JAC Volume 16 Issue 2

Marilyn Cooper writes that "our central purpose in a first-year writing class is to convince students of the value of using writing to criticize and change their social world" (28). This is a statement I readily concur with, but one that I could never have imagined being anything more than a sentence in a composition text.

In the spring semester of 1995, something unusual happened in my Freshman Writing Seminar at Boston College. The student body underwent a cryonic change, emerging from a deep freeze. One woman found the courage to describe acts of racial harassment in her dormitory; her story eventually helped to fuel the fire of campus dissent and it spread as far as an English class in a Midwestern Catholic high school.

I want to share these events with my colleagues in composition for two reasons. First, it was exciting to participate in a process in which the course material suddenly seemed to merge with the lived experience of my students. Secondly, what transpired in this class speaks against the essentializing of expressivist pedagogy, grounded as it is in experience-based writing, by compositionists like Susan Miller who dismiss it as characterized by "intransitive processes.'" She writes that "it is fair to infer that the composition course values the student for activity, reflection, and 'meanings' that are entirely contained in the community constituted by the classroom" (97). On the contrary, the events of that spring semester emerged from and returned to campus life. They are representative of what Sherrie Gradin calls a social-expressivism.

As Cooper puts it, my narrative concerns what "I consider to have been a successful writing class" (28). Yet I hope that my portrayal differs from certain composition testimonials and representations of students published in the journal College Composition and Communication. From 1967 to 1990, these accounts, according to Marguerite H. Helmers, generally characterize the student

Hostile Environment Harassment and Freshman Writing

The primary text for the class was the cross-cultural anthology Multitude edited by Chitra B. Divakaruni. While this collection does draw from a wide variety of genres, my tendency is to select many personal narratives. Patricia Bizzell might find such a focus to be essentialist. Because I assign articles that focus on "personal responses to experience" that appear to "legitimate the cultural capital of African American students," I "close off the discourse possibilities for students thus capitalized" (3-4). In her paper "Theories of Content," she advocates that course assignments ought to reflect many genres, from "argumentative public speeches to intimate personal narratives" so that "writers from oppressed social groups [can] learn that people like themselves have been using language against oppression with eloquence, and some practical success, for a long time" (5). Bizzell would most likely further critique my pedagogy from a Foucauldian perspective.

Wendy Bishop might characterize the following narrative as teacher-research as it is an observation on my own class. She reports that she "[has] come to feel that everything about ethnographic writing research is perilous" for a variety of reasons including that it is "inappropriate in traditional formats" (263). Specifically, my practice may seem to be under-theorized and, in fact, it was. I did not plan that the class would unfold the way it did. Frankly, I simply let it happen, trusting that Lad Tobin, the Director of Freshman Writing, would lend pedagogical support when I needed it. Any theorizing of my practice came to me in hindsight.

One day early in the semester, Dayhanara arrived in my office and told me she was not coming to conference, that she was too upset, and that she was going home. Not only did she stay for her appointment, but she went to class that day and made a presentation to her 15 classmates. Recently I asked her why she stayed and talked with me. She told me that from the text I had assigned, she suspected I might be "open-minded and that I could understand others' feelings. We had a relationship [from weekly conferences] and you listened. I didn't think you would understand, but when I started to speak and saw how upset you were, I just kept going."

In the presentation she made to the class that day, Dayhanara was unsettled, angry, and even cried as she spoke. Since I did not tape the class, let me quote from "Black Memories," a paper she later wrote comparing her experiences to Sonia Schreiber Weitz' Holocaust testimony, I Promised I Would Tell. Here are excerpts from that paper.

The class, made up equally of Caucasians and students of color, seemed shocked by her self-report. As one student put it later, "I've been telling my friends about what goes on in this seminar. Well, the things that happen here aren't even like a class." Slowly they began to ask questions and a lively discussion ensued. It may have seemed to them that up until that day they had been reading the book, and suddenly they were watching the movie. Whatever the reason, the consciousness raising effect of the reader Multitude or simply spontaneous human compassion, I do not know, but the majority of Dayhanara's classmates were very supportive. None were oppositional, but I do not think it was a case of "oppressive surveillance." Female students who had not uttered a word in any prior discussion actively engaged in the discourse. I remember, in particular, one Thai student as being the most outspoken. Her classmates turned to hear from here the voice was coming because she had never showed interest before.

