The effects of the introduction of the cybernetic apparatus (computers, internet) on an alternative school program (“Horizons”) within a specific social body, Branford High School, an American public school serving a small and relatively affluent shoreline community of about 30,000 in the Connecticut, will be analyzed here in terms of its grey literature production across a 16 year period (from 1985-2001).

Branford High School itself services approximately 1,000 students a year, with a teaching staff of about 80, close to a dozen administrators (with secretaries), a maintenance staff of around 6. The “Horizons” program, operating within Branford High School, services some 60 of these thousand students a year, those who have been identified as “at risk”, or as “disaffected learners” (two terms of many from its grey literature). It forms a sort of school within a school, and presently consists of 8 teachers, an administrator and a social worker. -- I worked as a teacher of English (language and literature) in this program during that time, and offer my observations from that perspective.

Following the basic definition of grey literature, as given in the program guide of this conference: "Information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing" – I offer, as theoretical framework, these four levels of discourse within the literature of Horizons and Branford High School:

1) of the students (product/clientele/industry)

2) of the teachers (knowledge/expertise/academia)

3) of the administrators (business)

4) of the law (juridico-legislative, government).

I link these further with the four discourse model, and attendant schemas and algorithms, proposed by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as elaborated by Dr Theaux – a model to which we shall return, following a brief introduction to and history of the "Horizons Program" in Branford.

The “Horizons Program” began originally under the name of “Basic Studies”, in 1973, with 4 teachers and one supervisor, as a program intended to get high school drop-outs off the streets (where it was feared they were engaging in socially unproductive and criminal behavior), and back into the classroom, with a view to turning them into socially productive members of the community. During this time it was also referred to (by number) as the “2 to 4 Program”, referring to its part-time hours of operation after the end of the regular school day. Shortly after I joined in 1985 it was expanded to a full-time program, brought within the regular school day, and renamed the “Core Program” – referring to its focus on the ‘Core’ areas of study: English, Math, Social Studies ( formerly called ‘History’), and Science. A year or so after this it was expanded again, to two full time programs, one focusing on the younger students (generally in their first two years of high school), and the other on the older students (generally in their last two). The teaching staff was doubled to 8, along with a part-time social worker.

Alternative programs in general have proliferated during the last half century or so in the American school system, driven in part by a ‘rhetoric of crisis’ strongly marked in its grey literature. This rhetoric of crisis has also driven the proliferation of new methods and types of teaching – one of the first I remember from my childhood was “New Math”, back in the 1960’s – today, the presentation of such new modes during regularly scheduled ‘professional workshop days’ and elsewhere has become a thriving business – my colleagues and I used to joke that we should come up with something “new and improved” with a fancy title (like: ‘Teaching Aperture – a Way Out of the Box’) and market it to schools nationwide in order to make more money than we were as simple teachers. -- Anyway, in addition to New Math, there has been the ‘Whole Language’ approach to reading and writing, ‘hooked on phonics’, ‘back to basics’, ‘bell to bell teaching’, ‘learning to learn strategies’, ‘integrated teaching’, ‘cooperative learning’, ‘performance based education' -- to mention just a few of the grey buzz-words and attendant educational movements..

This rhetoric of crisis is, of course, not specific only to the last half century of American education; it is found in the literature of American advertising of this time, where products are continually being marketed as ‘new and improved’, ‘better’, ‘bigger’, etc. It also applies to the whole of the 20^{th century, from ‘modernism’ through ‘deconstruction’ to ‘post-modernism’ and beyond. Nor need we stop there, historically speaking: we can trace it back further to the grey pamphlets and posters of the revolutions dating back to the ‘age of enlightenment’ (18th century). The concern that things are in crisis, breaking down (or in need of being broken down), and/or that things were better in the old days (‘back to basics!’), that the proper balance between those four levels of social discourse (law, knowledge, business and industry) is in danger, is indeed co-extensive with civilization and/or politics (-- words from the Latin and Greek roots meaning ‘city’ respectively).}

The clientele, the students, of such alternative programs as Horizons, are indeed generally in the midst of an identified crisis (a crisis of identification), as ‘disaffected learners’, ‘at risk’ of dropping out, burning out, acting out, and so on. For one reason or another they have chosen not to participate in school, or to participate in negative fashion – their grey literature production, instead of moving towards white or ideal literature, has turned black (non-existent) or 'red' (i.e. defined by the school and by law as a negative in need of erasure). Some are very bright, some are slow, with the majority falling somewhere in between. Many, though by no means all, come from poor or broken home situations. What is common to them all is that ‘school’, far from being seen as an ‘alma mater’ (nourishing mother), has become something threatening against which they rebel, a hated tyrant in their lives, an ‘evil father’ (malus pater).

