I encourage you to send me
comments and suggestions about this I-Search Project.
Send e-mail to me at this address: wahlstrl@buffalostate.edu
I-search
- R. Wahlstrom
I like to write, and I like to write with students. Some of my best short stories have emerged during my English 305W course on writing fiction, and I've been able to develop and present some important scholarship through other writing exercises, including the I-Search. Although my colleagues and I are fairly proficient writers, and we are frequently compelled to write by personal and professional interests, we suffer from the same kinds of writing problems as most students. The I-Search paper and other kinds of writing strategies help us to generate ideas and text, and that is, of course, the reason I assign this kind of work.
I have been fascinated by various applications of Taoist philosophy to Western concerns.Many years ago a supervisor lent me a copy of The Tao of Leadership .I was impressed and intrigued, but I did not follow up on the concept of Taoism until recently when I met a practitioner of the philosophy and became curios to know more. The meeting had reminded me of a former student's paper entitled the "Tao of Tutoring".Dana, my student, had explored the interaction between the writing tutor and the student from a Taoist perspective.I don't remember the details, but the paper and the title have stayed with me.
As a result of these scattered
influences, I've begun to wonder how the Tao might relate to the writing
teacher and student.
What I already know about the topic
I confess, I know little about Taoism, but what I do know suggests a way to think about writing that could benefit writing teachers and students. Fortunately, Taoism has been interpreted broadly over the years -- most recently by westerners eager to translate and assimilate this ancient wisdom -- all very "New Age," one might think, but the various interpretations of the Tao are not new.SOME HISTORY
As I said, this is fortunate because it is not my intention here to tie a specific set of rules to writing. It would be impractical and not very Taoist anyway.No, my intent here is to bring certain useful bits and pieces to writing and teaching. In addition, I confess that the Tao of Writing seems to fit my personal philosophy of writing.
Here's what I know, or at least what I think I know:
Tao means "the Way" and reflects a particular interpretation of the ways in which the world and the universe work. Douglas Chung describes Taoism as ". . . the cosmic, mysterious, and ultimate principle underlying form, substance, being, and change." It sees a world of balance and flow. What this means to my work is that the Tao can offer principles which guide a teacher's approach to students and the subject of writing. The natural balance of the Tao, it seems, can teach us a lot about a natural give and take in the teacher/student relationship. The flow and the sense of continuity inherent in Taoism also reminds me of the Process movement in composition instruction. As Peter Elbow has written, the best kind of writing takes place when the writer has the time and space in which to think and write. This applies to the prewriting, or invention, stages of the process as well as the drafting and revising of a text.
Writing instruction is traditionally the antithesis of the Taoist ideal. It is a painfully rigid, rule-bound system that has teachers and students imposing structure on ideas and forcing topics into structure. An extreme example might be the old practice of requiring students to write an outline then, holding strictly to that framework, to write an essay. Less apparent examples are teaching grammar in the guise of writing instruction, focusing on the five-paragraph essay and grading student work in any number of ways. We all do it, thus my goal is not to accuse or blame, not to say this or that pedagogy is bad, as I am not interested in colonizing or, in missionary terms, of "saving" the misguided. Students probably do benefit from a range of teaching practices in the classroom, and there is no doubt that they can become better writers through many approaches. No, my intention here is to explore a philosophy of writing.
Students approach the writing task with misgivings about what it means to be
a writer. To most of my students, writing doesn't mean
self-expression; it means following rules. It doesn't mean discover; it
means restating old news. It doesn't mean learning and developing a
critical sense; it means keeping strictly to well-worn paths and making
predictable choices. Finally, it doesn't mean writing for readers; it
means getting it done, handing it in and getting a grade.
Research
These questions about writing and my new theories about its relationship to a kind of Tao have not been completely ignored. On the one hand, Peter Elbow's Writing With Power and Zemmelman and Daniels' The Writing Community , Lucy Calkins' The Art of Teaching Writing and many other texts have discussed the natural and holistic nature of the writing process. Each identifies ways of addressing the writing malaise that affects students.
