Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52(5) February 2009 doi:10.1598/JA AL.52.5.2 2009 International Reading Association (pp.

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Opening Spaces of Possibility: The Teacher as Bricoleur

At a time when matching instructional practices to external standards is the norm, making do, like a bricoleur, may feel like an odd fit.
Mary Ann Reilly

visitor to Murray Krantzmans (all teacher and student names are pseudonyms) eighth-grade classroom in northern New Jersey would find it filled with soft lighting, multiple seating arrangements, and a library with more than a thousand discrete titles, many of these artifacts gathered by the teacher. A lot of the usual books that adolescents favor are on hand alongside titles that are less likely to be found in a middle school classroom, texts that mirror the teachers more eclectic interests and knowledge. At a time when teachers often are required to mold their teaching to external standards, the presence of these texts seems all the more important. It is with these less typical offerings, as well as why and how Mr. Krantzman shares such texts, that this story about teaching and bricolage begins. In The Savage Mind, Lvi-Strauss (1962/1966) referred to bricolage as the make-do activities a handyperson employs while working. The bricoleur is one who tinkers with the materials at hand. Lvi-Strauss explained that the materials of the bricoleur are elements which can be defined by two criteria: they have had a use...and they can be used again (p. 35, italics in original). Similarly, Mr. Krantzman acts as a bricoleur by continually cobbling materials together in the course of teaching. Such intellectual activity requires f lexibility and the capacity to work with what is given while being responsive to emerging understandings. Lvi-Strauss wrote that the bricoleur derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he speaks not only with things...but through the medium of things (p. 21, italics in original). Throughout the year, Mr. Krantzman uses the work he and his students create as a means for further inquiry and dialogue. Resituating and transposing ideas, hunches, and products is the modus operandi in this class.

Tuning Ears
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During the third week of school, Mr. Krantzman shows Silence: Lectures and Writings (Cage, 1961) to 13-year-old Sofia, saying that he wonders if she might find interesting the way that voice and breath are represented on a page. Mr.

Krantzman has told his students that he wants them to read deeplymatters of voice and breath as represented in literature, especially poetry, are content to be learned throughout the year. As a frequent visitor to Mr. Krantzmans classroom in the role of researcher, I have come to realize that engaging students in the study of poetry as readers, writers, and performers is not a unit of study but rather a yearlong immersion that begins with texts he offers to each student and that is sustained through engagements that are woven through the year as it unfolds. During the school year, it is likely that he will place poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Lucille Clifton, Robert Creeley, e.e. cummings, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee, Molly Peacock, Gary Snyder, Sekou Sundiata, and William Carlos Williamsto name but a fewinto students hands. Likely, he will receive poems from students that they offer as important art. In helping students to shape poetry, he will teach them to name the poeticsuch as repetition, rhythm, meter, and figurative languagein other types of print and nonprint texts, as this is a classroom where the idea of genre is purposely blurred. Students success as poets rests not only in the direct poetry instruction Mr. Krantzman provides, but also in the way he guides students to seek and name the poetic across multiple types of texts. For example, Mr. Krantzman and his students study essays by Wendell Berry, Bill Bryson, Annie Dillard, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Barry Lopez in an effort to better understand how these essayists compose. Students will use techniques such as found poetry (Dunning & Stafford, 1992) and sketch-tostretch (Harste, Short, & Burke, 1988) as ways to deepen their comprehension and understanding of a writers craft. I want students to take the reading strategies they employ while reading fiction, such as imaging, and use it to help them make sense of essay, Mr. Krantzman explains, emphasizing the reusable nature of things learned. By January, students will have read Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie, 1991) and closely studied aspects of the writers craft that are based on Proses (2006) work (see Figure 1 for a description of the assignment). Mr. Krantzman explains, Students are amazed at Rushdies control as a writer and his use of

