The Child-in-the-World-with-Others: Re-Visioning Lensmire's Critical Re-Visions of the Writing Workshop. A review of When Children Write: Critical Re-Visions of the Writing Workshop by T. J. Lensmire. New York: Teachers College Press, 1994 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Angel Lin review of Lensmire's When Children Write
What Lensmire's When Children Write does to progressive models of education parallels what William Golding's Lord of the Flies does to eighteenth-century romantic models of children as innocent beings who would flourish into creative beings fully actualizing their potential and living in harmony with one another if only they were left to grow on their own, free of the suffocating control and influence of domineering adults and their corrupted civilization (e.g., Rousseau's notion of the " noble savage "). The ethnographic account provided by Lensmire as a teacher-researcher and participant-observer documenting and critically reflecting on his own experience of running a progressive writing workshop with a class of third graders for one school year is compelling and ultimately profoundly disturbing. As the account gradually unfolds, the reader is led closer and closer to the final stark picture that Lensmire hints at early on with the sentence, " Everything, in the end, is not for the best " (2). The book certainly will not make comfortable reading for the marshmallow-minded or for those who refuse to take up the challenge of striving to understand the excitingly and disturbingly complex creatures called humans. In this respect, Lensmire's candor and intellectual and moral courage must be commended. Here we see how a responsible, critically reflective individual—an educational theorist and practitioner at once—struggles during his own physically exhausting, psychologically depressing, and intellectually disturbing journey of discovery with the complex, social realities of the writing workshop that he himself plays an important part in both bringing into existence and sustaining.
Writing in a crowded place: Peers collaborating in a third-grade writer's workshop
1999
This dissertation presents three case studies of collaborative interaction in a thirdgrade dual-language classroom during writing instruction over the course of a school year. The study addresses the notion of developing student voice, and how instruction can be seated so that students' narratives will assume central stage in the classroom, creating the opportunity for dialog between students^ texts and the texts of the schooL This study is situated between a progressive perspective that emphasizes growth through self reflection, organically driven texts, and above all individual meaning, and a postprogressive perspective that challenges educators to provide explicit instruction in the privileged discourses of the dominant ideology. A significant featwe of the study is the evolution of the Writing Workshop into a Writer's Workshop, as the focus of actnnty became the students and their intentions for their texts. The Writer's Workshop was characterized by active and varie...
Children Writers: Enactments of Identity, Agency, and Power in a Third-Grade Writing Workshop
2010
This qualitative study uses the theoretical concepts of identity, agency, and power to explore the ways in which students in their moment-to-moment interactions enact identities, agency, and power as they engage in the activity of writing and participate in a writing workshop. This research highlights what happens to writers as they engage in writing processes with one another and moves away from interpreting what happens between students as only cognitive or behavioral phenomenon. Additionally, through the lenses of identity, agency, and power, the complexity of what it means to be a writer in a writing workshop is made visible. Data for the study were collected over a five-month period and include observations of children participating in a third-grade writing workshop, written field notes, and detailed recording of the actions and interactions among the students as well as the teacher and students to capture the time, space, and participants' activity during the writing workshop. Whole class and small-group interactions were video and/or audio recorded daily for later transcription, observation and reflection. Semi-structured informal interviews and informal talks with the students and the teachers were conducted and recorded on a regular basis, and the students' written work and other related artifacts were collected to examine the students' work as writers. The research reveals three major themes: 1) students enact multiple identities to serve a variety of purposes; 2) students enact agency in the ordinary and everyday practices of the writing workshop to change their present appreciate the many opportunities that allowed me to grow and learn in my professional work. I have been moved by her deep respect for children, teachers, preservice teachers, teacher educators, and families. I thank Dr. Sarah Hudelson and Dr. Carole Edelsky for the abundant amounts of wisdom, kindness, support, and encouragement they provided throughout my graduate studies and the ways in which they have contributed to making this experience a rich and meaningful journey. I appreciate Dr. Josephine Marsh for her generous sharing of knowledge, expertise and experience as a member of my dissertation committee. My dissertation emphasizes the importance of relational work in children's learning and lives, and this dissertation would not have been possible without the relationships in my life. I want to acknowledge and thank my husband, Michael Meister, for his constant love and support as he patiently listened and encouraged me. Also, I thank my family for their unconditional love, support, and belief in me throughout this journey. Finally, I thank the many friends throughout my graduate studies that became my community, offering support, a kind word, a friendly smile, and, when necessary, a gentle nudge. v
This article seeks to counter the predominant understanding of young children's writing activity within a classroom, which has been formed as a response to the structural framework of school literacy. Taking a different approach, I have explored the established relationship between language and writing as a socio-cultural construction transforming human thought , and plugged aspects of these ideas together with features of Deleuzian thinking. The writing child is conceptualised as a becoming writer (Deleuze & Guattari 2004), and their writing activity considered as a process of 'relational encounters'. This alternative reading of children's early writing activity is presented through the analysis of a short vignette;a writing encounter between three children where connections between bodies, mediational objects, sensations and emotion are traced to further our understanding of writing as a process of movement and production.
Writing for Critical Democracy: Student Voice and Teacher Practice in the Writing Workshop
1994
Two important schools of thought in the teaching of writing are those of the "writing workshop" and "critical pedagogy." Both encourage expression on the part of the student, but while writing workshop advocates assume that the student writes from a stable, unitary, autonomous self, the critical pedagogy advocates do not. Writing workshop advocates see the teacher as a facilitator of the student's expression; though he or she may intervene, strategically, in the technique of students' writing processes and texts, he or she is not to critique what the student writes. Viewing the self as a social category developing in a multicultural context, however, critical pedagogy advocates encourage teacher criticism. Like writing workshop advocates, critical pedagogy advocates have not come to terms with the very real, problematic nature of the conflicts among voices in the classroom, both between teacher and student and among students themselves. At least two aspects of teacher practice are in need of further examination and development. First, more attention must be paid to the immediate classroom community within which students speak and write. Educators must look critically at what sorts of classroom communities they think are desirable and what s)rts of actions they can take to create and sustain those environments. Second, more attention must be paid to thQ. teacher's response to student writing. If the writing workshop view of "following the child" is inadequate because it does not allow for the possibility that the text will pursue questionable intentions and attitudes (concerning race, gender and social class), then viable means of teacher intervention in the expressive process must be proposed. (Contains 9 notes and 40 references.) (TB)