Relocating the Personal: A Critical Writing Pedagogy

by Barbara Kamler

A rich array of interesting ways to teach personal writing critically and in settings where it has typically been excluded.

Addressing the current and growing interest in the personal, the self, and the autobiographical not only in the teaching of writing, but also across many disciplinary and subject fields, Relocating the Personal describes a rich array of practical approaches to teaching the personal in settings where it has been excluded.

The author argues for the teaching of writing as a political project in schools and communities, and for a notion of the personal which is not simply equated with voice. The construct of narrative is preferred, because it allows teachers to examine all personal writing as a representation and not the same thing as the writer's life. Strategies are developed for examining how experience is portrayed and how it might be written differently, with material effects on both the personal text and the writer's person.

The book incorporates the latest theories of critical and genre literacy as it develops four teaching cases in different education contexts (secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and adult/community).

"With Relocating the Personal, Barbara Kamler offers readers two gifts. The first is a rich collection of critical writings, by so many different kinds of students, writing from so many different sites for education. Kamler's second gift is a text on critical pedagogy in which she is herself explicit and self-critical, instructive and generous about the teaching of writing." -- Michelle Fine, from the Foreword

"...most engaging for the ways it maintains a steady focus on personal writing within a post-structuralist framework. In an age when personal writing seems open to criticisms leveled by post-structuralism, Kamler resolutely defines ways that keep the personal without sacrificing, in fact by embracing, post-structuralist theories of language. She does so in a way that presents personal writing as a vital aspect of social critique and change." -- Kirk Branch, University of Kansas

Genres: Writing, Grad School

222 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2001

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never quite know what to say about writing. This book ‘a critical writing pedagogy’ isn’t an easy book to categorise. Firstly, she spends quite a bit of this talking about how hard she has sometimes found writing – memories of her needing her mother’s help to write, of needing cigarettes to write, of needing time. Most of the book focuses on her helping others to write and thinking through the very odd idea that we might be able to teach others how to write.

I just want to say that most of this review will not review this book at all. That said, my favourite chapter of this was Chapter 4 – ‘Who Said Argumentative Writing Isn’t Personal’? As someone who has always thought all writing is personal, I was keen to get to this chapter. You see, I judge people who talk about writing by what they say about non-fictional writing. The chapter is about a high school student who is having trouble writing an argumentative essay that her teacher will pass. Kamler sets about trying to help this young woman – with all of the ideas one might start with, such as, topic sentences, evidence, personal opinion and so on. But a large part of the problem that needs to be fixed is the relationship between this young woman and her teacher. I liked how this played out, how Kamler helped the young woman see the power in her asking for help, the power in vulnerability, but also the power in believing in one’s own voice and in trusting in having an opinion worth holding. And how writing allows one to form that opinion, to see one’s values.

The chapters here present various groups of people learning to write – people who are at very different levels, from novice to expert and back again. And so the problems they present to the teacher seeking to help them are significantly different too. I’m not going to provide a blow-by-blow discussion of the various groups or their problems – but rather, I’m going to use this review to offer some parallel thoughts that have been troubling me on the nature of writing that this book touched on in part as well.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is Vygotsky and Luria and how they say thought and language are intimately related, so much so that they believe abstract thought, that most human of abilities, is only possible via language. I mentioned this to a friend in a letter the other night and she wrote back a story of a young woman who had been unable to learn to read and write, but was able to do the most remarkable drawings – but then, as if by magic, someone figured out how to teach her to read and, just as suddenly, her ability to draw disappeared too. I like this story because it fits so nicely with some other ideas I have taken from Socrates and Plato about the costs of any new ability, even one that we generally assume offers nothing but benefits.

Luria studied peoples from the Central Asian Republics of the USSR shortly after the revolution – people who were illiterate, and he found that they were incapable of many very simple logical processes that we take for granted. In fact, while you read his book you can literally hear the frustration in the text as the researchers ask their questions over and over again, finding it almost impossible to believe they are getting the answers they are getting. The simplest syllogism proves to be quite beyond these peasants. What Luria found (oh, you can read more about this in my favourite of my own reviews here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) was that without literacy people are essentially trapped in the endless concreteness of their lives. They are unable to move beyond the concrete to see any abstract patterns in their lives, and yet, the slightest access to literacy opens the possibilities of abstract reasoning to them.

Of course, by literacy, we often think of ‘learning to read’. The beauty of learning to read is the ability to get inside another human’s brain. When I studied professional writing in my undergraduate degree one of my lecturers was Gerald Murnane. He said that the only time you can know that someone is saying the truth, can be sure they mean exactly what they say (you know, whether or not it proves ultimately to be true or not, but it is true in the sense that the person saying it absolutely believes what they are saying to be true) is when, in a work of fiction, the narrator says that they completely believe something to be true. Every other time we are left in some doubt, even if that doubt barely exists, all the same, it is always there. But when the narrator in a work of fiction says they believe something, it can be said without even the hint of irony or scepticism.

