So we begin by immersing ourselves in the text. It doesn’t always
pay at first to know too much about the child who wrote it or the
circumstances of its composition. As Geoff Keith said in our class
the other day, the trouble with concentrating on the child rather
than the story is that “it allows you to marginalize the text.”...
All the time we’re trying to concentrate our whole attention on
the significance of the words on the page. (p. 3)
One of the central goals of this protocol is to encourage direct engage-
ment between teachers and student texts with little context about the child
or the assignment. As one of the Gloucester teachers said, we were focus-
ing on “the actual writing itself.” Of course, much of this contextual infor-
mation is revealed in the course of the conference, but the initial reading
and discussion are conducted in as decontextualized a fashion as possible.
In general, everyone knows the presenting teacher and what grade she
teaches, so there are strong clues about the context of the work that can-
not be hidden.
In every one of these workshops, the challenge of looking at children’s
work in this decontextualized manner was considered confusing, diffi-
cult, and frustrating. Liz questioned this practice a number of times. In the
third session, she declared, “I find so much energy goes to figuring out
who the child is, and that feels very artificial. I mean, when do we ever
read work without knowing who the child is?”
On this occasion, I responded, “Well, certainly, in your classroom, you
always know who the child is. So why do I do that?” But then, instead of
offering a direct answer, I asked another question: “Is there anything gained
in not knowingthe identity of the child when you first encounter the work?”
A bit later, Liz came back to this issue: “To me the essence of writing
is to make an ‘I am’ statement. The person—and this came up last week—
the person’s voice and the energy in the writing are an ‘I am’ statement.
And that’s part of why some kids have trouble with writing, and then to
totally deny the identity of the person... .”
This criticism seemed to me a rather harsh description of the proto-
col. I responded, “Well, the question, Liz, is that if the child is really pres-
ent in the work, are we really denying them or are we just looking for
them in a particular way within the work?”
Wonder ing to Be Done 249