Remembering Alex McLeod
By: Ed Osterman
Date: Fall 2007
Summary: Alex McLeod's name may not be well known these days. His contributions to the profession may have become invisible with the passage of time. But his influence is no less important.
Nearly a year ago, NWP director Richard Sterling emailed me and Marcie Wolfe, executive director of the Institute for Literacy Studies, home of the New York City Writing Project (NYCWP): "Just received news that Alex died peacefully in his sleep on Saturday. Sad news. A wonderful man whom I was very glad to have known." My heart stopped for a minute; I had been out of touch with Alex McLeod for several years.
I realize Alex's name may not be well known these days. He didn't publish a lot, often preferring to promote the colleagues with whom he collaborated and the teachers he mentored. Indeed, his contributions to our profession may have become invisible with the passage of time. But his influence is no less important.
I first met Alex through Richard Sterling. I knew he had been a member of James Britton's research team that investigated the uses of writing and talk in British schools in the early 1970s. Britton and his team, in attempting to identify the kinds of writing assignments they saw in classrooms, used the now famous terms "transactional," "poetic," and "expressive." Briefly, transactional writing can be defined as writing addressed to an audience; it's concerned with accuracy. Poetic writing is writing for its own sake; expressive writing is writing closest to the self, the matrix from which all other writing evolves. Britton and his colleagues noted the limited use of expressive writing in schools and made a case for its value.
McLeod rejects a restrictive view of literacy as a set of skills to be tested, arguing in favor of the promotion of critical literacy.
They also argued that students needed a variety of audiences for their writing; too often they were expected to write for the teacher as assessor, an experience that restricted what students wrote and restrained their enthusiasm for the finished product. I had been introduced to these findings—published in The Development of Writing Abilities 11–18 (Britton 1975)—in the NYCWP's first summer invitational in 1978. I was then a young high school English teacher in the Bronx, and this research was instrumental in shaping many of my beliefs about writing and writing-to-learn. It's clear that the research also had a profound influence on our profession, shifting the ways in which many teachers used writing in their classrooms.
Critical Literacy
As a faculty member at the University of London Institute of Education, Alex often worked with teachers and students in a range of poor and working-class areas of London, exploring language and literacy and their impact on student writing and learning. I recently reread Alex's Language Arts article "Critical Literacy: Taking Control of Our Own Lives" (1986), which details his work with John Hardcastle and a group of teenage boys in Hackney, London. After all these years, I was once again both moved and astonished by its richness and relevance.
In focusing on some of the highlights of Hardcastle's five years of work with a racially mixed group of poor immigrant and working-class adolescent boys, Alex stresses how Hardcastle's class became a place where these students had opportunities to use both written and oral language to explore issues and institutions that affected their lives. In an often tumultuous classroom atmosphere, these boys discussed racism, questioned the school's curriculum, and studied the history of Caribbean, African, and Asian immigration to Great Britain. Throughout, discussions about recurring, important issues became a key source for generating writing varied in form and voice and full of enormous passion, reflecting the mastery and empowerment that can result when students write out of interest and knowledge rather than for purposes of assessment.
In this article, McLeod rejects a restrictive view of literacy as a set of skills to be tested, arguing in favor of the promotion of critical literacy, providing young people with the ability to react critically to the world around them. What still impresses me about this piece, so many years later, is not only that it focuses on poor urban students (something too many research pieces still avoid), but that the issues it raises—about curriculum, the limits of testing, the needs of immigrant students—are still current and important.
School Reform
It was in 1985 that Marcie Wolfe and I, in the midst of planning a 3-week institute in reading and writing to be held in London for twenty-five NYCWP members, decided we wanted the teachers to visit a range of British schools. Richard put us in touch with Alex. We wrote to him, asking if he would present for our group and if he could help us make contact with other educators. For months he wrote regularly, supplying names and addresses, arranging possible presenters as well as schools we might visit. The winter before the institute, Marcie and I flew to London to set things up. Alex and his family welcomed us into their home. He was enormously generous, and a friendship formed.
