The Challenge of "Listening" (Bishop and Powell)

I feel like a million bucks when a class goes right, when my students are engaged with their writing, when I can see they are all having interesting conversations, when they come to me excited about their ideas generated in class, but these grand moments in the classroom are not what keep me up at night. They are not what drive the questions I wake up thinking about the next day either.

The moments that stick with me the most is when a my student with Tourettes rolls his eyes when the students next to him keep talking during a freewrite, or when one brave student shared with the class a reflection of a deeply personal memory and a pair of students had the audacity to giggle. Or when one students asked me if it was okay if she wrote about her alcoholic mother? and how she could fit the narrative into the genre of the life place essay? and if it was okay if she didn't share it with the whole class? It's these lasting impressions that keep me looking for answers from teachers like Bell Hooks just as Malea Powell does in her essay. These moments make me want to become a better "communally focused" teacher that "sacrifices the needs of the individual for the needs of the whole"(573). For the most part, I agree with Powell's Utilitarian approach, 'what will benefit the whole class the most?', but with some of these acts of "listening" to my students as individuals, in reading their facial expressions, hearing their anxieties and acknowledging their trepidations, the individual has indeed affected my pedagogy.

I find myself reacting harshly when I see my student with Tourettes getting agitated when others are being too loud. When the girl asked me about writing about her alcoholic mother I promised her that I wouldn't put her in a position of sharing her story with anyone she didn't feel comfortable with and I changed my whole workshop activity around to accommodate that promise. The next time the two giggling students were being a disruption, I told them they could leave the class if they were done with their writing exercise for the simple fact that they were being annoying and I was sick of the disruption.

I'm not sure if my actions benefitted the whole class or not? I think some did, but not because of a calculated and philosophized decision making process that fit into focused communal pedagogy. Most of these decisions were born out of the immediacy of a moment. They were born to address, or protect, or advocate for a individual; and as much as I want to have a communally focused pedagogy, some of my students are just not ready to participate in the communal process of the classroom.

As a new teacher, I find gaping holes in my teaching pedagogy everyday it seems. I'm learning the art of "listening" to the community of the class though, and I'm trying to apply the pedagogical tools we have learned from these readings, but this essay made me realize yet another challenge I need to face. I don't think I will ever be able to NOT listen the individuals that are in my classroom. I will always look for the individual spirit that drives each one of them. So how does a teacher navigate this type of listening with a more communal one? I just wish I had a better answer to this question.

Democracy in the Classroom, The Napoleon Complex—And Steel-Toed Boots

Several weeks ago I started wearing steel-toed boots to WRIT 101. They’re heavy, brown, chucked up leather boots I bought when I worked in a warehouse. Designed to brace the weight of a two-ton forklift, the boots keep toes from being severed by falling oil drums or bandsaw blades, thick enough that screws and nails won’t puncture the bottom of your feet. And they make anyone wearing them two inches taller…

I have football players in my class, volleyball players, I have students a foot taller than I am, and I’ll admit it, sometimes I don’t feel physically fit while explaining to one of the said giants why they received a U on their Op-Ed assignment. Boots help. This was on my mind while reading bell hooks.

hooks emphasizes a democratic freedom and community in the classroom, an acknowledgement by the teacher and the students that it is just as much as the students’ responsibility as it is the teacher’s to engage the class, to “self-actualize” in a course. She writes, “I had never wanted to surrender the conviction that one could teach without reinforcing existing systems of domination. I needed to know that professors did not have to be dictators in the classroom” (18). Her insight to the relationships students and teachers should hold came at an important time for me, as I’ve been wondering how to create a more democratic classroom. How do I encourage students to believe that their ideas, their opinions and their history is just as important as my ideas? I wanted them to participate in their own learning more, not just wait for me to create learning for them. hooks offers a great example in her relationship with Paulo Freire: “The lesson I learned from witnessing Paulo embody the practice he describes in theory was profound” (56). And hooks obviously attempts to mirror and support the kind of community that Freire allows—admitting criticism, especially from feminists, in his case (54).

