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Articles Conference Reviews |
A.30 Narrative as ActionA.30 The Power of Stories: Narrative as Action This panel, comprised of members from the Department of English at West Virginia University, focused on the power and uses of stories. Citing both personal and institutional narratives, the panelists wove together the insights of theorists with their own experiences in an attempt to broaden our sense of what constitutes a story; of the power that stories have to change people and institutions or, conversely, to arrest change; and, finally, of the uses this allegedly non-academic genre can have in the classroom. The speakers took turns talking (even the session chair, Terry Myers Zawicki from George Mason University, took part as the voice of various students), telling their own stories, and circling around three questions at the heart of storytelling: Whose story is it? Why and how does a story get told? How do stories get changed? Nathalie Singh-Corcoran was most concerned with institutional stories, particularly in her role as Director of the Writing Center with the “Writing-Center-as-Fix-It-Shop” story. Singh-Corcoran reflected on the durability of such institutional stories, even when institutional sub-groups create and circulate a counter-narrative, in this case the “Writing-Center-Is-Something-Different, Something-More” story. Although this counter-narrative has wide-ranging currency in other venues—such as the listserv for Writing Centers and at CCCC—the established story has extraordinary staying power, a power that shapes attitudes and behavior of professors and students across the university. Clearly the Writing Center’s story is not its own, argued Singh-Corcoran. JoAnn Dadisman described a braided story assignment in an accelerated first-year composition course, where students begin with a “Talking About Me” exercise and are asked to consciously fracture and re-assemble the story anew (assignment and exercise available on request). Dadisman reported on graduating seniors who, in looking back, felt that what they learned was not so much storytelling, but the effective use of storytelling—when, how, and why to tell a story for rhetorical, illustrative, or explanatory purposes. A professional storyteller herself, Dadisman also described the use of storytelling in a 5-week National Writing Project Summer Institute and later in a three-day professional development workshop for K-12 teachers. In both cases, the focus was not so much the nuts and bolts of storytelling, but rather a concerted effort to get teachers to see storytelling as a mode of learning and to use it along with more traditional school genres of argument and analysis in order to foster students’ writing, reading, and thinking skills. Laura Brady, Director of the Center for Writing Excellence at WVU, discussed her experiences “listening” to stories which she invited on a discussion board in a graduate composition pedagogy class (Discussion prompts available on request). She intentionally looked for the in-between places that stories open up, places that can be found between stories and more formal academic genres, between storytellers and more formal academic personas, and between self and other. These spaces—which include the listener and the teller—encourage what Donna Qualley and Gillie Bolton call “reflexivity,” an awareness of self in relation to others. Listening to others’ stories changes our perceptions of the tellers, establishes connections, and sharpens our sense of our own stories, contends Brady. The session was very well attended and the listeners especially responsive to the idea of broadening our view of stories, storytelling, and listening; to re-thinking institutional stories and the stories we tell about ourselves (on CVs, for instance); and to the idea of encouraging students to use stories strategically and rhetorically as a means of effecting an action, as a part of persuading, explaining, or illustrating in a variety of genres. What I particularly appreciated was the breadth of recent resources cited: from Linda Adler-Kassner’s The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers (2008) to Charlotte Linde’s Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory (2009) and Annette Simmons’s Whoever Tells the Best Story WINS: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact (2007). A full list of sources referenced is available from presenters on request, and their email addresses are included below with their permission.
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