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Оглавление2 Beyond “Just Academic Stuff”: The Course, The Teacher, The Study
Everything we name enters the circle of language, and therefore the circle of meaning. The world is a sphere of meanings, a language.
—Octavio Paz
Introduction
Most of this book focuses on “naming”—describing how writers interact with trauma and symbols (verbal and visual) as they work to integrate past disruptions into their current lives. The writing processes and products explored in the forthcoming chapters have often been ignored, abandoned to sit at the curbside, outside the circle of meaning. Therefore, in order to contextualize these phenomena, this chapter focuses on three larger and more familiar circles of meaning: the course, the teacher, and the research study.
The first section describes my graduate course, “Teaching Therapeutic Language, Literature, and Media,” beginning with how it was born and evolved. Even though this course was aimed at gradute students in our English Education program, I believe that much of it can be adapted for other levels and situations. Indeed, some of the teachers in this course soon asked their own junior high and high school students to engage in the same activities they were doing on campus. This course has a dual purpose: to vigorously engage teachers in composng about trauma as well as to demonstrate how they may go about it with their own students. Implicit in these purposes is convincing teachers that composing about trauma is a serious academic pursuit that is not only worthy of inclusion in an already-crowded curriculum, but desperately needed.
The second section, “The Teacher,” explains my roles in this course, which I hope will help others to follow my own rough-hewn paths in their own ways. Finally, “The Study” explains how the case-study research reported in this book was designed, how the data was collected, and how it was analyzed. I hope that you’ll come to accept these three common names as more than “just academic stuff . . . as really doing something.”
The Course
Somehow, my lifetime of teaching and researching how people interact with language and media led me to this book and the people and issues that generated it. For this luck, I feel fortunate. My experiences teaching high school English in a high-poverty rural area taught me that students are not learning machines sitting at desks waiting with baited breath to please what teachers give them. Rather, they are people with all the problems of adults, intensified because they did not yet have the life experiences that adults draw upon. (Some of my students had grown up within a few miles of the Mississippi River but had never seen it.) My students would sometimes turn in personal writing about their current traumas even when I had not asked for it. I realized that their problems with their jobs or families or friends “got in the way” of their learning about J. Alfred Prufrock and John Donne, as worthy as these fellows are.
What I began learning back then, I kept re-learning in different ways throughout my career. As a graduate teaching assistant, I learned that my freshmen’s most coherent and natural writing flowed best when they wrote about what they knew, including their current traumas. They, too, managed to “work in” their life difficulties, regardless of what the assignment requested. These students were nervous and afraid of having their writing evaluated, to the point that they wrote very little, in halting, hiccupping ways, often crossing out words they were unsure of. These experiences led to my dissertation, which was focused on how to reduce such students’ writing apprehension. In my first university teaching job, my “developmental” writers, enrolled in a non-credit but required course which met off-campus in a small house owned by the university, had the same fears and needs. I observed the same issues at work in subsequent professional contexts, from directing a university writing program, to teaching technical communication to students as well as workplace professionals, to teaching teachers how to teach writing, reading, language, literature, and media. All of these experiences demonstrated—in living color—how and why literacy affects our thinking and feeling—how we relate to the world, adjusting or not. This fact keeps writing teachers going.
In 1999 I taught my first graduate course focused on writing about trauma. At that time, such a course was a definite risk. Few people, especially academics, considered trauma worthy of study, let alone a legitimate topic for a university graduate course in a College of Education. It was definitely successful. I was most pleased with the dedication and fearlessness of my students and their writing.
The following year, working in the Republic of South Africa, I gained a first-hand view of the huge societal needs for using writing as a way to cope with severe trauma. At this time, Cape Town was racked by domestic as well as international terrorism. Every day, the teachers, students, and others I worked with lived in palpable fear. In hushed tones, they warned me of violence at every turn. Paranoia enveloped this environment like a thick fog. People of all kinds warned me about staying safe, making sure I knew to do things like allow sufficient distance from the car ahead of me so that I had room to speed away in case I was car-jacked; not to go here, avoid going there, and never do that. Their concern was authentic and touching. The violence and crime was certainly real. However, every time I received a warning, I would invariably ask the person if such things had actually happened to them, and they often said no. My second question was always, “How long have you lived in South Africa?” and it was usually “forever” or many years. I reached the point where I had to turn off their voices of warning that had begun echoing too much inside my head. I decided to do and go where I wanted. At that time, in that place, it became evident to me that this shroud of paranoia seemed to be well-fed by language—a potpourri of sensational news headlines, television reports, rumors, and talk among people, all occurring in a “closed system” where not many competing voices existed. Language and symbols seemed to hold people hostage. The teachers I worked with did not write about their fears, and I regret that there was no structure in place during my stay, nor was there enough time to begin such work.