In her discussion with Ron Scapp, hooks speaks about the mind/body split that exists in many classrooms: “The arrangement of the body we are talking about deemphasizes the reality that professors are in the classroom to offer something of our selves to the students. The erasure of the body encourages us to think that we are listening to neutral, objective facts, facts that are not particular to who is sharing the information” (139). This was enlightening to me, as I often struggle with the right balance between pedagogical leadership and personal involvement in a classroom. What role do I play? How much do I avoid that mind/body split? I’m curious how the rest of you approach this, how you avoid the role of dictator and instead promote the role of a guide?

We began class today in the usual manner, by freewriting. Two differences, however: I wasn’t wearing steel-toed boots, and at the end of the freewrite I volunteered to read mine. I’d never done this before, and felt vulnerable as I began. But by the end of the class, most of the students had volunteered their freewrites—something they’ve never done either. I was reminded of hooks:

“The empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable…Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share” (21).

Maybe the boots make me feel more authoritative, maybe they make my toes feel safer. Regardless, after reading hooks, I’m encouraged to look at the class as a free, democratic community where my role isn’t to control or enforce, but to encourage, commit, and participate.

Jimmy's Post

Drawing from the works of Paulo Freire and a feminist theoretical approach, Bell Hooks makes a general plea for teachers to enact an ardent commitment towards “engaged pedagogy,” where we can see “the classroom remaining the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (17). She emphasizes that “self-actualization” on the part of teachers to “link awareness with practice” will enable teachers and students to both be “active participants” rather than “passive consumers” (14). Amongst all that Bell Hooks covers in Teaching To Transgress, I specifically want to look at chapters five and six for this post.

In chapter five, Bell Hooks outlines how theory can be used as a liberatory practice, that we cannot hope to enact teaching as a practice of freedom if we don’t see theory as a “location for healing” (59). But first, we have to distinguish what qualifies as theory, enabling us to deconstruct “theory as defined by patriarchal institutions in academia” (64). As the banking system of education has enabled teachers to saturate their practice and theories in a language that both alienates and silences students, Hooks stresses that “any theory that cannot be shared in the everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public” (64). As my professor has said that “we can’t get out of bed without a theory’” (Bruce), we can enable theory in the classroom that will “work to resolve those issues that are most pressing in daily life” (70), grounding the abstract in reality, enabling students to explore critical points of reference that both pertain to their own lives and the classroom. How we do it is another question entirely.

Chapter six illuminates matters beyond Hooks’s difficulties with the works of Diana Fuss. The dilemma of essentialism in the classroom is something Hooks strives to both acknowledge and overcome. Basically, essentialism posits that entities have concrete characteristics and properties attributed to them that are inseparable, making it easy for us to define things precisely. If we observe our student’s tendencies to rationalize culture bound viewpoints as being universal truths, we can see how essentialism is something that needs to be combated, not accepted in the classroom, where “the concept of a privileged voice of authority is deconstructed by our collective critical practice” (84). If we are to accept essentialism as an essential facet of academic constructs, than we acknowledge that “the artificial boundary between insider and outsider necessarily contains rather than disseminates knowledge” (Fuss, 83), rejecting the value of students experiences that shape “classroom dynamics” (83). The question comes back to a free space versus a contextual space, and although Hooks “shares” the perception Fuss makes concerning essentialism, she acknowledges that “racism, sexism, and class elitism shape the structure of classrooms, creating a lived reality of insider versus outsider that is predetermined” (83). Therefore, it seems that we cannot avoid the contextual space students engulf in the classroom, that “underneath everywhere, there is a lived reality” (91). But we have to draw a line that distinguishes how things can be and how things simply can’t be. Alas my fellow TA’s, again…how we do this is…I don’t kno

A Radical Feeling of Well-Being

“No matter the subject matter ostensibly being taught, the real point is to help the students find themselves, and find their own passion. Anything else is to lead them astray, to do them actual damage.”

- Derrick Jensen, from Walking on Water

As bell hooks notes right off the bat in Teaching to Transgress, “Progressive, holistic education, ‘engaged pedagogy’ is more demanding than conventional critical or feminist pedagogy” (15). This is because, as hooks adds, the emphasis within engaged pedagogy necessarily falls upon “well-being”—and cultivating wellbeing necessarily requires relating to the student as a person. A "traveler" rather than an object, a passive receptacle, an audience. It is challenging to de-center the classroom, to dismantle traditional power hierarchies and inspire the committed involvement of every member of the classroom community. What hooks and Plevin (and, indeed, many writers we've read this semester) encourage is the commitment of educators (us!) to the idea that the classroom is a place for liberation rather than domination.