Figure 1

Reading Slowly: Studying Salman Rushdies Haroun and the Sea of Stories

During the next few weeks as you read Haroun and the Sea of Stories you will be asked to notice and comment on Salman Rushdies craft. You will be posting responses to what you read online and posting a reply to another classmates response. Chapters 12: Words Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted...reading quickly for plot, for ideas, even for psychological truths that a story revealscan be a hindrance when the crucial revelations are in the spaces between words, in what has been left out (Prose, 2006, pp. 16, 19). 1. Isolate a small section (a paragraph) from the first or second chapter and examine Rushdies choice of words closely. 2. Use a dictionary to help you trace the origin of a word or two. 3. Post your response online. 4. Respond to a posting. Chapters 34: Sentences What do you notice about Rushdies crafting of sentences in Chapters 3 and 4? Locate one or two beautifully crafted sentences from one of these chapters. What makes them so appealing? Look at how each sentence was made (part by part). 1. Post a response by recording the sentences you have identified and explaining why these sentences are so appealing. What exactly has Rushdie done? 2. Respond to a posting. Chapters 56: Paragraph Choose a section from Chapter 5 or Chapter 6 and notice how Rushdie shapes the paragraphs, deciding where to end one and begin another. As you ponder this, consider what Francine Prose says about the paragraph: The paragraph could be understood as a sort of literary respiration, with each paragraph as an extendedin some cases, very extendedbreath. Inhale at the beginning of the paragraph, exhale at the end (p. 66). 1. Post your response. What did you notice about Rushdies paragraphing? 2. Respond to a posting. Chapters 78: Narration Who is telling the story, and who might Rushdie have imagined is listening to the story of Haroun? Take some time as you read Chapters 7 and 8 to ponder these questions. 1. Post your response. Who is telling the story? Who is listening? 2. Respond to a posting. Chapters 911: Gesture What small physical actions, often unconscious or semireflexive, do you notice happening in Chapters 9, 10, and 11? How are the gestures you have identified important to the story being told and heard? 1. Post your response. 2. Respond to a posting. Chapter 12: Details Francine Prose writes, Details arent only the building blocks with which a story is put together, theyre also the clues to something deeper, keys not merely to our subconscious but to our historical time (p. 207). In this chapter, how does Rushdies use of details echo our own historical time? Record your thinking. 1. Post your response. 2. Respond to a posting.
Note. From Prose, F. (2006). Reading like a writer: A guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them. New York: HarperCollins.

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language. I dont know that they would have been able to read Rushdie with their ears without the immersion into poetry. It all starts there, learning to hear. In discussing his students understanding of craft, Mr. Krantzman remarks that one student, Peter, while discussing revisions to an essay he was writing, explained that theres regular sentences and language and then theres Rushdie sentences and language. Peter was revising word choice and syntax to develop more voice as he had seen done in Haroun. The power in Mr. Krantzmans instruction is that like him, his students begin to cobble together bits of what they have learned here and there and apply these ideas to new situations. This process of shaping individual students reading is one the teacher develops alongside his students as he comes to know them, their interests, and their reading behaviors. It is a practice Mr. Krantzman says he considers essential. He later explains that he has offered the Cage text to Sofia because he knows her to be an accomplished violinist. When we discuss Sofia several months later, he tells me that he has noticed that while she and her classmates are involved in conversation, she often moves her fingers on the table in front of her as if that surface might be a substitute for the fingerboard of her violin. I wonder if she is composing or rehearsing music, says Mr. Krantzman.

Collaging Cards
By the close of October, Sofia has selected three poems from those she has written to include in a portfolio of works as per an assignment Mr. Krantzman has given, and she has included a letter that introduces each of the poems. In the first, Sofia responds to an engagement with which Mr. Krantzman had provided students with during the previous month. Throughout a two-week period, students recorded the germ of potential poems on separate index cards, resisting actually writing a poem. Mr. Krantzman asked students to carry the cards and a pen with them throughout the two weeks so they might jot ideas as they occurred. Students recorded individual ideas on separate index cards, accumulating 10 cards. During the next week, students brought their deck of cards to class and working alone, with a partner, or in a group of three pitched their cards. Its like pitching baseball

