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Collaborating with Megan HughesEach spring in 2000, 2001, and 2002, Megan Hughes performed a crucial, formative function in my Teaching of Writing class, first as a student, then as a colleague or co-teacher, and finally as a co-haggler. Before the Spring 2000 course, Megan was an undergraduate who had barely started her professional education course work. By the end of the Spring 2002 version of the TW course, she had successfully completed her certification program, had graduated, and was busily preparing for life in one of the graduate programs that had eagerly accepted her (she ultimately chose Purdue University's Composition-Rhetoric Program). The collaboration with Megan Hughes was only one part of all the stuff going on in my professional life, 2000-2002, but it was the best part for the way it was based on and synthesized and extended all the other involvements. Year 1, A Talented Student's Responsiveness Buoys up a Teacher's Tentative Reform Agenda Not too far into Meg's first journey through the TW course, she and I became entangled in some technical issues of Web building (see the "representative anecdote" in the next paragraph). All our work together has involved, in one way or another, the role of technology in education--but we've never been good or convincing "techies" together. Despite being the premise of our collaboration, technology has flitted on the periphery of our interests, goals, and abilities. For me, our work together originally provided an opportunity to give substance and professional texture to the fledgling attitudes that my struggles in building a server had planted in me during the summer of 1999. Those attitudes, based on new insights about learning, collaboration, experimentation, and trust, helped me question and reject traditional hierarchies about teacher/student relationships. Meg made it very easy for me to trust reform values and principles. On a sheerly practical level, her follow-through in our early projects was motivational; she certainly held her end of the bargain. But beyond mere dependability, she extended my learning and involvement in my studies and professional efforts. Through activities ranging from participation in professional listservs to making presentations at area universities and regional conferences, she promoted rich and various connections between me and scholars in my field. She has helped me learn much from and enjoy deeply the collegiality of scholars in composition, rhetoric, pedagogy, and all things kairotic. There is a "representative anecdote" that must be reported (to the authorities?) to highlight some key lessons of my collaboration with Meg. Very early on, just weeks into that first semester of Spring 2000, I happened to encounter Meg in the parking lot of Mother McAuley High School--the school of her clinical placement, where she was working with an experienced teacher on a "Technology in Clinical Practice" project. We engaged in one of those "hallway"-type conversations (where the real work of the world is often transacted). Megan was starting to build her first Web site on the English server, and she did so by searching the Internet for some pointers on HTML. To my utter amazement and to our joint pride to this very day, Megan told me of the first Web page she ever constructed, completed just the night before. It was a simple page--but its components were held in place by a table--and one she had composed in longhand HTML! Here she was, without any direct instruction, not only uploading a working page, but employing proper Web approaches (table formatting), and doing it in a more sophisticated manner than that employed by more experienced developers. Of course, I applauded her work, but I felt compelled to explain that the process could be greatly simplified. I told her about HTML editors that make Web page design much easier--almost like working in a Word processor, etc. I happened to have, neatly tucked in the inside cover of my "Week-at-a-Glance" calendar, my CD of Claris Home Page 3.0. I pulled out the disk, and said, "You know, Megan, a tool like this (Angelo waves the disk provocatively) makes the task very intuitive, and well, here--borrow it, install it on your computer for thirty days, and if you like it, purchase a copy for your very own. . . ." As I slipped her the disk, I shot a glance to my left and right. Of a sudden, I was Rick handing over the letters of transit to Victor Laslow. . . . Maybe not, but there was something exotic and illicit about the whole scene. How did we get there in that parking lot? What was I doing with the disk on hand? To what extent had I been setting things up so I could bend the rules? To what extent had class activities spilled over into the other realms of life--late night coding of HTML tables, intense involvement in projects that led to after-hours chance meetings, sharing of stories, gift giving, and future planning and strategizing? The thorny issue of software piracy aside, there is something in the culture of higher education that makes close faculty-student collaborations/friendships somewhat tinged with the "illicit." The judgments come in subtle and diverse ways--from colleagues, students, various onlookers. In Spring 2001, when Meg asked to participate in the TW class as my "unofficial TA," my response was not immediate and unconflicted. Our institution had no structure for undergraduate TA's, so her role would not have a recognizable shape or function. I found myself agreeing to the project, but not necessarily announcing it or discussing it with colleagues. Students soon enough came to appreciate the expert assistance she provided, as well as her alternate presentation of possibilities, and her dual perspectives of the current and prior year--but there were always a few who didn't quite understand her role. And in my own mind there was a twinge of danger to the whole thing: I often feared, am I becoming too dependent on Megan's assistance? What if she goes away and doesn't teach the class any more? Who will workshop and assist the students while I lecture/workshop/etc.? But I passed her the disk, and off she
went on her career publishing Web pages as needed, for
predictable and unforeseen purposes. And I conferred on her
the status of "Unofficial TA," and she became a fixture in
the class, though not without significant tensions--and not
only because of the lack of official status, but also
because of the complexities of communication and growth that
beset any collaboration as complex as co-teaching, and one