Some students are reluctant to break away from old paradigms and have great difficulty finding their voice in the classroom. They have a lot of trouble "getting" that the class is about self-discovery, them, and not merely teacher/authority figure's expectations. hooks describes the difficulty of rethinking traditional classroom roles: “I saw for the first time that there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches. I respect that pain. And I include recognition of it now when I teach, that is to say, I teach about shifting paradigms and talk about the discomfort it can cause” (43). Why else is engaged pedagogy-- liberation pedagogy-- difficult? Because it asks the student to accomplish is no less than a full examination of his or her individual set of cultural assumptions and practices. Oh, and the teacher too. Engaged pedagogy requires more participation than the standard "students sit and stare, teacher talks" method because there is simply so much more thinking that has to happen.

The transformative possibility of engaged pedagogy, as both Plevin and hooks describe it, is learning to relate to the “other” in a meaningful way, whether that “other” is a stand of old growth trees or a person from a different culture/race. Both authors relate this pedagogical concept to Paulo Friere’s theory of "conscientization." Plevin quotes Bertoff to clarify Friere’s idea: “Conscientization means discovering yourself as a subject, but it is not SELF-consciousness; it is consciousness of consciousness, intent upon the world” (365, qtd. in Plevin 151). In other words, we should encourage our students to not only be aware of themselves and their own voice, but to also be aware of contexts-- place, "whiteness," class, i.e. their own positionality. Conscientization is also an inherently radical idea because is encourages the awareness of contexts rather than rules and relationships based upon communication rather than domination. Achieving an awareness of positionality is, I think, the reason for asking students to pursue writing projects from a point of inquiry, to examine their own argument practices and strategies, and to rethink their relationship to their Life-Place.

I had a student admit to me that her high school teacher had advised her to “lie” in her papers since her teachers wouldn’t know her name or care to know her opinions. Again and again in class and in conference, students confess to me that in order to express their opinion they have to quiet certain voices in their head (namely former teachers or authority figures), that taught them to value information regurgitation and sameness rather than creative synthesis. The truth seems to be that institutionalized education in the United States inflicts way more emotional and intellectual harm than inspiration or empowerment. Perhaps this is why some of my students are so resistant to thinking-- everything about their schooling up to this point has reinforced that prejudice. I guess what I'm saying is I agree with bell hooks; we can radically benefit the well-being of our students by inviting the transgression of mental boundaries and encouraging authentic critical engagement (praxis!) both in and out of the classroom.

Radical Listening (Laurel's Post)

Whenever I enter a classroom at UM I gaze around the room looking for people of color, people that look like me or people with similarly divergent cultural backgrounds. My father’s first question is almost inevitably “Are there any other Asians?” which he has modified since I came to Montana to “Are there any other not-white people?” I realize that this intentional first impression doesn’t take into account the sometimes invisible differences in class and upbringing often present in UM classrooms. Differences in class are significant and worth being discussed (as bell hooks does in her chapter “Confronting Class in the Classroom”), but let’s talk about race here.


How do we bring questions of race into our classrooms wherein the majority of students represent one, historically privileged racial group? How do we avoid making the lone student of color a representative of her racial group (the “native informant”)? How do we examine the hierarchies of power embedded in our classroom? bell hooks would argue that we need to find (to use Friere’s term) praxis – a union of our beliefs and actions. I am assuming here that we do not fall into the category of the conservative “old guard” of academia. We are new to this teaching situation and therefore we are not attached to this identity of “professor” which hooks and Scapp identify as being so problematic (see pg 140-1). I believe the struggle that we face is in acting upon our liberal ideas. hooks articulates what I believe to be our position: “I want to reiterate that many teachers who do not have difficulty releasing old ideas, embracing new ways of thinking, may still be as resolutely attached to old ways of practicing teaching Even though we strive towards a more respectful and just ideal, we are still at risk of unconsciously reinforcing unjust hierarchies of power. The very institution we teach and study in is structured on these hierarchies of power. bell hooks writes of institutions: “knowledge was shared in ways that re-inscribed colonialism and domination” and that “our ways of knowing are forged in history and relations of power” (30). as their more conservative colleagues” (hooks 142).



