Category / education

by Cila Warncke

On Method Writing with Michael Downs

Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.

All photos courtesy Michael Downs

Light filters into Michael Downs‘ basement office, as if it were underwater.

Twin decorative dragonflies, backlit on a windowsill, and a red goose-neck lamp stretched into a honk, heighten the effect of a numinous natural space. It is, he says, the best writing room he’s ever had.

And he’s had a few to compare.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Downs rode economic currents with his family, first to Vermont then Arizona. After graduating from college, his journalism career took him back to Hartford for a spell; he met a woman and fell in love, moved with her to Montana; later, they moved to Arkansas, where he attended grad school, then to Baltimore in pursuit of work.

Downs nods in recognition at the mention of the 1960s-70s cadre of hard-drinking, fly-fishing Montana writers: ‘Tom McGuane, those guys, sure.’ Though a former sportswriter, Downs doesn’t need to prop his ego with tales of a trout [this] big.

His body of work reveals someone who lets nuance speak for itself; someone who illuminates and distils the details, then leaves them to do the work.

Downs’ published books include narrative non-fiction (the River Teeth Literary Prize-winning House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City); a historical-short story collection, The Greatest Show, about the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire; and The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist, a novel.

As befits his journalism background Downs, now a professor of English literature and director of the Master’s Program in Professional Writing at Towson University, regularly publishes short stories, essays and reportage. As befits a scribe, he also turns his hand to ghostwriting and editing.

Gathering words

The TV Guide, cereal boxes, the Bible, historical romance novels, Of Mice and Men, comics: ‘I read everything,’ Downs said. ‘I loved words; wanted to understand them.’

His precocious reading meant he struggled to keep pace with their sounds. ‘I’ve learned so many words just by reading that my pronunciation, throughout my life, has been terrible. “Inchoate” — is that in-ko-ate or in-cho-ate? I can never remember, but I know what it means.’

There is something to be gleaned from this primary engagement with writing as text. Technology has gifted the writer, or would-be, many ways to engage and construct, but there is power in being able to seed words on a page and watch the lines grow into a riotous harvest

Downs relishes the labor of it, the physicality of writing (more on that in a moment). His most influential teachers were the ones who, ‘demanded more of me than I thought I could do. And did so unapologetically. That helped me understand my capacities.’

The purpose of literature

Exploring his capacities took Downs to the University of Arkansas MFA program in the late 1990s. This was his grounding in Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Don Quixote, and teaching. ‘I wanted my tuition paid,’ he says with a grin. ‘But it was a wonderful thing for a variety of reasons.’

Foremost, teaching (as any teacher who gives a damn will tell you) demands the kind of close study many students elude. ‘I had to break down stories, novels, sentences; I had to do the craft aspect better than I would have otherwise.’

The process of deconstruction facilitates a deeper understanding of construction; clever writer/teachers seize opportunities to teach authors they love, or genres they want to better understand. Downs, for example, taught a historical fiction course while writing a historical novel.

Teaching writing is about more than just craft, though; Downs increasingly focuses on a less-discussed aspect of literature:

This generation has had a lot to deal with. It’s clear in their stress, their anxiety, what they talk about. What I want to do is use literary work – either the writing of it or the reading of it – to help them understand that the world is worth it, that it’s beautiful, that the unexpected doesn’t have to be dread inducing. The unexpected can also be the reason you get up in the morning. I spend more time now talking about beauty and how to use literature to help yourself get along in the world.

For all the joy he’s found in 30-odd years of education, Downs is transitioning to full-time writing. ‘I’m rich in former students, but I’m not as rich as I’d like to be in books.’

During his recent Fulbright Scholar year in Krakow, he encountered a quote by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski stencilled on a staircase: ‘it is not time that is lacking, only focus’.

‘Like so many other writers, especially writers who teach, I say things like ‘I don’t have a lot of time, I’m trying to find the time to write, etc.’ he says. ‘I read that quote and thought, ‘I need to change my focus.’ My focus has been students, for decades. I’ve been grateful for teaching at a university and having the summer to write, but I’m old, I’m a slow writer, and I want more.’

Part of how Downs accesses ‘more’ is through what he playfully refers to as ‘method writing’. He was kind enough to share examples and insights on this element of craft.

On Method Writing

Q: Why is it important for writers to get out from behind the desk and get their hands dirty?

A: Emily Dickinson didn’t do that, and she pulled off some good stuff. So I don’t want to say it’s a moral imperative, but for some writers, young writers especially, it’s important to get out of your own belly button. There is a world out there, experiences, things that are tactile, not just in your head. We take in experience through our five senses, then meditate on them. If you don’t have experiences, you don’t have stories. You can have think pieces, but you don’t have stories.

Q: What is your first memory of tangible experience that led to, or was integral to, a piece of writing?

A: When I was an 8th grader, I had a paper route. A stray dog used to follow me. I’d stop at a convenience store, buy some food, share it with the dog. It followed me for weeks, until it followed me across a road one morning, as the sun was rising over the mountain. Someone came along, driving fast into the sun, and hit the dog. And it fell to me to pull the dog off to the side of the road – still breathing, but clearly dying, and to stay with the dog.

Some time later, I went to a writing camp for kids, and a college professor told us to explore stories by writing about the parts of our lives that confused us. And I went back to that moment. It was a successful story, because I remembered the weight of the dog, what it felt like to touch it; that it was still breathing. That was the first time physical experience worked itself into my writing.

Q: How does tactile experience operate as a research mode in fiction versus non-fiction?

A: When I’m doing narrative non-fiction, I’m experiencing the world as me, so paying attention to my five senses. When I’m doing it in fiction, I’m trying to be someone else. So if they have experiences that I haven’t, I have figure out how to get close to those experiences. I try to save my imagination from doing too much work, or from getting it wrong. The imagination isn’t always right.

When I was writing about a woman who was burned in the Hartford circus fire, I drew from this wonderful Red Cross pamphlet about how people were treated after that fire, because it was groundbreaking. But also – I‘m going to sound a little crazy now – I needed to know what it felt like to be burned. I put my hand over the gas ring [on my stove], and held it as close as I could, for as long as I could. I did not hurt myself, but I got an idea of the feeling of a sustained burn. And that’s what I wrote.

If I hadn’t held my hand over that fire, I could not have imagined how it felt. It was cold.

Q: How do you incorporate method writing into second or third person POV?

A: It’s about coming to a place of focus where I can combine my engagement with the world and my imagination to say. If it’s working, it becomes transcendent. The words end up there; I don’t know exactly what brought them, but they are right, and I could never find those same words again.

Q: How do you know when to stop experiencing and start writing?

A: It’s always time to sit down and start writing.

It’s time to start experiencing when – in fiction – I don’t know what the character is experiencing. The character is in a situation and it’s time to figure it out. When working on the Horace Wells novel, I was struggling with the fact the main character wasn’t an enjoyable person to be around. He wasn’t super successful, he was whiny, he wasn’t that bright. I had to figure out a way to make him palatable.

