The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Six: Rhetorical Community

We are training writers in our classrooms. We are teaching students how to engage in public discourse. Or are we just assigning essays?

This week’s reading on “Democracy’s Lot” by Candice Rai looked at some of the physical spaces where rhetoric happens. Her book focused on one neighborhood in Chicago where the dual struggles of gentrification and affordable housing are at odds with each other. While published in 2016, the topic of democratic debate in community spaces seems especially timely for 2020. In her conclusion, Rai muses: “As ancient rhetoricians attested, the best way to arm a citizenry against the pernicious use of rhetoric is to train people in the art of rhetoric.” This is our role in teaching our students composition, we are preparing them to enter into public rhetoric.

“Democracy’s Lot” focused on areas of debate in Uptown. The future use of a vacant lot, the subjects of murals in public spaces, and the presence of day labors looking for work across from a U-Haul location all led to engaged debates in this community. These are the types of debates our students will encounter in real life. On a large scale, these are the conversations happening all over the United States in 2020. The role of modern police departments, the usage of racist and stereotypical images on products and as mascots, the existence of statues and monuments honoring slave owners, confederate leaders, and those responsible for genocide are all topics in the public forum this year.

Rai writes:

“Given the complexity of rhetoric, discovering the available means of persuasion, as Aristotle defined rhetorical invention, calls for immersive methodologies and the inhabitation of the sites of rhetorical production where one might study the places of invention.”

In the current movements we are seeing, the “sites of rhetorical production” are the streets being physically occupied, the ongoing occupation of which has given a physical presence to the words of protests that have been shared for years. Black Lives Matter is not a new movement, the arguments over the mascot of the Washington football team are not new either. There have been protests for both of these movements over the years with little results. It took a cold-blooded murder caught on camera and literal riots to enact positive change in these areas.

Rai also writes that:

“Therefore, if one is interested in the power of language to do things, one might shift focus to understand the nature and qualities of the forcefulness and consequences of language as the primary object, of which “truth” of an argument need not factor into its power—or, at any rate, is but one concern among others.”

While this quote focuses on the power of language to accomplish things, the physical act of occupying space lends additional weight to the words being used. Rai makes note of this too in her discussion of “positive loitering” which was used to impact day laborers in Uptown. To send the message to the day laborers that they were no longer tolerated, the neighborhood CAPS organization used as many bodies as they could to send the message. Rai quotes one homeowner from Uptown as saying:

“We’re sending them the visual message [through positive loitering] that it is not just me…but it’s this group of people, it’s the police, it’s someone from the Alderman’s office occasionally, it’s U-Haul, it’s Public Storage, it’s the car dealership over there, it’s the hospital. Everybody is not ok with this and we are all standing here hanging out letting them know how many of us there are…It’s the whole community. And that’s been shocking to them because they assumed it is one or two people who just stared out their windows and called the police all day, and I think they were a little surprised by that.”

This is how the current Black Lives Matter movement is gaining so much traction. The murder of George Floyd was outrageous enough to provoke large-scale public outrage, enough outrage that it led to action in the form of people taking to the streets, enough people to make public entities realize that this movement is more than a passing fade or a few outraged individuals. And while many of the positive changes that have occurred so far may seem superficial (see ya Aunt Jemima) they are reflective of a large-scale shift in public opinions. The meaningful change of policing reform may still be a long ways off, but these smaller changes still matter and reflect larger changes to come.

I’m thinking also of the very public actions that many cities have taken to paint the words “Black Lives Matter” on the streets. While such an action is largely symbolic, it is still meaningful. Rai writes of murals and other symbolic statements:

“In this sense, icons, like topoi and rhetorical structures more generally, are such powerful tools in everyday democracies because while people can access them within their idiosyncratic and situated contexts of everyday life, they are also tools that transcend the details of those contexts, which means—among other things—that they can resonate broadly, forcefully, and flexibly across social space and political positions.”

Let’s end by reflecting again on the “power of language to do things.” Even in cities where the leaders prefer to paint the words “Black Lives Matter” before actually crafting policies and protections designed to save Black lives, will the words alone lead to a change of attitudes and beliefs of those who drive over the words daily? Are words here enough? (I mean, obviously not, but is it enough to start with?)