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

cards, Mr. Krantzman explained. Students find an open section of the classroom and pitch their cards. Then they f lip a coin. If you get heads, you pick up three cards closest to you. Tails, you select the three cards farthest from you. Prior to students participating in this engagement, Mr. Krantzman has modeled how he would collect ideas and how he might use three random cards to form a poem. He introduces this engagement by gathering students in the center of the classroom and having them watch as he f lips index cards he has collected from previous students. He asks students to choose three cards from the ones scattered on the f loor, either close to him or far away depending on the coin toss. Students jockey with one another to read and reread the cards, laughing at some of what they find. They then choose three of the cards, selecting what they think seem to be the least related. Mr. Krantzman then arranges the three cards on the surface of a document camera and asks students to give him some quiet time as he thinks. Students quietly take seats around Mr. Krantzman as he begins to write, and as he does, he interrupts his writing to talk to the students about his evolving intentions. I want to use all three cards, preserving some of the language on each card, he tells them as he starts. He adds, I want to get at the underlying principle that connects the cards. The students observe as he composes the poem, borrowing language from each card and connecting the ideas, making use, like a bricoleur, of what is present. Using this method, Sofia has written the poem Vacant Skies (see Figure 2) and includes it in her portfolio. In her letter, she explains,
The three cards I picked had to do with music, art, and the sky. The reason I wrote about music is because it is a large part of my life. I do things with it a lot, and I decided to write a card about how music never goes away. I wrote a card about art because it isnt just a painting or a bunch of scribbles on a page. Art is something that has meaning to the person who created it, and often times tells a story. I chose to write about the sky because I always liked to just sit out on a clear day under a tree and watch the clouds go by. I always wondered as a child where the clouds went, and so I decided to base my poem on the card.

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Figure 2

Sofias Poem Vacant Skies

The sky is art. Always there, but taken for granted. The sky carries music. The wind whispers notes. Clouds wander. The music in the sky lasts forever, until it is understood. To fly with the aimless clouds In the sky that never ends. Singing heavens through time and space Music resounds. To fly forever. The air brushes my face The cotton candy sculpture clouds Take the shape of my thoughts. The art of imagination. For I cannot fly within the vacant sky that calls to me. It calls to me with music. It begs with soft singing, with vibrato. It calls for me to explore what has yet to be.

In this poem, Sofia explores the intersection of art and music in her life as occasioned by sitting beneath clouds and wondering. In a classroom that privileges wondering, Sofias musings seem right at home. Mr. Krantzman explains,
I plan instruction more as notes to myself. I have a sense of where the work might head, but it is not necessarily the procedural aspects that I am thinking most about. For example, in the poetry engagements I wanted kids to tune into hearing language: the assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia that is present in everyday talk. I want them to hear and record this. I want them to begin to name principles that rest beneath the surface of these everyday things. To do this, they will need to wonder.

Picturing Place
Throughout fall, Mr. Krantzman continues engaging students with poetry. In early October, he asks students to bring a photograph to class. He explains,
I tell them they dont have to be in the photograph, but they have to have been there when the photograph was taken. They cant be off in another room. They may have taken the photo or were standing outside the frame, or they may be in the photo.

My second piece is my picture poem, which I dont think is my absolute best work. The reason I put it here is because I learned a thing or two about punctuation in poetry. I can use it to create pauses when I need it to create an effect. I didnt just learn that by myself. John Cage helped a bit there.

