Naturalizing Writing—The Happiest Place on Earth

Wonderful CWPA 2015 conference at Boise. Thanks to all who worked to bring this off in the beautiful town of Boise. I want to come back. To live.

I thought about many issues while attending sessions, listening to the speakers, and talking with old and new friends. I will try to focus on one.

I wandered into a session entitled “The Wonderful World of Administration: Improving Our Programs Using Tools from the Happiest Place on Earth.” I’m slow, but after a while, I caught on. I leaned over to whisper to my friend  sitting next to me, “Do you think I’m the only person in this room who didn’t know where the happiest place on earth is?”

Beth nodded and said, “Probably.”

Since I am neither a Writing Center person nor a Disneyphile, I was misplaced in this session—as I may be displaced in life; nevertheless, I got something out of this session. In her presentation, Nicole Caswell said an instruction to Disney hosts is “Make sure each visitor leaves Disney World happy. How can we make sure that every student leaves the Writing Center happy?” she asked. She didn’t seem to expect an answer.

Uncharacteristically, I didn’t respond, but I thought: Write their papers for them.

I also thought, the happiness exit would be a good credo for our writing classes. We should as writing teachers have as one of our primary objectives students should leave our class happy—our class, not our course.

There was a lot of talk in the conference about transfer. Underneath the question of transfer lie the overt and covert purposes of required writing courses (the convert ones are complicated, involving money and the maintenance of social categories).

Purposes invite objectives. In several sessions, I listened to what teachers hoped would be the take-away for students; and here’s what I took away from these discussions: as a field, we may be going over a cliff by complicating the natural act of writing, of letting words flow from our fingers because we have something we want to say about something we care about to people we hope are listening and may have something to say back--the way I am writing here, on a plane heading out of Boise, and thinking about what kind of student writing I love to read, the kind that makes them and me happy when they leave the class.

An Act of Grace

I'm working through grief about Ali. I've been here before--or at least in a place too much like this one, but that doesn't make the journey any easier. I'm one thought away from crying.

When people ask me, innocently, how are you?, they really just want an easy answer, a sign that everything's okay and we can continue on with our day unburdened by other people's griefs. My problem at this stage is that if someone asks me, I tell them probably in some attempt to unburden myself. I know from hard experience that keeping grief inside doesn't work. It festers there. On the other hand, you can't shout it from the rooftops. Some people really don't want to hear.

These thoughts and one of my friends led me to a new thought about personal writing. I have for decades used writing as a way of getting things more or less "out there," not keeping them "in here." Of course they stay inside, but by having them out there as well, they're just not as bad. Sometimes, I  even figure things out. I think that being able to use writing like this is an emotional resource and that we should at least in our writing classes give this gift of writing to our students.  A few years ago, my students wrote a book of advice for writing teachers. If you look at the chapter on "Journals," you'll see how students use writing to cope with some of the difficult problems we face in our lives.

Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives

A close friend of mine has been listening to me whining. I called her on the day Ali died. She had had a particularly hard day herself, coping with something very sad in her life. She listened to me for about an hour on the phone, I suppose you could call it bearing witness to my grief. I talked to her the next day and she said something striking.

She said something about how it made her feel better by making me feel better by her listening. I can't remember her exact words--but I had never thought of personal writing from this point of view. It goes something like this: the writer gets some sort of release by opening up those emotions, fears, hurts that our culture teaches us to cover--the places where we are most human, and as Bene Brown has said, most vulnerable. I had never thought about how opening up is a gift of sorts to whoever was gracious enough to hear you. I haven't quite said it yet: the reader gains by opening up to hear the writer. It's really an act of grace.

DeCentering Writing Studies

I have finished taking notes on Laura Micciche’s Doing Emotion. Her book was well worth my reading. I appreciated most of what she wrote. And in those places where I had to acknowledge different universes, she brought up points for discussion.

Her important point to me involves the materiality of emotion: that we see emotion and we read emotion in texts—again, understanding texts as only superficially static. When we read emotions in texts, we are obviously reading ourselves, our histories, out cultures, our relationships with others, our friends we have loved, those who have died, those who have faded from our lives but left in our minds their traces.

