Embodiment, Emotion, and Gender in the Developmental Writing Classroom

Kendra Birnley
Northern Arizona University

Driven by a desire to see my composition students become passionately concerned about societal injustices and politics, I decided that the goal of my Master's thesis would be to uncover a new way for rhetoric and composition instructors to reach students at a level that was both emotionally engaging and politically progressive. I examined French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of embodiment and considered how it could be applied to rhetoric/composition pedagogy. Put simply, embodiment according to Merleau-Ponty suggests that it is through our lived, bodily experiences that we first come to know and understand our world; we develop a “feel” for it, an emotional understanding of it, before we are able to reflect upon it. Emotions experienced through the various situations in which we live become the primary means for us to initially interpret our realities. I used Merleau-Ponty's theory as a way to challenge strict logocentrism and a privileging of intellect over feeling that I see happening a little too often in rhetoric/composition classrooms. For me, the principle of embodiment has especially interesting implications for developmental writing courses and for discussions of gender.

As many of us have discussed on this listserv and in our studies of basic writing, our students' situations are disproportionately affected by race, class, gender, ethnicity, culture, age, and bodily abilities. And I'm going to assume that a great number of us consider the issues surrounding these social categories to be of pressing political concern because of the oppression that is associated with them. Several of our modules have also suggested methods in which we use these categories and issues as ways to reach our students on a personal level, to let them speak from their own experience, and to validate their interpretations of their own realities. This validation, I feel, is especially important in that it serves as a necessary step towards building confidence in our students, many of whom feel defeated by their circumstances. Some of the pedagogical assignments spoken of so far on this listserv which I believe take up an embodied approach to learning are personal narratives, service learning, and the incorporation of visual texts (because of their more immediate sensory—read “bodily”— experience) into curriculum.

My own teaching style is influenced greatly by Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I try, whenever I can, to let the emotions of my students come to the table when I introduce a new topic to them. Currently, I am teaching introductory women's studies courses, and not developmental writing. But, all the same, I have found that letting my students work their way out from their emotions to complex understandings of their own lives and the structures and ideologies that influence them has been a crucial process to get them truly passionate about some of the more “academic” material we study. More than anything, they enjoy reading and writing narratives because they feel they can connect with the material at an emotional level. In validating their emotions and the emotions of the authors we read, I feel that I am able to engage my students at a level that I couldn't and can't accomplish when I teach “traditional” academic texts in a more “traditional” way.

While the social categories I mentioned above (race, gender, class, etc) rarely, if ever, exist in their own vacuums, the constraints (e.g. time and purpose) of developmental writing classes do not necessarily allow for complex discussions of their intersectionality. For this reason, those of us who take on investigations of identity and oppression often, I imagine, have to discuss them somewhat separately. Even though I try not to present these categories as disparate forces, I find that I tend to focus on gender more than the others. I likely do this for two reasons. First, admittedly, is because this is where my own personal passion lies. But the second reason has more to do with the demographics of the students in my writing classes. While so much of the literature in the field of basic writing suggests that developmental writers have similar backgrounds, we know from experience that this isn't always the case. Our classrooms are often comprised of a highly diverse group of students. Gender, however, is one category that all of our students can relate to, whether they acknowledge it or not. From an embodied perspective, then, gender seems to be the one social category that our students have “felt” and experienced first-hand at some point in their lives.

Because teaching at an embodied level (i.e. validating emotions as a legitimate interpretive tool) can open the door for passionate and liberating discussions of our life experiences, I feel that it is an integral way to induce student engagement with certain material. Hopefully, in bringing the complications of gender to the table, we can help our students work towards a belief that an understanding of gender and how it affects their lives and education can be a source of empowerment. And in teaching in such a way that gives more credit to the emotional experiences that we have in life and in academics, we are, in turn, doing our part to “rescue” and redefine a state of being that has, unfortunately, been gendered as “feminine” and historically dismissed as unnecessary and unwelcome in academics.

So, the questions I have for the group are as follows:

• What role does emotion play in your classrooms?

• How many of you use gender as a catalyst for discussion and/or for writing assignments? In what ways?

• For those of you who do discuss gender in your classrooms, how many of you have met with resistance from your students? What were their protests and how did you deal with it?

• How many of you ARE able to take up a complex discussion of the intersectionality of oppressive categories? In what ways do you approach the topic of intersectionality?

• If you discuss gender, how do you address those students who feel that they “have no gender” or that gender doesn't factor into their lives?

What do you feel are the dangers (if any) of bringing up gender in the developmental writing classroom? What are the dangers of evoking more emotionally-laden topics in general?

This project was fueled by what I saw as apathy or even disgust for political issues in many of my students. There is certainly no one cause for this attitude. And while I'm curious to see how many of you have noticed this too, that might be an entirely different thread!

Works Consulted

Teaching Basic Writing