by Howard Tinberg Dr. Howard Tinberg is Professor of English at Bristol Community College, Fall River. He is a frequent contributor to professional English journals as well as a presenter at professional conferences.

In his most recent work, The Call of Service, Robert Coles recounts a conversation that he once had with his mentor William Carlos Williams on the importance of putting ourselves "in the shoes of others." Coles, whose life work seems to have involved doing just that, put the problem this way: "How do we place our mind (and heart and soul) in a position -- a place both literal and symbolic -- that encourages our eyes and ears to pick up what we might otherwise miss' (1993 p. 24). As I was reading, I couldn't help but think how rarely we academics consider that problem at all. I was struck by how unusual it is for us to even allow emotion and belief to enter into our professional and classroom discussions. The important thing is to be thoughtful and to maintain a critical detachment from what we study, read, and teach, not to invest time and energy on uncritical and emotionally charged beliefs. In fact, what I have since come to see is that both responses are important.

I see a tendency in my own teaching to favor the highly critical stance, as the following classroom narrative will attest. I once asked my first-year writing students to read an excerpt from Richard Rodriguez' memoir Hunger of Memory (1993). that work, Rodriguez describes his attempt to achieve success with a breathtaking singlemindedness: his decision at any early age to master a public language (English, as opposed to Spanish, the first language of his immigrant parents) that would ensure a kind of acceptance in main- stream American society. I expected my students to engage in a thoughtful discussion of the issues that Rodriguez raises: the tension between school and home, between mainstream culture and family culture. I expected them to accept and to debate those dichotomies.

The response was hardly what I had imagined. So complete is Rodriguez' early denial of his roots and so offensive is his behavior toward his parents, my students would have little to do with him. They simply shut down, denying outright that any tension exists between school and home, the public and the private. Why must Richard choose one over the other? they asked. I was stunned. I wanted my students to "problematize the text," as we say. They refused to do so and would not position themselves critically at all.

What these students didn't say, but what I have since surmised, is that Rodriguez's "miseducation" rankled them because many of them come to our community college with a fragile optimism that college can make sense of their world. They are the dislocated, in many instances: the unemployed factory worker; the single mother on welfare. They yearn for a connecting, coherent vision that will piece together the fragments of their lives. Who am I to deny their right to that vision and that belief! I have since asked myself.

My students' response to the Rodriguez essay prompted me to think about the assumptions behind my own way of reading and, more generally, my way of teaching. Had I been so deeply trained to read critically that I assumed students would take to it like fish to water? And had I come to devalue reading from the heart, which, in the case of my students' reading of the Rodriguez essay, was as legitimate as my own?

Since my students' "shut-down," I have since wondered whether I am doing them a service in having them adopt a thoroughly critical stance toward the texts they read and, more profoundly, toward the beliefs that they bring to those texts. Do I really want them to go out into the world and do battle with opposing ideas? And, if so, have I equipped them to move beyond contention? Have I nudged them closer to fashioning belief! These last questions are especially troubling to me since I doubt that many of us trained in the academy seriously reckon with the consequences of the academic stance that we model for our students and encourage in them. Moreover, we have been trained to be suspicious of matters of "belief or "faith." It all seems so unacademic.

I would like us to value in our classrooms and in our profession a response that is both thoughtful and heartfelt -- a matter both of deliberation and belief. It is no coincidence, I feel, that the one assignment that my composition students consistently rate the highest is one that encourages a search for such an integrated perspective. To begin with I ask my students to read Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," drawn, like the Rodriguez essay from our text, Ways of Reading (Walker). It is a brilliant piece that reads history as both a public and private matter (unlike the Rodriguez essay, which seems so intent on diminishing the private as a basis for "success"). Walker reads the silences or the gaps of history to discover those artists who paved the way before her -- from Phyllis Wheatley to Walker's own mother. I then encourage my students, whether black or white, male or female, to enter into the space imaginatively and emotionally, just as Walker fills the historical gaps with her own imaginative presence. To do so, I suggest that they turn to their own histories and research a powerful figure whose legacies help shape who they are. I tell them: Go out to interview your subjects, if possible, or research all that you can find out about them. Tell their stories and enter into those narratives. But, just as important, reflect on what has been given and what your own writing, in turn, can give.

