hartwell. 1987

Creating a Literate Environment in Freshman English: Why and HowAuthor(s): Patrick HartwellSource: Rhetoric Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 4-20Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465946 .Accessed: 09/01/2011 20:05

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PATRICK HARTWELL Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Creating a Literate Environment in Freshman English: Why and How

I want to start with three stories, to give me a frame of reference for rejecting one common view of literacy in our profession and substituting a better one, and then to serve as a basis for some speculations on how this emergent perspective might affect us as teachers of composition. The first story is, as I recall, from Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner's 1974 study, Culture and Thought. An anthropologist, among the Kpelle in Liberia, presents an illiterate farmer with twenty items spread out on a table, the items, in the anthropologist's mind, neatly grouped into four groups of five each - fruits and vegetables, let's say, and kitchen implements and farm implements. The anthropologist asks the farmer to group the objects, and the farmer produces ten sets of two each, using what Piaget would call "operational thought" - the knife goes with the orange because the knife cuts the orange. The anthropologist questions the farmer about the logic of this arrangement, until the farmer, now somewhat defensive, says adamantly, "This is how a smart person would do it." "How would a dumb person do it?" the anthropologist asks. The farmer immediately rearranges the objects into four groups of five each - fruits and vegetables, and kitchen implements and farm implements. So there are smart ways of doing things and dumb ways of doing things - even illiterate people know that.

The second story is about my daughter Beth, back when she was six years old and we moved from Los Angeles, where she grew up, to Michigan, so I could begin my first teaching job. In California, we'd driven up to the mountains several times to see the snow, but, as it happened, we'd never seen the snow falling. And in Michigan, the first couple of times it snowed, it snowed during the night, so that we woke up to find snow on the ground. Then one afternoon the snow started to fall, and Beth, her eyes suddenly wide with wonder, went to the window. "Oh," she said, "so that's the way it is."

(It kind of spoils a story when you have to explain it, but you see, Beth, like any active learner, was making hypotheses about the world around her, and the best hypothesis available to her, before she saw the snow fall, was that it grew up out of the ground, like most everything else around her.) At any rate, I hope to get pretty much the same response from you as reader - "Oh, so that's the way it is: It doesn't grow up out of the ground, it falls from the sky."

The third story is about my wife, Chip, who's begun to study Chinese and who hopes to visit China this summer. Chip was learning her vocabulary using both the Chinese characters and the romanized version of Chinese, called

Rhetoric Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, Fall 1987 4


pinyin. Naturally enough, Chip was more comfortable with pinyin than with characters. But her friend Lucy, who speaks Chinese and who's been to China, warned her about this misperception: "Oh, Chip," she said, "you don't speak Chinese in pinyin, you speak it in characters." One of my arguments here is that that's true of all of us literate adults: We don't speak in pinyin, we speak in characters. Thus, I'll argue that we are, as a profession, rather dumb, like Cole and Scribner's anthropologist. And like my daughter Beth, we may have it just backwards. We speak in characters, and yet we concentrate on pinyin. We are deeply implicated with - even, in some small way, constitutive of - human literacy, yet most of us spend most of our professional lives chipping away at the veneer of language, while literacy - Josephine Miles ("What We Compose") is incisive about the relevance of this metaphor - literacy goes deep into the grain of the wood. Let me give three examples of how dumb we are: the 1982 anthology on literacy edited by James C. Raymond, Literacy as a Human Problem; what I've elsewhere called "the Ong-Farrell party line" ("Response to Thomas J. Farrell" 461); and the research of E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

Three "Dumb" Views of Literacy I think it's fair to pick on Raymond's anthology because it comes with a

certain authority - published by the University of Alabama press, edited by the new editor of College English, featuring most of the big guns in our profession - Frank D'Angelo, Edward P. J. Corbett, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and so on - and distributed by the NCTE. What do we note about the book? First off, we've knuckled under to the usage mongers, for there's Thomas H. Middleton whining about grammar and John Simon moaning about usage, right in the first section. Only one of the authors, Frank D'Angelo, shows any awareness of the broad range of cross-cultural research by social scientists into the nature of literacy, but he cites that research only as it supports Ong's position. The authors Richard Lloyd-Jones is a healthy exception - tend to treat literacy as a "single thing." And sure enough, the final word is given to our departmental authority on literacy, Walter J. Ong, S.J.

