Michael Steinberg

Introductory Note: I've gotten a good deal of positive feedback to the first three parts of Karen Babine's "Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers." This is the fourth of a five installments. If you missed the first three, they appear right below this one. I'll post the fifth installment on December 16, one week from today.

Below. is my original introduction to the piece:

This month’s guest is Karen Babine, the founder and editor of the very fine, online magazine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies assayjournal.com

Karen’s contribution, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers, is, as its title suggests, a personal, yet very detailed and meticulously researched piece on/about using the essay to teach “place” to first-year-writers. Although it’s aimed at first-year students and freshman composition teachers, this essay, I believe, will be of great value to just about anyone--both experienced and beginners--who teach and write literary nonfiction.

For those who follow this blog, Karen’s essay is a departure of sorts. For almost four years, I’ve been posting personal/teaching essays on/about matters of genre and craft. I've written some and selected guest writer/teachers have written others. Karen’s piece, an expansive essay--a thoughtful, thought-provoking, personal/critical essay. Not only is it an informed, in-depth, study on/about the teaching of place, but it also re-visits an important conversation about teaching writing, about the relationship between creative writing (in this case, literary nonfiction) and composition, and about the writing process itself--a passionate, transformative, approach to writing that began in the 1970’s. The movement included a host of concerned practitioners, rhetoricians and theorists, and beginning teachers of composition. It thrived for almost three decades before being replaced ,in the late 80’s, by a traditional, heavily prescriptive, outdated, methodology, an approach that’s being taught today in most public schools and in many colleges and universities as well.

This essay is a reflective, complex (and a very important, I believe), piece. And so, I’ve chosen to post one segment each Wednesday for five consecutive weeks.

The fourth segment appears below.

Note: In this and in each subsequent post, I'll include the full list of citations.


FINDING THE MIDDLE VOICE: ARTICULATING DISTANCE

The struggle to articulate why their experiences or thoughts should matter to an outside audience, to people who do not know them and do not know the place they are writing about, mostly comes down to the element of exposition. This is what we felt was missing from Elizabeth Dodd’s piece, ability of the writer to navigate the distance between the self who experienced the event and the self who is writing about the event. This is the important link between valuing an experience as a writer and valuing it as a reader. Mark Tredinnick writes that “the essay depends on a world and on an author: it stretches between them, author and solid earth, speaking of, made of, both of them” (“Essential Prose” 36). He coins the term “middle voice” to speak of the space between the author and the earth—or, more broadly in this context, the student-author and his or her subject. In some languages, the grammatical middle voice refers to the third voice that bridges active and passive voice. Both are apt metaphors to discuss the analysis that exposition provides and universal quality of high exposition.

Teaching students about distance proves to be as difficult—and as simple—as teaching them that their experiences are valuable. Just as Natalie Kusz’s succinct description of nonfiction values “what you know now as a result of what happened,” teaching students that who they were when the experience happened is not the same person who is sitting down at the computer writing of the experience is a process that has proven to be easy in the conversation, but tough in the execution. My students nod in comprehension when I explain this, but the execution on the page takes practice that often spans the sixteen weeks of the semester. One student who wrote about the 2004 Hallam, NE tornado, an F-4 tornado that destroyed a wide swath near her grandparents’ house, a tornado that struck the same day her mother told her she had breast cancer, which resulted in a lovely essay about the language of cancer and tornadoes. My student, who was eleven at the time, knows a lot more now at eighteen than she did at the time, which, when that particular light bulb went on, shifted the draft from merely a journal entry about how she felt at the time into a true Essay that made these two unique events relevant to those who were not familiar with the tornado or had no experience with cancer. It is, as Mark Tredinnick writes in “The Essential Prose of Things,” “That writing self is a mosaic of many selves touched by many parts of the other she engages with; and the words she writes are made not so much by her—or even by all those many bits of her—as by the relationship between herself and the other. This is the kind of self the essayist must be” (37). The point here is that it is in this place that content and craft intersect.

