ESL freewriting and students' lived experience.

Abstract

ESL students in an urban basic writing classroom face challenges that are a complex mix of linguistic and cultural differences. Timed in-class freewriting allows the students to discover latent fluency that is essential in their development as writers, and writing about the homes they left behind gives them a particularly meaningful topic to investigate. The combination of the two results in an ongoing writing practice that, while it has resonances with various spiritual practices, has no clear ties to any organized religion. This practice argues for the primacy of conceiving of the writing classroom in holistic terms, encompassing as much of student's lived experience as possible.

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A young woman is sitting in my office at a university in downtown Brooklyn. Above her shoulder, clouds are scudding over buildings within sight of the Manhattan Bridge. This student is describing a time when, as a little girl in Vietnam, she saw ghosts. She had awakened in the middle of the night. When she walked outside of her family hut to use the village latrine, she saw that the trees around the compound were filled with young American soldiers, sitting in the branches. The ghosts were all crying. As she looked up all she could see and hear were American boys in combat fatigues perched on branches, crying in the dark, in the midnight trees. She ran back into the hut and went into what she now describes as a coma. She was unconscious for three days.

We are talking about this episode because she has written a paper about her childhood for her basic writing class. She does not treat this memory as being all that unusual. In the context of the rest of her experience, arguably it is not. She saw crying ghosts in the trees and then, after her family tied Vietnam on a boat with other refugees, she saw pirates in the South China Sea board her boat and do things that a child should never see. Yet she did see these things. This is what she remembers. The clouds that have blown in from out over the North Atlantic float over the city as she speaks, describing the things that happened to her, telling the story of her remarkable life. Why not tell of these events? Why not say what happened to her when she was a child in war-torn Viet Nam?

In the mid 1990s I worked teaching basic writing to recent immigrant students in Brooklyn. Many of these students had moved to Brighton Beach, a neighborhood next to Coney Island on the southern coastline of Brooklyn that had become the neighborhood of choice for people moving to New York City from the former Soviet Union, an immigration phenomenon which gave rise to the neighborhood nickname, "Little Odessa." These students, however, came from all over the former USSR--Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Cheehnya, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Estonia. Almost all of this particular group of students were Jewish, and had gravitated to Brooklyn through the good graces of an international aid society that had been helping Jewish immigrants come to New York for the last fifty years.

There were also, however, people from many other parts of the world in these writing classrooms just a few blocks from the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. There were many students from Haiti, for example, as well as Guyana, Vietnam, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, China, Ivory Coast, Cambodia, Burma, Nigeria, Cameroon, Bulgaria, Equador, Poland, Taiwan, Peru, Jamaica, Pakistan, and the Philippines. This was not all in the same semester, but over the course of three or four years all of these countries and many more came to be represented in the ESL basic writing classroom.

These were for the most part engaged, interested students. They came to class prepared and were willing to write and to talk about any topics that I brought to the class. They did not, however, possess much information about America, which led to a range of complications which impeded the students' progress in the course. Lucking a critical mass of knowledge about American culture meant that these students had a great deal of difficulty understanding readings in even the easiest, the most accessible, of the several anthologies of essays that I tried using for the class. I believed that they all would get there eventually, but in the meantime I was constantly searching for ways to engage them as writers and thinkers that were not dependent upon readings to generate discussion and written response.

Early on in the class I established the daily practice of freewriting. As soon as the students arrived in the class I would ask them to take out their journals and I would give them a writing prompt. I might ask them to write about their day so far, or find some way to describe their favorite meal, or a particularly memorable vacation. At first many of the students were uncomfortable with doing this, but most of them came around fairly quickly. There were also, however, a certain percentage of students who maintained their resistance to fully participating. They would typically sit and write a few lines and declare that they had nothing more to say. This isn't unusual in my experience, at least with student writers without any practice with this kind of timed, impromptu, spontaneous composing. I would tell them to keep writing. Something was bound to come out as long as their hand kept moving.

This in-class freewriting activity follows the work of the expressivist school of composition scholars like Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and Donald Murray, of course, but it also harkens back to much earlier writers from the 1930s and 1940s such as Brenda Ueland and Dorothea Brande, who suggested that the most powerful way for students to become better writers was to write without stopping for short periods, usually 7 to 10 minutes, and to do this every day.

