Elbow

Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers offers a guide to establishing a "teacherless classroom" based on the idea that the best way to learn to write is to get feedback from a familiar and diverse group of people who have no stakes in the outcomes.

Elbow bases his model on his own experiences as a writer/student. teacher of writing, and member of a therapy group. His main contribution here is the notion of freewriting and the ways that the teacherless classroom can help overcome people's fears about writing. It's certainly a member of the "process movement," and many scholars have critiqued Elbow for his "expressivist" notions of writing. These "expressivist" notions of writing privilege a solitary author, writing in isolation (in fact, several scenes are presented where Elbow discusses his own --solitary -- struggles to write), and that truth emanates from the individual's experience. The main goal of expressive writing is to find your authentic voice, and transmit that voice onto paper, as accurately as you see it.

While there are a great deal of these elements in Elbow's book (seen even if you only counted the number of times "organic" emerges), I'd like to argue two things about it: 1) Even if it is expressivist, it doesn't mean it can't be critical; and furthermore, first-year students, especially, often need to hone their "voice" and reflect on their experiences, as their voice has been squashed; and 2) that Elbow's book isn't entirely based on this model. His emphasis on the communal, social nature of the teacherless class --where no one's status is more privileged than the other -- is crucial for learning to write. That is, you cannot just send signals in the dark. You need feedback from an array of individuals.

Another key component of Elbow's book is the appendix essay on the "believing game," which offers a new route to critical (academic) thinking by way of acceptance, believing, instead of "doubting." For Elbow, in order to see contradictions, fallacies, or problems, we should really listen to others' viewpoints -- believe them -- and then we can see where they're beneficial, and for whom. I've always loved this idea, and want to try it out.

Finally, the major draw of Elbow's book for me is its practicality. He focuses on the practice -- the work -- of writing, without glamorizing it at all. In addition, he links theory with practice by theorizing from practice, and then doing it-- in other words, there's little, if any, distinction between the two for him.

Elbow's book helped me to understand Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality and vice versa. I have found that I disagree with Berlin's reading of Elbow (and some other expressivists, since Berlin categorizes them without much explication of their differences). However, I have also come to see how Elbow's book is great on paper, but what do we do in institutional contexts where, all too often, there's neither time nor sanction for this kind of work? What do we do when there is, in fact, a teacher?