|
When
the Blind Lead the Blind:
Literacy, Authority, & Collaborative Learning
an essay
by Mark Willis (1994)
| 1.
An Ugly Monster Comes out of its Word |
|
Most parents who value their
own literacy eagerly await the advent of reading ability in their young
children. They read books aloud to their children, actively connecting
the communal process of story-telling with the organization of words
on the printed page. They note with pride the first time a child reads
words from the page independently. It is a milestone in a child's development,
like the first mutually recognizable spoken words that preceded it,
or the first tentative but independent steps in walking. To some parents,
this milestone signals a welcome time when they will no longer need
to fulfill the expectation of reading aloud to their children.
Parent-child reading experiences are early "ways of being with
the text," a phrase John Trimbur uses in the context of composition
studies to describe the interaction between writer and reader (109).
Educators agree for various reasons that parents reading books to children
is an important foundation for the child's literacy. Reading aloud reinforces
the patterning of reading behavior as well as the value of literacy,
a value underscored by the social context of the parent-child relationship.
The goal of this nurturing way of being with the text, though, is the
child's independence as a reader. Reading in most literate cultures
implies being alone with the text.
When my son Brendan was
three years old, I eagerly awaited his transformation as a reader. That
transformation would mean more than the beginning of his independence
in the literate world. It also held a promise of greater independence
for me, because I am partially blind. I had hopes of Brendan someday
reading out loud to me, for such access to printed texts comes only
in privileged and carefully rationed opportunities.
Mixed with this hope was
an undercurrent of doubt about my role in my child's reading development.
I memorized the simplest of his books, and I could paraphrase (and embellish)
all of them. But I doubted that I was making the necessary connection
between my oral words and those written on the page. I could fake it,
but I could not read to my son Sometimes I wondered if my reading disability
would cause a developmental setback for him. This doubt about my own
literacy undercut my experience as a liberally educated, professional
writer, but it fit the concerns of a new parent who was also a single
one.
With just two of us figuring
out how to make a home together, we talked. Sometimes I paraphrased
the stories in his books, and Brendan's job was knowing when to turn
the pages. That was our way of being with the text. Sometimes we listened
to one of my Talking Books recorded by the Library of Congress. Other
times, we skipped the books altogether and I told him stories, repeating
familiar tales and inventing new ones. Brendan learned how to ask for
descriptions and plot twists. That, too, became our way of being with
texts -- completely oral ones.
During our conversations,
I also mined my memory for poems to recite, sometimes fragments, sometimes
complete texts. One night I recited Seamus Heaney's "The Singer's
House." Brendan listened raptly; then, to my delight, he danced
around the room and chanted his own poem in response:
An ugly monster came out
of its word,
and maybe a ghost, and maybe a witch.
I'm the ugly gleaming, I
am, I am.
Maybe a witch came out
of a star.
Maybe a goat came out of its field.
An ugly monster came out of the moon,
I'm the gleaming, I am
It was a moment of grace
that can change one's life as a parent. I was writing a book of poems
then, and Brendan became my collaborator. His poems were his inventions,
oral ones. I heard them, recognized them, and wrote them down. Our roles
in being with the text reversed: he spoke, and my job was knowing when
to turn the page.
The parental doubts faded
with time. Many other readers had a hand in Brendan's development, and
his first-grade teacher modestly described the transformation as something
inside him "just waiting to happen." He has been an unstoppable
reader ever since. Now, age ten, he is the reader most generous to me.
Our conversations about reading and writing continue, too. In the social
context of my own writing (what I write outside my job), he is an unavoidable
and welcome participant. As I was drafting this essay, he found the
copy of Heaney's Field Work on the dining room table and read
"Oysters" to me. It concludes:
... my trust could not
repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb. (11)
| 2.
