Bringing Students to Life With Memoir Writing
Eminent scholar Walter Ong said writing "is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. … Writing heightens consciousness as nothing else does." As a writing teacher, this axiom inspires and challenges me. What an incredible opportunity I have to facilitate a life-altering experience for my students, especially for those whose personal and academic growth has been somehow stunted.
This opportunity is powerfully illustrated in the 2009 movie "Precious." Based on the novel Push by Sapphire, the movie tells the story of an illiterate, overweight black teenage girl named Precious whose life is pure misery. Brutalized and sexually abused by her mother and father, Precious is invisible to the rest of the world. After a second pregnancy, she is taken out of the regular public school and sent to an alternative school, the last stop en route to oblivion. As it turns out, that dilapidated alternative classroom offers the only sliver of hope in the story, as the idealistic writing teacher struggles to bring a ragtag group of society's castoffs into literacy. For each student, that classroom is a last chance to make it in life. And miracles happen there. Writing brings those women back from the dead. In a safe place, they literally write themselves into existence.
This story resonated deeply with me as a writing teacher because bringing students to life through writing is my favorite part of what I do. Though the circumstances in my classroom are not nearly as dramatic as those in Precious', I relish the opportunity every semester to take a group of fresh faces on a journey of meaning-making through writing. As a rule, the most meaningful writing my students do is memoir writing. "Precious" illustrates the power of memoir: Putting a narrative frame on our past—especially our struggles—promotes perspective and self-awareness that are otherwise out of...
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