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reinventing curriculum

a complex perspective
on literacy and writing
This page intentionally left blank
 reinventing curriculum

a complex perspective
on literacy and writing

Linda Laidlaw
University of Alberta

LEA LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS

2005 Mahwah, New Jersey London
 The camera-ready copy for the text of this book was provided by the author.

Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microfilm, retrieval system, or any other
means, without prior written permission of the publisher.

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, Publishers

10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, NJ 07430

Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey.

Cover image by Michael Emme.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Laidlaw, Linda
Reinventing curriculum : a complex perspective on literacy and writing / Linda Laidlaw.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-5042-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8058-5043-0 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Language arts (Elementary) 2. English language—Composition and exercises—Study
and teaching (Elementary) I. Title.

LB1576.L243 2005
372.6—dc22
2004061423

Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper,

and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability.

Printed in the United States of America

1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
to my parents and mentors
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xxi

Chapter 1. Terra Incognita: 1

Unmapping Literacy Curriculum

Chapter 2. New Maps: 23

Complexity, Learning and Writing

Chapter 3. Rereading Maps of Literacy and Language: 59

A Tangled History

Chapter 4. Entering the Woods: 93

Writing, Interpretation, Identity

Chapter 5. Uncovering the Bones of a Complex 123

Pedagogy for Writing and Literacy
Afterword 163

Endnotes 167
References 193
Index 206

vii
This page intentionally left blank
The closest we come to knowng the location of what's unknown
is when it melts through the map like a watermark,
a stain transparent as a drop of rain.

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

This page intentionally left blank
preface

xi
This page intentionally left blank
 Preface

"One time," they write, "There was a little girl . . . ," or, "Once
there was a boy who . . . ," and so begin the stories which travel
into the realm of the imaginary. It always interests the teacher, the
capacity young children have for creating fictional worlds and ex-
periences through their stories or writing. There is a power in these
narratives—the children invent new possibilities, other selves, at
the same time that these stories tell tales of the children who have
invented them. To enter into such stories, the teacher discovers, is
to arrive into a new sort of place. . . .

+++

Like many of the children I taught in my days as a primary teacher,

I too have been drawn into imaginary spaces made alive within a
text, other realms of the less familiar which invited exploration
through reading and writing. Places of fiction, imagination, inquiry,
and interpretation evoke an interesting kind of travel by text. Cana-
dian fiction writer, Jane Urquhart, in the preface to her collection of
short stories Storm Glass, suggests that writing fiction provides "the
most satisfying form of armchair travel,"1 where one is able to leap
across time, geographies, and identities. Through such writing, ac-
cording to Urquhart, it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of
one's own homelands, and become further acquainted with differ-
ent versions of one's identity.
Sometimes, however, in school settings it can be difficult to cre-
ate or support the sorts of spaces and practices required for genera-
tive, interpretive work in writing and reading. Over the past few years,
my wonderings about the difficulties of engaging in interpretive
writing in schools, combined with observations of my own and my
students' experiences, has led me to investigate the nature of writing
and literacy and to consider what happens when children begin to
write. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in children's
development and success in literacy, particularly within political and
educational arenas. Numerous books and resources addressing the
subject of literacy acquisition have emerged, analyzing topics such
as how children develop literacy skills and how these may be as-
sessed, methods for teaching phonemic awareness and other decod-
ing processes, and the influence of children's social and cultural ex-

xiii
Reinventing Curriculum

periences, to list a few examples from diverse areas of research. These

resources play important roles in increasing understanding and knowl-
edge of how children become literate.
I have also been interested in attempting to understand how
children's literacy learning and writing experiences are embedded in
larger contexts, histories, and relations, and what these might signify
for learners and teachers. Relatively few resources examine children's
literacy from the perspective of writing; the majority of texts and
materials in the area of early literacy emphasize children's reading
development. This book attempts to address this gap, by examining
children's writing and its relation to the historical development of
alphabetic literacy, as well as other contexts in which literacy is inter-
twined. My argument, throughout this text, is that the writing devel-
opment and literacy of young children must not be disconnected or
compartmentalized from the larger literate world, and that, in fact,
knowledge about the history of literacy has a significant contribu-
tion to make in understanding how young children invent again, the
ability to write and to read, and the ability to create meaning from
literacy experiences. This book suggests that writing, as a learned
technology embedded in a living system of interactions, has the ca-
pacity for transforming and translating thought, language, relations
and subjectivities.
This book also proposes that, though writing tends to be con-
ceptualized as being primarily an individual matter within settings
of schooling, when writing is understood as a collective and trans-
formative representation system, pedagogy can provide alternative
structures and possibilities for 'knowing' and 'being' in the class-
room. Recent developments in the complexity sciences, a growing
field of inquiry developing across diverse domains, offer a number
of ways to reconsider how literacy pedagogy might be described
and organized. Current work in complexity science is concerned with
adaptive systems, also known as learning systems or self-organizing
systems. Such systems (including those found in classrooms and
schools) are difficult to explain using reductive methods of tradi-
tional science. What complexity science offers to the study of com-
plex organisms (such as learners, collective groups of children, or

xiv
schools) is a focus on the patterns and dynamic relationships across
such phenomena. Mathematicians, biologists, social scientists, and
theorists in the humanities have taken up frames and concepts from
complexity science to study phenomena in their own fields. Increas-
ingly, educators are using complexity science to understand and ana-
lyze their experiences of teaching, learning, and schooling.2 This book
examines some of the contributions complexity science can offer to
literacy teaching and learning.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

