Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/
Mindfulness in the Monolith: A Writing Course Design for Post-Pandemic Contemplation
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has generated new pressures for students and exacerbated their pre-pandemic stressors. One example is the impact of increased technology use upon students’ mental health. Interest in contemplative pedagogy has recently grown as instructors seek methods to alleviate the worries that students carry. This piece describes a writing course design that uses written reflection as a contemplative practice. Because the author’s institution requires classes to explicitly align with learning outcomes, the course design is a balance of contemplative practice and the learning outcomes expected by the university.
Educators have scrambled to manage and understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for four years now. The crisis further has been joined by frequent mass shooter tragedies and sometimes violent cultural wars in the U.S. (Godwin). Within education, these emerging problems have compounded those preceding 2020. Indeed, pre-pandemic concerns have been made more visible, such as students’ “stunning” lack of engagement (McMurtrie). It is no surprise that the sum of pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic [1] troubles often is discussed in the same breath as students’ mental health (ASU Teachers). As a college writing instructor, I have witnessed student coping behaviors ranging from deliberately performed classroom drama to affectless near catatonia (none of which are unique to the pandemic years).
This piece describes a writing course design that responds to student burdens. Writing curricula can enable students to discursively process their behavior and mental state, identify the source of personal, academic and professional struggles, and compose strategies for managing and alleviating stress (Flinchbaugh). Having explored contemplative pedagogical practice, in particular a focus on the self and its formation, I considered how a writing curriculum might address my post-pandemic students’ dwindling readiness for not only disciplinary writing but college more generally. Certain influences over students’ sense of self, including technology, further make a case for a course design that cultivates student mindfulness. The course especially uses reflective writing as a contemplative pedagogical strategy.
The piece begins with a brief history of my pre-pandemic service-learning (SL) writing courses, including the nature of students’ needs and the role of reflective writing. This history acts as a basis for comparison to post-pandemic stressors that have worsened student unreadiness. I then will trace how contemplative practice and its approach to the self have been pedagogically used to aid student development and ease anxiety. An exploration of the self also involves examination of its shapers; the majority of my students take cues from what they see on their phones. As I describe, social media influence is tenacious and has implications for a contemplative curriculum. My resulting course design moves students through reflective writing exercises meant to introduce them to mindfulness and discovery about themselves. The course links contemplation to learning outcomes in disciplinary writing, to defuse student overwhelm often associated with service-learning projects.
Background
My pre-pandemic courses’ service-learning projects teamed upper-level undergraduates with organizational clients, whereby students composed or revised communications needed by the clients. As students developed their product deliverables, they maintained a reflective project log that named and revisited decisions during their composing process. The reflection prompt said,
Keeping a project log of your actions (the “who, what, where, when, why, and how”) is beneficial because it both refreshes your memory about events that happened earlier in the process, and demonstrates your credibility. Consequently, you and your teammates should maintain a log about your work throughout your entire project process.
Here are just a few questions you might ponder in your log: What decisions are you making along the way, and why? What discoveries are you making along the way? What are you learning along the way? What unexpected circumstances and changes have occurred, and how are you responding to them? How do you know that these are the best responses? How have the course readings and lectures played a part in your decisions, discoveries, and learning? In other words, your project log is a chance to explore the question, “How did I come to know this [idea, concept, etc.]?” (Lamberti, English)
Until the pandemic, there seemed no need to overly think about the role of reflective writing in my classes because it achieved its primary purposes. For one, the reflections provided a forum where student rhetorics were welcomed. Understandably, students struggle whenever they are prohibited from using their ways of knowing to acquire content knowledge. In her rhetoric and composition course, Staci Maree Perryman-Clark asks students to explore “the Black Women’s Intellectual tradition” because these topics directly address the rhetorics that many of her students are expected to leave at the classroom door. For instance, while “Black women are expected to produce Eurocentric scholarship typically associated with the academy and academic discourse… when Black women produce scholarship reflecting feminist discourse, they are often pressured to ignore the intersections that exist between race and gender” (n.p.). Via a series of writing assignments, Perryman-Clark’s students engage with feminist intellectual traditions to better identify how their own research processes have been shaped (and inhibited) by academic and other cultural conventions.
My students similarly grapple with using their ways of knowing when entering the writing classroom. I teach at a regional comprehensive university in the U.S. Midwest; many students come from smaller, rural towns and are the first in their families to attend college. Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg and Eileen Schell, pushing against the deficiency label often applied to a rural upbringing, argue that such students already possess rich and varied abilities to discursively inhabit and respond to new surroundings. They explain that instructors would do well to “reclaim the rural” by deliberately helping students to use their literacies (4). For students at my institution, the writing assigned throughout their college classes often requires some experience with conventional academic rhetorics, including current-traditional. Inexperienced students often struggle with their coursework (Lamberti, Student).
The SL logs acted as a type of discursive safe space for students; because I ignored punctuation, mechanics and other correctness errors in the logs, students were freed from their worries about standardized English and could focus on describing their projects’ development. Their attention consequently lingered on factors influencing their decisions whenever the project’s process raised a challenge. For instance, students may not bring relevant experience to a project that requires elevated language, such as a recent student team who described in their logs how their blue-collar backgrounds made it difficult to research and edit customer testimonies for their client, a legal firm. During any tensions between students’ rhetorics and those needed during service-learning projects, the logs promoted student perspectives while acting as a vehicle for exploring how those perspectives were shaped.
