Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XXXIV)

In 1983 Chancellor Anthony Alvarado set up New York City’s Office of Alternative Schools and Programs, providing support for the small schools that were lost amidst the city’s large traditional high schools. Superintendent Stephen Phillips and his assistant, Marcia Brevot, oversaw many of the cutting edge alternative education strategies which innovative educators shared.

Waterways combined individualized student centered strategies with the use of computers, word processing, and photocopiers to create many inexpensive student publications. Teaching artists shared publications and carried floppy disks between program sites. Anything students wrote would be published. Peers studying the writing would raise questions as to what made for good writing and poetry.

“In pursuing poetic discoveries there is no need to rely on the support of rules, even those decreed by taste, and seek a quality classified as the sublime.”

Guillaume Appolinaire. The New Spirit and the Poets
translated by Roger Shattuck

We brought the publications outside the community where the authors attended school. Publishing was part of the process of sharing writing. The educational process didn’t end with the publication. After publication, the material was read aloud, put on stage, and translated into other languages or media.