by Kathy Frederickson
	Kathy Frederickson, Associate Professor of English, teaches Composition and Women's Literature at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester.

For many community college students, the standard initial assignment in introductory English Composition courses is the personal narrative. The writing environment may vary--a computer lab, a traditional classroom for lectures and conferences, or a "work space" with modular seating arrangements for peer collaboration--and approaches to teaching may be as diverse as the individuals on staff, but many instructors favor experiential writing assignments as a way to ease students into the composing process. Writing about oneself, then, introduces to students what James Moffett has called the "communication system operating among teller, told-to, and told-about" (1968, p.122).

A random sampling of popularly used texts reveals common pedagogical ground: Axelrod and Cooper The St. Martin 's Guide to Writing (1994) opens the course work with "Remembering Events" and offers sample topics such as, "any 'first' such as when you first realized you had a special skill, ambition, or problem; when you first felt needed or rejected; when you first became aware of some kind of altruism or injustice" (p.44). The Bedford Guide for College Writers edited by Kennedy et. al. (1993) opens Part One with "Writing from Recall" and offers a "Discovery Checklist" which poses facilitative questions from which a topic may be formulated (p.22). McCuen and Winkler's sixth edition of From Idea to Essay (1992) sets up "Part II: Writing the Essay" with Narration as the first mode. Possible topics are enumerated and include, for example, "Tell a ghost story or a story of some occult or unexplainable experience you have had" (p.112). And Atwan and Vesterman's Effective Writing for the College Curriculum (1987) features "Personal Observation and Narration" (p.30) as the prelude to other activities.

Not only do many of us instructors agree that the personal essay offers students a participatory voice in the "authority of experience"' and validates their social self, but we further realize that effective storytelling and autobiographical narrative can be the basis for developing analytical skills. While understanding and remaining sensitive to questions of disclosure,' we require students to construct a narrative that explores and articulates insights they may have gained from particular experiences; they must decide how detailed their details should be and what in their reader's experience they want to reach. Add to that the necessity to create vivid dialogue, point of view, dramatized conflict and resolution, and the assignment may be daunting even to seasoned writers.

This is often the first time many students have been requested to dwell on the personal in a context removed from kith and kin, in a context many perceive as the antitheses of the quotidian, work-a- day world. To many, academia may seem governed by "institutionalized discourse" and gaining access to the language means gaining access to upward mobility. For many, the request to write about the personal seems unacademic (as it does to some professors) and intrusive. For others, it offers the opportunity to analyze a painful or traumatic event, and those students sense implicit benefits to the "talking/writing cure." And since it is often difficult for many students to detach emotionally from their content, an instructor's response may be read with highly charged feelings.

Consider the narrative, "Tell Me You Love Me," written by Dawn, a new student, mother of two toddlers, caring for a mother with crippling arthritis, sister of a younger brother who has consistent run-ins with the police and who, though swearing loyalty and protection to his older sister, is never nearby when her abusive lover erupts. Dawn's paper recreated a sequence of events that exploded in a climatic night of terror, pain, and despair. My comments, though, helped her recognize that her subtextual and primary topic was actually the articulation of the cumulative implosions of her psyche, her personal scars, personal healing, and the social influences that have lead her to safety and into a transitional period of new self-discovery, of women's ways of knowing. For numerous students like Dawn, chronicling such trauma is undoubtedly therapeutic, and learning that the personal is political can be the invitation to cross thresholds--into new realms of awareness.

However ingrained the genre may (or may not) be in our collective syllabi, most of us appreciate the need to sensitize ourselves to students' disclosures. Further, our professional dialogue often revolves around a debate on the pedagogical uses of narrative: does the assignment of the personal essay reveal the instructor's/instructors' individual agenda? Is the personal essay the site of meaning- making as the epistemological camp suggests? Is there no place for personal writing in academia? Is the personal essay "democratic"?

Perhaps Joel Haefner's (1992) discussion of the personal essay which advocates a shift towards "balanc[ing] the individualistic, expressive view of knowledge with a social, collective perspective" (p.132) locates and articulates the missing link-- what Haefner labels the "cultural text" (p.133) of personal essays. Collecting materials from various sources and media--art, journalism, music, popular culture, political--broadens the canvas from which a particular piece is drawn; and students' readings of professional models are undoubtedly enriched for having situated the narrative persona.