Micciche makes a convincing argument to the necessity of paying attention to the materiality of emotion through language. Her larger point contests the debilitating dichotomy between emotion and reason—as if they could ever be separated by a theoretical centrifuge.

I believe with Micciche that when students are emotionally invested in whatever they write, they will write better than when defending some kind of canned topic. Not only will they write better, they will learn more about writing by having been engaged in the writing act.

Although Micciche links Marx’s theory of alienated labor to her overly-labored argument positioning composition and writing program administration as subjugated and feminized, I might turn it against what I have previously called performative, fake, or school writing—when we ask students to write essays demonstrating their competence or knowledge in order to achieve an external reward—a grade (see Daniel Pink’s TED talk on extrinsic vs intrinsic rewards). Reframed, we can see this kind of writing as alienated labor, labor that is “external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” This frame of school-writing might help to explain the marked difference between the kind of writing we get when we ask for honest or bogus information.

I appreciate the general thrust of Micciche’s argument, but I have to wonder about the space between what she and I see or whether one or both of us are blind. I wrote in a previous post that I have never “felt” the subjugation of writing studies or writing program administration—and I have often wondered about the disenfranchised claims—which Micciche extensively documents. I don’t have space to disentangle our differences here. I have always felt respected within the academic environment—and I think many of my WPA friends  have felt the same. I think some of this difference might be located in social class relationships—I don’t know. I do know that as a Writing Program Administrator, as a Professor, I have occupied an incredibly privileged social position. And I know that as a WPA, one of my dominant projects is to abdicate disenfranchised academic labor.  There is absolutely no logic that supports requiring writing courses taught by part-time teachers (other than the logic of profit).

Micciche argues extensively that Writing Studies suffers from its link to materialism, caring, affect. I think as a field we may have overly disenfranchised ourselves. I have seen a long history of rhetoric and composition scholars (note the way in which we have linked composition to “rhetoric”) attempting to argue for the centrality of our field. To me, these arguments have seemed silly. I think it’s equally important for citizens to be able to name in distant order the planets in our solar system as to be able to define ethos, logos, and pathos. I think as scholars we need to pay some attention to how our arguments make ourselves the center of the intellectual universe.  I love to write. If I can pass that on, that seems good enough. I’m not certain that this love should be required.

Writing Program Administration and Labor

I should be doing other work, but I have continued to struggle through Micciche's Doing Emotion this morning. The reading struggle has changed as I have moved through the chapters. In the early chapters, I resisted her theoretical language. I felt as if she were reproducing high-fives in the field. Micciche notes elsewhere Peter Herman's complaint that scholars in the field have reduced themselves in the tenure game to re-saying currently popular saids. I doubt that this trend is new. It might simply be an unannounced tradition of scholarship, mimicking a cultural phenomenon of resaying what's au courant. And who can blame? We all want to be known (see my previous post on numbers).

Here's how my reading struggle has changed. I strenuously resisted the  theoretical language in her first chapters, although I value, in my current emotional struggle with my dog's cancer, much of what she claims. We might even be "on the same page" (please forgive me). In her later chapters, the overly nominalized, abstract phrasing merged into straight language. But her message shifted from theorizing the ontology of emotion to a kind of rant (the kind to which I am prone). I think she has inherited this rant. I am materializing it here because I think the rant disables effective writing program administration and productive theorizing and scholarship in our field (loosely, the field of Writing Studies).

The first one involves the derogation of writing program administration. I have been a WPA in three institutions, beginning in 1990. I admit I am male--and my gender distorts my perception, but I have never felt marginalized in my work. In the three universities in which I have worked, I have always felt respected, my work and responsibilities certainly equal to a literary scholar's responsibility to acquaint students with Milton. Our responsibility is to help students with their writing, to make writing, like reading, a part of their personal, professional, and civic lives. I can't think of a more important responsibility.

As Writing Program Administrators, we are embedded within a historical labeling of our work as grunt as opposed to the etherealized labor of our literary brothers and sisters, but this imbrication doesn't mean we have to buy it. We can engage in the conversation, not be submerged by it. I have always been proud of my role in helping students make writing a part of their lives. I couldn't have wanted anything else. I also know many colleagues who have felt this sense of mission: of our desire to bring the magic of writing into our students lives. Most readers of this blog will know the names--the people who have thought of writing as pleasure, discovery, communication. NOT argument.

