Journal of a Living Experiment: A Documentary History of the First Ten Years of Teachers and ...

347 Pages·2007·15.37 MB·English

DOCUMENT RESUME
ED 328 909 CS 211 742
AUTHOR Lopate, Phillip, Ed.
TITLE Journal of a Living Experiment: A Documentary History
of the rirst Ten Years of Teachers and Writers
Collaborative.
INSTITUTION Teachers and Writers Collaborative, New York, N.Y.
REPORT NO ISBN-0-915924-09-9
PUB DATE 79
NOTE 347p.; Publication of this book made possible by a
grant from the National Endowment for the Ari:s.
AVAILABLE FROM Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 5 Union Square
West, New York, NY 10003 ($9.95).
PUB TYPE Books (010) -- Collected Works General (020) --
Historical Materials (060)
EDRS PRICE MF01 Plus Postage. PC Not Available from EDRS.
DESCRIPTORS Creative Expression; Educational History;
*Elucational Innovation; Elementary Secondary
Education; Enrichment Activities; *Experimental
Teaching
IDENTIFIERS Artists in Schools Program; *Teachers and Writers
Collaborative
ABSTRACT
Intended to celebrate the first 10 years of Teachers
and Writers Collaborative (the original organization which sent
poets, novelists, and other artists into the schools on a regular
basis), this book contains 29 articles, diaries, letters, manifestos,
graphics, and memoirs. The book contains the following articles: (1)
"Roots and Origins" (P. Lopate); (2) "Iliterview with Herbert Kohl"
(H. Kohl and P. Lopate); (3) "Journal of a Living Experiment" (A.
Sexton); (4) "Some Impressions Recorded as a Participant-Observer
in
the Summer Experimental Program in Deaf Education" (D. Henderson);
(5) "The Use of Arts in the Education of Children Who Are Deaf" (K.
Kennerly); (6) "Interview with Karen Kehnerly" (K. Kennerly and P.
Lopate); (7) "A Fable" (M. Rukeyser); (8) "Issues of Language" (P.
Lopate); (9) "'The Voice of the Children' Diaries" (J. Jordan); (10)
"Dreams" (J. Baumbach); (11) "A Class Novel" (L. Jenkin); (12) "A
Grave for My Eyes" (A. Berger); (13) "Attitude toward Teachers and
the Schools" (P. Lopate); (14) "Working on the Team" (K. Hubert);
(15) "Luis, A True Story" (M. Willis); (16) "So Far Away" (T. Mack);
(17) "Teachers and Writers and Me" (H. Brown); (18) "Combining Art
and Dance" (S. Sandoval); (19) "Drawing" (R. Sievert); (20) "Teaching
Art: Examining the Creative Process" (B. Siegel); (21) "Admiaistering
the Program" (P. Lopate); (22) "Two and a Half Years" (M. Hoffman);
(23) "Interview with Kenneth Koch" (K. Koch and P. Lopate); (24)
"Nine Years under the Masthead of Teachers and Writers" (R. Padgett);
(25) "Latin Nostalgia" (M. Ortiz); (26) "Don't Just Sit There,
Create" (W. Brown); (27) "A Love Letter to My Church" (D. Cheifetz);
(28) °Pausing, and Looking Back" (A. Ziegler); and (29) "Conclusion"
(P. Lopate). (SR)
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A Documentary Historj of the First Ten Years
of Teachers and Writers Collaborative
Edited, With Commentary, by Phillip Lopate
Teachers&Writers
84 Fifth AI 'nue, New York, New York 10011
V..
Copyright @ 1979 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative. All rights re-
served. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publica-
tion may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, re-
cording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the pub-
lisher.
This book is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts in Washington, D.C., a federal agency.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Journal of a living experiment.