How it happened surprised me. I went to a museum that had his tools, his notebooks, his death mask. They brought out the death mask. I put on white gloves and picked it up. His face was small, surprisingly small. I started touching his face. And I decided that his wife had touched his face. That though he betrayed her, and made her life difficult, she loved him. And if she loved him, I could love him through her. That changed him as a character, from a nebbish to a person who was loved by his wife.

Q: What is a rookie mistake writers make when attempting this?

A: To think their experience is how the character would have experienced it. John Keats said that Shakespeare possessed this amazing quality of self-nullification; he could stop being Shakespeare and be someone else. That’s how so many [of his] characters are who they are.

I encourage students to work at not being themselves. As a writer, your job is not to ask, what would I be doing if I were them? You have to become that character and know. Andre Dubus talks about studying Zen and becoming the word as he writes. It has to do with focus.

Q: Which writers do this particularly well?

A: Andre Dubus, absolutely. He was a man who wanted to be out there in the world, make stuff, experience stuff. Alice Munro, you know she’s out tromping the fields. Louise Erdrich, a favorite of mine, she doesn’t just sit behind a desk. Joan Didion, of course.

Q: What is an assignment or exercise you use to teach this to your students?

A: A terrible thing happened near my campus more than 100 years ago, before campus was there. A black teenager was lynched. I wanted the students to write about it. We walked to the site and sat for an hour; looked at the trees and the jail, which is still there, and touched the walls, looked at the sun. I wanted them to imagine how it was then, and see how it is now.

Downs Recommends

The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?

The Lord of the Flies. It completely freaked me out. I hadn’t know that boys could be so cruel. I was a shy, awkward boy who wore glasses. I could have been Piggy.

The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?

William Kennedy’s Ironweed, a profound and magical novel. Kennedy – a former journalist who never stopped thinking of himself as a journalist – wrote a novel set in a small north-east city, Albany, NY, that nobody paid much attention to. I wanted to write about Connecticut, about a small town no one paid much attention to, and this [novel] gave me the blessing.

A classic you love to teach?

‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor and ‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin. If I could only teach two stories for the rest of my life, it would be these two.

I love what Baldwin writes about art in that last scene; he’s writing about music, and Sonny’s blues, but … I’ll blow the quote, they were doing it at the risk of their own lives, but they had to do it, because we need those stories, and we need to make them new. It’s a gorgeous description of why we need stories.

‘Good Man’ because it is such an inexplicable story. Students have no idea what’s coming. Their mouths drop open. It’s a perfect story for proving to them that you can’t say what a story means.

A work you love to teach from 21st century?

Lydia Davis Varieties of Disturbance – she blows up the idea of what a story is, disregards everything anybody says. There’s a novella in it, which purports to be a sociological studies about get well cards written by a second grade class; it is just heartbreaking, funny, and reveals so much. She also has one-sentence stories in the book. Literally one sentence.

A book about writing every writing student should read?

Colum McCann’s Letters to a Young Writer.

A book + film adaptation combo you love?

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, which was turned into a TV series with Ethan Hawke.

A living writer you’d love to hang out with?

Olga Tokarczuk. I’m fascinated by the concept she discusses in her Nobel Prize speech of the ‘tender narrator’ – a new approach to narrating fiction. A different point of view.

Your perfect writing space?

If space and time are related, it’s more about the time than geography. If I create the time, the place doesn’t matter. I can be on a park bench, a balcony, a windowless room, sitting in the front seat of my car.

What are you working on now?

I’ve written about six essays and would like to write another four to six and put together a collection. I have some ideas that have been – there is no other way to say it – that have been strong in me lately. They are wanting to come out.

Connect

by Cila Warncke

On Culturally Responsive Teaching

The following presentation on culturally responsive teaching was written for, and delivered at, Le Sallay Academy’s January 2023 conference on blended learning.

The term culturally responsive teaching was coined by Geneva Gay. It entails crafting and delivering curricula that is relevant to students’ lived experiences. The aim is to engage students with material that is “personally meaningful” in order to pique their interest and motivation to learn (Gay, 2002).

My interest in culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy (which I didn’t have the time to get into in this talk) springs from the cultural homogeneity of my own education. As a high school student and undergraduate I read, mostly, books, stories and poems by white male Europeans.

Students deserve better. They deserve to be introduced to a rich, multicultural world of literary experiences and they deserve to see themselves represented in what they read. As a teacher, its my job to think about students’ intersecting identities: nationality, language, gender, ethnicity, class, faith, etc.

This presentation focuses on language as a form of cultural and self-identity, and the importance of representing multiple Englishes within an English Language Arts curriculum. This was highly relevant because the students in this class hailed from several countries and spoke more than a dozen languages.

Including world Englishes within a literature/language arts program is something I feel strongly about because, 1) it’s good for students and 2) it’s fun. Some of the fabulous things about the English language are the richness of its vocabulary (much of it borrowed from other languages), how its (relative) grammatical simplicity sparks creativity and the way it has been adapted/refined/altered by linguistic communities around the globe.

There are more great presentations from the conference available at the Le Sallay website.

Culturally Responsive Teaching in Blended Learning: A Case Study

Share your thoughts and ideas on CRT/CST in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

On Reimagining Normal

Foto de Mercedes Mehling en Unsplash

A new reality

Recently, I binge-watched Netflix’s relationship reality show The Ultimatum: Queer Love.

If you haven’t seen it, the show features five lesbian couples that split up and reshuffle. One partner in each wants to get married, the other isn’t sure; the show is a chance to figure out now, forever, or never.

The premise is whatever but it was transfixing to watch a show where queer was the default. There was none of the usual exception signaling or tokenism of shows with only a few queer participants/characters; no hetero normativity. Instead of being Other the participants just were.

Soapy plot-lines aside, it was cool and refreshing to see queer women flirt, do their make-up, argue, shuffle around in slippers, make romantic gestures, walk their dogs, pitch fits, drink too much.

It should NOT be revelatory that queer people are human too, but, watching The Ultimatum, made it clear that what we are presented with as normal is in fact (hetero)normative. This doesn’t reflect reality but constructs an image that we are taught to accept as real.

Resisting the norm

Michel Foucault’s concept of normalization, the process by which ideas or ways of being come to be taken for granted, is pertinent. As educators, we are immersed in normalizing messaging, as are our students. They can be as invisible and pervasive as the air we breathe. Like tainted air, they are dangerous. Sociocultural imperatives about normalcy or (worse) naturalness — often deployed around subjects like sex, gender, social roles, economics, etc. — have the potential to do massive harm. Even when they seem innocuous, they put a subtle curb on imagination.

Resistance is the only antidote. According to Foucault scholar Dianna Taylor, “Refusing to simply accept what is presented as natural, necessary, and normal – like the ideas of sex and the norm itself – presents possibilities for engaging in and expanding the practice of freedom.”

Positive normalization

Humans are neophobic, shying away from the unfamiliar. This calls for conscious effort to challenge unhelpful or restrictive norms with positive normalization, i.e. not of a particular way of being but of an open, curious approach to life.

Replacing an old norm with a new norm simply shuffles the exclusion tiles. What we need, and we as educators should model, is normalizing acceptance, inquisitiveness and respect towards what is unfamiliar but not harmful.* Nobody is obliged to embrace someone else’s way of living, but a good education should provide them with the self-awareness and self-confidence to live and let live.

