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Articles Conference Reviews |
F.37 Mindfulness and YogaF.37 Remixing the Writing Recipe: Applying Mindfulness and Yoga to Teaching Composition As a person interested in the practice of yoga, I was excited to attend this session, and I left with many new connections presented by the speakers in this session. Lance Cummings began the session by focusing on recipes in his presentation, “Cooking Up First and Second Problematic: Remixing the Writing Recipe.” Cummings pointed out that our current interest in celebrity chefs, like Emeril Lagasse, Anthony Bourdain, Nigella Lawson, shows how we have moved toward a celebration of process just as much as product in the arena of cooking. Today’s cooks seek to create their own signature dishes, and the spectacle of cookery is showcased on television channels like Food TV and shows such as No Reservations. Turning to the writing classroom, Cummings asked, “Are students also enjoying process?” He ended his presentation by connecting recipes and writing process—claiming that studying the language of recipes can allow students access to greater complexity in their writing. In other words, by looking at the patterns students may eventually be able to move past formulaic writing (like following a recipe exactly) and evolve into their own signature style (much like how a deft baker will create her own recipes after she gains confidence). The next two sessions moved away from the concept of recipes and focused instead on yoga. Katie Piper began with her presentation, “Re-Membering Writing Identity Through Yoga in the Composition Classroom.” First, she focused on metaphor, drawing on Lakoff and Johnson to note that metaphor is how we make sense of the world. Moving to writing, Piper argued that many of our current metaphors about writing focus on physical pain and torment, the metaphor of writing as suffering. As such, she suggested a connection between the breathing exercises (pranamama) of yoga and “breathing” in writing. For example, Peter Elbow mentions that writers should focus on “words that have breath in them” to “create a draft to believe in.” Similarly, Sondra Perl’s felt sense offers a breathing metaphor useful for writing. Thus, we can think of how to use pranamama in both a physical and theoretical sense in the writing classroom to help students grapple with their struggles in writing. Finally, Ann Del Principe closed the session with her presentation, also on yoga, “Ahimsa, Satya and Writing Assessment: Applying the Practice of Yoga to the Practice of Teaching.” “There’s a lot more to yoga than just moving the body,” Del Principe began, noting that yoga also is a practice with an ethical and philosophical path. Thus, we can connect insights from the practice of yoga to the practice of writing and our pedagogical practices. For those unfamiliar with the yogic concepts of ahimsa and satya, Del Principe gave a brief overview: ahimsa focuses broadly on the ideas of “harm” and “nonviolence,” while satya focuses on “truthfulness.” Narrowing in on the potential tension between these two concepts, the speaker offered several questions writing teachers could consider. First, what kinds of harm could be done to students when giving “truthful” comments about their work? Second, why is truthfulness often subordinate to not harming? Do we tell white lies to praise something in a student’s work so that we can “not harm” and what purpose does that ultimately serve? Del Principe then turned to several studies of teacher commentary to illustrate her questions, such as Straub’s 1967 study of commentary that noted students disliked highly directive comments, preferring instead comments that didn’t require any one fixed path to address them. Treglia’s 2008 study showed that students preferred mitigated or hedged comments, but that, interestingly, these kinds of comments didn’t necessarily result in better revision. She closed by urging those in the audience to look at their own tendencies in commenting on students’ writing. As a reader, do you tend to provide directive, negative, or challenging comments? Do you offer more directive commentary to particular types of students? While at first the connection among these three presentations was not necessarily clear, by the end of the session I saw a strong focus on the practice of writing, obviously a focus that fit well with the conference. As someone who often tends to go to the kinds of sessions that are most immediately applicable to my research and teaching, I’m happy to have attended this session, which seemed pretty off the beaten path for me. This was an excellent reminder that sometimes we learn most by breaking out of our boundaries and trying new things, and I will be keeping this in mind when selecting sessions to attend at CCCC 2011. |