Writing as a Way of Being: Yagelski

In Writing as a Way of Being, Yagelski explores what anyone who has ever written something they believed at the time was important already knows: that the actual experience of writing is actually quite separate from the text. And this is why, once the piece of text is "finished" that a writer feels separate from that text, even distanced, and, I would go so far as to say somewhat depressed realizing that the "finishing" of the text was nowhere near as exhilarating as the writing itself.

Thus, when teachers talk about writing as having the potential to change things, they often overlook that it is the experience of writing that often has greater potential to move the writer to a place of greater understanding of himself and the world rather than the information in the text or the information that is communicated when someone else reads it. With an emphasis on skill-based learning and correct text production in the writing classroom, teachers and students are missing out on this, Yagelski's ontological argument.  He emphasis a pedagogy that focuses on the "writer writing" rather than the "writer's writing":

The text does not appear in this pedagogy, but rather than being the focus of writing instruction, it becomes a component of the process of inquiry into self and world that the act of writing can be.  In this way, the text becomes part of a larger act of inquiry through writing, which in turn becomes a vehicle for truth-seeking, in Couture's sense of that term. In other words, we write as a way of being together in the world -- as a way to understand ourselves and our connection to what is around us; in this formulation, we write with the text rather than to produce a text. (8)

As an answer to the thin pedagogy of skill-based pedagogy and learning correct writing, this type of pedagogy is what Yagelski calls a "pedagogy of community," and as I argue elsewhere, closer to the type of democracy we should be practicing -- inclusivity, critical engagement and participation. To make education about "rightness" or "correctness" is to narrow the purpose of education, which should be about enabling us to imagine a better more sustainable future. It requires innovation and imagination, but it also requires a connectedness with each other and our world.  It is such a limited goal to make writing about communication and being academically successful. Yet, I will admit that I have to deliberately conscious resisting such rhetoric in my teaching. If our goal is to prepare them for workplaces defined by economic globalization, we are perpetuating the status quo that has caused this crisis of sustainability (139).  It is a Western value that oppressed the "other" and exploits resources, so it is less about creating a better world and more about merely participating in a world that is already constructed for our students, a world unsustainable.

If you have ever allowed your class enough time to settle into writing, you can see the beauty of the act of writing.

Yagelski also criticized the progressive pedagogies -- which I tend to practice -- by saying that writing as political action or community service is still focused on the product and not the act. He argues that even the process movement "has effected little change when it comes to where we cast our collective gaze in our efforts to understand and teach writing: Our eyes remain fixed on the text" (144).  The cautionary message here is that if writing is reduced to writing as a skill," it is distancing the act of writing from living in all its complexity."  In other words, it limits it to an activity rather than its potential for being.  The challenge then is to teach students to learn from the and through the act of writing rather than write in the service of learning or to produce.

In line with my argument for doing inquiry, Yagelski cites Bartholomae's overarching purpose in writing as a "critical project" to cultivate a critical perspective of the world and "to help them develop a set of intellectual skills to interrogate the texts they encounter, including their own" (152).  Because Batholomae's focus in on critical academic skills, Yagelski argues that it is too narrow. That said, the part that is consistent with writing as a way of being is that " the goal isn't simply to make a better text but to provoke genuine inquiry that can lead to insight into and understanding of the issues that emerge from the writing" (152). Bartholomae's pedagogy wants to expose the master narrative that is in the essays students write and seeks to trouble the frames for producing, revising and evaluating texts -- all frames of a master narrative.  Thus, mainstream instruction that emphasized writing "good texts"  fails to interrupt the master narrative and cultural values that have produced the society that we have, the one that exploits and oppresses.

As students revise or work on drafts of any writing, Yagelski suggests a pedagogy that asks about the experience that was the focus of writing (not the text). Teaching writing is engaging in writing as an act of inquiry into their own experience of the world. Writing is participating in the world and who they are in this world.  Peer response is valuable in this pedagogy because it is an act of community building and shared meaning making and because it is not limited to improving texts.  The other side to this is that writing is individual and social. Thomas Kent wrote that there can be no meaning without the other; writing itself acknowledges the other; an individual contains many voices.

The challenge of schools, therefore, is to cultivate curricula and pedagogies that take into account the complexities of human learning and human life that is part of distinct and overlapping global communities (163). The narrow curriculum that is prescriptive and measurable is an attempt to control such complexity.

Teaching how to produce texts has not achieved the goal of teaching students how to do school nor do they use it in the workplace. But, Yagelski argues that what if we would have taught these kids writing as a way of being. Might it have "opened up a capacity of writing to understand anew their experience of themselves in the world...What might the communities they created look like?"