And how does all of this apply to the composition classroom? I think it’s important to craft assignments that lead students to a growing awareness of the community around them and the dialogues that are already taking places so that our students are better prepared to join in such dialogues.

This is my last “official” post as the Comp/Intent blogger. I will be posting reviews of each of the books I’ve read during this class to Goodreads. Hopefully as I continue to read on my own more posts in this series will follow. Thank you for reading along.

The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Five: Community-Based Composition

So…service learning…community literacy…bringing the classroom into the real world. Engaging students with community-based writing projects can show students the meaningful impact that writing can make. It can also show them real world applications for what they are learning in the classroom, taking the learning from theory to practice. But what does it mean to provide students with real world writing experiences?

In “Tactics of Hope” Paula Mathieu gives some great examples of what not to do in planning for community-based writing experiences. It is far too easy for professors and universities to establish relationships with outside organizations which only benefit the university. These are often shallow, short term relationships with no history or mutual goals. Mathieu even cites examples of students being sent to outside organization with no prior understanding being established. One of the many challenges of community-based writing projects is the academic calendar. Outside organizations do not operate on a semester-based system, and trying to fit a meaningful writing project into a semester is both challenging and somewhat artificial. Mathieu states that “Writers working in the public realm often need a long-term vision to get a sense of the impact of their work.” Often a commitment beyond a semester is needed to see progress with such programs.

Another challenge that is seen in community-based writing projects is that the university, and by extension the student, is seen as the expert and the community is seen as somehow deficient or in need of fixing. Such centering of the university is why “service learning” leaves such a bad taste in the mouths of organizations. Mathieu spends a great deal of time explaining that these organizations and the people in the community have their own expertise and knowledge that should also be centered and honored. She says:

“The value in all of this work is to create relationships that not only claim reciprocity in a general way, but create bodies of knowledge that undercut elitist notions that frame communities, especially in urban areas, as sites of problems that only academic experts can fix. Tactical projects prioritize and exchange of skills or ideas over ameliorating a problem.”

In other words, students are coming to partner and to learn versus to teach or fix. I can imagine how, in certain situations, some students could eagerly try to take on the role of the expert rather than as a partner or even as an assistant in such relationships. Such an action by a student would lead to failure, and the relationship would not produce what it might otherwise have accomplished.

This concern is elaborated on in another work, “Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement” by Linda Flower. She writes:

“Community members typically exist as participants in social projects, not as partners with expertise who must be respected as agents in their own right. So to the extent that such partnerships are diminished—and people from mainstream and elite circles become experts, leaders, directors, service providers, and tutors—the possibility of a community for inquiry with others, across difference, evaporates.”

What might students be striving to do instead of usurping the lead in such projects? Flowers writes that “The community literacy I am hoping to document is an intercultural dialogue with others on issues that they identify as sites of struggle.” Mathieu’s work reflects on the ideal working relationship as well. The term “tactical” is used throughout “Tactics of Hope.” Mathieu uses the phrase first coined by Michel de Certeau. Of tactics, Mathieu says that “Tactics are available when we do not control the space,” and that “Tactics seek rhetorically timely actions.” Combined these two brief descriptions leave one with a clear idea of action in an unfamiliar area. Mathieu further states that: “A tactical academic balances personal convictions with close connections and dialogue about the work he or she does, not to arrive at final answers but to build some useful projects that hopefully will do good work in the world.” This gives any community-based service project a very clear goal and a pragmatic focus.

This is an active, engaged form of rhetoric. Flower writes “If rhetoric and composition is to achieve the personal, public, and social significance to which the field lays claim, it must recover the practice of “doing” rhetoric in its wider civic and ethical sense.” She continues: “The rhetoric of making a difference demands more than critique from academics or conventionally acceptable prose from students; it required an audience-attuned rhetoric, capable of turning critical reflection and personal exploration into rhetorical action.”

What does such action look like? We often think of writing as a disengaged action, and we often teach writing to be separate and free of the personal. Strict academic writing tries to eliminate the personal altogether. But for community-based literacy projects to be effective, they must embrace the personal. Flower writes:

“But for disenfranchised groups, denying one’s identity as a working-class student, an inner-city African American, or a migrant laborer denies the reality of social difference, of power, and inequality—the very issues these groups want us to see as public concerns. When a discourse insists its members suspend, ignore, or neutralize the identities of women, workers, peoples of color, gays, and lesbians, it effectively removes those realities from deliberation.”