One contemporary writer well-known for popularizing these techniques is Natalie Goldberg, who comes to the teaching of writing from a Zen Buddhist background. Buddhism seems to inform everything that Goldberg says about writing, and it becomes clear when reading her wonderfully lucid prose that writing for her is indeed a spiritual path, if not an overtly religious one, an ongoing process that shares many of the hallmarks of meditation. One writes as ordinary practice, nothing special, just putting pen to paper the same way in every class. There is no time to stop and think about whether or not these are good thoughts, sophisticated ideas worthy of the kind of writing one does in the college classroom. All there is time to do is to write, just putting one word in front of the other for the designated period of between 7 and 10 minutes.

There were plenty of times when the ESL class was so engaged that we continued writing for significantly longer periods, occasionally even longer than 30 minutes. On most days we would go around the room and everyone would read the piece that they had just composed. Other times, on the days when nobody in the class felt like reading, we just moved on to some other activity. I would write with the class, and would read my work out-loud just as frequently as anyone else. This accomplished several things. It enabled the students to see that this was something that everyone did, not just students, and it placed them in a setting where everyone wrote every day. They also could see that the teacher's efforts were not always all that great, that even more experienced writers began with rough drafts that were similar to the kinds of writing they were producing.

Whatever we wound up doing with the writing, though, whether we showed it to someone else or kept it private, was in a sense irrelevant. The most important thing was the ongoing, daily practice of the writing classroom--the patient elongation of the students' focus of attention and the gradual quieting of the mind that happens when one engages in this difficult yet oddly natural activity of writing without stopping for ten minutes. Unforeseen ideas pop up before one has a chance to see them and say that they don't belong there; they are already down on the page and the pen is moving on. The writer may choose to later discard them as foolish, the product of the kind of in-class writing that one only does if one is required to do so, but just as often one might go back in a few days and be surprised, even shocked, at the freshness and even strangeness of the thoughts, the ways that the mind has of supplying novel, intriguing, even bewildering directions to otherwise prosaic pieces when the hand is left to do the thinking and the surprisingly shallow depths of the conscious mind are abandoned for the much deeper reaches of the unconscious.

What does it mean to structure a class in such a way that students will slow down the focus of their attention, get accustomed to allowing their thoughts to arrive unbidden, and then to learn to respect each ether and their own minds enough to share this work? One can come up with many names for this kind of activity, but I want to argue that this is a kind of spiritual practice. It does not have anything to do with organized religion, however, or at least not explicitly. It does have much in common with many meditative traditions, but there is no dogma, certainly, yoking this practice to any particular spiritual discipline. Does that make it somehow inauthentic? It makes it what it is. It is a group of people learning to pay attention to the world through writing about it. It is a room full of immigrants writing about oppression and war and religious persecution and rape and drug dealers and high speed car chases and voodoo curses that supposedly killed a woman by putting a cow's heed in her stomach. It is the opening of the heart that happens when these stories are told. It is nothing more than that, but it is also nothing less.

All of these students placed into the basic writing classroom based on a placement test, a short, timed essay written in response to a prompt that is evaluated holistically by faculty. Most of the students assured me that all of their problems with writing stemmed directly from second-language acquisition. They said that they could write, in other words, in their own language, and that it was only problems with English that were holding them back. There were also students who felt like they had problems with writing, period--in any language--but it seemed like the clear majority of the students wanted to give the impression that they were fluent writers in their native tongues.

They may even have believed this fiction. I have never assumed, however, that students can write better in their native language than they can in English, anymore than I assume that there are fewer students with learning disabilities in the ESL classroom than there are in a class made up entirely of native speakers. But whether or not these students actually were fluent writers in their native language--and as best as I could determine some of them clearly were, though nowhere near as many as claimed to be--almost none of them had engaged in the kind of enforced, timed, structured freewriting activity that they were routinely doing for this writing class. This may be a result of cultural differences in pedagogical approaches, with American schools favoring freewriting more than other countries. Many of the American students in my other sections of basic writing had done some kind of timed, in-class writing in high school, and did not think that freewriting in college was unusual. The foreign students took longer to adjust. They had not tried freewriting before. The whole activity was strange and surprising to them, and as a result they were shocked into writing beyond themselves, into taking chances in a country of narrative where they were every bit the strangers that they were upon first arriving in New York City.