To a lesser extent, these are all things that are found in the regular school as well. Schools are defined by law in America (government or legal GL discourse) as standing “in loco parentis” – in the place of the parents. They provide nourishment (in the form of education) and also discipline (in the form of rules and regulations to be followed). If the students take their nourishment and give it back properly (according to the rules) -- beginning with the learning of the alphabet, the ‘ABC's’, the letter – they are rewarded and praised as ‘good’ boys and girls, who are on their way to the ‘ideal’. If they do not, they are punished or ostracized, as ‘bad’ boys and girls, on their way to nowhere.

Many students resist this encouraged and rewarded identification of themselves with the ‘good’ and end up counter-identifying with the ‘bad’ – a brief perusal of popular teen music reveals this very clearly. This ambiguity of identification can be found amongst schoolteachers and administrators as well (who were, of course, all students once themselves). I remember an anecdote the first supervisor/director of the Basic Studies program (precursor to Horizons) liked to tell. He (Charlie) was a science teacher in the regular school (a most excellent one, in my estimation) and had to go back to college for a supervisory degree before he took on the administrator role. In one of his ‘supervision/administration’ classes the professor read a set of rules and asked the class what they thought of them as rules for a high school. Charlie found the rules excessively harsh, as did one other member of the class. The rest of the class – most of them teachers working to become administrators – found the rules excellent, and thought it would be most excellent if all schools could adopt them. At this point the professor sprung his trap, and informed the class that the rules he had just read them were the rules for a federal penitentiary.

Having attended various ‘alternative education’ conferences over the years, I notice that alternative programs generally break down into two approaches or models. One sets up (in its GL) a very carefully defined set of rules and expectations, specific progress marks determined by standardized learning packets, and so on. The other is more relaxed, with flexible curricula that are constantly being retailored to motivate and meet the individual needs of the students presently attending the program. (Both these approaches, I should add, tend to work and meet with a certain success...) Horizons (and Basic Studies) followed the latter approach.

I mentioned “Charlie” as one of the first administrators of the program. This use of the first name (and avoidance of title) was a strategy that we carefully followed over the years. Students were encouraged to address the teachers by their first names, or by nicknames (which they were happy to invent/continue over the years). With regard to the “identification” ambiguity we found that this very much helped bypass the negative counter-identification problem. As teachers we thus stepped aside from the students’ problems with authority figures – by stepping aside from our own presumed ‘identification’ – we entered the grey and stood next to them on the level, as it were.

Another aspect of this identification question, which the Horizons teachers found important to note and work with over the years, was the way in which individual students responded to gender. We would find that certain students would respond very differently to the male teachers than to the female teachers. (We generally worked to maintain a gender balance in both staff and student population.) Thus, for example, I as a male might find that I was having problems with a student (either male or female), which problems were shared by the other male teachers, but that the female teachers had no problems at all with the same student (and vice versa in the case of other students). In other words, for some students, it was the pater (father-figure) that was always seen as malus (evil), and the mater (mother-figure) as ‘alma’ (nourishing), while for others it was the mater that was mala and the pater that was almus. In some cases this was a direct reflection of the student’s actual mother and father situation, in others it seemed to relate less to actual mother and father and more to the ways in which they had come to see other more generalized (i.e. social) authority figures in their lives. In any case we found that noting and dealing with this particular aspect of the identification problem made a marked difference in the success of the students.

As I indicated above, a major problem we as teachers had dealing with our alternative students was that they generally suffered from some degree of anomie – their grey literature production had faded to black: they would produce nothing; or their production, such as it was, had turned to 'red': graffiti on school walls and other grey acts generally perceived as negative. As an English teacher (of reading and writing, language and literature), there were three exercises I found worked well to break through this resistance on the part of the students, to overcome their ‘writer’s block’. Although the rest of the curriculum would change from year to year, these three exercises always found a place in my lesson plans at the beginning of the school year.

The first consisted of reading them a short passage from an author like Faulkner or James Joyce, written in stream of consciousness style, then turning them loose with a goodly number of blank pieces of paper. The goal was to see who could fill up the most pages, without regard to spelling or grammar, ordered sentences, etc. Most students responded well to this – interestingly, the most resistant could also be encouraged to participate, and would, though they held on to their resistance through the mechanism of repetition (lists of nouns, phrases repeated over and over…).

The second exercise was to provide them with a number of blank sheets of paper, have them hold one aside, and then on the others write as many observations as they could about that first blank sheet of paper. (The science teacher in the program would generally follow this up in his classes with slightly more structured lessons on the practice of observation.) The students tended to average about 50 discrete observations, with a bit of encouragement, in one 45-minute class period. (The all-time record was somewhere around 300, I think.)