That year, my colleague from the University of the Western Cape agreed with me for the need to address trauma in writing, and we began plans to work with HIV-positive patients and their writing. This was formalized two years later, with my group of USA graduate students—none of whom were HIV-infected—and his group of South African writers, who were. Too many complications of distance prevented these two groups from working directly with each other, but my colleague and I learned a lot about how to focus and implement our efforts. We next planned to create a humanities curriculum that would be infused with HIV/AIDS education: what it is, how to cope with it, how to communicate about it—all woven into the study of art, literature, and mass media. Unfortunately, my colleague was killed in a car accident and the project ended. Finding a like-minded colleague a world away was not easy.
I then decided to teach my next writing about trauma course with a major change: I would include media, especially visuals, with writing. I was convinced that imagery and language could work in tandem to “heal” a variety of traumas—that working with both symbol systems simultaneously would create more “combustion” for us to re-see, re-frame, and extend our perceptions of trauma. Despite my fears, the course was again a solid success. Students held nothing back, as they plunged deeply into verbal and visual renderings of their own traumas. For examples, see Chapter 4, “Seven Writers Composing in Word & Image.”
Finally, in creating and revising this course over several years and researching this book, I was also encouraged by responses from many conference talks I gave around the world. My sessions attracted relatively small but sincere audiences. I still recall a woman at UCLA coming up to me after my session who said, “This is not just academic stuff—You’re really doing something!”
The Syllabus
What I want to do in this course is immerse students in the topic of trauma, so that they may understand it, and, maybe someday, engage in it with their own students. Therefore, I want students to write it, think about it, read it, talk about it, visualize it, analyze it, and synthesize it. The complete course syllabus for Teaching Therapeutic Language, Literature, & Media appears in Appendix A. While this course is aimed at masters and doctoral students in English Education, much of it can be adapted for other levels and situations. If you have the luxury of working with teaching assistants, they can be very useful for everyone involved. For the course referred to here, two graduate teaching assistants volunteered to work in the class, even though they could not be paid. They simply wanted to participate. Rebecca Dierking collected data for her own dissertation throughout this course, and Deb Holland wanted to figure out if she also wanted to focus her dissertation on writing and trauma. They were especially helpful because the three of us could talk about how the class was going as it progressed and brainstorm possible changes, all in ways that usually did not specify individual students.
The required books and articles listed in the syllabus are intended not just to convey important and relevant information, but also, to convince students that writing about trauma is a serious topic, researched by scholars in many disciplines. Also, the book, Finding a Voice: The Practice of Changing Lives through Literature (Trounstine and Waxler 1999), documents the powerful roles that literature plays in working with adolescents, whose traumas include committing crimes and subsequent arrests. Instead of sending youthful offenders to prison, they are “sentenced” to reading well-selected books of fiction, then meeting in a library and discussing the literature with a librarian, a parole officer, and sometimes a judge. These programs in Massachusetts, Kansas, and a few other states have reduced the recidivism rate of those participating. My students read this book near the end of the course; it opens their eyes to another effective application of using language to defuse current traumas, as well as to limit future ones.
Following is the course description, which I hoped would challenge students, as well as communicate the spirit of experimentation.
What do we mean when we speak of “composing as a way of writing about trauma” and the “therapeutic uses of language and other symbols”? New fields of inquiry are emerging, but with inconsistent names (e.g., “Resilience”; “Emotional Literacy”; “Spiritual Studies”). How should we use words, images, music, and other symbols in such ways—whether it be temporary academic or personal problems, psychological trauma, or disease? How is “writing to heal” similar to “writing to learn” and “writing to communicate”? What roles do other literacy activities and symbol systems—especially reading and viewing—play in using therapeutic language?
How can writing processes and strategies that are described primarily from a cognitive perspective—one that values linearity, sequence, cause-effect, logic, and propositional thinking—and those that are rooted in “other ways of knowing”—ways which value emotion, images, silence, intuition, spirituality, chaos, and the unconscious—be integrated or reconciled to assist people who engage in writing about trauma? How do the therapeutic uses of symbol systems align with professional standards for English and Language Arts professionals? This graduate seminar will explore these thorny (but endlessly fascinating) issues.
