm conjured by the students when they feel they need me, and maybe there's like an abracadabra where I show up, but by and large, if I am not necessary to them learning, now I think still at the end I'm necessary to give them the kind of experienced feedback on their process and their product that only a teacher can give them, but if I'm not necessary for the step by step of them learning, that's the goal, and it's totally doable. I spent years putting myself at the center of the first year right in college classroom where I would impart my wisdom, and I would say, don't do this, do that, be on the lookout for these problems that every student makes every time they make it, and don't do this, the students, their writing was better when I was less present, their experience was much better when I was less present, and more importantly, their own reflective knowledge of their how to write and how they write was better. It's once I made that transition, there was just no way I could go back.

‍

CM: Right, right, right. I find it so bizarre that we're basically funneling our most academically advanced students into a place where they're all together to sit down, and then they never talk to each other. Like, why are we developing a system where all of the quite brilliant academic people not coming up with solutions to the world's problems?

‍

JW: Yes, this is what I tell students. Like, you know, the reason why we have residential colleges is because it used to be hard for people to communicate. And they said, and you have to go to where the people who actually know stuff hang out. And now that's not the case. This could go on and on if my critiques of sort of college approaches to teaching. But if we are going to be face to face on a college campus, why would we not take advantage of the unique things we can do in each other's proximity? It just blows my mind because you're a fair bit younger than I am, and your college experience sounds a lot like my college experience. And that is a problem to me.

‍

CM: I highly encourage everyone to check out why they can't write. We have a book review of it on our website. I personally thought it was incredible. It tackles a lot of issues well beyond just writing. It's the system itself that needs changed. Further, an English instructor would particularly love its companion book, The Writer's Practice, which just gives you a ton of ideas for writers' notebooks and feedback driven classrooms. Next up is Stephanie Hurt, an English educator at Broadhead High School in Broadhead, Wisconsin. Stephanie is a teacher leader for the National Writing Project's College Career and Community Ready Writers Program and the Greater Madison Writing Project.

‍

Stephanie Hurt: C3WP, the College Career and Community Ready Writers Program at the mouthful, is basically a program designed by leaders in the National Writing Project. So actually it's designed by teachers because the National Writing Project is a community of teachers, designed by teachers, and it revolves around argument writing. So how do we teach students to be good writers of argument and to get them to think beyond pro-con in an argument, which I really appreciate learning and teaching. I think about the persuasive essays that I wrote back when I was a student and up until now, even what I assigned to students, which were, okay, persuasive essay, choose a topic, and what would you do? You choose something you already know a lot about and already have a strong opinion about, find some evidence, you go and find stuff that already agrees with you, and then write an essay. And basically in that essay, the tone is, I'm right and no one else matters. And so C3WP has pushed me and pushed my students to really move beyond that type of thinking and that type of writing. And so basically what it looks like in the classroom is it's not a single unit. That's really important. You do it all throughout the school year. Each experience is based around an instructional unit that was designed by teachers and it focuses on an argument skill. So you slowly build up their skills over time. So it'd be like, this skill focuses writing strong claims or the skill focus is choosing the best evidence. And so it provides you with a tech set around a controversial issue somewhere out there in the world. Like homework, we've done video games, any topic that allows for a lot of perspectives. And so you spend time with students reading and annotating and discussing and writing about each article. It really emphasizes the process over that final product. And so students get a lot of practice with seeing an issue for multiple perspectives. Not just here's the pros and here's the cons, but here's different stakeholders around this issue. And here's what each of them have to say. And what I see happen is students change their mind from day to day or from text to text, because they're getting new information. And then we come to that stage of now write a claim and now go back and use the evidence that supports that claim and say something new about this topic. And so it really emphasizes that process of thinking about the evidence rather than like confirmation bias, just going out and finding people who agree with you.

‍

CM: And how do you use this C3WP's resources within your classroom?

