Class reflection: A Real Development

     This Basic Writing course has really opened me up to basic writing and the struggles and difficulties that students and teachers go through.  This class really changed my perspective on the idea of what basic writing is, and the identity of the basic writer. Through the readings that we had this semester, I have come to understand the importance of basic writing being offered in colleges to help encourage and motivate more students to participate in higher learning.  Education is an opportunity that no student should pass up because they are perceived as remedial or incapable of writing on a college level. 

     This class also taught a wider diversity of assignments that I can offer to my students.  The more options that I have to work with, the more diverse and interesting my syllabus can be; this can lead to stronger class assignments, higher participation from my students, and increased motivation in the classroom. 

     Although this class was challenging, I leave really appreciating the difficulties and struggles that I had with writing the literacy narrative and the book review.  The visits from Wamiq and Susan added an additional element to my exposure to writing academia.

Editing Your Writing: Basic Writing Tips

Giving Adults a Second Chance: Promoting Adult Literacy

I'm sharing a very helpful video about the power of giving adults a second chance. Hope you enjoy!

Many Thanks and Appreciation to Susan Bernstein

Dear Susan:

I would like to thank you for coming to our class on April 16th; I really enjoyed spending that class with you. It was inspirational to hear your story about compiling Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings. I can only imagine the process of reading and selecting very specific essays and writings to be compiled into your collection.

The diversity of the readings are simply amazing when compared to other collected works. Teaching Developmental Writing is a powerful tool in exploring the differences in our language and our culture. It presents us with people from different ethnocultural backgrounds, different linguistic backgrounds, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

I am a huge advocate of supporting and promoting diversity in the classroom and the learning experience. I believe that your book is a great reflection of the human experience—there is not only one way to view the world, and there is not only one way to express those views. I am encouraged to even use excerpts of the book in my Basic Literacy classes. I feel that they can be an inspiration for my students, as well as open up more perspectives in my life.

The chance to have you in the class telling us about the process of putting Teaching Development Writing together made the book even more effective for me. Many times I am detached from my readings in class, but to have the background information for how the book was brought together helps me to have a more personal view.

Hearing about your growth and learning experiences encourages me to really take a look at my own growth. By really analyzing where I am now, and why I am here, I too believe that I can really share my experience through writing. Your passion and zeal for learning really caught my attention; it is reflected in your presentation style, which is captivating.

It’s a pleasure to have been able to share this experience with you, and I wish you the best on all of your endeavors.

Thank you once again.

Mark Jamison

My Thanks to Wamiq Jawaid

Dear Wamiq Jawaid:

To begin, I would like to thank you for taking the time to come to our grad class; I know you must be busy. I appreciate your time spent teaching us about the online resources provided by Norton. Not only were they well presented, but I immediately saw the usefulness of using the online resources. Your presentation was clear and easy to understand, which allows me to quickly find the necessary materials for use in all of my writing. The tools were relevant and user friendly, and will definitely be utilized over my graduate career and in my professional career.

The clarity and simply presented information in The Norton Field Guide to Writing allows me to gain the knowledge to better my writing and the way I display my ideas. The information on organizing and planning a paper is definitely the most helpful, as that is typically my greatest difficulty in my prewriting process. With the multiple methods for making lists and outlines, the text provides flexibility and range in allowing the student write in a method that he or she is most comfortable with. This helps when teaching so that students do not feel as though they are boxed into a specific style of prewriting. Personally, this aspect has allowed me to expand this flexibility into other areas of teaching and learning.

The online resources from Norton are a great benefit for a student on the go, including the downloadable phone app. These tools are quick and easy to access, as well as readily available on demand. As someone who uses technology on a daily basis, having these resources is important to me as a student and writer. As a teacher, I can easily look up information about writing, for example, when searching a method for my English to Speakers of Other Languages students.

And as as student who may one day teach college writing, A Guide to Teaching The Norton Guides to Writing is a great addition to my collection. These books, along with The Little Seagull Handbook, are each unique texts that I can use now and in my future as a writer. The size of The Little Seagull Handbook appeals to me the most, as well as the ability to quickly search for the necessary information. The experience with having to scan multiple pages to search for one thing can be a frustrating process, but like the Field Guide to Writing, the Seagull Handbook is easy to use and easy to navigate.

As I develop as a writer and a teacher, I will surely use these tools to my advantage. Thank, you once again for the books and taking the time to come and present them.

Sincerely,

Mark Jamison

Student of MA Language and Literacy

May 14, 2013- My Identity Uncovered: How Reading & Writing Reformed My View on Culture

One of the most difficult struggles that I had in life was identity; growing up in a minority community, being Black was celebrated and necessary. There were no Hispanics, Whites, or Asians that helped to create ethnic diversity; there was only Black, and that was the expectation. I was the exception. My family had always encouraged celebrating who we were. The power of enjoying yourself and those of like characteristics was spoon fed to me from childhood.