Thus I think it's fair - even essential - to pick on the Ong-Farrell party line (for Ong's work, see his The Presence of the Word and his contribution to the Raymond anthology; for Farrell's work, see his "IQ and Standard English" and "Reply by Thomas J. Farrell"). The party line treats alphabetic literacy as a special form, it focuses on the surface features of literacy, the "standard forms of the verb 'to be'" in Farrell's version ("IQ and Standard English" 481), it makes an absolute - and unwarranted - distinction between "oral" and "literate" culture, and, most insidiously, it asks us to see our inner city students as specially deprived, trapped in a "residual oral culture"; the problem is "in them." Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole's cross-cultural perspective questions such deficit models nicely:

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The school's knowledge base, value system, and dominant learning situations, and the functional learning systems to which they give rise are all in conflict with those of the students' traditional culture. ... The problem does not lie "in them." Searches for specific "inca- pacities" and "deficiencies" are socially mischievous detours. ("Cognitive Consequences" 558)

Ethnographic studies of elementary literacy have sharpened our sense of these conflicts, both as they operate as gaps between school knowledge and community knowledge (Gilmore and Glatthorn; Heath, Ways with Words) and as "hidden curricula" in schools (Anyon; Gilmore; Mosenthal; Simon and Wil- linsky).

And I think it's also fair to pick on E. D. Hirsch, Jr., partly because of the arrogance of the title of his 1977 book, Philosophy of Composition, and partly because, now that he's had to give up on the central assumption of the 1977 book - that "readability" is somehow "in" the text - he's turned to writing about "cultural literacy" ("Cultural Literacy"; "Culture and Literacy"; "Reading, Writing, and Cultural Literacy"). Literacy, in this view, is privileged knowledge, and it's transmitted by the teacher at the center of the learning process. (More general criticisms of Hirsch's position are offered by Bizzell and Herzberg and by Douglas.)

(Of course, I want to hedge in these criticisms. I think Farrell does us a favor by bringing out into the open attitudes that are only implicit in Ong's work, and I think the recognition, in the works of both Hirsch and Raymond, that we are, as English teachers, deeply involved in the transmission of literacy, is a salu- tary one.)

Nevertheless, each of these views of literacy remains a "dumb" view. Patricia Bizzell ("Literacy in Culture and Cognition") identifies, as do others, "the great cognitive divide" between those who, like Farrell, Hirsch, Ong, and most of the contributors to the Raymond anthology, see literacy as conveying some special cognitive values - what Beth Daniels calls "the great leap for- ward" theory of literacy - and those of us who see literacy as instead embedded in social relationships, a matter of metacognition, metalinguistic awareness, and deep experiential learning, as opposed to the direct instruction of isolable skills. Roger Shuy captures this perspective on language learning with an "iceberg" metaphor: what we can be consciously aware of as teachers is the top of the iceberg; what is seminal in the transmission of literacy is below the surface, under the water. "Something is happening," anthropologist Clifford Geertz observes, "to the way we think about the way we think" (166). Oh, so that's the way it is.

There are lots of good overviews of this emergent perspective on literacy (there are review articles by Bizzell ["Literacy in Culture and Cognition"], by Brandt, by Chall, and by Scribner; books by Daniels and by Pattison, and a

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stunning series of anthologies on elementary literacy - those edited by Gilmore and Glatthorn; by Goelman, Hillel, and Smith; by Goodman, Haussler, and Strickland, by Jagger and Smith-Burke, by Langer and Smith-Burke, and by Olson, Torrance, and Hildyard), so, rather than to develop this view fully, I'll simply pause to clarify two of the key terms above - "metacognition" and "metalinguistic awareness."

Metacognition is the ability to monitor one's learning. I asked students in my graduate seminar in reading theory, "When you're reading and you don't understand, what's the first thing you have to do?" The next class, students offered dozens of what I think of as "repair procedures": keep reading, it might get clearer; if there's a word you don't understand, look it up; ask someone for help; find an easier book on the same topic; reread what you didn't understand; and so on. All are legitimate repair procedures, but each is, if you think about it, the second thing you might do. The first thing you have to do is metacognitive: you have to understand that you don't understand. And that's of course what poor readers can't do (see the reviews by Baker and Brown and by Forrest- Pressley and Waller), just as poor writers, as Robert Bracewell has noted, face problems that need to be defined as metacognitive rather than cognitive.

