A Place to Stand: Essays for Educators in Troubled Times
by Mark Clarke

About the Author

Autobiography: Mark A. Clarke

Welcome to the UMP Book Club. I hope you enjoy the books and I look forward to responding to your queries and comments.

In an increasingly hectic world book clubs provide a safe haven for friends to gather and discuss whatever is on their minds. This web version stretches the conventional version of the club somewhat, but I hope that the effect is the same—a place for you to come to work through important ideas and resolve problems that you have been working on. The essential ingredient is a healthy relationship with other participants, which requires that you know something about them. Here is some information about me to get us started.

Who am I and how did I get here?

I grew up in rural and suburban Colorado, spending a significant amount of time on my grandparent's farm near Paonia learning how to irrigate the "north forty" and in the mountain streams around Gunnison amusing trout with my attempts at fly fishing. I attribute my scholarly inclinations to my grandfather—an orphan and hardscrabble, independent, transplanted Missouri farmer who combined tenacious pragmatism with a philosophical demeanor. He acted as if the neighbors were put on earth to provide insight and amusement. From him I developed a sympathetic stance toward human foible, and curiosity about people in general. "There's no accounting for folk," he would say, as he mused on some recent event in town. I now think of this as my first exposure to tolerance for diversity.

My father died when I was in high school, and my mother continued my grandfather's tutelage in gritty no-nonsense approach to life. She started in on her 9th decade last December and she has declared that we will no longer celebrate her birthday. We'll see.

I met Patricia Barr in Costa Rica, where we were both doing a junior year abroad, she from Kansas University and I from Colorado University and we were married the following year. I have been teaching since the fall of 1969, the year that we bundled our three-month-old daughter, Amy, into a blanket and, much to the consternation of her grandparents, headed to the American University in Cairo, Egypt. There, we taught English and earned our M.A.'s in TEFL—teaching English as a Foreign Language. We moved on to the Arabian American Oil Company two years later, after deciding that positions in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and Papua, New Guinea, could not compete with the financial advantages of Saudi Arabia. We would have preferred Colombia, because we were anxious to return to a Spanish speaking country. And our curiosity was piqued by the letter we received from the college in New Guinea assuring us that cannibalism was on the decline there. But by 1971 our second daughter, Julia, had arrived, and we decided that we needed to begin behaving like parents, rather than globetrotting vagabonds, which had been an early goal of our relationship. So we spent two years in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, on the coast of the Persian Gulf. Our son, Ben, was born there, and we have many pleasant memories of the sheltered life of compound living, but after two years we decided to return to the States so that I could pursue my PhD at the University of Michigan.

An important reason for choosing the U of M was the fact that Mary Lawrence was teaching at the English Language Institute and I wanted to work with her. I had been teaching writing and her book, Writing as a Thinking Process, had been an inspiration for me. Unfortunately for me, she was leaving the ELI to work on her law degree just as I was arriving. My interest in literacy shifted slightly from writing to reading as I hooked up with a group of graduate students working on materials for teaching reading and as I pursued bilingual reading in my dissertation work. The collaboration on reading materials has continued un-abated; Sandra Silberstein, now at the University of Washington, and Barbara K. Dobson, who works in the testing division of the English Language Institute, U of M, and I just published the fourth edition of Reader's Choice, and we completed Choice Readings in 1996 (Clarke, 1996; Silberstein, Dobson, & Clarke, 2002).

In the past of all teachers lurk formative experiences as learners. As a ninth grader in first year Spanish at Euclid Jr. High in Littleton, Colorado, I found I had a facility for language learning. I enjoyed the drills and dialogues orchestrated by Senor Benevidez, and the class was certainly different from anything I expected. It was conducted entirely in Spanish; we memorized mountains of dialogues, and we were expected to discern grammatical and lexical meaning without the benefit of English explanations—without even a textbook. In fact, we saw no written Spanish at all until half way through the year. It was not until I got to high school that I was confronted with the request by a teacher to "conjugate the verb estar." I was struck dumb; I had never heard the word "conjugate," nor was I prepared for instruction, conducted principally in English, on Spanish grammar. I did not enjoy these classes much, and it is probably instructive that I cannot remember the teacher's name, but I did learn how to analyze the parts of sentence. Later in the year the grammar teacher retired, and the ebullient Senorita Burrow crashed into our lives with infectious enthusiasm and communicative language learning activities. She did not use drills or require us to memorize dialogues, and the classroom was the scene of riotous conversation and improvisation, where we students did most of the talking. In subsequent years at the University of Colorado, I had a wide range of Spanish teachers, each of whom approached teaching in different ways.