In the Foreword to the 2011 volume of Best American Travel Writing, the eleventh volume in the annual series, series editor Jason Wilson fits the essay—and the necessity of the middle voice—within the framework of his own classroom: “I always encourage them to think about their youthful adventures with as much distance as possible, and to fit their personal stories into the context of the place. ‘Why are you telling me this story?’ I ask them. ‘What makes this your trip and no one else’s?’” (x). At best, place and travel writing are two sides of the same coin and in my classroom, I often do not make the distinction, offering students the greatest chance to find what it is they need to write about without labeling their work one way or another. Wilson continues:

“Perhaps the real measure of success is whether or not these students sharpen their critical eye, learning to look for the sorts of fascinating or idiosyncratic or unexpected or profound moments and experiences that make travel (and life) more meaningful. Meaningful travel…is, of course, open to all of us. Writing about travel in a way that resonates with readers? Well, that’s something else altogether (xi).”

My intention in using the essay, knowing that I will be starting from zero-knowledge in this form, is to teach students to find the exceptional in the ordinary. I want to teach them that it does not matter if they can relate to a topic: the more relevant questions are Is this piece of writing successful? If so, what makes it work? If not, what makes it unsuccessful? What can you learn from this piece of writing that you can use in your own writing? As might be expected, this process takes some time. My students are writers—even if they do not claim themselves as such, I claim them as such.

It is this articulation of the space between the literal elements of the essay as well as the elements of craft that is important and I like the term middle voice for it. Later, Tredinnick writes that “The middle-voiced writer is not separable from what she encounters—is not merely an agent of action, or even of observation. Nor is what she observes reducible to a lifeless object. Each affects and is affected by the other. And the voice we hear belongs to them both; the self of the piece of writing is a self composed of its many figures of participation with the place” (36). Given this, the middle voice acknowledges that part of the page needs to be active, part of the page needs to make sense of that action, some of the page needs to observe and contemplate. None of the elements could survive without the other. The page is as much a place as the ground my students stand on.


ARTICULATION V

During WP2, while we are discussing place and language, we read Kim Barnes’s essay “The Ashes of August,” which teaches us the language of Idaho and the language of wildfires. Even on the first page, as we get a spectacular grounding in light and color and taste (which is bookended in the last paragraph by a wonderful evocation of smell), the reader is told that “the riverbanks are bedded in basalt.” My students and I agree that it means something different to know that your bedrock is basalt. On Tim Robinson’s Aran Islands in Ireland, it means something to know that the bedrock limestone, just as when he writes of Connemara, it means something different to know the bedrock is granite. As Mark Tredinnick writes of the Blue Plateau in Australia, the knowledge of sandstone beneath your feet also tells you what you need to know about what it means to stand here, today, in this particular angle of sunshine.

It means something to know that Barnes’s canyon was formed by volcanoes, as she’s making the point with that one word that her home is a volatile place, formed by fire from its earliest days. As the essay itself is about wildfires that come every August, it means something to know that fire still forms the people who live here, and it begins to answer the question what does it mean to live here, today? What are the layers of meaning? What is our context? What is underneath our feet that affects how we live? And how do we articulate what we cannot see?

And the answer is this: this is how we are connected. A volcano twelve million years ago connects those of us who stand on the Great Plains to those who stand in Idaho and it does not matter if we stand on flat or mountain, water or clay. Because the mud that cakes our shoes at Ashfall in Nebraska can be traced directly back to a specific volcano in Idaho, to a specific moment in time, linked by science, linked by the glass shards of volcanic bubbles when they shattered.  Read More 

#44 Part 3, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers (Part 3) by Karen Babine

Introductory Note: I've gotten a good deal of positive frrdback to the first two parts of Karen Babine's "Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers." This is the third of a possible four or five installments. If you missed the first two, they appear right below this one. I'll post the fourth installment on December 9, one week from today.

Below. is my original introduction to the piece:

This month’s guest is Karen Babine, the founder and editor of the very fine, online magazine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies assayjournal.com

Karen’s contribution, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers, is, as its title suggests, a personal, yet very detailed and meticulously researched piece on/about using the essay to teach “place” to first-year-writers. Although it’s aimed at first-year students and freshman composition teachers, this essay, I believe, will be of great value to just about anyone--both experienced and beginners--who teach and write literary nonfiction.

For those who follow this blog, Karen’s essay is a departure of sorts. For almost four years, I’ve been posting personal/teaching essays on/about matters of genre and craft. I've written some and selected guest writer/teachers have written others. Karen’s piece, an expansive essay--a thoughtful, thought-provoking, personal/critical essay. Not only is it an informed, in-depth, study on/about the teaching of place, but it also re-visits an important conversation about teaching writing, about the relationship between creative writing (in this case, literary nonfiction) and composition, and about the writing process itself--a passionate, transformative, approach to writing that began in the 1970’s. The movement included a host of concerned practitioners, rhetoricians and theorists, and beginning teachers of composition. It thrived for almost three decades before being replaced ,in the late 80’s, by a traditional, heavily prescriptive, outdated, methodology, an approach that’s being taught today in most public schools and in many colleges and universities as well.

