I am starting to realize how much we limit our students at the college level. Unless they are in a creative class (and often even then) I see that they are not willing to actually let any part of their interest or experience in a topic show. They are not shy, but the outside of the classroom and inside of the classroom split is quite extreme. I know that this is often a good thing; the separation of the curricular and co-curricular and "real" worlds allows us as teachers and them as students to step outside of ourselves to deal with contentious subjects as academic discourse. It is in some ways a parallel of the fictional "willing suspension of disbelief." But it can also make a subject that is potentially experience-able irrelevant to the daily lives we lead. To a certain extent what I am thinking is that there is a place and a time for everything. However, when it is time for the personal, I am finding it is hard for students to travel from the purely "them" or "there" universe into the one that is "us" and "here." Even when given permission and models it is challenging to let go of the comfort of reporting to achieve true narration.
The orange Silk Road twisty path is in your way. Let's cross it together, shall we?
This topic has come up as I spend more time with my class on the Silk Road. One of the themes I am using in the class is the idea of something being foreign, exotic, strange, and new. What is the world like when you have little framework to understand what is going on around you? My standard attempt to get students to deal with this is "What happens when we do meet aliens and have to interact with something that is truly different?" Creatures who really don't look like us, and whose differences go beyond just skin colour, beliefs, morality, etc. It comes up for some interesting discussions in terms of what is art? what is beauty? and other questions one considers in an art history or art appreciation-type class.
But in the Silk Road class, we have the ancient equivalent of this. So I am trying to get my students to talk about the world they are in now to consider what ways they would experience something different.
A colleague of mine who teaches historical material asked her students to spend a day really looking at what they do and consider how a Renaissance Italian would do it. For example, you check your wrist watch. How would Machiavelli tell time? You text a friend to meet you for lunch. How would someone set up a meeting with someone else in the Vatican of Leo X (pope from 1513 to 1521)? What would he have eaten for breakfast; what would be his equivalent of coffee? Who did Isabella d'Este discuss current events with? How did she find out what the great powers were doing? Did she even care? When a friend is sick, you go and get them some sinus medication, but what would you have done if you were in Venice in 1500? So what did they do? They came in with very academic descriptions of their lives, which were like a 1960s family drama. No one admitted to taking a shower or going to the bathroom. No one seemed to clean his or her teeth or brush or style hair. The things beyond the public world did not exist. She asked if anyone thought about how Michelangelo went to the bathroom, and they were blank. Some of this of course is discomfort with talking about such issues with a professor in a mixed gender class. But some of it is generally that we don't think about or express our non-public experiences to anyone, including friends as well as our broader acquaintances.
In my Silk Road class, which is "Writing Enhanced," I want my students to try out different styles of writing. These include quite academic writing -- your standard research paper with footnotes (or other form of citation) and bibliography, third person narrative and scholarly tone. But I also want them to break away from that style. I am asking for journal/diary/blog posting to include illustration, either drawn or photographed. One of the textbooks I have assigned is Ted Rall's Silk Road to Ruin, which includes both his comic strip style to make this a non-fiction graphic narrative, and completely written first person accounts. (If you haven't read it you should!)
Their first assignment, for Monday, is to write an essay about their home town using at least two disciplines to explain aspects of it. For example, if I were to discuss Lawrence, Kansas, the town I grew up in and still consider my home town (although I have been living here in Missouri longer than I did in Kansas), I might choose to talk about education, and how having the University of Kansas in town has affected the education of students in the public schools, and history -- how the Civil War shaped the town's image of itself. Or how wanting Wilt Chamberlain to come to play at KU encouraged the ending of some segregation in town (my mother told me about movie theatres that were changed because of the importance of basketball to the university and thus the broader community -- go Jayhawks!!! But I guess we should get back to other things). There are many ways to go with this, but I am trying to get them to write about something they know really well so they can let loose a bit with the writing and evoke a true sense of place.