There was an additional purpose for assigning the reflective logs, in that they scaffolded students towards an increasing sense of mastery in disciplinary writing. At my university, where mandated assessment of learning outcomes is threaded throughout the institution’s entire curriculum, instructors are urged to teach to an explicit list of outcomes and to list these on the course syllabi. The expected pedagogy for my service-learning courses, for instance, is defined by these outcomes:
Students [will]… further enhance their critical thinking and communication abilities by examining and designing, specifically, descriptive, definitional, and instructional instructions and other documents generated in workplace settings, as well as by practicing print and digital composing techniques specific to these documents. Content knowledge is also acquired via crafting and managing usability tests of professional texts. (Lamberti, English)
These outcomes are crafted at the departmental level and vetted at the upper administrative level. They are regarded as the guide for all activity associated with a course, both students’ and instructors’. Aligning the project log prompt to the course’s learning outcomes helped my students to regard writing as a route for understanding their work across the curriculum (Martini 357), and to anticipate “public perception of… outward-facing texts” (Iverson 31), among other threshold concepts in writing studies.
Finally, I used the reflective logs as a means for students to express any anxiety that may be generally caused by the service-learning projects—whether reconciling their ways of knowing to conventional academic discourse, acquiring the content knowledge of writing studies disciplines, or encountering the learning curves associated with what often is students’ first “real world” assignment. Post-pandemic, however, I have found that it is a luxury in the classroom to focus only on learning outcomes about disciplinary writing and service-learning. Below, I outline how the pandemic exacerbated my students’ unreadiness for disciplinary writing and added to their larger worries. Any responsive course design would need to address students’ emotional and psychological hurdles to learning.
Focusing the Problem
My students wrestle with emergent mental and physical pandemic troubles in addition to challenges they faced before 2020. “Culture war” tensions and food insecurity (see Camelo and Elliott; Albright and Hurd) are just two of many examples. These only worsen students’ unreadiness to acquire a course’s content knowledge.
The unreadiness now appears to take two forms in my courses, the first being students’ evaporated familiarity with common writing concepts. Service-learning disciplinary writing courses at my institution are restricted to students who have completed a general composition course or the equivalent. Learning outcomes for my courses therefore are determined with the assumption that students already will have encountered certain disciplinary language. This includes foundational writing terminology commonly taught in Western composition curricula (e.g., “thesis statements” and “transitional phrases” [McLeod and Maimon]). Such language also includes concepts from current-traditional pedagogy, which continue to be common throughout college curricula (Layton) and in my institution’s courses. Before 2020, students may not have possessed an easy ability to execute these concepts in their writing, but they likely would have recognized the terms.
The reflections submitted during my post-pandemic classes, however, have indicated students’ decreasing recognition of these concepts, much less an ability to see instances in their own writing. Pandemic-related erosion in learning is one likely explanation. Results from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed such a decline in U.S. students’ academic performance that news outlets could not be accused of hyperbole when covering the NAEP. As one Associated Press article put it, “The COVID-19 pandemic caused historic learning setbacks for America’s children, sparing no state or region as it erased decades of academic progress and widened racial disparities” (Binkley).
Student unreadiness appears to take an additional form. In my classes, students often have exhibited hesitancy when asked to participate in service-learning projects, some to the point of withdrawing from a course. Hesitancy is a common student response when a class assignment is unfamiliar; some instructors have even deliberately cultivated confusion as a pedagogical strategy (see D’Mello et al.). Reflective logs submitted during my pre-pandemic classes suggested that students’ reluctance and anxiety were tied to class-based insecurity often exhibited by first-generation college students (Pratt et al.), as well as perceived status differences between students and service-learning clients.
However, the degree of students’ anxiety has notably intensified. In the service-learning courses I’ve taught since 2020, students’ historical tentativeness has been replaced by something akin to panic when I introduce a project. Students pepper me with questions about how they will be grouped into teams, how their organizational clients will be chosen, how they should communicate with clients. Those questions have always been typical, but now, in their frequency, repetition, and urgency, is a new subtext: I’m terrified. More to the point, this fear no longer eases as a semester continues. In their reflections, students continue to exhibit a heightened level of worry about any coursework that does not come with explicit, granular instructions or otherwise requires self-initiative.
When my post-pandemic students struggle with these forms of unreadiness, two symptoms are visible: 1) the rapidity with which they become overwhelmed, and 2) their tendency to respond to overwhelm by disconnecting almost entirely—not only from their schooling but also from others. As an instructor expected to check many pedagogical boxes while somehow helping students to achieve a sense of connection to their work, I need to re-examine just what content is and is not reaching them. What shapes today’s student who walks into the writing classroom, and who is “student,” the culmination of these influences? As the following section explains, reflective writing continues to hold relevance for answering such questions, but my project log prompt was no longer sufficient for meeting students’ needs.
Considering What Shapes “Student”: Contemplative Pedagogy
The following surveys contemplative practices in terms of their educational potential. As laid out in this section, a central tenet of contemplation is a focus on the self (Velazquez and Nenadovic) as formed by an indivisible relationship between interior and exterior experiences. Considering my students’ influential experiences helped me to identify how technology in particular has deeply affected their formative moments. A contemplative course design would need to bear those moments in mind.
Student anxiety and other mental health challenges long have been addressed by practices in contemplative pedagogy (Gaard and Ergûner-Tekinalp). Often such health benefits occur via the transformative experience of contemplating the self (Sherman). Contemplative work is predicated on the inseparability of exterior and interior lives as they comprise the self (EHN Canada). By encouraging a person to focus on their current state of being without passing judgement on that state (Kabat-Zinn), mindfulness [2] efforts can reveal how external and internal are woven together.
Although the concept of the self is handled in myriad ways across disciplines, literature in psychology fields indicates how the concept has come to be a key theme in contemplation work. Discussions about contemplative practice assume existence of the self as a priori. It operates as an entity by which other entities may be defined; through this definitional process, all existences can be rethought and reshaped. Names and terminology such as “Freud,” “Jung,” and “ego” are more popularly known than contemplation in shaping the discourse of selfhood, and their influence remains in psychology (Firestone). For instance, social psychology scholarship regards contemplation of the self as methods for taking action (e.g., Walters and Bandura) and for processing information. George Mead explored how the self is socially constructed, defining it as being composed of the “Me,” or what a person learns via others’ reaction to the person, and the “I,” or how a person reacts to others (173-8).