These experiences as a language learner later proved to be instructive. I was not particularly reflective about the teaching I experienced as a schoolboy, but like all learners I had definite preferences for particular teachers, activities, and materials. Without knowing it, I had developed an awareness of differing approaches to language teaching. In my studies at the University of Colorado, the American University in Cairo, and the University of Michigan, I learned that those three teachers—Senor Benevidez, Senora Anonima, Senorita Burrow—were representatives of the "audiolingual method", "grammar translation" and "communicative competence" paradigms, respectively. Thus began my attempts to understand language teaching and learning.

Early on, my focus was narrowly instructional; I was searching for teaching methods that would motivate students and provide effective mechanisms for mastering content and skills. It took me many years to realize that classrooms are situated in complex relationships with schools, community, and culture, and that any attempt to understand teaching and learning that does not include these will surely fail. I found the work of several social scientists helpful as I sought to forge connections between the classroom and "the world out there" but it was Gregory Bateson, with his analysis of systems and system change, who provided me with the theoretical perspective of human interaction and learning that frames all of my work (Bateson, 2000). Pete Becker, a friend of Bateson's and a professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, was the person who suggested I read Steps to an Ecology of Mind not long after it came out in 1972.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind struck a chord with me. In subsequent years I read Bateson's other books and works by anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, and others who grappled with his ideas, but it is this book that has been my touchstone. The book caused a ripple of excitement on college campuses across the nation when it came out, and it occasioned intense conversations in the cubicles at the English Language Institute, University of Michigan, where I hung out as a doctoral student. I remember Michelle, a friend and fellow TA, confessing to confusion concerning the little yellow paperback—it seemed to her to be an odd collection of writings that circled topics but never quite addressed them. Indeed, the first seven entries are reports of conversations between a man and his daughter—Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson, perhaps 88 with intriguing titles such as, "Why do things get in a muddle?" and "Why do Frenchmen?" They are written in such a way that the content and the form of the dialogue reflect the problem being explored; in other words, they are examples of themselves, which accounts for the reason Bateson named them "metalogues." Michelle found them entertaining, but she was disappointed when she failed to discover some explanation for them—what did they mean? Ah, but Bateson doesn't explain; he merely elaborates, and each elaboration moves the topic forward somewhat, but for every riddle solved, another is introduced to take its place.

Bateson characterized the book as a collection of the most important pieces he had written up to that point in his life, with the exception of items too long to be included or too trivial and ephemeral to merit attention. The pieces cover four broad areas—anthropology, psychiatry, biological evolution and genetics, and the new epistemology which comes out of systems theory and ecology. The essays are pleasingly redundant and overlapping. Key concepts—form and content, context, pattern, information—recur in ways that cause you to adjust conclusions that you had thought comfortably concluded.

Over the years, as I moved in and out of different countries and classrooms, as I adjusted my focus to include teaching teachers as well as teaching language learners, and as I attempted to see the patterns that connect border wars with report cards, I gradually moved systems theory, as developed by Bateson, to the center of my vision. The result, that I should probably have foreseen, but which came as a bit of a surprise, has been that my vision has expanded. Everything seems to be an example of everything else, and this is reflected in the recursive nature of the arguments developed in the essays in A Place to Stand.

I find that I need to write to understand what I think, and that I need a real audience for the writing to work. I'll be interested to learn about you and what sense you make of the book. The essays developed in a rhythmic fashion as I crafted "think pieces" for my graduate classes at CU Denver. As students read what I wrote and challenged me to provide elaborations and examples, I found that I not only improved the drafts but I refined my understanding of the concepts I was attempting to convey. The questions and commentary that I provide in the other sections of this web site continue the process, and I hope that you will benefit from the process of reflection and response that they provide.

