Citation:

Mlynarczyk, Rebecca. “Storytelling and Academic Discourse: Including More Voices in the Conversation.” The Journal of Basic Writing 33:1 (2014): 4-22. Web.

Summary:

Since the start of her academic career, Rebecca Mlynarczyk has struggled with the relationship, or supposed lack-there-of that exists between what the academic world defines as “narrative” or “personal” writing and “academic writing,” and the contrasting validity that academia has granted each respective discipline. We are taught early on in our journey through school that the personal does not belong within the realm of an academic discourse. “Storytelling,” or the allowance of introspection to take the place of logical observation, is not only disvalued, but discouraged.

To create an understanding of what she means when she uses the terms “personal writing” and “academic discourse,” Mlynarczyk provides the reader with defining examples from the time she spent teaching an ESL course. Two separate essays: the first, a personal account of a student who writes about her experience of living in Nanjing, China, during the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The second: an essay devoid of personal experience, listing instead several facts, dates, historical figures, and data collected from the same region during the same time frame. Mlynarczyk claims that most readers, when asked which piece they found more compelling, chose the first piece, but when asked to label a piece as “academic writing,” they chose the second.

Mlynarczyk moves to unpack these sentiments. While both types of writing seem important, within the classroom setting, academic writing is privileged over personal narrative, thus removing the opportunity for cultural experience, differing literacy proficiency, and diversity, to flourish. Mlynarczyk argues that this prioritization of what the academy considers “academic writing” is incredibly harmful to all students and their successes throughout the education process.

From this emphasis on the supremacy of the “academic essay” stems a growing disconnect that students experience between their home lives and their school surroundings. Because the academic language they are asked to communicate with in school is so deprived of personal experience, emotion, and intuition, they are likely to feel that not only are their stories not valued within the education system, but that what they learn in school is “unreal” as it is so separated from their lives outside of the classroom. How do we solve this problem? The academy is settled rigidly within a school of language and expectation, how do instructors teach students to communicate within this difficult system and also promote the value of the self?

While the answers to such difficult questions are still forthcoming, Mlynarczyk states that it is important to place value on skills that meld the concept of the personal and the academic into one story, one argument. To do this, instructors must place value on “rhetorical dexterity,” more commonly referred to as literacy. Instead of viewing cultural differences as barriers to academic success, it is important to recognize these diversities for what they are: resources. Asking students to examine what they are passionate about, what knowledge they have, and showing them how to manipulate those skills that they already have to master the monumental task of mastering academic discourse helps to bring about the reimagining of “academic vs. narrative” and transform it into the “academic narrative.” Allowing students to explore their human experiences within an academic setting permits the relationship between the classroom and the home to strengthen, and constructs a foundation upon which students can accumulate the knowledge of how to successfully navigate the challenging institution of academia.

Quotations:

“The divorce between the language of the family and the language of school only serves to reinforce the feeling that the education system belongs to another world, and that what teachers have to say has nothing to do with daily life because spoken in a language which makes it unreal” (10).

“These students had gotten the message that their home language was ‘broken,’ not at all suitable for use in the academy. If this attitude finds support in the courses that students take, if teachers insist that students begin by writing only ‘academic discourse,’ that they should never use the word ‘I’ in an essay, that their stories and their languages are not appropriate in college, they will get a very clear and discouraging message: Your language is not valued here, and your stories don’t belong” (11).

“In essence, a translingual approach to language is one that minimizes or even ignores an either/or approach to storytelling vs. ‘academic discourse.’ This view of language as a living, ever-changing reality is one that eliminates the need to prescribe a particular form of discourse for our students” (12).

“This view of discourse and literacy as fluid and adaptable rather than as ‘autonomous’ and unchanging offers opportunities for students to draw upon the literacies and languages they bring with them into the classroom—including the resources of their oral language—as they and we ‘reimagine’ what academic discourse could become (13).

“From an evolutionary perspective, stories are at the very heart of what distinguishes us as human beings. We think in stories. Thus, it would be misguided to attempt to banish them from academic discourse” (18).

“Our students are invaluable sources of this kind of diversity. And it will enrich not only their lives but our institutions as well if we encourage them to tell these stories in the university as ways of supporting and enlarging the scope of academic discourse” (19).

Reflection:

I have always struggled with the exclusion of the personal within an academic discourse. The first time I ever encountered the allowance of the pronoun “I” within an academic paper was during my senior year of my undergraduate degree. After twenty-two years of academic institutions insisting that I remove myself from my work and stick to logical and factual defenses of my papers, writing a personal academic paper was a difficult negotiation of intuition and information. But, no matter the difficulty of balancing the two concepts within the bounds of my paper, never once was I discouraged or dispassionate as I so often was when I wrote previous “academic” papers. Not only did I feel as though I knew the argument and the defense of my theoretical essay completely, I felt extremely validated as a scholar and a person. My own experiences in life had contributed to the success of an academic paper; my knowledge of this subject that I had accumulated outside of school was assisting me in the creation of a thesis, a respected academic work.

I was drawn to this article because I believe it concisely articulates what we are working towards with the curriculum of English 101. Introducing students to literacy, showing them how their personal passions, interests, and questions all contribute to their accomplishments as a writer and an academic is so important to the development as a scholar and a person. I wish that I had a curriculum like this to experience early on in my undergraduate years so I could explore my strengths as a writer, and grow in other academic fields that I was excited about. This article provided me with a few free-write exercises and study ideas that I’m excited to implement into my classroom, and ultimately reaffirmed my understanding of the importance of literacy during the development of the writer.