This course, then, will provide you an opportunity to engage in the following activities:
Use evidence-based and standards-based teaching to also enhance students’ wellness.
Use a variety of writing prompts and literature to elicit and develop oral and written language to explore major life events.
Revise writing as a means of increasing one’s control over major life events.
Employ specific elements of general semantics to explore major life events in rational, grounded ways.
Of course, we could not resolve so many complex questions, but the activities occurred throughout the semester. Finally, every time I’ve taught this course, I’ve included a professional “counseling psychologist on call.” It helps if this person can visit and speak with the class. Fortunately, I’ve never had to call upon this counselor for specific advice.
Following are the course’s three major requirements. First, students had to complete weekly “projects” that included text and visuals. These were responded to in small peer groups, as well as by the instructor, and then revised as many times as the student wished. Near the end of the course, these projects were to be re-conceptualized into a “Collage Essay” (See Elbow, 1997). Specific information for all requirements appears in the syllabus in Appendix A. The second requirement was a “Mini Case Study” in which students were to apply their knowledge to a specific student, interview the student, and analyze her writing. The case study was intended to help “move” students away from focusing on themselves and their colleagues, and move “toward” their own students. This requires a lot of “quick distancing” for some students and may not be appropriate for your own situation. Third, students had to participate in Socratic Seminars focused on the assigned readings.
In short, this course employed three major types of pedagogy described by Lauer (2004): 1) the “natural ability pedagogy,” in which students write about what is most interesting to them and provides feedback, all within a supportive environment; 2) the “imitation pedagogy,” in which students also read extensively for examples of what they are composing themselves; in this course, such imitation was never directly requested; instead, it was left up to writers how (and even if) they wanted to somehow emulate another student’s example or a professional piece; and 3) the “practice pedagogy,” in which students write frequently and receive a variety of types of feedback, written and spoken (121).
While the major requirements each contain a percentage of the total course points, I tell students that I will not place any kind of grade or number or other symbol on their papers—but they will indeed receive much feedback, through my comments on their papers and my talking with them. I tell them that I do this because I can get away with it! Less cheekily, I explain that if they have come this far in their careers, they should have at least one experience in a class that does not use grades of any kind. I emphasize that grades would create an impenetrable barrier to what we’re trying to accomplish—that if they write and explore personal issues, they will not feel free to do so if a grade dangles over every word they write. I emphasize that this course is an “experiment” for all of us, and one does not judge results as they are occurring. I stress attendance, participation, and completion of all work. More importantly, I emphasize the necessity of responsibility—for themselves, for their colleagues, for me, and for their profession, which includes their dedication to finding “better ways.”
The Weekly Projects
On purpose, I exclude these projects in the syllabus. Instead, they are “reeled out” as we get to them, pretty much in the order presented here, two or three at a time. The reason is that I want to maintain a sequence that moves from the very open and exploratory, to the more focused and creative. I don’t want students to be overly influenced by an assignment too far down the road, thereby influencing what they write in the early projects. Receiving the prompts in batches allows the assignment to germinate in their minds for a longer period. You will find examples of how various students have responded to these projects in Chapter 4, “Seven Writers Composing in Word & Image.” However, Chapter 3, “Lucy” and Chapter 5, “Kate,” focus only on their self-sponsored journal writings and public writings. These two chapters were collected over a much longer span of time, during which I collected data on twelve “writing experts” who had not taken this course or anything similar to it.
For these verbal/visual projects, I suggest a text length of one or two written pages, single-spaced or 1.5 spaces, emphasizing that they can choose whether to go shorter or longer. Most or all papers should be shared in small groups. Students should be free to “try out” various issues, but I expect them to settle on one of them for most of the papers. Most projects require PowerPoint images and manipulation of them, and they may choose to integrate music, voice-over narration, and sound effects. Near the course’s end, for the last project, I ask students to choose from those assignments remaining.
In the following sections, each project’s instructions appear exactly as students received them. I follow a few of the projects with italicized explanations.
Project 1: The Mirror
At home (or in class; bring a hand mirror), for 15 minutes you should stare at yourself in the mirror. Do not look away from the mirror, except to make notes on what you are seeing, thinking, and feeling. When the music stops, you should stop. (When all of the writing is completed, I give them this final instruction.) Next, write up your notes into a good paragraph or page. Next, count the total number of positive or benign comments or words; do the same for the negative comments or words. Finally, write a reflection on the whole experience.