People say that being able to read isn’t all that different from being able to listen – people have been telling stories since there was a falling out between humans and the primal slime, and many believe that the only real benefit of being able to read is in being able to hear the stories of people we have never met. Of course, this was one of the things Socrates hated about writing – that you could never question a book in the ways that you can question a person. But I think reading is different for many more reasons than just this. The structures of written language are significantly different from those of spoken language – they allow for much more concision and they provide for experimentation and creativity that is also very different to that available to spoken language. For instance, can you really just ‘listen’ to George Herbert’s Easter Wings? Or is it also important to see it on the page? And if that is true for concrete poetry, is it any less true for other forms?

Socrates was worried that learning to read meant people would literally lose their memory – something he was proven right about, of course. Pre-literate humans ‘wrote’ the Odyssey and The Bible and kept these books alive for centuries before there were any books. But what we gained when we started writing was more than just a paper external hard drive.

Again, this is the problem with literacy being associated mostly with reading. For some reason literacy is very rarely associated with writing and the power (the super power) this gave (gives) us.

Writing is a remarkable thing. Think of a diary. People often write them with no expectation of them ever being read at all. In fact, some people say they want them destroyed when they die, because they were never written with the intention of them being read.

Think about that for a second. If writing is a means of communication, who is communicated with whom when we write purely for ourselves? And this is something I do all of the time. At work I often have to find ways to write about things that are at the cusp (and sometimes on the other side of the cusp) of my ability to really understand – and when that is the case the first thing I do is pick up a pen. I might scribble a mind-map, I might produce a list, I might start writing in whole sentences, or in clipped sentences – but whatever I do it involves writing. I’ve recently started hand writing again. I mostly do this when I get stuck. Someone I read recently said that one of the reasons handwriting is so powerful is because, unlike typed text, it is so unequivocally yours (oh, it must have been that Korean philosopher, Han, but I think he was quoting someone else).

The bottom line with writing for me is that we literally get to see what it is that we ‘think’ in ways that it isn’t at all easy to do in any other way – other than through talking to someone about as intelligent (whatever that means) as we are. Then they (our interlocutor) are able to provide the flint that provides the spark. When such a person isn’t available (that is, most times) writing is that other who provides the mirror our minds need to reflect upon. If reading lets us into the mind of someone else, writing lets us into our minds in ways we can’t get in otherwise.

Although, like any good idea, often this isn’t true. Too often writing can fool us into thinking we are much more clever than we really are. The momentum of the argument on the page makes us miss the fact that there isn’t much more to the argument than its momentum.

There is a nice bit in this book where she asks her students if it is okay to treat the text they have provided her as a piece of text that she can deconstruct and critique – or is the piece of text too personal and therefore too close to the bone to be criticised, where it being criticised would be much the same as having pieces of flesh stripped away from the writer (don’t look up the ‘death by a thousand cuts’, just trust me, it’s not at all nice). I’ve watched this flaying alive happen many times during my various degrees – that is watched people in tears while their writing is being ‘critiqued’. Once, a young woman sat sobbing while an older woman turned to her and said, ‘your crying is making it nearly impossible for me to properly criticise your work of fiction’. I’ve often thought much of my profession writing degree involved standing naked in front of strangers. But it is a hell of a lot easier to stand naked in front of people if you can convince yourself no one is going to laugh – unfortunately, few of us can sustain that assurance. Murnane used to quote someone or other who had said, ‘write till it hurts, then write some more’.

The surprising thing about writing, to me, is that so few people seem to do it. And that is something that really does surprise me. It seems to me a bit like having a mirror that not only allows you to see yourself in a clear way that isn’t available in any other way, but that the more you look into that mirror the better looking you become – and I really do believe that is the case, so, it really does surprise me that so few people choose to ever look into it. Part of me thinks that the reason why is that people have learnt to associate writing with ‘becoming rich and famous’ – god, knows why – given how few rich and famous authors there are. To me, writing is a form of productive talking to myself – it isn’t the only talking to myself I do, but it is by far the most interesting.

This book is lovely – any book that presents the difficulties associated with learning the ‘basics’ of writing so as to be able to shine new lights on those bits of our lives that confuse and frighten us – and I’m thinking mostly now of the bit of this book about Malaysian woman’s writing about her history and that of her daughter – is a book well worth reading. And this is a particularly interesting read because it is written by a woman who has taught, and thought about how to teach writing for much of her life.

[Cherylann]

This is my third time through this book, and it's one of the few "course books" that resonated me when I first read it. It probably triggered my ideas for my dissertation. Each time I read the book, I find a new quote to chew on and wrap my brain around. Kamler rules!

[Kalynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book...of course, because it talks of that personal connection with writing--the reflection, the possibility, the invitation. Barbara Kamler does a great job of expanding upon how we traditionally see writing, while sharing her journey, and the intersecting lives along her journey.