Can Care be Taught?

I’ve been thinking about a line from Peter Elbow’s article, “Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting.” Freewriting to get to the sense of what good writers do, he hits on the idea of double audience—that good writers write for themselves AND for an audience.  Musing on the differences between public and private writing, he writes, in the capital letters he uses when typing up an exciting idea, “SO HERE AGAIN, WE HAVE AN ANALYSIS OF COMPLEX BEHAVIOR, PERFORMANCE, SKILL: WHAT MAKES IT DIFFICULT AND COMPLEX AND SUBJECT TO ARGUMENT IS THAT IT CONSISTS OF ESSENTIAL PARADOX. A GOOD WRITER IS SOMEONE WHO IS MORE THAN USUALLY PRIVATE AND WRIITNG ONLY TO SELF YET AT THE SAME TIME MORE THAN USUALLY SHOWOFFY AND PUBLIC AND GRANDSTANDING AND SELFPANDERING” (50).

A few lines later we get the big reveal—a nugget that we know will become one of Elbow’s significant contributions to the field. “BUT REALLY WHAT LOOKS LIKE AN ANOMALY IS REALLY CHARACTERISTIC THE MAIN THING—RIGHT AT THE CENTER OF WRIITNG OR AT LEAST GOOD WRITING” (50).

One thing I love about this part of his essay is the sense of process Elbow conveys. He is making an argument that the best writers become that way by (guess what) writing. And by letting us see ideas developing in his own freewriting, he lets us witness this process happening for him. I also love that Elbow shows us freewriting where the ideas don’t happen; obviously not every 10-minute writing session is going to yield equally brilliant results!

We talked in class about some of our lofty goals in teaching, and the question was raised—can we teach students to care?  I think that depends on what we mean by teaching and learning. If caring is something that can only come from within a student, then a model of teaching that sees itself as imposing what we care about on our students and judging them on how much they seem to care about what we care about (or at least on how well they pretend to care) is doomed to failure.

What’s exciting about Elbow’s model of freewriting to me is how much care this very simple practice—this simple act of writing—seems to engender among its participants.   Elbow, in fact, talks about the students caring too much—so much that all they want to do is talk about their freewriting, even in situations where Elbow has other things planned for class.

So where does this leave us with regards to teaching literature? The closest parallel to Elbow’s model I can think of happens in elementary school classrooms when the teacher gives the class time to read whatever they choose. Simply reading, the theory goes, will make us better readers. But when we teach literature, we read texts in common—often texts that the teacher him or herself hasn’t chosen. And if we want students not just to read but to think, discuss, write, and even care, then we need to find processes, practices, acts that we can ask students to do—not to abdicate responsibility or to devalue content but in fact to engender the kind of care and investment in literature that we (at heart) want our students not just to exhibit, but to feel.