I am indebted to Dr. Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation for this activity. Dr. Jhally asks students to simply look at themselves in a mirror for an extended time and to take notes on what they see. I do this during class to ensure that we gaze at ourselves for at least 15 minutes or longer. (It’s harder than you might think.) Jhally’s purpose is for students to demonstrate to themselves and others that they mainly see all the “bad” things in their own faces, all the imperfections, such as the too-big nose, the blemish above the eye, the odd shape of the head or ears. This leads to a discussion of advertising and how consumers are conditioned, over time, to regard themselves as never matching up to the models and perfect people within the constant streams of media which surround us. My purpose in beginning with the mirror activity is similar, but goes beyond this. Sharing our notes, we learn that most of us find fault with ourselves, that we are made to feel inferior for many reasons, not just through advertising. This places us, at the course’s beginning, on a somewhat level playing field.
As a possible follow-up activity to this project, after reading and discussing the “Introduction” in Anderson and McCurdy’s Writing and Healing (1999), especially the discussion of the “existence of self,” and after responding to the Mirror papers in small groups—ask writers to write about what they believe about the existence of a “core” self.
Project 2: Synesthesia (completed in class)
On a long sheet of butcher paper unrolled on the floor, find a place with plenty of room between you and others. Use markers and crayons to draw whatever images come to mind, especially those related to your issue. To begin, you’ll listen to music for a few minutes with the lights turned off. Next, with the lights back on, begin to sketch anything that may be related to one of the traumas you’re considering writing about for this class. This sketch can include words or phrases, if you like, but try to keep it pictorial, however rough it may be. You’ll take your sketch and doodles home, so that you can write a reflection piece on this activity. Turn your drawing in along with your writing. Please refer to the whole drawing and specific parts.
The first music played should last for about 20 minutes and should sound “sad” or “bleak,” such as portions of Verdi’s The Requiem. The next music should switch to something upbeat and lively, such as a Benny Coleman saxophone piece or the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun.
Project 3: Fixing the Photo
See the example presented in class. Select a photo that is in some way related to your issue. The photo should include people and/or places that represent a relationship(s) that is somehow relevant to your specific traumatic event. Scan this photo into your computer and use Photoshop or other program to manipulate it and change it in a variety of ways (think adding, subtracting, substituting, altering color, background, etc.). You can even draw on the electronic photo. Place the original photo and your altered photo into a PPT, along with your analysis and explanation of both photos—why you chose the original and why you made the changes you did, especially, how and why the altered photo may better represent your perception of these people and this event. Include a brief reflection on both photos and the whole experience.
I’ve used this durable assignment for many years because it generates great writing. It began long before it was easy to deal with photographs and text electronically. It was first called, “The Snapshot Paper,” and asked students to find a significant and meaningful family photo and place it within their written paper—a literal copy, cut and pasted. The only restriction was that the photo not contain too many people (if so, writers often wrote a little about each person, and a cataloging was not good!). I next asked them to study the photo’s details carefully and select one such element to serve as a kind of visual metaphor for the larger issue the writer developed in her text. For example, an arm draped over another person, a slight distance of one person from another, a car in the background, or a raised eyebrow might be the visual counterpart of a discussion of what was occurring during the time the photo was taken, before it was taken, or after it was taken. A description of this visual element often occurred near the beginning of the paper, but writers were free to integrate it anywhere and often returned to it at paper’s end. This Snapshot Paper morphed into the “Fixing the Photo” assignment.
Project 4: Imagining Mama, Part I
Read the assigned chapter from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, recounting her childhood visit to Dentist Lincoln. First, write an objective, detailed narrative of your issue, no more than two pages. Exclude all thoughts, feelings, or any other subjective “colorings” of the event. That is, write of yourself in 3rd person, as if you are an objective reporter. Second, select 6–8 key images (created or found) to visually communicate your no-frills narrative. On each PowerPoint slide with an image, place 1–3 key sentences from your narrative, to further help tell your story.
Project 5: Imagining Mama, Part II
Change the ending of your no-frills written narrative (or the whole piece, but retaining much of the original message) and PPT narrative, so that the story ends in a neutral or positive manner, just as Angelou imagined a different response from Mama to Dentist Lincoln.
