Making Scribal Marks: A Book Talk with R. Joseph 

In Writing: Teachers & Children at Work, Donald H. Graves declares, “Children want to write. They want to write the first day they attend school. This is no accident. Before they went to school they marked up walls, pavements, newspapers with crayons, chalk, pens or pencils . . . anything that makes a mark. The child’s marks say, ‘I am’” (2003, 3). Graves reminds us that children write and, by doing so, claim their being, existence, and imagination. As children, they mark their human inventiveness that they then display to an audience that begins with themselves and also extends to their classmates, friends, teachers, and families.

“The child’s marks say, ‘I am.’” These words are my mantra.

My earliest memories of my public schooling in Houston, Texas, begin in bilingual classrooms, where I made my marks in two languages. In fact, I recall scribbling messages; I memorized words; I told and retold stories; I scribed all I could on paper and even in the sand in our school playground during recess. As I grew older and continued on to my secondary studies, some of my teachers noticed my writing interests, but I also lost a lot of my stamina to write when my writing production became more quantifiable, standardized, and determinist—solely based on my measurable abilities, intellect, circumstances, and potential. The writing values that took priority became detrimental to what I wished to cultivate in my life guided by my teachers: my emerging voice as a youth scribe and observer. Nieto and López confirm: “The benefits of writing for teachers hold equally for students: it can help them learn about themselves and their realities, develop confidence, and find and nurture their voices” (2019, 110). Today we must amplify the benefits among our students and our teaching colleagues.

The benefits were not always visible, though. When I was in my teacher preparation courses, there were few teachers of color who taught writing or who wrote about the teaching of writing, similar to what Aristotle “Ari” Mendoza reveals in the epigraph about an expressive writing life with Dante Quintana. (Their voices were unheard and underconsidered, not underrepresented!) The writing artifacts of students of color in many writing pedagogy books were limited to caricatures, clichés, and stereotypes presented by White author majorities. Some of the depictions appeared in foundational texts, while others were presented by speakers in national conferences as professional learning sessions on the teaching of writing for a select student population. As I taught more adolescents in secondary schools, these guiding questions informed my thinking and reflection:

• Who are the scribes among us, and who nurtures them to persist as scribes?
• What keeps students and teachers writing together?
• When can I squeeze in writing as a habit for thinking—from bell to bell?
• Where can I find the teachers of color who possess scribal habits?
• Why must we persist as teachers of writing?
• How can I connect concepts and content that value the civilizations, communities, and societies informed by scribes, dubsarne (Sumerian), griots (West Africa), soferim (Jerusalem), seanchaithe (Gaelic, Irish), tlacuiloque (Indigenous Mesoamérica, Aztec), and other thinkers?

As a teacher of writing and youth scribes, I needed to adopt a scribe stance that favored what students can do as they make meaning and create new ways of knowing, learning, and understanding. I believed this was possible and considered the words of the novelist Gish Jen, who reminds us, “One must live in order to have something to write about. That’s the commonplace wisdom, and to be engaged with the world is no bad thing; it is essential” (2000). The words of the character Aristotle from Sáenz’s young people’s literature novel that appear in the epigraph above and Jen’s words both tell us that there is something that drives our scribal lives and existence, which is to declare this: “I am.” As teachers, we can invite our students to continue to make their marks as scribes—even as adolescents. Nieto and López say that they “believe there are a multitude of reasons that people write. [ . . . ] In the cycle of teaching and learning, the power of writing should never be underestimated” (2019, 123). As a teacher at a public high school in Austin, Texas, and as a teacher educator of language arts education and action research at a local university, I believe in my students’ scribal abilities to create.