'

<ET> Why Share: Students in Pedagogy Scholarship
<EA> John Paul Tassoni and Gail Tayko
Treason, formation, elation, confession, dysfunction.
Entity, clarity, mystery, scarcity, nearness.
Sanity, pity, pleasure, conjunction.
--Stan Rice, "Emotions"

1
Sharing Pedagogies is an experiment in creating and sustaining dialogue within

English classrooms and pedagogy scholarship. Representing critical responses to dialogic
practices in composition, literature, and English education courses, the articles collected here
focus on the experiences of graduate and undergraduate students who have participated in
decentered classrooms, collaborative projects, and courses that stress issues of student
empowerment and cultural diversity. The selections include, for example, Chris Zawodniak' s
critique of his instructor's student-centered, yet student-stifling approach to Freshman
Composition; they include stories from Shannon Siebert, Richelle Dowding, Staci Quigley,
Melanie Bills, and Mary Anne Browder Brock, developing teachers who weigh the
practicality of their training in dialogic pedagogy against the demands of high-school
curricula, underprepared students, and their professional goals; and they include dialogues
among students and teachers like Lucille M. Schultz, Carman Costello, C. Ann Ott, and Bob
Mayberry, who connect university and community interests, discover multiculturalism within
their apparently homogeneous classroom, and personalize writing instruction and doctoral
candidacy.

1

We say this book is an experiment because we have found through working with these
authors that writing about dialogic pedagogies involves risk-taking in terms of how teachers
teach, how students interact with their teachers, and how pedagogy scholarship represents
classroom life. We feel that this book represents a site where dialogue "troubles" or shifts
the subject locations of its authors along the academic hierarchy as students become teachers
and teachers become students. In their depictions of academic experiences and in their efforts
to represent these experiences, the writers of this volume demonstrate what we carefully,
even

hesitantly,~entify as

"successes" of dialogic thinking and writing, namely, the values

of cooperation, negotiation, friendship, a willingness to take risks. To the degree it
demonstrates such successes, Sharing Pedagogies shows the mutual exchange of knowledge,
the "reciprocal influence"---to borrow Francoise Lionnet's phrase---that "unconsciously"

creates a "new culture" (1989, 15_-16).J
We proceed with caution, however, for we observe that vulnerability, conflict, and
changing values also measure into the ways our contributors write about teaching. Probably
more often than not, students and teachers who participate in and write about dialogic
pedagogies experience discomfort or duress, because negotiating each other's interests and
concerns implies altering ingrained behaviors and attitudes instilled by the academic
hierarchy. For teachers and students alike, a dialogic pedagogy means challenging forces that
prevent them from interacting as complex beings who feel pain and affection, make mistakes,
change their minds, get confused, teach each other, create (rather than merely absorb or
transmit) knowledge. This book also shows, then, the effort, the kind of postdisciplinar:y

2

commitment, involved in practicing a dialogic pedagogy "where every distance must be
drawn to scale/and an inch off means someone absent" (Bateman 1994, 24).
2

Having worked with the students who contributed to this volume, we understand that
the risks for students who share pedagogies are multiple, for their reciprocal engagement
with teachers requests that they assume roles as their instructors' intellectual equals; that they
be forthcoming, critical, articulate; that they overload already overloaded schedules; that they
risk their relationships with peers mistrustful of their relationship with an authority figure;
that they risk friendships with teachers they admire. Frequently, students who write about
their instructors are as yet under the power of those authoritative figures. This issue of safety
and vulnerability speaks to the institutional hierarchy: namely the felt limitations that remind
students that they reside at the lower rungs of the academy and should not trespass their own
local boundaries. To one of our undergraduate contributors who offers a stringent critique of
a former teacher's methods, we said, "You're still a student, and perhaps that teacher and his
colleagues will read your article---Are you sure you want this article to be published?" (And,
in this sense, we had to ask ourselves, "Should we publish it?") The institution's hierarchical
conceptions of student/teacher relations restrict the opportunities for student-researchers and
teacher-researchers to come together to write. In doing so, those conceptions restrict the
opportunities for them to scrutinize together and, perhaps, change what "really" goes on in
their classrooms.
Dialogic teachers not only need to encourage, but also to match their students' risktaking and vulnerability. It is not necessarily a pleasant or, for some, even a desirable