I have had students who objected from the start to the idea that we are shaped by the legacies left to us. Many got to the community college in spite of their traumatic pasts or legacies and, in addition, need to feel that their future is entirely in their own hands and not determined by that difficult past. Some will feel uncomfortable by the personal nature of the search in a classroom setting. Since so many will choose a parent or grandparent, they will feel obliged to delve into family matters - particularly troubling matters, in some cases.

Others see the opportunity to research family history a liberating one -- one not often given them in a classroom setting. For them, the assignment provides a chance to take writing personally and to become reflective on things close to the heart. I'd like to share one student's work because in many ways it demonstrates what can be gained when we go beyond conflict toward a more connected discourse. Jane, the student writer in question, is both a typical and not so typical community college student. "A suburban brat," as she describes herself, Jane was raised in a middle-class home by parents with professional careers. And yet in other respects she fits the typical profile of a community college student: Returning to school after many years, she is a survivor of a marriage gone bad. Jane is a single parent, struggling to find the confidence to make it in college and to fulfill her dream to become a writer.

Jane makes it clear from the start that she finds the assignment restricting. "There have been, of course, many people in my own life that I have bonded with," she remarks, "From each of these individuals I borrowed bits and pieces of who they were ... and slowly emerged as the being that sits here today ... It was a co-operative exercise in sculpture, with no one signature any more or any less predominant." But those "bits and pieces" make for incoherence. Jane begins to sense that her life has lacked a "philosophy," an idea that would make sense of her experience. I consider Jane one of the brightest of the students that I have had at my community college, but I feel that she speaks for others in her need for wholeness and completion.

As she writes, Jane recognizes a moment when the bits and pieces began to come together:

And then one day, just last summer, I came across something quite by accident that would begin to allow me to change all that. A book. Not a classic. Not the Bible or a "Get Rich Quick While You Lose 50 lbs. And Successfully Trap The man Of Your Dreams" piece of trash. . The title of the book (which I wouldn't be able to pronounce correctly for some time to come), was Sacajawea. As I began to read, and became more and more engrossed in the incredible life of this person, I became increasingly aware that I had stumbled upon my own missing piece. My glue, with which I could slowly begin to pull together and secure the mixed up medley that was myself.

I want to make the point here that Jane's response to her text so far is hardly "academic." Her writing is not a detached, carefully parsed critique of the text as text. Rather, it is a blatantly personal, subjective response. Jane enters imaginatively and spiritually with her subject. Indeed she eventually becomes the subject herself.

Recounting the terrible ordeal of Sacajawea, during and immediately after the latter's capture by "enemy warriors," Jane describes how Sacajawea "would witness the bludgeoning murder of her mother and other loved ones, and be carried off slung face first across the back end of an enemy pony, taken far from the mountains and people she loved." Spending over a year with her captors, Sacajawea, Jane writes, would be traded away to a neighboring tribe and then sold into a marriage with a "Canadian half-breed Toussaint Charbonneau." Jane finishes the first portion of her essay this way: "The following spring, eight months pregnant, Mrs. Charbonneau's trail met up with that of... Lewis and Clark, and she began her passage into history. Sacajawea was fifteen years old."

It is at this point that Jane returns to herself and to her own story: In high contrast, I, at fifteen, was an angry spoiled suburban brat who thought that the world owed me plenty. I sulked around complaining about the vast unfairness of my burdenous [sic] duties. "Forced" to with- stand such daily tortureous [sic] endeavors as loading the dishwasher or vacuuming the pool, or, God forbid, giving up an occasional weekend night to sit with my younger siblings.

