“The narrative essay was the easiest because all I had to do was write about myself,” and “I struggled with the personal narrative the most because I’m not used to writing about myself to a wider audience” are the reactions I usually get from my First Year Composition students when, at the end of fifteen long weeks of analyzing a variety of texts and genres, I ask them about their experience in the class.

I’ve taught composition at Stony Brook for a few semesters now. And while I am constantly updating my syllabus to reflect recent events and debates, students’ varying skill levels and my own pedagogical growth, one assignment I’ve been reluctant to give up is the personal narrative. I often have students narrate a conflict they have experienced in the past and consider the ways it has influenced or shaped their identities. I use this assignment for several reasons. First, the personal narrative provides a creative start to the semester: it’s an informal assignment that doesn’t usually require the conceptual heavy lifting of literary analysis, for instance, because it focuses almost entirely on the student’s own experiences. Second, it asks that the student engage with creative literary devices such as dialogue, description and narration, before they have to start dealing with them when analyzing another author’s work. Finally, the personal narrative makes them comfortable with the use of first person and allows for a conversation about the use of objective and subjective perspectives.

This semester, however, I experimented with teaching a new genre, still very much tied to personal writing, but more theoretically framed. Inspired by my colleague Meghan Buckley’s approach, I decided to teach the literacy narrative, shaping my syllabus around literacy acquisition and Deborah Brandt’s concept of “sponsors of literacy.”

In part, my decision to teach the literacy narrative stemmed from my desire to diversify my pedagogical approach–to find different and creative ways to engage students in discussions about authorship and audience in academic discourse. But more importantly, I wanted to explore – in published and classroom writing – the connection between identity, place and writing. Particularly, my current syllabus seeks to examine the ways in which writers develop and reflect on their relationship with the social, cultural, political spaces around them through the role that writing and literacy play in their lives.

The process
I used Deborah Brandt’s concept of “sponsors of literacy” as the framework for our discussion on literacy acquisition, the circumstances and participants that can hinder or foster it, and its larger implications in an individual’s personal and professional success.

In her 1998 article “Sponsors of Literacy,” Brandt argues that our literacy development is dependent on our access to “sponsors of literacy,” whom she defines as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, or model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way” (166). Drawing on case studies, Brandt examines how literacy functions as a key skill in the job market, increasing the individual’s competitiveness and employability.

At first, I was unsure about assigning a theoretical piece at the start of the semester, but the students seemed intrigued by the concept and how it might apply to their own experiences. In preparation for our discussion in class, I had the students read the essay at home and write a response journal highlighting five quotes that they had found particularly interesting, confusing or that they agreed/disagreed with, and then write a short comment explaining why they had picked them. This was a low-stakes assignment meant to engage student and theory. In class, the students discussed the article in small groups following a series of guiding questions I had prepared beforehand. This helped focus the general class discussion afterward, as most of the groups had been able to put together their own interpretation of Brandt’s argument. During our discussion, we looked at some rhetorical elements at play in the article, namely Brandt’s examination of contrasting literacy acquisition experiences gathered through anecdote, but mostly we worked to parse out Brandt’s definition of “literacy” and “sponsorship.” Brandt expands literacy to mean not just learning to read and write, but the acquisition of any skill that may prove socioeconomically beneficial to the individual – this would be the cornerstone of their essay assignment.

The next few classes consisted of close reading literacy pieces through these newly defined concepts. We looked at the way the lack of racial diversity and a sociopolitically stifling educational environment can hinder one’s writing development in Junot Díaz’s “MFA vs. POC.” Then we read an excerpt from David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, where the writer describes his efforts to learn French in spite of an abusive teacher. We focused on the shifting literacies and sponsors at play in each text, but also examined more closely the rhetorical elements used to make these texts compelling.

Then came time to introduce the literacy narrative assignment: in 4-5 pages, the students would focus on one/more key moments in their personal literacy development, as well as the people who had helped or hindered their process of acquisition. The specific guidelines were as follows:

• The student should choose one type of literacy and focus on a moment(s) when they felt they were becoming or had become literate in that skill – this literacy could be anything, from reading to learning a new language, playing a sport or an instrument.
• The student should draw on specific experiences, not produce a chronological list of events.
  Because of the informal nature of the essay, the student was encouraged to use narration, description, dialogue and reflection – show, not tell.
• Along with the assignment description, together we analyzed examples of literacy narratives written by students in previous classes (I used samples kindly provided by Buckley, but you can also find plenty of materials at the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN). We focused on the strategies that these writers employed to make their narratives creative and engaging to their audience, such as use of detailed descriptions, colorful language and dialogue.

Once I had explained the assignment, it was time to start writing! In class, I asked the students to write about a skill they had developed and the person who had helped (or not) in the process. This low-stakes free writing assignment would be the starting point of many of these students’ first drafts.

One last theoretical framework I tied in was Lloyd Bitzer’s “Rhetorical Situation,” which I often use to teach rhetorical analysis, but also like to discuss in the context of the personal essay because of its emphasis on purpose and audience. In this context, we talked about “exigency” – the purpose or main idea that the student is trying to convey – and audience expectations.

The results
The experiment was pretty successful! While some students struggled to find a central moment around which to develop their narratives, resulting in fairly generic essays that would need further revision, many showed a good understanding of literacy and sponsorship, and were able to create nuanced interpretations of these concepts.

The literacies students explored

A significant number of non-native speakers wrote about their efforts to learn English, often demonstrating frustration with the insufficient resources available to them in public education. Many walked their readers through the process of learning to play the clarinet or the piano, one of them describing the moment their fingers touched the keys so vividly that you felt you were there. Interestingly, a couple of students combined the acquisition of multiple literacies, showing how one skill had fostered another, one student having learned to read English by playing videogames and another one working to overcome their speech disability through playing baseball. And my favorite essay traced the student’s ability to apply make-up, giving us a completely new lens through which to understand literacy – which was ultimately the goal of this assignment.

So, here are some of my main takeaways from teaching the literacy narrative for the first time:

• Literacy narratives instill a sense of confidence in students’ ability to write for an academic audience: students are asked to draw on a concrete resource – their own life – to make a point, as opposed to the abstract classroom concepts of “analysis” or “rhetorical device.” “Describe the first moment you learned to sound out a word” is a much more relatable prompt than “explain the rhetorical function of simile in Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story.”
• Students become comfortable with the use of first person, which in turn helps them develop a sense of authorial agency. My class is often made up of first and second-year students who have been taught to never use “I” and so are often uncertain as to whether “it is ok” to use personal perspective in their essays. Starting the semester with an assignment that focuses entirely on their own experiences helps them overcome the self-doubt and uncertainty that they bring into the classroom. First-year Ph.D. Jessica Hautsch has written a great piece on how she teaches first-person use in her own classes. You can check it out here.
• The literacy narrative makes genre analysis more accessible. I used model texts to help students become more familiar with the features of the literacy narrative genre, so that they would be able to identify and practice applying them to their own writing. This helped students transition into the rhetorical analysis.

As we move on to more formal assignments, I look forward to seeing what other ideas and skills my students bring with them from the literacy narrative and in what interesting ways their new sense of their literacy acquisition informs their academic work. As for myself, I am already thinking of new strategies I can incorporate the next time I teach this assignment.