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Literature Review: Voice, Identity, and Assignment Design
How I Proceed with the Assignment
Introduction
As an international graduate student and a second language user of English, I understand how important a writerly voice is in my own writing process. I initially assumed that English-speaking students already possessed distinct voices of their own. However, when I began teaching writing at a Midwest research university, I quickly discovered that most first-year writing students tended to mimic the voices of the authors they read. The reading materials, authored by a diverse array of writers, both English and non-English, significantly influenced the students’ writing. Recognizing this pattern, I realized that merely imitating these voices would not serve my students well in the long run. If they aim to voice their opinion, they will first need to develop their “voice.” On this note, I felt a strong imperative to teach them how to develop their own unique voices in their writing.
After Fall 2022—the term I joined the department as a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant—I had an idea about designing an assignment. The first thing I wanted to do was to get to know my students better and personally. They are not numbers, but people. They are people with no tabula rasa, but a diverse range of stories. I wanted to hear their stories to help them write on what matters to them. Also, as an international Muslim female student of color, I was somehow suffering from an identity crisis. I set foot on the land of duality where my minority identity mattered to me as much as my identity as a writing teacher. On these notes, I developed an “Identity Narrative” assignment.
In a typical college composition course, students write a literacy narrative paper in which they narrate stories about any kind of literacy they have developed since childhood. When writing about their literacy, students often draw upon authentic and personal experiences. The nature of the narrative assignment is designed to bring out students’ agency and voice in their writing. Current scholarship is concerned with how students write about writing in their literacy narrative papers (Carpenter and Falbo). Eldred and Mortensen note, “When we read for literacy narratives, we study how the text constructs a character’s ongoing, social process of language acquisition” (512). I concur with Mary Soliday that “in focusing upon those moments when the self is on the threshold of possible intellectual, social, and emotional development, literacy narratives become sites of self-translation where writers can articulate the meanings and the consequences of their passages between language” (511).
While the literacy narrative, a well-researched and widely discussed genre in composition studies, helps students bring their literacy visions into their pages, it is not directly addressing concerns related to their identity which, I believe, has a great impact on their writerly voice. Recent articles also explore how creating better writing assignments help students meet the larger course learning outcomes (Rank and Pool). Keeping the importance of assignment design in mind, I have created a unique narrative assignment titled “Identity Narrative” for my writing students, which primarily aims to help them find their writerly voice through the understanding of their identity.
The “Identity Narrative” assignment, like most narrative assignments, aims to help writing students develop their own unique writing voice and style while enhancing their genre awareness and rhetorical understanding. It is unique for its ability to encourage students to critically reflect on their identities and their connection with their writerly personas. The assignment does not intend to replace the literacy narrative assignment; rather, it aims to be the first narrative assignment in a composition course. This approach allows students to initially discover their own writerly voice, rooted in their identity and self-perception, and subsequently use that unique voice in later assignments. Therefore, my paper including my assignment add nuanced contributions to the scholarly discourse on writerly voice and student identities, focusing on expanding the conversation rather than merely identifying gaps. My purpose is to introduce a new assignment into the vibrant field of our discipline. This paper presents a unified concept of a writer’s voice by demonstrating how the “Identity Narrative” assignment helps students reflect on their personal stories, backgrounds, and identities, thereby developing their unique writerly voices. This research is significant and valuable for writing instructors seeking to enhance their syllabi and course content by designing assignments that are both useful and impactful for students.