A contemplative exploration of the internal and external self and of self formation have a longer history than just described; of relevance here are implications for pedagogical use, especially the self as an heuristic. Oren Ergas’ work on contemplative and critical pedagogies, for instance, has elaborated on the “I” and “me” within educational scenarios. The “I” takes in ongoing, “discrete moments of [sensory] experience” (46). When an educational context provides influencing socializing opportunities, the “I” makes meaning of those sensory experiences. And because there are endless potential sensory and social experiences, the meaning-making process must winnow them down and cohere them into a “Me” (46). As such, a contemplative focus on the self renders most educational moments as a potential opportunity to practice mindfulness.
Because contemplation of the self challenges Cartesian distinction and disconnect between external and internal (Yagelski), when one is changed, so must the other. For many people, the pandemic’s acceleration of digital technology use has shaped how we define our workaday and existential existence. Meanwhile, regarding our students, technological future shock has visibly reproportioned the influences over their sense of self. An appropriate pedagogy would take into account these contemporary forces in students’ lives.
What Especially Shapes “Student”
Jean Twenge’s notable piece “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” posed a question that had been growing among pre-pandemic instructors and turned into an acute worry (Gotlib et al.) during pandemic pivots from in-person to online schooling. Her analysis of the smartphone’s role in youth culture, spanning the past decade, verified what many teachers knew anecdotally (Health Resources). In how they have shaped young people’s ability to concentrate, process sensory experiences, socialize, and solve problems, smartphones are making youth “seriously unhappy” (n.p.). The search engine Gale Academic OneFile (November 3, 2022) lists almost six thousand peer-reviewed texts published since Twenge’s article that address relationships among students’ mental health and social media. Whatever pre-pandemic challenges in education that were joined by those particular to Covid-19, technology is cited as contributing to their amplification, distribution, and severity.
Twenge’s exploration of the smartphone describes a redistributing of the influences over young people’s sense of selfhood. As she explains, formative relationships between Generation Z (born between 1995 and 2012) and their parents and friends have largely shifted to digital interactions. Formative activities such as obtaining a driver’s license and working a job have declined in occurrence, along with formative physical experiences such as sexual activity and getting sufficient sleep (n.p.). Replacing these in-person events is screen time, where an isolated user becomes a receptacle for endless information.
Citing several studies, Twenge draws a connection between the amount of screen time and the likelihood that young people will declare themselves unhappy. David Lewin offers one explanation: “Rather like our social media feeds that reflect the attitudes and dispositions of the user profile but are too easily experienced as proxies for wider, more ‘objective’ social attitudes, our inner life is at risk of becoming an ‘echo chamber’ in conversation only with itself, while deluding itself that its perspective is universal” (317). Formation of self, when so largely digital, seems to more resemble an avatar than a human.
There is no universal consensus that technology is a doomsday harbinger, but even those who challenge the “worried ink” (Harris) written about smartphones admit the digital’s impact on selfhood. Answering his article’s title Why Are Kids So Sad?, Malcolm Harris proposes that adults should stop surveilling young people’s every move because of concerns about screen time. In turn, children and teenagers would gain a sense of autonomy and thus an opportunity to develop an “‘internal locus of control’—the sense that your choices and actions affect your life, that they matter.” Harris points to a relationship between “an external locus of control in youth and hopelessness, depression, and suicidality,” with the idea that a stronger internal locus could counteract this risk. Vincent Waldron associates certain moral emotions to internal and external locus, for instance, assigning emotions such as fulfillment to the self, and assigning emotions such as admiration and sympathy to reactions to others. As Waldron explains, when the lines are blurred and emotions regarding external loci are used in reference to the whole self, the result can be social disconnection, perhaps even social ostracism, with its associated pain (141).
The tension between external and internal forces is significant for a contemplative pedagogical approach to the self. If students’ interior lives are so extensively shaped and, as Lewin says, homogenized by external influences, it is no wonder they struggle with the challenges of a monolithic self (see also Richtel). As we continue to learn about the degree to which social media consumption disrupts self formation (Törnberg and Uitermark), it may be that my students, digital natives whose phones supply a relentless flow of media influence, increasingly are bringing a digitally prescribed self to the classroom that differs from earlier understandings of self and its formation. Introducing contemplative pedagogy into my course design must especially consider this trend, if the class is to be appropriate to my students’ needs.
Reflection as Route to Self
Although I addressed student needs before the pandemic via reflective project logs, both pandemic impacts and contemplative practices indicate that the use of reflection should be reconsidered in my curriculum. Reflective writing has been regarded as an effective pedagogical method for contemplation of the self (Stortz). For instance, reflection can resist definitions of the self that prioritize individualism (Wu), and push against learning outcomes that promote internal/external dualism (Levit Binnun and Tarrasch).
Contemplation scholarship such as The Peaceable Classroom explores reflective writing to connect student with self (O’Reilly). Writing instruction can be an opportunity to more thoroughly embed students into their world by collapsing seeming distinctions between the self and its context. It dissolves these boundaries particularly by prompting a writer to intentionally situate the self as an extension of others rather than a discrete being (Bryant). Mary Rose O’Reilly’s work powerfully argues for writing pedagogy that assists students with not just finding but mediating their voice, as doing so “in a circle of others” acts as a dialectic promoting civility and peace (40). Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlburt, sharing unnerving, memorable examples of student writing in Letters for the Living: Teaching Writing in a Violent Age, extend the use of expressivist writing as it can deliberately enable students, “in their uniqueness, [to] work together to examine differences and to explore common ground” (16). Derek Owens’ discussion of sustainability and composition studies argues for the topic of place as a “zone of inquiry” for student writing; because “our surroundings… are never separate from us,” discursively attending to that relationship cultivates mindfulness (149). Christy Wenger, using yoga to explore the connections between mindfulness, the corporeal, and writing, discusses how reflection makes students more receptive to attempting other and more complex writing actions such as global revision of a text (175).
