As the Story Goes: Exploring the Tensions Between the Academic and the Personal in Writing 105--Amy Robillard

When composition classes encourage these students to ignore those voices that seem irrelevant to the purified world of the classroom, most students are able to do so without much struggle. Some of them are so adept at doing it that the whole process has for them become automatic.

--Min-zhan Lu, “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle”

Analysis is the kind of thinking you’ll most often be asked to do in your work life and in school; it is not the rarefied and exclusive province of scholars and intellectuals. It is, in fact, one of the most common of our mental activities.

--Rosenwasser and Stephen, Writing Analytically

Within the educational institutions where we learn to develop and strengthen our writing and analytical skills, we also learn to think, write, and talk in a manner that shifts attention from personal experience. Yet if we are to reach our people and all people, if we are to remain connected (especially those of us whose familial backgrounds are poor and working-class), we must understand that the telling of one’s personal story provides a meaningful example, a way for folks to identify and connect.

--bell hooks, “Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education”

These are the three epigraphs I used to introduce my syllabus in the Fall of 2001, the semester during which at least twelve teachers from the Writing Program were teaching the new analysis- and argument-based curriculum put in place for Writing 105. I decided I would follow along with the basic outline of the standard syllabus designed for new teaching assistants in the program, modifying the course to fit my own research agenda.

Having done research on the role of the personal narrative in the first-year composition classroom, I’d discovered long before I put this syllabus together that first-year students, if and when they were asked to write a personal narrative, were overwhelmingly asked to write the personal narrative as the first graded paper of the semester. Based on the research I’d done that held that, for example, teachers assigned the personal narrative as the first graded paper assignment because they thought it was easy to write, I wanted to experiment with that well-worn design. I wanted to see what would happen when students were asked to write “academic” essays first--to write an analysis and an argument and then, as the final assignment for the course, to write a personal narrative for an audience--both me and their classmates--known to them pretty well by now. The unwieldy title of my course, “Autobiographical Explorations in Analysis and Argument: An Introduction to Composition,” certainly did cover all the bases. At the same time that I was putting pressure on disciplinary assumptions about the personal narrative, I also wanted to introduce students to composition as a discipline, much in the same way that sociology professors introduce their students to the discipline of sociology in their introductory courses.

As I’m writing this, I hesitate. I hesitate because I know that there exists in this discipline an unwritten belief that we are judged as teachers by the work our students do. The quality of student writing reflects the quality of the teaching, so this reasoning goes. To hold up my teaching and its “results” for critical reflection so soon after the semester ended seems artificial to me in some vague way. I don’t know how to approach this piece tonally--do I present it as a step-by-step “this is what happened in my class” piece, or do I let readers in on how I really feel about the course? Should I tell you that this is the first time in my teaching career that evaluations were evenly divided between students overwhelmingly praising my work and the course and students complaining about my performance and the boring readings? Prior to this semester, my evaluations were largely positive, so much so that I began to wonder if I was actually teaching my students anything about writing and critique.

I taught analysis inductively, spending two-plus weeks on Wendy Hesford’s “Memory Work,” a dense theoretical piece that illustrates for students what critical analysis can look like. The first major writing assignment asked students to analyze an artifact that held both personal and cultural significance. I explicitly asked students to consider the personal significance of the artifact because the theme of the course being the tensions between the academic and the personal, I wanted students to experience some of those tensions first hand in their writing (I knew, of course, that they were probably experiencing those tensions in many other areas of their lives). So many of the students in my two sections had been trained not to use “that blasted letter ‘I,’” to quote Marissa Stupca, that I wanted them not just to do so, but to do so self-consciously.

Now do I write about the best paper I received? The paper from the only student who earned an A for the course?

As a class, we collected the twenty-one analysis papers into a classbook, my own paper included. I wrote a paper along with my students, one in which I analyzed both the personal and cultural significance of my father’s invitation to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball. I initiated a design contest for covers to the classbook; in one section, the classbook came to be called “unfold,” and in the other section, “Reflections.” Rather than gloating here about the work my students did during that first unit (again, I acknowledge that I am judged by the work my students do; sharing only my students’ best work does not extend much beyond a testimonial to my own teaching), I’ll share instead the collage of quotations that made up the cover of the “Reflections” classbook, each sentence coming from individual students’ papers, and one from my own.

