Sullivan.+Composing+Culture;+A+Place+for+the+Personal

=Sullivan, Patricia. "Composing Culture: A Place for the Personal." = //College English//, Vol. 66, No. 1, Special Issue: The Personal in Academic Writing (Sep., 2003). 41-54. Print.

Abstract
No abstract.

Argument
 Sullivan argues for the value of the personal essay, not merely as a beneficial exercise for students, but as a meaningful form of cultural pedagogy for instructors; she claims that by expanding perceptions of what deserves to be known, and who is worthy of imparting knowledge, writing teachers may learn more about their world, and themselves, through reading personal student narratives than by observing cold, detached research papers. Her assertion, surrounded by and immersed within three insightful personal essays by her students, stands as an example of the very method for student paper analysis that she endorses. She positions herself as a student, regards the student's writing as important, respects the student writer as an authority figure, and extricates what she perceives to be the narrative's meaning, often cataloging jarring details and themes from seemingly trite topics, such as the loss of a parent or a big game, before broadening the students' work to reflect the writing's cultural or societal implications. She encourages teachers of writing to use their red pens to validate and expand the experiences that students share, rather than to overly critique their work for serious content or appropriate spelling, grammar, and punctuation--that is, to use their red pens to prod and provoke, and not to puncture and destroy. While Sullivan contends for the worthiness of student narrative, she promotes a way of writing and reading that is significant to writer and reader because of its profound humanity, because she feels that the experiences of human existence are profound. Sullivan also believes in a constant shift between reader and writer (readers write their own versions of the narratives they read while writers read their experiences and society) and a relationship between student and instructor that endlessly fluctuates, so that teaching and learning may be experienced by both parties in equal measure.

Key Passages
Sullivan’s initial message to students: “Acts of seeing are acts of interpretation” (41).

 Sullivan's perspective on the philosophy of those who teach personal writing: “Those of us who teach personal writing…do so because we believe the personal essay locates students in a topic and form that is familiar to them, that they have a decided interest and stake in, that they can write about with a sense of authority. We believe that writing about a significant experience provides students with an opportunity to engage in reflection, to consider important matters on purpose and audience, to practice and refine elements of the craft” (43).

 The difficulty of personal writing: “Such writing requires a self willing to revisit and inhabit lived experience long enough to find and make meaning of that experience” (43).

 A flawed approach to composition:  “…that critiquing dominant culture is the starting point and prized goal of college literacy rather than the articulation of the lived experience of dominance in its own vernacular, in other words, an approach that begins with the overdetermined theories and ideologies of instructors rather than where she is—in the materially oppressive content of her everyday life” (44).

 Sullivan expressing instructor frustration with mundane student personal writing: <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">“But this is a conditioned response, this desire to flee the mundane in search of “higher” ground, however we define it: literature, theory, science, academic discourse, the Great Books...our response to the everydayness of our students’ personal writing is conditioned by a particular way of seeing—a way of seeing our students, ourselves, and our respective roles: We regard students merely as learners, not as knowers who stand to persuade or educate us” (45).

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;"> On the way composition courses do not value personal writing, or their students’ perspectives: <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">“Students are defined by their lack. They lack the status of speaking, knowing subjects. Whatever they write, however they write it, their writing has no intrinsic value or social import. It acquires value by being processed in the ten or fifteen weeks students spend in our classrooms, but even then only as a vehicle of learning, not as a constitutive and consequential act of rhetoric” (45).

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;"> What Sullivan learned from her student (Ellen) and her personal writing: <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">“It is not only what counts as knowledge—what we deem important and necessary to know—but who counts—who gets to make knowledge, the kind of knowledge worth having” (45).

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;"> The broader goal for expanding the value of students’ personal writing: <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;"> “Allowing students to write personal essays on subjects that matter to them leaves epistemological, political, and disciplinary biases against the personal…intact if their writing does not matter in any context or rhetorical space but the classroom” (46).

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;"> What effects the internalization of students’ personal writing could have on instructors, not as graders, but as cultural observers and analysts: <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">“What if we viewed our students’ personal narratives as ‘ordinary writings’ in Miller’s sense, as ongoing constitutive teachings that join students and teachers in a continuous process of cultural pedagogy?” (46).

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;"> What Sullivan focuses on when compiling students’ personal essays: <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">“What interests me in studying these ordinary and banal writings as forms of cultural pedagogy is what students find significant enough in the everyday to write about, what figures, themes, and tropes they use to narrate experience and convey its personal significance and how they position themselves in relation to others, both within the stories they tell and outside the texts proper” (46).

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;"> The possible results of treating student narrative as important cultural analysis: <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;"> “If we take our students’ writing seriously as a form of cultural pedagogy, it offers us a glimpse into a social text, drawn from the cultural subconscious, that reveals us to ourselves” (47).

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;"> How writing teachers have a similar role (responsibility?) as the Father (the person in the stands cheering on the player) in students’ personal writing on “The Big Game”: <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">“I would also speculate that the writing teacher, in his or her position of authority, plays a similar role for the writer....it falls to the teacher to bear witness to the writer’s passage, to take notice from the margins of the text” (50).

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">Foucault, Michel. //Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings//. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Random, 1981. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">Giroux, Henry. //Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life//. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">Miller, Susan. //Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing//. U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">Scholes, Robert. //Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English//. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.