Diverse FirstYear Composition

I began reading Jane Danielewicz's "Personal Genres, Public Voices" in the February 2008 College Composition and Communication in order to learn more about public voices, a concept that seemed relevant to my exploration of memoir writing for my sabbatical project. I thought that the notion of public voices might create an intersection between my developing interest in personal writing and my established interest in academic discourse. I was right.

In addition, the comments in the article about students "negotiating differences" (435), to use Patricia Bizzell's contact-zone terminology, made me realize that this essay could provide useful theoretical grounding for teaching diversity within composition theory. That potential is what I want to focus on here.



I think too often we look only at class readings to determine whether courses address diversity experiences. This is of particular interest to me now that my school has added a diversity requirement for graduation. Fortunately, our school's guidelines are broader than mere content. Here they are:



The course outline for classes submitted as Diversity courses will meet the following criteria:

Course exposes students to alternative perspectives, histories, experiences, and worldviews.

Course encourages students to evaluate their own perspectives, histories, experiences, and worldviews in the context of human diversity.

Course provides students with general tools to understand similarities and differences in the human experience and prepares students to apply these tools.

Course encourages students to experience a perspective that is different from their own. ("Cultural Diversity Guidelines")


Still, the only English course currently on the approved course list is the new English 215: U.S. Latino/a Literature ("Cultural Diversity Approved Courses"). English 215, of course, will be grounded solidly in theory as well as filled with rich content. But, according to Danielewicz, first-year composition courses based on personal genres that address public audiences can be crafted to meet diversity requirements as successfully as courses relying on literature to convey diversity.

The deep theoretical level of the diversity experience is what makes Danielewicz's approach exciting. Working with the students' own varied experiences and their emerging voices as public writers, this type of first-year course does exactly what the school's guidelines request. In this type of course the subject matter is the students' autobiographies. Instead of the "I was born at an early age" clichéd writing, though, students use process writing as well as rhetorical and genre theories to move their writing to a public voice ready for publication. Throughout, they must deal with the diversity of their audiences--from themselves, to peers, to public. As Danielewicz notes, they have to work through ways to "represent themselves and then must contend with how audiences respond" (436). In the process, she says, they develop a "mutual regard"--a willingness "to respect and support differences" instead of feeling threatened by sharing their thinking and writing with others (436).

This curricular approach, I argue, deals with diversity at its core. Besides promoting civil behavior in class as well as an understanding of personal and cultural differences, this approach to first-year composition emphasizes the rhetorical reality that the "I" is never alone. Danielewicz says that "in writing an 'I' story, we invariably focus on relations--to self, family, others, environment, context, world--and end up with a 'we' story" (437). Isn't that diversity?

In an apt application of the concept of the key elements of rhetorical theory, Danielewicz emphasizes that the "story [the rhetorical message] of the self [writer] cannot be told [audience] outside of a cultural context [rhetorical situation]" (437, brackets mine). Instead, the student writers "gain a sense of themselves only when they stand in relation to others, and judge their experiences against those belonging to other social groups or identities" (440). For students who engage in this type of curriculum, the pay-off is social and cultural and personal capital.

When students use their own stories to move "from private to public voices"(441), they not only learn differences and develop their public communication, but they learn to think about public issues that emerge from their personal stories and those of others. The course, then, is driven by the personal but is not confined to it. Danielewicz emphasizes that these student writers write "with authority, knowledge, conviction, and self-consciousness about issues that concern us all" (443). Isn't this what we seek to accomplish in freshman composition?

When students can realize this major composition outcome while "figuring out how to know each other" (442), such a first-year composition as Jane Danielewicz describes would seem to provide effective diversity training.




Works Cited






"Cultural Diversity Approved Courses." Johnson County Community College 22 Mar 2008 http://www.jccc.net/home/depts.php/4601/site/Instruction_committees/EAC/CDApprovedCourses.


"Cultural Diversity Guidelines." Johnson County Community College 22 Mar 2008 http://www.jccc.net/home/handbook/faculty.php/coursedevelopment/EAC/CDGuidelines.


Danielewicz, Jane. "Personal Genres, Public Voices." College Composition
and Communication 59.3 (2008): 420-450.