During the summer of 1993, The Boston Globe ran a series of personal narratives, in the "Living/ Arts" section under the rubric of "I Remember the Summer When...." Editor Nick King believed the general public would find the staffs' essays "interesting," but he may not have anticipated how useful to English Composition classes they would prove to be. Bringing these into the classroom offered students much more than correct prose models. Certainly comparable papers are found in newly printed anthologies such as How We Live Now: Contemporary Multicultural Literature edited by John Repp (1992) and Rereading America edited by Gary Colombo et. al. (1992), but the appearance of personal narratives in a newspaper assured students that such discourse is the public domain.

Pressed for time, we could not discuss all eight essays, but every one modeled key narrative features; more importantly, every one portrayed a narrative self-embedded in a social milieu, a self in transition or facing a rite of passage. And in spite of difference--race, class and gender--common ground was under foot: the "cultural text" of each paper re-presented a decade in the recent past. "My Car Set Me Free," by Nathan Cobb, detailed the narrator's newly found freedom embodied in his 73 Ford during the summer of 61. The demise of the car signaled a transformation not only of his adolescence into young adulthood, but also of an industry: "These were pre-seatbelt days," he writes, "and I bounced around the inside of the car like a pinball as the two cars collided, yet the Ford held the road" (p.68).

"Smokey Was My Life," by Patricia Smith, crooned about a ten year old's love affair with Motown--"it must have been love that made him wrap his voice around me and dizzy me with promises, singing cream into my ear" (p.39) while capturing the racial and political ferment of the mid sixties. "Trapped in Texas" by Call Caldwell, recounted the stifling, enervating social constriction the narrator rebelled against in 1968: "...a girl on the loose in Amarillo, armed with a Marlboro habit and her mother's Chevrolet, seems in retrospect about as safe as gunpowder on a dry day" (p.47). Jack Thomas' summer of 1958 was the summer when "Love Bloomed in a Stockboy's Heart." This essay blended past and present points of view as he revisited, twenty-five years later, an aged goddess, his idealized femme fatale--the counter girl he worshipped from afar.

For Wil Haygood, the summer of '75 was the summer "My Brother Ruled the Streets," a study of two brothers and an excellent companion piece to Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues." Though we could have spent the entire semester reading the subtextual "cultural text" of these and other papers and generating writing topics in response to our explorations, we needed to move to other genres.

The history/herstory that each Globe essay encapsulated is also the history of growing up in contemporary post-modern urban and suburban America (and growing up, period). As we composed our own papers, we kept referring back to the Globe essays to re-read and re-awaken our sense of the 50's, 60's, and 70's ethos of our times. These essays have imparted new meaning and spirit to the old "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" and offer students in English Composition classes engaging models of "making meaning" of individual and social experience, of moving from participant to evaluator, of creating retrospective narrators, of writing as, generally, empowering.

Notes

1. This expression originates from Diamond and Edwards (1977).
2. See Swartzlander et. al. (1993) for suggestions on how to avoid classroom assignments and/or dynamics that cause students to feel exposed, vulnerable, or marginalized.

References

Atwan, R. & Vesterman, W. (1987). Effective writing for the college curriculum. New York: McGraw Hill.

Axelrod, R. & Cooper C. (1984). The St. Martin 's guide to writing. (4th ed.). New York: St. Martin's Press.

Caldwell, G. (1993, August 10). I was trapped in Texas. The Boston Globe, pp. 47, 51.

Cobb, N. (1993, August 4). My car set me free. The Boston Globe, pp. 65, 68.

Diamond, A. & Edwards, L. R., (Eds.). (1977). The authority of experience. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Haygood, W. (1993, July 29). My brother ruled the street. The Boston Globe, pp. 53, 58.

Haefner, J. (1992). Democracy, pedagogy, and the personal essay. College English, 54 (2), 127- 137.

Kennedy, X. J., Kennedy, D. M., & Halladay, S. A., (Eds.). (1993). The Bedford guide for college writers. New York: St. Martin's Press.

McCuen, J. & Winkler, A. (1992). From idea to essay. New York: Macmillan.

Moffett, J. (1968). Teaching the universe of discourse. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann.

Repp, J., (Ed.). (1992). How we live now: Contemporary multicultural literature. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Smith, P. (1993, July 16). Smokey was my life. The Boston Globe, pp. 39, 50.

Swartzlander, S., Pace, D., & Stamler, V. L. (1993, Feb. 17). The ethics of requiring students to write about their personal lives. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 39 (24), B1, B2.

Thomas, J. (1993, September 2). Love bloomed in a stockboy 's heart. The Boston Globe, pp. 53, 58.

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