Scholarship in contemplation pedagogy unsurprisingly gained traction across the disciplines by the end of the pandemic’s first year (2020), and with it a focus on intersections among writing and contemplation. Medical fields offer one example. In teachers’ effort to shift to online instruction of complex medical information, the stressors faced by medical professionals overwhelmed by patient caseloads, and an associated decline in the number of people entering medical degree programs (Robeznieks), researchers examined how writing can bolster students’ mental stability within professions marked by uncertainty. Adrian Zytkoskee’s study of writing in education noted how reflective writing prompts could be used to assist medical students in articulating how personal experiences with illness are revelatory. “In the context of medical education,” the author found, such writing “provides students the opportunity to confess aspects of their patient interactions about which they feel emotions such as shame, guilt, and fear and consider how they might reshape those feelings into greater self-awareness and goals for revision of future practices” (138). Reflective writing exercises can help “learners challenge their beliefs and assumptions,” and achieve transformative learning, one outcome of contemplative pedagogy. Students use reflection to rethink “problematic frames of reference to make them more inclusive, discriminating, reflective, open, and emotionally able to change” (Gardner 154).
If I am to better understand my students who increasingly respond with near-paralyzing overwhelm to life struggles generally and to service-learning assignments in the classroom, I must examine how the self as a concept is addressed in my course design. Pre-pandemic, I had asked students to undertake their reflective project logs with the belief that they could discursively negotiate between their selves and the challenges presented by service-learning projects—all while acquiring the content knowledge of disciplinary writing. The logs were “a matter of retrospection, which reduces openness of perception and the ability to recognize variances in possible information” (Peary). Students were asked to be accountable only to the external, to look outwards and reconcile their observations with themselves. The reflective writing promoted, however unwittingly, a definition of the self as a unified internal entity that was distinguishable from yet engaged with external phenomena.
Reflection in Contemplative Course Design
As evinced in their logs before Covid-19, my students’ socio-economic background was a significant factor in their relationship to writing and larger academic expectations. But a contemplative course design appropriate to today’s college students must:
remain attentive to students’ backgrounds;
consider stressors raised by the pandemic; and
address non-pandemic concerns, particularly technology’s impact on students’ sense of self.
Melissa Tombro warns instructors against immediately swinging too far away from traditional writing models in the search for a more mindful classroom experience. Because practicalities such as grading, the structuring of lesson units, etc. remain necessities for an instructor, blending contemplative work with more widely recognized writing pedagogies can risk confusion for both students and teachers (15-16). It can be challenging for instructors who create writing prompts focusing “‘the personal’—an individual’s affect and/or narrative and/or experience,” if those prompts are to have a purpose other than segueing into mastery of conventional, impersonal academic discourse (Hindman 11). Tombro therefore recommends that those who are revising curricula focus on the I/Me relationship as explored by contemplative work, “and understand what function it serves in their classrooms” (17).
Reflective writing prompts alone would not sufficiently maintain this focus; contemplation must be reiterated throughout the class curricula. The course text is one example. Given how my post-pandemic students evinced a decreasing familiarity with foundational writing concepts and terminology, it was important that the text selected for my course design address these topics. I chose John Ruszkiewicz’s How to Write Anything with Readings. This rhetoric/reader is accompanied by a learning management system called Achieve. The text covers conventional genres such as narratives and reports, and is arranged to scaffold students towards genres such as evaluations and proposals. Incremental pacing through genres can ease students’ anxiety about a writing course, especially one with a service-learning component. In addition, each section of the text articulates to the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition; because these are echoed in my course’s learning outcomes, the text supports my institution’s expectation for an explicitly outcomes-based curricula.
Laying the Groundwork: First Lesson Unit
Narration, especially if scheduled in a course as students’ initial writing assignments, offers a familiarity of genre and an opportunity for students to introduce themselves to each other and the instructor. The reflective exercise templates provided by the Achieve site for How to Write Anything are meant to help students identify narrative conventions such as use of a timeline and character descriptions. The prompts, however, often make students look only outward when expressing aspects of their selves in relation to writing. Reorienting students’ focus so they instead linger on the “I” and “Me” interaction means assisting them in becoming comfortable with interiority.
Narration in the form of autoethnography has often been employed as a diagnostic tool in writing pedagogy (Scott), and I had used this form of narrative to determine the attitudes, mis/conceptions, and experiences with writing that students bring to my service-learning courses. This activity kept students at the level of outward-only examination, however. Wenger gauges the degree of student readiness for a writing course by asking students to attend to their physicality when they write; she calls her reflective prompts “body blogs” (63-4). Wenger further uses the body blogs to increase student willingness to explore their corporeal selves. For instance, instead of regarding physical restlessness, anxiety, etc. as evidence that their bodies are something to subdue so that writing can occur, Wenger’s students were taken through mindfulness exercises in order to dismantle what to students had been a “conceptual dichotomy between the mind and the body, seeing them as warring factions, specifically in that the reasonable mind must dominate the unruly body” (64).
There are four reflective prompts in my course design’s lesson unit on narration. [3] The first prompt, borrowing from the spirit of Wenger’s body blog, asks my students to become aware of how physicality affects writing. The prompt especially dwells on the student’s physical state when they are—and are not—interested in a writing task. In exploring the physical differences, students become more aware of how they respond to stimuli, with the idea that the familiarity of the topic (a student’s own body) will mitigate students’ other concerns (anxiety about the course’s first writing exercise).
The second and third prompts move students into more conventional territory, by asking them to write about seemingly external stimuli: an excerpt from Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir Good Talk and a literacy narrative by Jean Guerrero. The Achieve site does recommend genre-specific readings in How to Write Anything, but the association of these readings with reflective exercises is my own. Jacob’s graphics chronicle a tense question-and-answer dialogue between the main character Z and his mother. Guerrero’s essay describes the books that shaped her childhood. Although the students are asked in their reflections to concentrate on a subject beyond their corporeal selves, the second and third writing prompts nonetheless are predicated on how students physically respond to the surprisingly visual form and at-times discomfiting content in the Jacob piece, and to the power of a formative childhood influence in the Guerrero essay. Put differently, in their reflections, students keep one foot in selfhood by feeling their way through pieces containing vivid content, even as they apply the taught lessons about narrative convention such as chronology and detail selection.