Early on I hit upon the idea of having students write about the homes they had left. It seemed like a natural topic for these recent arrivals to Brooklyn, if for no other reason than it was a topic that they all had in common. It also turned out to be an good way for me to generate productive work from the entire class. I did not, at least at first, consciously set out to have the class write about something that was going to be particularly spiritual, and in fact it wasn't until I was well into this whole enterprise that it became clear that what was happening was something rather surprising--and refreshing--in the context of everyday school work. This writing, and the complex nexus of interpersonal relationships and psychological development the led to it, was outside of the grind that can become so enervating when writing is disconnected from the things that are the most important in life, to both our students and ourselves.

We had been having lively class discussions about a range of topics relating to immigration, mainly centering on American culture since this is what the students were primarily interested in, but occasionally the talk had switched over to discussing the countries that the students had originally come from. I had noticed a change in the quality of the discussions at these moments, a fluency and an almost elegant ease with description, which was notably different from so much of the other in-class talk.

I asked the students, then, to write in class about their home countries, and to then expand on this informal writing in a cycle of revisions for a formal paper. The changes in the results were immediately apparent, and they were dramatic. The overall shape of the writing, the organization, was not only more logical, but it also felt more organic, as much as those two things may seem, at least at first glance, to be in opposition. The sentences were certainly an improvement as well, and this was one of the most surprising things, particularly for second-language students, because sentence-level errors are paradoxically some of the most difficult and intractable problems in ESL writing classes. The students' writing improved in a range of different grammatical topics--tense shifts, subject-verb agreement, use of articles--all of which everyone in the class was struggling with on a daily basis. The problems did not go away--there is no such panacea, short of hiring an editor to do the work for you--but these mechanical issues did improve over the short term to a striking degree. The change from the previous writing was startling.

We went through a short cycle of revision with these papers, and then I asked the students to write about their homes in New York City. I specifically did not mention the fact that I was going to be asking them to link these various pieces of writing together, because I wanted the students to be concentrating on the project in front of them rather than trying to second-guess the intentions of the teacher. In-class freewriting allows the unconscious to have free rein without the constricting presence of the comparatively shallow depths of the conscious mind. Separating the stages of this project allowed the students to concentrate on visualizing and describing and providing details without the restrictive burden of trying to decide too quickly just what all of it meant.

All too often student writers think that they are providing sufficient information when they are not even close. Part of this is because they move too quickly into drawing conclusions that for them as writers seem merited by the evidence they have provided. Readers, however, at these times find themselves lost in pages of generalities. The writer has not provided anywhere near enough specific information. These ESL students in New York City were told to provide as many details as possible so that someone who had not been to their neighborhoods in Brooklyn could easily envision them. They were the ones who had to make the choices, of course, of what they were going to describe--they might mention the drug dealers on the corner and the fact that they have to walk through them every day on the way to the subway, or they might want to focus on the fact that almost every one in their neighborhood is Russian or Chinese or Haitian, or describe the corner market or the park or some of the local street characters. Whatever they did, their writing needed to be descriptive. I told them to try and make it as detailed and colorful as they could.

The differences between the two pieces was striking. The essays about the home countries tended to be glowing descriptions of fairy-land utopias, while the essays about Brooklyn were gritty, crime-filled pictures of crowded urban stress. I then asked the students to write a paper about why they had left. It seemed like nobody in their right mind would leave the places they had described for the nightmare of the life in New York that they were representing in their essays. It turned out, of course, that there was something that they had not been mentioning. There was a worm in the Edenic apple. For most of the students that came from the former Soviet Union, at least, the reason that they had to leave was because of rampant institutionalized anti-Semitism. They had only even been given the option of leaving after the downfall of the empire. It turned out that with some closer examination the idyllic world they had been remembering was nowhere near as wonderful as they had been describing, and the new home that they had made in New York City was actually much nicer, on balance, than they had been acknowledging.