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Students engage in sensory writing using the photograph they have brought to class. The photograph rests before them throughout the writing. They spend approximately 20 minutes in two- to four-minute intervals recording what they recall seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling when the photograph was taken. Mr. Krantzman directs this by prompting students to consider aspects related to the senses as they write through guided imagery (Gambrell, Kapinus, & Wilson, 1987; Geske, 1992; Jampole, Mathews, & Konopale, 1994; Lazear, 1991). Next, he collects the photographs and reissues them to the students so that each student has a new photograph. Mr. Krantzman then asks students to tell another peer a possible story related to the photograph. After this rehearsing, students write a quick story. To facilitate this, Mr. Krantzman prompts, Think about the photograph. Consider where and when you think it takes place and imagine a possible story. What might have happened? This prompt lays the groundwork for the character analysis work students will do later when reading Walter Dean Myerss 145th Street: Short Stories. Students spend 20 minutes writing the possible story. Mr. Krantzman returns the photograph and the new writing to each student. Students then have some options as they craft a poem. They might make use of their peers writing exclusively and craft a poem lifting words, phrases, and lines from the peers work and arranging these much like one might do to craft a found poem (Dunning & Stafford, 1992). They might create their own text based on their original writing, or they might elect to create a hybrid text based on their sensory writing and what their peer wrote. Mr. Krantzman expects students to try each engagement and to bring at least three of the works through a revising and editing process. In Sofias second poem (see Figure 3), based on a photograph taken at a wedding, she explains how Cages use of punctuation inf luenced her writing:

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Figure 3

Sofias Poem Memories

It was a party. With smells and tastes and feelings Very dim lights. You could tell when your picture came out. The smell of fresh food on the table. To see the beaming faces of those who you thought had long forgotten you. Still the lights were dim. Excitement was difficult to contain. You watched the dancing circle. If you didnt remember how to dance Your feet did. Around and around In the dimly lit circle. Warm hands of memories Held you as you danced Music that played so loud it rung your ears All the way home And when you checked out that dim picture You werent happy. You could barely see The expressions in faces But its okay, they said. Its a fine picture. A picture you made with your own words.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

Just as Sofia has observed Mr. Krantzman as bricoleur, here she too engages as one: using the photograph and recalled stories to craft a poem with potentially new insights. In Memories, we see the sensory details Sofia has included in the final draft, as well as her use of extended metaphor, approximations with line breaks and punctuation. Yet there is also unexplored territory. One thinks here of Vinzs (2007) notions of missed readings that she characterizes as disquiet easy responses (p. 1). In rereading the photograph through sensory details, Sofia seems to come to a detail that may well have been initially missed: And when you checked out that dim picture/You werent happy./You could barely see/The expressions in faces. The poem that she makes by repositioning the photograph alongside recalled sensory information and an imagined story is an example of bricolage.

to recognize that the events that make up aesthetic experiences are events that occur within and by means of the transactions with our environment that situate us in time and space (p. 130). Mr. Krantzman introduces students to the importance of time and place through selected class readings of The House on Mango Street (Cisneros, 1991) and 145th Street: Short Stories (Myers, 2001). With Cisneross text, Mr. Krantzman reads aloud the opening vignette, and across a few days, students put into order the next 35 vignettes. He divides his class of 24 students into four groups of six students. Each group receives a packet of vignettes, photocopied without page numbers. Students then work to arrange the vignettes they have in an order that makes sense. Mr. Krantzman listens in as the groups discuss and debate rationale but resists leading any of these discussions, as this is an opening engagement for the school year, and it provides him with important information about the students and how they are reading and problem solving together. After this initial round, Mr. Krantzman continues to reduce the number of groups until by the second day there are just two. Again students work to order the vignettes correctly. On the last day, the whole class works to build a sequence of the 35 vignettes, listing the chapter titles on chart paper and arguing for their ideas. Before reading aloud the remainder of the text, Mr. Krantzman debriefs the work, asking students to comment in their notebooks about the process, what they noticed about themselves as readers, and the social nature of reading. He explains,
I want to emphasize reading and rereading deliberately. By doing this in September, I see a greater engagement around reading and students are more successful. By the time I hand them a copy of the novel, they have read most of it and heard me read the ending. They reread with a picture of the neighborhood in mind. All students meet with success, and this becomes an important boost of confidence.

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Living Wide-Awake Lives

In visiting this classroom, I am reminded of Greenes (1995) wise dictum regarding the need for learners to live wide-awake lives and the importance of situated engagements with multiple art forms as a means for releasing the imagination. Greene writes, We need

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Through this engagement, students begin to notice textual details, consider logic, and understand how who they are and who they are not inf luences how they understand what they read. This learning is enduring. At the midpoint of the year, for example, Mr.