By the time the course reaches the fourth reflective prompt, students will have had experience in explicitly attending to their bodies as part of the self, while writing about narrative as a genre. The fourth reflective exercise re-centers students on the inseparability between visceral interiority and external stimuli. It asks them to describe which physical behaviors from the first prompt reappeared as they read and wrote about the Jacob and Guerrero texts. That is, during their description, students are characterizing who they are as whole-person writers. The prompt fulfills practical functions by meeting disciplinary learning outcomes in writing and cultivating in anxious students the confidence that can come by owning the role of “writer.” The prompt does so by asking students to use their (physical) selves as motivation for identifying with this role, rather than believe that they need to claim some academic or social definition of what a “writer” should be.
Scaffolding Upwards
The structure of How to Write Anything next focuses on report writing, but for the purposes of my course design, it would seem a backslide to move from the mindfulness promoted by the narrative lesson unit into one that is heavily product driven. A report written in an academic setting calls to mind “book reports” and “lab reports.” For my students, who bring writing anxieties to the classroom, a more cautious pace is appropriate. My second lesson unit needs to introduce students to another writing mode without overly dwelling on recognized academic formats, which would divert attention from the contemplation of their selves. The next unit in my course design therefore lingers on attention to the self while covering the topic of explanation. Explanation acts as a rhetorical purpose as much as any discrete genre, and as such serves a sufficiently incremental lesson unit to follow the narrative unit.
The narrative lesson unit is meant for students to consider the self insofar as it is physically embodied. The explanation lesson unit encourages students to continue valuing a “Me” of selfhood that is not entirely dictated by or comprised of social influences sensed by the “I.” As Wenger warns, a writing curriculum that moves from this focus to any other may inadvertently confirm the very interior/exterior binary that contemplative pedagogy challenges (68). Reflection prompts in the explanation lesson unit therefore ask students to contemplate the nature of their “Me,” using the type of “what if” questions often raised during an act of explanation (Lunsford).
During this lesson unit’s initial reflection, students respond to Ellen C. Caldwell’s Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Legacy of James Baldwin by explaining why the piece is relevant to themselves. This piece can be a powerful experience for any student in the U.S., given a national climate that daily raises the issue of race relations. The emotional work involved during this reflection activity continues students’ focus on their selves, while making sense of their reaction via explanatory writing. The subsequent prompts increasingly ask students to use the principles of explanation to respond to other essays in the text, but this lesson unit’s final prompt circles back to their corporeal reactions to the Caldwell piece; students explore how their emotional response was embodied by sympathetic nervous system behaviors. In asking students to revisit their earlier reaction, narrate how they felt about the piece, then explain the reasons for their reactions, the unit’s final reflection activity helps students to continue naming the nature of their selves by using the terminology of explanatory writing.
In How to Write Anything, the chapter on explanation is followed by one about argument. Mimicking this chronology in my course design might seem hasty, given the several ways in which my students’ readiness needs to be cultivated. However, the Achieve platform makes a point for assigning argument at this moment in a curriculum: argument “help[s] students to discover what they really think about an issue” (Lunsford n.p.; emphasis in original). By this moment, students will have worked through two lesson units devoted to naming interiority. But as Min-Zhan Lu warns, a focus on the personal is not automatically synonymous with reflection (241). It would be counterproductive in my course’s third lesson unit to keep students in a holding pattern where their visceral selves were the only examined topic during reflective writing.
The lesson unit on argument moves students away from naming their selves as merely reactive. It allows them to discover the interplay between reaction and stimulus in a manner that fends off interior/exterior binaries. Wenger explains how her “body blog” reflective prompts avoid the binary by regarding all sensation as valued stimuli, whether it is a corporeal response prompted by other physical sensation, by intellectual stimuli, or a blend. As she says, during reflective writing she does not “want students to begin to reify their bodies or account for every movement in the writing process as bodily; rather, I want[ ] them to discover the agency of their writing bodies in partnership to their minds, to see their intelligence as a union of both” (73). Again, comments from the Achieve platform are relevant: “Students struggle with writing arguments when they don’t care about an issue, when they don’t feel empowered to take a stance, and when they feel like they have nothing new to say” (Lunsford n.p.). Both “care” and the twice-used “feel” point to the importance of engaging students with an issue at simultaneously physical and mental levels.
In addition, the argument lesson unit is organized to continue familiarizing students with concepts in disciplinary writing. Specifically, the unit emphasizes the process of building an argument by repeating students’ physical and mental engagement throughout that process. By guiding students throughout, the unit “allow[s students] to genuinely build their ethos and originality” (Lunsford n.p.). The process invokes rhetorical canons, and How to Write Anything uses accessible terminology such as “claiming a topic,” “organizing ideas,” etc. I arranged the unit’s reflective prompts to support the process.
During the first reflection, students are asked to skim through the titles of the readings assigned early in the unit. These include Ain’t I a Woman? (Sojourner Truth), On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia (Kirsten Menger-Anderson), Teens on TikTok Make the Case for a Living Wage (Nicole Froio), The Covid-19 Pandemic (Jane Goodall), and Glutton Intolerance (Daniel Engber). From topics on gender to the economy to the pandemic to social media, these readings span issues directly impacting college students and inevitably will incite response. Before students actually read the pieces, however, the first reflection prompt encourages them to write freely about their anticipation of the texts, i.e., what is their immediate reaction to the titles. The responses are meant to name the source of students’ dispositions.
