Round My Way: Authority and Double-Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers

Eli Goldblatt spent six years teaching in a small private high school for low-income students in Philadelphia. The stories he tells about three of the students - Maria, Tita, and Kareem - center around their journal writing and drafts of papers they wrote about their neighborhoods during the 1988-89 school year. The stories collectively represent one teacher's attempt to read his students' writing with care. Goldblatt uses the concept of authority to relate student writers to overarching social structures. He argues that established writers derive authority not from personal self-confidence, but from powerful social institutions such as schools, academic disciplines, business entities, and interpersonal relationships which they come to represent through the long course of their education, apprenticeship, and professional training.Goldblatt also uses W.E.B. Du Bois'ss concept of double-consciousness to illuminate the writing situation of students who come from communities whose social institutions are not powerful in the economic and political life of the dominant society, such as neighborhood organizations, local churches, and extended families. His theory allows for individual agency and struggle while still rendering writing as an intensely social human activity.Within this theoretical framework, the writing of Maria, Tita, and Kareem takes on a quiet eloquence about the struggle to speak within and across the social institutions they are in daily contact with - in particular, their school, neighborhoods, an interpersonal relationships.Aimed at a wide range of educators and general readers concerned about urban education and writing instruction, Round My Way is, finally, a story about teacherly reading, providing both the theory and examples of practice to enliven other teacher's readings of their students' texts.