I think one of the biggest strengths of this class is that it provides a broad historical and social perspective that really puts the basic writing institution in a more clear light. I felt confident enough to understand what the policy makers would do and how they would justify certain actions taken that affected higher education institutions. I think it's great to be able to get information from that vantage point and talk about these different statistics and percentages in the classroom. It's easy to get lost in the quagmire of data about adult education institutions, and I am impressed by the people that handle that data.
My conception of who a basic writer is and how a basic writer is defined has not changed. It remains a very complex picture with students coming from all walks of life. It was an illuminating experience having Reggie Blackwell speak in our class. He had an incredible story and it's important to acknowledge the power that education can have to move people closer to their dreams. However, I think it's also important to not treat Reggie's story as exemplary of every basic writing student. It's also important to acknowledge what Reggie said when he states "It wasn't a lack of education but a lack of formal education" that stopped him. That statement stuck with me and I don't ever want to underestimate my students or walk into a classroom feeling like they are already ill-equipped to handle academic work.
One of the most rewarding aspects of this semester was revisiting my experience in South Korea through a literacy narrative assignment. My literacy narrative was a challenging experience for me. At first I was intent on doing an interview with my mother about her reading and writing experience. I thought it would be easy to do, frankly, because I had heard her tell her story many times; in many ways, it was ingrained in my being. In other words, the story was told to me that I felt it was part of a larger mythology that didn't seem to have a point in time but was timeless. So for these reasons, I thought the interview would be easy to translate onto paper. What I discovered when doing it was how time-consuming the process was. It was also difficult because I felt there was no story to tell really. My mother's answers were brief and I had to keep asking her to expand upon her answers more...The result of this however was a positive one. I switched to the literacy narrative instead and because of my conversation with Barbara before I did the draft, I was able to come up with a narrative that was suitable for the assignment and that was also creatively very stimulating for me. Talking about my story really helped me develop and latch onto the literacy narrative that I could write. I also felt confident that I could write an adequate literacy narrative because Barbara was there listening and guiding me with her questions.
Speaking and telling your story can be an extremely helpful way for students to articulate their literacy narratives in the same way that I had done. The power of oral storytelling is very important and I feel like there is less of that in our day and age where communication tends to favor brevity. If I were a teacher, I would employ this more often because I think it's such an effective tool to engage students with. It allows students to revisit past events and reflect on them in such a way that it creates a meaningful cornerstone from which to draw further experiences from. Combined with a long-term focus and adequate scaffolding, literacy narratives can be a powerful way for students to understand the connection between writing and experience. But this experience can only be understood if one knows that it was important; it seems self-evident but that is not always the case.
I was able to draw on my experiences as an ESL teacher in South Korea and connect it to bodies of knowledge that I was learning from at the time. Had I not talked about my experience teaching ESL in the context of literacy and transformative learning, I don't think I would've been able to understand how important those 3 years of my life were.
I think this was the most important thing take-away from this semester. Looking forward to another semester at City College!
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