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In a country whose streets and even classrooms often turn bloody, a title like The Peaceable Classroom has a certain instant appeal, especially when the Foreword is an ebullient one by Peter Elbow. (Elbow's pedagogy along with Ken Macrorie's, and the National Writing Project's among others are herein examined). Elbow characterizes O'Reilley's language as talismanic; her volume as one he could hardly wait to see in print, a book with a presence.
Settling down to her highly readable prose, however, one quickly finds her inspiration for her non-violent pedagogy actually stems from the Vietnam War, when something as frivolous as a poor English grade might have transformed a student into a draftee. This ever present guilt was coupled with a question posed by a professor at a colloquium O'Reilley attended: "Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?" It is this political agenda (or moral imperative) she brings to the classroom, contending that certain contemporary techniques such as freewriting and journaling invite the student's inner life into community, then, outreaching the mere classroom, go on to foster peace and justice. She admits this actual process has been well underway for some time. "Twenty years ago," says O'Reilley, "when composition teachers put their students in a circle, that scraping of chairs marked the beginning of a gentle revolution"--the beginning of teaching of writing in the light of what she deems a pacifist discipline:
We began to discover as teachers, one of our jobs is to help a student find her "sacred center," the place where she stands at the crossroads of human experience. Beyond that, we needed to help her to see that she exists within another circle: a community. To find voice and to mediate voice in a circle of others is one of the central dialectics of the peaceable classroom.Ms. O'Reilley admits, though, that she and her ilk may be faulted in their "underlying presumption that it is a good thing to encourage an expression of the inner world of students," that there is the danger of turning the classroom into some kind of therapy group. Her retort to that criticism is: "[G]ood teaching is, in the classical sense, therapy: good teaching involves re-weaving the spirit." She adds, "Besides, in the main, freewriting seems to be self-correcting and, at its best self-healing." The sometimes messiness of such opening of wounds is apparently more devoutly to be wished than traditional teaching methods that, she maintains, foster anger and "feed the purpose of overweening military." There must, however, be concessions:
Of course, a student's inner world may be positively poisonous; she may need to be led away from it toward health and society and the law of physics. Thus I have come to distrust any pedagogy that does not conclude in the communal: subject to the checks and balances of the others, the teacher, the texts.By her own admission, Ms. O'Reilley's classroom convictions have often wavered and frequently toppled, too heavily weighted with human shortcomings. "Violence is easy," she says. "Nonviolence, by contrast, takes all we have and costs not less than everything." She ultimately qualifies teaching as "some kind of spiritual inquiry so what we learn is more important than what they learn." Her inquiry is an intriguing process.
Her battle cry for pacifism calls forth quotes from Roman Catholic, Zen Buddhist, and Quaker sources, but in the end, it is a religion of human uniqueness that she champions as the natural foe of commercialism and violence. It is the "lost sister," the feminine, the intuitive, the anima that must be fostered to counteract the "fierce brother," the authoritarian, the coldly rational. Inner worlds must be exposed in a community of tolerance so that mindful teaching can begin. O'Reilley's message is not a new one--that in an atmosphere of mindfulness and trust, literature has the power to bring forth change. Her voice, however, occasionally sounds fresh harmonious notes in the sometimes overwhelming cacophony of pedagogical methodology.
Katharine S. Boling
Francis Marion University