‍

SH: It's helped me break free from the five paragraph essay because something that a tool that we use with C3WP is called kernel essays. And so we give students a choice of how to structure their essay, and it requires them to think about what they're trying to do with their argument. And so for an example, something that would be different from a five paragraph essay is a structure that's like, give an overview of the issue. First, I thought this, but then I learned this and now I think this. And so students have really liked that freedom of structure because it allows them to acknowledge that at first they didn't know much about this topic or at first they thought something and now they've changed their mind and, you know, at first they're like, what, we can do that? And it's like, yeah, that's real world writing. That's what people want to hear. I want to hear how something was changed when they were presented with new evidence.

‍

CM: You mentioned before that you're a huge advocate for using writer's notebooks, which is something that many guests on this podcast use. What are some benefits of having a student write a lot rather than just having one big paper assessment?

‍

SH: My classroom used to be a place where writing assignments were very segmented, like, okay, first quarter we do personal narratives and the second quarter we do arguments and the third quarter we do whatever. And now it's being able to layer the argument writing all throughout the year just feels so much more natural. And when kids can come back to it and improve on what they did last time and revisit the same skills, it just makes a lot more sense. So, and then the other important part is that they write, they do a lot more notebook work, I feel like through this process, because they're constantly writing and thinking rather than, okay, we're going to write an essay and everybody start typing. They've already done a lot of thinking and writing by the time they're ready to write that final. And then I just wanted to share, I think I wrote about it in the form that I filled out. Just my epiphany moment was that you can have a really great program like this, that I really believe in it and feel passionate about it. It's changed the way I teach and the way I teach writing, especially. You can have all of that and have the resources, but unless you give students the opportunity to use it in a real way, it's still just kind of feels like traditional school. And I learned that last year when I had taught C3WP all year and I saw my kids growing as argument writers and saw their skills improving, I was really excited and viewing around this time last year, doing our last cycle of argument and the topic was driverless vehicles and they liked that topic. They were pretty engaged with it. And we were wrapping up writing our final essay and then the scrum raised her hand. And no offense, Mrs. Hurt, but all the important topics in the world, and this is what we're learning about. And it she was like this very kind and mature voice in the classroom. So she really, yeah, yeah. So it was like someone I took seriously and it hurt, it really hurt. And, but it was because she was right. I had built them up all year as argument writers. I talked about, this is what democracy is. This is what you need to be able to do to use your voice out in the real world. And then I hadn't given them any opportunity to actually do it. We had just practiced and practiced. And so that was the moment where I was like, yeah, she's right. I need to open it up a little bit. And so that's what I did this year. We just wrapped up with it. They we built skills all year, but then this last cycle, they chose their own issue, they built their own tech set, and they had to include multiple perspectives and try to consider all of those. And then they came to a claim and wrote an evidence-based piece. And then we took it a step further by we turned our essays into letters and then sent them out into the world. So I had kids send letters to the editor of our local newspapers. One student got hers published so far. So that was really exciting. Some kids sent them to legislators, to the White House, to just more locally, to like our principal and superintendent. So they had to send it out to an audience. And so that was a really powerful experience because then they, they went full, full circle with it. They use their voice to ask for change. And that is the whole point of the work.

‍

CM: And how do you go about making all this more purposeful rather than just simply, you know, for the refrigerator, if you will?

‍

SH: I think that this experience of writing the evidence-based essay, which was part of the work that I needed for them as a final assessment of all the work we've done, but then taking that and reshaping it into a letter that has that quality of using a public voice, which isn't really how their essays usually sound. It's very much written like to nobody or to a teacher and it's kind of toneless. And so this experience of translating the evidence-based argument, but into a letter that had emotion behind it was really difficult and, and rewarding. And it's something I'd like to spend some more time working on with them. For example, I had a student who chose his issue of, he wanted his issue to be physical fitness standards for police officers. And I was like, okay, that's kind of a cool issue. And some, as I monitored his progress, he chose some good articles and it seemed like he, but then his final essay was very like cops like donuts, and he was trying to make all these weird points about that stereotype of cops liking donuts. And so I made him change some things so that it would be more evidence-based and more appropriate. But then when it came time to send that out as a letter, he wanted to send it to the commissioner of the NYPD. And I was like, okay, well, maybe we should send it to someone more local, like our local police department. He didn't want to do that. He wanted to send it to this guy. So we looked up this guy, looked at his picture and it's this older, white, intimidating looking man. And I just watched that student's face change because he realized there was no way he could send this man this essay that he had written, which was pretty disrespectful in tone and so he, he rewrote it. He was one of the only students who actually rewrote everything so that the tone and the public voice was more appropriate for the audience that he had chosen and so it came across much more respectful and I think cops should have very high physical fitness standards so that they can do the job to the best of their ability. So it was really interesting watching him process the idea of a real audience.

