“Set Up in a Mode of Consent”: Consent-Based Feedback, Authority, and Collective Silences

• In Event: Drugs, Poetry, Music, and Care: Illuminating While Reimagining Possibilities Using Collaborative Practitioner Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores poetry created in a community writing workshop in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. It pays attention to the relationship between the act of creative writing and group dynamics around authority figures, to explore the possibilities of “consent-based” feedback, participants' histories of “schooled” assessment, and the links between silence and engagement.

Theoretical framework

This paper draws on the work of critical practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) and critical literacy scholars, who have explored the links between school assessment practices and administrative logics that justify a lack of support for marginalized students (Simon & Campano, 2013). Similarly, teachers of writing have noted the impact of formal assessment on students and teachers (Elbow, 1993), even as they are aware of the importance of (and hunger for) feedback from creative writers, despite the emotional risks and consequences (Atwell, 1998).

This research centres the act of creative writing itself, as a way of being (Yagelski, 2011) and an interruption of literacy normativity (Johnson, 2017) that is restorative (Pritchard, 2017), particularly for writers whose identities are excluded or marginalized in school contexts.

This paper puts scholarship that notes ways that silence can resist the terms of engagement in classrooms, drawing connections between silence and power (Mazzei, 2003; Schultz, 2009; MacLure et al. 2010), alongside spiritual traditions that emphasize the connective power of group silence (Yamada, 2004).

Methods and data sources
The poems explored in this paper were written across seven 2-hour workshop sessions, which happened once a week. Field notes and audio recordings documented the process, as well as collecting poem drafts from participants.

Results
Some participants were hesitant to offer feedback to each other, and articulated their fears around critique and assessment. Others mentioned their strong desire for feedback, and a direct engagement with an audience for their writing. Workshop participants collectively devised a consent-based format for offering feedback to each other before they shared their poems. Alongside the non-hierarchical model of consent that participants devised, they consistently refused to take on authority roles in the workshop. The spectres of judgment and pressure circulated in the space, exposing the “schooled” histories of assessment that haunted the workshop. There were several forms of silence that occurred in the workshop space. Rather than utilizing silence only as a tool of resistance, participants enacted silence as a way of receiving each others' writing without critique or analysis, and extended the generative space of the workshop.

Scholarly significance
This research exposes a paradox of creative writing: feedback can be damaging, and “ranking” (Elbow, 1993) assessments within schools linger after formal schooling ends, as do our memories of authority figures. Yet feedback can be nourishing, and much creative work is intended to be received by an audience. Collaborative, consent-based models of feedback offer a path through that paradox. Similarly, group dynamics that make space for generative silences, reveal forms of engagement often invisible using traditional research methods, and resist typical framings of student silence as combative or as disengagement, which in turn justify the withdrawing of school resources.

Author

• Ben Gallagher, University of Toronto - OISE