The following July he came to New York city to cofacilitate with me an institute for a second group of NYCWP teachers. I can still remember the day when he divided the class into two clusters as a way for us to demonstrate our understanding of the reading and writing habits of the two communities described by Shirley Brice Heath in her book Ways with Words (1983). He asked each group to assume the roles of either Roadville or Trackton residents. Each group presented views and experiences as members of their assigned community, then answered questions, maintaining these roles.
When I recently reread Alex's Language Arts article, I discovered that he and John Hardcastle had used the same simulation technique with their Hackney students; the boys had assumed a multitude of roles reflecting life in Cuba after the revolution in the 1950s. Since that July, I have often used this technique with New York city students. Most recently, a social studies teacher I consult with designed a mock news panel on the French Revolution in which her students pretended to be representatives from different social classes, giving their views before, during, and after the revolution. Such activities are now common in many schools; they weren't when Alex introduced them.
It was also in 1985 that Sarah Warshauer Freedman, professor at the Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley, first met Alex McLeod while on sabbatical in London. She was at his house when Richard introduced all of us to Alex. He organized a number of school visits for her, which soon resulted in a ten-year collaboration on a study of the teaching of writing within the context of school reform efforts in the United States and Great Britain. At the heart of the study was a yearlong writing exchange between middle and secondary English classes and their teachers in the Bay Area and London.
In her book Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures: Lessons in School Reform from the United States and Great Britain (1994), Freedman analyzes the impact school reform efforts had on both instruction and student writing. Until his death, Sarah and Alex remained in contact.
Throughout the '80s and '90s, I saw Alex on my regular summer theatre jaunts to London. Though still close to his two adult children, he was now divorced and living with his partner, Richard, relaxing into retirement in the countryside. Whenever I arrived, I would telephone to make plans to see him, and he always insisted on a long walk around London. "You must see this neighborhood!" he'd say enthusiastically, and then map out a daylong journey.
Often we hiked through neighborhoods that were in the process of urban renewal, or areas that had been transformed by recently arrived immigrants. He always wanted me to see the sections of London a tourist might not visit. He was a small, wiry man who was enormously spry. Although he was in his 60s then, he could hike for miles, often leaving his younger companions winded while sustaining a heated conversation the entire time.
Alex loved conversation, often leaping from topic to topic: family updates, educational and cultural trends, rants about Margaret Thatcher's most recent offences. He liked to hear about American culture; though he often disagreed with America's foreign policies, he loved our nation's energy and youthfulness.
Alex was a native New Zealander who emigrated to England, where he lived most of his life. His own identity as an immigrant probably contributed to his fervent support of immigrant and labor rights. He held strong political views, which had been shaped by his experiences with the antinuclear movement. Recently Marcie and I had a good laugh recalling the walls of the McLeod family bathroom, which were plastered with news articles and posters from the "ban the bomb" sixties.
Late in his life he was a strong advocate for gay rights, and the AIDS crisis invigorated his political spirit. I recall his anger when he showed me a piece of work written by a London middle school student. The boy had assumed the voice of the AIDS virus and in the process turned out a harrowing and moving piece of writing that was not passed on some official exam because his working class language was considered "below standard" by the school authorities. Alex exploded.
There is no doubt Alex could be stubborn and cantankerous when debating current policies and politicians on the American and British scene. He exasperated several of his more conservative colleagues by deliberately voicing opinions that he knew would cause argument. As they got angrier, Alex would hold his ground, seeming almost amused by his ability to provoke such reaction. Some people may have become irritated with him, but he always retained his affection for his friends.
That is the Alex I will remember . . . fondly.
Note: If you want to read more about Alex McLeod's work, you might check the reference list below.
References
Britton, James, T. Burgess, N. Martin, A. McLeod, and H. Rosen. 1975. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). London: Macmillan.
Freedman, S. 1994. Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures: Lessons in School Reform from the United States and Great Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and National Council of Teachers of English. (Paperback edition, Harvard University Press, 1997).
Heath, S.B. 1983. Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
McLeod, A. 1986. "Critical Literacy: Taking Control of Our Own Lives." Language Arts 63 (1): 37–50.