This essay is a reflective, complex (and a very important, I believe), piece. And so, I’ve chosen to post one segment each Wednesday for four consecutive weeks.

The third segment appears below.

Note: In this and in each subsequent post, I'll include the full list of citations.


ARTICULATION IV

For the third Writing Project, my students and I spend a class period at the University of Nebraska State Museum, more familiarly known as Morrill Hall or the Elephant Museum. In the chamber off the main hall, an exhibit of Ashfall: twelve million years ago, a volcano in Idaho erupted in what is called the Bruneau-Jarbidge Event. It dumped enough ash on the Great Plains to create a mudpit out of a watering hole, resulting in a death trap that preserved two hundred different skeletons of animals. Most of my students—even the ones who have generational roots in Nebraska—do not know this place exists, let alone that it is three hours north of Lincoln.

One of my students follows me into the exhibit.

“This is my favorite exhibit in the whole place,” I say to fill the silence.

My student, who only voices his most important thoughts, nods. He then asks if the volcano in question was the Yellowstone eruption—and I am thrilled that he even knew of the Yellowstone caldera eruption—and I almost hate to tell him that it wasn’t, but I have to admit I do not know which specific volcano created Ashfall.

I leave him to wander the museum on his own and I lose myself in the bones of five species of prehistoric horses, three species of prehistoric camels, one species of rhinoceros—the teleoceras major. (There are several species of prehistoric rhinoceros native to the Great Plains.) One rhinoceros skeleton was found nose-to-nose with its calf. Smaller mammals that were the ancestors of the antelope and deer of the Plains, birds and turtles and tortoises and other reptiles that largely remain the same today as they were then.

What makes the bones of Ashfall unique is that the matrix holds them in the same position as their moment of death. Most fossils collapse into one dimension once the flesh has decomposed, once the skeletons have been stripped by the scavengers who take advantage of the opportunity. There is nothing left to hold the bones together and they collapse. If they collapse into a way that keeps the order of bones intact, we say that the skeleton is articulated, as if the order of the bones allows us to speak of them. What is missing when we cannot articulate the bones?

During the next class period, I tell them that the Western Black Rhino has just been declared extinct in Africa. This is place, I tell them. And I wonder how we articulate a place like that, one that no longer knows the Western Black Rhino.

Praxis: Using the Essay to Read Place-Consciousness

When I ask my first-year students to name Great Plains writers (not just Nebraskan writers), I rarely get anything beyond Willa Cather. But the reality is that the Great Plains—just like the Minnesota I grew up in—is wild with writers, one of whom, Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former Poet Laureate, teaches in our English department at UNL. How can we expect them to know—and value the writing of place—if we do not teach them? How can we expect them to value the writing of place that they are doing—if we do no teach them that their voices are as valuable as what is already in print? In her article “Sense of Place,” Sharon Bishop writes of proposing, in 1986, to replace the traditional anthology of literature with Nebraska authors in her sophomore English class (66). She complicates the reading of Nebraska literature by asking the students to actively participate in writing the stories of their place (with an oral history project), and the result is the sort of active learning that is so central to place-conscious education. But the idea is larger than a simple syllabus change: the result is that she is teaching her students that literature that matters is still being created in this place, that the students are also participating in the creation of that literature.

Since our first Writing Project in 150 is designed to explore an aspect of a place that the student is connected to—does not have to be home—we are looking at Gruchow for examples of how one writer does that, as well as forms that we can use for inspiration. Phillip Lopate writes that “Eventually, one begins to share Montaigne’s confidence that ‘all subjects are linked to one another,’ which makes any topic, however small or far from the center, equally fertile” (77). We consider W. Scott Olsen’s “The Love of Maps,” which explores all possible answers to the question that starts his essay: “Why are you here?” We talk about answering that question through history, theology, philosophy, weather, and more. We discuss that Judith Kitchen’s short-short “Culloden” is about more than being at Culloden on her birthday. Readings like these emphasize that there is no one right way to know something, that any moment we consider profound in our own lives can be articulated to our readers, so they can share in the experience.