1. ArtsStudy and teaching (Elementary) New York (City)
2. Teachers & Writers Collaborative.
I. Lopate, Philip, 1943-
NX311.N4168 372.5 79-19199
ISBN 0-915924-09-9
Table of Contents
Introduction by Phillip Lopate 7
PART ONE: THE FIRST YEAR
Roots and Origins by Phillip Lopate 14
Interview With Herbert Kohl
by Herbert Kohi and Phillip Lopate 21
Journal of a Living Experiment by Anne Sexton 44
Some Imr ressions Recorded as a Participant-Observer
in the :Ammer Experimental Program in Deaf Education
by David Henderson 76
The Use of Arts in the Education of Children Who Are Deaf
by Karen Kennerly 81
Interview With Karen Kennedy
by Karen Kennerly and Phillip Lopate 84
A Fable by Muriel Rukeyser 97
PART TWO: CLASHES
Issues of Language by Phillip Lopate 1(X)
"The Voice of the Children" Diaries by June Jordan
Dreams by Jonathan Baumbach 158
A Class Novel by Leonard Jenkin 164
A Grave For My Eyes by Art Berger 171
PART THREE: TEAMS AND ALLIED ARTS APPROACHES
Attitude Toward Teachers and the Schools
by Phillip Lopate 190
Working on the Team by Karen Hubert 199
Luis, A True Story by Meredith Sue Willis 207
So Far Away by Theresa Mack 214
Teachers & Writers & Me by Hannah Brown 224
CombiiIng Art and Dance by Sylvia Sandoval 227
Drawing by Robert Sievert 235
Teaching Art: Examining the Creative Process
by Barbara Siegel 244
{
5
TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued)
PART FOUR: BEHIND THE SCENES
Administering the Program by Philip Lopate 250
Two and a Half Years Marvin Hoffman 263
Interview With Kenneth Koch
by Kenneth Koch and Philip Lopate 269
Nine Years Under the Masthead of Teachers ,T4 Writers
by Ron Padgett 282
Latin Nostalgia by Miguel A. Ortiz 289
Don't Just Sit There, Create by Wesley Brown 302
A Love Letter to My Church by Dan Cheifetz 305
Pausing, and Looking Back by Alan Ziegler 309
Conclusion by Phillip Lopate 327
Contributors' Notes 343
a
,
reaChdt, & WHAM :tea, 1977:
Seated flow, left to right Theresa Moth, Barbara Siegel, Halsey lorms, Migoal A. Ortiz, Meredith Sue Willa, Kama Hobart.
Staodiog: Robert Sivert, PhilhP Lopata, Mark Solomon, [Pesky Brims, Richard Perry, Gleirda Adams, lairra Gip* Steven rbaler:
Sylvia Sandoval, Adalberto Ortiz. Not shows: Bill low*, Alas Ziegler, Ron Padgett Christine Spoieh, Aerins Fogel.
7
Introduction
When the director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Steve Schrader,
asked me to put together a special issue of our magazine celebrating the or-
ganization's tenth anniversazy, we had in mind a light, graceful walk down
Memory Lane of approximatdy fifty-two pages in length. Obviously it did not
turn out that way. As I began collecting the material, I became fascinated with
the complexity of the group's history, and the serious larger issues it touched.
What attracted me first of all was the sheer amount of literary history that Tea-
chers & Writers Collaborative had a hand in. An organization which has en-
gaged the dedicated energies of so many important writers of the last decade
Herbert Kohl, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Kenneth Koch, Grace Paley,
David Henderson, Ber-'amin DeMott, June Jordan, Nat Hentoff, Victor Her-
nandez Cruz, Jod Oppenheimer, Ron Padgett, Florence Howe, Mark Mirsky,
John Holt, Jay Wright, Rasellen Brown, Sonia Sanchez, Louise Gluck, Felipe
Luciano, Pedro Pietri, David Shapiro, A. B. Spellman, Tom Weatherly, Wes-
ley Brown, Maria Irene Fomes, Robert Silvers, Jonathan Baumbach, Bill Berk-
son, Armand Schwerner, Sidney Goldfarb, Calvin Trillin, Richard Elrnan,
Leonard Jenkin, Dick Gallup, Meredith Sue Willis, Lennox Raphael, Karen
Hubert, Richard Perry, and Bill Zavatsky, to name only the mosa widely-pub-
lishedmust have a story worth telling. The cast of characters was rich, as was
the verbal record they left behind of their struggles and satisfactions in at-
tempting a reformation of language arts teaching in the schools.
