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A scenario: Student X has been eagerly awaiting the return of her Literacy
Memoir assignment. She is worried that she didn’t do well on this assignment
(worth 25 percent of her whole grade!), never having written an essay on the
subject of her literacy, and not even being quite sure what “literacy” means,
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Copyright © 2019 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
anyway. It was hard to know how to approach that paper, since her instruc-
tor had told her that lots of things could count as literacy—even things that
didn’t involve reading books or writing papers, or didn’t happen at school.
Trusting that this was true, X wrote about a time when she learned just how
important it was to be a friend, naming the lesson of the experience as one
of “friendship literacy.” Somehow, it didn’t feel to her like this was exactly
what her teacher was looking for, but having been told that she should think
broadly and take chances, she went ahead with the idea—it certainly felt
risky enough.
Finally, her teacher’s response to the work arrives in her inbox. She first
notes the grade of B—disappointing, but not disastrous—and then reads:
Great story, and I’m glad you chose to write about something not usually as-
sociated with school. However, I’m unclear about your definition of literacy.
Also, your essay could use more examples and vivid details (note how Richard
Rodriguez and Amy Tan do this in their essays). Finally, your conclusion needs
more development—lots of people say that loyalty in friendship is important,
but isn’t the situation you’re describing really more complicated than that?
How is knowing how to be a friend a form of literacy?
Not as bad as she feared, not as good as she hoped. She closes the message
and turns to the next writing task, a “research paper.” Maybe this next thing
will go better, X hopes—she really needs to bring up her average, if she is to
be admitted to the major. This time, she’ll be sure not to take any chances
with the assignment—this one didn’t pay off so well, and she believes that her
high school English classes have, at least, taught her some less risky strategies
for earning good grades on her writing.
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We find that much of the disciplinary thinking about the uses of LNs in
FYW curricula retains a focus on the genre-specific features of LNs as texts
(whether produced by published writers or by writing students), rather
than as practices (Scott’s work is an exception, arguing that production,
rather than consumption, of LNs should be a primary goal). In “Successes,
Victims, and Prodigies: ‘Master’ and ‘Little’ Cultural Narratives in the
Literacy Narrative Genre,” for example, Kara Poe Alexander makes a case
for a broader understanding of the contents of LNs produced by students
in first-year writing classes. She describes LNs composed by students as
making predictable thematic moves and observes that these moves often
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is, potentially any experience), it can be a path to access for diverse learn-
ers. Researchers and scholars concerned with supporting nonmainstream
students have recognized the need for richer, more nuanced understand-
ings of how narratives can work pedagogically. We think, for example, of
Amy E. Robillard, who, in responding to the ongoing need to create more
accessible learning opportunities for working-class students, has called
for “a more complex pedagogy of narrative,” one that would “pay more at-
tention to how our students write their stories, why they write them, and
how they conceive of time in those stories” (91). Robillard sees personal
narrative writing as a means for working-class students to manage predica-
ments of studenthood by marshaling, and learning how to understand, the
affordances of their past experiences. She makes the case that the practice
of narrativizing is important for working-class students in particular, not
only because first-generation college students are already experienced in
practices of narrativizing, but also because they may not have histories of
projecting futures in ways that have been carefully planned and supported
by their social environments.
Our inspiration for rethinking the role of LNs, our LCM project, put
us into a different relationship as learners with students and their stories—
different, that is, from what is typically possible in the time and space of a
writing classroom (Halbritter and Lindquist “Time”). Listening to students’
LNs in alternative learning environments—along a much longer timeline,
and in spaces other than the classroom—made available to us new under-
standings of what facilitated processes of narrativizing can do for students.
The expanded timeline of LCM allowed us to make some observations
about how stories develop in narrative encounters, how to facilitate this
process, and how we might position ourselves as learners-from, rather than
solely as teachers-of, students’ stories. And this has changed how we see
the affordances of such stories within the greatly abbreviated timelines of
our FYW courses.
