Bill+Tucker

=== I am working on a blog that touts the kinds of personal and expressive writing overlooked by the Common Core. I hope to show that the most meaningful writing we do leads us to meaningful academic writing, and the two are not independent of each other. ===

= The Core and the Spring = The "Core" is the wrong metaphor for the "Common Core State Standards." The "core" is usually the heart of a domain of learning, whereas these standards are the outgrowth from the core of writing, which begins and develops from within. The actual "core" of writing is the heartfelt subjects and genres that motivate us to write with passion and sincerity--subjects that move us to write our best. At the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, we have sampled the Core dutifully, holding workshops for the past six months demonstrating what we know about teaching writing from the newest Standards. We have taught the “text types,” the “research to build and present knowledge,” and even the “production and distribution of writing,” which is Corespeak for the writing process. And we have supported the claim that “. . . a key purpose of writing is to communicate clearly to an external, sometimes unfamiliar audience. . .” As inevitable as these goals may be, they represent a commericial model of writing, writing to harvest and distribute something, writing to the remote and disinterested, writing the “text types.” The heartfelt motives, the “transformative” purposes, the self-actualizing goals for writing have been pushed aside as we focus on writing as a commodity, something to be employed in the selling of products and policies.

Writing from the heart rises from a deeper spring in the Summer Invitational Institute, four weeks where teachers write about what matters most to them, while demonstrating their best practices in the teaching of writing. We write for academic and personal reasons, but the text that we preserve at the end, published in our institute anthology, arises from deeper purposes than “production and distribution.”

“Hallelujah I have a teenager, and I mean it,” (Chichester), one teacher wrote about her son in college. “The reins, no longer needed, have been dropped, and I watch as you begin to travel into the directions of your own choosing” (Gronvall), wrote another about her daughter going away to school “I learned that if I am going to be a better writing teacher, I had better take a lesson from my students about honesty” (Shively) wrote another in a teaching memoir. “Someday I hope to pass a book of poems along to some young person who has been mugged by their school so that they too can breathe poetry again and feel the electric magic that can fill the air when words have power. (De Young Kander) wrote another teacher, reflecting on her own transformation as a reader.

These excerpts show what we write about when we write what matters. Most of us did not expect to publish and collect royalties for our writing, although one of us remarkably did just that. We did not write to get work done. We simply found the subjects that stirred our souls and went with them. Or as another teacher wrote, If my pen could talk what would it chatter? It would organize good and bad to weigh what matters (Korinek) We have a need to write about our consuming passions, even when they don’t correspond to the academic goals in our lives. And this writing is the payload that drives all other writing. It makes us feel that writing matters; it is more than a consumable product. It is not self-indulgent, but transformative, the urgent expression that springs from deeper sources than our task-driven writing. As Yagelski says, “. . .writing is fundamentally an act of living more deeply, more intensely; it is a process by which we become more ‘fully human,’ as Freire puts it” (190). The paradox of our writing lives is that we need to write from the heart to get ready to write for academic and commercial purposes. At a recent workshop on writing in the content areas, science and math and social studies teachers were initially asked to describe a recent memorable experience of writing. As they voluntarily shared their prose, they told stories of the birth of their children, of an important relative in their family, of an early experience of prejudice. Some were visibly moved as they shared the results of fifteen minutes of writing. The readings instantly bonded the forty teachers in the room, because the stories were passionate and identifiable. And yet the writing did not seem to reflect the goals of the workshop: to employ writing for disciplinary goals. But it was a three-day workshop and the participants were soon to find how writing from the heart would feed writing in the disciplines. The first writing episode had established the writer’s identity for teachers who did not necessarily teach writing for a living. It demonstrated how writing that transformed the heart could potentially transform the mind. Whatever the Common Core Standards say about writing for academic purposes, it cannot short circuit the need to write for personal goals. Without that deep-seeded connection, writing in school is only an exercise, a kind of posturing disconnected from our real motives and passions. Another of the summer institute teachers wrote,(initially quoting Donald Murray):

**Writing is autobiography—it comes out of the life you have lived and are living. It doesn’t matter that you aren’t writing specifically about yourself at all—just the fact that you’re writing is enough for readers to read about you, even though they may be reading about anything else you might happen to be writing about in any genre.** (Guillean) So we begin to write as autobiographers and that identity pervades all the writing of our lives, regardless of whether we are lawyers, landscapers, fashion designers or teachers. Our writing comes from our inner springs, even when our work becomes specialized and less personal. Or as another teacher wrote: ". . . no matter how we write it, we all want to be heard because we all have a story to tell." (Shively)

**Bill Tucker**

Authors of the Summer Institute 2011. //Road Maps: License to Write.// **Yagelski, Robert.** "Writing as Praxis," English Education, January 2012.