On the Podcast: Modern Day Scribes

Today we hear from Joseph Rodríguez, author of the new book, Youth Scribes, Teaching A Love of Writing. Joseph is a dedicated teacher from Austin, Texas who shares his unique approach to engaging 11th and 12th graders in the art of writing. Joseph is passionate about the term scribe and its historical significance across civilizations. He explains how scribes, often revered figures, documented and preserved knowledge, identities and cultures through various media. Join us as Joseph reveals how he fosters a community of young scribes who communicate across platforms and media, creating meaningful connections and expressing their unique voices. This episode is packed with insights and practical tips for secondary writing teachers looking to inspire their students.

Joseph Rodríguez:
 

I'm really drawn to the word scribe, especially when I read it in relation to just human civilizations across time. Most civilizations have had a role of a scribe in various communities, and this scribe had a significant role. I mean, we could just look at Mesopotamia, the Americas, Africa, China, India. And the scribe held a high title and it included women, young people, elders. But these persons had a specific access to tools, whether tablets, specific paper, some way of documenting what was happening. And it could have even been a civil servant, but this scribe worked across various media to collect, gather facts, specific knowledge that then would be recorded and also transferred across time. And that knowledge that that scribe held often began with the study of maybe holy prayers, scriptures or texts. But this person had a huge responsibility in documenting, preserving and maintaining these artifacts that held meaning and even identities of people, place, land.

And what I'm trying to do is, I certainly use the word writer, but scribe. The word scribe considers many more modes and media that our students use, and there are modes of communication. They can be aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, visual. Our student use technologies every day that enable communication across abilities. I have students who are very communicative across various platforms, and they want to sing, they want to perform, and that's scribal act. They want to draw, use different canvas, paint, make meaning, bring understanding into the fold of communication. When I introduce my students to the word scribe, I really want them to think about, well, that the scribe is also an interpreter and a translator of everyday society, of cultures, of dynamics and is offering new lenses to seeing the world and even solving problems. Whereas a writer, just the term writer, it can be intimidating for some of my students, especially if they prefer working with a different medium.

And their preference is to write songs. And those songs can be about society, they can be songs in response to decisions made upon human communities, or it can also be about resistance or a new way of seeing the world. This interests them. I have many students who work with canvas who are visual artists, and I want them to know that we have scribes across civilizations in many civilizations who worked in various media, and we look toward their work in the past to understand a lot of our present, and they influence future scribes and artists too.

Edie:
 

As you talk about different tools and modalities, I'd love to hear your thoughts on AI.

Joseph:
 

Well, I think AI came in as a, we had been alerted that it was in the works. And when I say we, teachers, professors, educators. We were aware that something was coming that would be revolutionary. And for my students, it just arrived on their keyboard with their mouse. They began telling me about it, how useful it is. I prefer the term information rather than intelligence. And the only reason is I really value the intelligence of humans, animals, and plants. I think these three groups possess an amazing amount of intelligences and what happens with AI, although it is evolving more and more, I think the information sometimes is, at least when my students show it to me, it's quite scattered, not interconnected. And a lot of our students are learning conceptual knowledge and how to synthesize and create their own new knowledge across time, across traditions, genres, and that cannot happen currently with AI.

And they tell me that they're stuck, and I'm able to see where they attempted to embed AI as researchers. And my students tell me, this is where it appears. And they indicate, and we talk about transitions, ways to acknowledge scholars. And I also want to give them their agency that they possess human inventiveness to, and machines rely on human input. As a result, I want them to know that they possess a scribal gift that can change minds and contribute to the humanities and the sciences versus a dependence on a machine that cannot always deliver the thought that they possess, that they've learned in their classes. Because I want them to know that they are a gift, like they have gifts of intelligence for the humanities and the sciences, and we need their knowledge and imagination in being human and finding solution for what we face as humans in our everyday life. And to also have a healthy, prosperous life we need human intelligence.

Edie:
 

Thank you for those thoughts. I'd really like to go inside your classroom a bit as we sit with this expansive definition you've given us, scribes in the world and your students scribes. How do you invite this discovery process?