Krantzman asks students to ref lect on their learning. In a four-page essay, Sofia writes,
Reading House on Mango Street allowed me to think outside the box. Not only was the book itself amazing, it was a different type of writing. I remember a lecture on our brain patterns. How we already have method paths burned into our brains. When we try something new, it becomes more difficult to understand because we have no path to follow. Now, I understand this concept. The House on Mango Street allowed a new path to form in my learning process.

The reason I didnt understand poetry is that I didnt have a way to look at it. After reading and writing so many poems, I understand language and poetry better. Writing poetry has taught me how to manipulate language in order to create images. I know how to enjoy poetry.

Mining the Ordinary

Sofias last poem for the portfolio is based on a rereading of her notebook that she had begun in September. Mr. Krantzman explains,
Its neither a readers nor a writers notebook, but rather a place where you think on paper. I dont separate them. I start by having students develop territories (Atwell, 1998). I want them to build stamina and speed. The only homework they have at the beginning of the school year is 20 minutes of writing per night, five nights a week. They can write about whatever as long as it is not a diary entry. They generally cant sustain 20 minutes, so I ask them to begin gradually starting at about 10 minutes and build. What I notice is that most will have difficulty after a week or two. They say they cant think of what to write about. I keep the assignment, and as they push through this having nothing to say, their writing changes.

Forging new ways to learn is important work, and Mr. Krantzman explains that arts-based thinking is a means to this end. I really want to emphasize collage and juxtaposition throughout the year. What happens if we randomly put x next to y? What do we learn? Again one is reminded here of bricolage insomuch as Mr. Krantzman continues to make use of what is at hand in new and interesting ways.

Situating Time
In response to 145th Street, students create a character chart tracing characters actions across each of the stories and then analyzing the characters across time and at particular points in time. This analysis of text through diachronic and synchronic methods informs students learning throughout the school year. In the opening story, Big Joes Funeral, we meet characters we will come to read about as the book unfolds. I want kids thinking about what these characters might be doing while off camera, explains Mr. Krantzman. Their lives have been continuing. Whats been happening? One might surmise that Mr. Krantzman similarly wants his students to understand their own work as learners through diachronic and synchronic analysis and, as such, creates conditions for such ref lection, such as the midyear essay. For example, Sofia recognizes that her understanding of poetry and herself as a poet has changed. Sofia writes that in previous years she [D]espised all types of poetry. I was convinced that I couldnt write it and that poetry made no sense. Through classroom engagements and lectures, Sofia explains that she is a more confident writer now who can employ methods to help her make sense of her reading and writing:

He explains that after having difficulty generating topics, students begin to notice the world around them, making use of very ordinary observations. It is when the notebooks are well anchored that Mr. Krantzman asks students to return to mine for ideas for poems. I tell them to go back to their territories. Reread your notebook and pull some poetry out of what you have done. In Sofias notebook poem Rollercoaster, she unifies the poem by repeating a line, Round and round we go, where we stop no one knows. The idea of a unifying motif has been emphasized by Krantzman throughout the first marking period in their study of Cisneross and Myerss texts and is present in Sofias thinking. Sofia writes, After I wrote down the things I saw come up, I thought of a carousel or a rollercoaster, hence the name Rollercoaster. Perhaps most dominant in this poem, though, is Sofias attempt to make use of white space (see Figure 4), again a technique Mr. Krantzman taught and Sofia saw present in the Cage text. Sofia explains,

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Figure 4

Sofias Poem Rollercoaster

Life. It has its ups and downs. Like a rollercoaster. Its never always happy or sad. Round and round we go, where we stop no one knows. Everyones got his own rollercoaster. Mine runs on music. Round and round we go, where we stop no one knows. The plunge it takes to the future. Unpredictable. Round and round we go, where we stop no one knows. Just keeps going faster. The music never stops. Round and round we go, where we stop no one knows. School and work all thrown in the mix. Thats just life. Round and round we go, where we stop no one knows.

