Can "I" Fit In?

"This ‘rhetorical identity’ - the presence invested in the text, developed by the writer to accomplish particular persuasive effects in the minds of readers, not only contributes to the writer’s authority/credibility but also helps build a mutual relationship to readers as fellow scholars. Effective rhetorical identity defines a textual voice that is at once distinctive and strongly resonant with readers,” writes Juanita Rodgers Comfort in her essay "Becoming a Writerly Self: College Writers Engaging Black Feminist Essays" (532-3).

I teach 15 and 16-year-old students non-Western literature. Throughout our semester we read a variety of African short stories and essays, poems from India, and novels set in Afghanistan. And as a white, female, middle-class teacher who grew up in the Midwest, I struggle to help students see beyond the “otherness” of the texts we read, to stop holding these texts at a distance, to stop reading them as exotic. The strategy of using model texts that employ the personal as a tool for teaching emerging writers to identify and also write with their own clear “rhetorical identity” (532) is intriguing, especially given that as essayist Juanita Rodgers Comfort points out, many teachers at the secondary level and beyond view the disclosure of the personal as “incompatible with the critical detachment valued in much disciplinary discourse” (527). We teach our secondary-level writers to leave the first-person out of the essay, give them easy rules to remember: spell out contractions and numbers under 10 and never use I, me, my, mine. We religate the role of student writer to outsider, making them “others” as well. We hinder not only our students’ critical engagement with content but also their greater understanding of their own developing identities as thinkers and writers when we forbid the personal stance in their writing. Comfort writes, “If imagining, through composing, is something more significant to students than exercises in critical detachment, and if we do not expect them to remain essentially unchanged by the encounters with the ideas they write about, then composing text must be for the purposes of these students’ education, becoming insurgent intellectuals (to use a term coined by West and bell hooks) who are personally invested in the world of ideas” (521). I want to teach insurgent intellectuals.

Photo by Steven DePolo

Bringing the personal into essay writing, when done with the help of carefully selected model texts, can help our students better understand their voice as thinkers and writers. “Rhetorically,” Comfort writes, “self-disclosures foreground the embodied nature of the self, which, through selective, insightful sharing, can build connections between writers and readers that authorize the writer to make claims to ensure the acceptability of those claims” (522). And so in using these rhetorically sophisticated texts that incorporate personal disclosures, we can also teach emerging writers to understand the personal voice as a persuasive writing technique, a rhetorical strategy and position that writers use for a variety of reasons (523). In doing so, students become a part of the conversation about composing rather than left outside of it. “I am convinced that significant problems arise with student writing precisely when they have not defined and located themselves as effectively self-authorized knowers for their evaluative audiences,” Comfort writes (529). No where is this more true than in the high school writing classroom where students are working not only on defining who they are as readers, writers, and thinkers, but where they are also really beginning the work of understanding their own unique cultures, positions, and identities. And it is in our classrooms, where students have already been told multiple times and multiple ways that their understanding of the world is incomplete, students crave opportunities to make sense of their learning and demonstrate it in personally meaningful ways. Teaching students to recognize and utilize their “rhetorical identity” will serve them well as they write to “assess, define, and assert who they are becoming as knowing beings” (534).

But this will not be easy work. Toward the end of the essay, Comfort suggests that utilizing the work of black feminist essayists is a way of helping increase student sensitivity to the writer’s ethos and better understand why and when writers invoke the personal (533). I wonder if this can be done effectively with high school writers, many of whom have been told time and again to disavow the personal stance, and who when given opportunities to write using first-person strongly lean toward confessional writing. Although I love Comfort’s call for writing instruction that enables “students to recognize the writerly self as a persuasive instrument that can be strategically deployed and to learn to make effective use of their own multiple locations to take personal stands on public issues that transcend the confessional” (531), I wonder if this can be done well with emerging writers who do not have a clear idea of their own locations.

How can we best help our emerging writers understand and develop their "rhetorical identities"?

Essay taken from Teaching Composition: Background Readings, third edition, edited by T.R. Johnson.

