Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 1; January 2004

The Heart of the Matter What Constitutes Common Knowledge? Or: Using Blackbirds in a writing class!

Lou Spaventa, California, US

“When nothing is for sure, we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we knew everything”

Carlos Castaneda

What knowledge can we assume that we have in common? Paradoxically, as the world of electronically stored and transmitted knowledge becomes a global world thanks to the speed and ubiquitousness of the Internet, satellite television broadcasting, and cell phones, the knowledge that humankind holds in common seems, to me, to be decreasing. What proof do I have of this and what consequence does this notion have for teaching? My first-hand experience of teaching a culturally and educationally diverse classroom of students semester upon semester constitutes my proof. If you think historically, the group of people to be educated was always a restricted one, namely the male property-owning or power-holding class in a given society. The curriculum which they studied was always limited in some severe way: the classics in ancient China, Greek and Latin in English public schools, old and new world male authors in U.S. university literature courses. Happily, but with less certainty about our practice in the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, we have moved from educating small groups of students with similar backgrounds to large groups of people with dissimilar backgrounds. The common knowledge that we could once assume shared by children or adults entering schools is no longer apparent. This presents an interesting problem for a teacher of writing like me who works from the premise that one must know something about the subject about which one is writing. I cannot assume this is true for my students; therefore, I need another method for helping them to improve their writing. My students must write in order to learn, and then read what they and others have written in order to write more and write better each time. Common knowledge becomes the knowledge that is generated by the iterative cycle of reading, discussion and writing within the classroom community.

To illustrate this, I will describe a training session with a group of community college instructors that I conducted about a month ago. The instructors were themselves a diverse group in gender, age, ethnicity and teaching experience. There were writing instructors, a theater instructor, two instructors in culinary arts, a business law instructor, two ESL instructors, and a chemistry instructor, among others. In planning for this workshop, which was on the subject of teaching students to write, I thought a lot about what knowledge I could assume we held in common. My conclusion was that I needed to choose a non-academic topic for writing which was at once common yet strange to all of us. By this I meant I would choose a subject that everyone had passing knowledge of, but few were likely to know well at all. So I chose to center the lesson around blackbirds. I don't know why blackbirds came into my head, probably because I had intended to use Wallace Stevens' poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” at an early point in the semester, but never did, so I had multiple copies of that poem sitting in a folder in a desk drawer. My thought at the time I had wanted to use the poem was that it was at once simple yet enigmatic. It allowed a way in for all my students, but would not bestow overconfidence of interpretation on any of them. This would have helped my second language students gain classroom confidence and find their voices. At any rate, I did not use the poem with my students, but did use it with the group of instructors in the workshop.

I did two simple activities to bring the individuals together – first, I had them create a first name crossword on the white board (See Frank and Rinvolucri, Grammar in Action), and second, I had them do a silent note-passing activity (See Spaventa and Spaventa, Writing to Learn: From Paragraph to Essay). Then, I told the group that we would be reading, writing and talking about blackbirds. I instructed them to take out a blank sheet of paper and make a drawing of a blackbird. Next I asked them to write about blackbirds on that same paper for about five minutes. They then posted their papers around the room so that others could see their work and read what they had written. I asked them to talk to each other in small groups about what they had seen and what they thought. After the discussion, I had them brainstorm on the white board as a class. The associations that came out ranged from “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” to racism, and the Beatles' song “Blackbird.”

My next move in constructing common knowledge about blackbirds was to give each student a picture and a description of a blackbird. The picture was a scale drawing against which individuals could compare their own drawing. The description gave them knowledge in a few simple paragraphs of English blackbirds: their range, eating habits, mating habits, and predators. By this time, each individual had learned something new about blackbirds, including importantly, what they looked like. They now had factual knowledge of blackbirds, and a sense of some of the associations, through the collective brainstorming activity, that the bird held for people in this workshop seminar.

I was ready to move to a more abstract level. I handed out a poem by Charles Bukowski, “The Blackbirds Are Rough Today.” The phrase “the blackbirds are rough today” has an emotional and symbolic meaning rather than a literal meaning, yet the poem is full of concrete images: “a dry and used orchard,” “an ex-pug selling dailies on a corner,” “an aging chorus girl who has gotten her last check.” The initial mood of the poem is one of decay and of life spent. The next part of the poem critically addresses a certain kind of self-confident American male. The poem ends with the cryptic lines

“don't be ashamed of
anything. I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.”

Again, the individuals worked in groups, first writing about and then discussing the poem and their interpretations of it. My directions to them were simply to make sense of the blackbirds. Why were they in the poem? By focusing on what we knew – blackbirds – we naturally moved into interpretation. It's easier to talk about something that is known, even if it is in a new context, than it is to discuss something that is brand new. That was my thinking in assigning the poem to the group of instructors.

After spending a good amount of time allowing individuals to interpret the Bukowski poem while I listened, I handed out the Stevens' poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The poem begins:

“Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.”

There are thirteen irregular stanzas in the poem, each one containing the word “blackbird.” Stevens' poem does not yield its meaning very easily, at least it is more difficult to make sense of than Bukowski's poem, and so the level of knowledge needed to say something about the blackbirds in the poem increases.

The participants in the seminar were not daunted by the task. They dove right into the Stevens' poem and began to tease out meaning for themselves. They did this by talking in groups, and then offering ideas and insights into particular lines and stanzas. As each group and person contributed, one could notice attention being paid. People were listening to each other. They were also constructing knowledge which would become common to their classroom community.

What more could I do with blackbirds at this point? I gave the class a reading of Helen Vendler's critical interpretation of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I mentioned to them that in Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, critical judgment occupies the highest rung (though I realize that many have claimed the hierarchy works at many and/or all levels simultaneously). Now the class was faced with a confident interpretation and could again measure themselves against some standard. They were also free to reject that standard. It is interesting to notice here that at a concrete level one would rarely reject an authoritative rendering, for example, a picture of a blackbird, but at a judgmental level, one is often free, and indeed sometimes expected, to reject authoritative rendering such as one critic's interpretation and appraisal of a poem.

Now within a two hour period I had worked with a group of instructors from a near zero level to an increasingly sophisticated level with the concept of “blackbird.” We did not get to our final writing assignment for the day, which was to do a group poem ala Maley and Duff (The Inner Ear) on blackbirds. But since this was a training session on how to introduce, create, and circulate common knowledge for writing, the actual assignment was not compelling. I was not going to work with their writing afterwards.

In this particular instance, I think I was successful in introducing a concrete idea, the idea of a blackbird, and multiplying it into a fairly complex set of ideas which were essentially constructed by a classroom community with guidance from their instructor. My work was largely done in planning what materials to give to students at what time in the process of knowledge construction. Once I did that, the students did most of the classroom work. This is the way I work in teaching writing and this is my answer to the question of how to assure both instructor and students that they share common knowledge.

References

Anderson, Lorin W., David R. Krathwohl , Peter W. Airasian, Kathleen A. Cruikshank, Richard E. Mayer, Paul R. Pintrich, James Raths, and Merlin C. Wittrock (2000). Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Allyn and Bacon.

Bukowksi, Charles. “The Blackbirds are RoughToday.” http://www.litkicks.com/Buk/birds.html

Frank, Christine and Mario Rinvolucri (1983). Grammar in Action, Alemany Press.

Maley, Alan and Alan Duff (1990). The Inward Ear: Poetry in the Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press.

Spaventa, Lou and Marilynn Spaventa (2000) Writing to Learn: From Paragraph to Essay, McGraw-Hill.

Stevens, Wallace. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-13ways.html