What follows below is an introduction
to senior English teacher, Alana Bell, and our recent conversation
with her about teaching English at Linden.
Alana Bell spearheads the English department's
innovative approach to teaching girls literary analysis and
creative writing. Alana has a B.A. Honours from Trent University
(English) and M.A. (English) and PhD (ABD) from the University
of Hawai'i at Manoa. Alana has experience teaching English
at all levels from elementary to post-secondary. Her specialties
are life writing, contemporary writing, pedagogy, and interdisciplinary
approaches to literature. In addition to being one of Linden's
co-principals, Alana teaches Grade 12 Writer's Craft and Studies
in Literature.
Linden: Your teaching is informed by feminist
pedagogy combined with a background in life-writing. Your
unique interests seem tailor-made for Linden. How did you
develop a taste for life-writing, and what inspired your focus
on pedagogy?
Alana: I was an English major at
Trent University. I always liked the literature in the curriculum,
but the programme didn't really speak to me until I started
taking courses with a more inter-disciplinary and multi-cultural
approach. I took a Canadian women's literature course and
a multi-cultural literature course with Christi Verduyn, and
those were transforming experiences for me. What I liked about
women's literature was that it broke down the boundaries between
what some might consider "high" and "low"
literature, and opened up the discipline to texts like letters,
legal and primary documents, which gave more concrete and
in-depth insights into the women's lives.
I enrolled at University of Hawai'i for my MA because of their
creative writing programme. I met an author who had studied
at UH, and her work and influences at Hawai'i appealed
to me.
When I began the MA programme, I very quickly
changed from creative writing to literary studies. I had developed
an interest in life-writing at Trent, and during my first
semester in Hawai’i, I took a Women’s Autobiography
course from Miriam Fuchs at the Center for Biographical Research.
Though I loved writing creatively, I realized through that
course that I had questions I wanted to pursue in literary
studies and that was the area of scholarship which would provide
the most growth for me at that time.
My MA in literary studies also allowed me
to continue to pursue my interest in the relationships between
music and literature. My MA thesis was on jazz and blues in
novels by Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, and Josef Skvorecky.
As I moved on to the Ph.D. programme at UH, I sought to combine
my interests in life-writing and music and literature, and
these come together in my dissertation on autobiographical
and biographical representations of Glenn Gould. This is a
fascinating topic for me, because it allows me to consider
the possibilities for representing musicians’ lives across
a wide variety of genres. I’m looking at print biographies,
music, film, fictional representations, poetry, websites,
album covers, and photography. One drawback of this dissertation
topic is that it doesn’t allow me to further my interest
in women’s lives and writing. However, I am able to use
my knowledge of life-writing theory, a great deal of which
has focused on women’s life-writing, towards my dissertation.
Linden: The Linden School offers its teachers
the unique opportunity to develop their own course outlines,
to select texts of their choice, and to shape the course according
to their interests, and of course, in line with the school’s
girl-centred pedagogy. How have you incorporated your interests
in the development of your courses at Linden?
Alana: Along with my dissertation,
my course work and area exams for my Ph.D. have been formative
for me and have influenced my teaching tremendously. One of
my Ph.D. areas focused on writing pedagogy, specifically feminist
pedagogy, writing for a multi-cultural classroom and writing
assessment, and I draw on the research I did for this exam
constantly in my teaching and curriculum design.
My background in women’s life-writing
and other women’s literature has really been an asset
to my teaching experience at Linden. The girls I teach are
developing their own identities, and reading about other women’s
lives gives them something to relate to. I also think that
autobiographies and biographies offer interesting opportunities
to develop critical thinking skills. We often take these forms
to be truth, but in fact, autobiographies and biographies
are often highly edited or artful accounts written from a
particular rhetorical perspective and with a particular purpose
and audience in mind. These texts encourage us to think and
ask questions: What is truth? Is it possible to represent
oneself completely, or accurately through text? Autobiographies
and biographies help us learn to question genres and information
that we may have taken to be factual, and therefore not considered
questioning. Once we become aware of the self-editing that
shapes these texts, we start looking for these issues in other
texts both in school and in the world around us. My hope for
the girls is that they can take these critical thinking skills
and apply them outside the classroom.
Some of the autobiographies that we look
at are highly literary and experimental. For example, we look
at the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in Grade 9.
In many ways this book confounds expectations of a typical
autobiography. Toklas is written by Gertrude Stein, so it’s
actually Gertrude Stein’s life told through the voice
of her partner, Alice Toklas. This autobiography exposes the
Grade 9’s to complex ideas of genre and allows them to
talk about modernist literature and experimentation through
a text that may be more accessible than other experimental
literature of that time. Students find the narrative challenging,
and this is one of the reasons why I have selected this text.
High school students need to emerge from the traditional and
have their ideas challenged.
When they look at a text like this, students
get to think about how they would represent themselves and
what choices they would make as writers. One of the assignments
asks students to tell their life stories from the point of
view of someone who knows them well, as Stein did with Toklas.
Some do musical autobiographies or visual self-representations
and then write an analysis of their piece that explains the
choices they’ve made. This unit offers students the opportunity
for self-discovery, and self-awareness in a creative, literary,
and interdisciplinary form.
Even a less experimental text like Anne
Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl poses interesting literary
questions. Since Anne Frank’s diary has gone through
multiple editions, we can talk about editors’ influences
on literature and what kinds of things have been deemed appropriate
for girls to write about in different time periods. This also
involves a consideration of audience expectations. Anne Frank
is appropriate for students in Grade 8 because the book provides
an example of a young girl, whose identity was linked inextricably
to the social and political situations around her, and it
helps our students to see the ways in which their lives are
influenced by the context in which they live. In class we
do an assignment where the girls write a diary that is meant
for publication, and in which they must address the current
events happening around them. I have had instances of students
who disliked reading the news, and who found themselves encouraged
to build their thinking skills and reconsider their place
in the world by analyzing news issues in relation to their
self and their developing identities.
