Welcoming More Stories and Emotions in English Class

As a new English teacher, I'm grateful for all sources of good advice and support for my job. I am emergency-certified for my role, and teaching outside of my domain of elementary education is no piece of cake. Aside from my professors at Rhode Island College (R.I.C.) and colleagues. Interestingly enough, some of the best resources I've encountered in my middle school English education career are my R.I.C. course reading assignments. This week's readings for one course that  give me some more specific, actionable guidance on becoming a better teacher.

One of the things I've learned from three of those readings is that, although argument writing can be dry as hell, it doesn't have to be.

In Chapter 3 of Linda Christensen's Teaching for Joy and Justice book, she describes how she has her high school English students "story" their essays (Christensen 130). The example that she gives is related to the our country's massacre of Native Americans. To "story," she explains, writers back up their written assertions and arguments with information from memoirs and stories, instead of embedding scholarly quotes only. In her example, she writes that students should, "use the stories from the Native American memoirs and biographies we studied in class."

I think that it helps to gives voice to people whose words are muffled, and it gives power to people who may otherwise be powerless. Judging what her student ended up writing in that paragraph, this practice can also makes essays much more interesting to read. This student went directly to the source (someone who'd suffered for speaking her Native American language at a boarding school) for her paper, rather than rely on secondary reporting of it.

Something else that Christensen teaches her students to write are strong introductions and conclusions. I like how she encourages writers to to add some creativity and excitement to her their essays by injecting some entertainment into these paragraphs. I especially love the anecdotal introductions that she allows her students to write, as well as how she wants to make her students' papers end on a high[-energy] note. For the anecdotal intro (page 141 of the book), one of her students connects how African American men are portrayed as hardcore sexual cheaters in Their Eyes Were Watching God to her own experiences hearing friends talk about how "men are dogs."

I think that both of Christensen's approaches for ramping up student engagement in their writing. I think that they connect to something else that I read this week that I found useful for my job. In her article titled, "Emotion and Intellect: An Unconventional Pair," Cait O’Connor challenges the notion that the best writers "divorce" their individual experiences, opinions, and feelings from their writing. I agree with her that impersonal academic writing and quashing students' emotionally-charged behavior in class do a disservice to our young people in schools. It's common knowledge that when you suppress your feelings and ideas, they build up and eventually boil over. Instead of suppressing our learners, we should be welcoming them.

O'Connor writes:

"Allow students to be angry, upset, sad, and emotional in their authentic writing. Because if they’re one or a few of these things when they write about an issue they care about, it’s probably because it affects them personally. And who are we to taper down their experiences, especially if those experiences have to do with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and ageism?"

Here, she brings up another reason why teachers shouldn't welcome and promote voice and thought in in all of their students' writing: Doing so is basically the same as telling students that their suffering was warranted and shouldn't be addressed. I agree with Christensen here 100%.