Sabbatical Project: The Beginning

“Not infrequently, training course participants call attention to ‘the danger of conscientizaçao’ in a way which reveals their own fear of freedom. Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic.”

––Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

There are voices I’m meant to keep with me, insights to hold as I embark on a seven-month long pedagogical journey to identify best practices for teaching incarcerated college students and anyone else my rural community college campus serves. These are the people of the forgotten and more impoverished southern Silicon Valley. Our students, like any students, hope to earn certificates, transfer to four-year institutions, or more fundamentally still, learn about the world, their place in it, and the potential each holds for transformation, creation, and how to best establish safety at a time when life is uncertain for many.

"Why teach using different cultural practices?" someone urges me to find the answer. "What are barriers to experiencing our authenticity?" asked another. Such questions emerged during brainstorming sessions I facilitated during the final weeks of the spring semester. I gathered tutors, teachers, and incarcerated and non-incarcerated students alike to anonymously frame questions and remind me of what to keep in mind as I explore four pedagogical approaches:

• Social Justice and Liberation Pedagogy
• Trauma Informed and Safety Seeking Frameworks.
• Improvisation and Play
• Mindfulness and Contemplation

You need to include more Latina activists, someone wrote. Remember to teach courage is the virtue that validates all others, wrote someone else. Personal stories are powerful and motivating, says a fifth. 

Each idea is expressed on a single post-it note. They clung, one to another, like flower petals, a riot of color in unruly clumps that settled at the bottom of the canvas bag within which I carried all this thought. It awaited organization and order, which I dreamed would appear come summer when I had the time to put each idea into place.

"What is the best way for trauma-effected people to learn trust?" they asked. "How much support does it take?" "How long?" "How can the scars of history help us appreciate the present?" "How does a teacher’s whiteness impact what happens in a classroom?" "Is it easier for students to enter conversations about race through a gender lens?" "What resources are available for helping facilitate anti-oppression activities?" "What do we say to those who don’t want to think in these terms?" "Is it OK to get up and move around during class?"

The college where I’ve been teaching English for 18 years has gifted me with this opportunity to explore these diverse and inter-related approaches, approaches that have shaped my teaching to lesser and greater degrees over the last two decades but within which I have never truly felt entirely grounded. 

My purpose is two-fold: to gain insight into best practices and program possibilities for the college’s inmate education program and to learn more about establishing good learning foundations for students who will be enrolling in our transfer level English classes, without the remediation we are used to providing. Our California state funders will no longer support the old model and now every community college is required to accept almost every student at the transfer level within the first year.

To answer the questions my sabbatical has generated and meet its objectives, I’ll visit other California community colleges, prison programs, and culturally rich community based projects and museums across the country. I’ll interview educators and experts who are leading voices in understanding how the ethnic, class, and gender identities of students and teachers alike affect classrooms, creativity, self-expression, and success. I’ll attend dance, improvisation, and mindfulness conferences and workshops to gain insight into the relationship between the mind, the body, and learning, and I’ll read and re-read books such as Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed(which provided the epigraph above) as well as Gilda Ochoa’s Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap, and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. 

My plan is to post what I learn here. Perhaps along the way you’ll want to share your own insights and questions, which will further enrich this anarchic exploration. With that in mind, let the image of this blank post-it note be your inspiration. 

Share your ideas and your voice, too, will be one I keep with me as I journey. 

Fresh Words from the Writers of San Benito County Jail

"Priceless is what comes to mind when we think of our Gavilan College classes .... Respect, gratitude, and genuine human caring is what this program has brought our community. Our writing becomes a part of our healing."

––The writers of A & C pods  

The writers of San Benito County Jail released two publications this spring: Creativity Takes Courageand Me, Myself, and Dopey: Lost and Found Expressions. Celebrations marking these publications are also a time to celebrate Gavilan College’s expanding inmate education program. 

At the jail, Gavilan offers classes in such things as GED preparation, creative writing, and career and personal development. Alongside the classes, there is a college counselor in place to help students set up long term education plans and help maintain their focus and hope while locked up. 

Having a place to land on the outside can make it much easier to avoid coming back, which is why across the state community colleges and universities are being supported to build programs like Gavilan’s.

According to students themselves, the program has already made a difference. For example, Eddie Kaufman, who attended every creative writing class available to him this semester, managed to overcome his fears about bad spelling and grammar long enough to get his voice on the page––a first for him. 

 “I have come to the point in my life, along with other inmates, that enough is enough. We have hit rock bottom and need to change,” said Kaufman, in his first college essay “Hunger for a Future”. “In Fall 2018, I’ll be attending classes on the Gavilan campus. For once in my life, I am excited. I can walk out of jail as a free and productive man, who can contribute to his community.”