 I’d hear stories of the struggles and triumphs of my family, and how distant relatives worked their way slowly into the middle class. The worn and old house in Greenville, South Carolina in which I lived was the very representation of the work that my family put in to reap such modest rewards. But through all this, I was still confused; why were we only celebrating one part of our family history? Why were we so biased against all of the Whites, Hispanics and Asians that have filtered through in our family and created the other parts of who we are? I didn’t understand how we can focus on the triumphs of one part of our identity and not the multitude of others. With my own motivation, I began to discover these answers through reading and writing.

As a child, I adored reading; there were few moments when you saw me without a book in my hands or near. Reading was my passageway to the world outside of my own. It was my escape from the grief and pain of family, and the paradise that I had not yet encountered myself. My books were my refuge, and thus my path to finding out not only who I was inside at the time, but who I could potentially be in the future. This discovery began with understanding the people who were like me and expanded from there.

In the late 1990s there was a series titled My Name is America that I found in my elementary school library. The series focused on the stories of individuals from different cultures and places throughout America, and used their perspectives to tell about the struggles and victories they had. The main book that stood out to me was The Journal of Joshua Loper: A Black Cowboy, The Chisholm Trail, 1871. The author, Walter Dean Myers, took me on the first ride of Joshua Loper through his eyes. His journal entries helped me to discover an identity that was not exposed to me before. In my community, Blacks weren’t cowboys, we weren’t adventurous, and we didn’t write journals. 

The story was one about Joshua following his dreams despite his surroundings, his history, and his perceived limitations. Joshua stood up, pursued his heart’s desires, and triumphed over his obstacles despite being the son of a former slave and free man. I could imagine his world and the challenges he faced exploring territory that was not common for people like him—Black people in the immediate post-slavery era. His story, like mine, was one of stepping out of the cultural norms and facing some of the unknown.

From this moment, my desire to read more was fueled by wanting to learn more about the cultures that live in America. Thinking through the conversations between my paternal great-grandmother and I, I knew that we were part Cherokee from her parents. This was my next step in discovering more about my identity. I surrounded myself with books about the Cherokee culture, since the original Cherokee lands included the Carolinas. I discovered a new world and imagined myself in the trees and woods around me. I saw myself in their minds, hearing their oral narratives, and passing on story after story about the history of their people, understanding where they came from. At that moment, I was no longer just a Black male in the South, but I was discovering an underlying identity; one that was not reflected in the color of my skin, but the blood in my veins, and the instincts in my gut.

I began to write about my thoughts and emotions during this period of time. Inspired by Joshua Loper, I wrote in a journal the many moments of learning something new, and tracked my progress on discovering my once clouded identity. This journal held my growing pains and confusion as I tried to reconcile why I must only identify as Black. This was the first time in my life that I had to really separate myself from my family and friends and track uncharted territory. I was no longer able to accept the status quo of my culture, nor that of my family. I could not continue living as only a segment of who I was; I only yearned to learn more about myself, and books continued to lead the way.

My growth and development became contort in the information I absorbed in my books.  My family began to wonder whether I would become reclusive and closed to the outside world, but for me, the world was only growing.  I read about culture after culture, life after life, and accomplishment after accomplishment, and I continued directing myself towards understanding how the characters thought, and recording how I contemplated my life in a similar manner.  My interests developed from simply wanting to learn about the cultures to wanting to become part of the cultures.  I first found my encounters with Spanish through this desire.  I had known that there were many family members of Latin American descent in my family, but I had little to no interaction with them.  With reignited interest and passion, I challenged myself to learn as many languages as possible, including Spanish,  and to embed myself in the culture. 

This seed began to sprout with small conversations with Spanish speaking friends and opened to formally learning to read, write and speak Spanish in school.  As I gained more vocabulary and my fluency increased, I began to read texts in Spanish opening my mind to the various cultures of Central and South America.  I explored the jungles of Costa Rica, the deserts of Mexico, the vibrant colors of Colombia, and the beauty of the Ecuadorian Highlands.  I discovered more than my own personal background, but the lives of strangers who may never walk through the streets of Greenville, South Carolina or New York City.  Their culture was not part of mine, yet I felt like it became my own.  I began to understand that my life was interconnected with the lives all around me, and that interconnectedness was the part of the human experience that I could not gain within the boundaries of my family. It was not that my family was wrong in how they supported Black culture over the others, but they didn’t feel the immediateness and urgency I felt to know who I was and how I could use that to my advantage.

