NONFICTION - Feb. 27, 1994

EATING ON THE STREET: Teaching Literacy in a Multicultural Society by David Schaafsma (University of Pittsburgh Press: $35; 229 pp.). In 1989, David Schaafsma and six other teachers initiated a three-week, summer writing program in Detroit for disadvantaged, African American preteens in which they explored the life of their own community. The children, to judge by their work, found the enterprise engaging: one ended up writing a recipe for “Life Stew” that included “4 cups of hope in the human spirit,” “3 days in jail, eating green bologna,” and “A dash of curiosity”; another composed a poem that reads, in its entirety, “I am a cat so soft and cute./I’m a rose with sharp thorns./I’m a Limo, so long and black./I’m Dora, so cute and so nice./but don’t mess with me/or I’ll dice you to pieces.” Schaafsma, a professor of English education at the University of Wisconsin, relishes his students’ work, but his emphasis in “Eating on the Street” is more scholarly: How do you teach children to write, and think, and judge, without imposing your own values upon them? If this book--whose title derives from the African American teachers’ belief that African American students shouldn’t eat on the street--is any indication, writing programs are a good way.