For example, to what extent will they note their physicality when commenting about The Covid-19 Pandemic? During the widespread pandemic lockdown in the U.S. in early 2020, the parents of some students at my institution lost their jobs, often rendering students as their families’ primary breadwinners. Will the stress of that experience and its associated physicality appear in students’ thoughts about the essay’s title? The lesson unit’s first reflection becomes a revelation as to what, of their selves, students bring to writing at this point in the course.
This “what” is used as a baseline for comparison during the unit’s subsequent reflection prompts. For instance, during the reflection prompt about On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia, students are asked to comment on Menger-Anderson’s framing of her argument (the representation of women on Wikipedia). This prompt is intended to help students practice the unit’s specific lesson on inventio, specifically, qualifying a claim. The associated lesson explores how audience analysis plays a significant role when shaping a claim.
Further, because framing an argument should consider how the audience might view writer ethos, the prompt is an opportunity for students to again reflect on their selves. The second half of the On Gender reflection asks students to return to their earlier reactions after reading the piece, and comment on their response in regards to ethos. What is the credibility of the stimuli that shaped their initial response? Such reflection allows students to appropriately defend the value of the selves that they brought to the lesson unit’s initial reflection. This might be, e.g., physical relief upon seeing a title with a familiar topic (Wikipedia) or annoyance at once again encountering a topic that is consistently in the headlines (gender). Or their response may be a blend—interest in spotting a topic that garners attention (such as @clarissarankin’s TikToks about female truckers) and the student’s physical energy generated by that interest. As the unit on argument continues, students are repeatedly asked to analyze lessons on argument by bringing their whole selves.
Service-Learning as Contemplative
The argument lesson unit is meant to cap off students’ ongoing study of the composing process and prepare them for the course’s final lesson unit, proposing and then creating the service-learning product deliverable. Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Downs describe how reflection and mindfulness must be linked for students to achieve learning transfer: “students need to explicitly create general principles based on their own experience and learning; to be self-reflective, so that they keep track of what they are thinking and learning as they do it; and to be mindful—that is, alert to their surroundings and to what they are doing rather than just doing things automatically and unconsciously” (n.p.). The previous lesson units’ reflections can assist students in transferring their lessons to proposal writing, by continuing to emphasize the whole selves that they bring to the projects.
Students in my SL courses are mostly new to proposals. The first half of the unit therefore must focus on the pragmatics of the genre such as conventional formatting and rhetorical moves. The lesson unit must not lean too far from contemplation, however, as doing so risks minimizing students’ reflective work in comparison to the perceived “real world” relevance of a product-driven assignment. Instead, the importance that the course design places on the less visible, intangible self can be used in this lesson unit to encourage student confidence during their projects. The unit’s reflective writing activities ask students to recall a situation when they used pre-existing knowledge to acquire new information and ultimately accomplish a task. These writing prompts create an opportunity for students to name aspects of their selves that they’ve been exploring throughout the class, while casting those aspects as a bridge to disciplinary writing knowledge.
During the second half of the unit on proposals and product deliverables, what had been the reflective project log in my previous classes takes a different shape. The log continues to ask students to reflect on their decision making as it comprises a trajectory during their service-learning project, but it now also asks students to call upon their previous reflections to describe the self they have been examining all along. I created a log template formatted into two columns; students are asked to chronicle their selves’ journey alongside the chronology of their project decisions. It could be said that a prescribed format contradicts the course’s larger goal to build students’ confidence in their writing. However, the dual-narration format is meant to call upon the power of a sense of self. That is, the course’s reflections have steadily linked students’ selves to their writing actions, in doing so keeping away from a top-down imposition of “external” writing lessons onto the student’s “internal” mind. Instead, students have been encouraged to see content knowledge about writing as something co-created in tandem with knowledge about their selves.
Conclusion
“I know that what I'm doing is important,” a TikTok-famous teacher said when asked why she didn’t leave education to create digital content full-time (Morrison). This sentiment continues to be common among educators despite tremendous challenges such as the pandemic and a growing teacher shortage across the U.S. (Teacher Shortage). Regardless of course content, we see what a supportive course experience can do for students while they carry aggregate burdens from the past three years. We celebrate the smallest of student victories as we read their writing, knowing they are hard-won. This piece chronicles my effort to make my pedagogy more responsive to students’ needs during this challenging time: a course design that overhauls previous teaching methods by taking a contemplative approach to writing instruction. The new curriculum and pedagogy are meant to help students feel guided in their developing selves. If our students can find certainty in their “locus of control,” they may be more equipped not only for college work but for all the aspects of the lives they bring to the classroom.
Appendices
Appendix A: Course Schedule
Lesson Unit: Narrative
Week One:
Introduction to the course and each other
Chapter 5: Narratives
Narrative Reflection 1
Week Two:
Amy Tan, from Mother Tongue
Mira Jacob, from Good Talk
Lynda Barry, from Lost and Found
Narrative Reflection 2
Week Three:
Jean Guerrero, Believing in the Animorphs Taught Me I Could Cope with Anything
Narrative Reflection 3
Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
Narrative Reflection 4
Lesson Unit: Explanation
Week Four:
Chapter 7: Explanations
Ellen C. Caldwell, Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Legacy of James Baldwin
Explanation Reflection 1
Week Five:
Rita J. King, How Twitter Is Reshaping the Future of Storytelling
Sarah A. Seo, What Cars Can Teach Us about New Policing Technologies
Explanation Reflection 2
Week Six:
Robert K. Nelson, Mapping Inequality: Redlining and Racial Bias
Josh Neufeld, Why We Break Our Stuff Accidentally-On-Purpose
Explanation Reflection 3
Explanation Reflection 4
Lesson Unit: Argument
Week Seven:
Argument Reflection 1
Chapter 8: Arguments
Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I a Woman?