Other students had described idyllic tropical wonderlands that turned out to have been ruled by the iron claw of a dictatorship, or simple villages in Vietnam that were the source of genuinely fond memories until the onset of the bad events that had eventually led to all of the pain and suffering in exile. This was when the student described seeing ghosts of crying American soldiers up in the trees, before her family had to leave on a dangerous boat and spend three years in a refugee camp in the Philippines. We all wrote together, pulling the past into the present and connecting the present with the past through the words that were emerging as we sat writing in class.

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg describes the wonder of writing about our everyday lives:

   Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live
   and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake
   in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have
   enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we
   have these magnificent hearts that pump through all
   sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We
   are important and our lives are important, magnificent
   really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.
   This is how writers must think, this is how we must
   sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human
   beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the
   earth passed before us. Our details are important.
   Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb
   and it doesn't matter. (43)

The last stage of this writing assignment was for the students to put all three parts of the essay together. We did an in-class exercise where we cut up the papers into separate paragraphs and rearranged them, taping them together in new combinations, just to see how this could work. On one level this was a way to focus on new approaches to organization and revision strategies, showing the students how to surprise themselves and investigate novel connections in their work. But this writing was also a way for the students to get in touch with another side of themselves, to see how the past could be linked to the present and the present enlivened by the meditative focus of the quiet mind, and these linked writing activities did precisely that without announcing that fact to the world. In a sense this was like the old tree falling in the forest conundrum. If a student gets in touch with a spiritual side of herself through writing but doesn't know it, does anybody hear her? Does she make a sound? Does she hear herself if she does? The sound of this tree falling in the forest was the sound of 22 pens gliding across the paper as they described spring in the Carpathian mountains, or midnight in Brighton beach, or the way that villagers would cover their bodies with chalk and parade moaning and writhing into the town graveyard on Halloween night in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The process of providing a structured activity where students engage in the primal act of creation is both spiritual and personal. All it needs is one writer recognizing the unique importance of her own life.

This was not the kind of activity that looks for major change as some kind of measure of success. In fact, the prime focus is always going to be merely the students' incremental growth in writing, improving in some small way, with a secondary but related emphasis on their ability to think critically about the world. Part of their growth in writing will be focused on the ability to sustain some kind of argument, where ideas are related in an organized way from paragraph to paragraph, and this is where the segment in the writing assignment about the reasons that they left their home country was so important. It provided a focus of attention that enabled them to make some coherent sense of their stories and to put them in a context that almost invited commentary.

I purposely discouraged this. I wanted the writing to stand on its own and the commentary to evolve naturally for the reader out of the details that the students provided. They were taking time in class to engage in a kind of timed meditation, using Ignatious Loyola's techniques of visualization of place, but rather than envisioning the stations of the cross they were writing about home, places that for them were charged with the ineluctable potentials of loss and desire, a past combined of innocence and pain and a present mixing optimism and dread. It was in the teasing out of these paradoxical contraries in the atmosphere of the writing classroom that they found, or at least I hope that they found, elements of an everyday spiritual practice, based on regular writing exercises, that they could take with them long after the semester was over.

I have no idea whether or not they did. I also don't have any illusions about the students in these classes viewing these activities as some kind of elevated contact with spirituality. This was something different, a simple focus on the clarity of the moment of remembering, concentrating on detail, that placed the student both in the past and in the present through the systematic application of simple yet time-honored freewriting techniques.

In Bird by Bird Anne Lamott writes about the writing life with startling honesty and force:

   I remind myself nearly every day of something that
   a doctor told me six months before my best friend
   Pammy died. This was a doctor who always gave me
   straight answers. When I called on this one particular
   night, I was hoping she could put a positive slant on
   some distressing developments. She couldn't, but she
   said something that changed my life. 'Watch her
   carefully right now,' she said, 'because she's
   teaching you how to live.' (179)

I am certainly not suggesting that the aim of a successful writing class is to rob young people of their illusions, of images of an idyllic past that might sustain them through some of the rigors they face after moving to a gritty neighborhood in a city where they eternally feel like strangers, if not outcasts, struggling with language and cultural difference. They have to communicate, in this situation, with other people in ways that seem to them, and unfortunately sometimes to the people they are talking to, like the rudimentary efforts of children, with all of the supposedly cute and endearing mistakes and linguistic blunders. It does not feel cute to them.

