As a composition teacher, I am committed to teaching practices that encourage students to explore the value of their diverse backgrounds and lived experiences. These two key concepts that I defined below shape the core part of my teaching and are always embedded into my writing assignments.
- Diversity and Diverse Backgrounds: Ones’ visible and invisible attributes that help them identify who they are as a certain kind of person. In this sense, talking about ones’ diversity (or diversities) inevitably means thinking about the collection of their identities—which involve their distinctive backgrounds such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, etc.
- Lived Experiences: Accumulation of memorable experiences from the past to the present that have (1) meaningful contributions to ones’ sense of identity as a certain kind of person and (2) significant impact on their imagined future selves. As a part of ones’ distinctive backgrounds, the value of ones’ lived experiences should be unique to each individual.
College students are in the middle of cognitive development in many ways, and it is crucial for them to raise awareness toward their own diversities and identities as valuable assets to them. To this end, I encourage students to reflectively think and write about their lived experiences, drawing on the concept of meaningful writing practice introduced in Hanauer (2012) and Park (2010).
Regarding meaningful writing practice, in the second language writing education context, Hanauer defined a writer as “a socially and culturally contextualized individual with a rich, extended history of personal experience” and indicated that language learning through writing is “a part of process of widening and deepening the ways an individual can understand, interpret, feel and express her or his personally meaningful understandings to themselves and within social settings” (2012, p. 108). In a similar context, referring to her cultural and linguistic autobiography writing project, Park (2010) stated that “[p]roviding opportunities for students to write about their lived experiences is a powerful pedagogical tool that not only empowers their ever-changing identities, but also guides them in continuously improving their English proficiency” (p. 55). I believe that such pedagogical benefits of autobiographical narrative writing are not exclusive to second language writers. I utilize an autobiographical narrative as a pedagogical instrument in my college composition courses.
I contribute to students’ meaningful writing experience through two kinds of autobiographical writing activities. Academic and Career Autobiographical Narrative in a Basic Writing course, where students aim to obtain fundamental knowledge required for college-level writing, encourages students to explore their past experiences that strongly influenced their decision to pursue college education. By revisiting memorable moments in the past, students can (re)recognize their motivation toward and goal(s) of learning at college. Additionally, this specific writing task is followed by other writing assignments through which students can gather firsthand information about their potential learning outcomes at college and create a practical action plan to make their academic and career goals accomplished. In this sense, I use students’ autobiographical writing as a catalyst to bridge between their past, present, and future. Indeed, in my teaching at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, I found that these writing tasks were quite beneficial for first-generation college students. In an Advanced Composition course where students obtain knowledge and skills needed for primary and secondary research projects, I offer Autobiographical Research Theme Narrative as an initial stepping-stone writing assignment. Students reflectively write about three most memorable life experiences with which they can construct academically, socially, culturally, and even politically arguable topics as their research projects (see Akiyoshi, 2019). Through a semester-long research project, students can notice that their unique backgrounds, experiences, and knowledge are valuable assets that help create meaningful connections between themselves and topics that need research and argument. As some examples, students worked on issues related to LGBT, African Americans in the U.S., heritage language, learning disabilities, parents’ divorce and children, etc. Students were inspired and motivated by their own narratives and investigated these topics; and most importantly, they could identify connections between themselves and society–academically or beyond academic contexts.
By defining diversities as an inclusive concept that consists of students’ unique backgrounds, experiences, and knowledge, my two autobiographical writing activities can help students make use of their rich personal attributes and histories as a catalyst for learning and writing. In this sense, my teaching contributes to students’ improved awareness of the value of their own diversities. This is a part of my fundamental teaching philosophy and what I am eager to implement in any of my teachings.
Reference
Akiyoshi, J. (2019). Pedagogical Applicability of Autobiographical Narrative in College Research Writing Class. https://www.hltmag.co.uk/oct19/pedagogical-applicability-of-autobiographical-narrative
Hanauer, D. I. (2012). Meaningful literacy: Writing poetry in the language classroom. Language Teaching, 45(1), 105–115.
Park, G. (2010). Meaningful Writing Opportunities in the Community College: The Cultural and Linguistic Autobiography Writing Project. In S. Kasten (Ed.), Effective Second Language Writing (pp. 51–55). TESOL, Inc.
Jun Akiyoshi 