Scholars Inside Invisible Boxes, Writing on Mirrors

In a foreword to Narratives of Social Justice Teaching, Ruth Vinz describes a sixth grade classroom in which—at the room’s center—is a boy in a cardboard box.  The boy, we later learn, is autistic, and when coaxed out of his box by the student-teacher he darts about the room, stands in defensive position with a pair of scissors aimed at her.  He runs for the window when Ruth, observing the classroom as a university liaison, pulls him down and holds him on her lap for the rest of the period.  The boy draws pictures of animals and plants. The box, you see, was used in the classroom because the boy’s mother suggested it.  When the boy’s mother, and the principal, and the teacher, and the student teacher, and Ruth sit at a table to discuss the child, it becomes clear that each person involved has their own standpoint—some unimaginable to the others—which has led to the normalizing of a child in box.

As I’ve been given this foreword to read as part of a graduate course on writing research, I begin to wonder about the questions Ruth raises.  It’s not just about classroom management or how students with special needs are responded to in schools.  It’s also about how scholars and researchers represents observations on paper. My mind leaves the foreword for a moment and certain words flash in my mind: paper, box, reader, writer, words, margins, representation, space.  I can do little to stop these words.  I pause and type out the sentence you just read and continue reading.

Ruth keeps silent as the others reach a consensus: that the student-teacher must leave the child in the box or leave the placement.  She leaves.  When Ruth continues that “thinking about the box through systems of interaction [might] make visible institutional positions and interaction that often marginalize negotiations and create less than productive spaces,” I quickly add to her list of binaries—school/university, student teacher/cooperating teacher—my own: writer/reader.  What are the spaces of reading and writing scholarship.  Ruth’s writing conveys her awareness of the reader: she crafts a narrative, a story through which she weaves observations and raises questions.  But the tides of academic writing seem far more content with templates and safe forms of “scholarly” writing in which the word “I” can be used only when trailed by speedy apologies.  What sorts of spaces are constructed for the reader when the writer is so busy genuflecting at the altar of Academe?  It’s the faithful who prays to idols while their neighbors suffer. 

I think about others who write about space and literacy, who seem of a similar camp as those Ruth describes in her piece.  They think that space is a social construct not an empty void to be filled with gibberish and knickknacks.  But even those who write about space and social justice and margins and centers often do so in a form that itself fits neatly into the academic box.  These writers imagine the readers to be just like them.  Whereas the student in the box suffers schoolish injustice, a scholar who writes in a generic box suffers from either complacency or sophistry.   The student’s box is explicit, heartbreakingly physical; the scholar’s box is implied and wrapped in authority of academia.  The student, when coaxed out of his box, arms himself with scissors; the scholar, when one draws his attention to his own box, cuts up opponents with words and indifference.  Both boxes are meant to keep others out, to provide safety from the dangers of reality.  I might suggest that the scholar possesses, in his invisible box, an accessory that our student lacks: a mirror.

I imagine the scholar writing in black marker on the cool glassy surface of a giant mirror.  With each word he sees his own hand and eyes and ears.  Each word reflects him unto himself.  The frame around the scholar’s mirror is of age-old woods from the earliest academic institutions: oak, perhaps, from Oxford; maple from Harvard.  The mirror hangs in a lecture hall that is filled with students eager to learn and inquire.  The scholar stands on a ladder and scribbles away.  He writes with words like is and of course and clearly and punctuates his ideas with periods rather than ellipses or dashes or question marks… He doesn’t typically narrate a story; he performs a tried and true verbal exercise for those who read and write just like him.

What incentive do young scholars have to break with the generic norm?  Their careers are built on being published; journals have a type of writing they accept; scholars, then, write in order to be published.  More than the editors of journals or the scholars themselves, it is the universities that seem most irresponsible here--dismissing narratives as little more than silly fiction, supporting projects that quantify boys in boxes, privileging status over students.  As Ruth suggests that boys in boxes must be met with cries of social injustice and political uprising, so too must we address scholars who write on mirrors.  Perhaps we might at least direct their markers away from looking glasses and toward windows, out of which they might wonder why boys in boxes aim scissors at their gullets.