3

experience for teachers to be honest with students about their grading criteria, their
uncertainty about subject matter, or their struggles to bring their personal and professional
concerns into a better balance. But with a dialogic pedagogy, teachers often find themselves
more honest than they usually are with their students, more vulnerable than they need to be
in classrooms where lecture notes and multiple choice exams prescribe a class's discourse.
For teachers, dialogics means asking: "Now, exactly how much power do I want to share
with this student?"; "Is it safe to speak?"; "Is that what I really wanted to say?"; "Is that
what I really wanted to hear?"; "What are the implications of writing collaboratively with my
student?"; "How do I write with a student?"; "Is there a student with whom I can write about
my teaching?"; "Is there a student who will write with me?"
Hierarchical conceptions of student/teacher relations stand alongside other
institutional, social, and personal hindrances to student/teacher collaboration in scholarship
and to student-researchers who write alone. Although dialogic pedagogy involves exercising
the skills and values that students and teachers need to look and act upon the world critically
and responsibly, the exercise of these skills and values are rarely incentive enough to propel
students, particularly undergraduates whose majors lie outside the discipline (those most
English teachers most often teach), into the world of academic scholarship. Unlike faculty
and graduate students, whose investment in scholarship translates into discernible rewards,
such as job security, career advancement, and funding opportunities, undergraduates who
devote time beyond their heavy courseloads and other job and family obligations do so with
the most altruistic of motives. And in those cases where funding is available for students to
conduct research, collaborators still must contend with the relative instability of students'

4

circumstances: Students leave town, transfer, drop out, overload their course schedules, take
second jobs, change majors, develop new interests, and as C. Mark Hurlbert points out,
"even go to war"---factors that make difficult sustaining a collaborative project through the
successive revisions necessary to bring it to publication (Hurlbert and Bodnar 1994, 230.n3).
And given the obstacles that do anything but invite engagement in dialogue and the
honing of student-researchers who can contribute to an understanding of how one learns and
teaches---people in our discipline must also ask this: Where are the dialogic models? What
models exist for those student- and teacher-researchers who want to represent their dialogic
practices dialogically?
3
Pedagogy scholarship has challenged the gap between research and instruction that
often divides the experiences of critical theorists and classroom teachers. Teacher-researchers
recognize the classroom as a place where students' diverse backgrounds and experiences can
add significantly to ways that classroom instructors and critical theorists perceive, teach, and
practice reading and writing. Nevertheless, while teacher-researchers like David B. Downing,
Patricia Harkin, and James J. Sosnoski recognize "the transaction between the teacher and
the student [is] a dynamic instance, not of preserving, but rather of actually forming cultures
discursively" (Downing et al. 1994, 9), research in English pedagogy, overall, limits or
excludes students' voices. There do exist publications in which students' perspectives are
indeed privileged, and conference panels also provide forums where students, periodically,
share their "sides of the story" with professional audiences, but in general, students have

5

found little space in our discipline's scholarship to articulate their involvement in the
theoretical dimensions that shape their educational experiences and those of their teachers.
We believe student participation in pedagogy scholarship to be not only a logical
outcome of, but also an impetus behind, dialogic approaches to composition, literature, and
English education courses. In dialogic classrooms, students and teachers interacJ as
collaborators. In dialogic classrooms, as Mary Louise Pratt would say, students "meet, clash,
and grapple" with texts, with each other, and with their instructors as they examine and
generate discourses vital to their education and, associatively, to their lives outside the
classroom (1991, 34). With the relative absence of students' participation in scholarship on
dialogic pedagogies, however, the profession risks perpetuating the objectification of students
common in the depositor/receptacle (banking) model that Paulo Freire describes in Pedagogy
of the Oppressed ([1970] 1990, 58).
As Marguerite H. Helmers makes clear in her extensive critique of articles that
describe classroom practices, Writing Students: Composition Testimonials and
Representations of Students, scholarship on English pedagogies rarely features students as
critical agents. Most often, work of this nature presents narratives dominated by instructors'
points of view. Reproduced in the form of journal entries, summaries of classroom
discussions and interviews, or excerpted passages of papers, students' voices are
contextualized by teacher-researchers, whose interpretations of events normally hold sway.
Of course, tl;lese interpretations are important. Teachers have knowledge and educational
experiences (experiences as students and as instructors) that qualify them to make such
assessments. But classroom narratives, or "testimonials" as Helmers calls them, tend to

