Helping Our Students Put the Personal in Dialogue with the Academic
When my students and I went over the description of their Personal Academic Argument assignment, I had them underline the phrase, “you’ll be asked to put the personal in dialogue with the academic.” My students stared at me blankly as they tried to wrap their heads around what this means. As Carol Matalene points out in her essay, “for students “the easiest, safest, and least risky method is to keep private and public separate” (188-189). And I’m requesting them to mix the two? In writing? It can’t be.
Matalene proposes that as composition teachers we should encourage students to use the private voice in their work to make it more authentic. She provides excellent (and in some cases humorous) examples of student writing that demonstrate just how much students struggle with this concept. Her examples reflect “the strange disjunction, dislocation, or dissonance of public and private voices at odds” (182). This awkward discord takes place because most of our students haven’t developed or don’t recognize their personal voice. By asking them to artfully meld this nascent personal voice with hard facts compiled from research (while trying not to misuse big words and complicated sentence structures that they think make them sound smarter), we are presenting our students with a bonafide challenge.
In order to help our students meet this challenge, we must first help them discover and gain confidence in their personal voices. To achieve this, I suggest we visit the section in the Purdy article about the second stage in the writing process: conversing. We’ve talked to our students about using conversation with others as an invention method (thank you, Ballenger), but have we adequately prompted them to converse with their sources? Here Purdy suggests that students engage in meaningful conversation with their research and that this dialogue serve as a foundation for students’ writing. He writes to the student, “You should respond to the sources you use rather than just report on or parrot them” (217). If students take Purdy’s advice and personally interact with their sources, their writing should begin to reflect a natural blend between the personal and the academic.
While our WRIT 101 classes are designed to promote our students’ incorporation of their personal experiences in their writing as promoted by Matalene, I think it’s important that the class also address situations in which this may not be the case. We should help students build the capacity to differentiate between the “centripetal voice” (Matalene 186) and their personal voices and know when and how much of each is genre and discipline-appropriate. Without this awareness and ability to balance the public and private voices, Billy Bob will turn in a paper focused on his family’s dysfunctions for his Psychology class and Sally will submit a “parrot-paper” for her creative non-fiction class.
As teachers of burgeoning writers, perhaps the greatest thing we can do for our students is help them gain confidence in their personal voices. One way to achieve this is by encouraging our students to choose their own topics and converse with their sources. Once-dissonant papers that combine excessive personal information with exaggeratedly academic language should slowly transform into a natural dialogue between the two as students gain self-awareness and self-assurance about their ideas and their voices when writing.
Nancy, I've had a similar experience in my class as well. Befuddlement and disbelief at the notion of using the "i". My response is always, "Use the 'I'. I want to read the 'I'." I guess I'm waiting to tell them how to incorporate the 'I' until I read their papers. Adding the 'I' can always be done in revision and I wanted to see what each student can do before I tell them the areas they need to work on the most. But overall, using the personal voice is a new concept for most of them.
ReplyDeleteI remember going through both creative and academic writing workshops in my undergraduate experience. I remember reading some deeply personal stuff in a few paper and stories. I remember being embarrassed when I put things that were too personal in my papers and they were read by my classmates. I think community on a classroom is key in creating a environment for students to feel comfortable enough to write in the personal voice. The personal voice can be vulnerable. Matalene didn't really get into using the personal voice in the workshop setting. The workshop setting can maybe even invent heteroglossia by creating hybrid versions of the personal voice. A personal tone that is private and one that knows it is going to be critiqued.
I'd caution against "waiting to tell them how to incorporate the 'I' until [you] read their papers" because it might create an "add 'I' and stir" approach. By this I mean an additive rather than a more rhetorically and epistemologically integrated understanding of how the personal and the academic interact.
ReplyDeleteI try to distinguish between personal-too private and personal as evidence in my class, since some students think they are *supposed to* disclose overly private parts of their lives when we don't really mean that at all.