We have been embedded within an historically institutionalized structure that has profited from the "Johnny Can't Write" mythology. We require first-year writing and institutionalize adjunct labor as teaching faculty, paying low wages and no benefits. The hypocrisy is hardly obscure. I estimate that at my present institution, charging upwards of $50,000 a year per student, that we make about $40,000 a year per course by requiring this First-Year Writing courses. We try to imagine that our writing program is something no well-educated student could do without, but a little bit of self-referentially critique might seriously undermine that claim (that we spend hours teaching them about logos, ethos, and pathos and the logical fallacies? Please).

Let me get to the quick: WPAs don't need to apologize for the work they are doing (unless they are fetishizing argument). We can be doing good work. We certainly don't need to be whining about our own positions (or at least those of us who are tenured--actually, I'm in a non-tenured position right now). Our real problem is labor practices. We can certainly unite behind one clear objective somewhat based on logic: if what we are teaching is important, we need to have full-time teachers teaching what we pretend is important. Let's call this a mission. And let's stop complaining about our own positions (the thrust of Micchiche's later chapters); Either we require first-year writing courses and then engage in responsible hiring practices; or let's forget it.

I didn't get to the second rant. 

Desire

I led a workshop yesterday at the Dornsife Center, a community center in a largely impoverished area of West Philadelphia. The workshop is part of an outreach series sponsored by Drexel in an effort to integrate the university with the surrounding community. Given that context, I suspect this blog entry will be a study in irony.

The workshop was about writing. Five community members, about five students--who came, I believe, because their teacher was awarding them extra credit--and my good friend Rachel was there. Like me, Rachel is in love with writing; she's also a prime mover in the community-based learning projects sponsored by Drexel (again, the irony).

We wrote and read aloud about ourselves as writers. I learned a lot by listening carefully to what others were saying. A kind of theme emerged as we dug deeper into our relationships with writing. Everyone in the workshop had an interesting story--a very interesting story--about themselves as writers. I would love to go over all I learned by listening to their stories, but this blog entry would be an essay. Instead, I want to focus on this theme, a kind of block, a gap, a contradiction.

All of the participants wanted to write. They wanted to write stories, memoirs, poems, essays, histories, diaries, collections of letters from ancestors--the desire was almost palpable. You could touch it. But with one--or perhaps two--exceptions, there was a gap, like a physical distance between the desire and its consummation. People want to write, but they find every reason not to do it--and that gap seems to make them want it more.

Our conversation made clear that all of them would be writing more, would be writing the way they breathe or whistle or sing if it weren't for how they have been conditioned not to write. It's as if in school, we have taken their voices away, and this desire to write is mostly a memory, a memory of far back in their childhoods when they loved to write, when they had such pleasure in putting words on a page and hearing them said, but we've schooled that pleasure out of them. It was enough to make me shiver.

Writers rather than People

It's been a while since I've posted an entry. End of the semester responsibilities, hiatus between semesters, and then start of the new semester. My English 2000 class will be using blogs again to keep track of issues they are investigating, so I want to keep up with them, writing and thinking about my subject--the use of personal writing for college writing instruction.

Using personal writing in non-required writing courses, like my course in Life Writing, is really a non-issue. But using it in required writing course (a preferred nomenclature for Freshman Writing a.k.a. Firstyear Writing) is more of an issue, one I think can be usefully explored.

As I have written in previous postings, I have been moving away from a pedagogy of cognition to a pedagogy of affect. Rather than train students to write within a family of academic and/or professional genres (cognition), I am focusing on the relationship between the writer and writing (affect). My hypothesis is that if we can help students feel more at one with writing in our classes, they might be more able to negotiate unfamiliar rhetorical situations in academic or professional settings than if we had focused on cognitive goals, training them to respond in impersonal genres to un-impelled (Britton et al.) rhetorical situations.