6

reduce the dynamic instances of the pedagogical situations they describe. That is, students in
particular must undergo "some flattening of life to fit the requirements of the genre." The
rhetoric of such testimonials, given to creating and sustaining generic images of studenthood,
present students as "transhistorical," essentialized characters (1994, 26). "It is through
teachers' knowledge of the commonly held beliefs of the profession," explains Helmers, "that
they [teachers] are able to supply the details that enable a testimonial about the student to be
understood" (27).
It follows, then, that when students enter the discipline's scholarship as critical

writers, their voices can complicate, potently, how teachers read pedagogy scholarship, how
they read themselves as teachers, and how they read their students. For this reason, if for no
other, students require room within professional publications to articulate their viewpoints.
For as much as classroom practices inform our discipline's scholarship, scholarship shapes
our classrooms; and if English teachers want to interact dialogically with students in the
classroom, students should be speaking subjects in English scholarship. With Joseph Harris,
we agree that teachers and writers on teaching "need to find ways ... to represent not only
our own view of what is going on in the classroom but those of students as well" (1993,
789). The discipline needs "a view of students staking out positions as intellectuals, working
and arguing through issues" (790). In this regard, Sharing Pedagogies aims toward
increasing students' participation in the discursive transactions that shape English classrooms
and , in tum, their culture.
4

7

Harris is just one of many teacher-researchers who have called for more student
involvement in the dialogues shaping English studies. Among others who have identified such
a need, Gerald Graff, for example, states,
The most neglected facet about the culture war is that its issues are clearer and
more meaningful to the contending parties than they are to~h~, student. It is

-

"'

not the conflicts dividing the university that should worry us but the fact that
students are not playing a more active role in them. (1992, 11).
And in "Students' Stories and the Variable Gaze of Composition Research," Wendy Bishop
writes, "When teachers become researchers and students' stories, interpretations, and
contributions count, then knowledge making and professionalization come into a better
balance" (1993, 210). These observations follow the assumptions of educators like Paulo
Freire, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux, whose work represents important articulations of the
political and professional implications of dialogic practices. Students, they suggest, need to
become critically aware of the ideological forces that shape them, their teachers, their
classrooms, and society at large so that they can act with and upon those forces
knowledgeably and responsibly. We believe that students engage those forces as they stake
out positions within the very scholarship that informs their classrooms.

Sharing Pedagogies represents such an engagement, and in doing so, joins a list of
works that privilege students' involvement in our discipline. Among these publications are at
least two works in which students do represent themselves as critical agents. David B.
Downing's collection Changing Classroom Practices: Resources for Literary and Cultural

Studies (1994) includes an article by C. Mark Hurlbert, an associate professor at Indiana