Project 6: Your Objectivity Plus Their Objectivity
Return to your objective narrative from the Angelou assignment (“Angelou Imagining Mama, Part I”). Select three key quotes from this paper and place them in the left-hand column of a split-page or screen (the page or screen should have a vertical line down the middle). Next, research the topics of each of these key quotes, and choose a few direct quotes to place into the right-hand column. If at all possible, these quotes must be data-driven information or “hard evidence” from experts that place your own quote into a larger or different context—or even refutes or disproves your quote. That is, you’ll end up affirming or refuting your own quote in some way. If you are unable to do so, you may instead list all possible factors entering into this situation and assign a percentage of influence to each.
Project 7: Entrance into Another World
Follow the written directions given in class, “Entrance into Another World Paper Guidelines.” You will also hear or read an example in class. In short, you will “enter,” in detail, a portion of a world different from yours. You will write about it in the present tense, as if you are there. You may choose to carry this world to absurd extremes. Because you are limited to two pages, you must be highly selective by focusing on a limited part of this other world. The world you select should be somehow related to your issue, directly or indirectly. You should also create a PPT (captions or other language optional) that visually depicts this other world. Use created or found images from popular media culture, etc. Note: You may find it easier to begin with the visual part.
Project 8: The Monster and the Angel
Following basic directions given in class, list all of your “monsters”—major issues that severely depress and frustrate you—or, you can use the list created on the first night of class. Next, select one of these and write a letter to this “monster” OR write a poem for this monster. Next, create or find an image of the monster you wrote to, and place it into a PPT slide. Then, take the image of the monster apart, tear it up, piece by piece, and reassemble it to depict your new “angel”—or some other creature that is far more benign than your original critter. Physically and actually take apart the pieces and re-arrange them into something more friendly and positive. Finally, write a piece that explains, analyzes, and reflects on this experience.
I am indebted to Deborah Holland and Bari Bumgarner, who introduced me to the first part of this project, writing a letter to one of your demons or monsters. To this I added three more parts. One asks writers to create a visual of their monster, preferably one that they create and not merely lift from the Internet. Second, I then ask writers to physically tear up the monster and re-assemble it into their “angel.” Third, they write another letter, this time to their angel. I wanted students to physically deconstruct their visual representation of their monster (or trauma), and then to physically reconstruct it into its positive or benign counterpart. They engage in the same process with language. You’ll find examples of how writers executed this project in Chapter 4. I believe that language represents reality, but for many people, a photograph or visual is a “closer” approximation of the real.
Project 9: All Issues Great & Small
First, create or find the absolute single image of your issue. Feel free to enhance it if you like, to make it as evil or scary as you think it should be. Next, place it into a PPT slide so that it fills the entire space. Then, create or find five images that somehow represent the best elements in your life, past and/or present; place all five of these positive elements onto a single slide. Third, again on a single slide, place all six images, good and bad, but be sure that the negative image is far larger than the five positive ones. Fourth, place all six images onto a single slide (the five positive and the one negative image), making them all the same size (and necessarily smaller). You may choose to place a photo or other representation of yourself in the center of the slide, with the six smaller images “orbiting” around it. Fifth, again on a single slide, make each of the six slides a different size: the most positive image should be largest; the second most positive should be the next-to-largest, and on down. Position your negative image in any way that you wish. Sixth and finally, several days later, write your analysis-reflection on the whole experience, highlighting why you chose these images and what you were thinking and feeling as you created each slide. Include your overall reflection on this “order,” and try to title or name your entire set of slides.
Project 10: Getting Inside the Quote
Select a direct quote from another source that strongly appeals to you, one that somehow “matches,” parallels, or somehow “speaks to” your issue(s). Choose a quote from any of our readings or from those shared in class, or from any other source, as long as it focuses on language and “writing about trauma” or spirituality in some way. Return to your earlier writings and explain how and why this quote applies to or parallels you and your issue. You may choose to “parse” or break the quote down into smaller chunks or organize this paper however you wish. You may do this assignment as a standard paper or as a PPT paper or some other way.
Project 11: Conversation across Time
Create a conversation, dialogue, or Q&A session between the current you—and the “you” of 25–30 years from now. Label the speakers however you wish (e.g., “Me Now” and “Me Older”), as long as they are cleanly differentiated. Limit this dialogue to no more than 2 pages. Place all or selected portions onto PPT slides that show a visual rendering of each of you on each slide containing bits of conversation. The slides need not be the same ones repeated (though that’s fine). Finally, write a 1-page analysis-reflection on this experience.
Project 12: Therapeutic Meets Professional
Explain which projects or parts of projects would lend themselves to serving as a springboard for a professional publication. Which could be integrated into such an article?
