Introduction | Sequence | Religion in Composition Classrooms | Sharing Others' Stories | Multiple Media | Multiple Cultures | Case Studies | Anonymous | Lauren Goldstein | Charissa Coleman Muhammad | Elizabeth Jones | Final Thoughts
A key advantage for using the DALN as a way of engaging religious literacy narratives is the opportunity to work with concrete, personal narratives whose narrators have already given permission to share their stories by uploading them to the archive. This move invites religious literacies and voices into the classroom with an emphasis on one person’s everyday, lived experience of religion, rather than putting orthodoxy of belief or religious institutions at the forefront of the discussion. With these stories, students and instructors alike can investigate religious literacies on a personal, embodied level without requiring any individuals to disclose their own stories or beliefs (though also opening up space for them to do so if they wish). At the same time, any assignment that seeks to use and represent other individuals’ deeply personal stories likewise demands a careful consideration of the ethics of such use and representation. I echo Shuman’s acknowledgement that telling others’ stories is something we as human beings already do, along with her call for critical attention in order to keep such storytelling “a process of negotiating, rather than defending, meaning” (5) in conversation with the stories’ first narrators.
One of the challenges in setting up an assignment where students retell others’ stories is the danger of a “narcissistic reading,” in which the remediators “[seek] to capture the stories of others as, at heart, stories about themselves” (Schneider 924), thus completely missing engagement with the particular nuances of the storytellers’ unique materially situated contexts and conditions. This is perhaps particularly a danger in the case of working with the literacy narratives of marginalized voices (religious or otherwise), as Schneider notes in her classroom use of literacy narratives to engage ethnic and racial identities. Along with Schneider, though, I argue that it is important to enter into critically discerning (927) examinations of others’ stories in the hopes of seeking common ground upon which to build genuine conversation (see also Spellmeyer). The process of remediating the source narratives thus becomes a challenge of active rhetorical listening that “[allows] the reader to hear the other both as the other and as a companion… encourag[ing] an empathy that identifies and differentiates, affiliates with others and respects their separateness” (Schneider 928). By creating these representations in all their creative glory and shortcomings alike—with the understanding that they represent the remediator’s response and do not replace the source narrator’s voice—the affective/aesthetic responses the remediations materialize can then be examined and critiqued in the reflection stage.
Furthermore, an approach to invention through critically reflective imagination constitutes an important knowledge-making mode in its own right. Royster and Kirsch name both “strategic contemplation” and “critical imagination” as important feminist strategies for engaging with otherwise marginalized voices in our research (and by extension our teaching as well): an imagination that seeks to fill in gaps by raising possibilities of “what if,” while recognizing that some gaps will and can never be filled (20; see also Anderson), and a contemplation that slows down analytical approaches to make space to be with a source in all its complexity without rushing to closure (22). In a recent essay from Composition Forum’s special issue on emotion, Leake likewise grounds his proposed writing pedagogies in Coplan’s definition of empathy as simultaneously affective and cognitive, a movement of both the heart and the imagination that recognizes both overlap and distinction in self-other relationships. This assignment sequence, in responding to a religiously inflected literacy narrative, uses the process of remediation to slow down and make space for these affective-imaginative responses to develop and take shape.
I note, too, both Leake and Shuman’s call for a critical empathy that does not just simply benefit the empathizer, who is often in a position of power. This assignment sequence could invite numerous kinds of follow-up activities dedicated to concrete action/response in absence of the source narrator: inviting classmates or family members to share and record their narratives; visiting local religious or interfaith centers to learn more about their literacies; inviting speakers from the community into the classroom. Such a project for collecting stories could work well with the infrastructural resources already offered by the DALN and modeled through other pedagogical examples, such as Selfe’s Literacy Narratives of Black Columbus class [cite from DMAC page]. As far as this particular assignment goes, though, the sequence does not end with the Reflection stage, which leaves the remediator focused on their own views of and approaches to the narrative. Rather, students are encouraged to take one step further and close with the Response stage, which opens up space for further continued conversation focused on the original narrator, and puts the power to speak (at least theoretically) back in his/her hands.