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Touchstones as sprezzatura: the

significance of attachment to teacher
literary formation
Teresa StrongWilson

McGill University , Canada

Published online: 20 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Teresa StrongWilson (2006) Touchstones as sprezzatura: the significance of
attachment to teacher literary formation, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 13:1,
69-81, DOI: 10.1080/13586840500347491
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Changing English
Vol. 13, No. 1, April 2006, pp. 6981

Touchstones as sprezzatura: the

significance of attachment to teacher
literary formation
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 16:33 23 September 2014

Teresa Strong-Wilson*
McGill University, Canada

A touchstone is a smooth dark stone that, when rubbed against gold and silver, proves the metals
quality. Figuratively, it has come to signify that which serves to test or try the genuineness of
anything (Oxford English Dictionary). Here I consider why certain literary touchstones of teachers
are more formative than others. This leads to an exploration of the close association between the
aesthetics of literary response and the sprezzatura of childhood reading. The pedagogical question
of involving teachers and teacher educators in critical reflection on their practices should begin
with these formative stories.

Memory must be formed; for memory is not memory for anything and everything. One
has a memory for some things, and not for others. (Gadamer, 1998/1975, p. 16)

I recall three different voices telling me stories when I was younger. One was my
Grade 4 teacher reading Charlottes web to the class. I remember the warmth of an
early summers afternoon, windows with peeling green paint opened wide, a shaft of
light and Miss Daryrimple, in a starched white shirt punctuated by a tiny black bow,
perched cross-legged on the edge of her desk. With her short hair, short skirt, narrow
glasses and buttoned-up shirt, she appeared severe and spinsterly, though her long
legs and reading aloud voice proclaimed a different message. Her words became
tender as she read us E. B. Whites classic novel. The second voice I recall is the
droning one of the preacher in Sunday service. The cadences of biblical stories were
brought alive only in the privacy of my room as I recounted fabulous stories of Jonah
trapped in the belly of a whale or the orphaned Moses floating among the reeds in a
basket. But without a doubt, the story-telling voice that eclipses all others is my own:
the coursing of words inside as I relished life between the covers of a booknot just
any book, but fairy tales, Scottish and Irish folk tales, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey
Twins, Beverly Cleary, Enid Blyton and later, Stories and poems of Edgar Allen Poe,
The diary of Anne Frank and The lord of the rings.
*Department of Integrated Studies in Education, Faculty of Education, McGill University, 3700
McTavish Street, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1Y2, Canada. Email: teresa.strong-wilson@mcgill.ca
ISSN 1358-684X (print)/ISSN 1469-3585 (online)/06/010069-13
# 2006 The editors of Changing English
DOI: 10.1080/13586840500347491

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70 T. Strong-Wilson
When I ask in-service or pre-service teachers to reflect on their literacy histories,
they recall lived experiences of smells, tastes, textures, sounds or feelings. As Grumet
(2004) tells her education students, the truth of autobiography is embedded in its
detail, not its generalization (p. 92). In my work with teachers, I typically begin with
on-the-spot writing. While often producing mere chicken scratches of titles or
authors, the teachers tease out memories, pulling on them thread by thread, and in
the process, invoking an interconnected web of associations through the discussion.
That web, I have come to recognise, is childhood, or what Grumet (1991) more
specifically calls the sprezzatura of childhood (p. 82), that synaesthetic fusion of
impressions with feeling that Virginia Woolf (1978) writes about. The sound of
waves breaking beyond the closed blind as Virginia lay in her crib in the nursery,
daylight seeping through, the wind blowing, an acorn caught in the blind scraping
across the floor and moving back and forth, back and forth. If I were a painter,
Woolf said, I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver and green.
There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers
Everything would be large and dim; and what was seen would at the same time be
heard (p. 76). Why do certain impressions stay with us? Why are some literary
experiences more formative than others?
I am still working out, or more accurately, working backwards to, the attachment I
have to particular stories because, unlike the teachers I have worked with, I began
my critical work by writing narratives about teaching and then critical essays in
which I analysed those narratives; I was a teacher in an elementary school within a
First Nations community (Wilson, 2002; Strong-Wilson, 2005). It is in teaching
undergraduate students in courses like The Kindergarten Classroom, in which I
introduce developmentally appropriate literature and ask students to compile their
own resource lists of titles, that I realise I have yet to do the work that I asked the
teachers to do in my research study, which was to examine the relation between
childhood stories and the experiences those stories evoke.
In a study I conducted between January and June 2003, 18 teachers participated
in four separate literature circles in which they wrote a literacy autobiography, read
and discussed childrens literature and were interviewed monthly (Wilson, 2003a).
All three contexts drew on stories and memories of stories, but in different ways. In
the literature circle, teachers read and discussed childrens and young adult
literature. The literature circle, as a way of organising classroom discourse, is often
found in elementary classrooms, but increasingly such circles (or book clubs, as they
are also called) are being used with teachers. The literature was selected based on
teachers own literacy histories. I also introduced stories that were unfamiliar to
them. The teachers literacy histories were elicited through the writing and
discussing of a short literacy autobiography that they had composed in the circle
in response to such prompts as: Name some books, authors, or genres that you
enjoy using in your class, What do you look for in a good book to read in your own
time?, or Which stories do you remember best from childhood? (Wilson, 2003a).
What became apparent was that teachers often returned to the same stories and the
same experiences with story. Taking up Matthew Arnolds term, I call these