What does this mean for my writing classroom? I feel that while community-engaged learning can be an important addition to some composition classrooms, I feel it doesn’t really work with the time constraints that I work under as an adjunct professor. However, I still feel like I gain important and validating tactics from these readings. At the community college I teach at, as well as the university I teach at, my students are the disenfranchised public described by Flower. They are working students, first generation college students, immigrants, first generation American, they are multilingual students, they are a diverse mixture of students that I am privileged to teach. These two readings reaffirmed for me the importance of empowering students to write what matters to them, and to use their voices to promote positive change in their communities.

The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Four: Teaching in the Time of Covid-19

The reading for class this week was about service learning, which is awesome, but the reading triggered other thoughts for me, so I’m going to save service learning for another post.

Upstairs my eleven-year-old is playing “Phantom of the Opera” loudly on the Alexa. She’s supposed to be unloading the dishwasher, but she’s playing with the two-year-old. I can hear their conversation from my desk. A few feet from me sits my oldest, age fourteen, who is practicing Spanish on an app on her phone. Behind a closed door my husband tries to work, the nine-year-old is with him playing on an old Nintendo 64 we dug out of storage for the pandemic. Somewhere there’s a six-year-old, who knows what she is doing.

In the introduction to “Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment)” Anne Frances Wysocki quotes the following from N. Katherine Hayles: “In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment.”

Once a student sent me a long email as I was getting ready for class. He was in a terrible car wreck, there were fire trucks and ambulances, the other driver was injured, he was waiting to give the police a statement. There was no way he’d make it to class. He named the intersection of the accident; it was right on my route to campus. I responded that I understood, of course, and told him to be safe. As I drove past the intersection five minutes later, there were no signs of an accident of any kind. I received another email from the student saying thank you, and that he was still waiting to give the police his statement. I didn’t feel angry, but it made me question every student sob story I received after that.

In our reading this week, “Tactics of Hope” by Paula Mathieu, she quotes another work, an article called “The Sites of Pedagogy.” This article argues that “pedagogical theory premised upon the classroom as a constant is no longer acceptable…We must learn how to adjust our pedagogy to account for the changing nature of the classroom.”

Later this month, I will learn what the fall will look like for my children. My oldest is starting high school, and really wants the whole high school experience. I don’t know what that will look like for her.

My fall is online. At one college I will be teaching asynchronously and will post video lectures and announcements to try to form some kind of connection. I will have phone conferences with students for ten minutes each twice during the semester during which I will quickly give a run down of how to improve their drafts. I will never see these students. For the other college, I will be teaching synchronously over Zoom, three classes back to back on Saturdays. I will smile big, maybe even put on lipstick and a nice shirt. I will wave goodbye emphatically. I will struggle to connect over video conferencing, to feel a connection. My husband will try to keep our five kids occupied and quiet.

In “Writing Bodies: Somatic Mind in Composition Studies” Kristie S. Fleckenstein says that “The need to control the degree of disruption in a physical writing scene evolves with the belief that an academic must shut out life, must separate the life of the work from the life lived, the body from the mind.” But such separations aren’t really possible now, are they? Any barriers students or teachers had erected between the “life of the work from the life lived” are gone during this pandemic.

During the spring semester, when everything moved online and I first tried teaching over Zoom, I had one student who would take his dog on a walk during class each week while using his phone to Zoom with us. I would watch his head bobbing with his strides and the sky above him as I tried to keep my train of thought delivering the lecture I usually gave in a classroom with white boards and physical space to pace in, to students sitting still paying attention.

Mathieu goes on in “Tactics of Hope” to say of “The Sites of Pedagogy” that “Pedagogy, they argue, must be attentive to individual “sites of pedagogy,” which they define as “the locations of pedagogical address,” the “spaces in which interactions between teacher and student occur”.”