On the other hand, I have spent some time online and in the library learning
more about Taoism and trying to form a clear connection between this ancient
way of living and the technology of writing. I will discuss the specific
materials a bit later in this section, but first, based on my early
explorations, I concluded that Taoism is a philosophy of creativity, utility
and joy. From this general impression and after my preliminary research,
I identified ten principles of the Tao of writing:
Sources to discuss
The Tao Te Ching is considered by many present the essence of the Tao. In its eighty-one verses, or chapters, Lao Tzu is said to have expressed the meaning of existence. I believed that the tenets of Tao Te Ching, which seem to fit the many concerns of modern societies as they had the old, also had a good deal to contribute to writing teachers and writers. I felt this because my early introduction to writing pedagogy focused on Peter Elbow, Mina Shaughnessy, Paulo Freire and others who saw literacy in general and writing in particular as an organic process that blended the personal and public, the conventional and innovative. In many cases, as with Freire and Elbow, this melding was almost spiritual, depending on cultural norms, traditions and beliefs. The philosophies of these writers are reflected in more current writing pedagogues such as Zemelman and Daniels and Lucy Calkins. I had enough of an understanding of Taoism that my sense of its connection to these writers remained unclear but persistent. Their texts were a foundation for my philosophy of teaching writing, a writer-centered, text and context-based approach that attempts to bridge the contradictions in public and private, school and home literacies, and in the ways we think about drafting and revising text.
What does this have to do with the Tao? As I pointed out in the last section, certain principles and ways of interacting with the world made sense to my thinking about writing. Early impressions of Taoism combined with my recent exploration of Internet resources piqued my interest. I applied this research to writing because am a writer, a teacher of writing and a teacher of those who will teach writing. This is what I do.
I decided that I needed to look more closely at Taoist texts.
I began my search, as most of us do these days, on the web. Using the search engines Google and Alta Vista, I searched for "Tao", "Taoism", "Tao of*", "Tao and Writing" and "Tao Te Ching". These searches led me to a number of general sites on spirituality, new-age philosophies and Buddhism. Although I found ties between Taoism and other philosophies, particularly Buddhism, I felt it was important to focus on the topic, so I will not address the other areas here.
I decided to toss out the search for an existing link between writing and Taoism. Instead, I looked to define the Tao first and then to search for a relationship in the available texts. The first of these is the Tao Te Ching. I looked at several translations of the Tao Te Ching an settled on two: Stan Rosenthal' s translation of the Tao. The first is a fairly straight-forward rewriting of the verses (understand that translation is never completely reliable). Rosenthal's translation is clear and accessible. The second, " The Simple Way of Lao Tzu " edited by Steven Ericsson Zenith, relayed the same general ideas as the first, but the language invited connections to creativity and to writing. When I returned to the text with my new mission and a general sense of my topic, I began to see real possibilities. Zenith's edition illuminates the Tao's treatment of the creative process, of detachment, of untangling the knot or finding the smooth way, of inspiration, of discovery, of unity, of flow or coherence, of development, or reaiming or rethinking, of accomplishment and, finally, of simplicity and clarity. I will discuss this more in detail later, but this text convinced me that I was on the right track as I searched for connections between Taoism and writing. At this point the definition of Taoism was still not clear to me. In " Taoism: A Portrait " Douglas K. Chung defines the philosophy this way:
Taoism believes "Tao" to be the cosmic, mysterious, and ultimate principle underlying form, substance, being, and change. Tao encompasses everything. It can be used to understand the universe and nature as well as the human body. For example, "Tao gives birth to the One, the One gives birth to Two, and from Two emerges Three, Three gives birth to all the things. All things carry the Yin and the Yang, deriving their vital harmony from the proper blending of the two vital forces." (Tao Te Ching, ch. 42) Tao is the cause of change and the source of all nature, including humanity. Everything from quanta to solar systems consists of two primary elements of existence, Yin and Yang forces, which represent all opposites. These two forces are complementary elements in any system and result in the harmony or balance of the system. All systems coexist in an interdependent network. The dynamic tension between Yin and Yang forces in all systems results in an endless process of change: production and reproduction and the transformation of energy. This is the natural order.