I'd like to highlight this moment of "high contrast" not for the obvious lesson that Jane draws about needing to count one's blessings. Instead, what I see here and elsewhere in the writing is Jane's connective vision. She connects in a powerfully personal way with, as she describes her, a "woman who herself buried five babies in her lifetime." At the same time, however, she is able to see herself anew; she achieves a critical distance on her own life. In so doing, Jane begins the process of what she calls "attaining a richer more holistic outlook" on her life. The qualities of "natural simplicity and spirituality" that were the hallmarks of Sacajawea's life become her legacy, handed down over two centuries to this stubborn "suburban brat."

As I reflect on Jane's accomplishment -- her ability to read with her "heart and soul" -- I am struck by how rare such a response might be in our conferences, journals, in the academy generally. I realize now that pervading the academy is a distrust of the heart and a privileging of the attack or critical move. Even liberal academics like Gerald Graff (1992) have called for faculty to "teach the conflicts" within our classrooms, bringing students into the debate over what texts ought to be read in our courses(1992). Such calls are more than a little ironic because, in some ways, to teach and write the conflicts accords well with the conventional view of academic discourse as based on contention and argument. But where do we take our students once they enter the fray? Do we really want a Bosnia in our own classrooms? I once took Graff's advice and had my students in a literature course read Conrad's Heart of Darkness against Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Achebe's novel, as you may know, recounts the tragic effects of encroaching European culture on the life of one proud African, Okonkwo. Conrad's novel charts, in horrific detail, the degradation of one European who seeks to exploit the very people whom he came to benefit.

Having assigned the Conrad and Achebe novels, I then asked my students to read Achebe's essay on "An Image of Africa," a scathing indictment of what Achebe claims is Conrad's "racism" in Heart of Darkness (1989). One of my students, moved by Achebe's reading of Heart of Darkness, asked pointblank in my class one day, "How can you assign a work so racist' It was a good and sensible question, to which I should have given a good and sensible answer. I didn't. I mumbled something about the shortcomings of Achebe's argument (Is there such a thing as an African perspective? And is Achebe's that perspective?). After the fact I wondered, had I really done my students a service in providing conflicting perspectives? Or had I so muddied up the waters for them that the world is far less coherent after they entered the class than before? "We exercise authority over them in asking them to give up their foundational beliefs," observes Pat Bizzell, "but we give them nothing to put in the place of these foundational beliefs. . ." (1992). What should we give them in the place of such beliefs? And how do we give it?

As teachers, we have an obligation to promote within our own classrooms a search for belief. As colleagues, we have an obligation to value that same enriching perspective. Is it too much to ask that at conferences and in journals, just as in our classrooms, we spend less time mounting arguments and more time constructing belief! At my own community college, much too much time has been wasted on setting up barriers -- between one discipline and another, between faculty and administration, between full- and part-time instructors, between faculty and staff.

We have started to talk more to one another at my college, crossing lines that have in the past been far too formidable to admit such passages. We are talking more in department meetings, workshops, and colloquia.

I am calling for all of us, two-year and four-year faculty, classroom teachers and theoreticians, compositionists and literary critics to stop drawing the lines to divide us and to "refigure," as Henry Giroux suggests, "the Disciplinary and Pedagogical Boundaries."(l992). In doing so, let us try to stake out some common ground.

Achebe, C. (1989). An image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of darkness. In Hopes and impediments. Selected essays. New York: Anchor/Doubleday.

Achebe, C. (1959). Things fall apart. New York: Ballantine.

Bizzell, P. (1993). Academic discourse and critical consciousness. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1992.

Coles, R. (1993). The call of service: A witness to idealism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Conrad, J. (1981). Heart of darkness and The secret sharer. Toronto: Bantam.

Giroux, H. (1992). Border crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education. New York: Routledge.

Graff, G. (1992). Beyond the culture wars.. How teaching the conflicts can revitalize American education. New York: W.W. Norton.

Rodriguez, R. (1993). The achievement of desire. D. Bartholomae and A. Petrosky (Eds.). Ways of reading. An anthology for writers. (3rd. ed.), (pp. 481-503). Boston: St. Martins.

Walker, A. (1993). In search of our mothers' gardens. D. Bartholomae and A. Petrosky (Eds.). Ways of reading: An anthology for writers. (3rd. ed.), (pp. 607-617). Boston: St. Martins.

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