‍

CM: I hope you're enjoying the podcast thus far. I sincerely appreciate you listening in. If you enjoy this work, head on over to the human restoration project at human restoration project.org to find our free resources and wealth of writings. And then if you think we should keep going, take a gander at our Patreon page for a dollar a month, you'll receive a professional print ready electronic magazine of all of our work every two months with our next coming out at the end of May. But as always, all of our work is still available free online. The best practices shouldn't be gate kept or here as a resource to support progressive ed for everyone. Thank you. Next on the lineup is Dr Richard Wilkinson. Richard is an accomplished social epidemiologist, author, and advocate who served as professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham. He is co-founder of the equality trust and was awarded the 2013 silver Rose award from Soledad for championing equality. His co-founder and significant other Kate Pickett wrote the spirit level and the inner level, which both focus on across the board improvements of equitable societies. To start us off, I wanted to pull a quote directly from the inner level. Quote, “today we live in societies in which worries about how we are seen and judged by others. What psychologists call the social evaluative threat are one of the most serious burdens of the quality and experience of life in rich developed countries. The costs are measured not only in terms of additional stress, anxiety, and depression, but also in poor physical health and the frequent resort to drink and drugs we use to keep our anxieties at bay and in the loss of friendly community life, which leaves so many feeling isolated and alone.” End quote. When I read this, I can't help but think about what our students go through as well. What connections do you see between what an unequal society reveals in our psyche and wellbeing to what students go through in the classroom?

‍

Richard Wilkinson: Well, I think it's very clear that the effects of inequality in the wider society get into schools in a number of different ways. And one of the things we show, which is an expression of the way inequality affects social relations, is that bullying is enormously more common in more unequal societies, really huge differences. And of course we think of the effects of inequality rather through evolved psychology. So, you know, to understand the effects of inequality, I think you have to understand monkey dominance hierarchies and actually of course bullying in schools. It's, it's pretty close to that kind of ranking hierarchy, the strongest at the top, the weakest at the bottom, and everyone out for themselves. But there are lots of other ways. I mean, we know how school performance of kids is influenced by home background as income differences widen. So do differences in these international maths and literacy scores between the best and the worst performers. And we think that some of the effects of inequality probably involve epigenetics, the ways in which the environment actually switch on and switch off different genes. They don't change your genetic makeup, but they change the gene expression. And the reason why these epigenetic processes exist seems to be to allow organisms to develop in their context. And so, you know, in amongst human beings, whether you're growing up in a society where you must fight for what you can get and watch your back and learn not to trust others because we're all rivals, or you're growing up in a society where we depend on reciprocity, on cooperation, where it's important to gain each other's trust, and so on. I suspect that some of the early childhood things, whether you're nurtured in a loving environment, family, and so on, relationships, or whether your parents are depressed and have no time for you, or there's domestic conflict and things like that, that kind of process, it looks as if it does trigger some of the epigenetic changes, which show up in terms of, as related to inequality, partly, I think, because domestic conflict seems to be more important, and child abuse more important, or more common, rather, in more unequal societies. So I think there are multiple ways in which inequality gets into the social relationships at school and educational performance of children.

