Crossing the Line: Student Writing and Instructor Responsibility
Katherine Frank, Ph.D.
Crossing the Line: Student Writing and Instructor Responsibility
by
Katherine Frank, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Chairperson of English and Foreign Languages
Colorado State University-Pueblo
Following the tragic events at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 and the news that the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, was an English student whose writings were filled with violent and graphic images, there was a rush to assign blame to those who might have seen signs of this horrific act in his writing. Fingers were pointed at the English faculty who were accused of not acting quickly enough or seeking out proper means of intervention, and many of the faculty members who taught Cho responded by protecting the sanctity of the writing workshop and the authenticity of the creative process. Diane Roberts, Professor of English at Florida State University, lamented during an NPR commentary on April 22, 2007 that teachers are now expected "to police students' imagination." It was reported by the New York Times that the task force of English faculty at Virginia Tech who convened prior to the shootings to consult about Cho's work "found themselves struggling to define the line between a legitimate work of self-expression and one of violent or sick imagery that needed to be restrained." The same article reported that one of Cho's professors concluded, "outside of an explicit threat that was rooted in reality, it would be impossible to have some kind of standard by which to judge whether a student's work was so alarming as to warrant intervention" (www.nytimes.com).
As an English professor who does not specialize in creative writing, but who after serving as director of composition for seven years has seen her fair share of student writing, I do not think it is a question of "struggling to define the line" or defining a "standard" by which to judge the risk-factor revealed by a piece of student writing. Nor do I believe that we should pretend that our pedagogy actually protects the sanctity and authenticity of a creative process. As Mary Louise Pratt has argued in "The Arts of the Contact Zone," we teach in constructed spaces that are defined and determined by pre-existing systems of power. Our pedagogies may seek to respond to and reshape these conditions by promoting de-centered classrooms via active and cooperative learning, workshop settings, seminars, etc. However, what we foster in the classroom is still a response to the structure and influences that surround us, and the learning process is still constructed no matter how organic we desire it to be. Hence, we should be able to assess a student's writing in part based on the way that it responds to the structure and process that has actually guided its production.
What I mean by this is that we, as English instructors, are largely responsible for the writing our students produce. We design their writing assignments and make choices about prompts or exercises we choose to give our students. Just like the constructed spaces in which we teach, our writing assignments are constructed texts. This means that as long as we take ownership of our assignments and are able to deconstruct the thinking behind them, then we are capable of determining when a student response falls outside the parameters of the task and certainly when intervention is necessary. Really the "line between a legitimate work of self-expression and one of violent or sick imagery that need[s] to be restrained" should not be a difficult line to discern.
As English instructors, we all want students to take ownership of their writing process as a step in their development as maturing scholars. We need to model this behavior by taking ownership of our own writing examples that we distribute in the classroom and to which we ask our students to respond. Of course assignment design will vary according to field and specific course content, but we are still asking our students to produce something in writing, and we have expectations regarding this product that we assess using some method of evaluation and measure of success. Also important to consider is that writing is a recursive act. As instructors, we need to model effective drafting and revision strategies for our students and help them practice this process. In doing so, we not only foster student learning, but also have the opportunity to review student writing in various stages, offer guidance, and redirect when necessary. It follows, then, that if a piece of writing not only falls outside the parameters of the assignment task, but also reveals troubling information about the author, we should take the next logical step and seek intervention.
Critical attention to assignment design and acknowledgement of the conditions that influence our lives are not steps towards "policing students' imagination"; rather, they are steps towards modeling careful thinking, self-awareness, and real world learning for our students. Part of our job as educators, learners, citizens, and individuals is when to know where to draw the line.
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Works Consulted
Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Ways of Reading. 7th ed. Eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005. 517-530.
Santora, Marc and Christine Hauser. "Anger of Killer Was on Exhibit in His Writing."
20 April 2007. New York Times. 21 September 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com>.
Weekend Edition. Host Diane Roberts. Natl. Public Radio. www.npr.org 22 April 2007.