There have been several articles about what the fall semester will look like, what different colleges are doing. Colleges and universities are special spaces, providing students and faculty alike with spaces to inhabit for teaching and learning. At my community college, there is a library reading room with windows overlooking the lake. At my university, most buildings have public work spaces. When I was attending community college, I lived with several loud roommates in an apartment. I used spaces like these on my college campus to study and prepare. Having that college space was invaluable for me as a student. Now as an adjunct professor, I still use such spaces for office hours, for grading, for meetings with students, for writing my nonfiction books. I love my home, it is loud and chaotic and wonderful, but it’s not the best work environment. And while I always do a certain amount of work from home, I still rely on my campus time for a bulk of my work.

Mathieu continues to quote from “The Sites of Pedagogy”: “While it may be obvious that pedagogical processes are affected by the setting in which they occur, we understand far too little about this relationship to be able to maximize its learning potential. Gaining a better understanding of the sites in which we teach and learn is critical to improving education.”

What will a return to college mean for students who will not have college spaces to occupy? Even with limited reopenings, campus spaces will not be what they are usually. The library will not be a space to linger, nap, socialize, work, it will be a space to quickly get in, get materials, and get out. The eating areas will likely stay closed, the tables will stay empty. The study nooks and work spaces will be unoccupied.

“In order to empathize with someone’s experience you must be willing to believe them as they see it and not how you imagine their experience to be.” -Brene Brown.

I normally get a certain number of emails from students in crisis each semester. My two colleges are unique: each has a large number of multilingual students, of first-generation students, of working students. I love working with these students, they remind me of my college experience: I was a first-generation working student. But these students face unique challenges. Since we moved online mid-March, I’ve had more panicky emails from students than usual. I’ve also had more students disappear than usual. I’ve reaching out, but received crickets in response. I had a student explain she can’t write at home because of domestic violence, I’ve heard of relatives dying, I’ve had several students become the sole breadwinner when family members lost jobs. I’ve had a student in health care share than she’s now working sixty hours a week, up from her usual twenty. I’ve taught online before, this is not online teaching. The space our classes occupy has fundamentally changed as all spaces have changed due to this pandemic. Even if I get a class on campus, I won’t use the space the same way, I won’t move in the same way.

Does the erosions of boundaries force us to pursue a more embodied way of teaching and learning? How do we adapt our pedagogy to this new space? I have so many questions about what we are doing, and how these readings connect to teaching and learning during this pandemic.

My goal in this blog is to bring the readers concrete advice for teaching. Here’s my advice for teaching during the pandemic:

1.      Believe your students. Even if you’ve been lied to by students before, believe them now. We all need more empathy.

2.      Forget the syllabus. Okay, no, not completely, but when it comes to all your carefully crafted policies and penalties, consider ways to be more flexible with those. Read through your policies carefully and consider reframing them. How can we help our students navigate this new space with all the demands that come with it?

3.      Just as you strive to care for your students, care for yourself. This fall will not represent your ideal work environment. The space you teach in will be far different for both you and for your students. Acknowledge that, and find ways to live with that.

Granted, some students will opt to put college on hold, but many will not feel like this is an option. College has become a critical step for beginning careers and building a future. This current situation is no one’s ideal. We owe it to our students to try to make navigating this new learning space more comfortable for them and for us.

The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Three: Rhetorical Empathy

EMPATHY!!!!!!!!

This week’s assigned reading for my grad class really struck a chord with me. We read “Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy” by Lisa Blankenship. And seriously, don’t we need more empathy right now? As a world, as a country, couldn’t empathy take us far?

But that’s not the focus of this blog post. This blog post is focusing on where empathy can take our students and our teaching. What does empathy in the composition classroom look like?

Blankenship describes this as a form of Feminist rhetoric, and explains that “Feminist theory holds that the personal, the body, and difference are vital factors in decision-making and deliberation.”

Most of writing composition classes, especially for persuasive writing, are influenced by theories of Aristotle. Logos, or logic, becomes the main basis of argumentative writing. But logic and facts don’t actually persuade anyone, a reality that is expanded on in this excellent article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-someone-when-facts-fail/  The solutions offered at the end of this article are interesting, but they don’t use today’s magic word: empathy. But isn’t listening and showing understanding a form of empathy?

