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Article Excerpt
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...
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