Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/

Embracing Vulnerability: Personal Narratives in The FYC Classroom as Methods of Personal and Social Change

Courtney Lund O’Neil

Abstract: There is valuable scholarship on the importance of teaching narratives in the FYC classroom, but none does so through the frame of vulnerability. This paper explores, through an IRB approved case study, how composition teachers can best guide students to write powerful and well-crafted personal narratives to ignite students’ own voices, histories, and stories to be born, made into art, to enact positive personal and social change. This work will examine how being vulnerable and understanding one’s own story as an instructor has the ability to produce powerful community in the college classroom (Mathieu; Garcia; Parks). Ecocomposition invites this writing experience to be seen through the lens of mindfulness, healing, and the belief that stories hold power to enact cultural change, not only within the writer, but also the classroom and beyond.

Introduction

In the fall of 2017, I eagerly begin a new semester of teaching. The sun slides into the room, creating a calm atmosphere. Students sit in their desks. Many are freshmen, eager to begin the first unit of their First-Year Composition (FYC) course. Many do not know each other, but I hope these students form a strong bond, one of community. I move from behind the podium and stand in front of the students. My body enters an open position. My body language says, here I am. “Our first unit is a Personal Narrative,” I say, a bit nervously. I’ve taught nine semesters before this moment, and every time I am exhilarated and fearful by framing this initial unit through a mode of mindfulness and vulnerability. By being mindful, I make myself aware of the space I am curating for my students, one that is safe, open, without judgment. By being vulnerable, I lean into the feeling of being brave, emotionally and narratively, without being fixated on an outcome. Vulnerability requires a release of control of knowing how something will be received. Mindfulness allows me to meet each student where they are, and acknowledging that vulnerability, from them is no form of requirement. Rather, it is something I model, to help show them I am human, too.

“And before we begin this unit,” I continue, “I’d like to share with you a personal story of mine. If I were in your shoes, your age, this is a story I might write.”

I begin, “When I was nineteen and a sophomore in college, I received a call from my parents that completely changed my life.” I continue by sharing that I was their age when my parents told me that my four-month-old brother was dying. He had been sick for the first few months of life but without a diagnosis. Now he had a diagnosis and prognosis. Doctors diagnosed him with a rare illness called Aicardi-Goutières Syndrome and were placing him in hospice care. My parents called to tell me that my only brother had a year to live.

Often when I get to this part in the story, I cry, or at least push back tears. “But the story did not end there,” I share. I continue by telling them I gave myself a choice: to hide in school and follow a “normal” path and stay in college—or drop out of college and spend time with my brother during the short time he had been prescribed.

“I dropped out of college; I faced the grief. I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I didn’t go home.” After this point, I share some of the specific challenges of dropping out of college, like helping my mom drip morphine into my brother’s mouth, holding him tight when his body seized, trying to teach him to sit-up, when he lost muscle tone in his body. Then, I inhale a deep breath and pull out from this specific scene to the larger story that would unfold. I tell them by the time my brother turned one, he was taken off hospice care; he was a hospice graduate. I tell them that his life shifted from someone who was dying to someone who was living. The disease, his diagnosis, would make him disabled, and it would be a journey to continue to give him the best life possible, but it was a journey my family and I were grateful to be on.

I end this story with another fact. “I went on to publish a part of this story. It was the first essay I ever published and it appeared in the New York Times.” I choose to end on this occurrence because I want to show students that if my personal narrative could reach as large of an audience as the Times then theirs could too. Of course, it didn’t need to, and I didn’t expect that of them, but I wanted to share with them that this assignment was not just something to move through, to work toward an “A.” I wanted the experience not only not help their writing but to change them. To share with them that this genre had significant value. Although the story I share is a moment of grief, as writers, we get to pull nuggets of beauty out of darkness. The trauma then transforms, as the writer has control over the story. We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we respond.

Oftentimes, after sharing a piece of me that is not visible to the naked eye, I get stories from students that illuminate humanity and pain and pleasure and joy in depths and breadths that I can never plan or predict. There are no requirements on what type of story a student shares. A student can share a story of missing a train. Or a student can share a story of losing a guardian. Whatever a student decides, I try to be mindful of the challenges of writing in the first person and of going deep with oneself. Through walking them through my own experience, I hope, to reflect the difficult and beautiful moments of the writing process. I want them to know they are not alone in the journey of crafting a personal narrative.

Over the past decade, my goal has been to have students form a community in the classroom and write personal narratives that ignite their own voices, histories, and stories to be born, made into art, and to enact positive social/personal change. I’ve been eager to better understand if my hunch—that a personal narrative essay in FYC—is indeed as productive as I’d like to imagine. In this conversation about personal narrative, pedagogy, mindfulness, and vulnerability, I hope to leave other FYC teachers with more confidence and ideas.