Nancy and Joel,
ReplyDeleteI can relate to the experiences you've had watching students’ confusion over the PAA assignment. After taking considerable time to introduce and discuss genre specifics of the PAA and the ways in which it differs from a traditional research essay, I had a student ask a clarifying question using new terms: “So, since we can use ‘I,’ this is an informal essay?”
Informal. I didn’t want to respond to him, “Yes, you got it!”—because I don’t want the word “informal” to work on students as an excuse not to work hard on this, or as a signal that they won’t be graded seriously—but, if his definition of “informal” is just that he gets to use “I,” he did get it, didn’t he? He listened to me, he interpreted what I was saying, and he named what he understood of the expectations I presented. He didn’t parrot, as Purdy would say; he responded, using his own voice.
Like Nancy, I am grateful for Matalene’s observations about the personal, real voice and the fact that our WRIT 101 classes offer a model of writing that is more or less compatible with her stance. I loved the words Metalene used to describe the student who had written about five-year-olds playing with bugs in the outfield: “Here I felt was a student ready to become a powerful writer, but he was never encouraged or empowered to be real….” (183). Those words—powerful, encouraged, empowered, real—wow! These are the words that I should be employing both in my mind and in my instruction when I think and talk about my hopes for students’ writing.
I want to put those words to work as I plan my lessons and think about how I’m going to answer future questions like the “informal” one I mention above. If I’d read Matalene before receiving that question, I might have been able to respond to him, “Not informal—real. The ‘I’ means you get to be real.” I know it’s not that simple to activate the personal voice, but maybe “real” is a word we can consider as we encourage students to think about the “I.” It would probably be worth devising a whole set of words (other than “informal”) that we can use to help students understand, and start to accept, this genre.
Nancy, Joel and Lauren,
ReplyDeleteI think my students are also confused about how to synthesize research with personal experience. I took Jimmy's advice one day and went in and gave them a (for me) impassioned speech asking them what they care about, who they are, what they believe. I felt that they were actually listening, instead of sinking into their typical mid-afternoon torpor. After my speech I had them do a free-write, telling a story which in some way showed who they are, what they care about, or what they believe.
I hope this exercise encouraged them to use their own voices, to practice understanding their own experiences as valid and important. I hope to incorporate other such activities into our classroom in order to emphasize the importance of their voices and experience in their writing.
I very much enjoyed reading Matalene's arguments and was pleased to note that the style of her essay was nicely in line with its' subject. She, unlike various other writers we have read, used her own voice, injected her personality and experience into the essay, and her writing was much more pleasurable to read as a result.
I also agree with one of the things Joel wrote in his post, about the propensity for some academics to lapse into discipline-specific rhetoric nearly impossible to decipher for those outside the small circle of that field.
First year students are certainly not the only ones who believe that in order to be taken seriously as a scholar (or to get an A) that they must bury their "I" beneath poly-syllabicisms.
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ReplyDeleteI think this is why I do like the Ballenger book and the emphasis on reflection in portfolio writing for this class. I think a Reflection invites writers to use the I, and by reflecting throughout the process during the invention, research and other journal work phases of the writing process, when the student sits down and writes their paper the synthesis process will have been start already. I think every free write I have done in class has involved a personal attachment. I'm hoping this bleeds over into the first drafts of their writing. I noticed that those who followed the directions from Ballenger in the write a sketch assignment did a great job in writing a balanced informed and personal sketch of their project. Those few who worked ahead and began writing their draft were the ones who left the personal voice out. I have this one kid who told me that every writing teacher he has ever had has told me to not use "I".
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping to use the conferences and the workshop days to really work with the students who are having a tough time with the personal voice. I'm thinking of doing a freewrite exercise where they pick one or two lines from their essays and write a personal attachment story about it. Maybe just to get them to explore a little deeper into their issues.
Matalene definitely makes a case for the personal voice.