*By all means, resist and reject ideas and actions that harm oneself or others.

Foto de “My Life Through A Lens” en Unsplash

What I try to normalize in my classes

  • Making mistakes: Students are under mad pressure about grades, achievements, performance, etc. This fuels counterproductive perfectionism and alienates kids from their greatest learning tool: mistakes. As I wrote in ‘On Screwing Up‘: “You can’t learn what you already know… Existing expertise may gratify the ego, but it doesn’t grow the intellect.”
  • Asking for help: Along with making mistakes, it is critical to encourage students to ask for help. Teachers are not (or shouldn’t be) remote judges, hovering only to instruct and assess: we should be there to solve the problems before we grade the answers. We have to resist the Anglo-American individualist tradition and remind kids that asking for help is a sign of intelligence, not weakness.
  • Discussing problematic language: As a literature teacher, problematic language is an all-the-time issue. How do we understand Jean Toomer’s use of the n-word in Cane? Is it ever acceptable to use the r-word? What about swearing? How do we get better at remembering people’s pronouns? Teachers cannot protect students from problematic language, nor prevent them from using it. What we can do is explore why words or phrases are problematic, how they got to be that way, and what using them really means. We can educate students about the power of words and help them understand what their word choices say about them, and how their use of language affects others.
  • Talking about intersectional privilege/disadvantage: There is no contradiction in urging students to treat everyone they meet as a unique individual and teaching them about how individuals are shaped by intersectional privilege or disadvantage. It is fact, not indoctrination, to articulate that white females have different experiences than white males, cis people different experiences than trans people, people of color different experiences than white, etc. Yes, people are more than the sum of their identities, but those identities matter and by understanding them we gain greater understanding of those around us — and ourselves.
  • Fluid gender and sexual identities: The majority of literature portrays a limited range of gender and sexual and identities. There is no getting around that, although the canon is growing joyously year by year. What I can do as a teacher is A) bring in as much LGBTQ+ literature as possible and B) teach texts in context, i.e. the couple in Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ are a man and a woman not because that is ‘normal’ but because it reflects the gender roles and romantic partnerships of that time and place. Typing that, I see how reductive it sounds. Yes, it is an imperfect approach, but it at least opens discussions about how gender roles and sexual identities have changed over time.

What would you like to normalize in your classroom (or world)? Share in the comments!

by Cila Warncke

Seven Lessons from the School Year

My full-time teaching year has just wrapped for the summer. After the hectic, emotional final weeks and days, it is time to pause and take stock.

This was my second year as World Literature and English Language teacher at Le Sallay Academy. In my previous life, as a music journalist, we bandied the phrase ‘difficult second album’. Nobody mentioned there would be a ‘difficult second year’ in teaching. Now I know.

We should embrace the difficult, Rilke advised. He is right.

Part of the difficulty of the year was my egotistical/oblivious assumption that everything would run on tracks — after all, I’d done it before. That made some things easier, sure. But nowhere near everything.

Each year, each class, each assignment, each student is a new opportunity and learning curve. Rather than expect (naively) to rewind and press play, it is better to figure out what works in broad terms, and use that as a springboard for the next fresh start.

Because I’m a geek and like mnemonics, I boiled down seven key lessons from the past school year into the word ACCLAIM — something all teachers want (right?). And all students deserve.

Adapt

I like planning, making lists, ticking things off. When preparing lessons, I get a kick out of an orderly progression. What feels like orderly progression to me, though, can seem incomprehensible or plain boring to my students. One of the important things I learned this year was that to be effective meant to adapt. Sometimes, this meant tossing out a whole assignment; sometimes it meant an in-class pivot when an activity sank like undercooked souffle; sometimes it meant adding materials or exercises to ensure an individual student had what they needed to succeed.

One example of an individual adaptation that benefited the whole class was when student said they were struggling to follow the plot of All Quiet on the Western Front. This alerted me that the dense, gun-smoke swirl of memories that carry the reader from the battlefield to the intimate reaches of Paul’s life were a lot for a less-experienced reader to follow, so I created a chapter by chapter summary/study guide that included plot points, key characters and vocabulary lists. By reading the summary in advance of the chapter, students were able to track the main events of the novel, learn vocab and better understand the narrative arc.

Challenge

Adapt works both ways: sometimes it is appropriate to summarize and simplify; sometimes, students need to be challenged. Doing this right, means they should be at the edge of — or just beyond — their comfort zone, but in a situation where they have tools to address the task.

For example, my sixth grade students learned what Shakespearean sonnets are, then wrote them. This challenge worked because we defined everything: iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme, volta, etc. Once they understood how a sonnet was constructed, we read humorous contemporary examples that showed how the form, however strict, could be applied to any topic. Then we worked through each student draft together, line by line, counting syllables, testing rhymes, reinforcing by repetition while also having fun.

Co-create

Students are only going to be participants in their learning if they are allowed to participate. For me, this means letting go of my ideas about perfectly formatted assignments and visually pleasing presentations and letting students co-create with me, and with each other.

Midway through the year we trialled collaborative Google Slides presentations, where students contributed their efforts to a single presentation. Initially, I created the presentation and turned them loose on it. By the end of the year, they were setting up the joint presentations themselves.

For final writing projects, there was a co-creation element, as students were given the option of choosing a set question or pitching their own big idea. Most students choose to come up with their own topics, with me as a consultant to ensure their ideas were appropriate to the scope of work.

Link

One of the things I love best about teaching literature is tracking ideas, themes and debates across epochs and regions. Without this connectivity, literature would just be words on a page — who cares? Only by helping students identify and explore the links can they truly appreciate the scope and magic of the written word. This is critically important at the ages I teach: 11-15. Kids are teetering towards independence, trying to understand the world they find themselves a part of; they haven’t yet claimed their literary heritage. So it is imperative to make explicit connections they might not see otherwise: historical, economic, social, topical.

For instance, when studying Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, my students read Jeanette Winterson’s essay, ‘Love(lace) Actually’ which links Shelley with pioneering machine-maker Ada Lovelace with Alan Turing, and Frankenstein’s monster with modern technology. We also dipped into The Heart of Darkness for another example of a frame narrative, establishing thematic and stylistic links to anchor the text in broader conversations. Also, I introduced Romanticism by showing them Meatloaf’s ‘I Would Do Anything for Love’ video. Let’s just say, there were no new Meatloaf fans after that. Maybe you have to be a child of the 80s to dig that OTT?

Aim

Have a target. Make sure students know what it is and how to hit it.

This is a work in progress for me, but I can confidently say that classes run more smoothly when everyone knows what we’re doing and why. Sometimes the why might sound arbitrary, e.g. we’re reading this book because it is a great example of X (notwithstanding all the other perfectly good literary examples) but even so, it is worthwhile to articulate the class aims and repeat as needed.

As a student, I hated fuzzy assignments or vague grading standards. How do you know what you’re supposed to be doing if the aim is undefined?