Something I find imperative to point out early on is that there is absolutely no requirement to share any form of trauma in their writing. When writing a personal narrative, one is writing about something/anything from their past. However, due to the nature of the genre, trauma does come up in some students’ writing. I stress that if one writes about trauma, it should be an activity that is approached with kindness and softness. Without this caveat and without softness, it may be possible to retrigger a student writer who is not ready to write about a certain story. To create a safe space for the students who decide to write about a trauma, I advise them to understand that they should have some distance in time from the event they are writing about and to understand that there are two “personas” in the story—the one doing the writing and the one, in scene, on the page, who lived it. I also remind them throughout the writing process, that they can change what they are writing about. The journey of writing a personal narrative is for them.

Embracing Vulnerability

Although she is not in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, psychologist and vulnerability expert, Brené Brown, is an important voice to turn to in defining vulnerability. In Brown’s book, Daring Greatly, she states that vulnerability is simply a fact of life, and if we experience it, we can feel and experience life in a new and enriching way.

In the classroom, from the moment a student enters, they are reading the instructor for clues. For this case, a student can be reading an instructor’s modeling of vulnerability. Then, when working with peer review groups, students are again affected by what kind of feedback they share and receive. During every step of this writing process, mindfulness is crucial.

Feminist scholars have long approached the classroom through rhetorical empathy, as expressed in Lisa Blankenship’s work on the importance of implementing practical pedagogical strategies of approaching those experiencing or having had trauma or hardship in the past. Critical witnessing illuminates rhetorical empathy, and the two combined are necessary when thinking about pedagogy and personal narratives (Magnet et al.). At the same time, Romeo García shares the important anti-racist work of this type of community writing—where stories are being shared, pedagogy must be taught through the mindfulness of anti-racists pedagogies. Garcia poignantly argues: “Community listening departs from individualism and mere presence as the genesis for listening. Rather, it resituates the individual within constellations of stories, genealogies, ghosts, and hauntings. It invites, in a Derridean way, a politics of responsibility and justice towards the past, present, and future.”

Paula Mathieu, in her work both in mindfulness and hope, sees pedagogy as a hope in action. In a conversation with Christopher Minnix, Imagining Something Not Yet, Mathieu begins by discussing the tangible acts of how we cultivate hope; it’s not stagnant, but active. Mathieu is interested in what writing can do for the world and so am I.

Marilyn Cooper’s web of connections is important when considering the critical pedagogy that makes up the argument for embracing vulnerability when teaching personal narratives. She proposes an ecological model of writing, where the motif of writing is that when one is writing, one is involved within multiple systems. When I imagine students leaving the classroom after writing a personal narrative, I picture Cooper’s ecological model as they leave the space and create new strands and systems of connections. The classroom is a living, breathing area that has power to vibrate change.

The field of rhetoric and writing studies has long been invested in student-centered work and what happens both inside and outside the classroom. Yet, the work I’m doing here involves a fresh new frame of mindfulness and vulnerability.

Case Study as Methodology: Vulnerability in Personal Narratives

For this project, I conducted a yearlong IRB approved qualitative study of participants who had at least three years outside of my FYC classroom. I sent out recruitment invitations to students who I thought might be interested in participating. This qualitative research took place in 2020, during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I chose to do a close case study with two former students, and I was able to gather rich and deep answers from the two participants. The two who agreed to participate in the study and follow-through with multiple rounds of in-depth interviews were both women in different Fall 2017 FYC sections. Both were in different classes, both women, and both took my class three years before the interviews. I chose to interview two students who took my class so long ago for a few reasons. First, I didn’t want them to feel like I had any power over them or their answers—I’ve long moved away from this university to work toward a PhD in a different state. Second, I was interested in a more nuanced effect of writing a personal narrative, and not the type of response one might find in the end of semester teacher evaluations. To be as fair as possible, I wanted it to be clear that I had nothing to gain and neither did they. I think this choice was important for these two case studies. With this information, I wanted to understand if and how mindfulness and vulnerability worked in the classroom while teaching personal narrative—both in students’ understanding of my teaching and in their own writing and lives.

As I move through both students and their examples, I have chosen for them to remain anonymous. The first will be Student A, the second Student B.