destined to develop and persist through several years. Year 2, Our Halcyon Days: The NCTE Conference and Meg's Revision of English 356 As a student in that first TW course, Megan was clearly involved an "immersion experience." But there was also an emergence going on--and for both of us. Through her reflections on course ideas, speculations about methods, analysis of past learning experiences, theoretical explorations of language and learning--all of which were given a rich texture through new experiences, including conference participation, grant writing and implementation, listserv memberships, MOOing, and task-centered email--she was able to engage in scholarly and professional work as a talented novice, and I was able to envision the full potential of my approach to teaching. I could see both the promise and limitations of my methods, goals, and accomplishments. I felt the full promise the day Meg sat in my office (in the renowned orange chair--which her affection for has redeemed in my eyes, for who could love an orange upholstered chair otherwise?), and reported back to me what she had seen and heard at the NCTE Conference in Milwaukee in 2000. "You know, a lot of the things you are talking about in class . . . other people are talking about them." This "you're-not-a-freak" message is very gratifying for teachers and parents whenever they can get it, but Meg was already looking beyond, to the larger rhetorical problem of how to communicate to her peers the mountaintop experience of the conference. Realizing the necessary indirection required here, Meg instead started thinking about the design of the Teaching of Writing class, and the opportunities presented by some of the technologies used in the class--the MOO in particular, which was something I had just kind of "thrown into" her class as a tool that's out there that students should know about. Meg had a vision of a "Virtual Writer's Room," a use of the MOO for having TW students provide both synchronous online tutoring of high school students in the MOO, as well as a-synchronous posting of drafts and comments in a bulletin board accessible through the MOO's enCore Xpress interface. So we went into our second year of work together, the post-conference year, and the Teaching of Writing class took on Meg's stamp (albeit atop the basic traditional structure I had given the class). Everything was comfortable and exciting. Students were using the MOO for online clinical experiences, groups of students were taking the initiative to form groups, assign themselves projects, meet, MOO, read and write--all with enthusiasm and self-directed joy. Meg was behind much of this, I know, if only by her compelling ethos and sensible approach. She gave one group in particular the idea for forming the "Best Book Club Ever" which met and MOOed regularly on Young Adult fiction, as described by Carol Medrano in her Webfolio. Meg was teaching mini-lessons, she was workshopping with individuals, she was conferring with groups, and she was providing context to all class discussions, in the most delicate, suave kind of balance. It was my happiest experience as a teacher having Meg take leadership in the class, because our movements, to my mind, were so synchronized, and there was no need in me for any kind of assertion in the way of taking control. My assertion motive was guided wholly by the connections I perceived--the need to assert the theories and course issues, educational realities, and so on, as they spontaneously made themselves available to my mind, and through that to the class. In all, it was the best stuff of teaching and learning. Meg may, of course, disagree about the extent of her control and ownership over the class, since it was still my class, with my syllabus and design. But in my experience, I felt it had become her class, in a way that was so beneficial to the students and to me (if not necessarily to her in her sense of autonomy and total pedagogical vision). As I mentioned at the 2002 Computers
and Writing Conference out of which this article evolved, it
is difficult in such messy types of collaboration that reach
into so many dimensions of professional/personal life to
discern the points where "collaboration" ends and
"friendship" begins. Perhaps more than anything, the work
with Megan Hughes reaffirms the oldest notions about
teaching and studying: that they are intensely human
exchanges, blessed with the gifts of humor, intelligence,
forgiveness, joy, and struggle. To those who would look at
technology in education as a threat to some of these
hallowed values, I can attest, at least from this
experience, that the intense study of technology and its
possibilities opened up so many points of deep humanistic
connection with a very special, talented person,
whose value and significance never lessened for the emphases
on computers, networks, and tools. Year 3, Finding Our Dialectic As wonderful as Year 2 of the
collaboration was, Year 3 was beset with various
difficulties, along the lines suggested in the
Learning/Teaching
Identity section. The
interactions of co-teachers are always complex, but
particularly so in the case of an inescapably a-symmetrical
relationship as that of teacher-student, attempting to act
as teacher-teacher. There are lessons to be shared here--on
the culture of education, disciplinary thinking,
professional growth, and interpersonal relationships. In
this article, I've only but glanced at the dynamics of the
professional friendship that developed between Meg and me.
Nonetheless, that evolution is one that, in its best
moments, I would characterize in terms of "finding our
dialectic." We've learned to become friendly antagonists on
nearly every teaching issue--respected allies who have
learned (at least I have) to do one's homework and
garner reinforcements before introducing an idea. Near the
end of her undergraduate career, Megan was espousing--much
as I. A. Richards did fifty years ago in Speculative
Instruments--"dialectic" as the highest study/activity
of higher education. To her honor, and to my immeasurable
delight, Meg made a paean to dialectic in the speech she was
invited to deliver at her commencement in January, 2002.
What she praised in her speech--the "Unending
Conversation," with the full
citation from Kenneth Burke--I felt I had lived and enjoyed
and appreciated through work and full involvement of
energies. The antagonism of ideas as softened by the kind
indulgences of friendship--this was the "finding of our
dialectic."
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