As a teacher, I want to protect my students from that frustration, and myself from their excuses (‘but I didn’t understand…’). Clear, concise goal setting, including deadlines, frees up everyone’s brain space to focus on what matters. For example, each classes final writing project was scheduled, broken down into steps with individual deadlines and students were given the rubric and grading standards in advance. (This might sound over-prescriptive, but middle school is where structure needs to happen so students can break free of it in secondary and further education.) Obviously, how (and to what extent) students hit the aims varied, but they had a clear, fair, impartial structure to work within.

Iterate

My expectation that year two would be easy was based, in part, on the assumption that I could wholesale reuse materials and texts from the previous year. That was lazy thinking.

This year was better was when I rejigged, or even started from scratch. Though working with the same broad themes and literary time periods, there was massive opportunity to iterate and improve. For example, instead of using Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling as a main text, I selected a handful of stories and wove them into reading Grace Lin’s stunning novel When the Sea Turned to Silver, which weaves Chinese folklore into a zesty YA adventure story. My students were far more immersed in the novel than the would have been in the stories alone, and they were able to see the link between Songling’s 18th century work and contemporary Chinese writing and traditions.

Model

This year, I’ve been more open about my geekiness, quicker to say how crazy in love I am with an author or text. Do my students think I’m weird, or maybe should get out more? Possibly. But they also seem to respect my passion for literature and language, even if they don’t understand or share it.

To me, this is what modelling is all about. How can I persuade students to love words, or to push themselves on an assignment, if my example is meh?

If I want students to be excited about books, I need to be excited about books. If I want them to take risks, I have to take risks. If I want them to make and learn from mistakes, I need to make and learn from mistakes. If I want them to discover joy, I need to embody the joy that awaits discovery.

The vast importance of modelling hit me when I realized that I remember a mere handful of books I read prior to high school graduation: To Kill a Mockingbird in 9th grade, The Odyssey and something by Shakespeare in 12th grade. That is it. And I love literature and lived for those classes. So, realistically, even my most engaged students will remember between one and zero of the books they are assigned.

What I do remember about literature classes? My teachers and how damn much they cared about words and writing, and how those models encouraged me to believe these were things to cherish and celebrate.

That’s what I want for my students. Any year I succeed in communicating that will be a good year.

What are some of the key things you learned this year, as a teacher? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

On Primary Sources with Katherine Cottle

Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.

Photo courtesy Katherine Cottle

In this week’s interview, author and Goucher College writing professor Katherine Cottle discusses the practice and possibilities of primary source research in creative and critical projects, which is embodied in several of her five books, including The Hidden Heart of Charm City: Baltimore Letters and Lives, I Remain Yours: Secret Mission Love Letters of My Mormon Great-Grandparents: 1900-1903, and Baltimore Side Show.

According to her bio, she two “feisty” children and a propensity for burning dinner (“I’m a horrible cook,” she assures me cheerfully). Cottle also writes poetry, non-fiction, cultural criticism, essays and reviews.

An Expanding World of Words

Growing up in a “farm-like” conservancy area of Baltimore County, Maryland, Cottle – the eldest of three children – sought out nooks behind rose bushes or slices of space between buildings where she could spin yarns in peace. “I was very quiet, externally. More of a listener,” she recalls. “But I was wordy internally: talking to myself, making observations, telling stories. I was writing, mentally.”

Cottle had the good fortune to attend a public high school which offered creative writing courses (“now, you’re lucky to get a unit, much less a whole class”). Her creative writing teacher, with whom she is still in touch, encouraged students to enter competitions and submit work for publication. This was important for Cottle, who was 14 years old when her first piece appeared in the local paper: “It was a big deal to have readers outside my ninth grade classroom.”

Building on her positive high school experience, Cottle went on to earn a B.A. in English from Goucher College, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Maryland at College Park, and a Ph.D. in English/Professional Writing and American Literature from Morgan State University.

Paths and Possibilities

Asked what steered her toward teaching writing, Cottle chuckles: “It wasn’t, ‘this is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life’. I still don’t know that. But no matter what I’ve done, writing has pulled me in its direction.”

Although she has not always, or exclusively, taught, Cottle has educated writers from early teens to adulthood, in settings ranging from intensive summer programs, to tutoring, to middle and high schools, to her current full-time role at Goucher.

There, she teaches courses including first-year writing, poetry, professional writing and senior capstone courses, allowing Cottle guide students from the beginning to the end of their undergraduate studies. “Every class, every semester is a new experience,” she says. “You are starting a new adventure every time – every class, every day. That requires strength, enthusiasm and a positive attitude.”

Strength, enthusiasm and a positive attitude are rewarded by reciprocal learning. Cottle cherishes interaction with students and colleagues as means to cultivate her own practice. “It allows me to reflect on my own work [at] a helpful disconnect. I have to step back and recognise where I am in that picture.”

Her goal as an educator is to pay forward the “gifts I got from my mentors… to inspire others to develop the command and craft of their work so they feel confident as writers. Whether first year or senior capstone, [I want them] to feel that what they’re learning will help them beyond the classroom. Hopefully they see how writing will play a role in their life, how communication will help them going forward.”

Photo by Catarina Carvalho on Unsplash

On Primary Source Research in Creative and Critical Projects

Q: What is primary source research in this context?

A: Opening your research lens beyond the standard scholarly essay. It means looking for non-traditional sources, things you won’t find in Google. Some might not be valued by the academy, but provide scope for humanities documentation. For example, my dissertation focused on intimate letters from 1850-1950 in Baltimore. Some [were] online, some I had to go to a physical place to see. Others cannot be found, because they were hidden or destroyed.

Q: Why is this type of research significant in critical and creative contexts?

A: It adds unfiltered content. It allows voices which might not typically be found in public settings to be brought to the surface and validates genres beyond the scope of traditional research.

Q: How does one begin?

A: Think of yourself as your own search engine, and create an algorithm. You can start on the internet, but usually you have to go to physical locations, or call or write people to find out if something is in an archive; you might open your research to living sources.

Q: How did you approach researching the intimate letters?

A: My focus was on historical figures. I asked mentors at my university, then cast a wide net to see what I could find. After that, I decided to focus on a particular time period. There were a variety of ways to go about finding letters. Some were available online. Some were in archives. Others were archived but not accessible to the public. I contacted writers who’d been immersed in particular figures and asked them. Part of the excitement of doing a primary source search is that the process becomes part of the journey. You document the search as much as what you find. I wound up with a chapter on letters that we’ll never find, even if they exist.

Q: How do you avoid drowning in details?

A: Set parameters as you go along: here’s where I am, here’s what I found, here’s what I’m going to continue, here’s what I’m going to put off for another time.

Staying within those parameters is useful, but you need to start the process first. It’s a little messy in the beginning, but human beings are messy.

Q: How might a teacher structure a primary source research assignment?

A: I teach a 200-level writing course with units on sources such as diaries, photographs, maps, children’s books, recipes, oral histories, etc. We focus on one genre a week, look at examples, do some practice.

We usually start with photographs. First, students observe exactly what is in the frame. Next is the reflective lens when the student considers what they bring to the image as a viewer. Then they apply an analytical lens to think about the picture’s social significance.