I don't want to make this a long post. I know that my required writing students are responding to this shift. They like to be in class. I like to be in class. They like writing and reading and responding to each other, and I like reading whatever they write. None of this seems strange. We are using writing as a kind of stand-in for talking. Actually, my students are right into this--after all, they txt like mad; they write dialogically. If we think seriously about Bakhtin and Burke, we might more carefully post writing situations that are dialogic rather than monologic.

We all know that in spite of our imaginative constructions of audience, the dialogic quality of student writing usually falls flat. While pretending to write to the imagined audience, the students are writing to the teacher for a grade--talk about complicating a rhetorical situation!  No wonder we get double voicing that we interpret as pandering.

I think I had better stop here. I did have an objective, but I haven't gotten there. I'll get there next time. I think it's useful to question our decades old paradigm of assignment, peer-response, revision repeated two or three times, and even to question the writing workshop paradigm--one that moves the writer away from dialogism to inauthentic monologism, one that imagines writers rather than people.

Having Fun Again

I'm just saying: what would happen if writing teachers at all levels (think Lucy Calkins) made as their primary objective having fun with writing (writing and reading)--and note (as you will if you read my students' writing) some of this can be hard fun.

#personalwriting2.blogspot.com #ipeckham #personalwriting #funwriting

Rethinking Objectives

Two things of interest this morning: First is that I find it easier to write in here (i mean in this blog space) than I do in word, like in my diary, where I usually write something that I might paste somewhere in a more public forum.  I have no idea why this is so.

Second: I'm going to write something in here about personal writing and teaching every MWF (days when I'm not teaching)--and possibly SatSun, the days of reduced pressure.  This is a way of accumulating my thoughts about the subject, some of which will reappear in different forms when I write for publication.

I feel wonderful this morning for reasons I can't explain. It's a lovely day and I enjoyed yesterday with my students and reading their work.  There is of course more to feeling wonderful than that. But when we feel wonderful, we should in some way mark it down so that on other more gruesome days, we can go back and say--there, it was like that, and I will feel that again.

I am thinking a lot about the kind of writing my students are doing and how this kind of writing might or should fit into an undergraduate curriculum and even in required writing programs.  I think I"m going to stick with only one thought this morning--the degree to which we have skated over our students' (dis)affection for writing--and whether we should elevate affect in our objectives--like consider affect as a separate outcome in the WPA Writing Outcomes. I don't think in all of our discussions in the 90s that affect even came up as a topic. Others can correct me here.

The real issue is the degree to which we backpedal a bit on our focus of preparing our students for the writing situations they are likely to meet in other undergraduate courses, one of the two most often cited objectives in our required writing programs--the other being critical citizenship.  Most of us probably recognize that the Service/CC objectives frequently alienate students from the writing habit that as writers we claim to cherish.

If you've read this far, I encourage you to read some of the autobiographies, reflections, and essays on vulnerability students in my Life Writing class have written.

Links:  Life Writing Essays

#personalwriting2.blogspotcom #ipeckham #personalwriting #firstyearwriting #studentwriting

The Space of Writing

Now this is interesting--to me at least: I just want to write a short blog entry today--nothing serious, and I found myself preferring to write in the blog space rather than in Word and subsequently cutting and pasting into the blog.  The choice has something to do with formality, revision, and spontaneity, and it taken far enough might have something to do with authenticity and personal writing.

In my Life Writing class, we always begin with about ten-fifteen minutes of writing in our personal diaries (I think I've said this in a previous posting).  We turn the lights down a bit and listen to music, like Gil Evans, while writing.  It's a quiet, lovely time, ten students (yes, small class) and me, going into our heads and writing about ourselves and our lives to ourselves, just figuring things out.

I had a lesson plan yesterday that quickly went awry.  The student who was supposed to give us our daily grammar lesson was missing, so we skipped that.  I had planned on having the students who hadn't yet posted their vulnerability essays upload them into the forum where we read one another's essays and then move on to our next personal essay--a good one that one of the students suggested (here it is, word for word as she suggested it:

Coming to terms with "reality". Eventually there comes a times when we realize that wanting to be the next Bill Gates or The president of United States takes a whole lot more than just saying so. How has the shock changed your perception on life as you've gotten older? Have there been any situations/life events that may have altered your "reality"? -The Success and/or Failure of relationships (love and/or platonic) & the lessons taken from them.)