Literacy, Authority, & Collaborative Learning |
|
Little has been written
about the literacy of blind and visually impaired adults. It has not
been studied from a comprehensive ethnographic approach in either the
specific context of composition studies or the broader context of higher-educational
pedagogy. A paper by Sushill K. Oswal, presented at the 1992 Conference
on College Composition and Communication, describes the writing processes
of a blind executive who heads a social-service agency. This case study
is preliminary in scope, and some of the writing practices described
are typical for many executives with staff support and leadership responsibilities
in an organizational context. But it points the way to future research
about blind readers and writers. Oswal calls for more research with
experienced blind writers who have first-hand understanding of their
disabilities and the social contexts in which they write (9).
This essay is the beginning
of an answer to that call, although my concern here is not writing processes,
but the broader issues of what literacy means, and can mean, for blind
people. I believe the central literacy issue for blind people is gaining
access to information -- texts, in the language of composition studies
-- in a visually biased world. We cannot begin to understand how blind
people think and write until we know more about how they resolve problems
of access.
What does the story about
my son's reading development say about his father's literacy? That literacy
is often oral in nature. It is multi-textured and adaptable. It grows
through collaboration in social contexts. Its moments of doubt reveal
as much as its surrounding sureties.
The doubt stems from the
traditional dichotomy made between oral and literate cultures. Oral
knowledge precedes literate knowledge in the time scale of human evolution
as well as the span of an individual's development. As dichotomies traditionally
go, the oral tends to be viewed as primitive rather than civilized,
a lower rather than a higher form of knowledge. In moments of doubt,
I ask myself: do I really read a text when I hear it instead of see
it? Is the knowledge I gather from countless oral sources valid compared
to that which is written? Composing a text through memory -- can I call
that writing? Can there be such a thing as oral literacy?
Recent work in composition
studies by advocates of collaborative learning, notably Kenneth A. Bruffee,
places renewed value in oral paths to knowledge. Bruffee articulates
an epistemology for collaborative learning that is rooted in the social
context of oral discourse. He draws on the theories of psychologist
Lev Vygotsky and the seminal language of political philosopher Michael
Oakeshott, who called the discourse "the conversation of mankind"
and defined education as "an initiation into the skill and partnership
of this conversation" (Oakeshott 198), to explain how oral discourse
originates and shapes thought. Reflective thought is internalized public
speech. Thought is an "artifact created by social interaction,"
Bruffee says. "We can think because we can talk, and we think in
ways we have learned to talk" (640).
Bruffee extends the schema
to incorporate writing. "If thought is internalized public and
social talk, then writing of all kinds is internalized social talk made
public and social again... Writing is a technologically displaced form
of conversation. When we write, having already internalized the 'skill
and partnership' of conversation, we displace it once more onto the
written page... Writing is at once two steps away from conversation
and a return to conversation. We converse; we internalize conversation
as thought; and then by writing, we re-immerse conversation in its external,
social medium" (641).
Knowledge, too, is a social
artifact. Bruffee draws on philosopher Richard Rorty and critic Stanley
Fish to explain that knowledge is established and maintained ("authorized")
by social groups of knowledgeable peers who constitute interpretive
or knowledge communities. "(C)communities of knowledgeable peers
make knowledge by a process of socially justifying belief," Bruffee
says (646). "Knowledge is the product of human beings in a state
of continual negotiation or conversation." (646-7) Teachers are
the members of knowledge communities who "induct" students
as new members of the community. Collaborative learning, according to
Bruffee, is a way students can learn to negotiate access to a knowledge
community's conversation. "(C)collaborative learning models how
knowledge is generated, how it changes and grows" (647).
This is an epistemology
where a blind reader can find a home. It embraces, rather than excludes,
the participation of others in the blind reader's literacy. From it,
the collaboration between Brendan and I can be seen as an actively functioning
knowledge community. We retain our roles as father and son, to be sure,
but we are peers in the endeavor of negotiating access to knowledge.
He assists me in gaining physical access to texts; I assist him in understanding
their meanings. We exchange skills, one writing for the other, one reading.
We talk, we listen, we think, and we write. Our knowledge community
may not fit the traditional academic concept, but it is not an uncommon
collaboration for the family of a person who is blind.