We apply this metaphorical frame to other types of sources, asking: What’s there? What [do I] bring? Why is this important to our world?

Cottle Recommends

Q: An author who does primary source research well?

A: Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. There’s a set of photographs in the middle, you can start the framing there; but the whole book is full of primary sources, [Skloot] pieces together Lacks’ life through research. Plus [she] has such a connection to Baltimore. I like to use articles or examples connected to place, so if students are local it gives them another perspective.

Q: A piece of writing that changed your life?

A: Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 by Lucille Clifton. Hers was one of the first readings I went to; she had such humor, her work was so in-depth and thoughtful. But she was also unapologetic about loving The Price is Right. It showed me you could be a writer and be real, you could bring your strengths to writing in a way that was unique to you.

Q: A classic you love to teach?

A: Poets like Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, Tyehimba Jess – I’m not sure I could pick just one. A collection of women’s poetry from the late 20th century would be perfect.

Q: A contemporary work you love to teach?

A: I enjoy Billy Collins work. There is a simplicity about it, with a deep foundation, but also wit. He takes the human experience seriously and not seriously at the same time.

Q: A book about writing every writing student should read?

A: Bird by Bird: Some Notes on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. Students connect with it.

Q: A living writer you’d love to hang out with?

A: Jeanette Winterson. I’ve only read two or three of her books, including Written on the Body and The Passion, but they left a physical feeling. The impact lingers, they are so powerful. She and Toni Morrison have that – they are in a whole ‘nother category. It is hard to find the language to describe, but you feel it at a cellular level.

Q: Your perfect writing space?

A: After going through the pandemic, it’s definitely not being home all the time. I work well in an outside environment, like a coffee shop, where there is human movement or discussion, but in the background. And a comfortable spot to sit.

Q: If you could publish anything, what would it be?

A: Right now, I’m working on [a book of] recipe poems. My brother-in-law is an incredible cook and has everyone over for dinner once a week. But during the pandemic, he couldn’t. We talked about writing a cookbook, but quickly realised it wouldn’t be typical. Each recipe is a tribute to a friend or family member who attends his dinners, so different people, different types of food; each will include a narrative about the person who makes, brings or requests the food.

I like blending genres. For example, my friend and I self-published a book of illustrated poetry. Even my memoir and nonfiction include other genres.

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by Cila Warncke

Journalism’s Role in Teaching Critical Thinking

This week I’m going to share a podcast recorded last summer (on one very HOT afternoon) for Le Sallay Academy. It features a conversation between myself and the wise, incisive author/journalist/memoirist Kat Lister.

It is shared with the kind permission of Le Sallay, which facilitated and hosted the podcast as part of its Le Sallay Talks series.

Reach Kat Lister on LinkedIn or via Blake Friedmann Literary Agency

***

Here are some highlights from the conversation:

Kat Lister on navigating the media of today

It’s very hard even for those working in the industry to navigate such a fast-changing landscape, and I don’t think there is any one person who is doing it perfectly. And the way that we learn and grow, and familiarize ourselves is by having conversations like this, which have to be very open about the downfalls of social media, but also about what the positives are, and what we can gain from it.

It’s not going anywhere. None of these platforms is going anywhere. The only thing that can change is our relationship with it and that can seem quite chaotic nowadays: it can be a hard place to navigate, it can be a hard place to verify. What is news? What is fake news?

The best way to make our way through this is to think about the original source. You see a video shared a gazillion times on Twitter, and that almost immediately verifies it in your mind, but actually, that’s not the asset to look at. I often have to double-check myself, because I will be almost hitting retweet, and then I’ll be like, hang on a second, where was the video filmed, who filmed it, where was it filmed, are the details correct? Is the date right?
Contextualizing tweets or videos on TikTok or wherever you happen to find yourself, is tremendously important. We’ve all become fact-checkers in a way, and that’s an incredible responsibility not only on the content creators but also the responsibility of the readers, on the audience. As we are saying, look at things more critically, and now, more than ever that’s become quite urgent. And it’s not something any of us are doing in a perfect way, I don’t think.

Cila Warncke on teaching

Yes, these are the traditional 5 W-s: When, Where, When, Who, and Why. And this is something that as a Literature teacher I really emphasize, continually asking students: “Okay, what’s the context of this? Whether it’s an article or a short story, make sure you understand where this is coming from. There is a direct relationship between that kind of critical reading of anything and the ability to navigate the news.”

Click here to listen to the full podcast

by Cila Warncke

On Revision with Elisabeth Dahl

Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.

In this week’s conversation, Elisabeth Dahl (no, no relation) discusses the transformative power of words, with a special focus on teaching revision.

Photo courtesy Elisabeth Dahl

‘I worry for people who don’t write’

Author, illustrator, editor, educator: Elisabeth Dahl’s writing experience spans genres and professions. The through line quickly emerges in conversation – a deftness with, and delight in, words that is as contagious as a yawn. And a knack for detail that brimfills anecdotes with life and color.

The Baltimore, Maryland native grew up near Johns Hopkins’ main campus, where she completed her undergraduate degree. She returned to the city as an adult, and lives a few miles from the hospital where she was born.

“As a child, I loved school right from the start,” she writes in her online bio. “By the time I was in ninth or tenth grade, one thing had become clear: Analyzing stories and crafting sentences lit me up in a way that history, math, and the rest did not.”

Speaking on the phone, Dahl credits this to her high school teacher Joyce Brown (with whom she still exchanges emails). “She approached us as if we were college students. When we started [James] Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we spent 20-30 minutes talking about his decision to use ‘the artist’ instead of ‘an artist’. To think this was even a question! It would have been one thing to debate writer versus artist, but to look at the article – the versus an – was incredible. As it turns out, [Ms Brown] led us to understand it made quite a big difference.”

Understanding the big differences a small lexical choice can makes is a sine qua non for a writer-educator. “I’m a better writer because I’ve taught writing,” says Dahl, who worked for Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth for the better part of a decade. “I was still making the same mistakes emerging writers were making: the stakes weren’t high enough, or I was padding the stories. Seeing these problems [as a teacher] was sort of teaching myself at the same time. It helped me incorporate the lessons into my own writing.”

Textures of language

For Dahl, a reciprocal relationship between teaching and literature was established early; her mother and grandmother (with whom they lived until Dahl was eight) were elementary school teachers who made reading a central part of her young life. They also gifted her with a fascination for the stories embedded in artifacts and moments. Her favorite space, as a child, was her grandmother’s walk-in closet. “It smelled like mothballs but had its own, not just aroma – aura. It had a history. It was a special occasion if I got to try on old dresses, like the one my mother wore to her junior prom. There was a scarlet red [dress], like what a Spanish dancer would wear, with tiers, strapless. It didn’t look like any of the other clothes in there. Jane Eyre had her red room; I had this red dress.”

The aural and visual qualities of words beguiled her: “I liked that if you said a word like ‘fork’ or ‘salad’ 25 times to yourself, it became nonsense, weird, you could almost hallucinate about it”. Another female relative, an aunt, was a graphic designer. Tracing pages in her books on hand-lettering introduced Dahl to the “tactile aspect” of language.