8

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University of Pennsylvania, and Ann Marie Bodnar, an undergraduate there. Authors of what
Downing, Harkin, and Sosnoski call "the most postdisciplinary writing" in the volume (25),
Hurlbert and Bodnar sometimes collectively, sometimes in alternating narratives, examine the
tensions they felt between the collectivist-like aims of their introductory literature classroom
and their moral feelings of outrage over the class's general support of the Persian Gulf War.
In the process of composing their paper, Hurlbert and Bodnar generated nearly 400 pages of
prose as they worked through their collective and disparate memories of their classroom
experiences. The result is a piece that represents the complexity of their experiences at the
same time it demonstrates the challenges that depicting a classroom poses for students and
teachers who write together (230.n2).
Another piece that reflects the aims of Sharing Pedagogies is Nancy Welch's
"Resisting the Faith: Conversion, Resistance, and the Training of Teachers" (1993), which
appeared in College English. Welch's first-person account of her experiences as a teaching
assistant in a doctoral program offers insights into the ways graduate students respond to the
often subtle forces of indoctrination they face within the profession. Welch explains the
manner in which pedagogies that are liberatory in intent can, within the context of students'
position along the academic hierarchy, produce "converts" rather than critical thinkers.
Although our search has favored collaborative projects, we include individually composed
essays like Welch's that provide a student's perspective on pedagogical practices.
In three other texts we have reviewed, all in composition, students find a relatively
large space in which to articulate their concerns. Although these works do not display
students' involvement to the same extent as Sharing Pedagogies, they do invite students'

9

direct participation in pedagogy scholarship. One particular work published in the English
Leadership Quanerly deserves mention. In "A Tale of Two Writing Teachers" (1993),

Wendy Bishop and Sandra Gail Teichmann describe their efforts in respective classes they
were teaching to fulfill each of their course's writing assignments along with their students.
At the time the article was written, Teichmann, a graduate teaching assistant, was also a
student in Bishop's course. In the concluding paragraphs of the work, she offers a vivid
account of Bishop, who has failed to meet the class's deadline for a final writing assignment.
Teichmann expresses her sympathy for her instructor, but she hesitates to ask Bishop to join
her peer writing group "because [Bishop] would not have been joining the group as an equal
but as a teacher, maybe even as a judge" (7). Such insights as Teichmann's into students'
perceptions of power relations in classrooms do reflect the goals of Sharing Pedagogies, and
the article as a whole is a telling account of the personal and institutional demands that often
divide the classroom experiences of teachers and students.
Another notable text The Subject Is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students (1993)

\

addresses students whom teacher-researchers are trying to "convince ... to stay willingly"
in composition classrooms (vii). Written predominantly by teachers, this collection edited by
Bishop includes literacy autobiographies and pieces on writing and writing instruction. These
essays were reviewed before their publication by students in writing classes around the
country. The authors revised their papers in light of students' suggestions, so they stem from
a dialogue with their audience, although the dialogue itself is not made literal. Nonetheless,
four essays in The Subject Is Writing are written by students. Two of these essays tell the
writers' stories of coming to writing. The third student essay, co-written, describes the

10

processes the writers go through in fulfilling essay assignments, and the fourth essay is a
third-person narrative that briefly and objectively describes a peer workshop in a writing
classroom. Although the student writers do not bring the English curriculum itself under
scrutiny, as do the articles in Sharing Pedagogies, these four works in The Subject Is Writing
offer readers rare personal accounts of the feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that
students bring to composition.
In line with the attention to student voices displayed in Bishop's collection, the
expressed aim of Sheryl I. Fontaine and Susan Hunter, the editors of Writing Ourselves into

the Story: Unheard Voices from Composition Studies (1993), is to
celebrate the true potential of our discipline's multivocal, heteroglossic,
nonhierarchical nature [by creating] an occasion for teachers and researchers . . . who
do not feel included in the story of our evolving discipline . . . to voice unheard
perspectives---expressing views that are not represented in the prevailing central
description of the field, calling critical attention to issues that have been overlooked,
writing in genres often deserted for the sake of academic discourse. (9--10)
Accordingly, an entire section of this collection examines how composition teachers
increased their understanding of their classrooms and professions once they began asking
students what they think about writing. The first essay in this section, Bishop's "Students'
Stories and the Variable Gaze of Composition Research," reflects many of our own
sentiments. The remaining three essays in this section follow Bishop's cue: Teachers relate
their students' concerns and revise their practices and theories according to students'

11

reactions. While none of these pieces makes explicit students' participation in the revisions,
the writers acknowledge and highly regard their students' contributions.