Metalinguistic awareness is the awareness of language as language. Psychologists test this at the elementary level by asking about concepts of word or by asking, "Can a stone learn to talk?" Scribner and Cole (Psychology of Literacy) tested metalinguistic awareness among the tri-literate Vai of Liberia, variously literate in English, through schooling, in Arabic, for religious purposes, and in an indigenous Vai script, for personal uses, by asking, "Can you call the moon the sun and the sun the moon?" Literate Vai, regardless of the orthographies they were literate in, tended to say "sure"; illiterate Vai tended to have grave doubts about such metalinguistic play. And I've found that "concept of word" is not stable even at the college level - I've walked into various classes and said, "How many words in the sentence, 'I've got a lot of work to do'?" repeating it orally until students wrote a number. Basic writing students tended to say there were five words in the sentence; regular freshmen found seven; and graduate students, hyperliterate as ever, found nine. (For review articles on metalinguistic awareness, see Hakes and Pratt and Grieve.)

What's "Dumb" about Being "Dumb"? Let me note four false assumptions of the guys on the other side of the great

cognitive divide - the dumb guys. First, they reify alphabetic literacy, giving it a privileged place among orthographies; in other words, they think we talk in pinyin. The truth is rather that alphabetic literacy is highly abstract - we talk in characters, you'll remember - and surface features of the code, like "full realization of the standard forms of the verb 'to be'" (Farrell, "IQ and Standard English" 481), seem much less important than these abstract concomitants.

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Ultimately, then, orthographies are much less important than the social and cultural uses to which those systems are put. Thus, a good general rule is that cultures cling stubbornly to their orthographies - and they are right to do so: the Ulithians in Micronesia today are right to reject missionaries' attempts to regularize their orthography (Walsh); the Japanese were right to reject McAr- thur's attempt, after World War II- and the Chinese, more recently, to reject Mao's attempt (Bonavia; Sheridan) - to make their cultures write in pinyin. After all, we have enough examples of what happens when orthographies are imposed from without - the Cherokee, ninety percent literate in 1890 and thirty percent literate in 1930, after they were forced to give up the syllabary devised by Silas John (Halle); the Old English, trapped in the marginal literacy of an orthography imposed on them by Irish priests (O'Neil, "English Orthography").

Second, these guys assume there's a stable world "out there," as it were: readability is in the text, literacy is measured by literacy tests, writing is measured by "full standard deployment of the verb 'to be."' But our theory of language tells us to look at reality as internal rather than external, as con- structed rather than "out there" (for a rhetorical perspective, see Gibson; for a social science perspective, see Harad; for a philosophical perspective, see Rorty), and historical studies tell us that literacy is embedded in tacit traditions of texts that develop dynamically through time (see, for example, the studies of literacy in western Europe by Eisenstein; Kaestle's review of texts and readers; Resnick and Resnick's historical perspectives on the meaning of literacy; and the various perspectives in the anthology edited by Daniel P. Resnick). Studies of education remind us that educational goals are intimately entwined with cultural pro- cesses and assumptions. Daniel Calhoun, for example, finds quite different concepts of "educated person" implicit at different points in American education, and James Donald reminds us that "illiteracy" is a nineteenth-century invention (coterminous, as we might suspect, with the discovery that the problem is "in them"). Studies of the professions - Richard Ohmann's study of college English, Frances Fitzgerald's study of changing values in American history texts, Jean Anyon's examination of concept of "work" in high school social science classes - remind us that things are not what they seem, that there are "hidden curricula" in the way we do our businesses. Consider, most obviously, Michel Foucault's insight that three cultural institutions that developed in the eighteenth century - prisons, insane asylums, and schools - share common underlying purposes: to observe, discipline, and punish. Oh, so that's the way it is.