These formative experiences of words and stories as real and imaginative, concrete and abstract, primed Dahl to thrill to the challenge when Ms Brown assigned Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. “A light had turned on. I remember standing in her empty classroom, during a free period, talking about it with her, totally energized. I [still] don’t know if I know what the story means,” she says cheerfully. “But I love it. It’s like a Rorschach test.”

Inspired by Ms Brown’s example, Dahl prioritizes space for students to encounter epiphanies by “helping them get a new perspective, become a better observer, or express themselves better. As a teacher, you’re another voice in this person’s head. You have to take it seriously. You don’t know the other voices in their lives, all you can do is be respectful and help them grow.”

But why learn to write any more – aren’t there machines for that?

“Because to have a good relationship with writing is to have a good relationship with your own mind, your history, the world around you,” Dahl responds. “I worry about people who don’t write regularly. The memoir I’m working on has taught me so much about things I’ve been thinking about for 54 years. By laying out the words, revising the words, reconsidering the words, I’ve developed new attitudes towards certain moments, and people. It’s wonderful to be able to do that.”

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

On Revision

How do you create an open, accepting environment where students think beyond the binary of right/wrong?

One assignment I designed is based on Amelia Gray’s short story ‘Monument’. In it, the people of a town came to clean up a graveyard, then something changes, and they start destroying the graveyard, almost like Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’. I had students pick a character and rewrite the [third-person] story in the first person. We talked about what that changed, what opportunities it created, what it shut down.

This helped them realize that a piece of writing is many, many choices. It loosened students up. It was an act of playing around, like they might approach improv.

How do you push students beyond ‘good enough’?

Try to present revision as an opportunity. What if you wrote in a different point of view? What if you sprinkled some of these details throughout the story?

For students who are good but could be better, I call upon their sense of a challenge, their curiosity, intrigue. If a student is a tennis player, or pianist, say, I remind them how many hours they spend on the court or at the keyboard. Writing requires the same. It’s a lot of time, a lot of effort, yes.

I always tried to teach that we’re all on the same continuum. We’re writing. We’re writers. Getting started, revising, these things are always challenging.

How can students develop a feel for revision?

They need to be reading, copying out passages as a way of internalizing what good writing is. I encounter people who say, ‘I know I could write a novel’, then you ask what they are reading and they ‘don’t really read’. That’s never going to work.

How does revision differ between fiction and non-fiction?

With non-fiction you have to think about fact checking, accuracy, but the process is not all that different. You’re still asking about tone, voice, consistency, how the narrative is laid out, what is the best way to tell the story, whether you’ve grabbed the reader…

How do you approach teaching revision with different age groups?

With younger students, don’t talk down to them. With all ages, nurture their curiosity about where a piece of writing might go. Again, trying to relate writing to other endeavors, whether playing sports, or working at a grocery story. Remind people that revision isn’t just something we do in writing. We’re always revising things, always being asked to spend more time perfecting or altering, it’s part of being human.

What is a sign that the process is working?

When students say, this went a different direction, or, the character surprised me by doing this. That is exciting. It shows they are engaging on another level, not just trying to bang out the essay or the story.

​Dahl recommends:

The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. She explores, in a graphic novel, growing up, the truths that were presented to her and the truths she had to discover later. It was fascinating, her level of honesty. I get most of my books out of the library, but I went straight to the book store and bought that one for full price.

A classic you love to teach?

‘Why I Live at the PO’ by Eudora Welty. It’s an unreliable narrator story, very subtle, hard to pull off. Every time I read it, I see new things.

A book about writing every writing student should read?

On Writing by Stephen King. Although I’m not a King fan, this book is so good, especially if students are interested in writing books and getting into publishing. It is full of good advice, very practical.

A book + film adaptation combo you love?

Ian McEwan’s Atonement – that was a great movie and a very good book.

A living writer you’d love to hang out with?

Ann Patchett. She co-owns a book store called Parnassus Books in Nashville; she has a wonderful personality, she’s smart, she’s a good writer.

Your perfect writing space?

My house, where I live and write, is suburban, there are beautiful trees but always people walking past. I like to have people around.

If you could publish anything, what would it be and why?

It would be nice if the memoir I’m writing eventually becomes a book. What got me started was realizing how much I loved reading memoir. There is something about a well-crafted, honest memoir that stands out; they are always engaging.

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by Cila Warncke

On Ungrading with Anthony Lince

This is the debut post of ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.

This week’s interview is with Anthony Lince, per his online bio ‘a Latinx educator and scholar who teaches first-year writing courses at UC San Diego and local community colleges.’

Photo courtesy Anthony Lince

Writing: From ‘terrified’ to teacher

In conversation, Lince has a ready beam and belies several notions of what a scholar of writing looks like. Figuratively, anyway. The dun-colored, round-neck sweater is classic English teacher chic, but he is quick to undercut the notion that he is a born wordsmith.

Growing up, San Diego, California Lince was happiest on the basketball court, running plays as a point guard through his high school years.

‘I was terrified of writing,’ he confesses, still smiling. ‘I loved to read, but as far as writing went, I never felt confident.’

Writing at all, much less teaching writing was so far out of mind as to be out of sight. After high school, Lince joined the Army and served as a military police officer. When he enrolled in college, aged 25, he planned to study criminal justice.

So where did writing come in?

‘Professor Bustos, who taught my first-year writing course. There were texts by Mexican-American writers like Pat Mora and Sandra Cisneros, which I connected with as a Mexican-American. And the Professor let me know he enjoyed my work.’

Despite struggling with imposter syndrome at the unexpected praise, Lince trusted his teacher enough to take a job at the writing center, at Bustos’ recommendation. There, he discovered he liked helping peers. His confidence in his own writing grew; he became an English major.

Lince didn’t set aside his thirst for justice, though: ‘As I started to get an education in the humanities, I saw a lot of injustices that needed work.’

Towards more equitable education

Lince is passionate about opening doors. One of the reasons he practices ungrading is to ‘create a positive, less-anxious, equitable, and antiracist learning environment’ (more on all that in a moment).

Lince was the first in his family to complete college. He understands the challenges and subtle (or blatant) inequities that non-traditional students, or those from marginalized communities, face. ‘It was unfamiliar terrain,’ he recalls of undergraduate study. ‘Take office hours – I had no idea you could go talk to professors. Things like figuring out a financial aid are hard if you don’t know anyone who’s done it before.’

After finishing his BA in English with an emphasis on Teaching, Lince qualified as a teacher and spent a year working in a high school before completing an MA in English with an emphasis on Rhetoric and Writing Studies. He graduated in 2022 with a thesis on labor-based grading.

Though peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings sprout like kudzu on Lince’s academic CV, his primary goal is to lead by example. ‘I try teach from the perspective of authentic writing practices and share with students from the point of authorial expertise. If someone were a dance teacher, you’d expect them to be a dancer, right? So when I go into a classroom, I let them know I write academic articles, book chapters, blog posts, that I’m working on a book. By bringing this into the classroom, they see how writing works outside the classroom.’

