Relocating the Personal

Barbara Kamler

Description

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).
Foreword

Preface

1. Space, Time, Embodied Texts

2. Relocating Voice And Transformation

3. Stories of Ageing

4. Who Said Argumentative Writing Isn't Personal?

5. Critical Spaces for Learning to Teach Writing

6. Language, Gender, Writing

7. The Politics of the Personal: New Metaphors, New Practices

Bibliography

Index

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 22 février 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791491355
• Langue: English

Extrait

R E L O C A T I N G T H E P E R S O N A L

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R e l o c a t i n g t h e P e r s o n a l ❖

A Critical Writing Pedagogy

B A R B A R A K A M L E R

With a Foreword by Michelle Fine

S TATE  U NIVERSITY OF  N EW  Y ORK  P RESS

Cover art, (Scroll, 1999) by Aloma Triester. Courtesy of the artist.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2001 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, NY 12246

Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Dana E. Yanulavich

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kamler, Barbara. Relocating the personal : a critical writing pedagogy / Barbara Kamler ; with a foreword by Michelle Fine. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-4811-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-4812-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. Interdisciplinary approach in education. 3. Creative writing—Study and teaching. 4. Critical pedagogy. 5. Autobiography. I. Title.

PE1404.K36 2001 808'.042—dc21

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To Jeanne Heidenreich Kamler

My first writing teacher

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Foreword

Preface

ix

xiii

C HAPTER  O NE

C HAPTER  T WO

C HAPTER  T HREE

C HAPTER  F OUR

C HAPTER  F IVE

C HAPTER  S IX

C HAPTER  S EVEN

Bibliography

Index

203

C o n t e n t s

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SPACE, TIME, EMBODIED TEXTS

RELOCATING VOICE AND TRANSFORMATION35

STORIES OF AGEING

55

WHO SAID ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING ISN’T PERSONAL?79

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CRITICAL SPACES FOR LEARNING TO TEACH WRITING109

LANGUAGE, GENDER, WRITING

137

THE POLITICS OF THE PERSONAL: NEW METAPHORS, NEW PRACTICES171

187

vii

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F o r e w o r d

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We may look back on this moment in history as the days of educational redlining: the exiling of the public from public education, the extraction of joy and the novelty of academic surprises from the teaching experience, the smotherings of intellectual creativity and curiosity in the name of ‘stan- dards’. Indeed, within the neoliberal assault on public educa- tion, ‘standards’ and access sit in a perverse seesaw. The former is presumably on the rise as the latter falls painfully on the backs of the poor and working class. In the United States redlining takes the form of anti–Affirmative Action policies, a retreat from remediation, heightened tuition rates, reduced financial aid, welfare ‘reform’ whereby women must accept low-level jobs rather than pursue higher education and a ‘standards’ movement by which the only ones held accountable are poor and working class youth and young adults increasingly shut out of higher education. In the midst of a rising elitism within the academy, Barbara Kamler in- vites readers to remember joy and to consider a democratiz- ing of education; that is, she argues for the teaching of writ- ing as a political project in schools and communities. InRelocating the Personal: A Critical Writing Pedagogy, Kamler introduces us to writers in unsuspecting bodies— ageing women, 60 to 90, with stories and more stories to tell; a sixteen-year-old ‘failed writer’; a set of undergraduate teacher education students; and postgraduate Master’s students, en- gaged in off-campus distance learning. We learn about the delicate practice of writing pedagogy: the power of working with multiple frameworks, the joys of a pedagogy that is at once collective and deconstructive, the struggle to theorise ‘personal experience—[and] relocate [that] experience within broader social, cultural and political contexts of production’.

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R ELOCATING THE  P ERSONAL

Crafting a text on writing pedagogy, Kamler produces a book on cultural histories of ordinary peoples and their schools. Encouraging her students to be coresearchers, together they carve ‘risky territories’ in which they refuse to position language as ‘neutral communication’ and insist, instead, upon interrogating the ideological and strategic moves of school- ing. They write to know, and they revise to know again, culturally, as a sea of humans making collective meanings of the shifting structures, formations, ideologies and geographies of their lives. WithRelocating the Personal, Barbara Kamler offers read- ers 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. Across these works, Kamler reveals teaching as delicate and prodding, respectful and nudging, predictable and fundamentally surprising. Relations of teaching and learning grow in schools, communities, around dining-room tables and within adult education writing groups. Kamler’s second gift is a text on critical pedagogy in which she is herself explicit and self-critical, instructive and gener- ous about the teaching of writing. In ways deeply feminist and poststructuralist, Kamler details how she works with students to extract cultural texts from under the stubborn lamination of the personal story. Carefully sculpting cultural stories from the clay of what seems so personal, Kamler dares to enter the terrain of pain, oppression, pleasure, tragedy, joy and loss. With grace and respect, she creates contexts in which students migrate from that which seems so private back into historic and political contexts, embroidering a cultural frame around often buried stories that feel so unique, authentic and distinctly one’s own. In the task of ‘relocating the personal’, Barbara Kamler rewrites social history, writing pedagogy and adult psychol- ogy. She borrows delicately from the ‘personal closet’, stories of power, gender, ‘failure’, the body, ageing, sexuality and anxiety. Renouncing the ‘true, inner voice’, out of the closet tumble multiple stories revealing what she calls ‘collective biographies’ of ideology, subversion, resistance and cultural reproduction.