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Using literacy narratives in the first-year composition classroom can shape a unique, sophisticated, student-driven language community.
Once it is allowed that how we speak and write is the product of how people speak in our homes, the speech customs in our native communities and early school years, in stores, on ball fields, in the movies, people will recognize these everyday language-use occasions. If one task of the literacy classroom is to try to reconstruct that history, then many hours can be spent thinking and asking friends and family about what one only partially remembers, and a surprising number of salient events of the past can be assembled. While it is never clear how "accurate" our memories are, the fact of having remembered something important always facilitates new reflection and analysis.
-David Bleich (183-84)
Introduction
The recent professional interest in literacy narratives has generated a body of valuable scholarship, dubbed by one of my colleagues as a "literacy narrative industry" (see Eldred; Eldred and Mortensen; Brodkey). This scholarship typically stops short, however, of providing writing teachers with specific ways to incorporate literacy narratives into their classrooms. In addition, much of this scholarship approaches the teaching of literacy narratives as an activity of reading rather than student writing or production.l For Janet Carey Elred, Peter Mortensen, Mary Soliday, and other teachers of literacy narratives, the narratives of published, "professional" writers serve as readers for the class and lenses through which students sometimes develop and interpret their own narratives; the works of Richard Rodriguez et al. constitute the "canon" in the emerging literacy narrative industry.
In this essay, I offer a supplementary approach to teaching literacy narratives, one that builds on the work of Soliday and others, but one that is centered in student production. I begin by outlining specific strategies for teaching the literacy narrative in the first-year composition classroom. Next, I discuss possible benefits of teaching the student production of literacy narratives. Finally, I critically examine current methods of teaching literacy narratives, including my own method.
Strategies for Teaching Literacy Narratives
Before outlining a production pedagogy of literacy narratives, I want to define the terms literacy and literacy narrative. In this essay, literacy does not refer to a type of consciousness (in the manner...