People hold onto their illusions for a reason, and sometimes these reasons are perfectly defensible, but it is also important, as part of any educational project, to complicate these dream-worlds and bring people face-to-face with unpleasant realities, if only to say that this is another part of the truth. It is just as true to say, in other words, that the countries where they were born and raised were both wonderful and terrible, rather than one or the other, and it doesn't mean forgoing one version of history for another. It might be argued that this is merely the ancient rhetorical strategy suggesting that a position may be more productively examined as both/and rather than either/or, and in a sense I would agree with that charge, after first replying that there are times when things truly are either/or, and it is not always best or most accurate to suggest a both/and approach. The pedagogy for this urban ESL basic writing class was a teaching strategy that worked productively in this particular environment, with these people, at this point in their intellectual development, and I believe that it also helped to show that the world in front of them every day is every bit as worthy of close attention as anything that they have been reading about in the books that are assigned for school.

I tried to encourage tenderness and attentiveness. Maybe the last thing to remember is that this process can be as beneficial for the teacher as for the students. Maybe I was the tree in the forest after all, and this writing years later is as much an attempt to come to terms with some of the unarticulated spiritual dimensions of my own teaching practice as it is a way to describe the ways that my teaching impacted on the lives of others.

This sequence of assignments worked remarkably well as far as helping the students become better writers, which of course is what it was designed to do. I can speak with far less confidence about the results of some of the more esoteric aspects of the class, the ways that the students might have benefited in some kind of spiritual way, perhaps becoming increasingly attentive to everyday surroundings and the rhythms of life that we tend to glide through unconsciously every day. I can say, however--and can say with confidence--that this was a time when some of the spiritual dimensions of teaching writing became very clear to me. I realized that if I was not engaged on a level of the spirit I was just not going to be able to help these students in the ways that were going to be the most important after the semester had long faded into the past. This was not some kind of evangelical project, but if I do not recognize some of the salvivic aspects of teaching writing, however small they may be, then I believe I am doing a disservice to the students that are paying for my time.

Writing about the world can help us see things we would not see otherwise. We go back and look at our child-hoods, our jobs, and our families and we are changed somehow. Sometimes we gain insight and clarity. The more that we do this and the more we are writing about it the better we become as writers. There are, of course, other ways to teach writing and some of them work very well. It was my experience with these students that writing about their homes was a royal road to rich, meaningful writing.

Part of what I took away from this semester was the fact that the lessons of the class really only revealed themselves significantly after the fact. The students from this class nearly a decade ago are calling out to me through the years, showing me the lessons that were there all along, the ones that had little to do with the things that I thought I was teaching them at the time, but had everything to do with what the students were teaching me. They were showing me how to live my life by the ways that they were living theirs, challenging me to pay attention. I like to imagine that this class made a difference to them, though I have not stayed in touch with any of the students. I know that it made a difference to me.

I structured things intuitively in this class and trusted my instincts, which turned out, in retrospect, to have been correct. I want to argue that it might not be a bad idea if more of us were operating in the moment, improvising as we go, because this is precisely what we are asking our students to do in their in-class writing. I would add that I think teachers need to be incredibly well prepared in order to do this responsibly, but for me the best moments in the classroom, the times when everybody feels the most alive, and in fact make for the most spiritually charged, memorable classes, are when nobody knows quite what is going to happen next, yet everybody has a clear sense that we are in this together, exploring the moment as we examine the past, writing about our lives and spirits, our homes and our dreams, the green mountains of our childhood and the streetlights that are shining when we come up out of the subway, in the rain or snow or sunshine, in December or April or July or October, about the lights of home that call to us or send us away but always hold our attention when we give ourselves over to time and memory and the stories that these ever-present resources provide.

References

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Boston: Shambhala, 1986. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. New York: Pantheon, 1994.

Stephen Newton, William Paterson University 

Newton is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center. His research agenda is currently focused on relations between Beat Generation writers, jazz, and James Joyce, as well as with ongoing interests in literacy and writing center theory and practice.