This balance of Yin and Yang speak to the organic nature of writing and the
writer as well as the ideas of creation and revision. Further along in the
piece says, "Taoism advocates a minimum of . . . intervention, relying
instead on individual development to reach a natural harmony . . ." He adds, "Stop trying to control."
We see this reflected in compositionist Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations, in which she
advocates trusting the student's natural language and rhythm and language
sense. This organic flow is reflected in freewriting,
brainstorming, and approaching writers and writing tasks from multiple
perspectives, as with
Clearly, I was on to something. I had read the Tao Te Ching in two versions and would soon read two more, but I was looking for a holistic sense of what it meant to be a Taoist. I had learned that Taoism is not a religion. In fact, the philosophy is so flexible that many people combine Taoism with the Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. beliefs. I don't doubt that certain members of these sects would argue with those connections, but that is another debate. I had a general intellectual understanding of the philosophy, but I wasn't sure I'd know a Taoist when I saw one. That is when I came across a website created by Justin Valentin and dedicated to Winnie the Pooh in general and to Benjamin Hoff's book, The Tao of Pooh . The site, just-pooh.com, provides a brief summary of Hoff's book. Valentin, who claims to have no commercial interest in this material and no connection to Disney or Dutton Children's Books says, " . . . the information is supplied as a public service to Pooh-fans the world over, for their enjoyment, and to help them embrace the spirit of friendship that Pooh brings out in each of us." As I had seen references to this "silly little book" in other articles, I picked up a copy and discovered that it was not so silly after all.
I liked the book immediately, but that didn't automatically mean it would fit my thesis. Yet, it did. In the introduction Hoff describes how in Taoism the wheel is defined by the spaces between the spokes and the bowl by the emptiness within the form. This reminded me of the technique in art of focusing on negative space to create more effective representations of objects. In writing we often forget the importance of the space between structure and writing without rules. Peter Elbow describes an experiment in which Mike Rose compares ". . .writers who were stuck in their writing to other people who accomplished their writing fairly successfully" (xxvi). Rose observed that the unsuccessful writers ". . . tended to try hard to follow the rules they learned from teachers" (xxvi). The others admitted that they were "doing it all wrong", finding their own strategies. This is not to say that writers should break the rules of good writing, but they should know when a rule helps and when it doesn't. The successful writers in Rose's group were following the tao as they used the spokes and the spaces to create the written wheel. This relates to another tenet of the Tao, Wu Wei, roughly translated to mean "do without doing" (Lao Tzu, chapter 63). When Eyore loses his tail the searchers' preoccupation with cleverness, knowing and business offers little help. Only Pooh who isn't looking or trying is able to find it (Hoff, 144), much in the way a writer finds a pearl in brainstorming or freewriting, or perhaps more commonly, in relaxing and not thinking about writing. I find this true time after time in my own experiences. My dissertation topic came to me in the shower. A story I'd published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine came to me one November evening as I my wife and I relaxed before the fireplace. The most effective writing teacher often teaches best through a kind of nonaction, by allowing student writers the time and space to write. This is not easy for Westerners. Several years ago when a senior faculty member was scheduling an observation of my advanced composition class, she said, "Make sure you're teaching something when I'm there. Don’t just have them writing." The implication, of course, is that nothing is being learned if the teacher isn't the center of action. I recently had the pleasure of observing an energetic young composition instructor. She was well prepared and congenial, all in all, a good teacher, and her students had regularly supported this observation through glowing evaluations. Even so, the class felt rushed. The instructor asked students to spend a few moments reviewing and commenting on one another's writing. Within a few moments, the teacher had moved on to the next segment of the class. Each time she asked students to spend time writing or thinking about writing, she short-circuited the effort, seemingly unable to allow them the time and space, unable to relinquish control. The tao opens a space for writing, thinking and exploring.