Third, these guys assume that literacy is a "single thing," again, "out there" as it were. Thus, we can talk about "a literacy crisis" (rather than, perhaps, multiple literacy crises?) and of "writing development" and of "reading problems" and so on, each to be mended or remediated by - you guessed it - skills


instruction. But ethnographic studies suggest that literacy development is highly irregular (Graves), renegotiated, in James L. Collins' happy phrase, "each time written language is used." Thus, these guys - Farrell and Ong in particular - make a simplistic distinction between "the oral" and "the literate." There's not one orality and one literacy, each fixed and stable, but a universe of oralities and literacies, interacting in much more complex ways than an either- or divide would suggest (on this issue, see Heath, "Oral and Literate Traditions" and "Protean Shapes" and Tannen). In this view, the smart view, surface features of literacy are less important than their metalinguistic and metacognitive concomitants, and those concomitants are deeply embedded in a social world.

Finally, these guys share a view of the teacher as the center of authority- this shows up again and again: literacy skills are transmitted or imparted, reading problems are remediated, writing is taught rather than learned, and so on. Again, it's as if we talked in pinyin, when you'll remember what Lucy told Chip - we talk in characters.

A "Smart" Approach to Literacy Now let's sort this literacy business out another way, a smart way - "oh, so

that's the way it is." And then let's ask how this smart view might affect us as college composition teachers.

First off, literacy itself is no big thing. We have example after example of cultures where people master literacy systems outside of schooling, usually in late adolescence, in a matter of a few weeks (Conklin's study of literacy in the Philippines; Scribner and Cole's study of the Vai in Liberia, Psychology of Literacy; Walsh's remarks on literacy among the Ulithians in Micronesia). And we recognize, in the history of our own culture, that disenfranchised peoples women, working-class males - have, at least in small numbers, been able to acquire literacy outside of schooling. Autobiographical accounts of working- class literacy differ in the importance they allot to formal schooling (for example, it seems central to the education of Richard Rodriguez, but peripheral to the educations of Jagdish Gundara or of Charlene Thomas [Heath and Thomas]). So the whole emphasis on "skills" instruction is just wrong-headed, and my guess is at this point that the more we try to transmit isolate skills, the more we block students from mastering them - and from mastering the deeper knowledges that are much more important (Shuy; Frank Smith, "The Choice Between People and Programs" and "A Revised Approach to Language Learning").

Second, the alphabetic system of writing English does not reflect sound in very many significant ways; it reflects meaning. The early Greek writing system may have been phonetic (Havelock), I'm willing to grant that, but our orthography is something far more abstract, as Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle point out by citing word patterns like sign::signal, serene::serenity, and

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even telegraph::telegrapher::telegraphy, where the system preserves meaning rather than sound (see also Carol Chomsky). John Hurt Fisher concluded, from his historical investigations, that standard written English developed in Eng- land of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a shared court system, Chan- cery English, unrelated to any dialect of English. Thus, to cite a single example, Middle English eren becomes Modern English errand through a series of changes that have little to do with pronunciation, but a great deal to do with the internal consistency of the abstract written system. That consistency creates a meaning relationship between "wander" (errand, knight-errant) and "make a mistake" (error, errata) that has no etymological basis. So our culture also clings stubbornly to its orthography, in the face of spelling reformers seeking a more "logical" (i.e., phonetic) spelling system. And it is right to do so.

Now, of course, we literate adults think our orthography reflects sound - that's just part of being a literate adult, and Wayne O'Neil rightly dismisses these misperceptions as "our collective phonological illusions." I once heard a colleague advise a student who was trying to spell basically, "oh, just sound it out," and a recent study by Jakimik, Cole, and Rudnicky found that college students "hear" the sound /b/ in words like combing and at the end of bomb. But we can dismiss all this as the unfortunate baggage we adults literate in an alphabetic system have to carry around with us, as literate pinyin when pinyin doesn't count.

Indeed, such baggage aside, a strong argument would be that, when we turn our attention to skilled adult reading and writing, as opposed to learning to read and write, orthographies aren't nearly as important as Farrell and Havelock and Ong would claim. Joshua Fishman, studying five minority language schools in New York City, the languages ranging from Chinese to Greek to Hebrew, found the orthography question simply unimportant, and Scribner and Cole (Psychology of Literacy) found few script-specific effects among the triliterate Vai in Liberia, and those effects were much less important than other variables - urban Vai as opposed to rural, for example, or schooled Vai as opposed to unschooled. (The experimental evidence - as opposed to ethnographic evidence - about the role of orthography in reading is admittedly more tangled; see the discussion in Taylor and Taylor and the various positions in the anthologies edited by Henderson and by Hudelson.)