I have tried to emphasize the idea that if my students can have an engaging conversation about their topic, then they can write an interesting and engaging paper. Imagine trying to discuss something with someone without using "I" or relating one's personal experience! It would be the most boring conversation in the world!
ReplyDeleteBeth, I really like that you made an impassioned plea for your students to think about what they care about and who they are. I think an exercise like that reinforces the idea that their voices are valid and valuable.
Lauren, I loved Matalene's piece too, and my students seemed to get a kick out of the part we discussed in class today. I had been saying over and over again that if their papers don't sound like them then they are missing the point. We read the part on page 182 about public versus private voices and read the examples of "bureaucratic prose" that Matalene includes. We looked for cliches, for "disjointed" language and generalities and some students seemed to understand why those were examples of inauthentic work. I was really encouraged when a couple students laughed out loud as they were reading.
Like Joel, I think that the conferences will be a good time to drive home the point even further. From what I've seen so far, I can tell that many students are having trouble going from reporting to synthesizing, which we addressed in 540 last week.
Nancy,
ReplyDeleteAs I wrote in my comment to Jenny, I received the same reaction from my students when I presented the PAA assignment to them—looks of confusion, dismay, and even panic. (I imagined some of them lapsing into cries of “What does this meaaaaannn?” like the hiker who saw a double rainbow). Perhaps if they’d read Matalene’s article (or your excellent analysis of it) they’d better understand that personal experience isn’t always a no-no in college composition. Like you, I found Matalene’s examples of stilted, disjointed student examples a little humorous, but at the same time very telling: after having learned for years that the personal should never enter an academic context, students have practically had their personal voices stripped from them. It’s no easy task to get back in touch with that voice, and having their instructors simply say “use your personal experiences as evidence” doesn’t always help them understand how to do that—as Brent says, “simply telling students how to perform any task, from throwing a basketball to writing a research paper, obviously will not by itself enable them to perform it” (Ch. 5, p. 7).
I agree with you about the importance of teaching students to converse with their sources a la Purdy’s rhetorical model. Looking back I realize that my most successful academic papers have been the ones in which I effectively placed my sources in dialog with other sources and my own analysis—but oddly enough I feel I haven’t adequately stressed this dialogic synthesizing process to my own students. I’m trying to rectify this now by creating a worksheet that calls them to place their sources in dialog with one another. Purdy’s emphasis on conversing with the sources again connects with concepts from last week’s readings—no source (or idea) is an island, and we must acknowledge that when we enter into a research project, we have to consider how our ideas, and how the experts’ ideas, have been shaped by others. I was also drawn to the quote from Purdy that you selected—this past week I tried to impart the same idea to my students. During our workshop on quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing, I emphasized that in selecting information from their texts they needed to provide context and analysis of the quotes rather than just “parroting” them. I also agree that we need to make distinctions for our students regarding when personal voice is appropriate and when it is not, so that we don’t have students returning to us in later years and complaining about their harsh history professor who marked them off for using “I.” These distinctions shouldn’t only occur in our assignment sheets or prompts; we should make them clear throughout the course as we discuss rhetorical strategies and situations.
Like most of you, my class struggled to understand how to find a personal connection with their research questions. How does "Billy" write about a sustainable consciousness in the Iraqi reconstruction from a personal point of view? With research questions like this, a few of my students struggled to connect with the issue personally, or they couldn't begin to try and write with the "I". I like Beth's idea of students telling a story about their question. I've had the students freewrite to discover why they care about certain topics. What I found is that through listing, brainstorming, freewriting, each student had a record of their thought process and were able to connect a distant topic to something tangible, personally narrative.
ReplyDeleteBrittany, I would love to see the worksheet you have developed to encourage your students to put their sources in dialogue with each other; it's a really important concept, and as much as students have a hard time doing, I find that I'm having a hard time figuring out how to effectively teach it. Ideas welcome!
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