But it could not be allowed to turn into a syrupy Feu/schrift. The decision
of an organization to write its own history must be based on something other
than self-aggrandizement for it to be of general value.
There is a tradition at Teachers & Writers, grounded in the act of diary,-
keeping, of self-reflection, and painful honesty about mistakes and tensions.
This volume will in no way depart from that t:adition. The value for some
readers. I hope, is that an airing of the history of one group's struggles over an
extended period will be useful to others attempting similar enterprises; the
value to us as an organization may be that the excavation of the historical rec-
ord will put us in touch with some of the old zcals which were present at birth
(and since routinized or blunted), while also enabling us to go forward on a
new footing.
Teachers & Writers Collaborative is. first of all, the original organization
to have sent poets, novelists, and other artists into the schools on a regular ba-
sis. It came out of a series of meetings in 1966-67 among writers whose awa-
kened social conscience about the plight of the schoolsparticularly ghetto
schools-- -compelled them to become involved and to take action in some way.
Because they were writers they addressed themselves initially to what they saw
as disastrous shortcomings in the English curriculum; but their concern for
language and the ways that schools traditionally choked off students' creative,
alive, use of language was only a metaphorical starting-point for larger con-
cerns about educational tracking and racial and social injustices that seemed to
be taking place in the schools. The writers (and later, the other artists') idea
was that by going into the schools, they could both lend support to the stu-
dents' "authentic" voices and cultures, while taking students further through
7
professional guidance in art-making activitiesat the same ti ne helping to
bring about a more enjoyable, unrepressed school environment.
The twistings and turnings of that idea through every conceivable barrier
and self-doubt, is one way of looking at the history of Teachers & Writers.
This book is also very much a document of the past decade, from the 1960's
into the 1970's, and the lives of a select and special group of people, some fa-
mous, some not. This isfor mea book about "activists," not Mark Rudd
type activists, nor Ralph Nader types, but people who wanted to do some-
thing andthough not without discomfitdid it. Are still doing it.
It has not been an easy road. Many of the founders of T&W, who were
present at the 1966 Huntting Writers' and Teachers' Conference, have ex-
pressed surprise bordering on incredulity that the group has lasted tcn years. It
was slated for an early death. There is even a hint of disappointment, an un-
derstandable apres moi le deluge sentiment on thc part of some pioneers, that
it did not go under or turn bad after they left. It continues to stumble on one
year at a time, renewing its shaky annual contracts on life. At some distant
turning-point in its past, Teachets & Writers, born in an all-or-nothing spirit,
began to cling to life, chose to survive. Not that that decision means that it
will survive. But what it does imply is that the organization has lived past its
wailing infancy and suicidal adolescence. It is even approaching a distinguish-
ed middle age, whcn the highs arc not so high, the lows not so low. Such is
the destiny, perhaps, of any idealistic agency which reaches a certain maturity.
In a sense, Teachers & Writers Collaborative is typical of thousands of
small, non-profit agencies for social change, many of which sprouted up in the
late '60s as an alternative response to the status quo in every field of delivery of
social services. There are very few satisfactory accounts of these cliff-hanging
agencies' careers, but we knot- that many did not make it into the 1970s. No
matter what energy and ideals informed their birth, all were soon up against
the dilemma of year-to-year grant funding. Foundations which had given out
original "seed money" expressed unwillingness to continue to carry the pro-
grams. The result was that agencies had to divert energy from crucial program
operations into grantsmanship and public relations; though often that did lit-
tle good.