These projects are challenging for students, indicated by their visible thinking, questioning, and talking with fellow students (another great benefit of small peer response groups). In many projects, I try to integrate either an actual visual rendering or ask students to engage in mental imagery or imagination—all of which I like students to manipulate—to juxtapose, alter, shrink, and enlarge. The role of meta-language is also important, so I ask for written reflections about their processes and products to accompany each assignment. All of this demands considerably more than “just academic stuff” from students, as well as the teacher, which I’ll turn to next.
The Teacher
In our fragmented, technologized, over-hyped society, we often surrender to “the cult of the expert.” Often, though, we’re far less needy of specialized training or advice than we’re led to believe—a kind of learned helplessness. On the other hand, some professions suffer from the opposite perception, the “anyone-can-do-it” syndrome. The teaching of writing (and teaching in general) have long been cast into this category. When people decide to write about their own traumas, regardless of their reasons and motivations, an experienced writing teacher can help them reap greater benefits, at a much faster rate, than if they were to go it alone. The younger and more novice the writer, the greater the need for a professional instructor.
A few people, though, will feel no need to seek out a professional teacher of writing. I closely studied Lucy and Kate (see Chapters 3 and 5) precisely for this reason: they were mature experts, who instinctively and quickly turned to the page after experiencing their respective traumatic experiences. It’s also true that a basic, preliminary research decision is whether to study novices or experts. I chose the latter because they could model behaviors that could help everyone. By the same token, most (but not all) of the writers in Chapter 4, “Seven Writers Composing in Word and Image,” were also professional, experienced writing teachers, albeit in earlier-career stages than Lucy and Kate, whom I studied separately, after they independently chose to write about their experiences. The writers explored in Chapter 4 expressed few reservations about exploring trauma through writing.
Experienced, professional writing teachers are needed to help students and others navigate personal traumas for far more reasons than I can note here. First, many people will reasonably argue that teachers should not take on the role of psychologist or counselor. While I clearly understand this position, I also disagree with it, mainly because teachers are not displacing such professionals. I always include a “counselor on call” in my courses, though, fortunately, I have never had to contact them. Second, teachers are the ones “there” all the time, they know their students well, and are called upon to dispense “counseling” on the spot, many times each day, without consulting anyone. It’s always been part of the job.
I believe teachers should face their students’ traumas head-on for many other reasons, several of which appear throughout this book, including the fact that the kinds of thinking and writing involved demonstrate the same qualities of critical thinking as traditional academic writing. (In the pages ahead, you’ll see this demonstrated many times.) As well, the written page is where the subjective meets the objective. We write about trauma encased in our own subjectivity. We must “run hot” as much as we can in order to generate all the details and sense of the experience. At the same time, we begin to “run cold(er)” because the mere act of putting down words begins to “objectify” them. After that, the more they’re revised, the more distanced the writer becomes from the prose. When the text is read and responded to by peers and teachers, more steps are taken away from the trauma itself, as it recedes a little further into the background as a more natural part of our internal landscape.
What may be more important here is that these alternating cycles of subjectivity/objectivity occur almost simultaneously or close to each other in time, thereby making them more immediately relevant and applicable for us to begin perceiving our traumatic experience in different ways. I believe this process may become more meaningful for writers than widely-spaced oral discussions with a counselor. Of course, this process can further develop writers’ sense of rhetorical flexibility, which can serve their future thinking and writing. In short, a writing class (also a safe environment) just may be where the rubber best meets the road: when the intangible trauma meets the visible words on the page, combustion is more likely, as one feeds the other.
Writing about trauma, then, occurs in cycles of subjectivity and objectivity, hot and cold. Experienced writing teachers are well familiar with these alternating cycles, though they don’t necessarily occur consistently, nor are they of equal duration. We are deft at reading and writing processes that must run hot and perch up close to us, when fluency and ideas, through the gush of words and images, dominate our internal universe. On the other hand, we are equally deft at distancing ourselves, at running colder, when we revise and edit. For these reasons and more, we can help students with their trauma and writing at the same time.
Truth in advertising: teaching writing about trauma is not for everyone. You have to feel the need, and you have to feel confident. Such teaching takes courage, even a kind of gall, which often comes with experience, when you know you’ve worked with enough different writers and texts to know that writing really does work. In this section, then, I offer some basic advice about the roles of teachers.
Preparing to Teach Writing about Trauma
Many teachers who choose to focus on trauma in the writing class will be well-prepared to do so, even though their backgrounds and terminology will somewhat differ from others. Nonetheless, I feel strongly that the following five elements be seriously considered when teachers prepare to help students mend ruptures in their lives.