When Dayhanara reported that her residence advisor had called a hall meeting for that night and that she was expected to tell her peers how she felt about the notes, I wanted her to take some of the rhetoric of compassion with her. The class was then encouraged to freewrite letters to the perpetrator(s) and those who chose to could pass them along to Dayhanara. She wrote her own. Here are some excerpts from what I consider to be epideictic rhetoric of the nineties:

At the end of the class, those who chose to gave Dayhanara their letters. Everyone was shaken by the intensity of the interaction, and it was one of those rare moments in academia when the time's up and no one leaves. I was encouraged by the student response as it confirmed the existence of a liberal political center that is vehemently opposed to racial injustice. I later learned that some of those students went beyond the rhetorical exigencies of the classroom, namely participating in the class discussion possibly to please their course evaluator, and showed up at the hall meeting that night.

Dayhanara was tremendously encouraged by their support. "Once I got that response from the class, I felt I didn't have to go home. I was motivated to stay on campus and reach out to others." However, there was a rather flat response to her speech that night. ("I couldn't really blame them. After all, it was a Friday night.") She then came up with an idea that had a far greater rhetorical impact. This is how she described it when she came to speak to my writing seminar in the Fall of 1995.

The rhetorical exercise I had intended to simply help Dayhanara on a personal level, namely that she have emotional support as she faced her peers in the dorm, ended up affecting her community as a whole. In trying to conceptualize what happened here after the fact, I turn to what Paul Smith calls "discerning the subject." He takes issue with both a liberal humanism which sees the subject as self-determining and removed from material reality as well as the opposite Marxist perspective which construes the subject as "simply an actor who follows ideological scripts" (xxxv). There is human agency, "The place from which resistance to the ideological is produced or played out" (xxxv). In distributing those letters, Dayhanara occupied the place of human agency.

After the third episode of racist graffiti, she completely overcame her initial feelings of embarrassment and self-incrimination, and turned to the campus organization that offers a variety of services to students of color, AHANA, an acronym for African American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American. Dayhanara also succeeded in engaging the attention of the campus police and the housing office. The assistant director of housing called a second meeting and this time the room was so packed, some people could not get in. As it turned out, she was not the only student of color experiencing hostile environment harassment. Racist graffiti was showing up in other freshman dormitories.

Shortly thereafter, anti-racist struggle broke out on campus when the College Republicans put out an endorsement of a Caucasian candidate for president of student government who was running against an AHANA student. The publicity was provocative enough to prompt a demonstration in an area of the campus known as the Dustbowl. The College Republication leaflet read,in part,

The rally took place on February 22, 1995, the same day my class was to discuss Sonia Schreiber Weitz's Holocaust testimony, I Promised I Would Tell. Much of this text is reconstructed from a diary she kept for two years in the Kraków ghetto prior to deportation as well as from poetry composed in her head during her imprisonment in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Mauthausen. Because I find myself becoming very emotional when my classes discuss Holocaust literature, which I feel compelled to assign nonetheless, I often solicit student discussion leaders who have been exposed to some of the texts in high school. They were just about to begin when Dayhanara burst into the room and announced that she was not coming to class that day, a replay of the time she came to conference to tell me she wasn't coming, "Because there is just too much racism on this campus and we're not going to take it any more." At that time I knew nothing of the College Republican leaflet or the demonstration, and I was thinking, "Well, what does she think I have been trying to deal with in this class over the last month?" Other students came by and whisked her away, but I managed to extract a promise from her that she would return with some information for us.