On the day we discuss “What Is Lost and What Can Never Be Lost,” we have read two Paul Gruchow essays out of Grass Roots (“Visions” and “Bones”) and Elizabeth Dodd’s essay “Underground,” from the anthology A Year In Place. It’s easy to write about loss—but it’s not easy to make people care about your loss. Since we are starting the day with “Visions,” about Gruchow’s childhood experience with the ghost of a cowboy in his bedroom and an adult encounter he and a friend have with a grizzly bear who tears apart their camp, we question beliefs and superstitions, growing up, and what do we lose when we put away “childish” beliefs? The cleverly titled “Bones” is about Gruchow’s lifelong obsession with bones. The content itself of these readings is the place-conscious element of the class, as we consider how other people relate to their places, how they form attachments to places and how they forcibly reject attachments.

But neither Gruchow essay is about its subject: “Visions” is not about the cowboy ghost, nor is it about the bear incident. “Bones” is not about bones. “Visions,” as we tease out of our discussion, is about how we make sense of loss: Gruchow is reacting to the loss of childhood curiosity and awe, what he feels like he has been required to give up to become an adult. The scene with the bear is his antidote to that loss—a re-mythologizing that counteracts the myth of the cowboys and Indians by finding awe and curiosity in nature. Does he create a new mythology here, with bears as mythical creatures—charismatic megafauna, a term from ecocriticism I introduce to them—stories we hear but never see ourselves? This is how he makes us, as readers, care about what he is doing, by making the stories he is telling evidence of some larger purpose. In “Bones,” what happens when all that is left is bones? Are the stories gone? How can they be part of something larger, when nobody knows the stories they represent? I want them to see that the Essay form is a perfect outlet for these kind of ideas that we are learning. We read as writers to discern how Gruchow achieves the effect that his content offers and this is the composition classroom element: how does writing work? Read More 

Introductory Note: I've gotten a good deal of response to the first part of Karen Babine's contribution, "Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers." This is the second of four installments. If you missed the first one, it appears right below this one. I'll post the third installment on December 2, one week from today; and the final one on December 9.

Below is my original introduction to the piece:

This month’s guest is Karen Babine, the founder and editor of the very fine, online magazine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies assayjournal.com

Karen’s contribution, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers, is, as its title suggests, a personal, yet very detailed and meticulously researched piece on/about using the essay to teach “place” to first-year-writers. Although it’s aimed at first-year students and freshman composition teachers, this essay, I believe, will be of great value to just about anyone--both experienced and beginners--who teach and write literary nonfiction.

For those who follow this blog, Karen’s essay is a departure of sorts. For almost four years, I’ve been posting personal/teaching essays on/about matters of genre and craft. I've written some and selected guest writer/teachers have written others. Karen’s piece, an expansive essay--a thoughtful, thought-provoking, personal/critical essay. Not only is it an informed, in-depth, study on/about the teaching of place, but it also re-visits an important conversation about teaching writing, about the relationship between creative writing (in this case, literary nonfiction) and composition, and about the writing process itself--a passionate, transformative, approach to writing that began in the 1970’s. The movement included a host of concerned practitioners, rhetoricians and theorists, and beginning teachers of composition. It thrived for almost three decades before being replaced ,in the late 80’s, by a traditional, heavily prescriptive, outdated, methodology, an approach that’s being taught today in most public schools and in many colleges and universities as well.

This essay is reflective, complex (and very important, I believe), piece. And so, I’ve chosen to post one segment each Wednesday for four consecutive weeks.

The second segment appears below.

Note: In this and in each subsequent post, I'll include the full list of citations.

MJS

ARTICULATION: ON USING THE ESSAY TO TEACH PLACE-CONSCIOUSNESS TO FIRST-YEAR WRITERS (PART 2) by Karen Babine

ARTICULATION III

When I was a sophomore at Concordia College, in Moorhead, Minnesota, I took a literature class in Minnesota Writers, taught by Dr. Joan Kopperud. Despite having grown up in Minnesota, despite being an English major, despite being the student that pestered my high school English teachers, I had no knowledge of the writing of my state. I had no idea that the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature was a Minnesotan. But the larger moment was first reading Paul Gruchow’s Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild in that class, an essayist who was teaching in our English department at the time, and first questioning you can write about Minnesota? and you can write true things about northern Minnesota? and being told a resounding Yes! Seeing that Gruchow not only could write about northern Minnesota—where I was from—but also publish it and win the Minnesota Book Award for it did more for my own writing than any other moment of my writing development. When I started teaching, that moment, attached to sitting in a classroom on the third floor of Grose Hall, and timidly knocking on Paul Gruchow’s office door to have him sign my book, still remains a strong sensory memory.

