A Writer’s Life: Philosophy
A Writer’s Life: Philosophy
When I imagined launching a writing–wellness practice, I thought about the teachers and philosophies that influenced me and inform who I am as a writer, teacher, and healer. In my life experience, a teacher is a rare gift that transcends educational theories and educational programs, and systems. Great teachers transform students into lifelong learners by their example and the content, structures, the contexts of their teaching. As a retired therapist, I use my clinical skills and experience to hold space for creative development and expression.
Three teaching philosophies and practices inform my vision, structuring, and support of powerful and productive writing practices. Black people of my generation and generations before me taught us the practice of Each–One–Teach–One, an African American educational philosophy. This practice began during slavery when educating a slave was a crime. Slaves who learned to read and write subversively shared that knowledge with slaves who did not have any access to learning. This philosophy’s core value and practice taught that all black people had something to teach and that formal education, achieved and shared, was the most prized and respected of accomplishments.
I was introduced to the writings of Paulo Freire during my MSW training at Tulane University. I was particularly attracted to his idea for a model of education based on the liberation of those being taught. Freire proposed a “problem–posing education” that could be a function of liberation and a practice of freedom. Freire defined the “problem posing education model.”
The teacher is no longer merely the–one–who–teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.
They become jointly responsible for a process in which they all grow. (61)
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks, while crediting and honoring Freire, also addressed the major issue he did not address: women, their power and value, and the importance of their liberation to the liberation of all. In “Engaged Pedagogy,” Hooks writes about how the teaching ways of Freire and the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh informed her progressive–holistic–engaged–feminist pedagogy.
Thich Nhat Hanh always speaks of the teacher as healer. Like Freire, his approach to knowledge called on students to be more active participants, to link awareness with practice.
Whereas Freire was primarily concerned with the mind, Thich Nhat Hanh offered a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasized wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit. His focus on a holistic approach to learning and spiritual practice enabled me to overcome years of socialization that had taught me to believe a classroom was diminished if students and professors regarded each other as “whole” human beings striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world. (14)
In Teaching to Transgress, Bell Hooks combines the theories of liberation education, education as a holistic practice, and feminist theories applied to education to formulate her own didactic.
Progressive, holistic, “engaged pedagogy” is more demanding than conventional critical or feminist pedagogy. For unlike these two teaching practices, engaged pedagogy emphasizes well–being. That means that teachers must be actively committed to a process of self–actualization that promotes their own well–being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. (15)
My early teachers taught me that each student must also teach, teachers must be available for and open to being taught, that a teacher’s capacities to succeed and excel are directly correlated with their levels of their compassion and professional accountability and their commitment to education as a practice of liberation informed by the practices of feminist, progressive, and holistic teaching and learning practices.
I have been a part of a women’s writer’s group in every community I’ve lived in for my entire writing life. Writing in community and in partnerships has ingrained in me the value of teaching, sharing and supporting the development of leadership among creative artists. For this reason participating in rotating group leadership a feature of AWL groups and camps. These writing communities also taught me the value of the inclusion of creative artists of all ages to assure the integrity and continuity of learning communities.
I launched A Writer’s Life in 2018 to provide writing wellness and teaching services to others and to encourage, support, and celebrate the creative health and success of writers and artists. AWL concentrates on individual and collective worth, each-one-teach-one learning and leadership, building and maintaining writing practice, building and maintaining writing community, writing, revision, workshopping over and over until the writing is ready, and getting the writing published. A Writer’s Life services includes an AWL Membership with reduced fees for members, Individual Writing Practices and Consultation, Writing Groups, Writing Camps, Author Reading Series, AWL Writer’s Reading from their work, Writing Prompts, and Just Write (Twice weekly structured times to write ek for two hours each to just. Writer show up and Just Write.)
A Writer’s Life Services are all about worth. The worth of the writer, what was noticed, memories and stories stacked up in their imaginations or journals or neatly, or not so neatly, tucked away or bursting at the seams to be let loose onto the paper and into the world. The worth of being and teaching environments. The worth of building and maintaining creative and healing community. The worth of developing writing partnerships, writing habit, accountability, writing stamina, and a body of work. And, the worth of the teacher, the guide, and the teacher’s commitment to the writer and the writer’s voice and body of work.
Andrea R. Canaan, MSW, MFA
415-515-5943