I do not know whether it was shock at the disruption of the class or the near impossibility of trying to speak about a personal narrative in which the author reports losing 86 relatives and describes in torturous detail the night her mother was taken away by the Nazis, but the class seemed shut down. Very few were willing to risk making themselves vulnerable by speaking. That changed when Dayhanara returned with the College Republican text and an account of the rally in the Dustbowl that morning. In the ensuing discussion, the class folded the past reality of attempted genocide in together with the present racial harassment of students of color. It was emotional.

I tried to focus some of the passion that was being stirred up by the reading and the political struggle in a writing assignment.

I saved several of the essays and one that stays in my mind was written by a white Catholic female named Erin. It is called "Learning to Speak Up" and is one of those texts that reminds me that the family is a crucial part of what Louis Althusser calls the ideological state apparatus, institutions that serve the power of the state in the private domain. Erin begins with a description of her aunt and some of the negative comments she has made about different ethnic groups at family gatherings. Erin had wanted to challenge her aunt repeatedly but her mother always put a stop to it with a fierce look, later telling her that the woman was too old, she was just brought up that way, and that she didn't want her daughter to upset her. Once, however, they were in the mall and Erin could not contain herself.

Since the class knew I am Jewish, one could argue that Erin's "personal response" was constructed with the purpose of pleasing the audience. Perhaps the essay was fiction. For example, in an article on how students read their classrooms as texts, Jennie Nelson describes the work of two students in a freshman sociology class who skipped the field work altogether, and used the detailed assignment sheet as a guideline for their papers. As one student put it, "I said that I had interviewed the coach and interacted with my teammates but really didn't. I used the assignment sheet to compose the paper— read through each step and tried to answer it'" (418). Did Erin use her ability to read me as a text (not a terribly difficult process) in order to write a paper that she knew I would like enough to give her a good grade and maybe even cite in a journal essay? Or perhaps the piece itself can be read as gestalt therapists do their clients' dreams. Erin would thus be representing parts of her own ambivalent thinking through the voices of her characters. Even if either or both of these cynical conjectures were true, still the student engaged with the course material. The engagement is what I am looking for, not perfunctory agreement with my world view.

The internal activities of the class leaked out in other ways, further demonstrating a lack of what Miller calls intransitivity and inconsequentiality in freshman writing classes. Tobin invited two students to a meeting of the writing faculty which is composed of tenured and adjunct faculty as well as graduate students. Dayhanara and Alyssa (a white student in the class who had attended the dorm meeting) gave the presentations. The students talked about how important it was to put their feelings in writing in the form of letters to the offenders and the essay on the Weitz testimony, how writing gave them a sense of power as well as provided a vehicle to release and channel anger. They described the campus organization that was formed out of the struggle, D.I.V.E.R.S.E. (Diverse Individuals Vowing Everlasting Responsibility for Superior Education) which describes itself as "an all-inclusive group which welcomes any student to join us in the pursuit of social justice." Dayhanara's story had appeared in this publication, the newsletter of the Organization of Latin American Affairs (OLAA), as well as in the broader based campus paper "The Heights." The speakers were well received and several faculty invited them to speak to their classes.

As the semester continued, I discussed what was going on at Boston College and in my classroom with a number of teacher friends. I sent a copy of Dayhanara's essay on Weitz to a friend in Michigan who teaches in a predominantly white Catholic high school, like the ones many of my students come from. It is located in the same town that the alleged Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was said to have been involved with a right wing paramilitary group. I simply wanted her feedback on the essay but, like the letters to the offenders, it became something more than frozen words on the page.