To read more of Kaufman’s work and hear from other writers’ published in Me, Myself, and Dopey: Lost and Found Expressions follow this link and watch this blog for more information about its publication alongside its sister journal Creativity Takes Courage at BenitoLink.

Forget Me Not: For Alice who Lived and is Remembered

    "The gentleness of that moon-fish face told me at once: the old woman had just got out of prison.

     'She's a thief,' I said to myself. As I walked away from her, a kind of intense reverie, living deep within me and not at the edge of my mind, led me to think that it was perhaps my mother whom I had just met."––Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

I never met Alice. She chose not to attend San Benito County Jail’s weekly writing classes, so until she was dead, I hadn’t known she existed.

After her death, however, I learned of the great love students in my class held for Alice. One Wednesday, their sudden lethargy and irritability marked the room. Usually, writers arrive buoyant and ready to experiment. That day it was their sadness they brought with them. I wouldn’t have known of their loss had I not asked what lay behind their grim faces. Even so, it wasn’t something they expected me to understand. It was something between friends. A loss others might dismiss, so why risk talking about it. She’d been released. Soon afterward they learned she died. A friend was gone in a manner that touched on the fears they had about their own lives.

Alice was an elderly homeless woman, sometimes given to outbursts. Before her release, she had argued with not only jail guards but her cellies too. Cellmates, however, understood that anger wasn’t all there was to Alice. They loved her for her humor, her optimism, and her friendliness.

This is the Alice celebrated and written about in Forget Me Not, the latest collection of poetry and prose from the writers of San Benito County Jail. We hope you enjoy this work. Let it open your eyes and your heart to the stories of others like Alice, people in struggle, yes, but also people that bring meaning, connection, and light to those who look closest.

Please click here to learn more about Alice and the people who loved her: Forget Me Not.

Hope and Fear

"We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize."

––Thich Nhat Hanh

Each day, two white boards in a peer-tutoring space at the rural community college where I teach, record students' hopes and fears. 

Recently, one anonymous hopeful someone longed “to make a million” while on the other board somebody else wrote, “I need to see a doctor, but I’m not sure I can afford it.”

In reading these boards, you learn a lot, especially about students’ fears. Nowadays some, indeed, are afraid. “Will ICE be knocking on my door today,” wrote an anonymous someone a few weeks ago. Those words sat beside another’s fear that they hadn’t left enough time to finish an essay. “I’m so hungry,” wrote somebody else.

Seeing fears written in a public but mostly in an anonymous way somehow makes them more visceral, something I wanted to capture in this post. But I also wanted to document the ways in which the space and the people in it have made hope more tangible too.

One day not long ago, just outside my office door, a young man and woman reflected on a book they were reading for one of their English classes. These Chicano and Mexican American students named all the ways they related to Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, expressing surprise and delight that a book written by an Haitian American academic told part of their own story as well. A second young man joined the discussion and together the three talked about masculinity’s challenges and traps and the need to open to the feminine and the feminine within the divine, which was something they felt connected them to their indigenous ancestors.

Only a few feet away, the newly organized Literary Society club meeting was underway. From across the room, I could hear laughter and sensed the joy it contained as the group made plans for a new student journal. This club had been inactive for about ten years, so it was quite a feat that suddenly more than a dozen people were willing to come together and spearhead a project with so much potential meaning on our campus. 

Only a few minutes later, a young man––an international student, perhaps the only one with this formal designation on our campus––came to my door expressing interest in the glitter jars that decorate tables about the room. They are like homemade snow globes and are there whenever anxiety or a need for delight overtakes someone––lift, shake, watch the glitter settle, and feel a bit more settled yourself.

Like many schools, our college has developed this international program to collect big student fees. We imagine our campus populated by foreigners, foreigners with pockets deep enough to save us from whatever looming financial crisis may be on the horizon. But it’s hard to imagine why any one rich enough to fly to the US would choose this tiny underfunded campus when close by are larger cities with the kind of well-funded colleges one sees on television programs America exports overseas.

Nevertheless, this young man chose us, and he is far from home in every way. The jars help him, he said, whenever he feels distressed. 

It was a pleasure to receive his gratitude as the jars mean a great deal to me too. I encouraged him to watch the short film Just Breathe (available on youtube) to learn more about the jars' origins and purpose without telling him I tear up every time I screen it for myself.

He smiled and made a suggestion. You should have bowls of fruits too, he said, and nuts, on the tables to feed hungry students and the smell of the fruit the textures and so on, it would excite the senses and help people with their writing.

Yes, I thought, what that would be a beautiful thing to do.

Early that morning I’d gone for a run, a practice returned to my life after a two-decades absence, and now, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, I can’t get enough of it. I could run for hours, it feels, all around the town. Lately, there is the scent of the sea even up in the old neighborhoods, and at this time of year blooming cherries. Peregrine falcons fly high overhead, and old women walk by with dogs who sniff my ankles. I rub the dogs’ heads and say good morning to the ladies knowing one day, if I live, I will be old because we only ever go one direction.

