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.
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