Student Voices Lost, Stolen, and Found

There are many ways people are silenced. Once, I overcorrected a student, pointing out all his errors and talking them through one by one. My clumsy attempt to teach him everything at once didn’t push him to become a better writer: I pushed him to silence. He withdrew his words for fear of being wrong. During family gatherings or at large dinner parties with friends, I’ve observed the way the loudest voices tend to reign, telling and retelling their stories. I’ve watched as my quiet children and shy friends sit back, silent, removing themselves from the conversation because no one makes space for their voices. I’ve witnessed the subtle silencing in meetings when some people’s ideas are lifted up and others ignored. I noticed it when our students are told to hush because their voices or laughter are too loud, out of place in the hallowed rooms of a museum, a hallway, a classroom. Some of us, especially people from traditionally marginalized groups and women, are taught to take up less space from the time we were children. 

Before launching the politics of language or language and colonization unit, Dylan Leeman, a wonderful teacher who has allowed me to share his classroom, and I wanted students to think about whose voices get heard, whose voices are viewed as correct, and whose voices are herded, tamed, trimmed, corrected, shamed, and silenced. Because we introduce this narrative to frame a unit on the hierarchies of language, we used the word “voice,” but the larger frame is the way some people’s languages, bodies, lives get edited, surveilled, praised, or shamed more than others. By leaning into their memories of silencing, we attempt to raise consciousness about race, gender, voice, language, and privilege. 

Finding Our Stories and Building Writing

I kicked off this narrative lesson by sharing a story I wrote about the time when I lost my voice during my freshman year of high school. My teacher — I will call her Mrs. B — asked me to stand and pronounce words and conjugate verbs as a model of how students should not speak. Then she asked another student — I will call her Sarah — to stand and correctly pronounce the words and conjugate the verbs. To be honest, I can’t recall much of the story beyond those few sentences. But the shame Mrs. B bestowed on me that day followed me around for years. As I wrote in my narrative:

Mrs. B’s memory remains dusted, clean, ready to scorch me when I stand in front of an audience to give a talk or speak on a radio program. She still stalks me when I least expect it — at a dinner party with well-educated acquaintances I want to impress, and I wonder if my tongue will slip back to 9th grade. She didn’t teach me to conjugate verbs or correctly pronounce words. No, Mrs. B taught me shame. She taught me to be silent for fear of making a mistake when I spoke. 

I end the story by introducing how I overcame that fear through knowledge:

Years later, when I studied linguistics in college and on my own as a teacher, I learned that many of my grammar usage and pronunciation “errors” came from my immigrant parents’ translations from their German and Norwegian languages into English. I discovered the many ways colonizers stole languages and marked them inferior. 

After I read my piece to the class, I introduced the assignment: Write about a time when you lost or found your voice. This prompt sparked immediate anecdotes at Jefferson High School where students I taught for decades came from diverse linguistic backgrounds. They spoke of the pain of losing their home language and not being able to communicate with elders at family reunions or being shy to speak in class because students made fun of their pronunciation. The students in the sophomore class I co-teach with Dylan Leeman did not share those experiences. It took a while to locate their stories, but once they did, they wrote powerful, diverse pieces.

To move them toward their stories, Dylan and I put a chart on the board with two lists: Times I found my voice and times I lost my voice. My finding list focused on language: I learned to love writing in Ms. Carr’s junior English class; I learned how to harness arguments in Mrs. Johanson’s debate class; and I published my writing in academic journals and literary magazines. Under the “lost my voice” column, I noted Mrs. B’s class and the absence of women in literature and history when I was in school. This curricular silence made me question my place in the world and by including this topic, I hoped students would understand the ways exclusion from the curriculum, history, employment opportunities, social media, and leadership roles are also methods of silencing. Dylan, a powerful storyteller, shared his two lists as well.