I never knew that reading and writing could take me from a child with a confused and fragmented identity to someone who is confident and whole in whom they are. Literacy was the gateway to opening up new worlds and cultures that I never experienced, and it placed me on the path to successfully integrating various cultural aspects into my daily life. From reading The Journal of Joshua Loper to reading poetry works by Jose Marti, I have grown tremendously in my knowledge of cultural identities and what it means to be part of something greater. What began as a search for identity turned into a passion for knowledge about languages and cultures.

A New Perspective: A Reflection on Writing (Reflection Essay)

This semester has been one full of learning experiences that have changed my view of writing from something detached to something that can be very introspective and personal. I came into the class expecting to learn methods and theories about teaching Basic Writing, but I walked away with much more. I am ending this class with new ideas about writing, a different perspective on who I am as a writer, and a new view on how I can manipulate writing to be my own.

My writing history has consisted of many research-based papers; I studied and used multiple resources to discuss a point that wasn’t my own, but that of other researchers and professionals in their fields. I only had to take that information and present it in a way that showed that I understood and could argue the material if needed. This form of writing became my more instinctual form of writing. There was no need to use elaborate detail and I could easily continue to find more information on the subject and use the resources around me to discuss the topic at hand.

Despite the poetry sections and creative writing chapters in my high school English courses, I had little experience writing about something that was subjective.  When I came to class and we discussed the Literacy narrative, I presumed it would be easy.  There were many times I have read and written things,  but the factor I didn't expect was the difficulty in remembering the moments that impacted me as a writer or reader, not inclusive of the great detail required to successfully complete the literacy narrative.  Not only did this paper become my biggest challenge, but it became my most recent writing experience. 

At first I sat in my room attempting to file through all of my literary experiences; not one came to mind.  There were no profound moments in recent history that changed how I thought of writing, nor was there anything significant that I could remember in my past that greatly impacted who I would become today as a reader or writer.  There were only blanks and frustration; it was my greatest case of writer's block, and by far my most worrisome.  Throughout this process, I submitted two drafts-- the first severely lacked detail and character development, and it resembled more of a reflection on my freshman writing course. The second was a narrative about how I came to understand what a literacy narrative should be, but was not actually a narrative. 

Through this experience, I developed as a writer who not only could express a very objective topic, but write from a very personal and subjective point -of-view.  This allowed me to be able to really draw from my own personal experiences and use my own words.  It gave me a sense of ownership over the story; I wasn't simply relaying previously researched information or narrating a story passed down, but I was the story, and I was the author. This new view of writing exposed me to many more possibilities in how to express myself and tell a story.  An opportunity to reflect on a literacy experience stretched me to really appreciate the process of reading and writing, and how much it impacts one's life to be able to read and write. Even when I teach my basic literacy students, I appreciate my own process more. 

As a writer, I am more motivated to reflect more on the papers and essays that I write. I pay much more attention to the word usage and details that I incorporate into my paper more that I have in the past, and I really look to other works for guidance and hints to how to better my writing. Using books such as The Norton Field Guide to Writing, I have learned to use the tools provided so that my writing can continue to develop. I learned not only to cater to my classmates and my teachers when writing, but I have started to focus on a wider audience. My writing can be used for much more than a term paper or assignment, but share more about myself as a person, and my view of the world around me.

As a writer, I have to be able to use my words to communicate emotions, thoughts, and information to my audience. More than anything, I believe that this part was developed over the course of this semester. The literacy narrative called for vivid detail and a well written story; this is something that I had not developed. Over the recent years, I’ve learned to use my words in arguments and discussions in order to express my point, or support an idea. This was the first time that I had to use these same strategies in writing. Although it was a very difficult process, it became easier as the topic of my assignment became more definite and clarified.

I believe the most important process that I learned this semester was the revision process. I learned that this is possibly the most difficult, and the most passed over part of the writing sequence. Although it is tough to find a topic, as in my case with the literacy narrative, I found myself constantly looking for new ways to revise my writing, and I put my papers through many trusted people who could give me both positive and negative feedback about my writing. Before class, most of my revisions were grammatical, and very basic, but now I see the importance of looking at context and flow of the text as much as the coherence of what I am writing. If the paper is repetitive or lacks enough detail to show my idea, it needs to be revised. This was a lesson that I had to learn, and I believe will be learned continually as I develop as a writer.

This semester can easily be named one of my most difficult; it included many new experiences and emotions that I have not felt as a student until taking Basic Writing Theory and Pedagogy. I enjoyed the class because it challenged me to step outside of my previous experience with writing, and it stretched me to view other styles of writing, and even look how to better my own. This experience was definitely one of my best and most memorable experiences with writing.