Writing Prompt

Consider the following lyrics from the song Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve.

I'm a million different people from one day to the next.

Reflect on this idea for a few moments. Is this lyric true for you? Think about the different roles you play from one day to the next, or from one hour to the next. You might be a student, an employee, a parent, someone's "better half," a volunteer, a musician, etc. Are you a million different people from one day to the next? Write your thoughts out, explaining the "million" people you are.



Lyrics taken from: www.lyricsondemand.com/onehitwonders/bittersweetsymphonylyrics.html

Relevant to my readings and preparation for the up-coming seminar paper, I decided to share a writing prompt intended to get Basic Writing students to think about experience and identity shift.

Writing Prompt: Describe a recent experience that has profoundly changed your perspective on an issue of personal importance. In what way has this impacted your previous perspective? How might it change your approach to the issue in the future?

Blogging Matters

Essentially relevant to our class, I recently read Diane Penrod's Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy. While her book's contents focus on blogging protocol, her answers to the essential question why blog? interest me most, having never considered blogging itself as an approach to enhancing literacy. The idea is far from novel. We spend so much time at the computer, online, steadfast to fluid technology. Is it not costly that professors continue to question the practical blog in lieu of embrassing the favored technology? The blog's expansion seems inevitable to me; the blog has its rightfully-earned place in today's writing classroom. Penrod notes that the ability to write in online environments is part of being literate in the 21st century, a fact that resonates with college freshmen but may seem superficial to professors. She appreciates blogging for its teachability and importance in "mastering language use, writing, critical thinking and multimedia use," adding that "blogging requires students to be active learners."


I certainly would be interested in adding blogging to the Basic Writing course syllabus. The idea opens up a fresh take on the Basic Writing curriculum and I have little doubt that students would be adverse to it.









Penrod, Diane. "Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy." Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

"The Learning Curve"

Reflecting a bit about last week's discussion about on students' and teachers' expectations, I remembered David Sedaris' book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, wherein he tells us his about his one and only teaching experience. Midway through his lovely anecdote, entitled "The Learning Curve," Sedaris expresses his loathing of the writing workshop: "The perfect balance between sadism and masochism."


As an instructor, Mr. Sedaris' own expectations stare far away from realistic. He admitted that he had prepared no lessons, nothing, expecting that students would talk without provocation, "offering their thoughts and opinions on the issues of the day. I'd imagined myself sitting on the edge of the desk, overlooking a forest of raised hands." Wow. To expect that writing students--or any students--would talk without provocation is just callow. After several failed experimental assignments, he decided to show One Life to Live episodes coupled with "guessay" assignments: "brief predictions of what might take place the following day." He confessed to his anger when, after thinking that he had actually taught his students something, their predictions left his expectations utterly unsatisfied.

Sedaris' approach falls far short of his students' expectations, clearly. One student transferred to another class after Sedaris encouraged smoking in the classroom. Following his instruction to write a letter to their mothers in prison, a student revealed that both her father and uncle were serving time and called the assignment "really . . . depressing." A middle-aged, returning student, fed up with his course and his lousy feedback, asked him squarely "just who . . . in the stinking hell do you think . . . you are?" Talk about unmet expectations; can you imagine the layers of rankling disgruntlement that built up before such a question came out of her mouth?

Another example of unrealized expecations, Sedaris' experience with beginning writing students leaves me with no better an impression than Shaughnessy's. I could be overly optimistic and proclaim that if I hold students in high expectations, I will see them met. Still, I choose to stick to a simpler doctrine: don't expect.

Collecting Abstracts

The idea of reconciling cultural identities intrigues me. Initially, the idea of dealing with such reconciliation in the writing classroom seemed to me utterly purposeless, so I decided to read more about it. I'm compiling some readings on the matter, hopefully to stimulate a thesis. I plan on questioning the claim that a Basic Writing course can impact students' identities, if so, how. If identity is at all formed through the use of language, can a shift in language usage (by learning academic writing) effectively cause a shift in identity in some students? I will touch on these and other ideas as they come up.

Here are some abstracts:

