Outsiders Within: Resolving Working-Class Experience within the Privileged Classroom
Journaling is another good way to give students a writing opportunity. Journaling, however, should not just be about getting one’s thoughts out on paper. Rather, in order for journaling to be an opportunity for personal and academic growth, some stipulations must be placed on the assignment. For example, journal entries must contain complete sentences. An assignment like this is likely to remove most of the stress that comes with “academic” writing. Journaling is a way to reconcile the personal with the academic. In Exploring Literacy, Eleanor Kutz provides a comprehensive model of a libratory classroom. Her system emphasizes an inquiry-based approach to teaching, asking students to evaluate readings from multiple perspectives. Believing that the best learning comes from personal investment, she also asks students to write memoirs: “A memoir, as a formal genre, offers a way for writers to reflect on their past experiences and explore their relevance to the present, but also to make those private past experiences public in a way that will speak to a larger audience,” (97).
Because the memoir is more formal than journaling, it requires that students adhere to more strict structural rules. Since students are writing about themselves, their ability to satisfy structural formalities will be eased; their vested emotional and intellectual interest will motivate them to tackle the formal constraints. Students must write, bearing in mind that an audience who does not know them will need to be able to understand their language and story. Moreover, the memoir assignment bridges the personal/public rift even more than journaling. It is an assignment that asks the student to bring his or her life to the academic community. In fact, having students share their memoirs with each other takes this notion one step further.
Composition theorist Nancy Sommers felt the same tension between the academic and the personal in her own life. In her essay “Between the Drafts,” she describes her family’s struggle with discourses, their desire to express themselves and see the world the “right” way. As an adult, Sommers entered academia and lost her sense of self, always looking for more credible sources to back up her ideas. Speaking with a colleague, she recommends he read Foucault. When he is taken aback by her recommendation, Sommers realizes “he had his own sources aplenty that nourished him. Yet he hadn’t felt the need to speak through his sources … his teaching stories and experiences are his own; they gave him the authority to speak,” (28). Long used to citing famous philosophers, this interaction makes Sommers realize the importance of her own experiences, deductions, and values. She then tries to find a way to bridge the gap between the personal and the professional. After some soul searching, Sommers comes to see the confines of adhering to an either/or world of expectations. That is, she finally comes to realize that she cannot live as simply a mother one moment and simply a scholar the next. Rather, the parts of her life can be an organic whole—she can be a scholar who sees the value in her own experiences and voice. “These either/or ways of seeing exclude life and real revision by pushing us to safe positions, to what is known. They are safe positions that exclude each other and don’t allow for any ambiguity, uncertainty. Only when I suspend myself between either and or can I move away from conventional boundaries,” (29).
For Sommers, and for an institution that seeks inclusion, moving away from binary systems of identification and expression is of the utmost importance. We cannot expect scores of individuals to walk into our classrooms with whole lifetimes of experience and ask them to kindly wipe their feet and leave their bags in the hallway.
Sommers’ ideas have many implications for tutoring. She recognizes the shortcomings of academic discourse by saying, “the journey between home and work … is a journey of learning how to be both scholarly and reflective,” (29). Sommers stresses the importance of bringing together one’s disparate selves to form an organically whole, thinking individual. Most writing-intensive courses tend to be in the humanities. That is why I find it ironic that so many professors try to evoke the Every Student voice from their students, instead of encouraging reflection along with analysis. If we are taking courses that get to the very nature of what it means to be human, shouldn’t our own authentic humanity be part of the dialogue?
It takes creative, invested professors and tutors to combat the constraints of academic discourse. Teachers must go out of their way to formulate assignments that encourage students to draw from their first discourses while also utilizing the benefits and finer points of SWE and academic discourse. Having my background and being an English scholar proves that academic discourse can be immensely rewarding, both personally and professionally. Only when students have a vested interest in choosing and using discourse styles will the libratory and economic results of academic discourse pay off. Only then will students feel that they can contribute effectively to the world.
Works Cited
Gee, James Paul. “What is Literacy?” Negotiating Academic Literacies. eds. Ruth Spack and Vivian Zamel. Mahwah: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates,1998.
Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways With Words. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Kutz, Eleanor. Exploring Literacy. Boston: Pearson Longman, 2004.
Kutz, Eleanor and Hephzibah Roskelly. An Unquiet Pedagogy. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1991.
Lu, Min-zhan. “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle.” Negotiating Academic Literacies. eds. Ruth Spack and Vivian Zamel. Mahwah: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 1998.
Meyer, Emily and Loise Z. Smith. The Practical Tutor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
