On literacy narratives

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a first-year student in a writing class in the first weeks of class.

Today is the day that the teacher is explaining the first paper: a literacy narrative assignment. The prompt reads: tell a story about yourself as a reader and writer. How might your respond? What might your questions or concerns be? Which stories from your own life would come to mind?

Literacy narrative assignments signal an approach to teaching writing that values reflection and lived experiences. This is meant as an inclusive assignment that welcomes students to college life, one that draws from their diverse experiences, and one that gives space for their own voices.

The literacy narrative also demands an act of self-disclosure from students. While it is up to the individual student how to handle this demand, the literacy narrative assumes that students already identify as literate in ways that shape their identity and in the ways they present themselves in the world and through words.

Yet there are points of intersection where students’ and teachers’ ideas surrounding literacy can be more clearly spelled out. Rather than assuming what we are talking about when we talk about literacy, I strive to find a common starting point for teachers and students to explore literacy, and to do so through models in the African American literary tradition.

This problem first presented itself to me as a writing tutor and teacher on assignments that ask students to think critically about literacy events in their own lives. I had assigned a literacy narrative to my own writing students, and they told the same stories of survival, overcoming, and sponsorship that later helped me to organize my dissertation. Their frameworks help me simplify my dissertation, and one way I might further develop students’ approaches to literacy would be to do studies similar to others studying literacy narratives in separate, but related research.

I discovered more about literacy narratives working as a tutor. The advantages of working with students one-on-one is that they are more likely to admit their concerns and tutoring provides a space where some of these disconnects can be more directly addressed.

Quite late in my dissertation-writing process, for example, I had the opportunity to tutor a former student. Although it was for a different assignment, it involved a lot of personal writing. As a second generation Chinese student, he asked me how to avoid the same tired stories of his family’s hard work and his continued dedication. His comment allowed me to realize the extent to which students tap into recognizable tropes in the ways they tell stories about their own lives, and the high stakes involved in personal writing that make these tropes culturally relevant.

At the same time, there’s the danger of such models silencing students, as they get caught up in these pervasive narratives. Also, more lore surrounding literacy acquisition in that the process of literacy acquisition is a one-time passage, an assumption I worked against in my dissertation by showing various engagements with texts and even with the surrounding world.

While the former slaves in my literacy narrative chapter were only able to make out letters, they were adept cultural readers who later became literate. Literacy is also a legacy, as previous generations pass on their wisdom to the future. Literacy acquisition is ongoing, especially in new and unfamiliar contexts, but also on familiar terrain as we envision new ways of reading and writing.

One of the grounding assumptions of my research, then, is that the way we present ourselves as literate individuals indicates both literacy’s role in self-fashioning and our role in shaping and re-shaping the literacy’s significance.

Other work focuses on the role of literacy as one feature of African American literature. This is clearest in the literature on the slave narrative, in which accounts of literacy acquisition are a common trope of the genre. My research builds from that focus and extends it to twentieth and twenty-first century texts in a survey approach of key texts.

One question might be why I chose these particular texts. First, African American literature, from the slave narratives onward, present literacy as key to the formation and presentation of the self. My first job, then, was to define these texts as literacy narratives, a genre I am using from writing and literacy studies.

My research uses recent advances in language theory, as well as foundational works in composition, to show a continued investment in literacy among African Americans. With a survey approach to these texts, ranging from 1860 to 2008, I explore the literacy narrative genre in detail.

It is my position that reading these literacy narrative can help students better appreciate the larger socio-ideological forces that influence their own reading and writing practices.

From there, I developed the key models of literacy coming out of the literature. These models act as an organizing principle for my research. While I engage the models of survival, overcoming, and sponsorship, in particular, there are others outside of the scope of my research I would like to examine more closely.