‍

CM: You mentioned that people are less trusting in less equal societies, and that people volunteer less as well. Do you believe that there is a loss of altruism due to the neoliberal influence on our education system, and just in our greater culture as well, as in students being pushed towards this individualistic job narrative? They're kind of almost conditioned to care about their own outcomes first, in a way?

‍

RW: Well, I think that it does lead to defining success and failure in life in very narrow terms. If you say somebody did well, you mean he moved up the social hierarchy, he became rich, this kind of stuff. You don't mean that he became an amazing artist, but lived in poverty despite that. One of the things we get asked quite often is that surely inequality is a spur to initiative, effort and creativity. But when we were challenged with that first, we thought, how on earth do we test this? What data can we get on creativity? And we thought maybe patents per head of population. You know, when you invent something, you might patent your invention. And we looked at that data and we saw that actually there were marginally more patents per head of population in more equal countries, they do a bit better. But since our analysis, somebody else has done a much better analysis, many more countries. And he shows a much stronger relationship, the same tendency for more equal countries, by that measure to be more creative, more inventive. And it's odd, if you look at, well, things like social mobility, you see there's lower social mobility in more equal countries. And, you know, more kids dropping out of high school in the United States, which we showed in our Spirit Level book. And so our view is that greater inequality means you waste more of your talent. It doesn't lead to higher performance. And in these international maths and literacy tests, more unequal countries do less well. So maybe when people think of inequality as a spur to initiative and effort, actually, I think increasingly that it's a spur to overcome the barriers that inequality itself puts in your way. So, you know, inequality puts in all these hurdles and so on, obstacles in your path. And because you see people trying to get over them, sometimes successfully, sometimes failing, you think that it's a spur to effort. In fact, it's an obstacle.

‍

CM: With student self-harm, anxiety, depression, and suicide rates rising, I can't help but feel that the system of education is at least partially responsible for these problems. And vice versa, education tends to blame these problems for issues within education. Is there any way that classrooms could help lend themselves to creating a more fair and equal society? It seems like modeling a fair and equal classroom seems like a place to start.

‍

RW: Well, I do think that, in a sense, inequality is about whether people feel valued or not. And if you like, income differences are the big crude dimension of how much people are valued. And a feeling, you know, people at the bottom are worthless. But it increases that idea that some people are worth so much more than others. And I think that means we judge each other by social status and wealth. We use external wealth as an indication of internal or personal worth. And that's because we do that while afraid of other people judging us in the same way. So that leads to more of these social anxieties, more of these fears about how we're seen and judged. And so what I think teachers can do is to try and create, if you like, a mini social environment in the school where everyone feels valued. I remember with my son, we transferred him from one school to another because he was getting bullied, having a hard time, really miserable. And to another school where the head teacher had that view of what you needed to do and tried to maximize the number of activities available to kids so that every kid felt he was good at something, he or she. And my son, I remember, said that everything changed quite dramatically on going into school. And I think there are also research results that show the same sort of process. So I do think it's about making people feel valued for what they are. And it's the opposite of the bullying culture, if you like.

‍

CM: Sure, and I can't help but notice the connection of income inequality with how we treat students in the classroom. We're promoters of grade-less learning, where students are judged by a subjective measure that tends to cause more harm than good. What are your thoughts on how these relate to classroom policies and the issue of inequality? 

‍

RW: Yes, and I think with the wider differences in performance you get in more unequal countries and probably more unequal schools, the average is less good. So if you create a different social environment and less pressure, less judgment of kids by academic performance and start valuing them for other things as well, I think you probably improve how kids do overall. We've been involved with helping three young men who dropped out with depression and anxiety and so on and felt their lives were a total failure and they had no futures. Getting them so they could make applications to university, helping them with personal statements and so on. And to have that idea of a future has transformed the lives of, well, there's one more to go of these three, but he seems to be on the road now. And I think it's an example of how our societies waste talent. And with a little bit of support, these young men are in their 20s, but they're damaged by their school experience partly. And then damaged by the kind of social environment they find themselves in because Britain is almost as unequal as the United States. So they're at the bottom of the heap, they're worthless. Last night just helping one sort of write down in a personal statement the things he was good at. You could see him change as he wrote them down and read this paragraph about himself and it was all true. He just never thought of himself as having any ability or skills to offer.

