By Deepti Dhir
Our writing centers are filled with stories that reflect a desire to culturally belong, suggested Dr. Jackie Grustch McKinney at the NEWCA conference this weekend. As someone who has lived abroad most of my life before coming to the U.S., I now wonder if the narrative I tell others of moving and its accompanying hardships are simply part of this “cultural script” that McKinney describes.
Recent discussions with colleagues at the writing center have led us to observe that students reach for the same narrative of migration in their essays. These stories read very much the same way – learning English, living away from home, adjusting to a new life. While I fully acknowledge how difficult each of these aspects is, I think we know that there are other details of each of these students’ immigrant stories that are unique and meaningful.
Similarly, in our own pedagogical practice in sessions, we often tell students stories of ourselves as writers, saying something to the effect, “As a writer, I like to…” or “As a writer, I always…” Are these stories then particular to each of our own writing experiences or simply a reflection of what we think good writers should be doing?
In McKinney’s keynote speech, she invited us to examine a story by asking, “What’s not said in this story?” This suggests that in investigating with students what is left out in their narratives, we can start to approach a more authentic story. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that as we begin to challenge the everyday stories we tell and write about, we are creating new cultural scripts that will influence what we should and should not say, what we should and should not write.
Published April 6, 2016