For me, the necklace has different implications. I feel her through her rings. Through all of this, I remain astounded. Socialist windows dressed the building. Few earn the title of eagle scout. We traveled all over the country. I felt as if I was mourning alone. I was suddenly proud of my home state. I am a collector of sentimental meaning. A distant splash caught my sister’s attention. …an ultimate sacrifice of love. The rest is up to us. She took Herbert’s mouth and ripped it off. This is an inevitable fact of life. Well, I was absolutely wrong.

For the second unit of the course, the unit on argument, we began by discussing Kenneth Burke’s parlor metaphor, by coming to think of argument as a conversation rather than as a debate with two sides, a pro and a con, or even worse, as a fight. When I originally asked students to write down all of the words they associated with the word “argument,” they wrote things like “fighting,” “divorce,” “anger and tears,” and “shouting.” Thinking about argument as a conversation accomplished a number of things: it allowed students to think of sources not as disembodied sources of truth but as people putting forth their own views on a subject, it allowed students to experiment with different ways of putting those people into conversation with one another, and it allowed students to imagine themselves in conversation with the authors of their sources. It helped students understand that they, too, needed to become part of the conversation, that they could enter that parlor and put their two cents in.

For the second graded paper assignment, students were asked to research a conversation going on in the academic discipline or profession that they were preparing to enter. The “hot topic,” as I called it, had to be something that was still being discussed in their field so that their entering the conversation could be as authentic as possible given the limitations of the assignment. As an example, I shared with students the never-ending debate within composition studies over the role of personal writing in a college curriculum. “What is the relationship,” I wrote on the syllabus, “between the kind of writing college students are expected to produce and writing from personal experience?” I shared with students Nancy Sommers’ “Between the Drafts,” for example, to give them an idea of what we compositionists talk about when we’re not reading their work. I wanted students to know that there is a large gap in the field, a gap between those who believe in the value of personal writing in college and those who believe that freshman writing courses are service courses designed to prepare students for the writing they’ll be expected to do in other college courses. At the same time that I wanted to provide them with an example of an ongoing debate in a discipline, I wanted them to know that they themselves were the subject of a long-running debate in composition studies, that I was engaging in that very conversation as a member of the discipline of composition and rhetoric. I like to think I accomplished both.

About a week and a half before Thanksgiving break, I asked students to freewrite about what they remember about home before coming to Syracuse. That’s it. Just write about what you remember about home.

Then, on the Thursday before Thanksgiving break, I asked students to work with the three epigraphs I’d included on the syllabus. By that time in the semester, we’d read all three pieces, so they knew the contexts for the epigraphs. The in-class writing assignment read, “With the goal of continuing to practice putting sources into conversation, please put the three epigraphs into conversation around the topic of the tension between the academic and the personal.” Here are a few excerpts from their work:

If analysis is so common, of course we should learn how to write analytically. After 12 years, however, it may be time for students to learn some of the less common forms of writing. Even (Gasp!) the telling of a personal story in a paper!
--Ben Levy

Through elementary school up through high school, we as students, are taught to remove ourselves and our opinions from writing because we are thought to not have enough insight into an issue to comment on it

--Chris Page

bell hooks says that students learn to become better writers and more detached writers in the educational system. She implies the connection of only time to the two facts, better analysis and more detachment. She is quick to say though that good writing isn’t necessarily detached writing. Lu on the other hand, in her piece “From Silence to Words,” makes explicit the connection between the loss of student experience and the educational institutions. Lu writes, “When composition classes encourage these students to ignore those voices….” Lu shifts responsibility for the detachment to the system by saying they are “encouraging the students.”

--Christina Bowdler

It is true that students need to learn to write, and if academic writing best suits the process of learning, then so be it, but where is the line drawn between analyzing the works of authors and allowing students to become authors?