Though he doesn’t use the word, Lince’s teaching practice is grounded in respect. Addressing students as fellow-practitioners of the craft is mark of respect. Seeking to ‘be equitable in my assessment and grading practices so students know they are having a fair education,’ is another mark of respect.

‘I want students to see that they are important. That they matter,’ he says. ‘I want them to be confident at writing. And to be able to spot potential injustices or biases that play out in writing.’

On Ungrading

  1. What is ‘ungrading’?

Moving away from traditional numbers and letters and moving towards authentic ways of assessment. Take my own experiences as reference points; when I write for publication, or even for fun, I don’t receive numbers or letter grades, assessment happens through feedback.

  1. Your Master’s thesis is on ‘labor-based grading’ – what is that?

There are a lot of sections under the umbrella of ungrading, one of which is labor-based grading. This method only uses a student’s labor to calculate their final course grade.

At the start of the course, students sign up for the grade they want. I tell them, you want a B, you need to do these things. If you want an A, you have to do all the B labor, plus more, to get the A.

All the activities [they complete] are based on the writing process: peer review, conferencing, visiting the writing center, drafting, revision. Students can complete more elements, or go more in depth, to get a higher grade.

  1. How did you become interested in ungrading?

When I taught high school, students were primarily focused the grade. I’d give feedback and they would just ask for a grade. During my Master’s, when I was teaching first-year students, I didn’t want them to be so focused on grades so started looking for an alternative. I was the first at San Diego State to implement ungrading, but it’s started to spread. It was great to see students come to conferences and listen to feedback, not just ask for a grade.

  1. Which student demographics does this technique best suit?

If the conditions are right, it could work for high school students. College [university], for sure.

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash
  1. How do students respond to ungrading?

Sometimes there is confusion in terms of not seeing a grade, they’ll ask ‘how do I know how I’m really doing?’

But most students don’t like grades, so we discuss it. They start to see how this can work for them. And I check in throughout the term to see how they’re doing.

  1. How does ungrading promote an antiracist environment?

Biases can enter into grading practices and, even if unconscious, negatively impact students. A study was done of two students in 2nd grade, one called Johnny and the other Malik. Their papers were given to various teachers and Malik’s paper was consistently marked lower. The twist was the papers were identical; the only difference was the name.

If this happens in second grade, third, fifth, high school and into college it can negatively impact that student. With labor-based grading, that sort of judgement goes away because if the student does the work, they get the credit. The classroom becomes a space where students don’t have to worry about biases or subjectivities.

  1. What other benefits do you see in the classroom?

The hierarchy of A student/C student breaks down, it becomes a place of collaboration. When students ask for feedback, they’ll ask about specific parts of the writing, which is a very different conversation from talking about a grade.

  1. How do students get a grade for their GPA?

They get a letter grade at the end of the semester, per college rules. If someone signs up for a B, I’m checking throughout the term to see if they complete the agreed work. If they do, they get the grade they signed up for.

​Lince recommends

  1. The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?

The Fellowship of the Ring. I read it when I was nine and was so taken by the way the world was created, the multitude of characters, the important quest. It ignited my love of reading.

  1. The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?

Anne Lamott on first drafts [in Bird by Bird: Some Notes on Writing and Life]. It let me know that all writers struggle, and that struggle is perfectly normal. I assign it to my students to show that they aren’t alone.

  1. A classic you love to teach?

George Orwell’s 1984. I teach a unit on surveillance and I like showing students this idea of a surveillance state.

  1. A contemporary work you love to teach?

I bring poetry into my classes, just to share. Shel Silverstein has some fantastic poems that are applicable to the writing classroom. Also, Percival Everett [a novelist The New Yorker describes as having ‘one of the best poker faces in contemporary American literature’]. He just won the PEN/Jean Stein Award for Doctor No, a satire on the James Bond trope.

  1. A book about writing every writing student should read?

Writing With Style by John R Trimble. It isn’t really well-known but he writes in a conversational tone students can relate to it.

  1. A book + film adaptation combo you love?

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was phenomenal. It was true to the essence of the books.

  1. A living writer you’d love to hang out with?

Percival Everett. I’d love to pick his brain, get a sense of his process and writing style. It also seems, from interviews, we have somewhat similar personalities.

  1. A writing tool?

Scrivener. It takes everything away from the screen so you’re only focused on the text. With so many distractions, its cool to have everything fade in the background.

Looking forward

Lince is at work on his first book, a writing guide tentative titled Questions to Ask for Becoming a Better Writer. Look for it in autumn 2024.

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by Cila Warncke

On Freedom From Religion

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

BELIEVE AND YE SHALL BE SAVED?

Do parents have the right to indoctrinate their children?

For millennia, most cultures have acted as if the answer is ‘yes’ — using everything from physical violence to threats of damnation to ensure each successive generation followed like sheep.

Now, finally, someone, somewhere has said, ‘no’.

In December 2022, Japan announced a law to protect children from parental religious fanaticism. The law would protect kids from being a) forced to participate in religious activities, b) refused medical treatment, educational or social opportunities based on their parents’ religious beliefs and c) protect them from religious coercion, i.e. being pressured by parents threatening them with hellfire.

My husband, brought up Southern Baptist, and I (Evangelical then Seventh-Day Adventist) raised our eyebrows: if only.

To quote ‘Giest’, discussing the Japanese legislation on r/atheism: “Most Americans would loose their shit over this. Forcing religion on kids is a big part of our culture.”

FREEDOM FOR SOME

The United States gets mentioned a lot in the reddit thread because perhaps no other country so full-throatedly proclaims its hypocrisies. Individual personal freedom, including freedom of religion, is enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution but few other nations match the United States’ fanatical zeal for enforcing minority religious practices on everyone.

Texas just passed a law demanding that the Biblical Ten Commandments be posted in a ‘conspicuous place’ in every classroom in the state. Florida wants to ban any mention of menstruation before sixth grade (12 years old), though which chapter of the Bible supports that blend of misogyny, gynophoby and science-loathing is not specified.

As anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see, the US Right believes only in the absolute personal freedom of wealthy, fanatical, embittered, power-drunk, humanity-hating men. The rest of us be dammed.

Hence the chances of laws to protect children from emotional, psychological and physical abuse in the name of God will remain unwritten and unenacted.

PERSON OR PROPERTY?

This isn’t just a United States problem, though; nor is it only a problem of religion in the States.

The real but unarticulated debate is this: are children people, entitled to the rights and privileges of personhood? Or are they, as the American Right, and so many other cultures construct them, property?

How a society answers this question is of existential importance for the simple reason that children become adults.

A culture, religious or national, that views children as property cannot prepare them for a successful adulthood. Responsibility, the ability to carry oneself in the world, cannot be conferred at an arbitrary age: 18, 21, whatever.

Children who are controlled, brain-washed, browbeaten throughout their youth aren’t going to suddenly blossom into self-sufficient, competent adults. Instead, they are turned loose on society as adult-sized toddlers, prone to tantrums and destruction.

I don’t believe it is any coincidence that the United States combines high rates of religious fundamentalism with catastrophic rates of interpersonal violence. Should we be surprised that children denied agency and personhood seek extreme and harmful outlets as older teenagers and adults? Is anyone surprised when a beaten dog bites?

