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The Power of Choice
“I think, as Concepts in Composition [Clark, 2003] enforces, that teaching freshman composition students one specific tool or multiple specific tools is not so important as enforcing the idea that multimodality is a crucial part of not only writing studies but many disciplines, and that establishing familiarity with a variety of methods is key.” -- A reading response from my writing pedagogy course, dated October 1, 2021
Nearly halfway through my first semester, I was in the process of completing one of the major projects for my pedagogy course, which was a draft portfolio of the course we would teach in a year’s time. At the same moment, I had eased fully out of the closet, though I still arguably had fingertips on the door handle. What I mean by this is I was now identifying publicly as a lesbian, and not slanting around pronouns when I talked about my partner. With the encouragement of my professor, I was feeling more confident in the framework of teaching I was developing, and slowly replacing the rotted preconceptions with budding notions of what could be. As I felt more settled in my identity, and began to understand that my perspective and positionality could actually enhance my teaching perspective, I began to weigh that value of choice. To fully honor myself was a choice, one I hadn’t chosen before. And, as is evident in this archived evidence, I was already feeling a desire to replicate choice, and variety, in my classroom.
Pedagogical Strategies: Open Assignments & the Graduate Instructor
I’ll never forget one of the warnings I received in the early part of my graduate training: adapting an open approach to my classroom was a risk, and a big one, because my students might choose a topic, method, or idea in which I had no expertise. I would risk a loss in credibility, this person insisted. Thinking through first-year writing as a space for students to carry applicable skills into their future paths, however, is shown to be generative in its bridging potential for faculty and students (Menefee-Libey, 2015). My thinking as I ruminated on that conversation was---if my students were to choose a topic beyond my wheelhouse---what an opportunity for mutual learning, as long as I was honest with them.
In our first-year curriculum, the first suggested assignment is a literacy narrative. When I designed that assignment, I chose to flip the definition of literacy over, instead opening it to topics well beyond writing and reading. As long as my students can explain their literacy in their topic of choice, they’re welcome to write about it. So too, I give the option of the anti-literacy narrative, where they are free and able to write on a topic that they feel has detracted from, or harmed, a literacy in their life. The response from my students was stunning: topics ranging from sports, to adulthood, to cultural competence came forward, as well as meditations on a traumatic writing class, a lost love, and more. Open assignments do not need to be limited to conventional curriculum, nor do they need to be a mandate. It is easy, in our academic world, to forget that choice can be radical, and choice can be queer. I cannot emphasize how crucial I believe the power of choice is in first-year writing.