Lu Huntley-Johnston

Abstract
Censorship can take a variety of forms. One of the more subtle is the self-imposed censorship of silence. This may occur in classrooms. Students are often silenced by instructional strategies which are intended to educate. Teachers are also silenced by their reluctance to: critically reflect upon their own history as students and educators, engage in systematic inquiry upon their own development as teachers, and share their discoveries in a form which creates an historical record of collective struggle.

James Moffett (Storm in theMountains, 1 988)

I get angry when I think about the ways I was taught writing in elementary and secondary school. I would have loved to have known real audiences for whom to write and authentic reasons to address them. Instead, my schoolbased literacy history was characterized by a subtle form of censorship, the suppression of my writing voice superseded by emphases on grammatical terms, mechanical exercises, and benign reports. Throughout my school career I felt like I was going through a motion, writing without any real sense of purpose other than meeting school requirements. Only later did I realize that the development of literacy is an evolutionary process which begins with a need to engage meaningfully with others. Denying students opportunities for engaged authoring in school limits their literacy development in the very context that is supposed to support it. We should be more mindful about this.