Robert's Response

[Robert Greco]

#800

If I understand Van Manen’s idea of the gaze correctly, he could crassly be compared to ideas of writing to learn. Van Manen writes “Every now and then he or she may find an updraft and suddenly soar, reaching the perspective of the gaze.” Whereas I think of writing to learn as a continual process of steady improvement through the writing process, Van Mannen seems to emphasize those moments of clarity? I question because I’m not certain that clarity is right here. Van Mannen describes the moment as “really ‘seeing’ something. Really being in touch with something.” As I try to internalize this, I want, for some inexplicable reason, the gaze to be messy. I want to resist the moment of clarity, I want to, hmm, dwell? no not quite, rest? not that either, luxuriate? definitely not, explore, that seems right. I want to explore the messy space, the space where I’m in contact with new ideas, where I’ve moved past the uncertainty of needing to say something specific, into an exploratory space where I can gaze (if I’m thinking about this right) not on a fixed point, but all about in a newly opened writing and thinking space.

In fact, the idea of writing as an exploratory space comes up repeatedly for my reading of Van Manen. He says, in “Seeking,” “What makes writing successful is to search for the meaning that motivates one to be a writer/researcher in the first place.” A transactional model won’t supply this meaning, it’s more intimate than that. Van Manen calls this solitude; he even calls it “lonely,” but lonely feels like the wrong word to me. Lonely feels closed and unproductive to my ear. I want writing not to be lonely but private, intimate, If this writing transacts, it does so only incidentally, as a byproduct of, again, exploration. I read privacy and intimacy in what Van Manen terms “wonder.” I’m not, to be clear, suggesting that Van Manen’s intention was to convey this meaning. Frankly, I’m not sure, but when I read him and reflect on my writing, this is the place I go. In my specific context, I connect intimacy and wonder.

But when I widen the context to my students’ relationship to writing, the apparent conflict between transaction and wonder emerges. My students, for better or worse, depend for the improvement of the material conditions of their lives, at least in part, on their ability to transact in their writing. For me, thinking now toward the teaching statement that I’m beginning (inexpertly) to draft for this week’s digital project, the pedagogy of writing instruction demands an eye cast toward wonder, curiosity, and inquiry and an eye cast toward communication, rhetoric, and clarity. While these goals don’t fundamentally conflict, the marriage of the two must be carefully tended. The writing classroom is a place of wonder, where students have something to say, and it is a place where they can, and should, actually say it.

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