Well, three or four students wanted to make a few more changes on their essays before they posted them, and none of us had finished reading all the new ones that had been posted, so some of us started reading and writing back to the newly posted essays while the others kept working on theirs.  Lights still low.  All of us reading on our laptops.  Gil Evans.

I finished reading and responding to two of them & looked up (we're all in a circle); everyone still reading and writing; period half over.  I mean seriously reading and writing.  I mentioned something about my plan to move to Sha'Myra's topic.  Everyone liked it, but they were busy reading and writing; they wanted to read what everyone had written, and that's what we did for the rest of the period--until the time came for our class journal--a place where I usually have them comment on what we did for the day, how the class is going, and where they would like it to go.

We usually have some very interesting discussions about writing and who we are and writing about who we are for some of the class period, but we didn't yesterday.  it was just into our laptops (even for the one student who RADICALLY prefers to write with a pen and read hard copy), Gil Evans playing.

I guess I'll just leave this entry here.  But not quite.  Their vulnerability essays are really interesting to read.   I hope they'll let me post links to them on this blog.  I'm really finding out what students can do when the teacher just basically gives them a space in which they explore with each other (and with me) their writing and who they are--with a little bit of organizing on my part.

These students are mostly juniors and seniors who signed up for this odd course because they like to write (not all of them are English majors).  I have my 7:30 morning English 2000 class with whom I am not terribly satisfied.  This is a required writing class.  I have about 12 out of 22 students who are there every day.  They are thoughtful students who are enjoying the freedom to write.  I have three or four more who get there most of the time.  And the rest, some of the time.  I'm thinking a lot about this class and the possible role of the professor.  And about grades.  And "rigor," tough-love kind of stuff.  And--I can't quite put my finger on it--but the relationship between my blaming some of them for being who they are as a way of avoiding blaming me for being who I am and that space between where no one is to blame for occupying the space s/he does in a cultural system into s/he was born.

Why I'm Angry--Maybe

This is far from an original thought (and yes, I am aware of iterative theory).  It's probably a mix of Marx, W.C. Allee, and Steinbeck (who, i think developed his social theories from Allee through Ed Ricketts.  Social reproduction theory posits that cultures act like single organisms (that's from Allee), unconsciously reproducing themselves, developing structuring structures (Bourdieu) that ensure the continuation of the species/culture.  The players in the game are of course unaware of their roles.  They imagine they are acting existentially.  The collective, of which they are a part, imagines (as if it had a mind--as if the individual had a mind--as if I have a mind) it is also acting existentially on the basis of announced (usually rationalized) purposes.  Higher education is one of those collectives in our particular culture.  Let's imagine HEd as a being, a collective, an organism within the larger organism (as our organs are collectives within the larger organism of us).  HEd has the announced purpose of educating citizens to be thoughtful, productive, cooperative, critical thinkers (of course) in our culture, ensuring the continuation and even evolution of our culture (the current standoff in Congress signifies what a great job we're doing of that).  

But the unannounced purpose of HEd is to reproduce the culture, which includes the culture of domination and radical asymmetrical distribution of wealth, status, and privilege (WSP).  I and others have of course written endlessly about this (Bourdieu, Clark, Katz, Gee, Bowles & Gintis and so on).  English departments are no different, although they like to imagine themselves as redistributing critical literacy.  And likewise, our field is no different, imagining such silly things as that we are teaching our students in our writing classes how to interrogate culture and write themselves into a better world.  (and of course, I have to imagine that I am no different either, although here I am, pretending that I have broken free from the structuring structures to think, ironically, for myself).  But just supposing I had a useful thought  born of the anger I feel towards writing classes and any other classes that make students feel what the student I have quoted feel--and I know there are many who feel that way.  Basically, I think we learn counterproductive teaching strategies (the kind that make our students feel off-balance, stressed, disliking what they are doing when they should be loving it [check out Gary Tate's searing essay, "Halfway Home") as part of that structuring structure, of that social mechanism that guarantees the ongoing radical asymmetrical distribution of WSP.  Think about it: who are the kids who get through (I mean through the whole educational gauntlet, leading the to JD, MD, or PhD)?  Probably (and this is obvious) the sons and daughters of those who already have lots of WSP.  I think this stupid notion of rigor is one of the primary mechanisms--we need to make our students work hard instead of enjoy the process of learning.  Maybe I have to think about why this would make me angry.

