In one of my earliest classes, I had my students free-write about an issue that they had some sort of personal investment in, hoping that it would help them center their Personal Academic Arguments. One girl wrote something like, “I don’t really know what you want me to say. My mom recycles and stuff, I guess, but I never lived on an Indian reservation or had an eating disorder or anything like that.” This is an issue that tripped up many of my students when working on their PAAs—they had an interest but felt they lacked the authority of experience that bell hooks both condones and examines as somewhat problematic. Later, when I was talking about the Personal Academic Argument in Writ 540, I said something like, “If I was taking this class I definitely would have made up a bunch of stuff for my personal narrative.” Reading bell hooks and Plevin along with these experiences has led me to think about why it is that we value student’s personal experience and subjectivity in writing and whether or not some student’s experiences are more valuable than others. I think that my glib comments in 540 revealed a wrong-headed attitude, because student’s personal writing is not about a neat little story of an eating disorder overcome or a unique experience on an Indian reservation. I think bell hooks helped me to realize that it is a great deal more meaningful than that, and that the personal experience of all students is valuable.
Writing about personal experience gives the writer a kind of authority that cannot be overstated. I have discovered, as I'm sure you all have too, how much students resist this kind of authority, believing that they do not deserve it or cannot wield it properly. bell hooks writes extensively about authority in the classroom—who has it and who assumes it and how teachers can take it away from their students. Authority has been an interesting issue for me, as a 22-year-old who feels that she is playing make-believe in the classroom sometimes. Going into this life-place unit, I felt nervous about my authority being challenged based on the fact that I am a recent transplant to Montana and know very little about its geography and culture. For someone who arrived here in August to talk to students who have lived here their whole lives about the bioregion of Missoula seemed absurd. bell hooks addresses this issue, saying that if she is asked to speak about exploited groups that are not black, she has invited students with more personal experience to speak out, “[welcoming] that knowledge because it will enhance our learning” (hooks 89). In a classroom activity we did recently about listing the natural and cultural features of Missoula, one student who is a lifelong Missoulian spoke out constantly. She is a student who is normally extremely bored and disinterested in class. Other students, many of whom typically do not make the best contributions in class, joined in, using personal experiences like having a part-time job at Costco to verify their observations. Truthfully, I was a little taken aback by how much more authority they had than I did—they were naming features of Missoula that I didn’t even know how to spell, and I didn’t want them to know how ignorant I was. But by teaching through the bell hooks model, I realize that I should have welcomed this authority, allowing my students to teach me and letting their personal experience give them a kind of authority.
bell hooks frequently addresses this idea of the personal vs. the theoretical, an idea that is particularly interesting to me when thinking about notions of authority in the classroom. Although the Writ101 curriculum creates a large space for personal narrative, personal experience is denigrated in the classroom setting. I was struck by the notion bell hooks addresses on page 65, of young women being assigned readings in feminist theory “only to feel that what they are reading has no meaning, cannot be understood, or when understood in no way connects to ‘lived’ realities beyond the classroom.” By putting young women in a classroom and handing them very abstract and theoretical readings that they feel they have no relationship with and telling them, “This is Feminism,” the world of academia is taking away the authority of their experiences to comment on the way that sexist gender norms influence the world around us. And, of course, as bell hooks points out, theory and practice should not really be polar opposites or exist in separate spheres—rather, “theory emerges from the concrete, from my efforts to make sense of my everyday life experiences, from my efforts to intervene critically in my life and the lives of others” (70). Throughout her writing, bell hooks encourages us as educators and as citizens to resist seeing things as opposing spheres: theory and practice, race and gender, student and teacher.
So, has this reading made you think critically about yourselves as teachers? How do we talk about subjectivity in our classrooms? Where is the line between giving our students authority and surrendering our own authority entirely? And how does this all relate to Plevin’s reading on the authority of writing about place?
In Writ 540 we can spend hours talking about our classrooms. We discuss the habitats and inhabitants of the little worlds that we endeavor to nurture. While we are equal as students of compositional theory, we have unique and valuable knowledge that no one else has, and, generally, we enjoy sharing. No one contests or challenges our observations, because we are the ultimate authorities. As we attempt to understand a world of theory that is relatively new, this position can be refreshing and empowering.
ReplyDeletePlevin deliberately strives to achieve the kind of power shift that is so daunting to those of us who cling to maintaining authority, control, and focus. She does this through giving her students the authority to talk about their inevitable knowledge of place. From there, Plevin challenges her students to examine this authority by raising awareness of the ways in which they perceive their places in “their” worlds.
Plevin describes and expands on Friere’s pedagogy of “writing” about one’s life, “reading” about one’s reality. By using place as an entry point into her students’ lives, she is able to guide her students towards a greater self-awareness and deeper critical thinking skills through an examination of the texts they create.
Since I was young, very young really, I've had a similar understanding of the role of the classroom as the one bell hooks describes and has worked to deconstruct. I remember school as place of systemization. I had to ask to use the bathroom, I had to be given permission to speak. Once, I had a teacher in grade school who told us we could only use the bathroom during recess and I remember trying to hold it until I peed my pants. I was afraid of the hidden consequences of defying her.
ReplyDeleteI came into writ 101 hoping to defy that model of authority. My goal was to make an environment much like the one hooks describes, a place where students felt authoritative and valued, but often I've found myself falling back on the structure of teaching I'm most familiar with, even when I try not to. When students were disengaging, I took it personally. When people hadn't done the reading, I saw it as their failings. I had the mind and concept to do the sort of teaching I value, but I've been missing the self-actualization hooks describes, that whole hearted purposefulness that connects our whole living to what we're doing, and as a result my students have suffered.
As is often the case, I find myself reaching to principles I learned from training animals to explain by own behavior. This is a bit of an aside, but I think it's pertinent enough to bring into the conversation. There's a well observed pattern many trainers have noticed that when put in a position of stress or confusion, animals first offer the most ingrained behavior, the one they know the best. For me, the authoritative model of teaching is the most familiar and despite my own resistance to it through out my life, and even a strong personal resistance to it, it is the model I fall back on when ever put in a point of stress. Teaching writ 101 has been one of the most stressful things I've ever done. Mostly this is because it brings to the surface many of the conflicts I've had through out my life with teachers, and sadly has put me in the position of actuating the side of things I thought I stood against. The thing about ingrained behaviors, and I think it's also true for ingrained theories as well, is that they are the hardest to change.
The only way to change an ingrained behavior is through slow and realistic modification coupled with lots of positive reinforcement. So, thanks to hooks, I have a more realistic goal: to take more risks as a teacher, to reveal to my students the struggles I have with being a teacher in the first place, and to try give them equal ground to stand on, both with eachother and myself.
Were I to adapt Plevin's article to a classroom activity (I hope this is one way of answering Emily's questions), I can't imagine it not taking the form of a lecture. Though it would start with students' unreflective written encounters with the natural world, how would I craft an activity to not merely tell them, but to allow them to discover for themselves that their writing does not witness nature seeking its own ends?
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