Kirsten Menger-Anderson, On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia
Argument Reflection 2
Week Eight:
Nicole Froio, Teens on TikTok Make the Case for a Living Wage
Jane Goodall, The Covid-19 Pandemic
Argument Reflection 3
Week Nine:
Daniel Engber, Glutton Intolerance
Naomi Klein, from No Logo
Argument Reflection 4
Week Ten:
Jess Morrissette, Dark as a Dungeon: Fallout 76 and the Coal Mining Industry
Ta-Nehisi Coates, from The Case for Reparations
Argument Reflection 5
Week Eleven:
Marcel O’Gorman, The Case for Locking Up Your Smartphone
Megan Marz, Look Who’s Talking
Argument Reflection 6
Lesson Unit: Proposals and Product Deliverables
Week Twelve:
Chapter 10: Proposals
Proposal Reflection 1
Viet Thanh Nguyen, College Admissions Are Corrupt Because Universities Are. Here’s How to Fix Them
Jane McGonigal, Video Games: An Hour a Day Is Key to Success in Life
Week Thirteen:
Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Cosmic Perspective
Larissa Parker, Make a Healthy Climate a Legal Right that Extends to Future Generations
Proposal Reflection 2
Proposal due by end of Week Thirteen
Weeks Fourteen and Fifteen: Workshop projects
Finals Week: Present projects
Appendix B: Reflection Prompts
Narrative Reflection 1:
Since the first day of class, we have focused on this idea: if you write, you’re a writer. This exercise asks what that idea means to you. Please respond to the following:
What types of writing do you enjoy? (If you don’t actually enjoy any writing, what types do you not mind?)
How do you feel during these types of writing? (For example, are you excited about your work? Proud of what you’ve created?)
What is your body doing during these types of writing? (For example, do you have a favorite way to sit?)
What are your surroundings during these types of writing? (For example, do you play certain music)?
On the flip side, what types of writing do you avoid?
How do you feel during these types of writing?
What is your body doing during these types of writing? (For example, does your knee bounce? Do you get up and down a lot?)
What are your surroundings during these types of writing? (For example, do you make sure to have everything arranged “just so” before you actually start to write?)
Narrative Reflection 2:
In Mira Jacob’s Good Talk, “Z” and his mother have a series of important, and intense, conversations. We’ve discussed ways to organize narratives, and Jacob organizes her essay into dialogue and reflection. Please respond to the following:
Chapter 5 discusses different types of style and design when writing narratives. Describe where you see two of those types in the Jacob piece.
Recall an important conversation that you’ve had with a loved one. Chapter 5 discusses how to sequence a narrative into “events.” Can you describe the main “events” that occurred during this conversation?
Narrative Reflection 3:
In Jean Guerrero’s Believing in the Animorphs Taught Me I Could Cope with Anything, the author describes the most important texts from her childhood. Please respond to the following:
Chapter 5 discusses how a narrative needs to “tell a story.” Guerrero focuses on two ideas: books, and herself. How does she connect these two ideas in her essay?
What was an important text from your past? Describe the text and why it means a lot to you.
Narrative Reflection 4:
Now that we are finishing our lesson unit on narrative, this exercise asks you to focus on the traits of narration that have most stuck with you. Please respond to the following:
Reread your Narration Reflection 2 response to Mira Jacob’s Good Talk.
How do you feel about what you said? (For example, were you relieved when reading about the end of your important conversation with a loved one?)
What was your body doing as you reread your response? (For example, was your neck tense when reading about your important conversation?)
Reread your Narration Reflection 3 response to Jean Guerrero’s Believing in the Animorphs.
How do you feel about what you said?
What was your body doing as you reread your response?
Between your two responses (Good Talk and Animorphs), what was your most powerful feeling? (For example, perhaps the most powerful feeling was excitement, when you described the influential text from your past.)
What idea about narration is connected to that feeling? (For example, perhaps your excitement occurred when you were “telling the story” of the text’s impact on you.)
Explanation Reflection 1:
In Ellen C. Caldwell’s Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Legacy of James Baldwin, the author compares two writers: James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Please respond to the following:
What part of this essay do you understand the most?
What makes this part understandable to you? (For example, perhaps you’ve heard news items about Dreamers.)
Explanation Reflection 2:
In Sarah A. Seo’s What Cars Can Teach Us about New Policing Technologies, the author tracks how the development of car technology in turn shaped police procedures. Please respond to the following:
Chapter 7 describes four common ways to organize an explanation. How does Seo use one of these types in her essay?
Explanation Reflection 3:
In Josh Neufeld’s Why We Break Our Stuff Accidentally-On-Purpose, we learn about how consumers can be motivated to be careless with their products. Please respond to the following:
Chapter 7 describes the styles and designs that are appropriate to an explanation. Since Neufeld is using a comic design, where in the essay does his use of style most surprise you? Why?
Explanation Reflection 4:
Now that we are finishing our lesson unit on explanation, this exercise asks you to use explanation strategies to understand a piece of writing. Please respond to the following:
Reread your Explanation Reflection 1’s response to Ellen C. Caldwell’s Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Legacy of James Baldwin. How do you feel when rereading about the part of the essay that you most understood?
Think about the organizational strategies, styles, and designs that we’ve discussed during our unit on writing explanations. Which strategy, style, and/or design appears in the part of the essay that you understood?
Where else do you see this strategy, style, and/or design appearing in Caldwell’s essay?
Argument Reflection 1:
We will be exploring a variety of issues during our lesson unit on argument. Please respond to the following:
Skim through the titles of the essays that we’ll read during the lesson unit:
Ain’t I a Woman?
On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia
Teens on TikTok Make the Case for a Living Wage
The Covid-19 Pandemic
Glutton Intolerance
No Logo
Dark as a Dungeon: Fallout 76 and the Coal Mining Industry
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Locking Up Your Smartphone
Look Who’s Talking
Which title interests you the most? Why do you find it interesting? What do you believe the essay will be about?
Which title interests you the least? What in your experience has shaped your reaction to this title?
Argument Reflection 2:
In Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia, the author uses statistics to make her claim: the lack of female scientists and mathematicians on Wikipedia is symbolic of a lack of females in the sciences and math. Please respond to the following:
Chapter 8 discusses ways to visualize your audience when writing an argument. Menger-Anderson’s intended audience likely are not college students. Given the type of statistical evidence that Menger-Anderson uses, who do you believe is her intended audience?