LCM was originally motivated by our desire to learn more about the
futures that first-generation students projected by way of their experi-
ences in higher education (Halbritter and Lindquist “Time”). Our goal of
investigating literacy sponsorship in students’ lives was served by eliciting
LNs from participants in scenes of collaborative invention (e.g., video-
recorded interviews). As such, we discovered that they had to be carefully
supported and scaffolded as inventive acts (to be made available for future,
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practices of schooling. DeRosa worries that critics such as Greer “often label
literacy narratives as ‘conversion narratives,’ and are skeptical of the ‘success
stories’ produced in students’ literacy narratives,” citing Greer’s concerns
that “conversion rhetoric in students’ narratives often aims at pleasing the
instructor,”6 and that “asking students to write specifically about cultural
literacy issues is itself a form of exclusion of students’ voices, a repressive
pedagogical practice similar to those that students have encountered in
their past schooling experience” (5). DeRosa suggests that “[i]t seems hasty
on the parts of critics who imply students’ reflections on their literacy ex-
periences lead them to become mired in a particular historical narrative
or force them to adopt a potentially repressive discourse,” on the grounds
that such criticisms risk a too-hasty dismissal of narrative pedagogy and
its potential for meaningful reflection (5).
We further suggest that it is essential to understand LNs as perfor-
mances that take place in scenes defined by histories, relationships, and ma-
terial environments—and that it is (precisely) the inevitable performativity
of storytelling that gives it much of its generative force as a pedagogical
practice. That students (behaving in their capacity as people) tell particular
stories, within specified contexts, for certain purposes is an understanding
that should be central to any pedagogy that puts LNs at the center. What
we are suggesting is that the production of LNs should be positioned early
in the writing curriculum, and that the instruction that follows should be
directed to revealing the situated nature of stories of literacy—stories with
which students may continue to enter into dialogue over the course of the
term as they are referenced in students’ ELDs.
And while the production of LNs is important as a situated act of
literacy in and of itself, the product that narrativizing yields is critical to
facilitate each writer’s ongoing dialogue over time. By way of these early
LNs, students may enter into dialogue with their former selves in order to
discover ideas about literacy that have changed by way of their subsequent
studies and literate practices.7 In this way, the early LNs serve as data for
later reflection; that is, whereas the LN is supported by each student’s
memories, the later reflection will be supported by the elements present
in the LN, students’ experiences of subsequent writing activities, as well
as the resources created by way of those activities. Thus, the early use of
LNs serves to represent each student’s starting point in terms of not only
familiarity (or lack thereof) with literacy as a theoretical topic or set of
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“[N]ot all literacy narratives are created equal when it comes to the work they
do for students and what they communicate to teachers. For some students,
creating a literacy narrative may be their first opportunity to invent a self with
an educational history. For others, it may present yet another opportunity to
refine fictions drafted long ago of who they are as good students. The work in
one case might entail facilitating the process of creating a useful narrative of
their studenthood; in another, it might be more deconstructive, getting students
to understand how developed narratives have served them and what might
happen if they understood differently the experiences and events their narrative
renders. (Lindquist 180–81)
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inventive work for her in a space that otherwise did not exist in her life. In
other words, when students such as Liberty Bell agree to participate in the
LCM project and come to regard the project as a kind of literacy sponsor
otherwise unavailable, this, too, can open insights into literacy histories
and patterns of sponsorship (Halbritter and Lindquist “Time,” “Sleight”8).
We are reminded of Annette Lareau’s study of the educational ex-
periences of children from working- and middle-class communities. In
that study, Lareau remarks on the striking differences in entitlement to
intervene in the conduct and decision-making processes of school insti-
tutions between working- and middle-class families. In Lareau’s observa-
tions, middle-class parents were much more likely to assume that their
own stories of their children’s needs and capabilities would be welcomed
and sanctioned by educational institutions and to expect results based on
these (tactically deployed) stories. Working-class parents, by contrast, did
not feel authorized to offer such stories as strategic interventions in their
children’s schooling. Such beliefs about where and when stories of self are
appropriate in educational settings are themselves expressions of literacy
histories. Our realization that LNs do far more complicated forms of work
than we had imagined has convinced us that they deserve both fully theo-
rized research methodologies and pedagogies to realize their possibilities.
DeRosa asks her students to write a series of LNs: “several self-reflective
literacy narratives that accompany each of the genre-based writing projects
for the course” (3). This seems like an appropriate move—far more genera-
tive than the single literacy-story performance that curricula typically invite.