Perhaps it would be good to clarify this point now, when I say “hierarchies of power,” I mean men over women, white people over people of color (and I would argue that there is a hierarchy within this term as well) and rich over poor. It is uncomfortable for me to be this explicit, I would much prefer to hide behind bell hooks’s ideas. It is difficult for me to write this because it implicates me in challenging and complex ways. I can pass for white in many situations and therefore I am implicated in these hierarchies and the privileges that these hierarchies afford (well, perhaps not gender privilege). It also implicates you in a similar privilege and responsibility. I am not sure how you will react when you read this post. Will you be upset? Will you want to discuss it in class? Will I be ready to speak eloquently and passionately about my beliefs and bell hooks’s ideas? These are some of the reasons that I have not brought up the issue of hierarchy and inequality in my classroom - I don’t want to rock the boat and I am not sure of how to deal with my students’ reactions. Roskelly addresses this sentiment in the introduction to her book: “Teachers and students have to be ready to break the circle of sameness that prevents voices from being heard and ideas being questioned, to spoil the “good party” where lines are clearly drawn between an A and a B, between what counts as knowledge and what doesn’t” (Roskelly xii).

I also feel similar to bell hooks in her first years of teaching: “I had absolutely no model, no example of what it would mean to enter the classroom and teach in a different way” (142). So how do we proceed in enacting praxis with our ideas and action?



In a recent conversation, a fellow TA suggested that we incorporate readings from various authors who are unrepresented in the academy and cannon (i.e. women, people of color, people from the working class). I think this is a great idea that warrants some deep thought on how to frame the readings and classroom discussions. As Scapp points out in his conversation with hooks, “It seems safer to present very radical texts as just so many other books to be added to the traditional lists – the already-existing canon” (141). Presenting texts in this way acts as an erasure of difference, which both Scapp and hooks point out as a dangerous move. Scapp says, “Many of us want to act as though race doesn’t matter, that we are here for what’s interesting in the mind, that history doesn’t matter even if you’ve been screwed over, or your parents were immigrants or the children of immigrants who have labored for forty years and have nothing to show for it” (140). bell hooks argues that this erasure of history also allows for “the erasure of the role of university setting as sites for the reproduction of a privileged class of values, or elitism” (140). If we include diverse texts yet refuse to discuss the diversity and history framing these texts it is just another form of tokenism that reinvests power in traditional institutional hierarchies.



So how do we incorporate these texts in our class? My fellow TA also suggested that we begin by acknowledging that every reader and writer is coming from a specific cultural, racial, gendered, sexual location. We must study the context of the writer and acknowledge their history, and we must study our context and position as readers. Perhaps we could begin by discussing student histories and cultures. We could look into white privilege and male privilege and the ways it affects the way one acts and sees the world. We could have conversation about who we are and look deeply into the people and institutions that have formed our world-view. If we know ourselves we will be able to listen to others in the class, if we accomplish this, then we can begin to acknowledge and listen to the authors and thinkers in our readings. With this radical listening we could be a force in changing our educational institution.

Getting the Band Back Together: The Nature of Collaboration

I think it is time to change the mind frame that “group work is different from real teaching” (Roskelly vii). Group work does not have to be looked at as an activity that only incites chaotic laziness out of our students. I like to think of it as putting a band together. The singer is nothing without the rest of the band, and just like you wouldn’t expect the singer to play the drums or the drummer to sing, I think we can accept the fact that some students shine in different areas then others. The whole point of group work is to benefit from mutual collaboration. Why not give the shy student the opportunity to have a drum solo by putting that person in a small group? Collaboration in the classroom should be about exploring the ways in which our students can connect with and help each other through the process of shared learning and understanding.

Hephzibah Roskelly explains in her book, Breaking (into) the Circle, that “Group work is supposed to value and use the opinions of the various people who make up the group, and the students in the group… learn to see how the different backgrounds, experiences, skills, and purposes among them account for varying interpretations and opinions…” (20). Not only are students exposed to a variety of people they also get to express themselves within a group and add to the diversity. Collaboration is a unique expression of self in correlation to others. I like how this idea, when used effectively, can foster a sense of community. One the other hand, Roskelly warns against the “dark side” of group work in which domineering personality types can monopolize the entire group’s projects and silence the voices they are supposed to be listening to. I agree that this can be an issue, but it is one that should be addressed rather than avoided altogether. If we were to write group work off as unproductive we would be missing out on the benefits of it. One example of this is how group work can be empowering to students because it gives them an opportunity to view themselves as “actors in their worlds, and the meaning makers in the acts of literacy they engage in” (122). It also gives them the opportunity to get valuable feedback from their peers.