--Brian Hickel

Finally, I asked students to put on their analysis hats (I literally asked them to do this, and we had fun mocking my use of such an elementary-school metaphor) while they were home over Thanksgiving (the only problem with this was that I was working under the assumption that all students were going home for Thanksgiving, which turned out to not be true), to be alert to any tensions between the academic and the personal. As this was for many students the first time they’d be home since starting college, I figured it would be ripe with tension. And there was a little part of me that felt like I was taking advantage of students’ real-life issues. But then, what else is writing for except to explore real-life tensions? I told that little part of me to listen to the other parts of me that knew that this was a great way to tap into students’ best writing. I wasn’t creating an authentic writing assignment for my students. The exigency was there, is always there for college students away from home, especially first-year students away from home for the first time. I was merely taking advantage of that exigency.

And so, as the story goes, the last formal writing assignment asked students to write a personal narrative exploring an incident or event that for them represented the tensions between the academic and the personal. The assignment’s scaffolding suddenly made sense to my students, some of whom remarked in their journals that they’d been confused at first about why I’d asked them to write about what they remembered about home a few weeks ago. Students wrote about, for example, the difficulties inherent in making new friends and keeping the old ones, the tension between the Midwestern and the eastern parts of the country, a sudden change in organizational styles (he’d begun color-coding his folders and assignments where in high school he was a mess), the tensions inherent in visiting former high school teachers and the pressure to sound “sophisticated,” and one student mourned the loss of a favorite church-based fall tradition, the Apple Fest in Salem, Connecticut.

The new curriculum’s requirement that we teach students analysis and argument does not mean that there’s no room for the personal narrative, as some might fear. In fact, if I hadn’t decided to follow the new course design for Writing 105, I might not have found myself with such a wonderful opportunity to experiment with disciplinary assumptions about the role of the personal narrative in the first-year writing classroom. The personal narrative still belongs in composition classrooms; I have no doubt about that. And based on this experience, I will continue to interrogate the positioning of the personal narrative; right now I’m fairly well convinced that it doesn’t belong in the beginning but at the end of a first-year course.

I end this reflection with the words of one of my students, Charles Gallant. Explicitly ignoring directions to turn his final paper in to the Writing Program office, Charles slipped his final draft of his autobiographical paper under my office door with a note. “Amy!!! Sorry to hand in a paper like this….but it’s ok because this paper is like BUTTER!”

As the Story Goes: Exploring the Tensions Between the Academic and the Personal in Writing 105

