Now that my first quarter teaching English 101 is over, and I have spent untold locate where my classroom seemed to get lost, disengaged, exceedingly quiet or when the room emitted at least a few reticent sparks— I believe I have come up with an idea of what was missing. Although the curriculum was designed to engender a strong sense of community and audience, it was apparent that there was nothing at stake for my students when it came to a lot of these projects, a general “who cares?” attitude was apparent throughout. The Literacy Narrative was by far, the greatest hit of all the projects, because it was the most directly personal. It was, for most of them, their first time telling a story about themselves in their own voices to an audience. They also had a chance to read their narratives aloud to other students, which they obviously enjoyed. Once we started posting to WordPress I could feel their interest and investment plummeting. A particularly depressing point was during the second week when they posted Project 2, the collage, to WordPress and we simply moved on— they were never asked to show their work in “real life”, they were never prompted to tell a story. It was as if it never happened, it had been dropped off into the digital graveyard known as Canvas where its only purpose was to stand for a grade. I deeply regretted not anticipating a way for them to share their work, to tell a story, to keep it personal and meaningful. We also did not require them to comment on each other’s finished product once it was posted, which in my opinion, killed the notion of ‘audience’ dead, regardless of being ‘published’ online. I was surprised and disappointed to find that almost every research topic the students came up with for their posters & webtexts had nothing to do with their personal lives. Not everything that comes out of a required composition class needs to be personal, of course, but I wondered how I could have prompted them to at least pursue topics they found meaningful.

This challenging experience reminded me of being I was a teacher in Peru where we put storytelling, sharing, listening and performing at the center of everything we did at the school, which created a wildly dynamic atmosphere where students wore their hearts on their sleeve and never missed an opportunity to play a role, to share, perform and listen. Obviously, I can’t turn my English 101 classroom into this rainbow-colored, ramshackle, Peruvian atmosphere because they’re totally different worlds, but I can infuse more of what we do in our class and within our projects with more engaging forms of interaction. I hope to carry my desire to foster a meaningful sense of community and connection during Winter quarter with these questions in mind, “Does oral narrative (storytelling and listening) in the classroom have psychosocial benefits for students? Will telling their own stories and listening to others’ help them to engage and enjoy the class more? Does storytelling help students to understand and develop identity and empathy?”

This has been my primary resource so far:

Mlynarczyk, Rebecca Williams. “Storytelling and Academic Discourse: Including More Voices in the Conversation.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 33, no. 1, 2014, pp. 4–22.

Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk is a linguistics professor who discovered her fascination with storytelling in academia while teaching an ESL class, where she noticed high levels of engagement displayed while sharing their own stories in a new country in far more compelling narrative voices than those she’d become familiar with in their assigned expository writing. She traces her career-long exploration of the relationship between personal, narrative writing and “academic discourse”, maintaining the believe that rather than viewing the two as separate modes of discourse, students need to use a “translingual” approach, cultivating “rhetorical dexterity” (p. 4) while they develop as college writers. Mlynarczyk writes, “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 it is spoken in a language which makes it unreal… this rift extends across all dimensions of life from central areas of interest to the very words in which these are discussed, and it can be lived only with a sense of dualism or in a state of resigned submission to be excluded.” (p. 8)

Other Sources to Explore:

Kearns, Rosalie Morales. “Voice of Authority: Theorizing Creative Writing Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 60, no. 4, 2009, pp. 790–807.

Bruner, Jerome. “Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986. Print.

Elbow, Peter. “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” College Composition and Communication 46.1 (1995): 72-83. Print.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Anansi Press. 2011. Print.

Practical Methods to be Tested:

I recognize that I’m not arguing for some brand-new idea here— the curriculum already starts off with a prompt toward personal narrative, but it diverges immediately and never seems to return until the very end when the inactive, unresponsive atmosphere (if you could even say it had one) of WordPress has already set a tone of echo chamber. Perhaps this issue could be addressed by simply including consistent opportunities to share, perform, recite and respond in-person.

Here are just some ideas I will fully flesh out and find appropriate footing for within the schedule:

• Students read their writing aloud during workshop, an invitation to tell a story each day we meet without any parameters, reading more stories and employing multimedia to demonstrate myriad forms of narrative, brief cultural/historical background on storytelling, listening to famous speeches and popular podcasts, making a personal audio recording an option for a project, a lesson about what “close reading” means (so students know how to interpret a text), team teaching: how to conduct a meaningful and respectful workshop, and the importance of a daily freewriting journal. I also have an ongoing list of speeches, poems, short stories, scenes from plays, student writing from fall quarter (already got permission to share), music clips and videos to include.

Evaluative Methods/Data Gathering:

It seems the only way to really measure things like enjoyment, engagement, empathy & improvement is by simply by observing workshops, closely following their drafts vs. their final product and asking them to answer questions about how they feel (i.e. surveys, evals, etc) at the beginning and end of the quarter in the terms I am seeking to qualify.