Student A: Texting and Driving

Student A was shy in my class, but had a story to tell. Her essay, “The Moment that Follows” opens with this:

An off-white, ninety-nine percent polyester dress hugs my incredibly awkward, ten-year-old body. I can hear the shattered pieces of my parents’ hearts rattling on either side of me. My mother and father are clutching my hands so firmly I start to think my fingers are turning blue. As the three of us walk down the aisle, I look around to see the wet cheeks and swollen eyes of the loved ones, friends, and complete strangers who came to show support. Why is this happening to us? How did we get here? These were the many thoughts I had as I neared my sister’s open casket.

The first time I read this opening, I cried. I still do. The student opened her life onto the page. She was in no means required. She could have written about anything. What this showed me was that the gentleness in my voice, the culture of community in my classroom, and the way I mindfully listened to students when they met with me about what they wanted to write about had helped the student arrive here. Something I did to practice mindfulness was to hold extra office hours and schedule conferences with students. Student A met with me weekly, where we sat outside and chatted about her writing journey. She’d ask me questions about what scenes she wanted to include. I offered her someone she could trust, someone who could listen, and someone who could hold her worries and concerns with her.

Student A then dives back in time in her essay, to opening the front door of her house to an officer in uniform, explaining to her and her family that her sister had been hit by a car. She was riding a bike. The family then rushed to the hospital, to find out the sister had been killed on impact. This event wrecks the family in ways the persona cannot imagine. A streak of hope emerges when the persona finds out the woman who killed her sister is going to trial; she was texting and driving. The persona and her family wanted some form of justice—some jail time or community service at the least. But the woman did not go to jail, did not receive one hour of community service. Just a three months’ suspension on her driver’s license. This infuriated the persona for years and in the essay, she wrote about how she felt like she was a “bomb,” about to go off. For years, she wrote unsent letters to the woman who killed her sister until she shares toward the end of the essay, “I wrote one last letter to the woman left unidentified, I forgive you.”

The essay, like all essays in this unit, went through brainstorming activities, a free-write phase, and two full drafts with edits, with the third draft being the final draft. Student A said, when writing this essay, she needed a place of her own, and waited one weekend to write the most difficult parts of this essay when her freshman dorm roommate was out of town. When interviewed about her involvement with writing this essay, Student A said this about the space in order to write this piece, regarding the classroom setting:

I felt safe within the walls of my writing classroom. I trusted my peers around me to read my work. I trusted their opinions and the edits they made. It was quite freeing for me to share this part of my life with complete strangers. I later went on to read this piece aloud to a literature class. This essay would be much different if my peers and professor hadn’t been a part of the writing process. I was happy to take their constructive criticism because I knew that my writing would be better because of it.

The classroom, like Marilyn Cooper suggests, is a web of connections and the personal narrative forms the foundation of those thick pieces of web. Student A said this about the class setting in writing this assignment: “In the classroom, I was encouraged by my peers and professor to return to experiences from my past and go as deep as I possibly could. It was not easy to write but it was incredibly rewarding.” Dobrin and Weisser place Cooper’s theory on writing in the context of other writers. In their work, Natural Discourse, they explain, “What is critical about Cooper’s ecological model is that it introduces composition to the notion that writers interact with systems that affect their writing” (19). Writers grow, depending on their surroundings. This is why I think it’s crucial to cultivate a mindful microcosm in the classroom that is safely vulnerable. When asked about the teacher’s role, and what was productive in terms of how this assignment was executed, Student A said, “The professor shared her own stories, essays, and told the class about her family. Being personable, open, and honest made the environment feel comfortable. All the writing assignments that led up to the personal narrative essay were intended to ease us into writing an essay about our life and to get us comfortable with our peers.” This confirmed that my hunch on modeling mindfulness paired with vulnerability—both through personal storytelling and by sharing other published work—left a productive mark on Student A.

In Romeo García’s work, Creating Presence from Absence and Sound from Silence, García weaves the history of himself and his grandmother and how he learned how to better listen, to better learn about the intersections of community. He writes that community listening “encourages listening for humanity in stories and memories in between cultures, times, and spaces” (7). What I learned from interviewing Student A is that her essay touched on social and cultural issues, which stemmed from the pain and grief of losing her sister but grew into something larger. When asked about any possible positive social change that could or did come from her personal essay, she said, “Although the story is specific to my life, I believe that it can reach an audience who has also experienced grief and tragedy. The essay also reveals the ongoing issue of texting and driving as well as flaws within the justice system.” To continue her explanation of the justice system around texting and driving she mindfully said, “After reading this essay, I hope at least one person made a vow to not text and drive.” She continued, shrinking the gap from the general public to the classroom, then to her family unit, “Inside and outside of the classroom, my hope is that this essay helps others become more compassionate and understanding of those who are experiencing grief, depression, and/or anxiety. Writing this essay was a healing experience for me, however sharing it with my loved ones was even more transformative.” Reading her story was transformative and had me rethink my actions while driving and her journey of not only what it meant to lose her sister, but how she changed her ideologies of justice.