What we would like to offer in an effort to make DeRosa’s approach even
more productive is a set of scaffolded curricular moves that make good on
the inventive potential of LNs we have discovered though our LCM research.
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they may, in fact, be excellent). The early LN—the first narrativizing expe-
rience—becomes the essential first move in a sequence of such activities.
It may be tempting to regard our shopping list of future evidence
(Figure 1) as an oversimplified assessment or to lament the loss of more
traditional indicators of excellence, such as those found in common col-
lege writing rubrics. However, we have found that the shopping list actually
helps us make better use of the more traditional indicators of excellence
than the rubrics in which they are commonly found. For example, we are
not recommending that teachers abandon holistic evaluation of the LN;
we are simply suggesting that holistic evaluation be moved to formative
rather than summative assessment. In fact, we suggest that the shopping
list be followed by a list of strengths—possibly copied and pasted from
the draft—and goals—either that emerge from the strengths above or that
emerge from elements also copied and pasted from the student’s draft
(Figure 1). We see several benefits in this approach to assessment: (1) it
models how to derive claims from evidence; (2) it models for students how
to reflect in the way that we will use reflection—looking back at what hap-
pened and using the evidence we find to formulate goals for future work;
(3) it builds trust that we will only grade what we say we will grade—that
is, not only already-excellent writers will be rewarded for their hard work;
and (4) it can encourage risk taking when students come to be convinced
that the risks they take do not need to be successful in order to be useful.
Furthermore, as indicated in Figure 2, the criteria for summative assess-
ment detailed in the grading form define the writing experience that each
student will pursue, rather than detail levels of excellence to be assessed
by way of the final draft. The formative section of the grading form posits
goals by way of what is revealed in the draft that emerges from that writing
experience—not for the teacher to have the final word on the draft, but for
the teacher to offer preflective comments to be referenced, potentially, in
subsequent acts of student reflection or assessment.
So, in some ways, everything changes: assignments become valued
most for the subsequent work they will inform and facilitate. In other ways,
nothing changes: assignments are evaluated as examples of the best efforts
that students can offer at the time. Most of us are already doing the latter;
it’s the former that most of us are not doing—and it’s the former that is
unlikely to happen on its own.
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Figure 2. The roles of summative and formative assessment in the assessment form for the LN.
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Our faith in the process goes to our central premise about literacy
itself, one informed and supported by a vast corpus of research on the
sociocultural nature and uses of literacy: that any act of literacy entails
not only genre-specific understandings but also situated awarenesses of
socio-rhetorical implications and engagements. With this in mind, stu-
dents will differ in the learning they will need to prioritize. The curriculum
we recommend—bookended by the LN and the ELD—attempts to help
students self-diagnose the learning they need most—not only to correct
deficits and amplify strengths but also to model how to manage successfully
the complexity of their ongoing development subsequent to the end of the
semester. We can’t, as we like to say, “get them all learned up.” However, we
can help them identify learning by way of their writing experiences and
to project goals from that learning onto their future development—not in
order to solve problems, but in order to continue addressing problems in
informed ways.
We suggest that it is important to scaffold not only the stuff inform-
ing eventual reflection—the ELD—but also using the “small stories” stuff
to support building trust in reflective writing itself—and in what are likely
unfamiliar means for learning writing. Students will probably not immedi-
ately trust these new methods. Small, early victories (e.g., demonstrations of
productive uses of informed reflection—of the successful uses of inaccurate
proposals and misdiagnosed revision strategies) are essential to gaining
students’ trust that this is not yet another system designed to use their
experiences as means for punishing them for their failures to conform to
an expected standard performance of excellence. In short, in a pedagogy
that attempts to make the most of students’ experiences of learning by way
of literate activities, the productive values of those experiences and the at-
tempted sharing of those experiences must be demonstrated early and often.
Once students perceive that they will not be punished for making false starts
and uninformed early plans, but instead will be led to make use of those
performances as evidence of their development (not merely their deficits),
students may be able to lean into the unfamiliar work of elucidating plans
that represent their best fledgling attempts—not as scripts for how they will
proceed, but as snapshots of their thinking prior to engaging the process
of pursuing the writing project(s). The reflection, in and of itself, will not
expose the learning by way of its miraculous potencies; rather, the assign-
ment sequence will shift the burden of demonstrating success to the final
reflection as taught. See, for example, the ELD assessment form in Figure 4.
