As an English teacher in a Maine fishing community, I observed that my students' resistance to learning how to write was related to cultural experiences of time and of ways to create identity. To explore patterns of alienation between home and school, I made an ethnographic study of the community and its schools; I interviewed students currently in school and those who had quit school in grade nine to begin work. My first two chapters describe how people in this community organize their daily work in harmony with temporal cycles such as days, seasons and tides. Chapters three, four and five respectively describe how students in grades K-2, 6, and 12 respond in contrast to a schedule that is regulated increasingly by the clock from one grade level to the next. I argue that the different ways in which time is organized and valued in the community directly influence (1) How students respond to the values implicit within the temporal organization of school, and (2) How students respond to a "process approach" of learning to write. Students' attitudes toward the value of literacy emerge in these chapters. In chapter six, I examine the temporal orders within student narratives and discuss how they reflect the temporal identity of the writer. My conclusions suggest that several different forms of time control the activites in this community. Students discover that these forms are evaluated differently at home and in school. As a result, some students experience major conflicts in school because the values that they associate with time are not recognized. An example of this conflict is found in the case of "existential time"--a time in which people create their identity. The opportunities for this to occur in school are limited since students have few opportunities to control their own time. Consequently, many students feel frustrated and alienated in school. In the students' writing, I found trace evidence in grammatical forms, and more substantial evidence in prior texts of the forms of time that students experience; these forms contrast with the time order of the kinds of prose that these schools generally accept.Ph.D.Language artsCurriculum developmentUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161278/1/8702782.pd
