The Literacy Narrative Assignment

I'm going to have my students write a literacy narrative for their first assignment. They will be asked not only write about themselves as writers but also say how the things they view--TV, movies, the Internet, video games, etc.--contribute to the sort of writers they are. I'm especially conscious of the fact that these students don't read as much as past generations and get most of their information on screen, but they nevertheless need to be good writers because the academy and the workplace demand it. That is why my class is going to write for the increasingly read/write web (Web2.0); the perfect lab for them to learn to be this new writer. I've come to this conclusion in several ways.

The conundrum for me as a writing teacher is that I learned to write by reading so it's hard to put myself in their shoes and ask them to participate in a classroom that is read-to-write when it should be one where we read/view-to-write. That's my goal, then, to provide a read/view-to-write writing classroom. And the first step is to get them to tell their read/view/write literacy stories.

I am going to use DeRosa's article "Literacy Narratives as Genres of Possibility: Students' Voices, reflective Writing, and Rhetorical Awareness" to jump start the discussion. She maintains that a course based on literacy narratives as reflective heuristics gives students a better way to subvert what she calls "literacy myths" that encourage labeling and discourage improvement. What she calls literacy narratives, I would simply term personal rhetorical analyzes. Her students are a model in how they learn to see their public writing positioned rhetorically. She denigrates the first and done literacy narrative that serves as a soft diagnostics at the beginning of a course. I see it more as a beginning that can be built upon.

My literacy narrative assignment needs to shock students out of the usual school-doesn't-have-anything-to-do-with-my-life syndrome by letting them read/view and be critical about how they learn in their day-to-day lives. I want to use this awareness of the read/view/write process to have them write the other assignments in the course. They will learn that writing has always been about reading and now it is also about viewing, too. And, if they want to be better writers they have to identify themselves as a reader/viewer who can more clearly write in this new era where the demands of communication are the same but they have changed as learners and writers. Knowledge of how they have changed can allow them to become better writers.