When Filling Pails and Lighting Fires Don’t Cut It
I discovered that I had a green thumb right around the time I discovered my passion for reading, analyzing, and discussing literature. Maybe it shouldn’t have taken me by surprise—my sister and I did craft a little garden plot behind the house when we were kids, planting the sunflower seeds we were given when we registered for kindergarten, and when I did start growing cucumbers and tomatoes of my own, I was delighted to discover that the plants looked quite like the pixelated produce I had cultivated in my favorite video games (Harvest Moon, anyone?). During my junior year, the same year that I began annotating and highlighting books with reckless abandon, I volunteered with the high school’s garden club—soon I found myself checking the greenhouse and watering seed starts after school, helping primary schoolers build their own garden beds, and planting peppers and radishes in my own backyard.
Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be a surprise that gardens sprang to mind on the ride home from the East Central Writing Centers Association conference. I pulled out my notebook and began jotting down a sudden thought that captured the “funds of knowledge” approach to writing center work that our MU Writing Center Director, Mark Latta, had suggested in his presentation. He had shaken up the audience by declaring that writing centers should shake off their attachment to the slogan, “Our job is to make better writers, not better papers.” The slogan relies upon deficit thinking, which frames our interactions in the writing center as those of deficient, or flawed, writers coming to us to impart our knowledge and “make” them better writers. It was troubling that the audience defended the slogan by calling attention to the way higher education as a whole operates in this manner. Paul Freire captures this approach to education with the concept of a banking system, in which teachers have and impart knowledge to students who deposit it in their minds without learning to think critically about that knowledge or use it. What happened to education not being the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire? And, as I reflected on that quote turned adage, I had the scandalous realization that even lighting a fire requires a missing spark.
But, to return to the stunned audience in Session 4A of ECWCA 2016, there was so much friction over deficit thinking that the alternative, funds of knowledge, was never really discussed. As for myself, I had jotted down, on the heels of our director’s presentation, a quick chart attempting to capture something of it. On one side of the page, I wrote, “unique voice and perspective.” No one can write the paper which that particular student is going to write, even if everyone received the same prompt. On the other side of the page, I wrote, “knowledge of institutional expectations.” Tutors, as experienced academic writers, bring an understanding of how to effectively present information to different audiences. Drawing lines from each side, I scribbled “unique + effective communication” in the center of the page and circled it.
Though the presenter immediately following our director mentioned that she would push back a bit on the criticism of the slogan, when she asked audience members to recall a particularly rewarding tutoring experience, one of the tutors in the crowd said something that caught my attention. As she recalled her tutoring session, she mentioned how she told the writer, “You’re the teacher here; I’m the student!” Exactly! Beneath my rough chart of what student writers and tutors bring to the table, I wrote and circled “teacher/learner roles shared here.” During Q&A section of the session, I tried to express my thoughts in my notebook once again: we all have deficiencies, but we also all have assets, and that is what is interesting—how our assets combine, not how our assets address student writers’ deficiencies.
Okay—here’s the part where I warn you that there’s an extended metaphor on the horizon. After dessert that night, the keynote speaker discussed learning ecologies. This concept poses that a writer does not write something in a vacuum—there is an environment around them that affects the writer and their writing. The conversation that the writer hears on the street, the writer’s relationships with family, friends, or coworkers, the stories which people share with the writer all, in part, contribute to the writing. The keynote speaker even brought up a textbook image of an ecosystem.
Let’s run with that. Let’s imagine all of us writers, tutors and students, as gardeners in a big community plot, and let’s think of all of our projects as our garden beds and plants. Tutors have a green thumb, and we’re veterans of a few more seasons than many of the students who come to see us. We know a little something about how to make plants grow well in our regions—our academic disciplines. We can offer advice on amounts of water and sun, on spacing between seeds, on what plants grow best together—what kind of language and citation to use, how to organize a paper for a stronger impact. If a gardener is struggling with a plant, we can recommend fertilizers—to spur a student’s thinking, we might ask them to think out loud, to dig deeper into their sources, to shed a little more light on an undeveloped idea. We do not pretend to hold all of the answers—we do not deposit gardening kits into the hands of new gardeners, as students in Freire’s banking system are handed knowledge to deposit in their minds unquestioned. In that case, we would see them struggling over their failing crops with limited directions, trying to make the plants adjust to the system rather than questioning the system. Sometimes, the gardeners who come to us might know more about their specific plants than we do—maybe we are unfamiliar with the discipline’s expectations for this kind of paper, maybe we are totally unfamiliar with the course material, but the student can teach us something as we provide our own insights. This collaboration, this hybridization, makes our gardens and our plants more flavorful, more colorful, and more resilient.
What our student gardeners have in their garden is unique to them, based on where they came from, their traditions, and their personal preference. My garden, with plenty of hot peppers and cucumbers for pickling, might look very different from another’s, with plenty of tomatoes, with experimental varieties, with herbs and spices from another part of the world that I have never visited. Our director mentioned that deficit thinking could even be colonial—we don’t want to see our class discussions, our essays, and our educations become like a crop monoculture. Mass produced thoughts that are accepted without discussion or question, much like mass produced crops that are picked and packaged before they are truly mature, make for a bland intellectual environment. As in nature, in the writing center and in our academic pursuits, we are stronger for diverse diets. Our community garden flourishes when we realize that we are better for all of the different experiences and insights, all of the funds of knowledge, we each bring to it. We are all growing, cultivating our gardens with a little help from our friends.
--C.C.
*I would also like to thank K.C. for her recommended reading on the “banking system” in education and for sharing even more insightful ways to compare tutoring with gardening!