Virtual Communities

by Jim Burke

When poet Czeslaw Milosz writes "I learned to say here is my home," he clarifies all I know about the idea of community. It involves choice: you must choose some place, some time, some people, must declare your allegiance based on some shared sense of values or common goal. The ability to make such choices knowingly often comes as a result, having felt out of place, unaccepted, misunderstood at some point. And, perhaps more than any other factor, our notion of community includes, indeed demands some sense of "home," of belonging, security, welcome. It is, to borrow from Robert Frost, that place where "when we knock they must let us in."

When I entered teaching, I assumed ours was a profession defined by its tolerance, its intelligence, its common purpose: to educate kids. Unfortunately this assumption ignores our common denominator: we are human and thus seem to demand some measure of conflict. One of my greatest disappointments has been the realization of how we in our own profession can antagonize each other or our ideas, can pass judgment on others’ methods and practices, in the worst cases utterly dismissing each others’ knowledge and experience as worthless, meaningless, irresponsible.

In my second year of teaching I somehow found my way to the Asilomar conference in September. After a weekend of rooming with Bob Chapman, a writing teacher in Eureka who introduced me to portfolios and talked me into coming to his excellent workshop that weekend, after talking to Mary Kay Healy and Sandra Murphy over dinner and leaving with an invitation to write an article about work my freshman were doing, I felt some sense of arrival. Here were people who read, who wrote, who never lost their fascination for education and welcomed me into their conversation as an equal partner; being new, being young were not limitations but part of my knowledge about teaching and education. I drove home understanding Milosz’s ideas about home and belonging, feeling myself a part of something larger than myself, than my own classroom.

If I had not fully understood the boundaries of that community nor fully recognized my membership in it, a short time later I received from Carol Jago what I now consider a written invitation to this close society of English teachers which had begun to claim me as one of its own through invitations to write, to visit schools, to serve organizations. Early on I began to write and publish articles about education in different papers and journals. This was a different route, though I didn’t think about it at the time, of joining the great discussion that creates and sustains the thoughtful society to which we all belong. Carol wrote:

???

Imagine being a young teacher and recieving such a letter, such a model of being a reader, a writer, hearing such a voice telling you even after these years it doesn’t get easier, that the work matters, that you are not alone.

At this point my world was fundamentally changed forever by the arrival of e-mail. It linked me and my students to a world far beyond our classroom and brought people from all around the world into our class, our discussions, creating immediately a more worldly, global, exciting community in our classroom. Kids came in everyday wondering who they might hear from, whether they had letters from their correspondents in Israel, Germany, Argentina, India. And while the conception of the classroom expanded, so did my idea of what an English department was or could be. I no longer felt limited to a department where too often I felt alienated and disengaged; there was no great conversation going on. Soon after I got Carol’s letter we both got on-line and began the nearly daily conversation about books and teaching (and sons) that has continued through this day. I will send her a draft of this essay, in fact, because often we read for each other and offer feedback, becoming with a few others not only a virtual department but an electronic writing group when needed and always an online bookgroup. Eventually the dialogue expanded to include others such as Bill Clawson and Sheldon Smith, both Project leaders who all served as virtual mentors to me at a time when I had few I could talk to about why lessons failed, how literature is taught, what kind of writing kids need to do. Having once asked several of them for any ideas on how to approach Homer’s Odyssey, Bill Clawson sent me this:

???

I found myself having an e-mail correspondence with the head of my former school of education that can only be compared to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Geography no longer mattered; or rather it had been reconstituted into a mental geography where so long as I was near a modem the roundtable was always available. These mentors and colleagues responded with specific suggestions, elaborate assignments, or praise, periodically supplementing this e-mail conference with "snail mail" packages containing articles, books, or disks with dozens of exemplary projects and rubrics for me to think about and steer by.

All of this leads me to the most profound experience I have had when it comes to community. CATENet began as an emergency response to the initial CLAS test challenge of Alice Walker’s stories. I quickly realized that there existed no real line between English teachers around the state. I sent out a simple query asking for e-mail addresses so that we could keep all areas informed of the CLAS developments since the story was so sporadically covered. After three years CATENet allows, at its best, a thoughtful, ongoing dialogue about teaching English to take place among over one hundred of the leaders of English language arts in California. Sometimes a week or two can pass without anything on there. Then the CDE calls for a new framework and CATENet lights up and everyone is trying to figure out how to respond. Or a teacher wants to go to some international conference for English teachers and she writes to CATENet and asks for help finding grants; people immediately respond with ideas, addresses, names, e-mail addresses, encouragement. Or a reporter wants to cover a story and solicit English teachers’ thoughts on, let’s say, the Huck Finn controversy so they post a question to us via CATENet and the conversation resumes.

These electronic tools do not always build a stronger community, erect bridges between our islands. Sometimes the illusion fosters the hope of greater communication; too often, in such situations, we mistake information for communication, words for feelings, addresses for homes.

Few accomplishments could mean more than creating a community, being the one who said Let’s come together, here, now, for this reason--and they did. CATENet continues to grow, welcoming in new teachers to this very real community of minds and hearts that share a common purpose: to help insure that all communities are made of people who can talk about ideas, communicate their thoughts, their feelings, and engage in the business of being human and part of the human community to which we all belong. It is where our stories come from: sitting around the fire in the old days talking about where we came from, how we got here, and where we will go--so long as we go there together. I know enough about this work of ours now to understand that without you, without Asilomar, without CATENet, I have no chance of sustaining the enthusiasm that defines my days as an English teacher.

THE END