Best wishes,

Mark

References

Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clarke, M. A. (1996). Choice Readings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Silberstein, S., Dobson, B. K., & Clarke, M. A. (2002). Reader's Choice (4th ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Reader's Guide

Comments, Questions, Quibbles

Mark A. Clarke

I am teaching the course in which A Place to Stand was crafted, and I continue to revise my ideas in response to students' reactions. I will post the comments, questions, and quibbles we are wrestling with and I invite you to join in. Post an excerpt and offer your interpretation, pose a question, give an example and we will explore these ideas together.

The position taken in these essays is that the only person over whom we have any real control is ourselves—and even that is limited—so that the most productive approach to change efforts is to assume that we are the ones who are going to do most of the changing. (p. 2)

I wrote this and I believe it, but every single day I catch myself trying to change others when what I should be doing is finding ways to adjust my own approach to problems. You know the saying, "Do as I say, not as I do." Well, in the time since this book was published, which marked my most public declaration of my beliefs, I have experienced repeated opportunities to discover contradictions between what I say I believe and how I behave. Barbara Kingsolver deals with this issue of conscience in every essay of her book Small Wonder (Kingsolver, 2002)—how do we reconcile our aspirations to lead moral lives with the exigencies of the daily onslaught of experience? It is cold comfort to know that others struggle with the same dilemma, but it is all I can offer.

. . . I have found no appreciable intersection of books on personal change and those on organizational or educational change in spite of the fact that lasting change in society or its institutions will require corresponding changes in individuals, including the individual instigating the change. (p. 3)

This issue, the relationship between individual identity development and cultural change, is at the heart of all enduring problems in the world today. Here are some assertions that help me frame my understanding of it:

>>  Learning is change over time through engagement in activity.

>>  We are always learning.

>>  An individual is what s/he does. Or, more accurately, is becoming what s/he is doing. An important feature of this learning is that we are not are not always aware of it. Identity is perhaps the most important learning we do and we are always doing it.

>>  In school, the adults are learning as well as the adolescents.

Some important implications from these assertions:

>>  As we contemplate learners and teachers we need to attend to the activities they engage in, over time, so that we can understand who they are.

>>  Teaching and educational reform (being variations on the same activity) need to be aimed at changing the activities that individuals are engaged in.

>>  "Curriculum" as this is commonly understood, is not the only or even the primary learning that we as educators and researchers need to pay attention to.

You won't find much support for these ideas in most education textbooks, but the arguments are developed very convincingly by Barbara Rogoff in The Cultural Nature of Human Development (Rogoff, 2003) and by Dorothy Holland and her colleagues in Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). Essentially, this is the argument:

>>  We encounter life as an array of "worlds"—family, community, school, worship, and the work place are perhaps the most important—that we have to work our way into. As we work into those worlds, we learn and so, willy-nilly, we change, and our identity changes gradually as we adjust to our new roles and responsibilities.

• We use the tools we have acquired to nudge and elbow our way in
  • We assert, others respond, we adjust our behavior accordingly, perhaps continuing to assert, perhaps withdrawing.
• We continue to participate, improvising based on past experiences.
• We move from the periphery of a world (what Lave and Wenger call "legitimate peripheral participation" (Lave & Wenger, 1991)) into fully functioning positions of competence. Or, we move away from a particular world.

But here's the point: As difficult as it is to get our heads around it, we have to learn to participate in the world as if our actions here and now have an influence on the cultural worlds we inhabit. Because they do.

Weeds in the garden, flabby waistlines, deterioration of the environment, unwieldy class size—these all represent variations on one fundamental reality: life. They are all examples of the inexorable cycle of the natural pattern of living systems. Things are the way they are because living systems tend to function toward stability: they resist change. (p. 11)

Another difficult lesson from life—pay attention to what is going on to see if you can understand how things function. And an important part of the process is learning to resist the tendency to see only evidence for habitual ways of thinking and behaving.

References

Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. J., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kingsolver, B. (2002). Small Wonder. New York: Harper Collins.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Rogoff, B. (2003). The Cultural Nature of Human Development. New York: Oxford University Press.