So yesterday, in class, I started out by asking them to think of writing about "place" as more than a very arms' length kind of description. We started by having each student (there are only eight, but one is taking it long-distance, so he is not in class regularly) answer the question "When you have been away from home for three months or so and you walk into your parents' house or apartment, what is the first thing you experience?" One said that he heard the barking of his pet chihuahua. Another talked about the fact that the father is not a particularly enthusiastic housekeeper, and there is a lot of dust and some odd smells. Dust floating in the air and on every surface. It changes the colour of the light. Another, whose parents have moved a lot, including this past summer when they moved across the country, said that the place itself was not the thing she thought of -- it was the people, adn that really made the place for her. I shared that the house I live in now I had bought from friends who had lived here before me. Their house had a particular smell to it, and when I bought it all I could smell was them when I walked into what was now my home. It took me a while to make the house smell like me rather than them, but it is right now. My parents' house still has a bit of the smell of the house mustiness there was when we came home from a six-or eight-week trip when I was little. That was the familiar thing. I wanted them to communicate the experience, not just describe the thing that is their home town.
Then we went to the exotic. What is the most exotic place you have ever visited or exotic (or strangest) food you have ever eaten? We again went around the room. One student talked about being at a roast where a whole goat was cooked, and she and her brother were given the goat's testicles to eat. She described it visually, what the texture was like to eat it, and the flavour. Another described the lighting at a luau, the fire and the low lights on the beach in Hawaii. Yet another talked about eating chocolate covered crickets. She said it did not taste that different from any other bug she had ever eaten, like ants or scorpions which got her a few looks from the other students. But she is afraid of crickets and so it was different for her. And then she talked about the texture, and how the wings broke off and got stuck under your gums like popcorn. It was vivid and personal, and evocative. She is obviously a good storyteller, and the class was laughing and cringing along with her as she told about the eating of the crickets. Seven of them really got into it, but the eighth, the last to go, described very effectively a place he had been where there was a waterfall series that had been carved out into a waterpark sort of place in the Dominican Republic, one which he and his friends had visited when they were on a mission trip there. He talked about the mechanics of it and how it was really beautiful, but there was nothing personal about how he had experienced it. With prompting he did describe the sound of the animals and said the air was humid. But there was no hook that made one want to remember it in the way that the light from fire and ocean would be an image I would think of when picturing Hawaii. I remember the smell of roasting coffee in Amsterdam from when I was five, a sensation I will not ever forget. I remember how sharp the edges of the bread crust on the rolls we had for breakfast was, and that it hurt my mouth until my parents broke the rolls open so we could get to the insides. I remember the gold flecks floating in the air in Myanmar when we visited a temple there. I remember how soft the wind felt on my shoulders in a Hawaiian night.
I want to free them up to really talk about place in all its manifold ways. The essay (not a "paper" in the syllabus) will be a strong example of creative non-fiction if they really take it to its full potential. The blog/diary posts/entries will again be personal narratives -- this is what I discovered about X town and what I thought about doing Y (attending a country estate auction is one of the possibilities, or a harvest festival, or spending a weekend camping out (if they haven't experienced it before), or something else that is new). I will be asking them to visit a restaurant that serves a type of food they have never had before -- there is an Ethiopian and a Salvadoran restaurant in a city about an hour north of us, and Thai and Russian ones 90 minutes south. Or they could have a foreign student cook something for them from that student's home cuisine (haggis, anyone?). But when they describe their experiences in their writing I want them to be evocative in the way that scholarly writing seldom is. Their measure of success will not be the number of sources they use, but their ability to make me (or another reader) experience the discovery of something new as they make it themselves.
I want the students to shake loose from the idea that the only sort of writing they do is dispassionate. It is the appropriate style to use in many of their classes, and in fact, it is the style I mandate in most of my disciplinary classes. But in those instances where I can ask them to be creative and personal, I definitely want them to take advantage of that. In an interdisciplinary class they can do that, and I want to read something that is not dry, not detached.
There is plenty of chance for them to write from book-based research here. But one of the things we try to do at my university is to make them life-long learners, and that does not mean going to classes for the rest of their lives. I would feel I was successful if a former student took a leap and went to a completely different sort of place than he had ever visited or a restaurant from somewhere she has never heard of before. There is a world out there and curiosity is an incredibly important thing to have and hold onto.
Writing is a reflection of attitude and in some ways creative writing is scarier than academic. In part the writing IS the content, rather than just conveying the content as in a research paper. But also you are putting yourself out to be interacted with, even judged, in a way you never would be in academic writing. I think that is why most students steer well away from being personal in their writing for any readers they do not know, and may simply avoid it altogether. In this class I am trying to break down the wall again, and let them use writing to explore the world and to share that exploration with others. We'll see how it goes.