[ok--I wrote what i was thinking.  as i said, highly unoriginal--but i think it needs to be revoiced from time to time]

And now I realize why I'm angry: I'm probably reworking my anger at teachers/the system that almost killed my love of reading and writing.  I have never been the best of students.  School still bewilders me.  

Apologies and Teacher Narrative

Teacher Narrative

This morning, I want to begin with an apology: when I wrote my last blog (before I edited it), I was feeling a little overfull of myself, and I let that spill out onto the page.  I had just had a wonderful day of  working with my students in the classroom; and a couple of other things are going right in my life; and so I simply got carried away with myself in a public sphere.

Apologies having been offered, I want to think in this space about another conversation I had with  Carra--I guess I depend on her to keep my honest.  She has been traveling with me in this personal writing conversation--and the interchanges on WPA-L.  The pseudo opposition between personal and academic writing is of course historical, having been played and replayed many times in the last three centuries--and in our own experience, in the Bartholomae/Elbow conversation (side note: one of my students perceptively noted how Bartholomae was appropriating Elbow's style in that CE/CCC conversation).

Carra suggested that many of us have a common narrative in which we travel in and out of writing for pleasure.  She painted a kind of mind-map for me, which I have tried to reproduce, but I'm not that kind of thinker, so I'm writing out here my map as my own way of understanding it.  She said there are probably many people in our field who think somewhat as I do, people who have been drawn into the profession because of their love of writing.  Here's where the trouble starts: this love runs into social demands on the writer.  In school, the writer runs into the teacher.  Our love of writing very likely (as was the case with me--and as is a common narrative) had a lot to do with our love of reading. I'm going to include a link here to my narrative of my -- i kind of hate to use the term but -- my literacy history.

School is really a killer.  Yes, we learn things there--but frequently, not the lesson intended.  The majority of students learn to dislike reading and writing.  This disaffection is in part a consequence of social class reproduction--which I and many other writers/scholars have explored.  I'm going to stick to writing here.  Probably most of us who are writing teachers managed to survive negative school writing experiences--and of course some thrived (that wasn't me--see my narrative).  I don't think it would be too difficult to create a graphic correlation between social class fraction and writer-survival.

Here's where the story gets complicated:  I think it's the tension between being and seeming (another side note: Bourdieu links these conditions to social class origins--guess who is and who pretends to be).  We come into being through our non-school writing, which we maintain (and most give it up) in spite of our school experiences.  The school writing is mostly seeming and an unsatisfactory experience for several reasons:  we're being graded for our "being," and we soon learn we have to "seem."

I can already see this is going to be too long.  Let me try to cut to the quick.  By the time we get our PhDs, we're pretty securely locked into the land of seeming.  We know how to negotiate it.  We learn how to get published, how to cite, how to assume certain poses, how (Judith Butler?) to obfuscate, seem more intelligent than we are, how to be someone other than who we are.  We learn how to "seem" intelligent, learned, how to quote Bakhtin, Foucault, and Butler, trying to insert ourselves in the unfolding conversation.  I know I'm being a bit cynical here; on the other hand, I have too often had to counsel graduate students about the need for simple, clean language--enough of this iterative discourse already.

Most of us probably segue into WPA positions--that was my trajectory after teaching high school for 13 years and returning to graduate school at forty.  When I was a high school teacher, I taught in California according to the closed-door concept.  I basically taught courses in Steinbeck and writing.  In my writing courses I had the simple formula to which I have (now that I am no longer a WPA) returned: create writing assignments you know your students will enjoy writing, that you will enjoy reading, and that they will enjoy reading what the others have written. Dewey and Freire are embedded in this formula:  learning should be exciting and fun, a lifelong project.  And as Moffett said, we are not only teaching what, we are teaching how.  If learning is fun in our classroom, we are teaching learning as fun.  If learning is a pain, well . . .