Touchstones as sprezzatura 71
formative stories and experiences touchstones. In this essay, I illustrate this
principle using the stories of one of the teachers, Terry. (All teachers names are
pseudonyms.) Terrys touchstones also provoked my own literacy memories; I wrote
this in my Literacy autobiography on 16 January 2003:

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Ive been thinking a lot about the Lord of the Rings, since my son is so infatuated with
the books and movie. It was one of my all-time favourite stories and when I think about
it, the books that have influenced me most deeply have not been those taught in school
I was definitely attracted to the shadows, the stories that explored the grand themes
of good versus evil, like Tolkiens, or the ones, like Poes, that immersed me in a
shadowy nether world charged with meaning. Im not sure what meaning.

A touchstone is the name given to a smooth, dark stone that, when rubbed against
gold and silver, was once used to verify the quality of alloys. Figuratively, it has come
to signify that which serves to test or try the genuineness of anything (Oxford English
Dictionary). Within the context of this paper, a touchstone is understood as a
returning to the same spot, that is, to the same topos within a teachers landscapes of
learning (Greene, 1978, p. 2). Such familiar markers are then used to judge the
worth of other stories and experiences.
Matthew Arnold, Victorian poet, essayist and school inspector, first popularised
the literary meaning of touchstone. Arnold (1960) maintained that a storys value
needed to be judged in relationship to other works: the great thing for us is to feel
and enjoy [a poets] work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide
difference between it and all work which has not the same high character. This is
what is salutary, this is what is formative (p. 6). Formative passages come to
comprise literary memory, which also becomes cultural memory because certain
stories are considered to be more significant (i.e. more formative) than others.
Such memory formation can be likened to a training of the imagination. Yates
(1984) dates the influence of classical notions of memory on Western thought to
Ciceros story of Simonides who, when a banquet hall collapsed, assisted relatives in
identifying their loved ones so that they could bury them properly. Simonides was
able to recognise the individuals because he remembered where they had been
sitting. Yates likens the art of memory to an inner writing (p. 6). The loci
constitute actual or imagined places where images or words can be stored (p. 6).
Arnolds reader, by always [having] in mind lines and expressions of the great
master [i.e. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton], applies them as a touchstone to
other poetry (Arnold, 1960, p. 10).
Whereas children once memorised passages from the Western canon, stories have
become formative in less explicit but no less powerful ways through the literacy
rituals through which stories are taught in and out of school (silent reading, readers
workshop, literature circles, reading aloud, reader response, bedtime reading) and
the stories children repeatedly hear, in which contexts, and with what gloss or
interpretation (Harris et al., 2002; Wolf, 2004). Such formation results in a general
imbibing of story structure, or those stories that are most commonly told and re-told.
I turn to Northrop Frye who, in claiming to provide a comprehensive anatomy of

72 T. Strong-Wilson
Western narrative (Frye, 1957), also applied that thinking to the role of literature in
early childhood:

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One essential aspect of literary training, and one that it is possible to acquire, or begin
acquiring, in childhood, is the art of listening to stories. This sounds like a passive
ability, but it is not passive at all: it is what the army would call a basic training for the
imagination. (Frye, 2000, p. 150)