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A Final Reflection
We have suggested that literacy narratives can be an important part of a
curriculum designed to encourage students to understand themselves as
developing learners and students. We know that there is great potential for
LNs—conceived as opportunities for narrativizing—when invited within a
scaffolded curriculum of collaborative narrative inquiry, to educate teach-
ers about the literate lives of their students—to help teachers “know” their
students in ways unavailable to them without such deliberate collaborative
inquiry. The goal of the curriculum we have described is twofold: (1) for
students to invent life stories that serve their current educational projects,
and (2) for students to acquire transferable rhetorical knowledge through
the practice of narrative inquiry. With such a goal in mind, the primary
pedagogical content in the course becomes instruction in methods for
facilitating and scaffolding literacy narratives. As we have seen, such a
course operates differently from a course that begins with a consideration
of definitions of literacy for the purposes of inviting students to create nar-
ratives that could plausibly function as stories of literacy, one that positions
LNs as examples of “personal narrative” or “memoir,” and that assesses the
products of the LN as more or less successful examples of this genre. Instead,
we have suggested using early storytelling opportunities to set in motion
an ongoing series of interventions in the development of the learning self
who is engaged in the project of discovering the uses of writing for or as
inquiry. This approach entails repositioning literacy as a concept in order to
better facilitate discovery of, and reflection on, students’ own experiences.
In the spirit of reflecting and goal setting, we leave you with these
thoughts. In reflecting on what we have learned so far, and the work yet
ahead of us, what we describe here is a pedagogical approach that moves
from teaching narratives to learning via narrativizing. This seems like a good
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Notes
1. In this piece, we describe the goals and methodology of the LCM project. It
is not our purpose here to fully elaborate the discoveries of this project, but
to point at it as a set of moves and learning experiences that have informed
our work as writing teachers. We describe our rationale and approach to
that project as follows: “Research interviews—as scenes of production—can
be strategically sequenced to elicit narratives as inventive practice: like any
other human encounter, an interview is necessarily rhetorical (and therefore
interactive and scenic), and it can be intentionally arranged in a sequence
of other such encounters to (further) exploit the inventive potential of time,
already implicit in the temporal practice of narrative. The research design we
have developed has four phases, all of which use videotaped interviews as the
primary method of data collection . . . .[W]e begin with a scaffolded interview
sequence (Phases 1 and 2) to discover domains of practice—forms of inven-
tion, communication, and sponsorship—and to identify emergent narrative
arcs. After eliciting themes and topoi relevant to students’ literacy practices,
we move to (researcher-sponsored) participant-generated video documents of
relevant sites, practices, and sponsors (Phase 3). Finally, we join participants
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Julie Lindquist
Julie Lindquist is professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State Univer-
sity, where she teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, literacy and composition
studies, and research methodologies. She is author of A Place to Stand: Politics
and Persuasion in a Working Class Bar (2002) and, with David Seitz, Ele-
ments of Literacy (2008). Her writings on rhetoric, class, literacy, and writing
pedagogy have appeared in College Composition and Communication, Col-
lege English, JAC, and Pedagogy, as well as in several edited collections. Her
article “Time, Lives, and Videotape: Operationalizing Discovery in Scenes of
Literacy Sponsorship,” co-authored with Bump Halbritter, was awarded The
Richard Ohmann Award for Outstanding Article in College English in 2013. Julie
began her tenure as Assistant Chair of CCCC in December 2018.
Bump Halbritter
Bump Halbritter is associate professor of Rhetoric and Writing and director of
the First-Year Writing Program at Michigan State University. His research and
teaching involve the integration of video-based, audio-visual writing into scenes
of college writing and scholarly research. Bump’s 2013 article, “Time, Lives,
and Videotape: Operationalizing Discovery in Scenes of Literacy Sponsorship,”
co-authored with Julie Lindquist, received The Richard Ohmann Award for
Outstanding Article in College English. Bump’s book, Mics, Cameras, Symbolic
Action: Audio-Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, received the Computers and
Composition Distinguished Book Award for 2013. Bump serves on the CCCC
Executive Committee (2017–2019).
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