Translating that moment to my students means finding readings that easily move on the continuum of reading and writing, from Literature to models, from the moment of reading something brand new on a page to writing something brand new, to give students the permission they need—that I needed as a writer—to write about their local places. The readings for the first two weeks of my English 150 semester combine Paul Gruchow’s 1995 Minnesota Book Award-winning collection Grass Roots: The Universe of Home with contemporary examples of the essay. Instead of Montaigne himself, I assign Patrick Madden’s essay “The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things” to introduce the idea that the world is full of writing topics and often the best topics are small in size, that there is more to an essay than my students’ own narrow definitions.

Madden writes, “I learned that essays were not stories, did not focus on great adventures or recoveries, were not extraordinary in their subject matter at all. Essayists are keen observers of the overlooked, the ignored, the seemingly unimportant. They can make the mundane resplendent with their meditative insights” (4). When I was a college sophomore, taking a nonfiction class and learning about essays, the important moment was being given permission to write about my grandmother’s famous Swedish rice pudding was an incredible moment, complicating that particular memory with fears over losing my family’s history.

And Alexander Smith, in his 1865 “On the Writing of Essays,” gives that most-important permission about what one can write about:

“The essay-writer has no lack of subject-matter. He has the day that is passing over his head; and, if unsatisfied with that, he has the world’s six thousand years to depasture his gay or serious humour upon. I idle away my time here, and I am finding new subjects every hour. Everything I see or hear is an essay in bud. The world is everywhere whispering essays, and one need only be the world’s amanuensis.”

All I have to do, as an essayist, and in the larger sense, as a college student, is pay attention. We can write about anything.

TOWARDS A PEDAGOGY OF THE ESSAY

Teaching students how to articulate what matters comes in the written form itself, not simply in the pedagogical framework. On the first day of class, I ask my students to define an essay. The five-paragraph-essay, they tell me. Topic sentences. Research. Citations. What we’ll do in here is a different type of essay, I tell them. While English 150 is a composition class, not a creative writing class (though I consider composition to be equally as creative as nonfiction, fiction, or poetry), the essay provides a bridge between various parts of the writing brain necessary to provide an exciting inquiry into a topic, inquiry that is the foundation of Rhetoric as Inquiry. The essay engages both the right and left brains; the essay does not neglect the writer’s craft, and it remembers that language is important, that language is the greatest weapon students possess. When we read Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau, we discuss the sentence-level brilliance of Tredinnick believing that one must cleave to this landscape. What does to cleave mean? I ask. Even at this late point in the semester, my students are loathe to look up words they don’t know (something they are eager, yes, eager to do after we start The Blue Plateau and consider this particular moment). To cleave means both to bind and to sever, which is exactly the verb that Tredinnick wants here, because he means that to belong to this place, one must do both. The complication and layers that the language provides is something that cannot happen any other way.

Yet the Essay also requires the left-brained activity to establish the relevance to readers, to analyze and articulate why the writer’s ideas should matter to someone other than the writer. My students feel connected to their home, to places that have personal meaning, but the challenge in their own writing is how to make that relevant to other people, so that other people can understand what makes that place important.

This necessity provides an excellent bridge between the personal writing that students may or may not have experience with, the diary-type writings, and teaching them to think outside themselves, as is difficult for this entitled generation of Millenials. If we teachers assign canned essays, that will naturally be what our students turn in. But our students have plenty of perspective, plenty of lived experience in the world that makes what they have to say extremely valuable. The first true requirement of a first-year writing classroom—from both the teacher’s perspective as well as the student’s perspective—is to trust the writing. Push where necessary, but trust the writing. But Bishop points out “That we don’t see students as authors says more about us as teachers, I believe, than it says about students as thinkers” (268). If we as teachers expect more from students, if we give them the freedom to choose the form that their essay most naturally takes, we will not only see an improvement in writing ability, but engagement with the texts as well.

