Autobiographical Elements

Janet Miller’s Use of Autobiography

As a child, Janet Miller was deeply moved by this painting of Picasso’s entitled, Guernica.  This painting became a symbol for Miller of helping students make connections beyond the “pre-packaged curriculum” because this was an opportunity that she herself experienced.  The image of Picasso’s Guernica, as well as an autobiographical passage from Miller’s article, “What's left in the field .... A curriculum memoir” is featured below:

I first saw Picasso’s Guernica when I was a junior (i.e. grade 11) in high school. As I stared at the huge painting, I felt as though life itself had been squashed, twisted, contorted- destroyed for reasons that I neither understood nor could forgive. I remember that I felt frozen by this painting, unable to speak even after I had backed away from the canvas, in retreat from the pain that emanated from Picasso’ s vision of the wanton destruction of war. As I struggled to make sense of the electric light bulb hanging above the shredded newsprint and the convoluted forms of humans and animals, the sounds of my friends’ voices and the explications of our guide remained muted to me. I was aware only of my bewilderment and the immensity of my outrage.

As our group was gently nudged into movement by our class chaperones , I recall that, even as I was able to slowly re-enter the chattering world of my peers, I was pondering the intensity of my reaction to Guernica. However, as we made our way through the crowds at the Museum of Modern Art [in New York City], I was not even dimly conscious of the changes that had immediately and irrevocably taken place in my ways of seeing my own and others’ lives. What I primarily felt at that moment, but could not articulate, was that all the colour had been drained from the world.

Earlier, my friends and I had lurched up and down the aisles of the train that was meandering through the hills of Pennsylvania, hauling us on our junior class trip from Pittsburgh to New York City. We had laughingly prioritized our tourist stops and had made pacts with one another about seating arrangements on the myriad bus tours that had been arranged for us.

This was a first trip to New York for most of us, and we were excited about seeing the lights of Broadway and Times Square. I knew that we would be touring the museums too, and I looked forward to actually seeing some of the paintings that our teachers had discussed in our art and English classes. However, as we voted on our absolutes for this trip, the mandatory snapshot for our group included waving from the crown of the Statue of Liberty and hugging one of the New York Public Library stone lions. Art was something that our teachers had put on our itinerary, something that we would talk about in class upon our return. Although I secretly was pleased about our museum stops, I also was caught up in being a tourist. As I entered the whirlwind of our city tours, and even after we had exited the Museum of Modern Art, I could not have anticipated that the force of my response to one particular painting would mark a turning point in my understandings of the connections among curriculum, the arts, my work, and my life.

Before I saw Guernica, the visual arts had been removed from the everyday for me. Paintings existed as images, colour, and light melded together as representations of life as it should or could be, and hung on walls of museums located miles from the south hills of Pittsburgh, where I lived. As a child growing up on the cusp between the steel mill towns and the burgeoning suburbs of Pittsburgh, I always looked forward to our elementary school `art and music’ field trips into the city or to the galleries in Shadyside or to exhibitions and concerts at the University of Pittsburgh or what was then Carnegie Tech. I remember that, even in fourth grade, when the emphasis among my friends was on kickball games and bike rides after school, I loved clambering onto the school bus to be carted o€ to the symphony or the planetarium or the museums. Returning home, amidst the singing and jostling of my fellow classmates, I sometimes tried to envision myself within the frames of the paintings that we had viewed of bucolic landscapes or of serene dignitaries whose portraits appeared to attest to their importance and bearing in the world. Such paintings represented a life foreign to me, appealing in its apparent serenity, beauty, and dignity, yet separated from my world not only in dimensions of time and space, but also in terms of wealth, power, and circumstance.

Always, as we returned from these outings, the school bus would lumber past the steel mills as it rolled us away from the city, crossed the Liberty Bridge and returned us to the south hills. Often, on darkening winter afternoons, we stared out the bus windows at wavering red skies that reflected the glow of molten steel being dumped down mountainous slag heaps. Some of my friends waved at the steel mills as we bounced by, sending symbolic salutes to their fathers who were just beginning the night shift. And as the driver wedged our bus into its parking place next to the school gate, those paintings that I had viewed during the afternoon at the museum faded, replaced by the grey air and the familiar faces of the people who lived and worked in my neighbourhood. Art was remote for me, distanced by the idealization of form and content to which I, even as a fourth grader, had attributed its function.

