[Teaching_Basic_Writing] Personal Writing in the BasicWriting Classroom

[Laurie Grobman]

Hi,

The late Candace Spigelman's book, _Personal Speaking: Experience as 
Evidence in Academic Writing_ (I may have the subtitle a bit 
incorrect), is incredibly valuable for this topic.

Laurie

At 03:16 PM 3/8/2006, Molly H. Moran wrote:
>First I want to thank Karen for mentioning Mary Soliday's and Marilyn
>Sternglass's books, which I hadn't known about and which sound very
>relevant to this topic of transitioning from "personal" to "academic"
>writing.  I have already put in an order for them.
>
>One possible way to transition from the purely personal (e.g., "write
>about an event that changed your life") to the
>public/academic-but-infused-with-the-personal is to have students do
>journal or freewriting in which they connect personally to a public
>issue or a theme in a reading.  In his book Opening Up, psychologist
>James Pennebaker talks about an experiment he conducted at SMU in which
>an experimental group of students who were enrolled in a large poli sci
>lecture course were told to do freewriting for the first 10 minutes of
>their weekly breakaway group discussion classes--in the freewriting they
>were supposed to connect personally in some way with one or more of the
>week's lecture topics.  They had to turn this writing in, but they
>weren't graded on it (and I don't think the TA running the section read
>it--but I'd have to look this up again).  The findings were that the
>experimental group ended up having much livelier discussions about the
>topics and writing better papers for the course than did those in the
>standard groups (in which they just discussed the week's lecture
>topics).  I think that if students know that the teacher is not going to
>read this freewriting--but just have the student flash it before her
>eyes to check that they did it--students feel much freer to explore
>their feelings/thoughts related to the topic.  Students can then be
>guided into finding a thread in their freewriting that they can develop
>into a public essay.  For many students, they may need to be guided via
>a one-on-one conference.
>
>I was excited about hearing Sam's thoughts on writing about trauma,
>because this is how I got into the whole area of writing-and-healing and
>from there into the idea of using it for basic writers.  I personally
>experienced the psychological transformation effected by taking a
>traumatic experience (in my case, this was the disappearance and murder
>of my sister) and turning it into a narrative.  The shaping of this
>chaotic, confusing, painful, bewildering mass into art (if you will)
>helped me to move beyond the pain, in a sense to let it go.  I hadn't
>realized how common this experience was until I started reading around
>in writing and healing theory--especially the essay "From Trauma to
>Writing" by Marian MacCurdy in the NCTE volume she co-editied entitled
>Writing and Healing.  You are probably already familiar with this work,
>Sam, but if not, I recommend it.  Oh, this reminds me: if anyone is
>interested in learning more about my memoir about my sister's tragedy,
>you can go to my website:
>http://www.findingsusan.com/
>
>There are so many more intriguing questions many of you have raised that
>I want to respond to eventually.  Please keep the questions, insights,
>and suggestions coming.  Your emails are re-inspiring me about this
>whole topic of the possibilities for personal writing in the BW
>classroom.
>
>Molly
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Laurie Grobman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Penn State Berks
P.O. Box 7009
Reading, PA 19565
(610) 396-6141