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).
So much of the readings had me wondering how long it takes our students (and how well) they can portray, validate and even celebrate their own voices. Brooke's ideas of voice and identity clearly transfer to the kind of groundwork occuring in our classes - trying to offer a successful bridge between academic writing and the individual sets of knowledge each student brings with them. While I try to make a concious effort in asking, prodding and poking students to 'look behind' them in terms of their communities, stories and experiences to inform their writing, it doesn't always turn out well. I have decided thus far in my first semester teaching that perhaps first we must ask (or demand...is that fair?) our students to claim an indentity or voice in their writing, then the work in clearly communicating these identities and voices will gradually come later. In short, I like to think the more practice they have with writing with their voice, the stronger their identity in writing will become. At the moment, I feel as if I'm in the tough trenches in the process of first asking my students "who they are". With hope, they'll be able to communicate this question through clear and effective composition as they grow through their college coursework.
ReplyDeleteBeth, I too saw elements of my own students in Brooke’s article—I found myself picturing my wry wisecracker (a frequent quip—“This isn’t really freewriting because you give us prompts that tell us what to write!”) and the trio of giggling gal pals who frequently host side conversations . Brooke’s article did make me realize that these perceived “problem” students are just succumbing to a natural reaction, rebelling against the student-roles that the academy prescribes to them (which fits well with Elbow’s ideas about the roles of writer and academic that are largely prescribed by the academy as well).
ReplyDeleteI was especially drawn to Brooke’s characterization of writing instruction as disruptive to the academy, because 1) This made me picture myself amidst you all, my 540 peers, as a masked band of renegades, slipping onto campus at night with The Curious Writers in hand, plotting our next academic attack; and 2) I think this description fits well with the pedagogical goals of Writ 101. I think it’s safe to say that we’d all like our students to “see herself [or himself] as an original thinker, instead of as a ‘student’ whose purpose is to please teachers by absorbing and repeating information” (151-2). If we truly want our students to transcend contextual and genre-based boundaries and move their writing skills beyond the classroom (as discussed with our readings on ecocomposition & sustainable pedagogy, rhetoric, & rhetorical genre), we need to embrace our rebellious “disruptive” role as instructors and empower our students (despite Bartholomae’s strident disapproval).
If we—the student-empowering Writ 101 instructors—are an institution-disrupting militia, we can count Peter Elbow amongst our ranks and David Bartholomae amongst the enemy troops. I agree with you, Beth, in your observation that Bartholomae seemed uninterested in the student’s voice, and I admit made me feel a bit defensive when I read his article since I, ever the disruptive renegade, privilege my own students’ voices in my classroom. To me, Bartholomae’s argument was a bit reductive—I’m especially resistant to his suggestion that the goal of the personal essay genre “is to reproduce the ideology of sentimental realism—where a world is made in the image of a single, authorizing point of view” (69). “Sentimental” has such negative connotations to it, and I think that Bartholomae denigrates more writer/student-focused assignments by associating the word with the genre. I do believe that students can produce great writing when they write to discover more about themselves (although I’m sure Bartholomae would disagree)—I’ve seen evidence of this in my own students’ Life Place invention work. Some that struggled substantially with writing in more “academic” genres (the PAA, for example) have produced the best blog posts, full of incredibly-detailed descriptions. Because of this—the fact that my students have excelled in various genres, some succeeding across the board, others finding their strength in the more personal genre—I’m inclined to say that we should take a more combined approach, as Elbow seems to advocate (and as we at UM already do take, I’d argue). We should teach multiple genres that appeal to multiple contexts—the academic (the PAA), the civic (Op-Ed), and the personal (Life Place).
I would agree that Bartholomae's "argument was a bit reductive," but I find it important to keep in mind as we run ahead as "an institution-disrupting militia" as Brittany so eloquently put it. I think there is room for his skepticism, more so to inform us of the extreme (or the "enemy") that we want to understand and keep on the periphery, the limitations we are indeed working within, as we empower our students.
ReplyDeleteI also found the Brooke piece interesting, particularly the information about behavior in the classroom. After a long absence from academia, I've noticed the clear change in the student/teacher power dynamic. And why I am tempted to step up on my soapbox and ask why students are now on an equal plane with teachers, I'll avoid ranting and state the obvious: the only way a student writer develops his/her identity or writing voice is by writing, writing, writing. Bartholomae and Elbow can "converse" for the next twenty years about the merits of academic versus first-person writing, but the argument strikes me as superfluous. Don't students need to write across several genres and styles? It doesn't matter as much whether the writing is academic or personal. Students should be required to write both academic and personal papers, to write, write, write.
ReplyDeleteI believe that academic theory, in its attempt to improve writing pedagogy, can sometimes get a bit beyond its purposes. We should remember that our goal is, at its core, simple: for students to express strong thinking through clear, concise, and understandable writing.