Students struggled to find stories. Their charts were mostly empty. Dylan and I spun through the room like tumbleweeds, attempting to elicit ideas, hoping to find a few students who might share their brainstormed lists. Because Dylan’s and my topics focused mostly on language, students couldn’t land their narratives. In conversation with table groups, we realized that if we broadened the prompt, students found a way into their stories. “Think about times you witnessed someone being silenced. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was your sister, cousin, best friend.” Dylan and I traded suggestions across the room to elicit more responses. “Silencing doesn’t just happen with language. It can be who gets called on in class and who doesn’t. It can be who teachers, coaches, and parents choose to put in the spotlight and who is in the shadow. It can be who gets called out for inappropriate behavior and who doesn’t. Often, even awards that appear to be earned can be products of inherited privilege.” The process of locating wisps of memories and winding them into a coherent piece is messy and can feel like failure until I remember that this is often the way teaching and writing start. I learn and relearn the lesson that prompts need to be broad enough for students to find connections in their lives.

The following class period, students read their ideas/topics with their table groups. Dylan and I encouraged students to share with the whole class, especially when we thought others might strike a similar vein. Degan’s story, for example, was about a time he worked the scoreboard at a basketball game and lost focus. The parents who filled the bleachers yelled at him. He wanted to pull his hoodie up and slink out of the gym. This sparked ideas for Tristan, Max, Liv, and others about times when a single error caused an avalanche of criticism that threatened to define them. By bringing to light these stories that seem private — supposedly a result of a character flaw or personal defect — we can examine the ways that invisible privilege works. Mrs. B’s correction of my language was both personal and political. She asserted the power of her position — an English teacher — to correct and humiliate me for my home language, instead of teaching me that language is rooted in a system that privileges those who make the rules, those for whom Standard English is their home language.  

Once everyone had at least one item in their columns, I said: “Select an idea from your list to write about. If it doesn’t go anywhere, choose a new item. Sometimes when I’m writing, new memories emerge. Open your notebooks and write one or two sentences telling the story as a summary.” I turned and wrote on the board “My 9th-grade English teacher humiliated me for the way I talk in front of the class.” The purpose of this step is to clarify the story for the student. Throughout my teaching career students have complained that they can’t remember the details, so I short-circuited that argument in my narrative. “Look,” I say. “My high school freshman year was 1965. I don’t remember the details. Here’s what I know: My English teacher humiliated me for talking wrong. From there I can include some details based on what I remember of high school. I can add other details. I can embellish where I don’t know. There’s no fact-check on this, Mr. Leeman and I are interested in the big idea of the story of finding or losing yourself in a moment, a story that sticks with you. You get to add the details you remember and invent the ones you don’t.” 

To move students into their writing, Dylan and I returned to a strategy we’d learned from elementary teachers in the Oregon Writing Project: a story diagram. I shared my diagram on a slideshow with a bubble in the middle with my statement: Mrs. B humiliated me for the way I spoke. I created small bubbles above it with the characters in my story: Mrs. B and Sarah. Radiating out from that I included some details about them: Sarah wore matching pleated skirts and sweaters and penny loafers. Mrs. B was tiny and hunched over and old. I included the name of the high school as the setting. In another bubble, I wrote “I felt humiliated, not smart, I started monitoring the way I talked. Silenced.” My final bubble read “I regained my voice and power when I learned about the politics of language in college.” 

After going over my slide, Dylan instructed students: “Create a diagram of your story. What’s the one-sentence summary? Who are the characters in your story? What do you remember about them? Where did it take place? How did this incident make you feel? How did you gain or lose power? What lesson about power and privilege can you take away from this incident?”  

The art of teaching social justice narrative writing means layering lessons instead of merely giving an assignment and hoping students will write. With our next layer, Dylan and I provided students with strategies to open their piece: Character description, setting description, action. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but instead offers an invitation to play, to see the narrative as a story in progress, and that revision can happen even in the first moments of construction. 

To show how to start with a character, I shared my description of Mrs. B. Partly, we used my model because it demonstrates my fuzzy memory, and how the use of the word “maybe” allows for the possibility that I’m wrong, again encouraging students to loosen their hold on needing to get every detail accurate: 

My memory is that she was tiny and stooped, dressed in black with grey hair pulled into a tight bun, but memory is tricky. I admit she resembles the wooden witch Halloween decorations I set out with my grandson Mateo this morning. Maybe she wasn’t evil. Maybe she wasn’t small. Maybe she even wore the colors of the rainbow.