Although I continued to be drawn to art and music, by my junior year in high school I knew that I wanted to become an English teacher. Literature was at the centre of my academic interests, and I thought that I was lucky to have been able to decide so easily and quickly on a career. What could be better than getting paid for loving to read and sharing that love with one’s students? It was easy to be a high school romantic.

In my junior year, too, I was in¯ influenced by my favourite high school English teacher, who could quote extensively from [the US poets] Longfellow, Poe, Emerson, and Irving, but who also introduced us to the verse of Whitman and Dickinson and Lanier and to the regionalists and realists. Miss Beidler talked about these authors as among those who revolutionized the forms and intentions of literature in the United States. She often would make connections among painters, artists, and musicians whose works represented similar challenges to notions of a romantic idealism or an aesthetic purity.

Although I was interested in these challenges, I was connected to words, to written expression, as the primary means of creating meaning and eliciting response from others. I was learning about literature as a discipline, as a separate entity, and although Miss Beidler made countless connections for us, way before interdisciplinary studies and response-centred curriculum had hit the high schools, I still saw my art and music classes as auxiliary in my awkward attempts to interpret the meaning of life. I, of course, felt confident that this was the primary function of literature, and, by extension, of the English teacher. I was sure that novels and poems and short stories and plays were the direct connections to Truth, and I was just as certain that there was Truth to be found, if one could just learn how to interpret those symbols. What’s scary about all of this is that I continued to learn about literature and its functions and its genres in this segmented and definitive manner throughout my college years as an English major. And, as I began to teach eleventh and twelfth grade English, just as I had hoped to do since my own junior year in high school, I could feel in my teaching, in my skin and bones, the further splintering of the disciplines into discrete subject matter areas.

As a high school English teacher, I was expected to emphasize my students’ mastery of factual details, such as the elements of a short story or the parts of speech or the characteristics of a tragic hero (nevermind the heroine). My colleagues and I all taught furiously, as if in a race to cover the canon before it could enlarge and encroach upon our established grade-level content. We also taught as though there were one agreed upon interpretation of [the US novel] T he Scarlet Letter, the main choice for a novel selection among all the eleventh grade English teachers in my department who were preparing our students for the New York State Regents’ exams.

Throughout my college studies, I had felt that there was more to literature than the facts surrounding its creation or the categories into which we constantly placed each selection. And, as I taught high school English, I constantly wondered how Miss Beidler had found the room in her curriculum to even mention the connections she saw among music, art, and the literature that we were studying at the time. I attempted to juggle the demands of a curriculum, conceived as a set of predetermined objectives for my high school English students to achieve, and my own need by now to make connections among works of art and the circumstances of our everyday lives. I also began to wonder how I might possibly encourage students to make their own connections, given the structures of schooling that encouraged them only to replicate mine. And I thought of Guernica.

After taking that junior class trip to New York, I had spent many hours talking with Miss Beidler and my classmates about our reactions to Guernica, which, of course, were varied in their intensity and focus. I chose to read more about the Spanish Civil War and tried to figure out Picasso’s political stance by learning more about the historical and political circumstances that impelled Picasso to paint Guernica. I did this research, not as an assignment, but as a form of questioning about my own passionate response to the painting. I did not especially want to know into what period of Picasso’s work we might classify this particular piece, or what techniques he borrowed or rejected from Cubism in order to create his angry and anguished response to the destruction of a small Spanish town and its people. Still, I think that I fell back on the traditional ways that I already had learned were means to understanding because I did not know how to trust my own responses.

But even as I pursued these traditional routes to knowledge about myself as well as about the circumstances that evoked Picasso’ s fervid response to the senseless murder of innocent people, I found myself remembering foremost my reactions when I first saw Guernica. I knew, after that initial encounter, that words were not necessary to evoke or to express response to work of art or to a human condition. And ultimately, Guernica shattered my learned and limited ways of seeing, forced me to consider new ways of looking at life and death, demanded that I encounter, confront, and, most importantly, respond to competing visions of the world.