Every semester, my first-year writing students begin the class by writing a personal narrative. Of course, for the last four years of high school, they were told that they should not include any first person references or their own opinions in their writing. The writing they did involved them in writing as though knowledge were completely outside of them.
And now, in their first college writing course, the personal narrative and reflection on something that happened to them requires that they not only turn to what has happened to them. It assumes that there might be some value to this. This is the deeper imponderable beneath the surface shock that they are suddenly required to use both the first person pronoun and give their own opinions. Of course, they have to seek permission first. They’re still quite young and have much to learn, even if some seem unaware. I hope the years are kinder to them than they have been for me.
What is interesting is that although they’ve been taught not to do this kind of writing, once they get past the usual mental objections, they approach the assignment with enjoyment. At the end of the course, many report that writing in personal terms about their own experiences was their favorite assignment in the course.
What they have become used to writing–research, book reports, the five paragraph theme–is a kind of writing that different Composition teachers refer to in different ways–Michael Carter has called it scribing, which he opposes to creative writing, by which he means any writing that creates new knowledge or engages in knowledge making in productive ways. Others have referred to it as “current traditional rhetoric,” a form of writing that focuses completely on grammatical correctness and form. At the same time that students learn a few rigid forms, they learn that they don’t like it and that it has little to do with them. I tend to think of the writing they’ve learned and what they expect me to teach them as pseudo-scientific. It has the tone and yet none of the real work of the indifferent researcher.
I tend to think of what they have learned to write as headless writing. I am following Joseph Petraglia in this. He goes so far as to suggest that in most writing courses today, the head and the heart, or the body, have been separated. Certainly, one of the indifferent and less explicit lessons students learn from this kind of writing is that knowledge is something they don’t possess. Knowledge is beyond all they have experienced. What they know is mostly personal, and that, they have learned, is not going to cut it. Perhaps worst of all, they are made to think that what they experience is of no consequence.
Yet where in all of this is the dividing line between real knowledge and what is merely personal? I can place where the Mississippi River runs on a map. I can trace the Mason-Dixon line. But this line between knowledge and not-knowledge, where does it start and end? How do our experiences play into our growing awareness of the world around us? How do our experiences of people, events, subjects, activities, play into what we know? A math teacher can keep her fifth graders back from participating in band or a string orchestra because they need to learn math. But then so much math is involved in music. Are we not creating knowledge impoverishment when we deny the application, the experience, of math?
A music teacher I know refers to his students in terms of getting to know “the whole student.” He says that this is why he sometimes leaves his music room to watch them play at recess. He wants to know other things about them than just their immediate relationship to the subject he is teaching. In fact, he sees that understanding his students more fully will help him to be a better music teacher.
I really like his image: the whole student. This is not just a head cut off from a body, a grotesque figure that exists no where but in the mind and that has no environment. This is a human being.
Personal knowledge is part of what we know and how we know.