As I began working on this book, I puzzled over how to best repre-

sent the complexity of engagements with literacy and how to weave
together the various threads I wanted to include in this text. I wanted
to provide descriptions of teaching and learning; histories and re-
search on writing and literacy; narratives of teaching, learning, and
writing; and some suggestions for practice. However, one of the
inherent difficulties with print texts is their linear physical structure.
"When you write, you lay out a line of words," as writer Annie Dillard
describes.3 Most of the time, the external shape of books and the
blocks of text within them are linear and square, though the ideas or
stories that are revealed are not necessarily so. Within literary writ-
ing, forms such as poetry, fiction, and picture books invite a more
recursive reading experience, where metaphor and imagery may cap-
ture interconnected layers of meaning. Interpretations and experi-
ences of such texts are fluid, evolving over time and repeated read-
ing. Ideas from one text may 'speak' to another. In this book I have
attempted to use forms that encourage intertextuality.
Many of the ideas addressed here represent structures that are
different from the geometries of lines and squares. Instead, they are
reflected in the structures of a spider's web, the fronds of a fern, or
the patterns of branches entangled with branches. In writing a text
aimed at university audiences, I am aware of general expectations
for texts to follow a fairly predictable chronology. However, I also
want to invite a nonlinear reading (and writing) experience in this
text and have attempted to make this book illustrate, in a concrete
way, the ideas explored within.

XV
Reinventing Curriculum

I use a number of strategies to aim for a more complex and

recursive structure. Two types of inset boxes are developed as
'subtexts' that can be read alongside or separately from the main
text. The insets labeled Writing Practice are intended to be read as
both writing practice and Writing practice (as a noun phrase or 'object'
and a verb phrase or 'action'). These are narrative and autobiographi-
cal accounts of literacy teaching and learning and provide examples
and descriptions from classroom life. The second category of in-
sets, Extending Ideas, highlight or elaborate ideas presented in the text,
offering additional links to history, theory, or further detail.
In a book about children and writing it is important that chil-
dren and their teachers exist somewhere within the text. Initially I
struggled with how to honor and highlight children's and teachers'
complex experiences of literacy within the main body of the book.
The description of primary writing at the beginning of the Preface
provides an example of the form I have chosen to use. Though the
examples I present are fictionalized, they are based on actual experi-
ences and classroom observations I experienced either directly, or
through anecdotes shared by other teachers.
I label such excerpts narrative tableaux (or simply tableaux). A tab-
leau is a structure commonly used within theatre and drama educa-
tion and describes a sort of 'frozen statue' created by the bodies of
a group of participants for the purpose of being viewed by an audi-
ence. The technique of tableau is also known as still picture or freeze
frame. The structure of a tableau presents a contained yet complex
image that can be viewed and interpreted in multiple ways. Viewers
can move around a tableau and observe it from different angles or
perspectives and when several tableaux are presented at the same
time they can be interpreted in relation to one another, layered to
provide additional perspectives and interconnections. This form, in
both writing and in drama, presents multiple possibilities for pre-
sentation and interpretation. In some instances, I directly discuss
the example presented in the tableau, while in others, I provide a
tableau for the reader's interpretation, as a way of re-symbolizing
ideas addressed in the section or chapter. My use of epigraphs and
quotations at the beginning of sections or chapters, is also intended

xvi
 Preface

to function as offering literary or nonfiction tableau representations,

intended to be read against the other layers of text. The tableaux are
intended to offer the reader an opportunity to experience the larger
text as one that invites multiple engagements, and where her or his
own interpretations can develop alongside the explicit interpreta-
tions I present.
Because this is a book about writing, it was important for me to
be consistent, in my own writing processes, with the practices I am
presenting. One important tool and method has been my use of the
commonplace book for gathering research, collecting stories, and devel-
oping interpretations.4 The commonplace book, a structure described
in more detail in chapter 5, is an unusual, multilayered and evolving
text. The commonplace book I used to develop this book was some-
thing like an expanded journal; it included my thoughts and inter-
pretations, research notes, and descriptions of anecdotes that were
interconnected with my inquiries. I gathered and juxtaposed texts,
artifacts, and interpretations, and responded over time with further
interpretations, narratives, and notes on the readings and rereadings
of the evolving texts of this work. I have used this gathered and
interconnected collection as the 'backbone' of my text, although
part of the process of making a commonplace text into a book has
also meant discarding and adding details when necessary.
It has been interesting to notice how this commonplace text has
changed over time, growing with added reflections and interpreta-
tions of texts, responses to fictions, journal entries, historical docu-
ments of teaching and learning, and descriptions of conversations
and activities. Readers of earlier manuscript drafts have added fur-
ther layers to my commonplace text; their responses, although not
included in their original forms, have also influenced the final ver-
sion of the book. However, if this text is to be a true commonplace
book, my readers will complete the process—responding to it with
their own interpretations and 'liner notes' or other methods for
making it their own.
I provide a brief synopsis for those who prefer to know where
this "line of words" will lead, before entering the path. Chapter 1
examines the relation between literacy instruction and curriculum

xvii
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