Thus, third, print literacy is best seen, not as a code, but as traditions of text, ways of behaving with language. I read with expectations about what a given document might be allowed to do, and I locate myself as writer within given traditions that are, ultimately, ways of be having - or not behaving, as the case may be. That is, I write in characters, not in pinyin. David R. Olson points out the historical origins, in the eighteenth century, of what he calls "English essayist literacy," and Ron and Suzanne B. K. Scollon stress the distance between "English essayist literacy" and other ways of behaving with language,

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such as those of the Athabascans of central Alaska. Josephine Miles ("What We Already Know about Composition") and Patricia Bizzell ("William Perry and Liberal Education") have speculated in interesting ways on this "weight of texts" as it bears on the teaching of writing, and structuralist scholars in Europe have focused on how this tradition of texts impinges on the writer (see Barthes; Derrida, Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology; W. Ross Winterowd has been the soundest interpreter of the implications of this tradition for rhetorical theory ["Black Holes"; "The Politics of Meaning" ]).

Fourth, we need to realize that we English teachers are lames, profoundly removed from the active life of language in the communities we live in. The term lame is used in the black community to refer to adolescents who are unable to participate in the language activities of their community, and William Labov, in a seminal essay, "The Linguistic Consequences of Being a Lame," notes that it's the lames who do well in school, get educated, become teachers, and, in his view, become sociolinguists, trying to observe the active life of language around them. Well, we English teachers are lames, too, and in many ways, we're less adept at language than our students are. The teacher I mentioned above, advising the student to "sound it out" to spell basically, is a lame, and I've elsewhere noted the paradoxes that it's only our weaker students who learn what we tell them and that what they learn helps them behave in ways counter- productive to the acquisition of literacy ("Writers as Readers"). (Some working- class cultures recognize these paradoxes in their profound distrust of "book learning.")

Thus, quite often, we English teachers are likely to do less well at some language tasks than our students are. I have replicated Arthur Reber's classic study of the tacit learning of the grammar of an artificial language again and again; the only times I've failed to do so were in graduate seminars with English teachers. Or consider a group of elementary teachers, asked to isolate the four sounds of the abstract past tense -ed, and given the following specimen sen- tences:

- He rounded third base. - She walked on the sidewalk. - I walked to the store. - You monitored the class.

After fifteen minutes of trying, they reported failure; they could only find three sound equivalents. Sure enough, they were sitting around saying to each other, "I walked to the store" [wakt tu] rather than "I walked to the store" [wak tu]. Now in real language, "I [wakt tu] the store," means "I am very angry"; "You took the car, so I walked to the store." And I'm sure that's true of those teachers, too, outside of their classrooms. But in this context, as "English teachers at school," they were simply aberrant language users, lames.

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So, all the way through, it's the other way around. The problem is not "in them," as Ong and Farrell would tell us. The problem is not in defining and measuring and teaching literacy, as most of the contributors to the Raymond volume would have it. The problem is not in "cultural literacy" in the form that Hirsch offers us. The problem is in the complex four-pronged relationship among our students and ourselves - and we're lames, you'll remember - and a tradition of texts and a provisional, developing literacy. The snow doesn't grow up from the ground, it falls from the sky, and we don't talk in pinyin, we talk in characters. Deborah Brandt, in a recent review of this emergent perspective on literacy, captures these insights in a brilliant phrase: "literacy has less to do with overt acts of reading and writing than it does with underlying postures toward language" (128-29).