Amy Robillard
When composition classes encourage these students to ignore those voices that seem irrelevant to the purified world of the classroom, most students are able to do so without much struggle. Some of them are so adept at doing it that the whole process has for them become automatic. --Min-zhan Lu, “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle” Analysis is the kind of thinking you’ll most often be asked to do in your work life and in school; it is not the rarefied and exclusive province of scholars and intellectuals. It is, in fact, one of the most common of our mental activities. --Rosenwasser and Stephen, Writing Analytically Within the educational institutions where we learn to develop and strengthen our writing and analytical skills, we also learn to think, write, and talk in a manner that shifts attention from personal experience. Yet if we are to reach our people and all people, if we are to remain connected (especially those of us whose familial backgrounds are poor and working-class), we must understand that the telling of one’s personal story provides a meaningful example, a way for folks to identify and connect. --bell hooks, “Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education” These are the three epigraphs I used to introduce my syllabus in the Fall of 2001, the semester during which at least twelve teachers from the Writing Program were teaching the new analysis- and argument-based curriculum put in place for Writing 105. I decided I would follow along with the basic outline of the standard syllabus designed for new teaching assistants in the program, modifying the course to fit my own research agenda. Having done research on the role of the personal narrative in the first-year composition classroom, I’d discovered long before I put this syllabus together that first-year students, if and when they were asked to write a personal narrative, were overwhelmingly asked to write the personal narrative as the first graded paper of the semester. Based on the research I’d done that held that, for example, teachers assigned the personal narrative as the first graded paper assignment because they thought it was easy to write, I wanted to experiment with that well-worn design. I wanted to see what would happen when students were asked to write “academic” essays first--to write an analysis and an argument and then, as the final assignment for the course, to write a personal narrative for an audience--both me and their classmates--known to them pretty well by now. The unwieldy title of my course, “Autobiographical Explorations in Analysis and Argument: An Introduction to Composition,” certainly did cover all the bases. At the same time that I was putting pressure on disciplinary assumptions about the personal narrative, I also wanted to introduce students to composition as a discipline, much in the same way that sociology professors introduce their students to the discipline of sociology in their introductory courses. As I’m writing this, I hesitate. I hesitate because I know that there exists in this discipline an unwritten belief that we are judged as teachers by the work our students do. The quality of student writing reflects the quality of the teaching, so this reasoning goes. To hold up my teaching and its “results” for critical reflection so soon after the semester ended seems artificial to me in some vague way. I don’t know how to approach this piece tonally--do I present it as a step-by-step “this is what happened in my class” piece, or do I let readers in on how I really feel about the course? Should I tell you that this is the first time in my teaching career that evaluations were evenly divided between students overwhelmingly praising my work and the course and students complaining about my performance and the boring readings? Prior to this semester, my evaluations were largely positive, so much so that I began to wonder if I was actually teaching my students anything about writing and critique. I taught analysis inductively, spending two-plus weeks on Wendy Hesford’s “Memory Work,” a dense theoretical piece that illustrates for students what critical analysis can look like. The first major writing assignment asked students to analyze an artifact that held both personal and cultural significance. I explicitly asked students to consider the personal significance of the artifact because the theme of the course being the tensions between the academic and the personal, I wanted students to experience some of those tensions first hand in their writing (I knew, of course, that they were probably experiencing those tensions in many other areas of their lives). So many of the students in my two sections had been trained not to use “that blasted letter ‘I,’” to quote Marissa Stupca, that I wanted them not just to do so, but to do so self-consciously. Now do I write about the best paper I received? The paper from the only student who earned an A for the course? As a class, we collected the twenty-one analysis papers into a classbook, my own paper included. I wrote a paper along with my students, one in which I analyzed both the personal and cultural significance of my father’s invitation to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball. I initiated a design contest for covers to the classbook; in one section, the classbook came to be called “unfold,” and in the other section, “Reflections.” Rather than gloating here about the work my students did during that first unit (again, I acknowledge that I am judged by the work my students do; sharing only my students’ best work does not extend much beyond a testimonial to my own teaching), I’ll share instead the collage of quotations that made up the cover of the “Reflections” classbook, each sentence coming from individual students’ papers, and one from my own. For me, the necklace has different implications. I feel her through her rings. Through all of this, I remain astounded. Socialist windows dressed the building. Few earn the title of eagle scout. We traveled all over the country. I felt as if I was mourning alone. I was suddenly proud of my home state. I am a collector of sentimental meaning. A distant splash caught my sister’s attention. …an ultimate sacrifice of love. The rest is up to us. She took Herbert’s mouth and ripped it off. This is an inevitable fact of life. Well, I was absolutely wrong. For the second unit of the course, the unit on argument, we began by discussing Kenneth Burke’s parlor metaphor, by coming to think of argument as a conversation rather than as a debate with two sides, a pro and a con, or even worse, as a fight. When I originally asked students to write down all of the words they associated with the word “argument,” they wrote things like “fighting,” “divorce,” “anger and tears,” and “shouting.” Thinking about argument as a conversation accomplished a number of things: it allowed students to think of sources not as disembodied sources of truth but as people putting forth their own views on a subject, it allowed students to experiment with different ways of putting those people into conversation with one another, and it allowed students to imagine themselves in conversation with the authors of their sources. It helped students understand that they, too, needed to become