How about a Literacy Narrative?

For the past few days I have been immersed in writing theory, particularly in the instruction of the Literacy Narrative as the first assignment in a developmental writing class. I hit a gold mine, simply because there is an abundance of solid research validating and assessing this assignment, both academically and personally for students as developing writers and learners.
The next few posts might be a series of Literacy Narrative posts, as to make sure that we are looking at this from all angles.

Once again, if we go back to building a course around writing and helping our students to understand and embrace why writing matters, we must introduce some essence of a rhetorical awareness to our students, so that they can begin to see writing with a myriad of purposes, other than for a grade in the classroom. Life-long writers is what we are after. But with this hope, comes a lot of looking back, hence the Janus Figure is introduced during the opening week of class.


The Janus Figure is a powerful metaphor because it is something visual that the students can hold in their minds while they are looking back and also forward in the same piece of writing. I use this in almost every writing class particularly when students are doing a sort of personal/autobiographical piece of writing where they are looking back and discovering how the past shapes pieces of the future. The more research I find on Literacy Narratives, the more fascinating the Janus Figure becomes as a viable teaching tool within this genre.


Susan DeRosa has a foundational article in this conversation, entitled "Literacy Narratives as Genres of Possibility: Students' Voices, Reflective Writing, and Rhetorical Awareness." She bases her whole premise on the fact that students placed in developmental writing courses often have self-perceptions based on outcomes of standardized writing assessment tools or what they've been told by the experts--past teachers who have labeled them. This causes students to have a narrowed definition of literacy,which is often what they bring with them to our classes. What they don't realize is that literacy is fluid, not static or fixed. Writing is not a set of skills to be measured in a single writing event/test or acquired in a semester of a college writing course.


We could consider a starting point of our conversation as writing teachers with these two questions DeRosa asks:

• What pedagogical strategies could I use to offer my writing students a space to reflect on, or even challenge, these limiting ideas about literacy?
• How would such reflective writing encourage them to rethink their roles as writers--writers who make choices based on rhetorical situations?

Literacy Narratives may provide us with an opportunity to explore changing versions or literacy and writers' visions of themselves as writers. DeRosa argues that "student-produced literacy narratives can encourage self-reflective learning and help students develop a sense of critical agency about their literacy practices."

The literacy narrative is a more specific, targeted version of the autobiographical and biographical essays. Its emphases on literacy and knowledge would seem like a natural fit to a developmental writing class that focuses on Writing as the theme, or subject matter. Trimbur states that "the term literacy event gives us a way to think about how reading and writing enter our lives and shape our interactions with others."

The purpose of a literacy narrative is to look at a time in your life when reading and writing had a significant effect on you, and then to analyze this effect in writing, which is the reflection and ponder part of the writing assignment. Often times students will discover some fascinating pieces of who they are as a writer, and who they have the potential to become. It is a narrative essay that focuses on an issue related to writing, reading, and education. This type of writing is especially relevant to writers and writing students. Also note that we should not limit students to only classroom events. Home life, influences or lack of reading in the home, might be just one example that might contribute to a student's story of literacy.

Lastly, DeRosa claims that "by writing self-reflectively about their literacy practices in narratives, students may: 1)identify and reflect on their roles and responsibilities as writers--a sense of ethos; 2) develop understanding of their literacy in flux and a sense of agency as writers; and 3) develop awareness of their "literacy in action"-the ways that their writing can effect change in their communities---a sense of civic literacy."

As students look back at where they have been with writing, reading, and their education, the literacy narratives allows them the space to reflect on how it has shaped who they are today, and also how they will move forward to this continuous process called learning.

Sharing the literacy narratives in peer workshop could be a very nice way to create a strong classroom community where students begin to teach one another.