Logos is a great, fancy Greek term made famous by Aristotle. But there are other great fancy Greek terms. Like pathos. Pathos is an appeal to the emotions. Using empathy to appeal to emotions can be a more effective form of persuasion, or at least a most effective dialogue. And while Blankenship treats the idea of putting logos and pathos together like it’s a new concept, it’s actually something journalists have been doing for decades. How many times have you read a news article that starts with a human interest element, like “Due to pandemic, single mom Kelsey has been out of work, and now is facing eviction” then that’s followed by some nice hard logos with facts and figures on how many Americans are now facing eviction? By providing readers with this human element, we are creating empathy in our readers. People being evicted are no longer impersonal numbers, they are Kelsey the single mom. This is an impactful way to write, so why is it foreign to our composition classrooms?

Empathy also looks like forming connections with those one is trying to persuade. If you know your audience, then you should understand them enough to relate to them on some level. For example, as many of you know I’m a far left liberal, and I am vocally pro-choice. One of my dearest friends is firmly pro-life. I will never, ever persuade her to switch camps. But we have found common ground through sensitive and empathetic dialogue: we are both for better sex education in school and more easily available contraceptives. And if that isn’t a form of being pro-choice, I don’t know what is.

So what kind of assignments can we give students that incorporate both the personal and the logical in a way that creates persuasive empathy? The book offers the example of assigning a literacy narrative or a narrative about education, and then assigning students to write a persuasive piece about education that incorporates parts of the narrative essay. This meshing of two writing assignments does sound like a helpful assignment. As Blankenship describes, “The use of the personal in the form of stories disarms an audience through identification (“You’re like me on some level”) and so can help bridge gaps in understanding across marked social differences.”

I’ve actually been teaching writing that combines ethos and logos for several years now in one of my classes that I teach. An argumentative composition course, I teach several essays in this course that I love. On the first day of class, I have students list different identities that they hold. These can be anything from racial/ethnic identities to identities we take on ourselves, like pet owner and book lover. I make a list of identities that I hold on the board as an example. Then we brainstorm a list of cares/concerns that we hold based on these identities. Then I have students pick the one they are most interested in to focus on their writing for the semester. We talk about pathos and logos. We also discuss ethos, or authority, and Kairos, or timing. For the first paper they write an analysis of an argument or cultural item related to their chosen topic. How does it work? How does it fail? This paper relies on logos and ethos. For the second paper they write an op-ed style paper combining their personal experience with research. This is using logos, pathos, and ethos. By appealing to their reader’s emotions they are creating empathy. For this paper I also encourage students to consider the position of those they are trying to persuade. The audience for this paper should be those who disagree with their position, and they should consider how to best persuade or find middle ground with this audience. The third paper I assign in this class is a satire essay, which at this point students are expert enough in their topic to really pull off some amazing stuff in the satire essay. This paper focuses on reframing an argument in a way that forces the reader to consider the author’s position in a new light or from a new angle.

I would argue that teaching rhetorical empathy has positive implications for students beyond the classroom as it helps students to  become more aware and engaged in dialogues that concern them personally and as it helps them to become more empathetic and to actively seek common ground with those who view the world differently. To close with another quote from Blankenship, “Rhetorical empathy resists the echo chamber of contemporary, digital, and political culture and forces us to engage with the Other in the form of real people with real stories that, chances are, do not align with our own understanding of the world.”

The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Two: Bringing Mindfulness into the Classroom

This past week I started doing yoga. And I liked it. For those of you who know me well, you know I’m not really a fan of exercise. I attempt it as necessary; I know it’s important for one’s overall health, but I’ve never really enjoyed it. But I enjoy yoga.

As I was reading “Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies” by Christy I. Wenger for my Emergent Pedagogies class, I kept wondering about the claims of the author. Could yoga really help that much with writing? Which led me to trying it. And I’ve got to say, I do think yoga breaks during a writing day would lead to more productive writing. I don’t have a writing project for this summer, so I can’t experiment with that right now, but my yoga breaks from teaching and reading have led to increased energy and focus.