5
Following the examples of teacher- and student-researchers like Hurlbert and Bodnar,
Welch, and Bishop and Teichmann, Sharing Pedagogies engages students and student/teacher
collaborators as active participants in the scholarship shaping English classrooms.
We realize, however, that with its capacity to draw distances to scale, to engage
students and teachers at the levels at which they perceive reality (Freire [1970] 1990, 52),
dialogics is also potentially mystifying, and crucially evocative. Gaps, ruptures, and silences
in language exist always (Yaeger 1991, 239--41). In dialogue those gaps, ruptures, and
silences do not necessarily vanish. In dialogue, they can "appear." Students and teachers can
only go so far in representing the nuances of their exchanges.
As editors we know this to be true as we perceived ruptures, gaps, and silences in the
works of our contributors. For instance, we noted inconsistencies in the ways contributors
sometimes described themselves and each other. And at other times, we felt certain writers'
status as "students" might be restricting the degree to which they could be honest about their
responses to their teachers' practices. Most often, we brought these signs to their attention,
asking them to respond to what in fact was absent, or at least to what we felt was absent. 1
Sometimes writers addressed these absences, interested in what insights they might develop.
~---

.\

·.\v

At other times they could not address them. In these cases writers were either confident they
'

had said what they meant to say or unwilling to rely on memories of classes they had taken
two or more years earlier. There were also times when writers simply chose not to address

12

issues we raised for reasons of their own, for reasons, we gather, they would rather keep to
themselves.
Are co-writers still in dialogue if one or both writers stop responding to their text?
Given the gaps in and ambiguity of language, just how much of students and teachers can be
brought into dialogue? Or brought into representations of dialogue? As Iris Marion Young
writes,
[S]haring is never complete mutual understanding and reciprocity [our
emphasis]. Sharing, moreover, is fragile. The other person may at the next
moment understand my words differently from the way I meant them or carry
my actions to consequences I do not intend. The same difference that makes
sharing between us possible also makes misunderstanding, rejection,
withdrawal, and conflict always possible conditions of social being.
The notion that each person can understand the other as he or she
understands himself or herself, moreover, that persons can know other subjects
in their concrete needs and desires, presupposes that a subject can know
himself or herself and express that knowledge accurately and unambiguously to
others. ([1986] 1990, 310).
With this in mind, we do not claim dialogics as a tool easily applicable to pedagogy and
scholarship. Nor do we claim that those who share pedagogies can fully represent the
complexity of their interactions. Rather, we present the concept of dialogic pedagogies, of
sharing pedagogies, as a method of learning, teaching, and rereading/rewriting the

13

discipline's scholarship. It is a concept in which the willin2ness to talk and listen, to
negotiate meaning, values, and differences amongst participants, is central.
For as long as time permitted, we worked with our contributors to explore their
pieces' insights, contradictions, and inconsistencies. We proceeded self-consciously, keeping
in mind that pedagogy scholarship involves transactions between editors and writers as well
as those between teachers and students. In other words, although our position as editors
differed considerably from that of our contributors, who had firsthand experience with the
events they depict, we hoped to make our editing process as dialogic as possible. We hoped
that students' and teachers' and our own pedagogies would be enriched throughout this
project, as we and our contributors scrutinized the memories of and feelings about classroom
practices we all brought to this work.
In fact, perceptions did change. Contributors often referred to the process of writing
their articles as an integral element of their learning experience, and as editors and as
teachers we, John and Gail, were affected by our conversations with these writers. In light of
stories students were sending us about their struggles to develop and maintain ownership of
their writing, we grew more cautious about how we asked contributors to make changes in
their drafts. We also found ourselves more careful to notice the risk involved in our
contributors' shaping of these articles, and more open to interpretations that conflicted with
our own . In writing this introduction, we also became increasingly self-conscious about
contextualizing student voices, wishing we had both the time and space to construct even
more of a "talking book" (as Ira Shor at one point suggested to us) in which we, our
contributors, and Shor could literalize our responses (and our responses to responses) to each

