Feet of Clay: On Walking Upright
“In the midst of doing things together, participants display how they align themselves toward other participants with whom they are interacting…. In Goffman's (1981) terms, they display their stance, footing, or their ‘projected selves.’” (cited in Goodwin, 2007)
Finding one's footing represents a moment-to-moment prayer for equanimity in a world bombarded with stimuli that threatens to sweep us off our feet. This truth reveals itself most purely in a baby's first steps, that wobbling moment when a child discovers gravity after floating in the protected realm of walkers and buggies.
In this seemingly simple act, the infant must perform astoundingly complex calculations, integrating information from their vestibular system, visual field, proprioceptive awareness, and tactile sensations of pressure against the ground. It's quite a “feat,” one that mirrors the neural complexity involved in all significant learning.
Anchor Standard I: Stand Up for Yourself
This pattern of physical adaptation embodies the essence of human learning across all domains. Just as babies must observe others walking to create mental models of upright locomotion, developing writers need to see models of effective communication.
The countless hours a baby spends crawling and pulling up on furniture parallel the drafting and revision process in writing, where productive struggle builds essential strength and capability. In both realms, learners must muster the courage to let go and trust their own balance—in writing, their own intentions and meanings.
The neuroscience of this development reveals fascinating parallels. Just as the brain integrates multiple systems for walking, it coordinates various cognitive processes in writing. Muscle memory in physical movement relates directly to developing writing fluency, while motivation and emotion affect both physical and written development.
Unique learning styles influence these processes uniquely just as babies develop gross motor skills at varying paces and through different strategies. Thinking that humans have just three simple learning styles—visual, auditory, or kinetic—is absurd. Each human is a precious, irreplaceable original. I’ve often told my students to remember: You are the pinnacle of human development on this day. You are a born learner.
Anchor Standard II: Find Your Path and Walk It with Friends and Family
Traditional writing pedagogy often fails to honor these natural developmental patterns. We frequently rush students to "walk" before they've developed the necessary "muscles," imposing standardized assessments that expect all learners to progress at the same pace.
Digital technology has transformed the "gravity" of writing, creating new challenges and opportunities for finding our footing in written expression. The question becomes whether our instructional approaches provide enough space for the productive struggle that characterized our first steps.
The role of teachers in this process mirrors that of parents supporting toddlers learning to walk. They must master the delicate art of knowing when to hold on and when to let go, when to cheer and when to console, creating safe spaces for students to "fall" in their writing while maintaining high expectations for eventual independence.
Anchor Standard III: Transform Independence into Interdependence
This balance between direct instruction and discovery learning shapes not just individual learning but the learner's entire relationship with the learning process and with members of their grand cohort. The independence theme runs deep in both walking and writing development—but independence alone lowers the bar.
Complete independence is a dangerously incomplete goal; instead, the lesson from evolution tells us to value interdependence, recognizing how cultural participation shapes our understanding of both physical and intellectual development. We share highway space, we walk on sidewalks, we read and write together.
The teacher, like a parent supporting a toddler's first steps, must carefully scaffold this journey toward autonomy and agency as one among many. Consider how this narrative of finding one's footing in a group plays out in daily life, as Bakhtin's chained utterances suggest.
Walking the aisles of a grocery store, we respond to unexpected situations, perhaps a commotion at the entrance to the store, a homeless shoplifter fleeing, fellow shoppers gathering to commiserate with the checkout clerk, shared sorrow about the state of the world. Each moment requires us to realign, to adjust our footing both literally and metaphorically, to integrate new information and respond appropriately. Do you see what I see? As a society, we have not met the requirements of Anchor Standard III.
The Illusion of Individual Mastery
The journey toward walking upright independently in any domain follows recurring episodes of constant adjustment and response to feedback from the physical and cultural world. Mastery at the individual level is impossible without operating at the interdependent level. Individual mastery is the illusion that becomes real through mastery of interdependence.
Like those first tentative steps, learning to read and write effectively requires us to fall and rise repeatedly, each time gaining new insight into following the path between intention and execution of worthy projects made worthy interdependently. Learners must develop the strength to stand on their own while actively affirming the value of support systems for all of us in our 21st century cohort that catch us when we stumble.
Finding one's footing thus becomes a metaphor for all meaningful learning. Standing and enduring this long walk is a continuous process of observation, attempt, failure, and adaptation. Whether in physical movement, written expression, or any other domain of human development, we progress through similar stages of supported exploration toward increasingly confident independence, making us fit to be servant leaders in interdependence.
This understanding can transform how we approach teaching and learning, honoring both universal patterns of human sociocultural development and the unique journey of each learner finding their way in the world. Classrooms grounded in racing one another to the top with independence as a goal ironically leave masses of people behind, not just in childhood but as adults in a democracy.
REFERENCE
Goodwin, C. (2007). Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society, 18(1), 53-73.
This article examines how participation frameworks, stance, and affect are organized through embodied interaction, using as data a sequence where a father helps his daughter with math homework. It analyzes how participants position their bodies toward each other and shared materials to create joint attention and understanding, while also negotiating moral and affective stances through their participation or non-participation in these frameworks.