But the real argument being made for yoga and writing is yoga’s ability to ground one’s physical body. Writing is often looked at as a disembodied act, with the writer focusing solely on the mental energy used to create the words on the page. But writing is a full body exercise, with our physical location and positioning impacting the writing process. Now I do not see myself actually using yoga in my writing classes, but there are other tools in “Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies” that I can see myself adapting, as well as from this week’s reading, “Prolific Moment” by Alexandria Peary. Not all of these exercises are focused on embodiment, some are more focused on ways to be mindful in writing.

So before getting to the exercises, let’s talk a moment about mindfulness and mindlessness. Both have important roles in the writing process. From Wenger, we have this description of mindfulness:

“[W]hen we cultivate mindfulness of our thoughts and feelings, we can choose our behaviors and move beyond the habitual action-reaction cycle, which dictates how we tend to respond to situations. A re-theorization of the writing subject as a writing yogi, a contemplative writer skilled in embodied imagining, is needed in composition studies precisely because the dominant action-reaction chain that dictates how we approach students’ and teachers’ subjectivity is unresponsive to matter, and mindlessly so.”

And I love the idea of being this kind of mindful writer, but at the same time there is a time and a place for mindlessness. From Peary, there’s this description of the balance between mindfulness and mindlessness:

“Mindful composition looks for a combination of directed and undirected thinking, a healthy balance between mindfulness and what would be called an inspired mindlessness. With a mindfulness approach to writing, we strive for clear awareness of our mental actions, trying to avoid outcomes of undirected thinking such as preconceptions and outcome fixations.”

Mindlessness has several benefits. When we are mindlessly engaged in nonwriting activities, we can be inspired with ideas and solutions for our writing problems. Agatha Christie is quoted as saying “The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” That is precisely because the mindlessness of the task invites contemplation. Our minds are skilled at filling empty time, and working out solutions during down time. I think this is why yoga could lead to writing breakthroughs: your body is engaged in the yoga moves and in your breathing, your mind is invited into a state of meditative mindlessness. While you’re not concentrating on your writing project, your subconscious will still be at work. “Prolific Moment” talks about that moment right before you know what you’re going to write about, the moment of not knowing. What if we lean into that moment right before we discover an idea to write?

More importantly, how do we bring this embodied mindfulness into our classrooms? Here are some activities to try with your classes. I do recommend experimenting with these on your own first, so that you better understand what you’re asking students to do.

1.      Guided meditation. There’s a great guided meditation at the end of “Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies” that I hope to adapt for classroom use.

2.      Free writing session. These are relatively common, with the only rule being not to stop writing.

3.      Assign a narrative essay. I use a literacy narrative in one of the freshmen composition courses I teach. I tell students to focus this essay on a strong memory associated with writing, to explore/lean into their relationship with writing. A colleague from one of the colleges I teach at shared that she assigns a narrative essay that calls on students to consider what their future in their chosen field will look like.

4.      Disposable writing. This idea comes from “Prolific Moment.” The idea is to assign students to write something that they will later delete/shred. Personally, for me, this idea makes me cringe, but I can see how this could be a valuable exercise for someone who doesn’t like writing or who is intimidated by the idea of writing for an audience.

5.      Mindfulness breathing exercise. This is also from “Prolific Moment.” The idea here is to preform a simply breathing exercise. Students are to focus on their breath for a period of time, and when their thoughts wander they are to quickly record the wondering, and then get back to mindful breathing. The wanderings are recorded as “pas” for something in the past, “fut” for something in the future, or “eva” for an attempt to evaluate the current moment. No other notes are needed.

And of course, these can be mix and matched. A guided meditation can be followed by a free write session. Mindful breathing can come before or after some disposable writing. Basically these are tools to bring your students to a state of being more mindful in their writing.

Hope this has been helpful. I’ll be back next week sharing more ways to be intentional in your writing instruction.

Comp/Intent Blogger Part One: An Intro to Embodied Writing

Hello friends! I know I haven’t blogged in…a long time…but I’m taking a graduate level course this summer, and for the next six weeks I will be blogging to share some of the things I’m learning in this course. And since many of you also teach composition, I hope these posts will be helpful for you and what you do in your classes. For those of you who don’t teach but are writers, I think you’ll find ideas and practices here that are helpful for you as well.