Making Learning Personal: Using Memoirs in the Secondary Classroom

“Memoirs are in essence historical documents. They are timeless perennials that not only describe a period of history, but also address the universality of collective human experiences. History, after all, happens to real people. It isn't just cold facts, but a living, organic changing thing. It is about life, human life, with all its triumphs and failures, its increases and decreases, its courage and weakness, its lights and darks.”
--Eleanor Ramrath Garner

As educator Eleanor Ramrath Garner writes in the introduction to her 2004 ALAN Review article titled “Memoirs In Adolescent Literature,” there has not been enough written about the significance of using memoirs and personal stories in the classroom. Whether it is because some teachers view memoirs as a grey area somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, or whether it is because of a lack of familiarity on the part of teachers, memoirs are generally a forgotten genre in the world of secondary education. This is strange given that the genre has been steadily rising in popularity with the general pubic since the early 1990s. In fact as early as 1996, New York Times writer James Atlas pointed out, “the triumph of memoir is now established fact.” And it is easy to understand why. As many writers have pointed out, memoirs not only expose readers to truths about the human experience, but they also connect readers to the lives of others. Memoirs, Atlas suggests, are “…a democratic genre -- inclusive, a multiculturalist would say. The old and the young; the famous and the obscure; the crazy and the sane…” Because anyone can be a memoirist, everyone can connect to the memoir.

This is an even more important idea to consider when reflecting on the use of multicultural literature in the classroom. A great deal has been written about the benefits of using the voices of writers from a variety of backgrounds in the classroom setting. Caroline Cavillo suggests,

“One should think of critical multicultural literacy as citizenship or character education, precisely because it concerns itself with issues of power, domination, authoritarianism, and the diversity of human beings and their decisions about how to act, think, and behave with others.”

It is for these reasons in addition to so many others that the use of literature from non-western writers has become a priority for many educators. Literature from traditionally under-represented populations not only broadens students’ cultural horizons, but it also aids in the articulation of shared and differing values, exposes students to a variety of writing styles and themes, builds empathy, and connects students to a world that is growing smaller through technological advances.

Although a great deal has been written about the importance of including multicultural voices in the classroom, and some has been written about how memoirs might be used, when combined, there are very few educators writing about the use of memoirs from non-western authors as a way to connect students to perspectives and voices from other walks of life. And yet, this seems to be intuitive. As educator and writer Katherine Bomer points out in her book Writing a Life: Teaching Memoir to Sharpen Insight, Shape Meaning--and Triumph Over Tests, memoirs are “…how we connect to each other, how we find out that other people feel the way we do. It is also how we learn about lives that are vastly different from our own so that our minds and hearts can stretch to understand how life is for others” (Bomer 2). An exploration of memoirs written by non-western authors brings numerous benefits to the secondary classroom. Such works are pivotal for

encouraging students to make connections;

encouraging students to think about how writers engage their readers;

exposing students to a variety of perspectives, beliefs, and values;

broadening students’ cultural horizons;

aiding in the articulation of shared and differing values;

exposing students to a variety of writing styles and themes;

building critical thinking skills and reasoning abilities;

and, building empathy.

As a genre, non-western memoirs would benefit from more exposure. More and more writers of non-western memoirs must find their way into our classrooms.

For more information on using non-western memoirs in the classroom, check out these resources:

Ward's World Wiki: Using Non-Western Memoirs is a wiki that I've started to develop with a list of example memoirs, lesson plans, and resource links for educators

The Expanding Canon: Teaching Multicultural Literature in High School is a site put together by Annenberg Media’s Learner.org which explores Native American, African American, Asian American and Latino works through various pedagogical approaches and offers many linked lesson plans.

Web English Teacher: Autobiography, Biography, Personal Narrative, and Memoir Lesson Plans and Teaching Ideas, put together by teacher Carla Beard, this site offers many linked lesson plans for how to use personal writing and memoirs in the classroom.

Supporting Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Learners in English Education is a list of guidelines established by the Conference on English Education together with the National Council for Teachers of English meant to educators think about integrating a variety of cultural perspectives and materials into their curriculum.