Understand General Semantics
First, instructors should thoroughly understand and be able to apply the basic principles of general semantics. Hayakawa and Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action (1991 or later) remains the best introductory source. The over-arching principle is expressed in the semanticist’s mantra, “The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing.” You can also think of it as, “intensional orientation vs. extensional orientation”—the world out there vs. the world inside our heads, i.e., our representations of reality.
For example, before soldiers go into battle, their inner consciousness may be full of patriotic movie scenes, song lyrics, and texts that glorify war. As Twain would say, they may be full of “gunpowder and glory.” However, when these soldiers actually step into a real battle zone, their idealizations of war can starkly differ from actuality. As Johnson (1946) and others have explained, such idealization can lead to frustration, which in turn can demoralize us. The internal constructs formed in words and pictures can be way different from outer reality. In terms of trauma, over time, one may “abstract from” the original experience certain elements that can exaggerate the actual event. One problem here is that traumatic events can reside inside us, frozen in time, and not change. The process of “recovery” via writing is to begin changing those frozen elements into different, more realistic, or more flexible ideas. A related concept here is the Is of Identity, a term that describes an unchanging or frozen sense of who we are as a person. The problem is our labeling of people in specific points in time, and then assuming that reality is unchanging—that those labeled will always be what they were branded. Here, is denotes or implies a state of being that lasts forever.
For example, one of my students lied when his mother asked him if his brother was a drug-user. This student’s younger brother had been arrested for marijuana possession. My student carried guilt about lying to his mother for several years, so he at least somewhat represented his identity to himself as a liar: “John is a liar”—not in that one conversation, but for all time. As well, he and his family regarded the jailed sibling as a drug addict: “Rob is a drug addict.” The facts, though, were that John was not a liar for eternity. He lied to his mother once, yet the simple word, is, labeled and froze him forever in that state. Nor was his brother Rob a drug addict forever (if he ever was).
A related concept familiar to writing teachers also applies to this same student, context. I learned through John’s writing that a good portion of the guilt he carried was connected to where his trauma occurred, a small, conservative rural community in the Midwest. John and Rob’s parents felt especially shamed by Rob’s arrest because “everyone in town knew about it.” He and his family therefore felt isolated and looked down upon in their community. The best teaching approach was to convince John to “enlarge his context” by researching the history of minor drug arrests in different locations in America, as well as overseas. I believed he would come to regard his brother’s arrest as “not such a big deal” if he were to view it through a wider lens.
The ladder of abstraction is another important principle surrounding how we may think about past trauma. Writing teachers seem to spend much of their careers telling students to “get down to specifics” when encountering lofty generalizations. The bank teller who habitually described a robbery she experienced as “nightmarish” needed to dissect or partition this abstraction into smaller pieces before she could begin to deal with it a bit more rationally. Following is a series of questions (and the student’s responses) that was made by the teacher and this student’s small writing response group, all focused on the central question, “What exactly made the trauma nightmarish?”
“Was the robber holding a weapon?”
“Oh yes!”
“What kind of weapon was it?”
“A gun.”
“Did you actually see it?”
“Well, no, but he was holding it in his sweatshirt pocket.”
“So . . . he could have been holding a pen or just using his fist?”
“Well, I guess that’s possible.”
You get the idea. Other semantics principles are equally important as those summarized here, especially either/or language and thinking, our habit of seeing the world in polarized terms; the differences between reports, inferences, and judgments, as well as between denotations and connotations; and advertising and propaganda techniques, such as repetition and association. If your students are also working with actual images (see Chapter 4), these principles can also apply to visual renderings. You may also want to explore some basic tenets of Gestalt psychology and semiotics.
Select Readings that Weave a Web of Connections
Another important consideration is deciding what students will read and why—texts that they can link to other texts, as well as to their own and their peers’ writing. I use books that very clearly provide essential information about writing and trauma in organized and accessible ways, such as Louise De Salvo’s (2000) book noted earlier. I also use Anderson’s and McCurdy’s anthology, also noted earlier, because it is more academic in tone and demonstrates the variety of professionals who seriously study writing and trauma. I also use a number of separate articles and excerpts that focus on insightful details about language and trauma. All or most of the readings should be discussed in class, so that students can draw some lines of connection between four types of texts: 1) academic and research; 2) literary nonfiction that focuses on the author’s traumatic events; 3) their own writing; and 4) their peers’ writing. This is a challenging task, and I don’t “test” students on their ability to solidify such links. I trust they’ll do so in their own ways. It’s best if such links arise as a natural outgrowth of discussion. Also, an even larger amount of synthesizing occurs when students create the final “Collage” project (see the syllabus).