The course I’m taking is on emergent pedagogies, and is focusing on mindfulness and embodiment. The readings have made me think long and hard about ways to implement these ideas in my classroom, both my physical classroom when I get to teach on campus again, and my online classroom. How can we find ways to embody our writing processes virtually?

During week one, our readings focused on chapters from the book “Composing Media Composing Embodiment” with chapters written by a variety of people. One writer, Jay Dolmage, in his essay “Writing against the Normal” made the following observation:

“In composition and rhetoric we have, for too long, held onto classical generalizations that belittle the role of the body in thought and in the act of writing. And when the body has been invoked, it has been either as an impossible ideal, or as a baseline for discrimination. One solution is to seek to reconnect mind, body, and writing, and to do so focusing not on ideals, but on the body (and the text) as meaningfully messy and incomplete.”

So there’s the actual physical act of writing, the sitting down, the hands on the keyboard. I have a bad habit of sort of hunching over my key board, leading to neck and back pain if I work for too long, so I always force myself to start in a very upright typist pose…a pose that was emphasized in my high school typing class, a class that I failed…yes, I failed typing when the floppy disc containing all my work for the year mysteriously disappeared. I suspect the teacher, she was always annoyed when I finished first. So I start in this upright pose, my head facing straight ahead and my eyes peering down at the words as they appear on the screen, but then there’s always something that leads me to lean in. I think the more involved I am the more I lean towards the screen, the closer my body wants to be to the work, to the words…

 

There’s that as a form of embodied writing, this awareness of what we are doing with our bodies as we sit and write, but then there are the bodies themselves, and wrapped up in those bodies are our identities. Now speaking of identities is strictly coming from me for now, I’ve yet to read much to support this viewpoint. Some identities come from our bodies, for example I’m a white 37 year old cisgender woman with two mostly invisible disabilities. Some identities are a cross between what our body is and what we do: I am a mother, my body is marked from birthing five children, I continue to mother those children today. It’s both in my body and in my life. And aren’t the physical things we do with our bodies remembered and recorded, becoming part of our bodies? My fingers type quickly because my body has retained the knowledge of how to type. My fingers have typed countless stories and books, isn’t that knowledge also retained? When I call myself a writer, doesn’t that include my body? I would argue that we embody those identities that we take on as we act on those identities. And in fact, this view is supported by Christina V. Cedillo in her article “What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy” from Composition Forum. She says “Bodies allow us to perceive and inhabit the world around us; they are sites where the social and corporeal dimensions of our lives coincide.” When it talks of the social and corporeal, I see that as the physicality of our bodies combining with our social world, the things we do with our bodies as we move through the world.

For you fellow writing teachers, I can almost hear you asking, “This is interesting, but…so what? Why should I worry about teaching embodied writing?” I hear you. In the book “Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies: Contemplative Writing Pedagogy” Christy I. Wenger presents a strong argument for embodied writing:

“[F]irst, when we acknowledge that writing always springs from our material placement, we add authority and transparency to our compositions, no matter how explicitly our content references our body; second, in this process, we necessarily move beyond the rules and structures of “conventional academic discourse;” and third, this movement engages us in a feminist endeavor that disturbs the ways patriarchal power is enforced by a malestream tendency to erase the writer’s materiality in order to create an illusion of objectivity. To write as a body…means disrupting the objectification and marginalization—in other words feminization—of bodies in the academe. No longer is distance from the body a prerequisite to truth; instead, proximity lends persuasiveness.”  

Acknowledging our bodies, bringing them into our writing, gives power to our words. It also fosters awareness and mindfulness in our students and ourselves, which I assume leads to better mental health and better writing practices.

I am still coming to terms with my disabilities. I was diagnosed as bipolar almost ten years ago, but this past year has been extremely challenging, and I’m finally beginning to recognize this as a disability. And about a year and a half ago, my eyes closed, leading to my diagnosis of blepharospasm. My body has very real limitations that impact how I interact with the world, and with my writing. In addition to bringing all of you useful tools for your writing and teaching, I hope to explore my relationship with my disabilities this summer.

 

This week we looked at what embodied writing is, and why it’s important for our writing and our students’ writings. Next week we will look at ways to bring this into our classrooms, and I’ll share with you my discovery of yoga.