The case study as methodology is essential work to best understand what one assignment can do for a student. To me, this is the heart of vulnerability and mindfulness, the folding toward transformation, beginning with the self and moving outward. To trust in another person’s work and life, we have to not only be okay in not being able to know, but also be willing to creating a space for mindful listening, growing, and learning. Paula Mathieu writes in her interview in Imagining Something Not Yet that one of the most powerful questions we can ask is “Are you okay?” (9). I’d like to think Student A’s response to her experience when writing this essay was an answer to this question. Student A told me she even went on to read her personal narrative aloud in a literature class, to showcase that this piece lived and breathed outside the classroom, outside her family unit, and into new spaces.

Student B: Gender Identity and Performance

The second personal narrative written by a student in one of my FYC courses is titled, “Victory in Defeat.” This essay, written by Student B, is about her experience being the first female wrestler on an all-male high school team. The essay begins:

My feet crunch dilapidated gravel as I trod towards the entrance of Monte Vista’s gymnasium. There’s a cool breeze reminding me of the way I love winter and the cold. It’s 6:30 a.m. and I see my breath swirl ahead of me and then vanish as I enter the vaulted ceilings and blinding overhead lights. There is a noticeable increase in temperature as my heartrate simultaneously quickens. I haven’t eaten in about 24 hours and I cannot decipher whether my tummy pangs are felt from hunger or anxiety; I assume a little of both. As I glance down from the blinding lights, the gleaming wooden floor of the gym abruptly changes to a matte plastic padding before me. My eyes wander further down to my feet, covered in ill-fitting shoes that extend past my toes, and then to my thighs, crammed in a tight singlet. I am the first and only girl wrestler to represent Christian High School, eager to prove the chauvinist administrators and other doubtful people wrong about their assumptions that wrestling is only meant for boys.

Student B chose the important topic of the disparities of gender in stereotypical male sports. The narrative begins uniquely close to the persona—this story is hers to tell. However, toward the end of the opening, the stakes are made clear, that this is not just her story, but a systemic story of the politics of gender.

The personal narrative continues on, closely, to the event of the persona’s first match. An important secondary character in her essay is her “spunky, strong” mother who cheers from the stands, who believes in her daughter. Student B does an excellent job at balancing the five senses while suspending the reader in a place of unknowing—will she win, or won’t she? And perhaps, how will she react if she doesn’t win?

The essay closes in on the final round and the ending lingers with this:

He overcomes me with strength, but I have an unconquerable will. Unlike this kid who has little to prove, every action I make represents women and their ability to compete with men. Time is almost up. He is unrelenting with force, jerking me towards my back, but I resist with every breath, with every muscle contraction. I can only fight for a little longer, the immense strain blurs everything around me except the sound of my coach yelling “Head up! Belly out!”
     Suddenly the buzzer screams and the match ends. There’s a release, the previously incessant pressure ceases and I float up from my crumpled and compressed state. The immediate lack of downward force combined with exhaustion leaves me unbalanced and dizzy as I stand to meet the referee and boy in the center of the mat. We shake hands, he is announced winner by points scored, not by pin. As I begin to catch my breath and collect my thoughts, a smile sneaks upon my face. To the same extent his meager win is disappointing to both himself and his coach, my resisting being pinned is all the more a stupendous triumph. I tread over to my Coach who embraces me in his strong arms. The heated rage drains from me like the adrenaline dissipating from my veins. In its place resides a glowing warmth like that of a hearth that wraps me in joy and pride in my performance. The dried blood on my nose reminds me of a struggle that has been overcome and my now solidified confidence in my ability to wrestle and do whatever I put my mind to. I look up to the bleachers and see my mother smiling and clapping with pride illuminating her face. I didn’t win the match, but I kept my head up and experienced great fulfillment in my personal growth as an athlete and a determined young woman.

What I’m drawn to at the ending, as both an instructor of writing and a writer, is that she doesn’t win in the typical sense one may view a wrestling win. In fact, she loses, yet nothing is lost in her spirit. To the persona, the win is not letting her match, a young boy, pin her down. She finds this frustration within him too it seems, in an embodied manner when they stand in the center of the ring after the match. The reader finds joy with her, through her, and is given a quiet space to consider what possibilities the wrestling ring may embody, may encompass, may imagine.