Along with an emphasis on narrative and
critical thinking, I want the books we read to address issues
that are pertinent to Linden’s mission as a girl-centred
school.
In the Grade 12 Studies in Literature and
Writer’s Craft class, we are studying The Story of
Jane Doe: A Book About Rape, which allows us to consider
the way women’s identities and bodies are institutionalized,
and the ways in which writing can allow a woman to exert some
level of control over her public or institutional identity.
At the same time, it’s a fascinating text in terms of
narrative because it’s a kind of hybrid form that incorporates
multiple types of text, by including fiction, autobiography,
journals, graphics, and a kind of institutional language (through
court and medical documents) that we don’t study very
often in literature.
In Grade 10, we read I Rigoberta Menchu:
An Indian Woman in Guatemala. This testimonio, a kind
of communal autobiography, allows the girls to consider women’s
roles in their community and in politics and activism. The
1999 controversy surrounding this text also brings up important
questions of genre, ethics, and political purpose in literature.
I don’t want to give the impression
that at Linden we only read autobiographies and biographies.
We also read fiction, poetry, essays, and drama from various
time periods and locations, and analyze media.
We strive for a balance between canonical
literature and literature that has been marginalized. We study
Shakespeare and Chaucer and more canonical women’s literature
like Emma and Jane Eyre, but we bring questions
to these texts that are informed by our girl-centred philosophy.
My concern is not really with exposing the students to the
classics (though I am interested in the question of how certain
texts come to be classics and others don’t); I’m
interested in providing students with the tools they need
to analyze any literature they encounter, and we can use many
different texts to build these skills.
Sometimes girls will come to me with comments
or questions about why they are reading a particular text
in Grade 8, while their cousin at another school read it in
Grade 12. My response is always that it’s not the grade
in which you read the book that is important, it’s the
questions you bring to it. This year, we read Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God both in Grade 9 and in
the Grade 12 Studies in Literature course, because I felt
it was important that the Grade 12’s who hadn’t
read it in Grade 9 be exposed to that text. The discussions
in the two classes were very different. The Grade 9’s
had very different interests and concerns than the Grade 12’s,
and each group was able to bring something of their own to
the text.
Linden: In your experience, what aspects
of writing do most girls struggle with? How do these courses
assist girls in developing better writing skills? In short,
how do you teach writing?
Alana: At Linden, we emphasize writing
as a multi-step process including brainstorming and free writing,
drafting, revising, peer revision, proof-reading, and editing.
Breaking writing down into many steps makes writing tasks
seem more manageable to students and eliminates some of the
stress they feel when they face a blank page. This process
approach translates into many different classroom activities.
Students keep journals to develop fluency in writing and to
help form a link between writing and thinking. We also use
free writing (writing for a certain amount of time without
stopping and without focusing on grammar, punctuation, and
spelling) to generate thought during class discussions. Larger
writing assignments, like essays and book reports, are broken
down into steps, like the ones I’ve listed above, and
students are given instruction on each of the steps. We do
teach grammar, spelling, and punctuation, but students understand
that these are most important in later drafts of an assignment,
and that in early drafts the emphasis is getting their ideas
down on the page and organizing them.
Another important aspect of the writing
programme at Linden is an emphasis on a community of writers.
Students share their ideas for specific projects and their
more general ideas about writing with their classmates on
a fairly regular basis, and we also do a lot of peer review.
If I had to pick the most important aspect
of the Linden writing programme, it’s the emphasis on
revision. We really try to get away from the notion than you
can sit down the night before and hammer out a really good
piece of writing. Even the best writers revise. Many classes
at Linden use an end-of-the-year portfolio project to emphasize
revision and self-assessment of writing. Students collect
their written work throughout the year, and in the spring,
they look it over, choose pieces that represent their best
work (or pieces that they feel need the most revision), revise
them substantially, and write an introduction to their portfolio
explaining how these pieces demonstrate the ways in which
they’ve grown as writers throughout the year. This encourages
students to be active participants in the writing evaluation
process and to assess their own work and make goals for the
future.
Linden: What pre-conceptions did you find
yourself questioning after coming to Linden ?
Alana: I don’t think I had a
lot of preconceptions about Linden. As soon as I heard about
the school’s girl-centred philosophy and read the mission
statement, I wanted to teach here. I felt that it would be
an excellent fit for me.
I’ve always been interested in the
social aspects of teaching. It’s important to expose
people to ideas they may not encounter elsewhere and voice
that may not always be easily heard. In the past, I’ve
had arguments with other teachers about whether or not our
role is to influence the students socially and politically.
It’s my opinion that all learning and all courses are
political, even if they don’t openly acknowledge it.
I always tried to focus my teaching on equality, equity and
social justice, along with the study of literature, and I
choose my texts based on that. It’s a political choice.
But a course that focuses on Shakespeare or deals exclusively
with canonical texts is equally as political; it just privileges
a different perspective. The argument that I’ve had in
the past with other teachers is not going to occur at Linden.
The social aspect of teaching is highly valued here, and that’s
one thing that makes me very happy to be a Linden teacher.
Linden has really confirmed for me the importance
of learning that happens at the high school level while the
girls’ identities are still developing rapidly. I used
to see the university level as a more important stage in life,
or at least the level at which I would feel the most satisfaction
teaching. I’ve questioned that since coming here.
I’m constantly amazed by the number
of girls who come up to me and say, “I couldn’t
do _____ before I came to Linden.” And it’s true.
I’ve seen girls grow and develop in ways that they didn’t
think were possible before they came here. It’s an incredible
experience to be a part of that.
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