There are a lot of elusive, moving parts to the question of students’ awareness, coherence, and worldviews. Are they aware? In as much as they seem cognizant, physically present, awake. Are they coherent? In as much as they’ve strung meaningful words in to meaningful sentences on every occasion I’ve given them to do so. Do they present evidence of the scope of their worldviews? In as much as they perform in writing and in discussion for what they perceive to be the needs and wants of their audience: their peers and instructor.

I’ve absolutely seen evidence from assignment to assignment of their beliefs and worldviews. Students in their personal letters talked about the social influences that brought them to university and to ENG101, from economics to race to religion. Their literacy timelines also were rich in “world history” details (though I don’t know how much of that proceeded from their own awareness and knowledge, and how much stemmed from cursory Google searches). Several of their fastwrites also start to identify their positions in the socio-political matrix. Now, their research questions—which range from evaluating the efficacy of religious sponsorships to critiques of the WWU Honor Program’s curriculum—indicate students whose worldview is, at the very least, encapsulates more than just the “world” of their own experience.

I can read things like their fastwrites and their literacy narratives and their research questions and I can presume to construct a worldview out of it—but, first of all, that’s entirely subjective. There are so many gaps in what I know of my students that those few puzzle pieces I have could combine with any number of other pieces unknown to construct an infinite spectrum of worldviews. Not only that, but the way that I interpret what they write is absolutely biased by how I perceive them from class. Second, whatever they commit to paper and hand in to me is necessarily performative. There’s a sort of scale that I think most students engage in when they write for a class that ranges from trying-to-ingratiate-themselves-to-the-instructor all the way to trying-to-buck the-instructor’s-authority. Maybe that’s reductive or jaded, but I think even the most inexperienced writers have a sense of that they have an audience, regardless of how they decide to engage or disengage from their audience’s needs or expectations. Much like in the case of trying to evaluate my “difference” from my students, I hesitate to try to deduce the interiority of my student’s through my own subjective experience of their institutional performance.