I am somewhat comfortable about how I handled my years as a WPA.  Nevertheless, much of what I did could be interrogated.  When I was WPA in my two universities, I lost my closed-door pedagogy; instead, I felt as if I were in a fishbowl.  I felt as if I had to create a pedagogical model that could responsibly be repeated by new graduate students and instructors and approved by professors in other disciplines.  Actually, I think I did a pretty good job of this.  I linked our objectives and genres to what we discovered were common in other disciplines.  There is of course an obvious fault line here: what if those objectives make students dislike or even hate writing?  And what if a significant proportion of our objectives in higher education are bogus--just a part of the game of maintaining social-class relationships.  I'm just wondering.

When I was no longer WPA, I felt a certain freedom.  I was no longer teaching in that fishbowl.  I closed the door, and I taught and have been teaching writing the way I know I should have been teaching all along.  Anyone who has managed to get through this reflection might see the threads that lead into unknown directions--like a spider casting her silk into the wind and knowing that sooner or later, one of them will catch hold.

Writing and Teaching for Fun

Writing and Teaching for Fun

Well, it's a Thursday night and I'm just kind of hanging around my computer and thinking about the personal writing question--not really a question to me, because I am enjoying how I am teaching writing.  I go into the classroom every day to meet with students who are learning about themselves and each other through what they write.

I want in this post to take up the question of transfer that Jerry brought up in a WPA-L post yesterday & which I have included as a post below. If I may be reductive, Jerry notes that personal writing (and again--let's get over the hangup of what is and isn't personal writing-- doesn't move toward generalization.  It remains in the individual's experience, the logic of One.  Academic (let's call it scientific [Kinneavy] comes from a different direction: from research of the many, legitimizing generalizations that can the be applied to the One.  I know this is oversimplified, but that's the general drift.

Jerry then brings up the question of transfer: of what we teach in required writing classes (RWC) transferring to other academic contexts.  I feel myself moving into dangerous territory here and think I should stop, but I guess I'll plunge ahead for a couple of paragraphs.

Ok.  Probably a good deal of what we teach in RWCs is bullshit, everybody's wasted time.  Most of us know what's behind this claim--lots of money, for instance.  Seat time.  Release of tenured faculty for more research because of the cheap labor.  I'm not saying that we couldn't imagine seriously useful writing classes for first & second year students--but, well, I needn't go on.  Anyone who has taken the trouble to ask student at the third and fourth year levels how much those RWCes helped them negotiate subsequent writing tasks knows what I'm saying here.

Let me get to two fundamental questions.  What do I want to focus on in my writing classes.  It's love of writing. It's learning how writing can help you understand more about who you are and who others are (when you read their writing) and then adjusting your frames as a consequence of what you read.  And when you get your students writing about what they are going through (and including what you are going through), they read about each other and move toward generalizations about the human experience by having read about real experiences.  Obviously, I'm relying on Freire here (unapologetically, my personal hero, along with Moffett and Bourdieu).  And if writers can reflect back on this generalizing process--well, what does one need to say?

And finally, the important question of transfer.  I'm a genre freak.  My dissertation was on the uses and misuses of genre.  But now I'm writing about affect transfer.  I think that if students have good writing experiences, they will be more open to meeting new rhetorical situations/demands. If they have made the kind of connect with writing that I and so many others of you have made with writing, they'll be able to move their love of writing and confidence of themselves as writers into new territory--understanding how this move into new territory works.

Writing should be fun; reading what our students write should be fun; our students reading what the others write should be fun; and thinking about all this should be fun.  I'm going to make a claim--if you're not having fun with your students and their writing, well, it will probably show.