After each model opening, we gave students time to write and share with tablemates, then encouraged them to nominate someone from their table to read their start with the class. “These are drafts,” we told them. “Try different styles. Listen to your tablemates. If you find someone’s opening that you love, figure out what they did and try that.” 

Then we left them alone to write the draft. “Just get it down. We will revise the story later. Gather as many details as you can but focus on telling the story. It doesn’t matter where you start. Writing can be fixed.” Students wrote their drafts in their notebooks first instead of on a computer. Handwriting allows students to move more slowly, for details to arise, for mistakes to happen without the quick delete button of the computer. 

Embroidering the Narrative

The idea of embroidering a narrative came from years of encountering students’ grumblings that their memories can’t capture enough detail for a full story or that their piece is just one moment in time and they’re not sure how to make it bigger, longer. Their pushback is legitimate. I face the same dilemmas when I write, so Dylan and I returned to literature to explore how writers solve this problem and teach students the tools that writers use to expand their stories. A critical classroom doesn’t assume all students understand how to write, instead it unravels the mystery of a genre and helps students navigate through the process. 

Interior Monologue

Dylan and I encountered the usual disparity between those still writing the first draft, those who needed to revise, and those who considered themselves done. Wherever students are, they benefit from a craft lesson in writing that returns them to their draft. We began with a lesson on adding interior monologues, the imagined thoughts and feelings of a character, because this strategy helps them access their emotions at the time of the event. We used a section of Renée Watson’s novel Piecing Me Together. In this segment of the novel, Watson demonstrates the kinds of judgments people make based on race, class, language, clothes, gender, the side of town you live on. We chose this piece to continue to broaden the idea of the way other people’s judgments about our lives add up. 

Watson offers a model for how to add more background details about the character: what they eat, drink, dream. Watson includes elements from her character’s life to broaden the reader’s understanding: food stamps, guns, boys. I began this layer of writing by saying: “A narrative is and isn’t about you. Think about Watson’s lists and consider adding one to your narrative. You might use the line What people get wrong about me . . . What people get right about me . . . or I am the one who. . . . This can be used to explore you as a character in the story or to explore another character in the story.” 

Maxine is right and wrong.

Wrong because I am like those girls. I am the Kool-Aid-drinking, fast food-eating, unhealthy girl she wants to give nutrition classes to. I know all about food stamps and dollar menus and layaway. Know how to hold my purse tight at night when walking down dark streets, know how to duck at the sound of a shooting gun. I do. I am the girl who walks down the hallway, hoping for at least one boy to notice me because I look nothing like their mothers, look nothing like the Dream. The boys over here, well, to them I am good for tutoring and friendshipping and advice giving. I am. 

So Maxine is wrong — so wrong — about me.

But she is also right, because I know more than that, want more than that. Right because I am the girl who spends her summers reading books and working, tutoring at the rec, where a lot of her friends play their summers away. I am the girl who knows when to stop talking back to a teacher because I know my mother will be waiting for me when I get home, asking me if I forgot who raised me. I am the girl who dreams of going places: to college, to grad school, all around the world if I can. 

After we taught the lesson, we said: “If you didn’t finish your story, finish it now. Hands to the keyboard or pencil and write, write, write. If you have a draft, this is a great time to revisit it and see how you can make it better. Read back through your draft and find a place to insert one or more interior monologue. You may choose to use Watson’s format or find another way into the interior monologue.”  

We continued building the story in other revision craft lessons — on creating scenes, elaborating on a character, embroidering when memory failed them: “Where you can’t remember, invent.” 

Providing Feedback During Writing

Students need feedback during the writing process, not after they have finished. To stop spending fruitless time sitting in cafés responding to final drafts, I started giving feedback while students are still writing and open to changing things up. Now I do a quick read of their drafts to see what they got right, to find models to bring back from students who developed their characters, who made smart writing decisions that illustrate the storytelling process, who used words that elevate their writing, whose stories illuminate moments where they lost or found their voices. During this time-saving process, I also locate common problems that I need to reteach. And I note who needs one-on-one time while the rest of the class moves forward on their next draft. Before turning in the final draft of papers, students make notes about additions and edits they made and why they made those changes. When the final draft is turned in, I scan through the drafts to note what they’ve learned and use those points when we return to the next writing assignment. 