I feel like I have modeled this idea to my students when I was observed by a fellow TA. When Jimmy was in my class he took notes while I lectured and watched as I had my students circle their chairs in the middle of the computer lab so we could have a group discussion. I am a strong believer in teaching by example and I feel that showing that I was open to the idea of being observed demonstrated this to my class. Jimmy mentioned writing up some comments for me and I told him I looked forward to reading them. I’m glad my students were able to witness this exchange. This is what I want from my students. I want them to see the value in working with each other. To accomplish this Roskelly insists that we need to make our classrooms “a place of trust where both teachers and students can cross from the safe boundaries of unquestioned assumptions into the wilderness of new ideas and divergent experience and opinion” (94). How do we create this safe space? Do you think you create a safe space within your classes? How do or don’t you accomplish this?

I think the first step should be to abandon our assumptions that relinquishing our position as center of attention will undermine our authority. Roskelly believes that the real issue should be attributed to the fact that “the teacher worries that his or her expertise might be pushed aside if too many other voices—and many without expertise—counter it” (70). I found this idea humorous because maintaining authority in my class is something I have wondered about. The first time I spelled something wrong on the board I stopped and had a split second loss of authority panic. I realized this worry was unfounded and shook it off. So I spelled something wrong on the board and my handwriting is bad enough for me to have considered a career in medicine, so what? It doesn’t mean my students are going to make a mass exodus for the door. I feel the same way about group work. Averting the focus from myself to my students does not mean that I cannot maintain authority in my class. I agree with Roskelly that the real issue is not authority it is about holding students accountable for completing a specific task as a group (65).

What did you get out of Roskelly’s ideas about group work? Do you agree with her assessment that all groups have the potential to fall apart? I know from my personal experiences that I have seen the “dark side” of group work when I witnessed my students waste the whole time arguing with one another or when they have just sat there with blank stares. But when they cooperate and help one another I feel like I should have them do group work more often. What triumphs have you experienced with student collaborations in your classes?

The Real Group

This the true story of four strangers, picked to work in a group, write together and have their work evaluated. Find out what happens when students stop being polite and start getting real.

In her book Breaking (into) the Circle, Hephzibah Roskelly paints a picture of classroom groups that is not unlike the social situations from the MTV reality series, The Real World. People from all walks of life are brought together in a common setting to be challenged by their differences and to accomplish something together. Okay, so the scenarios aren’t exactly the same (we try to avoid fighting, sex, and alcohol among students), but in both group situations people are learning about themselves (and their writing) through interaction with others.

Breaking (into) the Circle explores group work from both theoretical and practical angles. In Chapter 2 Hepsie describes Vygotsky’s theory about the social nature of learning and explains how it serves as a foundation for building group work in the classroom. Based on this theory, she presents three specific practices that can foster productive group work. For me, the two most meaningful of these practices were the use of mixed groups and the importance of play. Let me explain.

I’ve wondered in my own class what the most effective way to group students is. Should they be grouped with peers of a similar ability level? Or should they be mixed? Hepsi avoids homogenizing groups and advocates us to do the same. According to her, genders, races, and writing ability levels should all mix in class groups because it increases students’ zone of proximal development; that is, the difference between their actual performance and their potential performance through working with peers (39). Hepsie points out that with the proper training, students’ writing and confidence will grow from working with both higher and lower performing peers. She also makes a strong case in Chapter 3 for mixing students of varying races and genders in groups as a way to encourage students’ exposure to and use of language that is different from the “normal discourse” of the traditional academic environment (72).

The other practice she notes in Chapter 2 that caught my attention is that of play. By assigning roles, acting out situations, and using other methods of “play,” students can be more creative in the classroom and have a sense of ownership (which scares many teachers who fear chaos from group activities). Hepsie describes how this spirit engendered by play can shape group dynamics and thought: “The group makes talk and knowledge flow in new directions, in a circular path rather than a straight line from teacher to student” (55). This “circular path” is similar to that of the dialectical diagram Ballenger promotes in writing⎯ our process should flow in a circle from creative to critical and back again, just as our students’ ideas and writing should flow from them⎯to peers⎯to the teacher (who Hepsie believes should be a part of group conversation)⎯and back again.

