2 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