#8. A Literacy Narrative about Literacy Narratives, Part 1

A LITERACY NARRATIVE ABOUT LITERACY NARRATIVES

By Casey Manogue

This blog post is the first of a two-post literacy narrative, which details a pivotal moment in my transformative journey from English major to compositionist. During the spring semester of 2021, I was finishing up my M.A. in English at CSULB, where I was specializing in 20th century American literature. It was my last semester before graduation and I was only signed up for two courses, until it came to my attention that I needed to take a third to have enough units to graduate. I was looking forward to a chill semester, so the prospect of taking another class was more than a little annoying. I reluctantly signed up for a course titled "Theories of Writing and Literacy," which worked well with my schedule, however, I was disinterested because I knew this was a rhetoric and composition course and not a literature course. Since I was working as an embedded tutor at a local community college, I figured that the knowledge from the class might be relevant to this role, so I tried my best to keep an open mind. 

Dreaming in UC Davis' Hutchison Field

Interestingly enough, this course was where I first encountered Paulo Friere's famous chapter about the banking method of education, as well as Flower & Hayes' landmark article about cognitivism and process pedagogy. Out of respect to the course instructor's privacy, I will not name them here and will simply refer to them as Professor Smith. To start the class, Professor Smith first assigned a literacy narrative assignment where we had to provide 1) a recording of an oral literacy narrative, 2) a transcription of the recording, and 3) a more formally written literacy narrative. I featured this written literacy narrative in a previous post, which you can read here. I remember being quite intrigued by this assignment, and it is noteworthy to mention that at the time, I had no frame of reference of the literacy narrative genre as an established genre or as a pedagogical practice with a large body of scholarship behind it. I remember that for the assignment prompt, Professor Smith had offered a few famous examples of the literacy narrative genre to serve as models for students to imitate. My memory is fuzzy, but I think they included Sherman Alexie's "Superman and Me," as well as another popular piece from the DALN, Al Smith's "Short Bus," which I have linked here. Looking over these different examples was when I first got a sense that the genre was part of a larger, more sophisticated scholarly tradition. 

For the final project, we were required to write a seminar paper developing a research interest stemming from the course content, and I chose to focus on literacy narratives. Considering the fact that we were still in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was initially interested in inventing something akin to a COVID-era literacy narrative prompt. This preliminary idea revolved around a literacy narrative assignment where students would have to write about their literacy experiences in relation to how they were impacted by the social, political, and material effects of the pandemic (1). As I started to research this topic online, I found that it was definitely novel as not much had been published about COVID yet within the field. However, I ultimately ended up not pursuing this line of inquiry as I felt I was not acclimated enough into writing studies discourse to do the topic justice. Instead, I wrote a lesson plan for a "start-of-the-term" literacy narrative assignment, which was designed to provide writing instructors a maximal amount of diagnostic information about their students. Looking back, this assignment was a strong early effort at lesson planning but not one that I would ever actually try in the classroom, and I will decline to share it here. 

While I don't think this story so far is worth a Pulitzer Prize, I want to emphasize that because of this course, though I didn't realize it at the time, I was exposed to three important influences that had a very large impact on my scholarly trajectory. It's funny how life works, and I also think this underscores the wisdom that we should try to be open-minded when confronted with things we think we aren't interested in. I genuinely believe that this course was a large reason why I decided to pursue a PhD in Writing Studies, and if I hadn't taken it, who knows what I would be doing now. Maybe selling insurance?

The author of this blog, working diligently in the French-Italian library at UC Davis' Sproul Hall

The three influences that I am going to describe are interesting because they sort of function as a disciplinary bridge between literature and writing studies, and this bridge is what facilitated my conversion into becoming a compositionist. It is no secret that the two disciplines have had a long, storied, and oftentimes contentious relationship with one another. However, my experiences reinforce the established understanding that the two disciplines are inextricably bound up with one another, whether we want to admit it or not. Literacy narratives are ultimately narratives in the same way that novels, short stories, and plays are, and perhaps this is why the genre so strongly piqued my interest, as opposed to something more pedagogical like peer response workshops. At this point in my graduate school career, my main research interests are focused on more applied areas of composition pedagogy, however, I don't think this shift would have been possible had I not developed this transitory interest in literacy narratives.

This is the end of Part I. Unfortunately, due to my busy PhD studies, this is all I can write for this week. I will list the three influences in Part II, which will be coming soon! 

Notes

(1) - I still think this is a great idea, and it was actually the basis of an idea that I shared in a roundtable discussion at the 2025 Research Network Forum. However, it is probably not an idea that I will develop anytime soon, if ever, as the COVID era continues to fade into history and I am currently pursuing other projects.