The literacies of blind
and visually impaired people often follow a collaborative course. It
is important to understand, however, that such literacies also can be
richly multi-textured. The reading strategies and adaptations used to
gain access to information are as diverse as the range of visual acuity
itself. Some visually impaired readers (myself included) can read limited
amounts of printed text by using a variety of visual aids. Skilled braille
readers value that medium's self-sufficiency for reading and writing.
The availability of braille texts has been quite limited in the past,
but the development of braille-display computer technology holds the
promise of making any computer-based text accessible for tactile reading.
For blind readers who do
not read large print or braille, as well as for many readers who do,
oral transmission of texts remains an important literacy mode. Blind
readers listen to oral texts several different ways, each having its
advantages and disadvantages. A "live" personal reader can
read any text chosen by the blind reader, who can guide the flow of
the reading to meet his or her needs. This reading strategy is limited
by all the exigencies involved in bringing two people together in time
and space for a common purpose. Recorded texts enable the blind reader
to do so independently, but the reader is dependent on the linear nature
of the recording. Control of reading flow is usually limited to fast-forwarding
or rewinding audio tapes. Reading strategies such as skimming and index-searching
are difficult, if not impossible, with recorded texts. In the U.S.,
the Library of Congress's National Library Service for the Blind and
Physically Handicapped (NLS) and Recordings for the Blind (RFB) maintain
extensive free libraries of recorded books. These libraries are a national
treasure for the literacy of blind Americans, but the selection of recorded
titles is nonetheless finite. Computer-based technology combining optical
character recognition of text and voice synthesis for oral text transmission
promises a limitless selection of texts for oral reading, but the reader
must learn to listen to a machine's voice. The portability and expense
of the technology limit its use as a literacy mode.
Reading an oral text is
a collaborative experience for blind readers. The collaborator may be
a live reader, a recorded reader, or a machine. Each strategy represents
a way of being with the text; each brings an interpretation to the text
that exists beyond the blind reader's interpretation, which is derived
in some part from this other interpretation. To say that oral reading
strategies are collaborative, however, is not to say that they are equal
in reading effectiveness or collaborative outcome. When blind and sighted
readers read a text together, two minds can interact with it and each
other to derive interpretations. They can converse with the text; they
can form a true knowledge community around it. When a blind reader reads
a recorded text, the conversation is missing. If the recording reader
mispronounces, misunderstands, or amends the text, the blind reader's
access to it becomes problematic. This collaboration could be said to
constitute an "unknowledgeable" community.
This brings me to a final
point about Bruffee's epistemology for collaborative learning. Like
thought, writing, and knowledge itself, the authority of knowledge is
a social artifact derived from conversation and negotiation within a
community of knowledgeable peers. The authority of knowledge is not
an absolute, like the "mind of God" or the New Criticism's
objective text, existing separately from people interacting in social
contexts. Bruffee acknowledges that the notion that unknowledgeable
student-peers can collaborate to negotiate access to knowledge communities
-- to minds who need a fixed, Cartesian schema for knowledge -- sounds
like "the blind leading the blind" (646).
Long ago, I decided that
I do not need to carry the symbolic weight of this type of metaphor.
Moments of doubt not withstanding, I am sure that blind people do not
need to be led to their literacy or to the authority of their knowledge.
As a member of that unique knowledge community called "the blind,"
I know how we can guide one another and lead sighted people along the
way. Collaborative learning is one of the paths.
| 3.
Reasonable Accommodation in the College Classroom |
|
Lisa Ede revealed her own
moments of doubt about collaborative learning in a paper presented at
the 1988 Conference on College Composition and Communication. She
avowed her place in the epistemology of writing as a social process,
but admitted that using collaborative learning in her writing classes
had been "less than successful" (3). Even more troubling to
Ede, her students seemed to resist it. "The notion of knowledge
and culture as a conversation has been liberating for us," she
said of the advocates for collaborative learning, "so we have assumed
that it would be for our students as well" (6-7). Ede speculated
that "failure of nerve" in implementing collaborative learning
in the college classroom may be a reason for its mixed success (7).
She also suggested that privileging epistemological arguments such as
Bruffee's may have led educators to downplay the politics, ideology,
and psychology of collaborative learning.