14

other's work. And, although we've always considered ourselves sensitive to the needs of
students as individuals, we began to see more clearly students in our own classes who
resisted our criticisms, felt ignored, sought our praise, wanted our intervention, suppressed
their own wishes, enjoyed our personal revelations and private conversations. In other words,
it became impossible to interact with writers, to refer to our classes, or to hear other classes
referred to as homogenized groups of "students." Sharing Pedagogies helped us, as teachers
and editors, to see better the complexity of interests and concerns that inform our interactions
with students.
6

Because these articles represent complex interactions between students and teachers,
students and other students, and students and curricula, they do not sound or feel like typical
academic articles, and they do not necessarily act as blueprints for course designs. Selections
such as "Telling Secrets, Telling Lies, Telling Lives," "Writing Cincinnati," and "At Home
with Multiculturalism in Kansas" do offer extensive descriptions of curricula in the areas of
autobiography, advanced composition, and multiculturalism, and should provide ideas and
expectations for anyone thinking about enrolling in or teaching such courses. And other
articles such as "Creating Dialogue," "Between Student and Teacher Roles," and "Out of
Control" make concrete suggestions for improving undergraduate instruction and teacher
training. But in other cases writers do not advocate pedagogical practices; instead, they
foreground their emotional responses to and personal revelations about educational
experiences. So that while articles like "Voices of a Student and a Teacher," "Lezlie and
Brian's Excellent Academic Adventure," "Dinner in the Classroom Restaurant," "When

15

Pedagogy Gets Personal," and "I'll have to help some of you more than I want to" may
suggest useful ways of thinking about sequenced writing assignments, protocols, open syllabi,
teacher-centered hierarchies, and student-centered classrooms, these pieces emphasize more
the feelings of anger, delight, anxiety, and vulnerability brought forth through dialogic
practices. Every article in this book focuses to some degree on the responses of individual
students and teachers to particular educational experiences, and it is this individuality and
particularity that make tenuous any function these articles might serve as prescriptions for

,.

curricular designs.

It is, however, through these portrayals of the particular and individual, the personal

and the emotional, that articles in Sharing Pedagogies enter the lore of teaching practices and
accrue considerable theoretical value. With Patricia Harkin, we understand lore---which takes
the form of personal stories, syllabi, departmental memos, student papers, etc.---as a way for
teachers to use classroom narratives to explain and to solve local and cultural problems

~ (l991,
"

{\
~

~~

125). And as Downing, Harkin, and Sosnoski might say about the lore-ic pieces

collected here, these narratives have "an outstanding advantage over concepts" in that they
"retain the complexity of the human relationships under investigation." Against the "thin
generalities of abstract theories" and the flattened characterizations that too often constitute

--

scholarship in English pedagogy (1994, 20), Sharing Pedagogies provides what Clifford

-----------

-

-----~

Geertz (1973) would call "thick descriptions" (quoted in Downing, et al. 20). Such

descriptions make the depicted situations more recognizable to the practitioners of the
pedagogies under consideration.

16

With this understanding, we organize the articles in Sharing Pedagogies in the form
of an academic narrative---arranged, roughly, accordingly to grade levels---as a way of
tracing not only the impressions students and teachers form about dialogic practices
throughout postsecondary education, but also as a way of tracing the different academic
experiences, different types of courses, teachers, and classmates, and different university
settings---that affect dialogue. In this sense, Sharing Pedagogies is not a narrative with a
single viewpoint; no single definition of dialogic pedagogy or response to dialogic pedagogy
reigns. Rather, the voices printed here can be read against, as well as alongside, one another;
for this reason, we feel Sharing Pedagogies needs to be read as a whole---its voices weighed,
aligned, brought into conflict. As in most complex narrativizations, the reader should take an
active role in locating and reflecting upon the personal, social, and institutional factors that

-=

affect the individuals depicted here.