That training consists of being constantly dipped into the cauldron of childrens
stories (Cairney, 1990), a corpus that in Western literature has been, and largely
continues to be, founded on the all white [and heterosexual] world of childrens
books (Larrick, 1965; see also Harris, 1994; Mendoza & Reese, 2001; Agosto et al.,
2003; Bradford, 2004).
Literature is, by its very nature, intensely allusive, according to Frye (2000,
p. 149). Stories echo other stories. For the reader, such echoing happens through a
complex and powerful web of intertextual associations that forms largely
unconsciously (Fairclough, 1992; Lemke, 1992; Bloome & Egan-Robertson,
1993; Smagorinsky, 2001; Eubanks, 2004). Familiarity, then, becomes the implicit
criterion by which readers choose and interpret what they read. Applying this
knowledge to their behaviour as readers, teachers use familiarity as the implicit
criterion to select which stories children should read. While teachers offer children a
measure of choice, those options are circumscribed by the teachers literacy
formation, which is in turn influenced by access or the political economy of
childrens literature: which stories are made available through school or local
libraries or can be readily purchased in bookstores or through the offerings of book
club flyers (Mendoza & Reese, 2001; Taxel, 2002; Bradford, 2004). In short, while a
cornerstone of best practices in English instruction is student choice of text
(Routman, 2003), certain stories become touchstones not only because we like
them but because those are the stories to which we have been granted access and
with which we have lived experiences in a society that privileges certain narratives
over others:
Where were the seeds of my interests sown? In childhood, I remember borrowing tons
of books from the school and town libraries; being a voracious reader from the time I
could read. I can remember reading Beverly Cleary, Enid Blyton, all kinds of mystery
stories (especially Nancy Drew). Even before that, I can dimly remember reading
picture books, ones with Chinese characters from folktales as well as fairy tales about
princesses and giants. (Strong-Wilson, Literacy autobiography, 16 January 2003)

Maxine Greene (1965) sees the imagination as a phenomenological landscape

formed through lived experiences with literature and the arts. Louise Rosenblatt
(1938, 1964, 1978) first elaborated the notion of an aesthetic or lived experience as
being at the centre of our encounters with literature. Previously, the focus had been
on the text as the primary source of meaning, with the teacher providing
authoritative readings (Pradl, 1994). Rosenblatt maintained that the relationship
between text and reader was a transaction or co-construction, with the text guiding
response and the readers background knowledge informing the reading event. In
developing what she called the aesthetic stance (which she contrasted with the

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Touchstones as sprezzatura 73
efferent stance, or an intention to carry information away), Rosenblatt became
intrigued by the role of attention in reading: the readers attention is focused on what
he [sic] is living through during the reading-event. He is attending both to what the
verbal signs designate and to the qualitative overtones of the ideas, images,
situations, and characters that he is evoking under guidance of the text (Rosenblatt,
1985, p. 38; emphasis in the original). By attention, Rosenblatt means a
phenomenological awareness, which is even more evident when she talks about
the early language behaviour of children as closest to a primarily aesthetic approach
to experience [in which] words are primarily aspects of sensed, felt, lived-through
experiences (Rosenblatt, 1982, p. 271).
Rosenblatts theory of reader response provides one approach through which to
appreciate the emotional significance of literacy encounters, especially those recalled
from early childhood. Literacy research on early childhood has consistently found
that reading stories with children at an early age is one of the strongest predictors of a
child learning how to read. Why? We know that story comprehension is fostered by
active parentchild interaction during storybook reading (Sulzby & Teale, 1987).
One of the interactions that the teachers in the study best remembered falls into the
category of Fryes passive training. Teachers vividly recalled experiences of bonding
with an adult over a book. Examples include Helens memory of being read fairy
tales at bedtime, or Margots of snuggling up to her mother on the couch as she read
to her; this reading time came to signify her time with her mother (Wilson, 2003a).
Such bonding creates a larger context or story (i.e. storytime) within which a
particular story becomes nested: When you give a book, youre giving a gift of
knowledge. But I think when you read together, its a bigger gift. Its a gift of sharing
time together. Sharing something enjoyable together (Margot, Interview, 27
February 2003, in Wilson, 2003a, pp. 236237). The aesthetic experience of
bonding intermingles with the value that the adult reader implicitly ascribes to the
text; such value is complex, related not only to the cultural role that stories play in
individual formation but also to the value given to the childhood story. These literary
relationships between adults, children and stories prefigure the larger purpose of
literacy acquisition and induction, which is for the individual reader to construct
meaning through personal encounters with stories:
I want to go back to childhood, to thinking about the stories that I read and was read. I
dont remember being read to. That is where it should begin; with the memory of a
motheror a fatherperched on the edge of a bed reading a story to me, or with me
sitting in my mothers or fathers lap as they read to me. But what were the nighttime
rituals, really? My mother prepared supper, we did the dishes (from which I would
always try to hide by disappearing into my closet so that I could read), and then TV and
then bedtime. I remember family rituals around TV. But I also recall reading in bed
past bedtime, with a light in the covers, and rising in semi-darkness to the same book.
(Strong-Wilson, Literacy autobiography, 25 April 2004)

