Week 12--Post on Lorraine's Story

The story's very personal focus--titled "Lorraine's Story" instead of "How I Worked With A Student on Bringing Personal Voice"--shows both the greatest strength and weakness of this case study. As other students have noted, this pulls you in--you get invested. Brian's framework prompts memories of revision and darling-killing in creative writing, and the reader can sympathize with the struggle to move between kinds of writing while acknowledging how Lorraine's lived experience as a woman of color in a majority-white institution has shaped her experience in Iowa and extended to how she moves between kinds of writing. 

However, this is ultimately Brian's framework and mediation of Lorraine's story; without citation, with the creative non-fiction structure, it is difficult to discern how much of this is quoted from Lorraine vs. surmised by Brian; he writes himself as a facilitator, and we do come to understand the complexities of this student's writing, but Lorraine didn't write the essay. At several key moments this drew me back out of her story into Brian's perspective on her story; although valuable in terms of our positions as teachers, where we must be able to appreciate the stories we hear as well as able to see both forest and trees, this was more jarring than the style concerns Brian had about Lorraine's work. It had the personal narrative touch that the other progress-based studies lacked, but in turn skirted a full trajectory of Lorraine's work as a writer to focus in on her experience with his tutelage.

Comments

  1. Carol SeverinoApril 8, 2020 at 2:04 PM

    Many case studies by teacher-researchers, or in this case, teacher-writers, are actually case studies of the relationship between the teacher and the student rather than only of the student. But I agree with you Kathleen. We learn about this relationship completely from Goedde's point of view, perhaps in part because it's published in a journal about teaching writing. It was completely OK with her that he use her real name vs. a pseudonym, and I think he might have even shown it to her and asked for her feedback.

    Previous classes have criticized his perspective as being somewhat oblivious to the importance of academic writing as empowerment of an underrepresented minority who faces discrimination, even if he does acknowledge her point of view. It would certainly have been a different essay had she co-written it with him.

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