Rejoinder to Responses

Abstract

There are many possible ways to write a rejoinder to a response to an article one has written. I'm choosing to write informally with a less traditional academic voice. One consequence of that decision is that, although I have been influenced by the work of many others, I'll not refer to them by name. Also, I will try to share some of my own working out of ideas even though others have written of these things far more clearly than I will here. I must confess I was extremely flattered when I received a packet from Michael Connelly indicating that two people had responded to recent Curriculum Inquiry articles by Weber and me and that he wished for comments from us. This has never happened to me before, and I eagerly skimmed through the two responses while still at my mailbox. I noticed each mentioned my name several times. Nice. I put them in my briefcase for later, read each again, and was puzzled. There were many points in these responses with which I agreed, some well-chosen quotes from the work of others, namely, Ricoeur and Bakhtin, that enlightened me further about their work. But what did these responses have to say in response to what I was trying to do? Once again, I put the two responses away to be read again and soon did so. The reading was hard work, but gradually I came to find some openings in the two that enabled me to become engaged. For some reason the process brought to mind an experience I had had a few years ago. I was doing a thing typical of much of my growing up in the U.S. Midwest-zooming along a country road in the summer sunshine with the car windows down, the scent of farmlands and farm animals blowing in, and the radio on. Now, though, it was 1987 and I was listening to classical music on FM, not rock 'n' roll on AM.