I dont remember being inducted by others into stories. I remember doing that
myself. The teachers in the study also had clear recollections of the rituals that they
had developed around reading. Lee read past bedtime, hidden under the covers with
a flashlight. Helen describes reading as taking a nice hot bath; she read Anne of Green

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74 T. Strong-Wilson
Gables while submersed in Avon Desert Flower bubble bath, the shower curtain
drawn, the bathroom door locked, a sweet aroma suffusing the cloistered space. In a
family in which all things were shared, it was the only private space she remembers.
Such intimate encounters with childrens literature are culturally important, for the
value they assign to literary experience as an aesthetic experience (Willinsky, 1991;
Sumara, 1996) and the construction of childhood as a secret space hidden away
from adult eyes (Rose, 1984; Goodenough, 2004), in short, of childhood (and
childhood reading) as a place of formation.
Since evocation should precede response, Rosenblatt (1982) argues, we need to
provide opportunities for the child to listen to the sound, hear the tone of the
narrative voice, evoke characters and actions, feel the quality of the event
before we hurry the young listener or reader into something called response
(p. 273). It is no accident that Rosenblatt likens the aesthetic experience to
childrens early language experiences, thus connecting this experience with a
romantic notion of childhood in which things need to be allowed to be felt before
being formalised. In Wordsworths Prelude, the poet, as a young boy, experiences in
nature a sense of things far more deeply interfused while the advent of formal
schooling marks shades of the prison-house closing around the childs growing
imagination. Childhood is understood to reside in secret spaces (Goodenough,
2004), of which one that persists beyond childhood is the privacy of literary response
in the form of aesthetic experience. Through her examination of eighteenth-century
discourses about the child, Steedman (1995) has tied the adult search for self to the
construction of childhood. She links the emerging discourse of psychoanalysis in the
eighteenth century to a fascination with the past as well as with nascent scientific
discourses fascinated with smaller and smaller units; the past is only retrievable
through probing the unconscious of memory.
The cell, the smallest place within, promoted another set of analogies, for what the cell
carried was the child turned within, an individuals childhood history laid down inside
its body, a place inside that was indeed very small, but that carried with it the utter
enormity of a history. (Steedman, 1995, p. 92; emphasis in the original)

It was with pain and reluctance that one teacher in the study described her own
early reading history as attenuated. Such an admission disclosed how, as a struggling
reader, she had felt shut out from the company of books as well as from those
children for whom reading was not a chore, as it was for her. The way in which she
whispered this revelation within a circle of teachers who had all been avid readers
(myself included) spoke to the implicit assumption that in missing out on that
touchstone experience, she had somehow also missed out on an essential aspect of
childhood. Thus childhood itself (or more precisely, its construction through
remembrance) becomes a phenomenological topos as well as cultural and political
touchstone of literary experience.
Elementary teachers play a special role in the inculcation of stories in early
childhood education; that is, they play a special role in inculcating childhood. The
teacher is someone who is immersed in stories through classroom pedagogy and
curriculum and who herself typically comes bathed in stories. A phenomenology of

