Research question: Does the introduction of identity-based activities and conversations in the FYW classroom lead to a classroom that can be more aptly navigated as a brave and safe space? Does the introduction of identity-based activities and conversations in the FYW classroom lead to more awareness of the rhetorical situation of a written piece?
As an instructor, I focus heavily on the creation of my classroom space as a collaborative environment between my students and myself. Borrowing from Geller et al.’s The Everyday Writing Center who draw on Etienne Wenger for their definition, I come to understand community of practice as a place where “meaning is negotiated among mutually engaged participants, negotiation that ‘in practice always involves the whole person’” (7). At the beginning of fall quarter, I tried to open up the idea of my classroom as a community of practice (Geller et al.) where we are accountable to each other and work as colearners in the space—each sharing our the “gifts” that we have. This idea of “gifts” in my classroom stems from my understanding of writing center scholar, Michele Eodice’s work that discusses about the concept of “participatory hospitality” at a time when hospitality is being brought into the classroom. Participatory hospitality centers around the idea that everyone has something to offer each other and that in order for that “gift giving” to be completed, the recipient of the gift needs to accept it. I think this is especially prominent in my understanding of the classroom because I believe that the heart and center of the classroom is my students.
With these elements in place, my first instinct is to tie this into my understanding of brave and safe spaces—as they relate to the construction of my classroom—how that ties into the identities present in any given space, and the language we use in that space and in the writing we create for the class.
To focus on the language, I’d like to collaborative examine language of oppression pulling from Mandy Suhr-Sytsma’s article “Theory In/To Practice: Addressing the Everyday Language of oppression in the Writing Center” and Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening Theory: Identification, Gender, Whiteness as a basis for beginning to think about the interplay of identity and language within the classroom and developing an activity about identity by pulling from other identity workshops that have probably been done in the literature already (I will be looking more into this). This research will boil down into two specific realms:
- The way the space is navigated as brave or safe, even specifically relating to me (if not the students) in the culmination of autoethnographic writing.
- The incorporation of the discussion of audience and audience awareness in writing as it relates to identity and some sort of assessment doing so.
My goal is to hopefully get students to think about identity as it is related to the concept of audience and see how that impacts their writing. This is especially important to me when I’m thinking about the ways the rhetorical situation of a piece of writing can be illuminated.
Possible Research Sources:
Arao, B. & Clemens, K. (2013). From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame
Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice. The Art of Effective Facilitation.
Denny, H. C. (2010). Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-To-One Mentoring. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.
Eodice, M. (n.d.). Participatory hospitality and writing centers. In (Eds.) The rhetoric of participation: Interrogating commonplaces in and beyond the classroom. Retrieved from: http://rmomizo.github.io/rhetoric-participation/front/eodice/.
Fuss, Dianna. Identification Papers. Routledge, 1995. Print.
Geller, A. E., Eodice, M., Condon, F., Carroll, M., & Boquet, E. H. (2007). The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice.Utah State University Press: Utah.
Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois University Press. 2005. Print.
Suhr-Sytsma, Mandy. “Theory In/To Practice: Addressing the Everyday Language of Oppression in the Writing Center.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, Web.
What I’m looking for in further sources:
- Rhetorical situation based teaching
- Audience based teaching
- Identity activities for the FYW classroom
- Discussion of the incorporation of identity into the FYW classroom
Great focus here: identity/environment/rhetorical situation. There’s an interesting meta quality to this study that will allow you to examine how teaching/learning happens from a grounded but theoretically rich perspective. I’m eager to hear how you envision this activity working. A one-off workshop could work well, especially if you gather student reflections afterward to examine closely. Could interviews play a part too?