Instructors often rush through assignments, and student writers learn to think quickly, draft quickly and finish quickly. They learn to write like their instructors -- quickly, confusing putting words on paper with effective writing. Hoff might call this the "Bisy Baskson" approach to writing. The Bisy Backson confuses exercise with work and activity with creativity. "The Bisy Backson is almost desperately active," says Hoff (93). He adds, "Let's put it this way: if you want to be healthy, relaxed, and contented, just watch what a Bisy Backson does and then do the opposite." INSERT INSTRUCTOR EXAMPLE HERE. I conclude that if you want to be a writer, just watch what most writers do and then do the opposite. When the Bisy Backson writer is madly dashing off a magnificent first and only draft, daydream, jot a few words on blue or green paper, talk to friends, gather ideas like wild flowers. When the Bisy Backson writer is moving on to the next quick paper, write something, begin to put ideas on paper. And when the Bisy Backson writer is hyperventilating in the hall, waiting for the teacher to post grades, then weeping over the C or B or A-, write for feeling and power and style. Write to enjoy the sensation of the pen rolling across the lines of a legal pad and to savor the beauty of smooth black lines on clean white bond.
Like Hoff's Bisy Backsons, writers focus on the final product before they've begun the journey. In The House at Pooh Corner Pooh considers what he likes best in the world (Hoff, 110). He decides the ". . . moment just before you begin to eat it [honey] . . . was better than when you were." In effect, it is the journey, or the process, that we most enjoy. This, of course, goes against the typical writing student's attitude toward a writing task. The goal is to get it done and hand it in. The process is seen as punitive. Pooh would tell them to enjoy the process, to see it as an oppotunity to create, to develop and, above all, to understand the central role of change and growth in life. Experienced writers will tell us that a paper, article, book, letter, etc. is never actually finished. Practicality requires that we stop somewhere in the process, but nothing actually says we can't keep on writing and revising. In fact, many writers continue to develop ideas and themes from one book to the next in what is essentially a lifelong evolution and revision.
Perhaps the most important lesson the Tao brings to writing is the benefit of simplicity. Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching tells us, "To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day." Inexperienced writers typically try to emulate the worst kinds of writing, what they may imagine to be "educated" writing. The result is verbose, pretentious text, rich with malapropisms and thick, pompous structure. Students will often tell me that they learned to write this way in high school, but I have my doubts. Teachers I know are as baffled as anyone about this phenomenon. Most likely, it is a stage of the writer's development. Students are trying-out a new written discourse, one that will fall by the wayside if they are given time and guidance. The Tao Te Ching's call for simplicity parallels the writing instructor's advice, to strive for simplicity and clarity in writing. ______ wrote that we should cut what we most love in our writing. The Bisy Backson needs the clutter. "Emptiness," says Hoff, "reminds them of loneliness. Everything has to be filled in . . ." The writer who peels away the layers of complexity will find a kernal of meaning inside and can then, if the task calls for it, develop levels of complex meaning with clarity.
The Tao Te Ching tells us, "Prepare for what is difficulty while it is still easy. Deal with what is big while it is still small" (ch. 48). The writer who understands the power of simplicity is able to create the longer works that seem so intimidating at first glance. To those of us who have written grants, dissertations, and books of various kinds, beginning with small steps and building up a work piece by piece is evident, yet few students understand that these tomes are pieced together, often over years of stops and starts, trial and error. It is almost surprising that we rarely teach students or allow them the time and space to write in this way -- in way we write.
Further Sources:
I will consider Paulo Freire's writing and take a closer look at pedagogy to see how these works fit my thesis. I'm still thinking about this.
Chung, Douglas K. "Taoism: A Portrait." A Sourcebook for Earth's Community of Religions.
________:_______.
http://www.silcom.com/~origin/sbcr/taoism.htm
"The
Hoff, Benjamin. The Tao of Pooh.
Liu, Xiaogan. "Naturalness (Tzu-jan), the Core Value in Taoism: Its Ancient Meaning and Its
Significance Today." Lao Tzu and the Tao-te-ching . Eds. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue.
What I discovered
Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power
Zemmelman, ____, and ____ Daniels