Oh, So That's the Way It Is How then do we as teachers of composition get at "underlying postures

toward language"? I don't have solid answers to that question, but I will point to some ways I'm trying to get at those postures in my own teaching. First off, most of my comments about literacy center around the social use of language, and I think it's essential to establish a new language base in the classroom. I try to banish teacher talk, since I have every reason to believe that nothing impedes learning more ("The Writing Center and the Paradoxes of Written-Down Speech"). ("Teacher talk" is simply "the language of the classroom"; Heath's Teacher Talk offers typical samples - "I know two girls who are going to be in a lot of trouble, don't I?" and "Now, let's put the chairs in a circle, shall we?") Rita S. Brause and John S. Mayher sketch what this new language base means for classroom discourse, adapted here as Table 1; you'll note that this language base establishes new modes of learning and new roles for both learners and teachers.

Table 1

DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF LANGUAGE SETTINGS

Types of Interactions

Empowering Controlling - collaborative - authoritarian - personal - impersonal - cooperative - evaluative - comfortably paced - time-pressured - negotiated focus and methods - imposed focus and form - responsive to individuals - predetermined expectations


Language "Can we go ...;" "Do you mean ...?" "I want you to ..." "Why .. .?" "How would you like...?" 'Tell me ..." - equality in quantity - different quantity

Effects of These Differences - Growth through experimentation - intimidation - assurance/independence - insecurity/dependency

Authority - earned - imposed

Implicit Philosophy of Language Development - Language develops as a product of - Language develops through

participating in activities explicit teaching

Source: Brause and Mayher. Copyright ? 1985 The National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted by permission.

Secondly, I'm now following up on some work by Jana Statton, Roger Shuy, and Joy Kreeft at the sixth grade level by asking my students to keep dialogue journals with me (see also Gambrell; Kreeft; and Statton). The current instruc- tions are:

Entries in your dialogue journal should deal with four things: your concerns about the class - the readings, the conferences, and activities in class; your developing views of literacy and the college experience; your "literacy autobiography" - whatever you can tell me about past and current experiences that have had an effect on your reading and writing (toward the end of the semester, you'll be asked to develop this "literacy autobiography" as a separate writing; for now you're just making observations); and, later in the course, your concern about grade.

I respond to these entries, encouraging continued dialogue, and I also enter in the dialogue journal the comments and suggestions I make during conferences. At the end of the semester, I ask students to compile a formal "literacy autobiography" from these continuing observations.

Third, I try to actively involve students in language in the real world. Here I've benefitted from Shirley Brice Heath's presentation at the 1985 meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, about how she's been working with teachers at all levels, asking students to investigate literacy

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events in their communities. Last year my students, in teams, looked at a variety of literacy events - at student/secretary talk, at peer talk surrounding a writing event, at my writing conferences, and at how students successfully or unsuccessfully negotiated their needs at the reference desk in the library, returning to present their findings to the people they observed and to "skilled observers," my graduate students. I asked students to interview professionals working in their major about the reading and writing they do on the job. Here I also benefit from the work of colleagues and students who have allowed me to observe their own learning (Birns; Hartwell and LoPresti; Jacob; McAndrew; Purvis; Ron Smith; Walsh; Williamson), for as we begin to explore this emergent literacy we begin to constitute ourselves as a discourse community of our own - the guys who insist that the snow falls down from the sky.

Fourth, I'm seeing myself in a new role - not as an English teacher, but as a teacher/researcher, an ethnographer of literacy, a "kid-watcher" in Yetta Good- man's terms. This is not a traditional teacher role, and it's a hard one to adopt (oh, let me tell you), but it sure is more fun.

Finally (and I must admit that I have to be more speculative about this), I suspect that we don't organize our literate lives around knowledges, or even around procedures - the stuff of the traditional classroom - but around metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson) and around narratives (Rosen; Scholes), around our own developing literacy autobiographies. Courtney Cazden and Dell E. Hymes speculate on the importance of narratives in one's socialization into a profession, and they then go on to point out a fundamental, and unwritten, rule of the traditional classroom - only the teacher has narrative rights. I think Cazden and Hymes are right about the classroom: We can tell stories, but our students can't. And I think they're right about the centrality of narrative in constituting literacies. Consider, for example, the role of narratives in the faculty lounge of an English department as a vehicle for perpetuating a whole set of attitudes toward students and toward what the teaching of writing is. Similarly, I think if you begin to listen to what goes on at professional meetings, to talk in bars and at book exhibits and publishers' parties, you'll recognize how important narratives are in forming us as a profession. And even formal pre- sentations like this one, though you may not have realized it, are structured around narratives, not knowledges, around metaphors, not procedures: I am trying to write in characters, not inpinyin. And here I think of Sylvia Scribner's "Literacy in Three Metaphors," offering three ascending metaphors: literacy as "adaptation," literacy as "power," and literacy as a "state of grace." Oh, it comes down from above.