A final nugget of knowledge that I took away from this book is the importance of permanence in groups. Hepsie keeps her students in the same groups all semester (named after birds, a bit odd) and they have a group envelope in which peer comments and group work goes. Her reason for insisting on such permanence is simple⎯ trust. She writes, “For people to voice opinions, to share writing, to react to a topic, or to explain a quotation, they have to feel that others are listening and believing in them” (138). I experimented with my class during the Op-Ed unit and kept students in the same groups. At the end of the unit I asked them to freewrite about the effectiveness of their groups. The overwhelming response was that they preferred working with the same group members because they felt they could be more honest with each other in feedback.

What will you do to foster meaningful group work? Do you believe in tracking or mixed groups? Have you used “play” effectively in the classroom? Is it feasible to have permanent groups all semester? Next semester I would like to try keeping students in the same groups. And just maybe they’ll become the subject of a new reality show…

Creating Knowledge, Challenging Authority

Hephzibah Roskelly, in Breaking (into) the Circle, focuses on small group work as a means to knowledge creation. “Group work and the collaborative learning that ensues from it suggest that knowledge is made, not merely acquired; not simply discovered, but made” (Roskelly 72). One of the primary aims of WRIT101 is inquiry and discovery. However, in properly using small groups we also have an opportunity to encourage students to learn in ways not typical to conventional courses. That is to say that we have an opportunity to foster a learning experience focused on what everyone brings to the classroom. The idea of breaking free from “normal” academic discourse has resonated with me as Roskelly suggests that it challenges my authority as a teacher (72). I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about this as I think the purpose of this course is to empower students not only as writers but as members of a community, inside and outside from the classroom. By talking, listening, and negotiating with each other, students can learn in ways that are fundamental to “real life” outside the institution.

I have used small groups and have witnessed this sort of knowledge creation. Roskelly says, “Students learn from their peers because they value peers’ opinions and are influenced by them in ways that they’re not influenced by teachers” (32). This has been evidenced most clearly on the day that students and I reviewed several controversial op-eds. These writings focused on healthcare, the Islamic Community Center, and the Bush tax cuts. We formed a circle and discussed the central points of the arguments. From there, students were allowed to argue whether or not they thought the author had effectively made his/her case. In having this argument, students who were entirely opposed to the Islamic Cultural Center opened up to points made by those who supported it. Students, because they were in a circle, had to look at each other and be responsive to what was being said. In listening to the conversation that ensued, I too learned as a result of various perspectives coming into the forefront. Students spoke with authority on the topics as my position as teacher was de-emphasized. Such activities, if successful, assist everyone in developing their own ideas. Everyone has an opportunity to say what they think and what they think ought to be transformed by what is said by others. In this way, knowledge is not to be viewed as static but as fluid, influenced by a variety of voices. If this isn’t a beautiful thing, tell me what is.

Crossing Boundaries: Identity and Voice in the Writing Classroom

The three authors, Brooke, Bartholomae, and Elbow, write about ways to teach writing in the classroom, whether it be Elbow and Bartholomae's ongoing conversation about academic versus personal writing, or Brooke's exploration of identity in writing classrooms.

I was most intrigued by Robert Brooke's essay, “Underlife and Writing Instruction,” by the notions of identity play which are at work in the classroom as in all walks of life. I was amused by sections of the article, as I recognized in his descriptions some of my students' interactions and behaviors in the classroom. They roll their eyes, they surreptitiously text, they chat together during group work, and they joke with me as they play with the boundaries between their roles as students and their identities outside the classroom. Brooke's point, that students don't necessarily intend to “disrupt the functioning of the classroom, but to provide the other participants in the classroom with a sense that one has other things to do, other interests, that one is a much richer personality than can be shown in this context,” (148) rang true to me, as I remembered my own college classrooms, and the various identities and personas I and the other students tried on. I thought of my students' behaviors again, and I felt less irritated and more tender towards them. This can be a time of such exploration and flux, of experimentation and discovery of who they are and who they want to be, as they question their purpose, both at school, and in the larger contexts of community, and as citizens. My students are living out their expressions of identity within the classroom as well, shifting and jostling each other, testing boundaries, sinking into their “underlives,” and observing how others (and I) respond to them.