I also applied a little of what I learned from Cage here with my spacing to create dramatic pauses. From far away it looks like an odd paper with writing in random places, but once you read it, it makes sense. I had never really written a poem like this one with a line that kind of tied everything together. Round and

round we go, where we stop no one knows.

Practicing Currere
In reading Sofias work, I think about the tensions between making a plan and living the plan. On the early September morning when Mr. Krantzman gives Sofia the Cage text, he does not know if it will resonate with her. It may well be a text she sets back on the shelf unviewed or one she abandons after a brief look. Perhaps this text is one Sofia will carry with her for the next few weeks as she attempts to read and reread Cage. Perhaps none or some of these scenarios will be her experience. What matters here is that this brief exchange between the teacher and the student opens possibilities for learning while modeling thoughtful conversation and important habits of mind, for alongside the book, these less tangible but nonetheless critical practices have been offered too. Sustaining interest in poetry is sustaining interest in students living wide-awake lives and, as such, requires curricular routes that one makes alongside students. One could say Mr. Krantzman practices currere (Pinar, 1994; Pinar & Grumet, 1976), Pinars and
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Grumets term for a reconceptualization of curriculum as a course of action that advances understanding. Here understanding is temporally conditioned and, as such, occurs alongside lived actions. Externally prescribed curricula, scripted lessons, and packaged classroom materials intended for teachers to use directly as written with students suggest an absence of temporal realityas if that which was conceived in a different time and place might be wholly applicable to the present moment. Such epic constructs (Bakhtin, 1981) situate teaching and learning as finalizable. Bakhtin explains that [d]iscourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word (p. 292). At Mr. Krantzmans school, teachers had been given a language arts curriculum they did not write, although teachers did write the initial curriculum. The work the teachers did was thrown out, he explains. Instead, the director of curriculum rewrote the document alone and gave that to us. Mr. Krantzman describes the official curriculum as a collection of four thematic units of study, one to be taught per marking period, that privileged reading and included almost no emphasis on writing, speaking, listening, or viewing. The texts selected by the administrator privileged whiteness and what Mr. Krantzman describes as a nave understanding of genre:
I did the best I could initially when I first received the curriculum. I spent a lot of time figuring out how I could teach the units. But when I tried the second unit, I realized that there was a conf lict between the ways I understood curriculum to work and the way this curriculum required me to operate. In order to enact this unit the way it was written, I pretty much had to pretend it was September again and instead of picking up the strands of learning that were already in progress, I had to start a new story. This did not work, so I chose surreptitiously to abandon the prescribed units and to bring in my own thinking and text selections.

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This straying from the official document was not comfortable but necessary, says Mr. Krantzman. I dont like to do things on the sly, but I couldnt teach what was given. There was no place for the kids inside the curriculum. Everything had been determined.

With the presence of a new director of curriculum, Mr. Krantzman and his colleagues have been able to discuss curriculum revisions and have been encouraged to live outside the existing document.

Teacher as Bricoleur
In The Lost Language of Cranes: Windows and Mirrors in the Regressive Phase of Currere, Pinar (1994) tells us that
[t]he regressive phase of currere is not about wandering around in ones own house of mirrors, Narcissus-like, but remembering that the language we speak now derives from what and whom we saw through our windows as infants, and children, and young adults. (p. 265)

The idea that ones autobiography matters and how it matters is essential here. Mr. Krantzmans reactions and responses to his students and their reactions and responses to him, one another, and the texts they compose are prompted at all levels of consciousness by who they are, are not, and have been. The presence of autobiographical sensibilities as a signature in the design of classroom instruction and curriculum is no less a need for Mr. Krantzman and his eighth graders than it is for other teachers and students. In contrast to the image of teacher as an embodied self, I think of Sumaras (1996) characterization of teacher as tour guide. He writes, Curriculum is a normalizing experience.... Teachers become tour guides, showing students which sites must be noticed.... As a daily performance, teaching becomes a pointing ritual that seldom pierces underneath the skin of the everyday (p. 233). The bricoleurs work depends on his or her capacity to pierce underneath the skin of the everyday (Sumara, 1996, p. 233). Mr. Krantzman says that he begins the school year wanting students to hear the poetic in common speech and that his intentions evolve alongside his understanding of the work. The teacher, like the bricoleur, understands that nothing remains fixed and, as such, makes use of materials at hand, often reinventing based on evolving intentions. This capacity to walk the uncharted path is important. As Sofia noted in Vacant Skies, clouds wander. Morson (1994) in Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time explains that creativity and ethics are