For example, two closely connected to my dissertation but not fully fleshed out are literacy as mastery and literacy as standard or threshold. A third is in connection with the American Dream captured in the words of Langston Hughes: “what happens to a dream deferred?” By the time of the early 20th century, the promises of post-Reconstruction collaboration proved hollow, as individuals and institutions were tasked with securing their own literacies.

It is my underlying argument that literacy narratives can help students reflect on the literacy events, sponsors and other meta-narratives that have shaped them in their growing identities as readers and writers. I draw from African American writers, including Ellen and William Craft, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and Toni Morrison in particular to make this claim. It is important for my project in that these models are used as a pedagogical tool to help students frame their reflective responses, rather than stand in for their own responses.

Another goal of my research is to engage in a productive discussion that brings together composition theory and literature. language, which could inform learning objectives and assignments, as well as enrich discussion.

My choice of theory emanated from the central finding that language use is tied to identity in ways that can get overlooked in our ways of framing and describing the self, and also that systems of privilege are inscribed in the standards we set and work to maintain. However, this approach alerted me to both points of intersection and divergence in the field, which I account for in making these claims by showing the relevance of reading in writing classes, as well as potentially writing’s value for reading works of literature. While these all constitute engagements with texts that fall under the umbrella of the English department, disciplinary histories that I reference like Sharon Crowleys’ and David Russell’s help me to show the turns the areas made in defining themselves.

In Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, William and Ellen Craft effectively navigate the nineteenth-century racial landscape despite their inability to read and write. William and Ellen present their manipulation of others’ readings of their bodies in transit, using readings of race to their advantage. Indeed, due to this difference, it might seem like a strange text to call this a literacy narrative at all. However, although they were only able to decipher some letters at the time of their escape, their retrospective literacy narrative calls for a broader understanding of literacy and literate practices.

Their literacy narrative imposes a critical stamp on their environment and legitimizes their critique of slavery. William and Ellen Craft demonstrate their cultural fluency while in transit by manipulating the readings of others, based on culturally-encoded visual markers of race, gender, class, ability, (hetero-)sexuality, and literacy.

Taking up issues of sexuality, gender, ability, language, and race, their narrative emphasizes how systems of privilege work together to disenfranchise individuals. Connecting identity to language politics more explicitly, I use recent work in translingualism to show how porous boundaries around languages disrupt the discrete categories imposed on our social and intellectual landscapes.

I also envision how this model of literacy can serve First Year Writing students in composing their own literate identities. In addition to making visible how racialized bodies are read, commodified, and consumed through American literature, Ellen’s disguise maps onto how intersections of individual identity, expanding notions of literacy beyond text-based proficiency and mastery to a more fluid reading of texts, bodies, identity, and the larger environment.

Published in 1929, Nelaa Larsen's Passing celebrates a New Negro modernity that is both urban and educated. It takes a look into the social networks framing the personal interactions of Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, and shows the complexities of reading race on the American urban landscape. Using race as a visual signpost, I use the well-established trope of visibility in this text to explore the novella as a literacy narrative encouraging open-ended cultural reading practices. What’s most novel in this chapter, in addition to using a founding work in composition studies to explore this text, is the reading of primary colors. Larsen’s use of primary colors highlight the reading practices of visually-inscribed binaries.

A series of literacy quests in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye highlights childhood literacy acquisition for children developing the skills that they will need as adults. Unlike the MacTeer sisters, who effectively learn to read their environment from these quests, Pecola Breedlove increasingly dissociates from the community of Lorraine, Ohio. Survival and death are set up in dramatic terms from the beginning of The Bluest Eye. Pecola Breedlove, unable to make sense out of the recent changes in her body and the way that the townspeople are reacting to her, reads her growing isolation from her home community as evidence of her unlovability and ugliness rather than as a result of her unmistakably pregnant body confronting the town with evidence of her father’s sexual transgression. In response, the town distances itself from her, increasing her obsession with the white beauty she thinks could make her lovable.