The third exercise, and by far the most popular, was the so-called “story-slam”. (I only discovered the name for it after several years, from another English teacher that joined the Horizons Program at that time, who used the same basic exercise as lesson himself.) I see it as a sort of primitive or basic grey literature generation program. Classes in Horizons averaged about 8 students each – for this exercise we would sit about a table (myself included – I also participated in the stream of consciousness and observation exercises). Each would spend about 3 or 4 minutes writing the beginning of a story, and at the end of the 3 or 4 minutes we would pass what we had written to the person on our left, who would pick up that story and continue it for the next 3 or 4. I always made it clear that there was to be no particular censorship involved – the students were free to write whatever they pleased. Names of the participants often figured strongly in the stories generated (myself included), with a good bit of rough give and take occasionally -- generally most took it all in with good humor -- it was, after all, an even playing field. From time to time I would perform an intervention (beyond what the other seven in the circle were writing), generally a brief private communication between myself and one of the students.

But here already we can see how, as soon as the students start producing again, another resistance beyond theirs threatens to arise: that of the school to aspects of the students’ GL production. This suggests itself as the original resistance, against which theirs developed as an angry reflection. I side-stepped the problem of this return of the original resistance in the case of the story-slams by 1) participating within the group on a level (“keeping it real”, as the phrase goes) and 2) functioning as ‘expert’ advisor to individual students rather than as ‘master’ (actual censor). Further evolutions of the students’ GL, however, beyond the primitive and immediate story-slam, had to face this problem of resistance again on a higher level:

Along with a regular yearbook, once the program had enough computers and computer access, I would have the students work together to publish a newspaper or journal during the year. The first one was called Horizon Times, and ran for about 3 years, using Apple II’s Newsroom program.

Like the story-slams, it was self-censored, if at all. (As the “expert”, I would make recommendations on wit & lack of wit, but only go so far as observations on permitted and not permitted.) I can still remember the curiously ambivalent look on our administrator’s face when he saw and began to read the first copy. He (Mr. G in this case, not Charlie, who had been forced out of the position earlier) was enamored of the notion of “project teaching” and thrilled to have an example of it from the program he was administrating. At about the same time as he was laughing at the somewhat intimate ‘Advice Column’ in the Horizon Times, a look of despair started to descend. He did not need to tell me – at that moment I could read his mind. When he first saw the product he immediately wanted to show it to the Principal and even the Board of Education, as an example of what Horizons was accomplishing. Reading it he realized that he could not do that in any sort of official capacity: amusing and as well done as it might be, the content had the potential for upsetting certain people and drawing censure. -- So we did not show it off officially, but rather let it flourish half-hidden in the grey. (The student who had written the advice column actually did bring a copy of it to the Principal of the school – unofficially, as it were; from what she told me it seems the principal’s reaction was much the same as Mr. G’s.) We usually made extra copies for students outside the Horizon’s Program in the regular school where it and the later New Horizons Literary Review (done on Windows based machines) were popular. -- Neither made it to an official presentation at the Board of Education, though a few selected members of the board did get copies from time to time.

-- A theoretical detour is in order here, to elucidate this problematic of resistance in and to grey literature production. Let us take a closer look at the Lacanian algorithm of the four discourses mentioned above, and at how it represents the four discourses of grey literature. (I use here the model as it has been developed by Dr Theaux. The pictures you will see come from some of his webbed-material, where they appear as a single rotating .gif file. <www.akhnaton.net/dna/sub01/1999/20030823155300_knwan_fr.htm>

These depictions show how 4 terms or images (/S/, S1, S2, and a) rotate about 4 places (agent, other, product and truth) to produce four discourses: academia (the teachers), government (the board of education), industry (the students), and business (the administrators).

‘S1’ stands for the primary significand, the written letter, the spell of a word on a page. ‘S2’ is the second significand, whose necessary interaction with the first makes ‘reading’ possible. Thus it stands for knowledge, or knowing. The barred ‘/S/’ stands for the individual Subject. The ‘a’ (or aobject) stands for all objective other ('a' objects), and by extension the environment in toto. These 4 represent the basic necessities for a discourse: a Subject, an Object (<>environment), and the linguistic doubling with which a discourse proceeds (S1, S2…)

The ‘Place of agent’ indicates what it is that drives the action of the discourse. The ‘Place of other’ indicates what is reflected in the discourse. The ‘Place of Product’ indicates what is produced by the discourse -- and thus at the same time reveals the cause of the discourse. The ‘Place of Truth’ indicates what is seen as essential in the action of the discourse.

Let us now begin the rotation of these images on these places, and show how the 4 permutations, in this model, generate the four discourses of grey literature.