While I may have had trouble beginning this narrative, I am not guilty of what Smith refers to as claustrophilia, or the tendency to want to cut off a story, "circumscribe the subjects," and put an end to the "puzzlement" it stimulates (98). In short, there's more. In the Fall semester of 1995, I assigned an essay written by a former student and published in Fresh Ink, a juried collection of freshman writing at Boston College, edited by Lad Tobin and Eileen Donovan-Krantz. "The Missing Voices of AHANA Students" by Charles Flores had been written the Fall of 1994 and it anticipated the anti-racist struggle the following spring. When we discussed the essay, many students, almost all Caucasian, groused about "special privileges" for AHANA students. I decided to invite Dayhanara and one of her classmates, Antonio, to talk with them. (Antonio's essay on American imperialism in the Philippines had also been selected for Fresh Ink.) The students listened attentively and respectfully, asked a few questions such as, "Did you ever catch the offender?" (as if all the acts of racial harassment last semester and the current one were carried out by one isolated racist), but were fairly tight-lipped. Mike, one of the most self-confident students in the class who had a difficult time hearing other points of view, took the time to e-mail me his response.

I was not sure what to do with this e-mail so I forwarded it to Tobin who asked me if it was intended just for me or for the class at large. With Mike's permission, I then assigned the e-mail text along with an article on white privilege by Peggy McIntosh. Modifying Peter Elbow's doubting and believing game, I asked the class to freewrite on the two texts, pick two points from each one and doubt one and believe the other. In other words, write arguments in support of and against two points in each of the readings. Then they shared what they had written in small groups, selected the strongest arguments and reported back to the whole group. The discussion immediately became very lively. McIntosh listed forty-six points that demonstrate how she personally benefits from "unearned advantage and conferred dominance," (14) primarily related to skin color privilege. Two of these points are: "If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I want to live"; and "I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me" (5). Several white students found these points to be "outdated." Their doubts were addressed by both James, a Haitian student, and ed (sic) who had only recently identified himself as half Native American. Ed told a story about a white man putting an explosive device in a pie and giving it to some black newcomers in his neighborhood in New Orleans. The narrative was confusing at first, but the class seemed most alarmed when Ed said the man went to jail for it.

Later, Kelly, who had felt silenced by Mike early in the semester, reported the criticisms of his e-mail from her group. For example, he said he was not a separatist, but he was separating himself from "Nordic peoples." A lot of spontaneous discussions broke out and I did not try to contain them. Just as the class was ending, I looked over and saw Mike standing up and another white male, Stephen, angrily telling him, "Get over it!" Later I learned that Stephen was sick of hearing people complain about affirmative action ("That's all I heard when I was applying to college") when it was clear that people of color had been kept back and had to be allowed to catch up. Both Stephen and Brian, another Italian student, were furious at Mike's use of the slur "guinea." This self-description seemed to hint at what I suspect is behind a good deal of prejudice, ethnic shame for one's own group. I cannot say that the Caucasian students were driven suddenly by the desire to root out racism. It is probably more accurate to say that they were fed up with Mike's aggressiveness as well as his printed charge against them for not "opening their mouths." And that is just what they did.

So what was accomplished in this series of relatively unpremeditated pedagogical phenomena? Perhaps what I have presented makes a strong teaching narrative, but I hear my colleagues on the Left (where I was strongly entrenched in the sixties) saying something like, "Yes, but, you never linked racism to class; you never showed how it is a systemic necessity of capitalism to divide the people." Marxists like Mas'ud Zavarzadeh would see the seminar in the pring of 1995 as an example of reformist "experiential activism [which] thrives on such . . . anti-intellectual and experiential (localizing) practices" as "spinning anecdotes, narratives, and tales of self-affirmation (through performed crises) in the name of progressiveness'" (222). I would accept the criticism, but nonetheless assert that the class was successful in engaging students in writing that effected personal and social change, even if what is meant by "social" here is the campus community of one college. Thus I declare myself a social-expressivist, nothing more and nothing less.

As far as reform is concerned, one result of the struggle is the restitution of something called "the social justice floor" which had been removed ten years ago, allegedly because of the need for space. In spite of the fact that many of the students seemed to be assigned there randomly, and others initially appeared opposed to anti-racist struggle, Dayhanara lives there and has succeeded in getting them involved in "D.I.V.E.R.S.E." Other victims of racial harassment contact them and they are also working to overturn the administration's refusal to officially recognize a gay, lesbian and bisexual student organization. But that's another story.