Photo by Artem Kniaz on Unsplash

TOUGHER. BETTER.

The only way to rear children to become full citizens of humanity is to, quelle surprise, treat them like human beings. From their first breath onwards.

“Childhood is a time for gathering and developing the assets necessary for full autonomy,” writes Hollingsworth (2013). Developing the capacity for full autonomy requires independent trial-and-error, in the same way developing the capacity to ride a bike requires time spent wobbling up and down the street.

Adults can screw this up in so many ways: laziness, authoritarianism, over-protectiveness.

It is tougher to co-regulate, discuss, take time to listen to a child than it is to demand compliance, or at least the appearance of it.

But it is better.

Children learn respect by example. If we want them to grow into adults who respect the opinions, privacy and autonomy of others, we had better show them how its done. Treating children as full-fledged human beings is the best way to inoculate them against hateful ideologies that thrive on repression: nationalism, racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia and the like.

As educators, we have the extra privilege and responsibility of making our classrooms safe for ideas and self-expression. When children express ideas we find difficult (as they will) we have to model an appropriate, adult, respectful response.

Once, I was teaching English to a group of 14-and-15-year-old Spanish kids. One of them came out in support of Vox, the ultra-nationalist, uber-misogynist far-Right party that had formed recently.

My kneejerk response was: ‘We’ll have none of that in here.

But I pulled myself together and asked why he supported them, and we had a class discussion. Who knows whether he changed his mind about Vox, then or later, but at least he had a chance to participate in a respectful debate, instead of being shut down.

Teachers, and parents, have to model the behaviours and responses they hope to see in children. If we want kids to become thoughtful, compassionate, self-respecting, respectful global citizens we better start working on ourselves.

How do you support your students/kids to develop autonomy? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

On Animal Welfare Education

Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash

Last November, I read about New Zealand children being taught to trap and kill rats. The story has nagged me ever since.

The child killers were ostensibly working towards the laudable goal of protecting native fauna.

What I have a hard time with is the gleeful tone of the kids, and adults, involved (quoted by McClure, 2022):

  • “My trap, basically the whole thing’s a layer of blood,” grins one enthusiastic vermin-slayer.”
  • “Even the five-year-olds are really into the idea. They know the end goal: they want kiwis back in their back yards,” said Emma Jenkinson, chair of the school’s board of trustees, who helped organise the competition.”

Do the five-year-olds really want kiwis back in their yards? Or are they learning a dangerous lesson?

Teaching cruelty

Research beginning in the 1960s has found consistent strong links between childhood animal cruelty and adult interpersonal violence (Holoyda & Newman, 2016; Glayzer, et al., 2002).

This is so well-established, Holoyda and Newman (2016) note, that: “Cruelty to animals entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the revised third edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1987) as a criterion for conduct disorder, the childhood precursor to antisocial personality disorder.”

But it’s rats, you may say. Vermin.

Rats — like it or not — are living creatures capable of feeling pain.

In April, 2023 New Zealand was prepared to offer children under 14 cash prizes for killing ‘feral’ cats. Fortunately there was enough public outcry to force the organizers to rescind the reward.

My point is, the category of vermin is dangerously prone to expansion.

It is a hallmark of genocide that perpetrators classify the objects of their violence as pestilential, invasive, repulsive.

“In the apocalyptic Nazi vision, these putative enemies of civilization [Jews] were represented as parasitic organisms — as leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion,” writes David Livingston Smith, author of Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others. He also notes that during the genocide in Rawanda Hutus referred to their Tutsi victims as “cockroaches.”

To be clear, I am NOT equating killing rats or cats with killing humans. That would be absurd and offensive.

What I AM arguing is that humans can be conditioned to treat other living creatures with regard, or the opposite, and that training children to delight in the death and suffering of any living being paves the way for insensitivity to other living beings.

If we teach kids it’s okay to torment and kill one animal, what’s to stop the category of vermin expanding? Again, numerous studies across more than half a century have found strong correlations between childhood animal cruelty and adult violence.

Taking responsibility

Another problematic fact of the New Zealand slaughter campaigns (at least as reported) is the lack of acknowledgement of how the problem started.

Neither cats nor rats are native to New Zealand, and they didn’t swim there. Humans brought rats to the islands (Innes, et al., 1995), and doubtless brought cats to kill the rats, in nursery rhyme fashion.

Photo by Jinen Shah on Unsplash

If anyone is to blame for endangering native fauna, it is the colonizers and invaders who arrived with these animals. It may be necessary and appropriate to take protective measures now, but any engagement children have with the issue should be framed in terms of human responsibility for the initial problem.

This means that adults need to deal with the situation instead of outsourcing killing to children. If culling seems the only way to protect endangered native species it should be done as humanely as possible by trained adult professionals.

Animal welfare education

Schools can, and should, educate children about animal welfare. At this point in human history, it is less about kindness than about a last-gasp chance to save ourselves from self-inflicted environmental meltdown.

We cannot slow the headlong rush to planet-scale destruction by continuing with the same mindset that got us into it — the mindset that says: when an animal (or plant, or person) inconveniences us, let’s call them a pest and kill them.

Educating children to treat other living beings and ecosystems with respect and consideration is a step towards self-preservation, in the immediate and (if we’re lucky) long term.

Immediate impacts include reducing interpersonal violence. Scheib, Roeper and Hametter (2010) found that children who taught about animal welfare, “acquire social competences such as empathy, consideration, and responsibilities. Thus, Animal Welfare Education plays an important role in preventing violence in schools.”

Tarazona, Ceballos and Broom (2020) argue for far-reaching benefits to animal welfare education, writing: “The basic concepts of biology, welfare, and health are the same for humans and all other animals. Human actions have wide consequences and we need to change the way we interact with other living beings. … Animal welfare should always be considered in our relationships with animals, not only for direct impacts, e.g., manipulations, but also for indirect effects, e.g., on the environment, disease spread, natural resource availability, culture, and society.”

Interdisciplinary connections

To avoid this outcome, teachers in all disciplines need to participate.

As long as environmental or animal-related topics are confined to science classes, they will remain easy for students to compartmentalize. And a thing that can be compartmentalized can be ignored most of the time.

What can I do, as an English teacher?

For starters, I can highlight relevant themes in texts. One of my classes just finished reading Doris Lessing’s striking debut novel The Grass is Singing, a book in which the physical environment plays an outsized role in the social, emotional and psychological environment. It explicitly deals with themes like land exploitation, too, and highlighting them initiated a thoughtful discussion.

I also love to draw from authors like Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin and Margaret Mead.

History class is another fantastic place to educate students about the environment. We should consider and highlight the impact of social change, war, technology, etc. on animals and the wider environment.

Math teachers can use problems that engage with the natural world, ranging from population expansion to epidemiology.

Children who don’t understand that all life is fundamentally connected will grow into adults who won’t see how their actions and choices affect their environment. They will be, in a profound sense, irresponsible. And it will be our fault for not having taught them better.

What is your view on animal welfare education? Have could it best be integrated into curricula? Share your thoughts in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke