7.1 Finding What I Came For

Finding What I Came For, Transitions to College Writing and Reading: Cultivating Performative Literacy in Freshman English Class - Patricia Gillikin

By this session—the last full session on Thursday, April 2, the first full day of CCCC proper—I had stopped taking studious notes at every session I attended in hopes of writing coherent reviews for Kairos and BWe. I went to this one, in fact, for myself—I expected it to be about slam poetry, perhaps—I mean, “performative literacy”? I love slam poetry, and I was hoping at the least to be invigorated and entertained.

Instead, I left this session with the most stunningly useful ideas for my basic writing program. Turns out it was all about reading, and, in our program at the Valencia Branch Campus of the University of New Mexico, we have been working for the past year to integrate reading and writing, to better prepare students for our first-year sequence, and, OK, turns out this integration is lots of fun, too, and fairly transformative of our curriculum.

I walked in a bit late, to find Sheridan Blau speaking—his article in Sullivan and Tinberg’s What is “College-Level” Writing? had already won my admiration, another reason I was attending the session. His longstanding connection to the National Writing Project was another draw—I should have known something amazing and unexpected would be in the cards for me. Blau was declaiming a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost—this was nice, but it surely wasn’t slam poetry (not that Milton couldn’t be slammed, but that’s not what Blau was doing). I sat down toward the front, and just about when he put us into pairs to read aloud the same passage to each other, stopping and discussing when we came across something challenging, I noticed the Mississippi outside the huge windows on the left side of the room (it was the Port Room in the Hilton Conference Center), and I was suddenly longing for my spot by the Rio Grande back home in New Mexico. At various points in the session, I stared unabashedly at this vista, the sky and huge water in late-day colors, and seagulls, and boats. Water. Even in the humidity of New Orleans, I was thirsty.

But the session and activities pulled me back—activities that, reminiscent of Writing Project approaches, made the learning theory come alive in ways that I found extremely welcome at 4Cs; I’m not a fan of presenters reading aloud highly theoretical papers that are more for (re)readers than for listeners. I heard Cheryl Hogue Smith declare that her goal was to for students to be in a state of confusion in their interactions with texts—because then she knew they were learning. I learned about the “dimensions of performative literacy”:

1.Capacity for sustained, focused attention

2.Willingness to suspend closure

3.Willingness to take risks

4.Tolerance for failure

5.Tolerance for ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty

6.Intellectual generosity and fallibilism

7.Metacognitive awareness

These were projected up on the overhead projector in the room at one point in the presentation, but since I wasn’t taking notes I’m getting them from Blau’sThe Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers, which I promptly purchased from Heinemann in the bookroom the next day.

I felt excited hearing all this because it resonates profoundly with my own sense of what learning involves, and it is definitely a way I want my students empowered—willing to make mistakes and “dwell in uncertainty” (nobody on the panel quoted this by Emily Dickinson—or Keat’s “negative capability”—but they came to my mind). I certainly want my students to enter complex texts and stay there long enough for something interesting to happen, developing habits of persistence and having fun.

This was the theory that excited me, but the practice was equally invigorating: Smith took us through a sequence of activities that I knew I wanted to take back right away and ask my students to do, and ask my colleagues in the program I coordinate to try out and adapt in their own classes. As I write this review now, I’ve been poring through The Literature Workshop, finding in it an approach to high-level reading (not just “literature” as such) and reading/writing integration that I have already begun sharing with colleagues.

Stephanie Paterson spoke then about “pants-down” teaching, a term for teaching a text one has not read before, approaching it new as the students do. I took it also to be more broadly a term for using concepts from performative literacy to teach reading and writing. I especially appreciated her application of the dimensions of performative literacy to writing and revising. On her PowerPoint, she quoted a student making these applications to her own writing:

What helped me the most is the need to have ‘a tolerance for failure’ (Blau 211). This is important because, without this, it’s difficult to open yourself up to revision. Dr. Paterson highlights this point when she describes her classroom as a laboratory for trial and error. Also, you need to have a “willingness to suspend closure” (Blau 211). In case you don’t find any of the answers you were looking for, be open. You may find the answers will come when you least expect them.

–Tarah, FYC student

I also enjoyed another item from that PowerPoint:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey…The mind that is not baffled is not employed. ---Wendell Berry

So, though I was expecting a fun and diverting session, this was instead the transformative session for me at this year’s 4Cs—this was the session that I hope will change my and my colleagues teaching for the better, and deepen our understanding of what we are doing. I must say that being able to immediately buy a book related to the session, and read in it on the plane on the way home, and begin sharing it with my sleepy colleagues during long waits in airports, contributed immensely to the staying power of these ideas. I must also say that, though Blau’s book came out in 2003, and he’s been playing with these ideas for longer than that, it doesn’t matter because all this is—in this incarnation, at least—new to me, and what I’m ready for, and it is timely for what my program is ready to take on.