In addition to funding worries, the frustration of being helpless to
change in any visible way the larger social service system, such as Welfare or
the Board of Education or the Bureau of Health, whose wrongs they had ori-
ginally formed to redress, marked a crisis of purpose in the lives of many of
these small aaivist agencies. Should thcy continue to try to survive, knowing
that their efforts would be as slow to alter the problems as the proverbial rain
beating on the mountain, or should they, taking the path always remarkably
open to radicals and reformersself-destruct? Choose an issue for a last con-
frontation, and go down in a martyr's blaze? Or should they simply disperse,
quietly, as many did, on the last day that the grant ran out, and pick up their
lives at some other point, working either for another alternative organization,
or finding securer positions in government or corporate life, or gravitating
toward less security, going "free-lance," making pottery for street fairs, join-
ing a communal farm?
All of these alternatives were part of the daily drama for people strug-
gling to make a go of such agencies. Above and beyond the question of whe-
8
9
ther the organization's program was effective, or actually doing anything, rose
the doubt in every worker's mind: would thc organization even be there to-
morrow? As Zelda Wirtshafter, the second director of Teachers & Writem
(during onc of its most beleaguered periods) put it eloquently:
At present all the programs can be much better than they have been, and much more ef-
fective, and yet we cannot even think of our future existence without anxiety. This seems
a foolish way to function. Thc writers and teachers most involved in our program just be-
gin to see ways in which the material and personnel of the Teachers & Writers Collabor-
ative can be used more effectively, yet can't act upon this insight because the specter of
non.existence continually hangs in thc air.
After ten years of this grim game of staring into financial non-existence,
Teachers & Writers has developed an ad hoc personality, flexible in respond-
ing to emergencies, while reluctant to engage in long-range planning. So it
became hard to put into words the pedagogic program of the organization in
terms of a set of clearly definable educational goals and objectives. The one
Teachers & Writers Collaborative goal that has remained consistent has been
to help release the creative capacities of children, adolescents and adults. The
Teachers & Writers operative, who is luxuriously free from the burdens
placed on the classroom teacher to bring each student up to a community-
accepted norm in math, reading and science, has another obligation placed
on him or her. It is the responsibility to detect the pre-artistic promise in a
person and bring that to full expression.
The record of pedagogic adventures in this book will, I hope, prove a rich
storehouse of ideas for teachers, parents, and volunteers eager to work in crea-
tive directions. More than just a set of teaching ideas, what is being presented
here is a special mode of work, and a patient, experimental attitude toward
work, which, when successful, can be deeply freeing and educational. It is this
ideal of good, freely-chosen work (however vague that sounds for the mo-
ment) which lies at the heart of the Collaborative's search, and which unifies
its members in a consistent belief-structure.
The idea behind the Collaborative has always been to place writers and
other artists in situations without telling them what to do, but letting them
find their own way, in the same manner that they would proceed into their
own art. The assumption has been that artists are more at home with initial
open-ended uncertainty, and with setting up problems and tasks for them-
selves, out of the freedom to do almost anything. The assurance that each ar-
tist can make his or her own program in the school (even abandoning one's
special skill and pursuing a different medium) has been a constant of Teachers
& Writers policywhich has had a bracing, giddy and sometimes anxious ef-
fect on its members.
Another emphasis that runs throughout the Collaborative's history has
been on continuing relationships between student and artist, with the under-
standing that the relationship itselfrather than a detachable set of lessons or
skillswill form the ground of the teaching. Jove Jordan worked with a
group of children on Saturdays, first in a community center, then at a church,
and at their schools, and finally helped set up a summer camp for them. Bill
Zavatsky stayed in ontact with his ex-poetry students after they graduated
from elementary school, and eventually gave a free workshop for them on
Saturdays in his apartment. Thc search on the part of the artist for other ways
of relating to children, more naturally, casually, equally, playfully, or more
9 1 0