(Admittedly, Scribner is talking specifically about cultures in which literacy has strong religious overtones, and the goal of that literacy often is, as it was in eighteenth-century America [Resnick and Resnick] or as it is in Qu'aranic literacy today [Pattison; Scollon and Scollon] the ability to read the sacred text

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aloud, with or without understanding. But I've learned that we have to place a lot of trust in metaphors.)

To adopt this kind of stance, as I've noted elsewhere ("Grammar, Gram- mars, and the Teaching of Grammar") is to give up a great deal of power, and it's always hard to give up power. But the result is to empower our students. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance look at this power question, speculating about "writing and criticizing texts" at the high school level. Our kids have trouble being critical readers, they note, explaining that situation by the power that text has in American schools (and also by the fact that texts manage to sound so authoritative about things that any researcher in a given field knows are much messier). Similarly, they note that our students have trouble improving their writing, and they explain that by their having to write for an invariant audience of teacher as examiner, seen as a social superior, and hence involving a defer- ence vocabulary and a submissive stance that prevent learning. They put it this way:

The solution to the problem of both readers and writers is the recovery of a sense of authority, not necessarily of superiority to an audience, but of an equality to readers who make up the writer's peer group. True discourse exists only between equals. As a reader, one must come to see the writer of a text as basically equal to oneself, and as a writer, one must come to see the audience, including the teacher as reader, as basically equal to oneself. (40)

The neat thing is that, once kids get this kind of insight - "oh, so that's the way it is" - nobody can ever take it away from them, convince them that the snow grows up from the ground. Here's a kid telling a story to Lucy McCormick Calkins:

Before I ever wrote a book, I used to think there wa s a big machine, and they typed a title and then the machine went until the book was done.

Now I look at a book and I know a guy wrote it and it's been his project for a long time. After the guy writes it, he probably thinks of questions people will ask him and revises it like I do, and xeroxes it to read to about six editors. And then he fixes it up, like how they say. (157)

That kid is only seven years old, and he's got an insight - an equality with text - that no amount of skills instruction can later take away.

Of course, as Greg Jacob notes, if this new perspective is hard for us as teachers, it's equally hard for our students: Most of them have played a different game - the teacher controls the text - through most of their schooling, and it's as hard for them to assume power as it is for us to give it up. So making freshman English into a literate environment takes time. After all, we're now learning to

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deal with "underlying postures toward language." And if I've taken years to learn that "this is how a smart person would do it" and that the snow falls down from the sky and that we talk in characters, not in pinyin, then I've got to give my students a little room - a little narrative space - for them to gain those insights for themselves.

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Winterowd, W. Ross. "Black Holes, Indeterminacy, and Paolo Freire."RhetoricReview 2 (1983): 28-35. ---. '"The Politics of Meaning: Scientism, Literarism, and the New Humanism." Written Communica-

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Patrick Hartwell is Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is the coauthor, with Robert H. Bentley, of Open to Language: A New College Rhetoric (New York: Oxford UP, 1982; 2nd ed., Random House, in press), and he has published articles on the teaching of composition in such journals as College Composition and Communication, College English, and Research in the Teaching of English.

CCCC COMMITTEE SEEKS INFORMATION ABOUT SCHOOL-COLLEGE LIAISONS AND COLLABORATIVE PROGRAMS

FOR WRITING TEACHERS

The Committee on Collaboration Between School and College Writing Teachers of the Conference on College Composition and Communication seeks information on and descriptions of successful programs in which the English teachers of secondary schools or school districts maintain close liaison, information exchange, or collaboration with English teachers in colleges or universities. Brief notes as well as more formal descriptions are welcome. Please include names and addresses of contact people. Mail by January 1, 1988, to Jerry L. Cook, Wedgwood Middle School, 3909 Wilkie Way, Fort Worth, TX 76133.

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Documents