Emphasize Fluency, Freedom, and Flexibility in Writing
Donald Murray (e.g., 2003), Peter Elbow (e.g., 1998), and many other scholars place fluency at the necessary heart of any writing course. Generating language will never be more important than it is in writing about trauma. If your students are unfamiliar with freewriting, you should model it for students on the first day of class. I ask students to assign me topics and I list them on the board, select one, and then use an overhead projector or smartboard to compose aloud, including all kinds of questions, hesitations, false starts, stumbles, and occasionally coherent phrases or lines. I ask students to take notes on the kinds of things I do, such as re-reading, asking myself questions and answering some of them, and going off-topic. What’s important is to keep going. This is followed by my emphasizing that most writers flounder like this. Again, for novices, freewriting should be practiced at every class session, for increasingly longer amounts of time. I begin with three minutes and gradually increase it to 10–15 minutes. Especially with trauma, writers should work from abundance.
Students should have utter freedom in the types or genre of writing. They typically write in narrative form. This makes sense, given their familiarity with this genre. But they are never restricted to narrative or any other pattern or format unless the assigned project requests it, as some do. In most cases, after students make informal lists or “cluster” diagrams, freewriting and narrative rule the day. If students express difficulty with an assignment, the first thing I tell them is “try writing it as a poem”—or news report or graphic short story, or other genre. Students are also free to abandon the “assignment” and approach the task in any other way.
Nudge Writers to Break the Chains of Chronological Order in Writing
Given these established freedoms, I also want students to break the chain of chronology that’s usually imposed by the narrative form. A hallmark of literary nonfiction, getting student writers to “move about in time and space” is one of the hardest things to teach (see, for example, Fox and Lannin, 2007). However, disrupting a traumatic event’s time sequence can be very important for re-seeing and re-framing traumatic events because such events tend to “freeze” in our memory as a cause-effect chain. The student bank teller described earlier may in part blame herself for the robbery because the thief entered the bank soon after she unlocked the main door, a few minutes before she was supposed to. This sequence is cemented into her festering memory of the trauma, but, in reality, her performing this daily chore was very likely unrelated to the robber’s actions.
Responding to Writing about Trauma
Undeniably, the small peer response group should be an integral part of any writing about trauma course. All of its virtues—providing a variety of perspectives and types of advice; clarifying the nature of the paper’s topic; showing emotional support for the writer’s experience, as well as her paper—are intensely needed when writing about trauma. While the syllabus provides guidelines for students (see Appendix A), they are equally useful for teachers. Because my students are experienced teachers, they know how to prioritize and phrase their comments, delivering them in ways that allow their peers to be fully receptive. Of course, the nature of the topic steers most students into adopting supportive stances toward their peers. However, if your students are novices, you’ll need to model how a group should respond, as well as provide them initial guidelines (especially see Elbow and Belanoff [1999] and guidelines from the National Writing Project). After your class gets rolling, sit in on peer sessions (trying very hard not to speak!) and record examples of helpful and specific comments. Then, reproduce and discuss those notes with the whole class.
Differentiate between Written Comments on Students’ Papers and What You Speak Directly to Students
Especially in a writing and trauma class, students will often imitate (in content and expression) the kinds of comments you make about their writing. In stark terms, if you regard yourself as more of a “talker” than a “writer,” then save the most sensitive comments for speaking to the student, preferably out of earshot of others. I’m more of a writer than a talker, so it’s easiest for me to write the most important and/or sensitive comments. This decision also applies to the student in question. If I view the writer as shy or defensive about his writing, I’ll be sure to write my comments, but will engage him in less important conversation, in hopes that we can, in the future, speak of weightier matters as well.
Empathize with Students’ Writing. Always.
Even though you’re all in a writing class, and writing is important, it’s even more crucial to first respond as a human being. As the course gets rolling, you’ll be able to focus comments on style, word choice, organization, metaphor, etc., but this should never occur prematurely. And when it does occur, it should always include the human-to-human response. Even late in the course, I’ve found myself so “blown away” by the prose that I am unwilling (and unable) to respond as a writing teacher. And I’m fine with that. Empathic comments should avoid clichés and be as specific as possible to the paper’s content. One obvious way is to recall a similar situation you may have experienced or know about.