When asked how Student B went about writing this essay, she described it like this: “Writing from my own perspective and about my own life encouraged me to slow down and meticulously choose what words I wanted to represent my thoughts and actions. The challenge of effectively conveying my thoughts and feelings and even the details of what I remember was one I relished as I tried to remember an event in my life from the perspective of a bystander.” I appreciated how she had an attuned attention toward audience—by imagining what a bystander might focus on. This type of mindfulness dismantles the myth that personal narrative is a stroke of navel gazing. Rather, mindful narrative writing creates a relationship with a reader.

Student B was someone I encouraged to do something with her essay. I invited her to think about how her piece could reach others. Something I’m rooted in as a scholar, is the theory of transfer, and what leaves with a student after their time in the FYC classroom. Typically, this field of study focuses on how one’s writing moves across one’s collegiate education. However, I’m attentive in what a personal narrative does to someone’s core; I’m interested in if writing this essay changes something in them or how they see/live in the world. Student B’s response illuminated this concept when I asked them what happened to them and this personal narrative after they left my class. Student B responded:

I went on to submit the paper to our school’s collection of student works that is printed as a book each year, The Driftwood, and I got in! It was a cool feeling being able to share my experience with not only my immediate classmates, but to have my words published by something that is purchased and read by people throughout the university. Being selected to be part of that collection made me want to continue writing, or at least continue pursuing a career where I can communicate with people. I am not sure how that will be embodied as I graduate, but I do know that writing this piece sparked a fire in me for sharing and speaking in front of others in a way that encourages them to pursue their passions.

I appreciate Student B’s word choice of “embodied” as not only was this essay concept embodied in her lived experience, but it also embodied her viewpoint on how she sees herself moving toward the future, as it has been almost four years since she wrote this essay. When asked about the vulnerability necessary for writing such a piece, and what Student B took from being vulnerable in the classroom, she said, “Writing from a place of emotional vulnerability allowed me to better acknowledge my feelings and also encouraged me to continue to do a self-check on how I am doing. I believe that we will never reach our full potential in relationships or life unless we take care to monitor and respond appropriately to how we are feeling or experiencing life.” I found her response to be powerful; the tools gained in writing her personal narrative allowed for more reflection in her life, on her whole self, and not just the person she was in an FYC classroom setting.

Because vulnerability and modeling mindfulness is so important, in my opinion, to a successful teaching of the personal narrative, I wanted to highlight what Student B had to say about vulnerability in more detail.

Being vulnerable in a classroom setting can be intimidating because you do not know all of the students and there is a very real possibility that you will convey your emotions or struggles, and someone will belittle or mock your experience. However, I think everyone should experience sharing a bit about themselves or their story in this manner. Vulnerability helps to build community that is patient and understanding, one that strives to think empathetically and of others rather than only of one’s own experience. After hearing my classmates share their experiences, I knew more about their personal lives and we were no longer just people sitting by each other, we were getting to know each other better and learning how to love each other better.

I continue to turn to both Paula Mathieu and Marilyn Cooper when thinking about Student B’s response on the power of vulnerability in a classroom setting. I see the space through mindfulness with attention to a vast web on connections; often those connections are difficult to imagine, to visualize, until the personal narrative assignment initiates a vibration. Student B then remembered the power of reading other students’ stories. One particularly stuck with her, one she remembers years later.

One of my classmates shared in his personal narrative about when his dad had passed away in military combat and the body was not returned home to his family. I could not imagine the grief and longing and lack of closure which arose from such a tragic circumstance. As he shared his narrative, my heart broke for him and his family. Sharing my story, hearing my classmate’s, and reading both Professor Lund’s and [other writer’s] stories helped to soften my heart to the reality that all people encounter different struggles and triumphs in their lives. Each person brings a lifetime of experiences into their conversations and daily living and we can only begin to care for others when we recognize and are sensitive to this.

A classroom can be a place of oppression or of blooming growth. How wonderful it is to be able to help shepherd a student into understanding the lives of others in a way that is attune to sensitivity, compassion, and kindness.

Personal Narrative as Community Building

In bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, she opens her book on a meditation on the sacredness of teaching. She writes, “Our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students” (13). I appreciate hooks’ meaningful lens when it comes to the role of the teacher and the lives of the students. With compassion, mindfulness, and focus on the whole person sitting in our classroom, the student writer, it is paramount we consider their lived experience. It is a must that we create space for every student we have the gift to teach. If writing has power, the personal narrative embodies unlimited power—the personal narrative brings the gift of turning a part of one’s life into a place of community, a means for deep connection. Vulnerability and mindfulness aid us to this communal sacredness of living.

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