Joseph:
 

I invite students to bring all their selves and identities to the classroom, and I tell them about scribes that surround us. And on their own, they'll start telling me, well, I think I'm a scribe. This is what I do inside of school and outside of school. And that's quite significant for me to know as a teacher. Currently, I teach 11th and 12th graders at a public early college high school in Austin, Texas. Currently, I have 181 students across six class periods. Those students are amazing and they want to scribe more and more. I think what sometimes hold them back is that they've been seeking that invitation, a revival to scribe. And one way of doing this is through, I think, ethnography that students initially write their own narratives about themselves, their origin, where they see themselves. And many literary works often begin with the word or at least the name, the names that surround us.

What are our names, our nicknames, given names that we receive or give ourselves as people, as adolescents. How do we rename ourselves? And who holds the power of naming? Who names us? How do we rename ourselves or unname ourselves? And I introduced them to a brief passage as a model scribal text by Pat Mora. It's from her family memoir titled House of Houses. And I'll share a brief excerpt and it just begins with, "I am Patricia Mora, born in El, Paso, Texas, daughter of the desert of the border of the Rio Grande del Norte. Daughter of Estela Delgado." And the writer continues and describes a father across generations who the maternal grandfather I never knew who below revolutionary bullets and stars floated in a carriage with his grown daughters across the dark Rio Grande in 1910. Some of my students want to write, some of my students are bilingual.

They speak English, but they also know Arabic, Spanish, Vietnamese. And I introduce them to this work as a model for them to begin an I Am statement and then a catalog, which some of them recall from reading the Odyssey, that there are catalogs that appear, a listing descriptors of place, people. And they begin their launch of their own story. And one example would be the student Jorge Antonio Arredondo, who writes Born in H-Town, Houston, Texas, Harris County. Son of Dr. Jorge Luis Arredondo, who received his degrees from the University of Houston and so on. And then this student, he describes his paternal grandfather, Eventino Arredondo, lover of the great people's instrument, the accordion from Martinitos Nuevo Leon made his way to meet his wife, Orfelina Arredondo in Cerralbo Nuevo Leon, Mexico, while both attended a [Spanish 00:11:46], a dance. They sent letters to each other as the only transportation available was a horse ride.

After their marriage, they lived in the rural Martinitos helping with herding goats and corn cropping. Together, they moved to the city Monterrey to find work booming from the steel industry and other heavy manufacturing plants. Then they heard of opportunities in the US through an agricultural workers program, and they traveled together to different parts of California and other states to pick the harvest in fields. And this becomes a scribal journey. My student reveals the role of correspondence, letter writing, which also appears in youth scribes. How do we invite students in through correspondence that is friendly or business-oriented, or both throughout a combination of academic, creative, and technical writing? How do these three stand alone, come together to create today's scribes in this century? I'm really grateful to my students and their families that gave me permission to feature their work, student work that was created in my classroom over a four-year period.

The writing that is possible from our students who have a reservation about writing at the middle or high school levels, and it's a reservation that they did not have when they entered pre-kindergarten or kindergarten. They created characters. Donald Graves tells us that our students were making marks before they were our students. Their parents were placing their work on refrigerator doors. And then something slowly happens that maybe there's doubts. There are doubts that appear as we move into early adolescence, adolescence, or even there's a scoring of what we write by a psychometrician, by an evaluator, a scorer behind a screen that gives us information that says, well, maybe this isn't the best writing. Maybe I'm missing something. But what if this teacher comes? What if this teacher comes with these scribal habits that are braided in instruction and lessons and activities that invite the adolescent writer back in as a scribe who can work across various modes and media to make meaning, to communicate identities, and to say, I have something to say.

As that student watches their teachers write with them, describe with them. That's a community of scribes that we write with them, we show our doubts, we communicate what we created together in the classroom in digital and non-digital forms.

Edie:
 

Thanks for tuning in today. To learn more about Joseph's new book and read a full transcript, visit blog.heinemann.com. And for 30% off any Heinemann professional book, use code PROFBKS30P.

R. Joseph Rodríguez is a secondary language arts teacher at William Charles Akins Early College High School in Austin, Texas. He is the author of numerous books including Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites, Teaching Culturally Sustaining and Inclusive Young Adult Literature: Critical Perspectives and Conversations, and This Is Our Summons Now: Poems. 

Joseph is a former editor of NCTE’s English Journal, founder of the literacy initiative Libre con Libros, and a reader of banned and challenged books.