Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change

Alan McEwen

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Alan McEwen teaches English as a second language to adults at the Salinas Adult School. He was a newspaper photographer for many years. He also paints landscapes.

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Why Glean?

Gleaning, McEwen says, has been something different, something new, something worthwhile, and something that has taken him out of himself. Remembering that helps him make a decision about how to spend a Saturday morning.

Curiosity

Curiosity was a large part of McEwen's decision to glean, especially curiosity about familiar places and situations that become new once more when looked at in a different light.

Landscapes

As a landscape painter, he sometimes finds himself in the field seeing his surroundings in a new way.

Newspaper Photography

McEwen's work as a newspaper photographer took him around the county. Now that he teaches many Spanish-speaking adults in the community, he says, he recognizes a certain provincial quality to the newspaper's coverage of the county.

Teaching English as a Second Language

Now that he is a teacher, McEwen says he feels, maybe for the first time, that he has truly meaningful work. Most of his students are Spanish-speaking. Many work in the fields or have family members who do.

Fields

Gleaning is one way to experience in a very limited way some of what his students have experienced their whole lives, McEwen says. Even understanding something as small as the different ways he and his farm-working students look on rain helps him be a better teacher.

Gleaning, Writing, and Painting

When I asked him when the word "gleaning" had entered his vocabulary, he talked about how writing or art often involve a kind of gleaning ... finding something overlooked.

His First Glean ... and His Second

The first time he joined a glean, says McEwen, he was struck by the newness of the experience, and also by the camraderie of a group of people working toward the same goal. Already by his second time, the newness and uncertainty were gone, but the satisfaction in the collective work was even stronger.