This, I have found, is one of the most difficult things about teaching essays: good essays do incorporate outside context and context comes from many different places (including different parts of the writer’s mind), but requiring research of students that fulfills the department’s Aims and Scopes often causes students to forget everything they already know about writing, simply because they have been taught to fear research, taught to fear citations. Robert Root writes of the “anonymous researcher persona expected of academic writers. Think then what a disengagement the demand for an anonymous, impersonal, universally interchangeable persona invites in our students. It’s tough enough learning to write like ourselves without pretending to be someone else, someone we don’t know, someone better educated and thirty years older” (253). By asking students to conduct research—something they consider a chore and completely divorced from creativity and curiosity—I’ve inadvertently put them back into feeling like their own ideas do not matter. They simply cannot understand—yet—that a research paper and an essay are not mutually exclusive. At this point, they still believe that research is solely confined to the type of writing they have been taught to hate.

If, as W. Scott Olsen advocates in his introductory nonfiction classes at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, an Essay is “the witnessed development of an idea,” that means that even a beginning student, one who has never written an essay like this before, can write an excellent essay, because the only thing to hold an essay back is the lack of movement of the writer’s mind on the page. Natalie Kusz, at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, says that “the fact that the thing happened is not the subject of the piece; what you know now as a result of what happened is the subject of the piece.” An essay cannot simply be a narrative, a story, an anecdote, because everyone has stories and nobody cares about yours—so you, as the writer, have to make them care. We use the terms narrative, exposition, and high exposition to identify these elements that create meaning for the reader. Finding the larger idea in the subject matter is the writer’s job.

My students often say that they hate writing. But they don’t, not really. They hate being told what to write and a formula for writing that allows for absolutely no connection to the materials or their own lives and ideas, forms that eliminate any type of creativity they bring to the process. This type of writing emphasizes that the student’s own creativity is subordinate to the research that teachers often require. In the last several years, I have heard more than once that my students were taught in high school that for every thought or idea they had, they needed to find a source to back it up. In this scenario, there are no original ideas—and they certainly do not originate from the students. As a result, the shift from high school to college writing often involves an un-teaching of certain values, particularly in research. This is why the Essay is so valuable in teaching introductory students, especially in courses that focus on place-consciousness.  Read More 

This month’s guest is Karen Babine, the founder and editor of the very fine, online magazine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies assayjournal.com

Karen’s contribution, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers, is, as its title suggests, a personal, yet very detailed and meticulously researched piece on/about using the essay to teach “place” to first-year-writers. Although it’s aimed at first-year students and freshman composition teachers, this essay, I believe, will be of great value to just about anyone--both experienced and beginners--who teach and write literary nonfiction.

For those who follow this blog, Karen’s essay is a departure of sorts. For almost four years, I’ve been posting personal/teaching essays on/about matters of genre and craft. I've written some and selected guest writer/teachers have written others. Karen’s piece, an expansive essay--a thoughtful, thought-provoking, personal/critical essay. Not only is it an informed, in-depth, study on/about the teaching of place, but it also re-visits an important conversation about teaching writing, about the relationship between creative writing (in this case, literary nonfiction) and composition, and about the writing process itself--a passionate, transformative, approach to writing that began in the 1970’s. The movement included a host of concerned practitioners, rhetoricians and theorists, and beginning teachers of composition. It thrived for almost three decades before being replaced ,in the late 80’s, by a traditional, heavily prescriptive, outdated, methodology, an approach that’s being taught today in most public schools and in many colleges and universities as well.

This essay is reflective, complex (and very important, I believe), piece. And so, I’ve chosen to post one segment each Wednesday for four consecutive weeks.

The first segment appears below.

Note: In this and in each subsequent post, I'll include the full list of citations.

MJS

# 44
ARTICULATION: ON USING THE ESSAY TO TEACH PLACE-CONSCIOUSNESS TO FIRST-YEAR WRITERS ByKaren Babine

Part 1

ARTICULATION I

On 23 August 2011, the day that a 5.9 earthquake rattled the East Coast, toppled spires and cracked walls at the National Cathedral, I walk into my first class of the fall semester to a bright-eyed group of English 150 (Rhetoric as Inquiry) students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Quake-free, for now. It is 2011, after all, nearly two hundred years to the day after the New Madrid Earthquakes made the Mississippi run backwards, shaking a land not used to being shaken.