I liked Brooke's analogy of voice and identity in the classroom: “Writing teachers... are more likely to speak of "voice" than of "identity," for the first is a rhetorical concept and the second a sociological concept. But the two are very closely related, since both have to do with the stance an individual takes towards experience.“ (149) It struck me that Bartholomae was less interested in teaching his students to develop their voices, but instead, to adopt or mimic perhaps, the voices of academics already participating in discourse. His students' own experience, as writers and as human beings seems to count for little, as they can have no new stories to tell, in Bartholomae's view (66). Elbow, on the other hand, encourages his students to adopt the identity of writer, and express their own voices and therefore identities: “But in my desire to help my students experience themselves as writers I find myself in fact trying to help them trust language-not to question it-or at least not to question it for long stretches of the writing process: to hold off distrust till they revise” (78).

Brooke speaks about the conflict inherent in encouraging students to use their own voices:“In writing classrooms, "voice" is often felt to be the paradox that prompts pedagogical change - as teachers, we want students to write in their own voices, but how can they when we assign them to? And how can their voices really be their own when they are evaluated by us?” (149). I have pondered this question as well as I flip the pages of my students' essays, trying to identify where they are writing “to me” and where they cross boundaries and find themselves getting caught up in ideas and writing to explore.

Finally, I was intrigued when Brooke referred to the potentially subversive nature of writing, if certain students were to explore their voices: “Pamela Annas' "Style as Politics" shows how, for writers who are disadvantaged within the current social structure, writing is always a complex political act of finding language to express other possibilities than those offered by the current sociopolitical climate, and that this finding of language is in conflict with the standards of accepted writing” (149). I love this notion of testing and toying with language and its boundaries, to create for readers a new experience perhaps, or to tell a universal story with a new voice. I hope to encourage my students to trust language, to trust their voices and stories, in the hopes that they will “accept their own underlife, to accept the fact that they are never completely subsumed by their roles, and instead can stand apart from them and contemplate” (Brooke, 152).

Fake it till You Make It: Teaching our Students to Survive in the Academic World

When students walk into our classrooms I would make the presumptuous statement that they are trying to figure out what roles they should be playing just as much as we are. An important line of inquiry posed from this week’s readings is: what are our students’ identities and how does this fit into our positions as classroom facilitators? Or better yet, how do we feel about those roles and how do we use them to both of our benefits?

In this week’s readings, Peter Elbow, appears to be engaging in a skewed version of the old “chicken or egg” argument with himself, but rather than discussing which came first, he is trying to figure out whether it is more important to place the emphasis on our students roles as writers or as academics. The tension he feels between these two roles never comes to a concrete resolution, instead he furthers complicates the matter be stating “I’m proud to be an academic and a writer, partly because I’ve had to struggle on both counts. I’d like to inhabit both roles in an unconflicted way, but I feel a tug of war between them” (82). I think it should be possible for him to inhabit both roles even if he feels like they are inherently oppositional. This makes me wonder how Elbow plans on assigning a role for his students to occupy if he is still trying to reach an understanding between the two. My advice to Elbow would be to embrace his own advice. A concept that resonated with me was when Elbow quoted writer, William Stafford, to rationalize his desire to let students write without worry or fear, or in other words, to write with the confidence of a professional. Stafford believes that writers, like swimmers, need to understand the “value of an unafraid, face-down, flailing, and speedy process in using the language” (78). Students should accept the reality of inevitable mistakes, we all make them, if only to experience what uninhibited writers feel when they write without hesitation.

A way for students to own their work and relate it to their academic lives would be to incorporate what Robert Brooke’s refers to as an “underlife.” This would allow students to reflect on their personal lives and the identities they experience away from the classroom. The importance of using personal writing in the classroom is that it would focus “on the identity and abilities of the student as an original thinker, rather than on the student’s ability to comply with classroom authority” (152). Brooke asserts that these “underlives” are existing identities that students do not get to express or use in the classroom, so they present themselves often as distractions, like engaging in conversations or notes that are done in a secretive way that could be used in a productive way during class. The reason for this, Brooke’s explains, is because even if the behavior mimics activities that are not classroom related, they are often relating to the ideas presented in class (145).