Using what we learned from our quick-read of their drafts, Dylan and I developed a lesson using their work as a model for our final revision lesson. We started with Tristan’s example to demonstrate how he incorporated Watson’s interior monologue technique in his narrative, and how he talked back to those who judged him. 

The fans are right. I’m indecisive and my calls aren’t great, but they’re also wrong. I still know the rules, even if I’m not confident. They may know some things about me: My jerseys are too big, my whistle is quiet, but they don’t know things too. They don’t know I love this game and that I’ve played it all my life. They don’t know that I’m not even supposed to be a center ref. I may not know things too. I don’t know if this is a tournament, I don’t know if their kid is injury prone, and that’s why they’re being so protective. But what they should know is how to extend grace to someone who is obviously struggling.

We point out how Tristan balances what he knows and doesn’t know. And we point out his killer final line.

Parker’s character development gave us an opportunity to review, again, how writers can make a character come to life: 

He walks with a strange, injured gait, and his clothes loosely cling to his body as if he stole them from a man much larger than himself. He wears a white graphic tee with a logo of some band I don’t recognize and a pair of dirty jeans. His face is pockmarked and sallow, his eyes sunken into his head. His hair is long and greasy. It clings to his head in mismatched clumps.

After analyzing Tristan’s and Parker’s pieces, we shared examples from other students. “As you finish, slow down and look at your sentence patterns and verbs and see if you can polish them a bit more. Add zing to your sentences like Kiyomi did with her short sentences: No electrical issues with my heart. No answer. No diagnosis.”

“Look at your verbs. Can you bump them up? Jonah wrote, Ms. X hawked around the room.”

As always, student narratives became better and bolder as they heard stories from their classmates and they returned to their drafts with new eyes and new strategies to try. The evidence of the lessons showed up in their language, descriptions, and scenes. Jude wrote about the night he messed up orders at his first job in a food cart, and, like Tristan, he learned that the judgments about him were flawed:

The biggest mistake of the night for me was one of the orders. A group of guys not much older than me ordered four sushi burritos, all with different alterations. I tried my best to remember the orders, but I knew I had made a mistake. When they received their food, they complained and made me feel useless. Although the guys are right for calling me out and not being thorough . . . they are also wrong. Wrong for thinking that I didn’t care about my job, and wrong for thinking that I’m not trying my hardest to learn. 

Dylan and I created spaces in the classroom and in the hallway for students to gather in groups of four to share their stories. We sent them off with our mantra: “Listen with a hungry heart. Take notes on what you love. Tell your partners what they are doing right.” We handed them a sheet with questions to think about as they listened to members of their group: “What do you find out about ways people are silenced or cherished? Whose voices or lives mattered in these stories? What did you learn from your classmates about how privilege works and what can we do to disrupt it?” Their laughter filled the hallways; in fact, the principal stopped by to see what was going on: Kids laughing, crying, as they read their narratives and supported each other’s writing, but also empathized because they too had lessons they learned. 

The bell signaled the end of the period before students answered our questions. While we hoped for a grand finale discussion filled with their insights, Dylan and I shrugged it off. The year was young and the questions on silencing and privilege are ones we weave through the entire year. What didn’t happen in the shortened period with their narratives would resurface again in the politics of language unit and beyond. 

For students to write well, they must care about what they are writing enough to persevere through multiple drafts. They must find meaning and purpose in the tasks we ask them to perform. Every lesson must teach strategies that they carry with them to their next piece. The goal is not perfection; the goal is building a writer who has a reservoir of tools. 

But building student skills should not be the only point of narrative writing. What stories they write matters. We must excavate incidents from their lives that need to be taken out, examined, and rewritten. The stories that ride in our bones, that remind us that we are powerful or that torture us with our incompetence must be reviewed in the light of day so we can learn from and use them as reminders of how we want to act and respond in the future.