The memories of these runs sometimes come with me to school, and I feel the blood pumping through my body as I look out at the students working away on their essays or talking with friends, and there is purpose in their focus. They are at it. They are here. I think, yes, there are things to fear in the world right now and so many reasons to hope.

Part Two Revision Strategies: Writing without Readers

Part Two Revision Strategies: Writing without Readers

“And what is the main thing, we speak of beauty and good itself, and so in the case of all the things that we then set down as many, we turn about and set down in accord with a single form of each, believing that there is but one, and we call it ‘the being’ of each./That’s true./And we say that the many beautiful things and the rest are visible but not intelligible, while the forms are intelligible but not visible …. Then let’s not be surprised if the carpenter’s bed, too, turns out to be a somewhat dark affair in comparison to the true one.”

––Plato Republic

For many writers enrolled in beginning composition courses, texts are only a site for right and wrong. In their minds, “naturally” talented authors write in perfect drafts. Plus, there is seemingly no such thing as a reader separate from the writer, a reader who has her own needs and desires that might be in opposition to the writer’s expressive strategies.

For example, my students sometimes experience their texts as being made of concrete. Revision, if it exists at all is meant only for removing errors. Everything else about the text is immutable and fixed as a prison wall.

I need them (and myself) to experience our drafts as being made of clay, ready to be wetted, reworked, and shaped into new and infinite forms. Texts can become sites for discovery, experimentation, and play. Something that can only happen if we learn to smash, manipulate, expand, and refine them with curiosity and joy.

For years, I thought and spoke about revision as being made up of four possible actions and two possible entry points. This helped me rework my own writing and made the revision process real for my students, something I covered in an earlier post (“Infinite Revision”).

In setting forth the four actions (adding, subtracting, moving, or replacing) I hoped to create simple ways of entering an abstract endeavor. Through revision as play, I hoped we could offer our readers freshness, surprise, and a less rigid more authentic voice that arose from delight not rigidity.

Until recently, the goal of revision for me was the reader’s on-going interest, but as I explored in last week’s post perhaps the reader’s presence dims rather than illuminates the writer’s ultimate purpose.

It wasn’t until I heard the celebrated author Ottessa Moshfegh name another possibility for revision, one that ignored readers and focused only on uncovering stories in their most illusive and ideal form that I realized my own approach to revision might benefit from further refinement.

Sometime after Moshfegh’s visit to my class, I was awarded a fellowship to the CatamaranLiterary Conference in Pebble Beach. There I worked with Scott Hutchins author of the novel A Working Theory of Love. It was like being taught by Buddha. In his presence, the most anxiety provoking writing tasks––the beginning or ending of a piece, its revision or its goal––became achievable and charged with hope.

Like Moshfegh, when approaching revision discussions, Hutchins never explicitly spoke about readers’ needs. Thus my anxiety about a text’s ultimate purpose may have been eased. He did guide us, however, to closely explore the work of other writers in order to identify how and why we found them affecting.

Everything about Hutchins’ approach to writing and writers was gentle and encouraging. He offered frameworks that made revision seem like a fundamental, even enjoyable task. What he shared was immensely helpful, and in that spirit, I share it with you.

Hutchins draws from Stephen Koch’s excellent book the Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction. In it, Koch proposes that there are roughly three primary phases to the writing process.

Phase one is the initial draft, where a writer gathers clay and begins to sense the particular elements in what is being created. Phase two, by far the longest, is where a writer expands, improves, and builds on what the phase one brought forth. Phase three is a time of intense polishing. The writer “cleans” up and ideally reduces the text by about ten percent.

Hutchins also shared what he named as the key ideas he’s taken from Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style. Those ideas are: state things positively; avoid modifiers; use strong nouns and verbs; and pay attention to periodic structure, placing the most important words of each sentence just before its final punctuation.

In his workshop, we therefore spent time scanning our own texts and reworking them with these guidelines in mind. For example, “Don’t revise only thinking of your laziest reader” might become “Find entry points to revision other than reader reaction.”

Likewise, getting rid of modifiers means your sentences will become lively and direct, not “so,” “very,” or “too” lively and direct.

In general, the strongest nouns and verbs are those that are the most specific and sensory. So, whenever possible, use proper names and the most active form of any verb.

Finally, think about the impact and placement of each word in a sentence. Consider placing strong words at the end of your sentences where they will have the most impact. I wasn’t at all sorry to experience how such focused actions, generated such dynamic texts. Or as I should say, I gained confidence witnessing dynamic texts emerge from focused action.

Since then, what I’ve learned about revision is that like everything else about writing, one will never grow bored considering what it can do and how one might approach it. Revision is writing and to write is to revise; it is best to enter all of it with respect for its magnificent possibilities and compassion for the writer engaging in it.