Laura Deisley’s response to my previous post got me thinking. Here’s an excerpt:
What would happen if we allowed students to have more freedom with their learning? What would they create, and if they made a mistake would we/they be gleeful even while cleaning up the mess?
Curiosity. Where do we allow for that in today’s educational/societal structure?
Indeed, allowing students to make messes is worthwhile and many of us probably don’t do it enough. I know with my own writing assignments, for example, I’ll often give graphic organizers or share student examples or write my own. I think in most cases it helps more than it hurts. They still have to come up with the ideas. They still have to develop their own voice. My support is intended to give them some sense of my expectations as well as the attributes of a meaningful piece of writing. Obviously, one could debate the meaning of meaningful. One could also debate the line between nurturing, generative support and stifling support. For example, if I want my students to include rich details in their writing I try to show them examples in literature or in my own writing. Where on the line does that fall?
This past year Melissa Fay Greene was the writer in residence at Lovett and in preparation for her coming I had my students read an article of hers (”A Writer’s Life in a Household of Children”) that, among other things, argues the merits of letting her own kids pull things off shelves in the playroom, dump things on the floor, and embrace the chaos. She happened to be using the parenting technique as a metaphor for writing (brainstorming and drafting=letting go and not cleaning up as you go). I like it both on the metaphorical and literal level, as a parent and as a teacher. When I share my own writing with my students I try to show original drafts, webs, notes scrawled on a torn sheet of paper. I don’t always do this and I wonder if that compromises the “modeling” experience and leads them to believe that I produce final drafts spontaneously, like Zeus giving birth to Athena from his head. They don’t see the mess in the creative process, the evolution, the change, the redirection, the narrowing down, the opening up, the adding here, the taking away there, the essence emerging from the chaos.
I think introducing technology is going to require me to let go a bit (a lot?) and try things out, perhaps sending dog food everywhere. Who knows? A pattern might emerge from the chaos.