I say: our class will focus on place and location this semester.
“What is place?” they ask me.
I say: location is a spot on a map; place is context, everything you bring to that location.
I say: you’re living in a flyover state—what does that mean?
I say: you’re living on the outer rings of the most active seismic zone outside of California—how does that change your view of Nebraska, given the earthquake on the East Coast today?

Some weeks later, we read Tom Coakley’s essay “How to Speak of the Secret Desert Wars,” published first in Fourth Genre and listed as a Notable in the 2011 Best American Essays. Coakley had recently moved from Nebraska to Washington, DC, to work at the Pentagon, and as I was preparing to teach this essay I asked him about the earthquake and Hurricane Irene. It hadn’t bothered him much, he said, but while the West Coast was mocking the East Coast’s reaction to the earthquake, the last time the earth had moved like that at the Pentagon, a plane had crashed into the outer rings of the building.
This is place.

ARTICULATION II: DEFINITIONS AND MOTIVATIONS

It is true that discussions of how the essay can best be used in composition classes is not a new one, but among various critics, the consensus seems to be based in what I consider to be a erroneous definition and use of the term essay and the conversation seems to be the realm of compositionists, not creative writers, who have an equal stake in the discussion. This collapsing of various subgenres of nonfiction is exceptionally problematic for me as a creative writer in a composition classroom, considering that the essay is a form, not a genre, and represents more than the definition of “to try.”

THE FRAMEWORK OF PLACE-CONSCIOUSNESS IN THIS PLACE:

At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the English Department’s Aims and Scopes lay the framework for the three composition classes it offers: 101 (Rhetoric as Reading), 150 (Rhetoric as Inquiry), and 151 (Rhetoric as Argument). Because the Aims and Scopes are broad enough to allow for any pedagogy an instructor chooses, the framework provided by place-conscious pedagogy is an excellent starting point for first-year writers. Additionally, the written requirements are also broad enough to allow exceptionally different interpretations of what can constitute those Writing Projects. The freedom allowed the graduate teaching assistants and lecturers most often assigned these classes results in a very rich body of departmental offerings.

Wendy Bishop, in “Suddenly Sexy: Creative Nonfiction Rear-Ends Composition,” works towards a theory and pedagogy that combines nonfiction and composition, because they share similar goals. Other writers have discussed similar meldings; as I have mentioned, this is not a new discussion. But her questioning looms larger than form: what is important here is that she places the responsibility of creativity, curiosity, and inquiry in the hands of teachers—where it should initially be—and wonders not simply at the forms of the written work, but also at the classrooms that best foster the type of learning teachers want. She wonders,

"How do we teach the pleasures of essay writing and the civic possibilities of prose literatures? How do we create courses that allow writers to define interesting topics of reflection, and how do we create classroom cultures within which the essay needs to be written? We treat the student essayist as we treat ourselves, as essayists and authors of creative nonfiction (271)."

For me, the answer is to combine a pedagogy that requires an active engagement with the students’ own grounded experience with a written form that requires active engagement with the students’ own lived experience. It is through this pedagogical framework, though, that the essay—as a form—functions best, because it provides the opportunity for personal motivation of the student, taking what they know, valuing it, and asking them to take it a step further, back to the place they come from. Robert Root sees this type of motivation as an essential element of nonfiction (and by extension, the writing classroom): “Nonfiction is not simply an option of style or format or attitude; it’s a perspective on the world, and its texts are composed by writers animated by the nonfiction motive” (6) and this distinction is important in a composition classroom, between form and style, purpose and result. He continues,

"Without the nonfiction motive, writers get no internal checks and balances on their own honesty, no incentive to investigate, explore, observe, compare witnesses, and analyze all the evidence, no commitment to comprehend or to extend that comprehension to readers. […] How we approach what we write makes a great difference in what results…a student’s motive in writing is to clear a hurdle or fulfill a requirement or complete an assignment or master a skill rather than to acquire and express knowledge or to share insight and information. The results are often detached, disengaged, insincere. If, among working writers, writing really matters, why wouldn’t “motive” be essential to apprentice writing or novice writing? (7)."

For me, place-conscious pedagogy is a natural choice to facilitate both, and so this particular English 150 course is designed around a theme of Home and Away, a lens through which we develop a way of looking at what surrounds us, physically, intellectually, and emotionally. We explore the ideas of quest, how movement and stasis can lead us to a greater understanding of where we are and who we are—and we use the Essay form to do so.  Read More