References
Atwell, N. (1998). In the middle: New understandings about writing, reading, and learning (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/ Cook. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Cage, J. (1961). Silence: Lectures and writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cisneros, S. (1991). The house on Mango Street. New York: Vintage.

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lessened when living is understood as the mere unfolding of an already completely determined sequence of steps to a ready-made conclusion (p. 24). I think about Morsons assertion in relationship to the negotiated texts that Mr. Krantzman and his students determine and consider how occasioning learning is quite different than sequencing activities for learners to do to get to some prescribed meaning. If meaning is fully prescribed, one need not attend. To create requires the willingness to enter unknown territories, often making use of what is at hand. The creative process, Morson (1994) contends, typically traces not a straight line to a goal but a series of false leads, missed opportunities, new possibilities, improvisations, visions, and revisions. It is constituted by an intention that evolves over time (p. 24). It is this multiplicity of intention evolving over time that most characterizes Mr. Krantzmans instruction and that is central to why students come to deeply love learning and be academically successful. Mr. Krantzmans students almost always pass the states literacy assessment, with close to 40% of the students performing at an advanced level. At a time when matching instructional practices to external standards is more the norm, making do may feel like an odd fit. Yet Mr. Krantzmans instruction might well be understood as bricolage in that he constructs opportunities that open spaces of possibility, not destined certainties. He understands the school year, not as a collection of units of study ready to be enacted, but rather as learning that is collaged and juxtaposed and made with students along the way. As such, he reuses strategies and texts, changing intention to match perceived need, pulling in materials he finds at hand as needed.

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Dunning, S., & Stafford, W. (1992). Getting the knack: 20 poetry writing exercises. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Gambrell, L.B., Kapinus, B., & Wilson, R. (1987). Using mental imagery and summarization to achieve independence in comprehension. Journal of Reading, 30(7), 638642. Geske, J. (1992, August). Teaching creativity for right brain and left brain thinkers. Paper presented at the 75th annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Montreal, Qubec, Canada. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Harste, J., Short, K., & Burke, C. (1988). Creating classrooms for authors and inquirers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Jampole, E.S., Mathews, F.N., & Konopale, B.C. (1994). Academically gifted students use of imagery for creative writing. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 28(1), 115. Lazear, D. (1991). Seven ways of teaching: The artistry of teaching with multiple intelligences. Palatine, IL: Skylight. Lvi-Strauss, C. (1962/1966). The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1962) Morson, G.S. (1994). Narrative and freedom: The shadows of time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Myers, W.D. (2001). 145th Street: Short stories. New York: Laurel Leaf. Pinar, W. (1994). The lost language of cranes: Windows and mirrors in the regressive phase of currere. In Autobiography, politics and sexuality: Essays in curriculum theory 19761992 (pp. 253267). New York: Peter Lang. Pinar, W., & Grumet, M. (1976). Toward a poor curriculum. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. Prose, F. (2006). Reading like a writer: A guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them. New York: HarperCollins. Rushdie, S. (1991). Haroun and the sea of stories. New York: Penguin. Sumara, D. (1996). Private readings in public: Schooling the literary imagination. New York: Peter Lang. Vinz, R. (2007, November 17). Reading and (other)wise: Rereadings and missed reading in literature and its teaching. Paper presented at the English conference of the National Council Teachers of English Conference, New York.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

52(5)

February 2009

Reilly teaches at Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York, USA; e-mail [email protected].

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