‘Why Didn’t I Know About This Book When I Started?’: In Memory of Donald Graves and Arthur Applebee

Abstract

This essay explores Donald Graves’ groundbreaking research of the 1980s. We show how Graves’ approach to the teaching of writing built on his sensitive appreciation of the ways children actually engage in the composing process when they are given the opportunity to produce writing that is meaningful to them. However, the issue for us is not simply the quality of Graves’ research, but how his work slipped from our memories, to be replaced by the dull drills in writing skills that now dominate US classrooms. To try to engage with this second issue, it has seemed best to disrupt the flow of our account of Graves’ work with representations of personal moments in teaching writing that we have each experienced, which we include as interpolations in the text. Only in this way do we feel that we can somehow get close to the nub of the issue with respect to the collective amnesia surrounding Graves’ achievement, in an attempt to bring back – both individually and collectively – his key insights and our students’ re-voicing of them to apply them in our professional practice as teachers of writing. We have also tried to include other voices beyond our own, all in an attempt to challenge the culture of the template, of the uniform response that ignores what ‘I’ have to say.