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Touchstones as sprezzatura 75
reader response suggests that the process of accepting responsibility for ones own
cultural literacy formation is more involved and complex than simply becoming
aware, on an intellectual level, of the history and politics of injustices within the
school system and society. Rather, the question needs to be: how can teachers
become involved in examining their own stories? Some have suggested that stories
stand in specific historical relationships to individuals (Pratt, 1991, p. 39, cited in
Cushman & Emmons, 2002, p. 204) therefore teachers need to re-engage critically
with those texts, or texts that are sufficiently the same so as to remind them of similar
stories they have read. Teachers need opportunities to undertake this memory work
in order to recognise their own landscapes of learning (Greene, 1978, p. 2) and
confront the stories that they find there (Greene, 1965, p. 423). This process is one
of bringing memory forward (Wilson, 2003a) or, as Rose (1984) puts it, the only
way out is to go back (or down) in place and time (p. 43). This journey engages
not only stories but the experiences, old and new, to which they cleave:
I remember a room unnaturally darkened because my mother would have closed the
curtains to shut out the light so that I could go to sleep. I hear the sounds of children
laughing and playing, my mom chatting with neighbours as she works in the garden. I
am inside. Maybe all that I had to do was sleep. But maybe I had been sent to my room.
My mother never spanked me. For that, I had to wait until my father got home. I can
remember crying myself to sleep. But I also remember reading and reveling in the fact
that I was reading when I was supposed to be sleeping. I came to prefer these nethery
spaces between light and darkness. (Strong-Wilson, Literacy autobiography, 25 April
2004)

Three boys are stranded on an island in Ballantynes (1977) Coral island, a story
originally published in 1858. Like Robinson Crusoe, the boys find inventive ways in
which to survive, ways that civilise their surroundings, including the lives of the
cannibal Natives who arrive on their shores and whose ways the young boys
reprimand and thus reform. The books allure for Terry, one of the teachers in the
study, lay in his recollection of the boys freedom to go wherever they please: the
wanderlust and exploring. The freedom to do whatever you want but in a very
simple way (Interview, 14 February 2003). Terry loved to travel and take in
whatever the world could offer him. Part of the storys charm for Terry also lay in its
attention to detail, including Ballantynes seemingly preternatural ability to
anticipate future fads, as when he described a man with an Afro who seemed to
Terry to be riding a surfboard (Literature circle, 21 May 2003; in Wilson, 2003a,
p. 254), this in a story written in the mid-1800s. Terry, in fastening on certain
aspects of the narrative, continually reiterated the same touchstone interpretation of
his touchstone book in the literature circles and interviews. Embedded in it was an
attachment to an experience.
From the high regard in which Terry spoke about Coral island, one would suppose
that it was one of Terrys childhood favourites, but he had only come across it in his
early twenties. Nevertheless, the effect of sprezzatura, or Terrys unalloyed delight in
boyish intrepid adventure, was the same. Coral island quickly became a staple of his
teaching, being the only novel that he read aloud to his Grade 4 class. At the same
time, Terry was fascinated by indigenous cultures; one of the allures of the literature

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76 T. Strong-Wilson
group was the expectation that he would read literature from First Nations cultures.
Terry had met some indigenous individuals in his life, although the only ones who he
had come to know fairly well were his students. One of the books that he borrowed
from me and became very enthusiastic about was Ruby Slipperjacks (2000) Little
voice. Terry had borrowed it from the resources that I regularly brought to the
literature circles for teachers to peruse while we waited for everyone to arrive. The
story tells of a First Nations girls development of a close relationship with her
grandmother who lives in the bush. The elements that endeared the book to him
were the same as those motivating his love of Coral island, even though the
protagonist was a girl: what they do is get in this canoe and theres nothing; theres
just hunters and the odd cabin. And theyre pretty free to do whatever they want
(Interview, 16 May 2003; emphasis added). Freedom is associated with a childs
ability to roam, in imagination or in fact (Goodenough, 2004). As in his reading of
Ballantyne, Terry admired the authors ability to imbue ordinary events (a simple
life) with excitement and a sense of adventure:
Terry:

I dont know if I could do it, because Im a city boy to a degree, but it would
be wonderful to try it. You know how fascinating can filling jars full of
blueberries be? And yet the author
Teresa: Can make it really interesting and meaningful.
Terry: Yeah! You want to be there. (Interview, 16 May 2003)

There were important differences between the two stories. Little voice represented
an authentic First Nations voice, Slipperjack being Ojibway, whereas Ballantynes
late-nineteenth century tale was written within a colonial frame of reference.
Through the literature circles and monthly interviews, Terry was beginning to see
Ballantynes stories as tarnished. As someone who liked to be seen as sympathetic to
indigenous peoples, he began to distance himself from his former favourite:
Teresa:

