Personal Narrative, Revised: Writing Love and Agency in the High School Classroom

by Bronwyn Clare LaMay

Overview

In this inspirational book, LaMay shows readers how to transform classrooms and schools into places where youth can explore the intersection between literacy and their lives. This book is the culmination of a literacy curriculum that the author and her high school students wrote dialogically, beginning with their attempts to define love. Through real-life classroom examples, they demonstrate how an innovative curriculum that intertwines personal and academic engagement can create space for students to explore their identities, connect to literary texts, and develop agency as writers and thinkers. In this important contribution to literacy educators, the author shows how personal narratives can help students rebuild their fractured relationships with school and envision writing and academic achievement as playing a role in their futures.

Book Features:

• Evidence of how students’ social-emotional and academic growth may intertwine in the interest of school engagement.
• A re-conceptualization of the complex layers of the personal narrative genre and its role in the pedagogy of academic writing.
• A reinterpretation of the transformational role of revision in students’ academic and life texts.
• Examples of writing and interview data that illustrate the diversity of student responses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807775158
Publisher:	Teachers College Press
Publication date:	10/02/2016
Series:	Language and Literacy Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Bronwyn Clare LaMay is currently a high school English teacher at Impact Academy of Arts and Technology, Envision Schools, in Hayward, CA. In addition to her K–12 work, she has taught pre- and inservice teachers at University of San Francisco, Mills College, Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Foreword Andrea A. Lunsford ix

1 Defining School Gravity 1

School Gravity in the Context of EI Cuento 3

Love and Agency in Our Stories: Surviving "Whole" 8

Personal Narrative: "Procedures for Life-Making" 10

Storying the Academic Curriculum 14

Differentiating Revision 16

2 Writing Love 19

Why Love? Becoming Love Literate 20

Love Metaphors and Life Outlooks 23

Shared Writing: "You Realize You're Not Alone" 25

Love's Literary Elements 28

My Narrative Work: Writing to "Face It" 31

3 Writing the Personal-Academic School

Gravity Connection 42

Blending Genres: "A Writer is Just a Person" 43

A Sequence of Love Papers 47

Alisha's Academic Stories 48

Nate: Making a "Whole Story" 51

Sofia and Maizie: "Giving Something Back That's Real" 53

Kylie's Narrative "Limbo" and Other Themes 58

4 Revising Why Me 62

Running, Writing, and Seeking the Story Beneath the Story 64

Narrative Revision and Stories of Trauma 67

The "Why Me" Story 71

Revising "Why Me": Defining the "Milkman Moment" 73

5 Revising Narrative Truth 79

Preliminary Conversations: "It's Whatever, You Know" 80

The Anti-Story: "Lord Please Erase My Birthdate" 83

Resilient Truths: "Where I Get My Pride and Grace" 88

Restoring Love: Changing Our Ways of Caring 94

6 Colonel Sanders, Counterplot, and "The Connect" 97

"Sky's Plan" and the Charter School World 98

The Absence of Ambiguity: "You Get A's or You Fail" 104

Love Equals Struggle 107

Breaking Tradition: Love + Struggle = Energy 108

"Educational Reflexes": The Relevance of Paulo Freire and Academic Citations 112

Conclusion: The School Gravity of Love 116

The Language of Corporate Education Reform: "Words With No Shadows" 118

A Place Where the Love Is "Generous" 121

Notes 127

References 129

Index 137

About the Author 147

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Heart and mind blend in this remarkable story of a teacher and her students working with courageous determination to create an education that values young people and gives weight and meaning to their lives."
—Mike Rose, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

"This wonderful book provides a vivid portrayal of what is possible for young people when teachers humanize writing and literacy education. Bronwyn LaMay demonstrates how enabling students to tackle ideas that are meaningful to them can produce both rigor and integrity in the learning process."
—Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University, author of Grawemeyer award-winning, The Flat World and Education

"In Personal Narrative, Revised, educator Bronwyn LaMay takes Toni Morrison’s concept of response-ability to heart and develops a powerful sequenced theory of narrative revelation. LaMay transforms this into compassionate praxis in order to empower students (and teachers) who sometimes find themselves needing to respond, endure, and triumph in the face of those same or similar worlds and odds confronting characters in the turbulent and prophetic narrative space of Morrison’s prose. Many theorists have compellingly argued in favor of the power and centrality of narrative in our lives (and the brilliance of Morrison), but here LaMay takes the claims further, risking its theoretical elegance for the sake of students whose lives, stories, and writing are clearly her greatest interest."
—Nigel Hatton, University of California

"An insightful, moving, and eloquent demonstration of the power of narrative to connect the personal and academic."
—Tom Newkirk, University of New Hampshire

Editorial Reviews

" Personal Narrative, Revised is a beautiful balance of writing, writing instruction, and theory. The book would be a welcome addition to any course, study group, or professional development that supports educators in creating dialogic and narrative spaces for students to cultivate meaningful connections between their personal and academic identities."

—Teachers College Record

" She reminds us that where radical choice is present, hope often blossoms."

—English Journal

From the Publisher