The Peaceable Classroom
by Mary Rose O'Reilley
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""Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?"" "When a professor dropped this question into a colloquium for young college teachers in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, most people shuffled their feet. For Mary Rose O'Reilley, it was a question that would not go away; The Peaceable Classroom records one attempt to answer it. Out of her own experience, primarily as a college English teacher, she writes about certain moral connections between school and the show more world outside, making clear that the kind of environment created in the classroom determines a whole series of choices students make in the future, especially about issues of peace and justice." "The Peaceable Classroom first defines a pedagogy of nonviolence and then analyzes certain contemporary approaches to rhetoric and literary studies in light of nonviolent theory. The pedagogy of Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and the National Writing Project are all examined in the context of nonviolent discipline. The author emphasizes that many techniques taken for granted in contemporary writing pedagogy - such as freewriting and journaling - are not just educational fads, but rather ways of shaping a different human being. "Finding voice," then, is not only an aspect of writing process, but a spiritual event as well. To find voice, and to mediate personal voice in a community of others, is one of the central dialectics of the peaceable community." "The author argues that teachers must not allow themselves to be co-opted by a material culture that views education as a freeway interchange on the fast track to job success: the central task is to foster a critical encounter with the intellectual and spiritual traditions of humankind and to reclaim the revolutionary power literature to change things. As the author writes, "If we make it impossible for students to bring to literary studies the questions that dominate their own lives, we insure that the spiritual traditions of Western humankind will not touch us. In the long run, students find it less painful to have no questions at all.""--Jacket. show lessTags
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8 Works 582 Members
Mary Rose O'Reilley's first book of poetry, Half Wild, won the 2005 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her five essay collections arc grounded in her life as a teacher, potter, musician, Quaker minister, Buddhist novice, and farm worker. She lives in Minnesota, where she tends to animals and organic gardens.
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Common Knowledge
- Epigraph
- Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives. - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 428.007 — Language English & Old English languages Standard English usage (Prescriptive linguistics) standard subdivisions and translation standard subdivisions Education, research, related topics
- LCC
- PE68 .U5 .O74 — Language and Literature English language English
- BISAC
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- 51
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- (4.21)
- Languages
- English
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- ISBNs
- 1