‍

CM: And a huge section of your book is on how unequal societies cause a sizable gap in educational performance. Teachers everywhere are trying to solve this problem. They're trying to power through and solve the education system within their classrooms. But they're faced with really insurmountable odds in low-income areas because there's just so many barriers to effective learning when you're hungry, tired, sick, afraid, etc. And this isn't limited obviously just to low-income communities, but there's certainly a disadvantageous position to be in. What suggestions do you have for teachers that are in this predicament? Is the solution to protest and demand political action when you're a teacher?

‍

RW: I think that it's really important for teachers to make, I suppose, people on the more conservative side of the political spectrum aware that what teachers see in front of them all the time is this waste of talent due to the effects of inequality. And just like I think doctors, it's really important that they make people more widely aware of the social and economic determinants of health. It's not just about medical care. So teachers have to say, it's not just about what I can do in the classroom. It is the wider society as well. And to expect teachers to overcome all the burden and divisions and so on of class and poverty and so on, it's a very uphill struggle. And often teachers have no training or awareness of those sorts of issues. But I do think, and people think of income inequality as a long way from the sort of issues we're talking about. And I think to point out that it is about people feeling valued. And everyone knows actually that they think, before the financial crisis, we used to think of the bankers and people as brilliant. But we still do tend to think that someone's social status is a measure of their worth. And there's now very good evidence in societies, both rich and poor societies, that simply being at the bottom of the social ladder in your society, your own society, makes you feel worthless and a failure, makes you feel looked down on, devalued, makes you ashamed of yourself. There's some international work interviewing people in poverty. And whether they're in poverty in India or Pakistan, where poverty means living in some earth-flawed shack without any sewerage, or whether they're in poverty in Norway, which means living in a three-bedroom centrally heated house with most of the latest electronics, there's that same feeling of having failed, of being hopeless, of being devalued, of being looked down on, disrespected. And of course, that's the link between inequality and violence. It's so well established now. Many, many studies around the world show that homicide rates are much more common, where there's more inequality. And it's because people are feeling disrespected, looked down on, it's those things that are the trigger to violence. There's one way I can make you respect me if there's no other way. And of course, people are particularly sensitive to that, in a society where income and status are even more strongly the measures of worth. So I think it's important that teachers try and make people aware of these links. But ultimately, I mean, we must move towards, we must deal with tax avoidance and tax havens. I think that in the past, trade unions have been a very important, and the whole labor movement, a disciplining factor, preventing the take-off of incomes at the top, which happened, the unions were weakened from the Reagan and Thatcher era, around about 1980 onwards. And it's then that top incomes could take off unopposed. But I think we need now to move towards forms of economic democracy, extending democracy into the workplace, into the economy. And about half the member countries of the European Union have some legislation for employee representation on company boards. It's weak in some countries, it's strong in others. In Germany, when a company gets as many as, I think, 2,000 employees, half the people on the remuneration committee have to be employee representatives. And the evaluations of more democratic models of company management suggest that it's good for productivity. And it certainly creates a nicer working environment where people are less likely to feel they're just being used. So I think that, you know, and it's an enormous job to make the links from the personal experience of teachers trying to help individual kids to these great big societal issues. And the other thing, of course, is that greater equality is essential to moving towards sustainability. And one of the ways in which we try and bolster ourselves and communicate our self-worth is through consumerism. You know, if you live in a more unequal area, you're more likely to spend money on flashy cars and status goods. And that's such a clear sign of the kind of pressures that inequality creates. We have to understand that inequality has psychological effects, psychosocial effects, which come right down to issues to do with feelings of self-worth.

‍

CM: Thank you again for listening to Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. If you have time, I'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes, social media, or anywhere you see fit. The more people that share this, the more they will feel comfortable having these conversations. Let's restore humanity together.

‍