The counterargument to this idea comes from David Bartholomae, who does not see the value in incorporating creative non-fiction techniques into his composition writing course because he does not “want [his] students to celebrate what would then become the natural and inevitable details of their lives” (71). If these details are seeping out of our students “underlives” anyways then why shouldn’t we try to figure out how to incorporate into our classroom curriculum in a way that lets them express their inner identities and give them some authority by letting them write about their lives?

I have seen some of these ideas play out in my own classroom, but it is not the once-in-a-while side whispering that worries me as much as when my students want me to give them all the answers instead of figuring them out for themselves. I do not necessarily believe that my students ask me for cookie cutter formulas to follow for their assignments out of laziness, as much as it is done out of the apprehension they have about doing it wrong. This is why I think it is important for our students to embrace a professional assertiveness while writing, even if they lack the experience to justify the approach. I should clarify here that I do not mean that I want my students to engage in some sort of haphazard cannon ball into the deep end of the composition pool, I want them to observe the methods of experienced writers and emulate them while writing, even if we have to go back and clarify it later. The addendum I should add to my title is that I want them to responsibly “fake” the authority of practiced writers while seeing what kinds of writing they can produce and still accept guidance until they can make that type of writing on their own.

How did you react to Elbow’s idea that we should help our students resist the “am I doing this right” worry that plagues inexperienced writers? Do you feel that we can embrace our students “underlives” without appearing to be accepting of classroom distractions? How can we explain the difference between allowing our students to deviate from the classroom agenda if it relates to the class and not appear to be encouraging unproductive disruptions?

Forgive me, Bartholomae, for I have Sinned

This week’s readings reveal the world of tensions inhabited by our student writers. While Bartholomae insists on the validity of requiring academic writing for first-year composition students, Elbow and Brooke make a case for inviting students to see themselves as writers with individual voices outside of traditional academic-writing genre constraints.

Bartholomae’s primary argument for academic writing is that it requires students—and instructors—to acknowledge the “busy, noisy, intertextual space” in which students compose: a space “defined by all the writing that has preceded them” (64). He poses that, by requiring students to participate in “a first person, narrative, or expressive genre” (69)—one that diverges distinctly from traditional academic writing—instructors are responsible for the reproduction of [the] myth” (70) that student voices can exist in an open space that is free from the history of past writers.

While such observations are worth being aware of in the defense of traditional academic discourse, I find Bartholomae’s rejection of the value of creative nonfiction in the composition classroom stale, discouraging, and almost callously dismissive of student writers’ potentials. For example, he cites a student who is writing an essay on her parents’ divorce and remarks, “We’ve all read this essay” (66). He claims that we’ve read it because the student cannot be capable of talking about the universal themes of such an essay in a way that is new or imaginative. So why let students write about their human experiences using first-person, author voices? Here, Elbow might interject that the student should write the essay so she is “able to say, ‘I’m not just writing for teachers or readers, I’m writing as much for me—sometimes even more for me’” (77).

I’m with Elbow. He maintains that our highest priority as teachers should be to “show that [we’ve] understood what they’re saying” (77), that inviting students to write something in which they are “self-absorbed and see themselves at the center of the universe” is more empowering than to require students to employ the writer-as-academic role of being “personally modest and intellectually scrupulous…to see themselves as at the periphery” (79). By asking our students to write about themselves with essays like the life-place assignment, we are living out Elbow’s confession that he invites students “to fall into the following sins: the take their own ideas too seriously, to think that they are the first person to think of their idea and be all wrapped up and possessive about it…to write as though they are a central speaker at the center of the universe—rather than feeling…that they must summarize what others have said and only make modest rejoinders from the edge of the conversation…” (80).

In my class, I have observed that the students who have improved the most are the ones who have developed confidence in themselves as writers. If it’s a sin to let students be at the center of the universe in one class of the many they take in the institution; if it’s a sin to let students claim an authentic voice about personal experiences; if it’s a sin to let them make claims independently, rather than craft responses timidly—sin, sin, sin away! Sin for confidence, and don’t repent.

Fellow teachers, what value did you discover in Bartholomae’s argument? What is the value of shifting roles, as Brooke endorses, “from student to writer, from teacher-pleaser to original thinker” (152)? Do you think it could be ever be dangerous to indulge in the sins Elbow proposes—why?