In the beginning, or about 1974, a hierarchy kept all writers and teachers of writers in their place,  and the place was called “blame.” The blame for shoddy writing descended from the teachers of graduate school to undergraduate school to high school to junior high to elementary, and ultimately to students at every level.  The infamous “Why Johnny Can’t Write” was published in the December 8 issue of Newsweek, 1975, and it had been foreshadowed by a Time Magazine article the previous year called “Bonehead English.”  (references below)

“Thinking back on those early days, I understand that much of the early success of the writing project can be traced to being in the right spot at the right time” (Teachers at the Center, p. 58). For James Gray, founder of the National Writing Project, the right time coincided with the national dismay at the state of writing in the nation’s schools.

At the University of California at Berkeley there had been a lot of pondering in 1973 about the number of students who could not pass the writing test to place out of “Subject A,” the remedial writing section.  The class offered no credit hours and no student could escape it until he or she could pass the three-hour writing test.  As a student teaching supervisor, Gray knew a number of writing teachers at the high school and the college level, and he brought them together them on a retreat that year.   At their first meeting  “Blame for the sorry state of affairs was lobbed, like a hand grenade, back and forth across the table, and at times it was vicious. The university teachers said ‘If you had taught them how to write, we wouldn’t have this problem.’ And the school teachers said, ‘They’re your students, so why don’t you teach them how to write and stop blaming us?’ (p. 46)

A year later, in the summer of 1974, some of these same teachers and professors convened with others at UC Berkeley to share their own methods of teaching writing in the first institute of the Bay Area Writing Project.  As teachers shared their demonstrations, the atmosphere changed, and a spirit of inquiry prevailed.

The Bay Area Writing Project model created an environment where both academics and classroom teachers could appreciate each other. Professors of English and English Education worked as partners and colleagues of classroom teachers. For teachers, BAWP was a university-based program that recognized–even celebrated–teacher expertise.  For academics and teachers alike, the Bay Area Writing Project model managed to reverse the top-down, voice-from-Olympus model of so many past university efforts to school reform. (56)

BAWP had breached the hierarchy near the top, at the stratum between high school and college teachers of writing. The summer institute had been constituted to give every participant a share in the teaching, each accorded academic respect. Thirty-six years later the National Writing Project continues to sponsor similar summer institutes, some 200 or more annually, in the same shared spirit of inquiry among college and K-12 teachers.

If Gray was the apostle of equity among writing teachers, Peter Elbow was the prophet proposing the liberation of writers from domination. In his Writing Without Teachers (1973), he explained how teachers were miscast as readers of authentic writing:

“What I mean is that though [the teacher] can usually understand everything you are trying to say (perhaps even better than you understand it); nevertheless he really isn’t listening to you.  He usually isn’t in a position where he can genuinely be affected by your words.  He doesn’t expect your words actually to make a dent on him.  He doesn’t treat your words like real reading. He has to read them as an exercise. He can’t hold himself ready to be affected unless he has an extremely rare, powerful openness” (127).

To dissolve this unproductive relationship, Elbow proposed the “teacherless writing class,” consisting of seven to twelve members, none of them specialists or schooled in a specific kind of writing.  The best grouping would be writers of diverse purposes and genres:

The poet needs the experience of the businessman  reading his poem, just as the businessman needs the experience of the poet reading his committee report. If each thinks the other’s writing has no meaning or no value, this is an advantage, rather than a disadvantage. Each needs to experience what it was like for the other to find the writing worthless and where the other sees glimmers (79).

This reconstitution of the writing classroom chopped at the foundation of the hierarchy. Writers were to be given ultimate authority over their own writing, only to admit their dependence on honest readers who could report how they heard or received the writing. Teachers were sent to the sidelines, if not quite out of the game completely.

The unrelated events of the publication of Writing Without Teachers and the first summer institute of the Bay Area Writing Project set the stage for the curtain of shame descending on the nation, the publication of “Why Johnny Can’t Write” and its successors. So blame was about to be apportioned, and the hierarchy was unshaken.

But some innovations survived the 1970’s, along with the hierarchy that stood unbowed.  In 2008 the National Writing Project had 7,000 active teacher consultants who reached 92,000 other teachers with some form of professional development that year. Peter Elbow continued to write eloquently of the dignity of the writer, culminating in his anthology of work Everyone Can Write (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Blame has continued to rain on teacher and student alike, but the writer has become a more accessible and desirable role in the realm of literacy.  The day of the writer is at hand

Return to:  http://postcognitions.wikispaces.com

References

Sheils, Merrill. “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” Newsweek 92 (8 December 1975): 58-65.

Stone, Marvin. “Bonehead English.” Time 106 (11 November 1974): 106.

Stone, Marvin. “Due Dismay about Our Language.” U.S. News and World Report 86 (23 April 1979): 102.