The Question of Transfer

I'm going to post Jerry's post the WPA-L here and then struggle to answer his central question.  As usual, Jerry poses thoughtful remarks--and the earmarks of seriously thinking about his question rather than pose a rhetorical question, using the question as a frame within which to make his argument. I'm going to think carefully about his post and a way of engaging in his question.  I'll probably combine this with some links to others who have taken seriously my project of making writing fun.  I'm assuming Jerry wouldn't mind this reposting.
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Irv,

Very nice summary of much of the argument for teaching personal writing.  As David suggested, many of us in the field don't view personal writing as too easy but just the opposite.  And I would take it one notch further: I suggest that personal writing is really a complex of different writing functions that rely primarily on one particular kind of data (i.e., personal experience) and tend to take a similar form (i.e., narrative).  But the purposes of these different "genres" ("sub-genres"?) can be vastly different.  Yet they also share one more trait: a limitation in the ability to generalize from them, because they rely primarily on personal experience and narrative.

Traditional academic and professional writing, different as they can be, share at this abstract level just the opposite functions and features: They use varying kinds of data and take a variety of forms with the intent of generalization.  And for me, this is where teaching personal writing becomes complicated, because the different functions of personal writing "genres" can make transfer a real issue--IF we assume that what students should learn from personal writing assignments should transfer to other kinds of writing and, specifically, academic and professional kinds of writing.

Let me give an example.  This semester, I am using Amy Chua's Wall Street Journal essay, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" as a starting point in teaching students how to actively and critically read texts, summarize texts, synthesize texts within ongoing "conversations," and respond to those conversations.  Chua's essay is interesting, because she relies virtually entirely on her own personal experience.  She mentions "tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting" and summarizes "one study," but she never provides any adequate citation of this research, and she leaves it behind after the 4th paragraph.  Also, notably absent is any data from other Chinese or Asian or other parents. All she provides are sweeping generalizations about Chinese parenting versus Western parenting (in addition, a clear either/of fallacy, among others).  Chua's essay, then, is a lesson in how not to use personal experience in argument.  Yet, there are moments of good personal writing, most notably her anecdote about her daughter Lulu (age seven) when trying to learn a particularly difficult piano piece, a narrative that Chua calls "a story in favor of coercion."  The problem, of course, is that Chua presents this as an example not just of how her "Chinese" (also called by experts in the field "tiger" and even "harsh" and "authoritarian") parenting can produce success for children but an example that, Chua claims, shows the superiority of her kind of parenting.

I don't know about you, but I've seen students--even graduate students--fall into this same fallacy of overgeneralizing from personal experience.  Yet, there are other examples--I think here of a number of Ellen Goodman essays--where the writer successfully relies on personal experience to suggest the possibility of generalizing.  Goodman was very good at telling a suggestive story and letting the reader do the generalizing from her or his own experience, although there were many times, where her personal stories would lead into actual arguments.  But that ability to use personal experience to suggest the possibility of generalization is such a nuanced art, I question the ability of many novice writers to apply their learning about that strategy to their own writing.

And so, I think many of us fall back on having students explicitly state the "lessons" of the personal experiences they relate and then, offer a final conclusion about how the lessons of these experiences could be relevant to that of others, perhaps even the readers.  And this is where I become ambivalent about the personal experience essay.  I understand the argument of having students succeed at writing early on.  Self-efficacy research is very clear: success raises self-efficacy levels and thus, breeds further success.  But the research is also clear that success as causation of further success must be perceived as relevant to that subsequent effort at success.  That is, what students learn from writing the personal experience essay must be seen as relevant to the writing of the next or some subsequent text(s).  That's why I tend to teach the use of personal experience as one source of data for supporting examples and the use of personal narrative as one argumentative strategy.  And I also teach reflective writing, which will include personal reflections, as a way for students to monitor their learning.

I am not saying, of course, that personal writing can't have other, just as important functions. There's research clearly showing the health and well-being values of journal writing that includes writing about personal experiences.  Personal writing can certainly help us explore ourselves and reflect on who we our and our relationship to the world.  But that brings me back to the larger issue of the purpose of the composition course.  It seems to me that if we view the comp course as preparing students to write academically and/or professionally, then the role of personal writing becomes a question. 

So, in the end, I'm not sure that personal writing is really the issue.  Personal writing exists.  It's not "easy."  It has important functions that should not be discounted.  But what's its role in college composition instruction?  And I'm asking this sincerely, because I am truly uncertain what I think about its role.