Abstract
I’ve lived in Manhattan’s East Village for 20 years. Sometimes I call it Little Utopia because every category of person seems to have a place there. Hippies, junkies, babies, punks, bankers, beggars, supermodels, rock stars, aging immigrants, brand new refugees. Change is tradition in the East Village, a tradition that keeps its institutions impervious to deterministic, top–down urban planning. Take for example the community garden next to my building. When I first moved in, it was an overgrown tangle of plants, trees, flowers, and weeds on top of an abandoned lot. Honeysuckle and ivy crept up my window, and the gentle, waving fronds of the weeping willow cast hypnotic shadows on my living room wall. The iron gate door was locked and chained, and the most foul-mouthed woman I’ve ever heard possessed the only key. From time to time, she would unlock the gate and curse nonstop, pulling weeds and hacking branches. There were occasional birthday parties for her grandkids, I guessed. The trees and bushes were littered with balloons and paper; music blasted from tinny speakers. As the flower beds were trampled, Penny, the ogress, cursed harder than ever. Whatever garbage they missed picking up would remain. The garden grew up over it.
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Notes
- 1.
The advertisement for the coordinator of tutoring in writing was co-written by members of the search committee and disseminated via electronic mail during July and August 2003.
- 2.
I thank for this information George Otte, writing director at Baruch College in the late 1980s and 1990s, and Gary Hentzi, the current associate dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College.
- 3.
See, for example, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
- 4.
See, for example, Vygotsky’s Mind in Society.
- 5.
- 6.
The term “pedagogic intuition” was coined by Prabhu (1987) in a discussion of his Communicative Language Teaching project in Bangalore, India. His take on second language acquisition embraces a Vygotskyan understanding of the primacy of communication in learning. He writes,
The stimulus for the project was a strongly-felt pedagogic intuition … that the development of competence in a second language requires not a systematization of language inputs or maximization of planned practice, but rather the creation of conditions in which learners engage in an effort to cope with communication (3).
- 7.
Since my review of the literature on ESL writers while working on my master’s thesis in 1995, ESL writing pedagogy theory and research had significantly morphed into the more appropriately identified field of second language writing, teasing out, and complexifying teaching and learning issues. See, for example, Matsuda, Cox, Jordan, and Ortmeier-Hooper (2006) Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Significantly, there had been groundbreaking theory and research on Generation 1.5 student writers, which accurately defined most of the population at Baruch. See, for example, Harklau (2000, pp. 35–67).
- 8.
- 9.
See, for example, Giroux (2003, pp. 197–204).
- 10.
For an excellent reference and manifesto, see Cross-Language Relations in Composition, a special issue of College English edited by Min-Zhan Lu, Paul Kei Matsuda, and Bruce Horner in 2006.
- 11.
See also, Pajares (2003).
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Jerskey, M. (2011). The Fortunate Gardener: Cultivating a Writing Center. In: Summerfield, J., Smith, C. (eds) Making Teaching and Learning Matter. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9166-6_5
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