What parts of the essay do you believe would be of interest to a college student?
Reread your Argument Reflection 1’s response to the title of Menger-Anderson’s essay. Think about the experiences that shaped your initial reaction. What, if any, of those experiences could you use in order to make an argument about female representation? Who would be the intended audience for that argument?
Argument Reflection 3:
In Jane Goodall’s The Covid-19 Pandemic, the author argues that the way humans have treated animals and nature have contributed to the spread of viruses. Please respond to the following:
Chapter 8 describes ways to gather materials to support an argument. Where do you see Goodall using one of those ways in her argument?
Which of Goodall’s points do you feel the most strongly about? How do you feel about that point? If you were trying to argue that point, who would be your intended audience and why?
Chapter 8 describes ways to use style and design when writing an argument. Which of those ways would you use to argue your point to your intended audience and why?
Argument Reflection 4:
In Daniel Engber’s Glutton Intolerance, the author argues that the “war on obesity” actually makes the problem worse. Please respond to the following:
Chapter 8 describes ways to use style and design when writing an argument. Engber uses different styles as a method of making his ideas persuasive. How would you describe two of his styles?
Which of Engber’s points do you feel the most strongly about (in a positive way)? Which of Engber’s points do you feel the most strongly about (in a negative way)? Are there differences in the styles that he uses to make each point? How might those styles affect how you feel about the points?
Argument Reflection 5:
In Jess Morrissette’s Dark as a Dungeon: Fallout 76 and the Coal Mining Industry, the author describes how the video game Fallout 76 ignites memories of his upbringing. Please respond to the following:
Chapter 8 describes how to imagine your audience when writing an argument, including how to “control your ethos.” As we’ve discussed, ethos is the identity that writers create for themselves when they’re making an argument. Use Chapter 8’s description of “controlling ethos” to describe Morrissette’s identity.
Morrissette is blending both personal and analytical in his essay. Think of a time when you’ve had personal experience with a topic, but you weren’t able to use that experience when discussing the topic. What did that feel like? If you weren’t able to use personal experience, how did you go about discussing the topic?
Argument Reflection 6:
Now that we are finishing our lesson unit on argument, this exercise asks you to focus on the traits of argument that have most stuck with you. Please respond to the following:
Reread your responses to Argument Reflections 2, 3, and 4. Where has your thinking stayed the same? If you (hypothetically) had to write these responses again, where has your thinking changed?
Regarding where your thinking has stayed the same, do you see any themes or repetition in your answers? (For example, perhaps your thinking has stayed the same when you were writing about the style of an essay.)
Regarding where your thinking has changed, do you see any themes or repetition in your answers? (For example, perhaps your thinking has changed because you see “ethos” differently now, and that has affected your view of the essays.)
Compare the reasons your thinking has stayed the same
to the reasons your thinking has changed. How do you feel about that?
Proposal Reflection 1:
Our lessons about proposal writing are meant as a guide while you compose a proposal for your service-learning project. Please respond to the following:
Think of a situation when you had to do something and you had some knowledge or experience to get started, but not enough. For example, the situation could be a job task, a chore, an assignment, etc. How did you go about gaining the knowledge necessary in order to complete the task/chore/assignment?
When thinking about your team’s proposal, what are the things that you already know for certain (for example, the due date)? How do you feel when you think about the things that you know for certain? What are the things that you’re confused about? How do you feel when you think about the confusing things?
Proposal Reflection 2:
In Larissa Parker’s Make a Healthy Climate a Legal Right that Extends to Future Generations, the author begins her proposal with personal experience. She then moves into legal evidence to back her claims. Please respond to the following:
Chapter 10 describes steps for writing a proposal, beginning with “claiming a topic” and ending with the step “choosing style and design.” Reread those steps. Which seem easy to you? What knowledge and experience make those steps seem easy?
Which steps seem confusing or difficult? Choose one step with which you have at least some knowledge or experience. How can you use that knowledge or experience to learn more about performing that step?
Project Log:
There is a lot of learning that happens “behind the scenes” as you work on your service-learning product deliverable. A project log, which documents your decisions, is an opportunity to showcase your learning.
Please use the template below when writing your log. Make sure to tag who writes each entry.
Project Process: |
Related Decisions: |
Week Fourteen: |
|
Reread your reflective responses from our narrative lesson unit.
|
How are you using narration during your project’s process? (There may not be narration in your intended product deliverable—in this log, you can discuss any project situation that involves narration.)
|
Reread your reflective responses from our explanation lesson unit.
|
How are you using explanation during your project’s process?
|
Reread your reflective responses from our explanation lesson unit.
|
How are you using explanation during your project’s process?
|
Week Fifteen: |
|
Reread your Argument Reflection 2 and 3 responses.
|
Focus on how you thought about argument when writing your responses. Where do you see this thinking appear during your project decisions? (Your team should select two responses to discuss in this log as examples.)
|
Reread your Argument Reflection 3 and 4 responses.
|
Focus on how you thought about argument when writing your responses. How has your thinking changed since you wrote the reflections? (Your team should select two responses to discuss as examples.)
|
Reread your reflective responses from our proposal lesson unit. |
When you share your projects with your client, you’ll be making a type of proposal argument. In other words, you’ll be arguing that your final product deliverable is the best way to address the client’s needs. How will your team persuade your client?
|
Notes
[1] In this piece, I use “pandemic” as a timestamp to indicate the years 2020-2022 in the U.S., while recognizing that Covid-19 remains a very real presence.
[2] As with this special issue’s Call for Proposals, “contemplative” and “mindful” are used synonymously, even though mindful is a subset of contemplative work.
[3] See Appendix A for the course schedule and Appendix B for reflection prompts.
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Mindfulness in the Monolith from Composition Forum 54 (Summer 2024)
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