Psychically fractured by violence and neglect, she devolves into talking to, and responding to, herself, in a chorus of call-and response that replaces meaningful interaction with others. By novel’s end, Pecola’s deterioration shows her full-fledged fixation on having obtained her obsession: the blue eyes that she believes would make her lovable and safe from harm. Morrison provides a cautionary tale warning to be careful what one wishes for in this literacy narrative.

The enduring legacy of white beauty standards also looms over the novel, packaged and disseminated for a mass audience in the twentieth century through popular media. In addition to my close reading of her children’s book The Book of Mean People, this chapter advances an in-depth exploration of Soaphead Church.

The discomfort related to Church’s character speaks to the complexity of his characterization, questioning the limits and use of empathy in reading him. Morrison asks us how far we are willing to enter into this uncomfortable space in order to reconcile our tendency to judge and condemn with our desire to better understand the forces that shape, and eventually destroy, Pecola. Whereas most criticism glosses over Church, in this chapter, I examine his ritualistic letter writing to God following a riveting interaction with Pecola.

Reflective letter-writing also factors into the next chapter. Morrison’s neo-slave narrative A Mercy considers the ways that historical narratives get developed and maintained. Written in the beginning of the twentieth century, it relates the story of a seventeenth-century young female slave who ventures into the woods and returns to etch her story on the walls and floor of her master’s abandoned mansion in this neo-slave narrative.

Florens’ journey through the woods compels her confession, or in other words, her reading of the American landscape primes her for her writing. By the conclusion of the novel, she recovers a connection with her dislocated maternal ancestry to survive the daily increasing isolation and oppression she is facing from her mixed-race community.

Important for my study, Morrison provides insight into reading and writing as distinct literacy practices rather than conflating the two. Furthermore, she examines how race is read in 21st century America by imagining a time before race was fashioned in the ways we have come to know and recognize.

Not all of the characters in A Mercy are racially identified, and readers cannot use the markers they have used to assign race to individuals. Published in 2008, Morrison’s later novel signifies on twenty-first century assumptions about race in connection with literacy and other systems of oppression. The details of Florens’ personal writing relating her journey into the confusing, untamed American landscape provides experience for her reflection, etched into the physical space of her master’s abandoned mansion. Morrison also shows the intergenerational legacy of slavery. At the same time, she shows how even private writing can help recuperate dislocation and mitigate trauma.

Finally, my research reimagines the classroom space given the increased diversity on college campuses, heeding Matsuda’s 2006 advice and the ongoing implications of CCCC’s Students’ Right to their Own Language(s) for English departments as they re-imagine the literacies they pass on to future generations. At the heart of this project is the potency of narratives that gloss over the lived experiences of marginalized individuals and homogenize the particulars of oppression based on difference. Together with their composition students, instructors and other composition practitioners can begin to explore the politics behind inclusionary and exclusionary practices in classroom and other public spaces through literacy narratives.

I align myself with scholars who point out that linguistically-diverse students are still not adequately accounted for in our theorizing of First Year writing, despite the fact that language users diverse repertoires enter into both ESL and writing classes each year. Most classroom spaces are still conceived of as predominantly or even only English speaking.

Students continue to be marginalized due to factors such as language use. Rather than a burden to address, linguistic differences offer the opportunity to Writing departments to think through the ramifications of English use in increasingly diverse environments, and how departments want to position themselves in relationship to language politics when setting their learning goals.

Rather than assuming an “English only” space in which all students are native speakers, teachers can actively engage students in coursework that bears witness to their own cultural stores, building from the multiplicity of experiences and literacies that the classroom space brings together.

As a reflective starting place to envision the challenges and rewards of literacy in their professional and personal lives, literacy narratives attest to how language users shape, and are shaped by, the college literacy classroom. I call for a theory that acknowledges that the work of the First Year Writing classroom can become a productively collaborative space, and do so by crossing some intra-disciplinary divides to see how to best work together.