So what do you think of how he [Ballantyne] writes about [the Native

people]?
Terry: Well, you know, again, its an older perspective so hes you know yeah
sort of
Teresa: Heres Chapter 20. Intercourse with the savages. Cannibalism prevented.
Slain or buried. Survivors depart.
Terry: I did start another book that he wroteit was more of a Western, set in North
Americaand I noticed it was obviously not contemporary in terms of how he
talked about the Natives. We skip over those ones. (Interview, 28 March
2003, Wilson, 2003a, pp. 251252)

By the time the May 2003 literature circle arrived, when excerpts from Coral island
were read alongside those from a novel about the experiences of First Nations
children in residential school, called No time to say goodbye (Olsen, 2001), Terry was
showing clear signs of alienation. Familiar echoes of his love for Ballantyne
remained, as when he tried to share his delight at the surfboard episode, but he
quickly sensed that his comment had fallen flat. All of the following quotes are from
the literature circle held on 31 May 2003.

Touchstones as sprezzatura 77
When I was reading it a long time ago, I think that what I thought was really fun about it
was this description of the guy with the hair because hes got it in an Afro, right? And
then later on in the book, they describe him riding on a surfboard. Its just funny
because I kept looking back and saying, How could this be written in this contemporary
style? Thats beside the point. Youve got two dominating: one is Natives dominating
Natives and the other is whites dominating Natives. (emphasis added) (Wilson, 2003a,
p. 254)

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Challenged to explore links between the two stories, the teachers discerned that
even though at first there appeared to be little connection, the stories could be linked.
The Monica [story in No time to say goodbye] hit far more to the core because it was such
a personal violation of herself and her customs and her family promises. The Caucasian
teachers became the enemy, whereas in the Coral island one, the boys seemed more
observers who were very interested in the other culture and were watching the violence
[between the members of the two Native tribes]. (Wilson, 2003a, p. 253)

Here Naomi (another teacher) is alluding to the passage we read in which a nun in
the residential school cuts off a young girls hair, even though the girl pleads
with her not to; she had promised her dying mother that she would keep her hair
long. Faye, another teacher, concluded that the books were identical in their
depiction of a superior attitude on the part of the whites. Terry, whose familiarity
with Ballantynes text was intimate, did not resist Fayes imputation of the real
source of the boys adventurous spirit in Coral island. Indeed, he helped carry her
argument along:
Faye:

I sense the same kind of contempt, superior attitude, from the narrator or the
nuns, in the case of No time to say goodbye. The same sort of generalizations
and attitudes about people from other cultures are in both the boys and in the
nuns and the priests.
Teresa: Where did you get that impression from?
Faye:
In the Coral island story, even though the boys are detached, theyre, um
[she re-reads the text silently] there are things like the most terrible monster I
ever beheld or
Terry:
Incarnated. Incarnated fiends. (Wilson, 2003a, pp. 254255)

As evident from the videotape, Terry completed from memory Fayes quote from
Ballantyne. Later, it was Terry who turned on Ballantyne by mocking the likely
source of information for his stories:
Teresa:
Virginia:
Terry:
Teresa:

Where do you think the authors got their information from?

In No time to say goodbye, wouldnt it be personal experience? Stories handed
down.
Interviews with the people.
[sounds of general agreement; yeah]
It was their interviews; their experiences. What about Ballantyne? (Wilson,
2003a, p. 255)

Terry jumped in and responded with: His imagination [general laughter]. Earlier in
the study, Terry had been convinced that Ballantynes stories were based on truth
garnered from the authors travels, not unlike the stories that Terry told based on his
travels to India and other parts of the world.