Booklists for Young Adults on the Web: Nonfiction, compiled by librarian Maggi Rohde, is linked to many other sites that provide extensive booklists and book reviews for using memoirs with students.

Read Write Think is a wonderful resource that offers a wealth of lesson plans for teachers. Use the search box in the upper left corner to search for lessons on “multicultural memoirs.”

And here are some great examples of memoirs written by non-western writers that could be used with high school students:

Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa

Alphonsion Deng, Benson Deng, and Benjamin Ajak’s They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky

Shoba Narayan’s Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes

Paul Rusesabagina’s Ordinary Man

Adeline Yen Mah's Falling Leaves

Yang Erche Namu’s Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World

Farah Ahmedi’s The Other Side of the Sky

If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Balancing

In so many respects, teaching is a balancing act. The balance between the professional and the personal, the profound and the profane, between free speech and censorship, hope and fear.

I’ve been reading and researching a number of memoirs recently. The stories of child soldiers in Sierra Leone and those forced from their homes as a result of the civil war in the Sudan haunt me. I’ve reread stories of young men who survived unthinkable atrocity under South Africa’s apartheid and stories of girls living under strict Shira law in the Middle East. How poignant and important these stories are, the stories of youth surviving the harshest conditions and clinging to their hope for a better world. Of course such memoirs would be of the utmost significance in a world literatures course like the one I teach, the stories of young people the same age as my students persevering, reflecting on their experiences, and making a difference in their world. But I’m caught in a balancing act.

In some respects, educating teenagers is perhaps the most difficult age group to teach. In middle school, parents and teachers need to shield adolescents from some of life’s most grotesque realities. As college students, no content matter is taboo. High school is a time of balance for teachers, students, and parents alike. It is a time when students are initiated into the world of adulthood, truths revealed and fantasies shattered. Students are initiated into the realities of our modern world in the hopes that they will learn from the mistakes of the generations before them. But how much is too much?

I’ve just finished Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. It is the heart-wrenching journey of a young man who loses his family and at twelve years old is forced into fighting Sierra Leon’s bloody civil war. Drugged and brainwashed by unthinkable acts of violence, Beah’s story is important for all readers, but for especially high school students. Such a memoir would help students begin to question the nature of violence in our modern world, contemplate the effects war has on children, question how such violence toward and against children is sustained and in some cases funded by the western world, and reflect on the privileges that they have as a result of growing up in the suburbs of the United States. It is from memoirs like Beah’s that students learn to take an interest in their world and hopefully take action to make it a more peaceful, more just world. But is it too much, too early?

Stories like Ishmael Beah’s are violent. How could they not be? Beah’s story would not be as poignant, as real without his vivid descriptions of how he was kept in a drugged stupor in order to perpetrate horrendous acts of violence against his own countrymen. To leave such reflections and descriptions out of the book would lessen the importance of Beah’s journey. His is a story begging the world to wake up to the realities faced by child soldiers throughout the world today. Without such descriptions, his story would not have the impact that it does. But is this too much for a 15 or 16-year-old to grapple with and understand? Some would argue that Beah was forced into this violence at 12, so of course American high school students should not be shielded from such a memoir. In fact a story about the atrocities of violence would be one that is especially important to an increasingly more violent youth culture in our own country. Others might argue that such a story is too violent, too profane for the high school classroom. Where do we draw the line?

I’m not sure if I will add Beah’s story to my list of recommended books this fall. In an ideal classroom, I would. In fact, the story was recommended to my by one of my former students, so I know I have students that would be moved by Beah’s words. But in a society where the threat of litigation is ever present, especially for teachers, I am stuck between the profound and the profane, between free speech and censorship, hope and fear.

But in case you’re into some good non-western memoirs, might I suggest:

Ishmeal Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Alphonsion Deng, Benson Deng, and Benjamin Ajak’s They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky

Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran

Shoba Narayan’s Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes

Paul Rusesabagina’s Ordinary Man

Yang Erche Namu’s Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World

Farah Ahmedi’s The Other Side of the Sky