An important impetus for
collaborative learning, according to John Trimbur, was the political
and social transformation on college campuses in the 1960s and 1970s.
Open-admissions policies brought an influx of nontraditional students
into college classrooms. Traditional classroom practices needed to change
in order to accommodate students with divergent backgrounds and learning
styles. "The faculty at open-admissions colleges, however, were
largely unprepared and unequipped (and sometimes unwilling) to deal
with the learning problems of nontraditional students" (90). Some
educators began to view collaborative learning as a strategy that could
help to ease the transition of nontraditional students from one social
status to another.
Among the influx of nontraditional
college students in the 1970s were many who had disabilities, including
some who were Vietnam veterans. Their access to a college education
was enhanced by the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which required all colleges
and universities receiving federal funds to provide nondiscriminatory
accommodations to students with disabilities. As this law was implemented
in the late 1970s, most public institutions established disability-services
programs for students. The locus for these accommodations, however,
has tended to be outside the classroom itself, which has traditionally
been the sovereign domain of college teachers.
The 1990 enactment and
ongoing implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
will open even more doors for disabled college students. The ADA applies
nondiscrimination requirements to private as well as public institutions.
One of its key concepts, reasonable accommodation, could provide a renewed
political impetus for collaboration in the college classroom. Reasonable
accommodation is a positive effort to resolve or adapt a discriminatory
situation. It can include bricks-and-mortar solutions such as providing
a wheelchair ramp, or technological solutions such as providing adaptive
computers. But it can also be a human solution as simple as verbalizing
texts viewed with overhead projectors in the classroom. Negotiating
the terms of a reasonable accommodation, rather than litigating them,
is essential to its success. A growing number of college students with
disabilities will gain the skills and partnership of negotiating their
accommodations in the classroom. The parallels with collaborative learning
are obvious.
Another reason for the
"less than successful" implementation of collaborative learning
in college classrooms may be that the terms of collaboration have been
established by teachers more so than by students. Both Bruffee and Trimbur
note that informal collaboration is an essential feature of college-student
life outside the classroom. In attempting to formalize collaboration
as pedagogy, college teachers may have missed important cues from the
students themselves. This speaks to the ideological issue of who has
control in the classroom, teachers or students? According to Bruffee,
collaborative learning challenges teachers to recognize that learning
can happen outside their domain. "Collaboration," Trimbur
says, "verges on plagiarism in the minds of many teachers"
(102).
Proposing specific models
for collaborative learning experiences that also provide reasonable
accommodations for blind college students is beyond the scope of this
essay. The design of collaborative accommodations should follow the
needs and adaptive strategies that blind students have already developed
for themselves. Teachers who are committed to providing reasonable accommodations
for blind students in their classrooms can look for solutions to the
diverse, multi-textured literacies of those students.
Lisa Ede asked this question
of educators in her moment of doubt about collaborative learning in
the college classroom. "Have we conceived of the social in the
fullest, richest terms" (9)? I believe the answer is "no"
until all students with disabilities can join the conversation.
| Works
Cited |
1
| 2 | 3 | Works Cited | 
|
Americans with Disabilities
Act. Public Law 101-336; 104 STAT. 327. 101st Congress: July 26,
1990.
Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Collaborative
Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" College English.
46:7 (Nov 1984) 635?652.
Ede, Lisa. "What is
Social about Writing as a Social Process?" Paper presented at the
39th Conference on College Composition and Communication,
March 1988.
Heaney, Seamus. Field
Work. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979.
Oakeshott, Michael. "The
Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind." In Rationalism
in Politics. New York: Basic Books, 1962.
Oswal, Sushil K. "The
Writing Process of a Blind Administrator: A Case Study." Paper
presented at the 43rd Conference on College Composition and Communication,
March 1992.
Trimbur, John. "Collaborative
Learning and Teaching Writing." In Perspectives on Research
and Scholarship on Composition. Ed. Ben W. McClelland and Timothy
R. Donovan. New York : Modern Language Association of America, 1985.
|