part of the conversation, that they could enter that parlor and put their two cents in. For the second graded paper assignment, students were asked to research a conversation going on in the academic discipline or profession that they were preparing to enter. The “hot topic,” as I called it, had to be something that was still being discussed in their field so that their entering the conversation could be as authentic as possible given the limitations of the assignment. As an example, I shared with students the never-ending debate within composition studies over the role of personal writing in a college curriculum. “What is the relationship,” I wrote on the syllabus, “between the kind of writing college students are expected to produce and writing from personal experience?” I shared with students Nancy Sommers’ “Between the Drafts,” for example, to give them an idea of what we compositionists talk about when we’re not reading their work. I wanted students to know that there is a large gap in the field, a gap between those who believe in the value of personal writing in college and those who believe that freshman writing courses are service courses designed to prepare students for the writing they’ll be expected to do in other college courses. At the same time that I wanted to provide them with an example of an ongoing debate in a discipline, I wanted them to know that they themselves were the subject of a long-running debate in composition studies, that I was engaging in that very conversation as a member of the discipline of composition and rhetoric. I like to think I accomplished both. About a week and a half before Thanksgiving break, I asked students to freewrite about what they remember about home before coming to Syracuse. That’s it. Just write about what you remember about home. Then, on the Thursday before Thanksgiving break, I asked students to work with the three epigraphs I’d included on the syllabus. By that time in the semester, we’d read all three pieces, so they knew the contexts for the epigraphs. The in-class writing assignment read, “With the goal of continuing to practice putting sources into conversation, please put the three epigraphs into conversation around the topic of the tension between the academic and the personal.” Here are a few excerpts from their work: If analysis is so common, of course we should learn how to write analytically. After 12 years, however, it may be time for students to learn some of the less common forms of writing. Even (Gasp!) the telling of a personal story in a paper! --Ben Levy A little bit of guilt here; maybe I’m affecting their opinions too much. But I can’t deny how happy it makes me to read Ben’s sarcastic (Gasp!). Through elementary school up through high school, we as students, are taught to remove ourselves and our opinions from writing because we are thought to not have enough insight into an issue to comment on it --Chris Page Though most students know this on some level, it’s nice to see Chris articulating the issue critically. bell hooks says that students learn to become better writers and more detached writers in the educational system. She implies the connection of only time to the two facts, better analysis and more detachment. She is quick to say though that good writing isn’t necessarily detached writing. Lu on the other hand, in her piece “From Silence to Words,” makes explicit the connection between the loss of student experience and the educational institutions. Lu writes, “When composition classes encourage these students to ignore those voices….” Lu shifts responsibility for the detachment to the system by saying they are “encouraging the students.” --Christina Bowdler Though students know this, as Chris shows us above, Christina has moved past restating the issue to analyzing how student detachment is produced. It is true that students need to learn to write, and if academic writing best suits the process of learning, then so be it, but where is the line drawn between analyzing the works of authors and allowing students to become authors? --Brian Hickel Hallelujah! Finally, I asked students to put on their analysis hats (I literally asked them to do this, and we had fun mocking my use of such an elementary-school metaphor) while they were home over Thanksgiving (the only problem with this was that I was working under the assumption that all students were going home for Thanksgiving, which turned out to not be true), to be alert to any tensions between the academic and the personal. As this was for many students the first time they’d be home since starting college, I figured it would be ripe with tension. And there was a little part of me that felt like I was taking advantage of students’ real-life issues. But then, what else is writing for except to explore real-life tensions? I told that little part of me to listen to the other parts of me that knew that this was a great way to tap into students’ best writing. I wasn’t creating an authentic writing assignment for my students. The exigency was there, is always there for college students away from home, especially first-year students away from home for the first time. I was merely taking advantage of that exigency. And so, as the story goes, the last formal writing assignment asked students to write a personal narrative exploring an incident or event that for them represented the tensions between the academic and the personal. The assignment’s scaffolding suddenly made sense to my students, some of whom remarked in their journals that they’d been confused at first about why I’d asked them to write about what they remembered about home a few weeks ago. Students wrote about, for example, the difficulties inherent in making new friends and keeping the old ones, the tension between the Midwestern and the eastern parts of the country, a sudden change in organizational styles (he’d begun color-coding his folders and assignments where in high school he was a mess), the tensions inherent in visiting former high school teachers and the pressure to sound “sophisticated,” and one student mourned the loss of a favorite church-based fall tradition, the Apple Fest in Salem, Connecticut. The new curriculum’s requirement that we teach students analysis and argument does not mean that there’s no room for the personal narrative, as some might fear. In fact, if I hadn’t decided to follow the new course design for Writing 105, I might not have found myself with such a wonderful opportunity to experiment with disciplinary assumptions about the role of the personal narrative in the first-year writing classroom. The personal narrative still belongs in composition classrooms; I have no doubt about that. And based on this experience, I will continue to interrogate the positioning of the personal narrative; right now I’m fairly well convinced that it doesn’t belong in the beginning but at the end of a first-year course. I end this reflection with the words of one of my students, Charles Gallant. Explicitly ignoring directions to turn his final paper in to the Writing Program office, Charles slipped his final draft of his autobiographical paper under my office door with a note. “Amy!!! Sorry to hand in a paper like this….but it’s ok because this paper is like BUTTER!” � Table of Contents