Identity and discoursal elements: Three case studies of first-year writing students
by Hollander, Pamela Weisenberg, Ed.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005
Abstract (Summary)
This dissertation examines, from a poststructural perspective, the writing of three first-year college students enrolled in the researcher's basic writing course, which was taught from a social constructivist perspective. The goal of this research is to gain a better understanding of how the course may have impacted the students' writing and their multiple and changing identities. Building on the idea that identity is formed through the use of language, the focus of this study is the discourses, and subject positions made available through these discourses, in students' writing. Interviews were used to identify discourses and subject positions contributing to the autobiographical selves (Ivanic, 1998) that students brought with them to the course and Critical Discourse Analysis was used to discover what discourses and subject positions were drawn on in students' writing.
The degree to which the case study students' writing and identities were impacted by the social constructivist curriculum and course readings varied depending on how closely the discourses and subject positions they took up before the course matched those of the course. Specifically, Autoethnographic genre was found to encourage the use of Social Constructivist Discourse, raising the possibility that genre plays an important role in providing students with access to Social Constructivist Discourse and associated subject positions. Nonacademic discourses and subject positions were found in the students writing. Students' identities were found to be sites of competing, shifting discourses.
This study implies that poststructuralist ideas are useful for theorizing about writing. The fact that there were multiple, competing discourses found in students' writing has implications for conceptualizing the first-year writing course as "dialectical" (Wall & Coles, 1991). Students may find other discourses more appealing than Social Constructivist Discourse because of their offer of comfort and optimism. The finding that students drew on subject positions and discourses they found in the course readings has implications for seeing readings as "sponsors" (Goldblatt, 1995; Herrington & Curtis, 2000), which give students authority to draw on particular discourses and subject positions.

Academic writing and identity: An ethnographic study of a basic writing class
by Otto, Sheila, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, 2001
Abstract (Summary)
This dissertation reports findings from an ethnographic study of writing and identity in a basic writing class at a two-year college. Grounded in a theoretical frame where both identity and literacy are defined as socially constructed, the study examines the social construction of identity for basic writing students. Data collection, which occurred throughout the sixteen-week semester, consisted of participant observation, the recording of field notes, audio taping and videotaping of class sessions, interviews with participants, and the collection of artifacts. Selected classroom literacy events and the written texts of three students were analyzed using sociolinguistic and microethnographic methods. The analysis focused on (1) the moment-to-moment construction of identity as people interacted with one another during interactions in the classroom, and (2) the social positions created as a result of the linguistic choices students made in their written texts. Findings from this study indicate that the students positioned themselves very differently in their written texts than they did in their face-to-face interactions. During class discussions, specifically those conversations in which they discussed the subjects of their essays, students positioned themselves as engaged, knowledgeable, and interested participants. However, in their written texts, through the use of such linguistic techniques as nominalization, third person inanimate subjects, passive verb constructions, intransitive verbs, and low affinity modality, students positioned themselves as detached, unengaged authors, and they tended to position themselves and others as having little sense of agency. Students' written texts were weak, in part, because they attempted to distance themselves from the content of their essays. These findings suggest that issues of writing and identity should be discussed and examined by students and teachers in writing classrooms. By acknowledging that literacy is inextricably connected to issues of identity, teachers can begin to help students make choices about how they want to position themselves in their texts as well as in their interactions.

Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse in the Writing Classroom: Classifying Critical Pedagogies of Whiteness. Beech, Jennifer, Ph. D. University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.

Abstract: The article describes the class and race differences among middle and working class folks. Redneck is a polyvalent referent with multiple, shifting meanings across time and space. It notes how poor working class whites are despised and considered inferior to elite whites. Thus introducing the concept of white racism where poor whites are termed as hillbilly, redneck, white trash, and cracker, that in essence means that they are deviant, obsolescent and unsophisticated. In this process of discussing such issues students know their roles and prejudices while learning is enhanced by use of resources such as dictionary and websites.

Hollander, Pamela Weisenberg. "Identity and Discoursal Elements: Three Case Studies of First-year Writing Students." Diss. U of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005.


Otto, Sheila. "Academic Writing and Identity: An Ethnographic Study of a Basic Writing Class." Diss. Vanderbilt University, 2001.


Beech, Jennifer. "Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse in the Writing Classroom: Classifying Critical Pedagogies of Whiteness." College English 67.2 (2004): 172-186.

Basic Writing Instructors' Expectations

As a Basic Writing instructor, my initial expectation would be quite elementary: that students know their language. As I have come to understand from this course, such an expectation is already too much--most students in the Basic Writing classroom do not know their language. Understanding that, my first expectation is blown away. Second, I would expect that students who do not know their language (and who are there to learn it better), would be eager to learn! Again, from this course I have learned that such an expectation, that students be willing to learn and grow as writers, is over-shot. Perhaps third I would expect that students' writing abilities improve over the course of the semester; this, too, is expecting too much. Not all students will improve.

If I have learned anything about expectation from this course, it is simply not to expect. Or to expect the unexpected and that Basic Writers will be basic writers.

Basic Writers' Expectations

It is difficult to imagine the experience of a Basic Writing student. Myself, I feel a firm, content control over my language. Not to have such control, or to feel discontent in my control however it be, must be the experience of the Basic Writer.


Expectations of the Basic Writer? As a Basic Writer, I suppose I might go to the Basic Writing course expecting first that I would learn more about English and writing in English, that I would grow as a writer--that I would find the tools to help me become a better writer. I would expect to find an instructor who is willing to assist my growth. I would expect that it would take a lot of time and effort, practice. I would expect to gain--most importantly--more control over my langauge.