78 T. Strong-Wilson
Terrys willingness to openly critique Ballantyne publicly is telling. This stance
contrasts with his former enthusiasm, three to four months earlier:

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[Why couldnt the teachers in elementary or high school get us to read something like]
Coral island? A hundred years ago Ballantyne wrote about these boys who get
shipwrecked on a desert island, and the literatures fabulous. Im reading it to my whole
class now. (Literature Circle, 20 January 2003)
I told you about that book, Coral island, by Ballantyne, written in the late 1800s. Some
of the stuff, I go, Wait a second! I check the date when it was written because he talks
abouttheyre on this island and some of the Native people come along and theyre
headhunters or something, I dont know, but one of the guysthe leaderhas a
personal servant and all that this guy does is take care of his hair. He makes it all puffy
like an Afro. It kind of gives a little bit of a description, like the combs, and Im going,
That didnt happen until the seventies! The other one was that they go out on pieces of
wood and stand on them and ride the waves. This was all written before 1900. So he
cant be playing a little trick on the reader and pretend that they were doing this.
Obviously, hes getting these experiences from what happened to him. (Interview, 14
February 2003)

As these excerpts show, it was not that he had not read the part about the
cannibals (headhunters); it was that its significance had escaped him. Its meaning
had eluded him because he was enthralled with certain touchstone passages, which
in turn were enmeshed within a colonial travel narrative that uses the veracity of the
witness account as a trope. Part of that veracity can also be attributed to how reading
and re-reading the story made Terry feel; it reminded him of childhood, in
Steedmans (1995) sense of an ideal formation. Ballantynes tale represented a
retelling of Robinson Crusoe within a childhood context of sprezzatura, the life that
Terry re-enacted in his travels to other countries. In particular, Terry was attached
to the freedom associated with untrammelled or innocent travel (Pratt, 1992;
Strong-Wilson, 2005). This innocent experience of adventure is problematic, in
that if freedom exists for Terry, it is based on its denial to others, as Toni Morrison
(1992) makes plain in her discussion of the significance of slavery to the white
American imagination. Terry began to discern the shape of a larger cultural narrative
through the interviews with the researcher and literature discussion with the
teachers, but it was primarily propelled by his own implicit weighing of Ballantyne
against Slipperjack outside the circles, in which Ballantyne came up short.
The tenacity of touchstones signifies a pronounced attachment to particular
imaginative experiences. I have recounted Terrys experience as an example of what
may be involved in recognising and challenging ones touchstone stories. The
questions are far from over, though. In displacing a touchstone story, what happens
to the experience associated with it? In Terrys case, is only the story dislodged or, in
becoming open to Ruby Slipperjacks story, which is not rooted in exploitative
relationships, does his own conceptualisation of story change? Terry broke with
Ballantyne, but in holding on to Slipperjacks story, did he only establish a new
touchstone, one that reiterated his own attraction to a free and simple lifestyle,
emblematic of the Rousseauian and Wordsworthian ideal of childhood as wedded to
a kinship with a (pastoral) nature?

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Touchstones as sprezzatura 79
Asking these questions brings me back to the significance of my own love affair
with stories. I, too, have performed a distancing from stories that I once loved in
order to latch on to new ones, such as those written by indigenous authors. The
possibility that attachment to story is not only or even mainly to particular titles, but
to an aesthetic experience, is a sobering thought, especially when we consider the
resiliency of the implicit association of such literary experience with an aesthetics of
childhood as sprezzatura. In any aesthetic experience, Rosenblatt (1985) offers by
way of confirmation of that thesis, we ought to be able to describe our response as a
feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we
say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold (p. 270; emphasis in the original). The
aesthetic experience is something that we imbibe with stories; stories are nested
within childhood and memories of childhood. What that means, pedagogically, is
that both stories and the (aesthetic/childhood) experiences associated with them
need to be addressed in critically engaging teachers with their own stories. Moreover,
it would seem that attachment not only precedes critical engagement but is what we
return to, even after challenging our landscapes of learning. Such was the case for
Terry. Such is also the case for me and no doubt, for others too:
This relationship to stories dwarfs all others in my childhood memory. For when I
wasnt inside of a book, a storyor the intention to return to storywould have been
inside of me. (Literacy autobiography, 25 April 2004)

Notes on contributor
Teresa Strong-Wilson is an assistant professor of Early Childhood Education in the
Faculty of Education at McGill University. Her research interests focus on
investigating social and political constructions of difference, narrative and
memory in early childhood and teacher reflective practice. In particular, she is
interested in teacher learning and constructions of childhood and methodological
approaches that address the critical literary, social, political and economic
contexts of early childhood education and teacher education, especially with
reference to indigenous education. She has published in such journals as
Educational Theory, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Educational Insights and
English Quarterly.
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