Writing through trauma: The emotional dimensions of teaching writing

Composition Studies, Spring 2001 by Micciche, Laura R

Anderson, Charles M., and Marian M. MacCurdy, eds. Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice. Urbana: NCTE, 2000.

Payne, Michelle. Bodily Discourses: When Students Write About Abuse and Eating Disorders. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2000.

The books under review here are engaged in a double move to launch a long overdue study of pathos in composition studies and to (re)insert the concept of agency into discussions about student writing. Whereas postmodern and political discourses in the field have frequently de-emphasized agency in order to analyze how power shapes conceptions of identity and culture, Writing and Healing and Bodily Discourses construct agency as a central concept for writing classrooms. In a recent essay, John Trimbur explains that agency is the way people "articulate... their desires, needs, and projects, giving voice to their lived experience as they join their productive labors to the institutions and social structures they live within" (287). This dual personal and social function of agency is at the heart of both books as they foreground connections between student writing about trauma and the social contexts in which trauma happens and is understood. Both assume that writing is a form of action that has personal and social consequences: personal because writing enables students to reflect on and revise their own narratives about loss and pain; social because writing about trauma involves a reeducation of emotion, beginning from the personal and then moving outward to critique systems such as family and education, which engender responses to trauma that emphasize one's powerlessness. Perhaps the most illuminating aspect of these books is their admonition that however pervasive charges against personal writing may be, the fact remains that students have and will continue to write personal narratives about trauma whether we ask them to or not. Thus, teachers need to have a repertoire of skills for responding to such writing and an approach to pedagogical theory that takes this reality into account. In addition, both books suggest very promising possibilities for further studies of how pathos might inflect our understandings of writing, teaching, administration, and professional life.

The journey from pain to healing interests editors Charles Anderson and Marian MacCurdy. They conceive writing as an instrument of healing, one that can be taught by university writing teachers and community members. Themes that recur throughout the volume circulate around practices of recovery and the dual connotations assigned to this term. First, the term refers to re-surfacing "the personal" in writing studies discourse. I was grateful that the editors did not rehearse the worn out positions occupied by so-called expressivists and constructionists, positions that have been reduced so egregiously that they have long outgrown their capacity to advance our collective thinking about writing instruction. Instead, Anderson and MacCurdy argue convincingly that in the heat of our professional debates about personal writing, we have failed to recognize that, like it or not, "stories about painful, traumatic events in the lives of students do appear in our classrooms, they have always appeared, and they will continue to appear, not because we want or don't want them to, but because writing is quite simply the medium in which, for many people, the deepest, most effective, and most profound healing can take place" (8-9). Thus, the editors are careful to explain what they are not arguing: that all teachers should solicit traumatic stories from students, that all writing classrooms should focus on trauma. Given the sometimes inevitable and often unsolicited connections between personal and private that fuel student writing, the editors argue that teachers must consider how to respond appropriately to students who write about trauma. That is, rather than rejecting out of hand, "losing sight of the writing as writing," or appropriating student texts' as our own, Anderson and MacCurdy hope their volume can offer ways of responding to healing narratives "as writing professionals, writers, and human beings" (9).

The second connotation of recovery is more closely aligned with the therapeutic process of working through pain and excavating grief for the purpose of gaining control over a painful past. The editors claim that, by working with students as they compose traumatic life stories, teachers "demonstrate that the academy is not a place of alienation, an 'Other' to `the real world,' or an ivory tower. We transform it into a locus of connection where the hard, personal, and social work of understanding the lived realities of experience can happen. Out of this transformation, we believe, may come human agents capable of generating real and lasting social action" (8). The goal of personal writing here is to produce both personal and social transformation-a goal that aims to revive our field's relation to personal writing by conceiving it as academically rigorous and socially relevant, a goal that is met unevenly throughout Writing and Healing.