So, for instance, readers considering the place of personal revelation in English
classrooms will need to weigh the rewarding interpersonal relationships among students and
teachers portrayed in articles like Lezlie Laws Couch and Brian Arbogast de Hubert-Miller's,
and Ott, Hurlbert, and Elizabeth Boquet's against the guarded approach to student/teacher
interaction discussed by Katharine M. Wilson, and the discomfort in such relationships that
Rosemarie Lewandowski and Roland Cooper, and Mary Anne Browder Brock and Janet
Ellerby express at various points in their narratives. This collection as a whole leaves much
for readers to decide about what pedagogical practice might be appropriate for them, about
what kinds of responses these practice might incur given readers' own situations, and even
about the feasibility of such practices to begin with. At the same time, we hope that the

17

/ '

voices of these students and teachers will bear heavily against any tendency to read the
practices discussed here as prescriptions, any tendency to overlook the complex motives,
histories, and perceptions that attend interactions among students and teachers. In other
words, Sharing Pedagogies is a narrative that many students, teachers, and teachers-to-be
should find applicable to their own situations; but like their own situations, this book is a
narrative already peopled.
Amongst these articles, readers will find people experiencing in different ways the
affects of academic hierarchies and the struggle for student empowerment (e.g., "When
Pedagogy Gets Personal, "Out of Control," "I'll have to ·help some of you more than I want
to," "Creating Dialogue," "Lezlie and Brian's Excellent Academic Adventure," "Writing
Cincinnati" "Voices of a Student and a Teacher"). Readers can examine the ways these issues
drive many of the pedagogical practices treated here, such as open syllabi and the willingness
to revise syllabi in mid-course (e.g., "Dinner in the Classroom Restaurant," "At Home with
Multiculturalism in Kansas," "Telling Secrets, Telling Lies, Telling Lives," "Between
Student and Teacher Roles," "Voices of a Student and a Teacher"), the development of
alternative sites to establish cooperative and collaborative classrooms (e.g., "Between Student
and Teacher Roles," "Dinner in the Classroom Restaurant," "At Home with Multiculturalism
in Kansas, "Lezlie and Brian's Excellent Academic Adventure"), the willingness of teachers

to share their writings with their students (e.g., "Telling Secrets, Telling Lies, Telling
Lives," "Dinner in the Classroom Restaurant," "Lezlie and Brian's Excellent Academic
Adventure," "Creating Dialogue"). Throughout this collection---this narrative---issues and
practices occur and recur. Together, these articles narrate the attitudes, beliefs, expectations,

18

and tribulations that can at any given moment constitute a classroom. They are attitudes,
beliefs, expectations, and tribulations that dialogic pedagogies bring into play. 2
<A>Notes

1. We emphasize our own perceptions here. After all, Sharing Pedagogies rests on the
premise that readers' interpretations of the classroom descriptions can never capture the
reality of the classroom experiences as well as the teachers and students who participated in
those classes.
2. However, like most narratives, the organization of this volume implies exclusions, for no
narrative can accommodate each and every approach and perspective constituting
postsecondary education. Sharing Pedagogies, for instance, contains---unfortunately---no
responses to computer-assisted education, no accounts from minority or gay and lesbian
students responding to courses devoted to canon revisions, no reflections on cultural studies
approaches to composition courses, no pieces by white students describing their experiences
amongst non-white classmates studying non-white literature, no articles by men who have
taken women's studies or other courses with predominantly feminist bents, and even no
article in which a male student shares views with a male teacher. In our drawing to scale the
distances in this narrative, an inch off has indeed meant someone absent.
Through various stages of our work, we had the opportunity to consider proposals for
and drafts of articles in such areas, but for various reasons could not include them in this
collection. In these cases, the hindrances we describe above were quite evident: Teachers'
and students' courseloads led several potential contributors to withdraw their proposals; one
student writing alone felt he should not be completely honest about a professor who would be
19

•

on his dissertation committee (even though his memories about the professor were
predominantly positive); and in the absence of models, other teacher- and student-researchers
struggled through several revisions without ever meeting the generic standards that,
admittedly, changed for us more often than we care to admit.

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