By Dr. Tom Friedrich, Professor of English, Director of First-Year Composition at the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh, and SUNY Council on Writing Board Member
Featured image by Richard Ricciardi.
I.
March 14, 2020
My last student leaves, and I am alone in my lab classroom at SUNY Plattsburgh. With the Governor’s suspension of face-to-face instruction, I don’t know what to feel—I have a growing feeling it is going to become hard for me to do my job.
Since the start of the term when COVID arrived, I’d been writing fieldnotes—excerpted above–about my First Year Composition class. My focus was on how assigning autoethnographic research projects might help this class foster a meaningful, inclusive researched writing culture—a community organized around valuing and doing source-based persuasive writing. To gauge my success, I had decided to write an autoethnography of my own—with my fieldnotes serving as my core empirical data source. That autoethnography, shared here, bears witness to the challenges posed to teaching and academic writing at the onset of the pandemic. More importantly, for my purposes, it affirms that even then this researched writing task was fit to serve as a meaningful, inclusive cultural hub.
On March 14, 2020, though, everything was uncertain. I continued:
Right now, I am seated at our empty common table. I wonder, Will I even be able to teach an autoethnography now? If I keep writing fieldnotes, will they be about anything other than the Coronavirus? Should I stop writing them altogether?
I had no good answers, so I kept writing.
II.
My pedagogical journey began in the 1990s when I first encountered the work of Lisa Delpit, who suggested that effective writing instruction ought to teach students to navigate between the “culture of power” (25) and their home cultures. Delpit’s famous critique is of a 1980s-era approach to writing instruction that was highly non-directive and, as a consequence, often positioned white middle class students to produce the work teachers considered best (Hillocks 119-122). Driving this “natural process” approach was students’ self-selection of drafts to develop into polished work, a move that placed teachers in a “reactive” role that reinforced prejudices (119). Delpit aimed to break this cycle by “tell[ing her students] that their language and cultural style is unique and wonderful but that there is a political power game that is also being played, and if they want to be in on that game there are certain games that they too must play” (40, 46). To play this “game,” she argued “students must be [explicitly] taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, decontextualized subskills, but rather within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors” (45). This explicit code-teaching focused on tasks using traditional genres to advance students’ home communities’ interests. Examples she gives include a formal letter addressing a land claims settlement, or a translation of a message in a formal register to an informal one, creating an opportunity to discuss generic rules’ “history,” “purpose,” and “contextual appropriateness” (44, 45).
Inspired, I designed a source-based writing task I called the “place-based case” or PBC. In this summary-response assignment—think Graff and Birkenstein, Behrens and Rosen, and others—students would test the claims of a theory about U.S. national culture against a case in a community, usually their hometowns. I would pre-select a book featuring a social theory, such as political scientist Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, which claims that class-segregated communities are driving opportunity inequality, or technology critic’s Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, which argues digital tools lead users to devalue human relationships. Earlier, shorter formal tasks in the term, including a summary of one chapter and a rhetorical analysis of another, would introduce them to Putnam’s position. Then, in the PBC, my students would test these now-familiar arguments against close-to-home cases, such as a community-sponsored winter carnival or a locavore café and its clientele. The products were case studies featuring brief literature reviews, descriptions of the communities based on public data, the cases themselves, and “so what?” conclusions that spoke to their research’s significance for scholarship on this social problem.
With time, my students told me they found writing arguments on communities they knew firsthand meaningful. I began to wonder about the task’s inclusiveness, though, primarily as I’d initially asked students not to put themselves into their hometown cases as first-person narrators. Distancing authority from experience, this classic academic approach would allow my students to switch between but not to mesh codes. To switch, Prof. Jay Hardee writes, is to “attempt to teach students to translate the codes of their Englishes into the codes of standard academic prose.” It values the codes associated with marginalized groups as codes, but the translating act–as Vershawn Ashanti Young puts it in Other People’s English, a volume responding to Delpit–”segregat[es]” them out of the classroom product (3). The code-switched, standard English product—whether it be a literary analysis, a lab report, or a set of instructions on how to use a photo editor–is a type of writing that presents itself as coming from nowhere in particular and, thus, politely charms the reader into believing it must be true in many places and times. Though writing is a historical product, code-switched texts can thus discredit writing that openly acknowledges its origins as certainly local and possibly suspicious. In an alternative to code-switched writing that thus obscures how writing is a product of place that novices can learn to do, writers may mesh codes, using “flexible, ‘global and descriptive language’ that…[could] accommodate a wide range of linguistic and cultural influences” (Hardee 78). Code-meshed texts are, in fact, everywhere, including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick—combining fictional passages and scientific descriptions of whale species—or, as Young himself describes, Iowa senator Charles Grassley’s tweets, which combine standard English with texting abbreviations like “u” and “WKEND” (114). Meshed writing takes many forms, then. For student writers and writing teachers, these diverse registers can be meaningful, inclusive onramps that say, “you do this already, and you can do it even better.” Sympathetic to this code-meshing critique, I thought I could do better with my summary-response task. I decided to include an interview or observation, and ask my students to include themselves-as-participants in their write-ups. The result? I would have an autoethnographic task on my hands. It seemed interesting, but would it deliver the meaningful, inclusive results I hoped for?
III.
Pre-pandemic, I went with it. I learned that an autoethnography was a story-based, empirical study of a culture to which a writer belongs. Often, the culture of interest was one that had been marginalized and misrepresented by, or is at least somehow different from, a majority culture (Adams et al; Brodkey; Chang; Pratt). In some ways, in asking students to evaluate cultures they belonged to while using a formal research methodology, autoethnography seemed to take a cue from Delpit by having students switch to the language of “power” to value their home communities’ ideals. Still, blending scholarly argument and personal story as it did, autoethnography also seemed an obvious stage for code-meshing.
For advice on how to suit autoethnography to the first-year composition classroom, I turned to Melissa Tombro’s Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom, which describes a semester-long sequence of tasks–from interviews and observations to, ultimately, an autoethnography integrating the results of the earlier work into an argument primarily based on primary sources, and possibly, a breadth of secondary sources. For me, keeping secondary sources as a requirement was important, a hedge against heading back to the nondirective 1980s and its “reactive,” develop-what-you-want instructional approaches (Hillocks 119). Delpit’s emphasis on asking students to use the language of power to respond to marginalized interests–reflected in the summary-response approach–characterized something essential to doing good academic writing that I didn’t want to let go of. In other words, in asking each autoethnography to feature writing by published critics on cultures similar to students’ own, I hoped I could accommodate Young’s segregationist critique while still requiring a canonical form of switching. What appealed to me most about Tombro, though, was her focus on asking students to write about “subcultures” to which they belonged. Featuring subcultures organized around practices such as non-denominational church going and illegal drag racing, Tombro’s approach struck me as inclusive and meaningful, in part because it seemed manageable. The subcultural knowledge was ready to go, to be played with, built into. With Tombro, I felt I could guide my students through this process.
As we moved into the autoethnography, on February 26, 2020, students were able to see, with some of Tombro’s excellent student samples, that writing meshing argument and story, authority and experience, was by and for (sub)cultural participants. In the following fieldnote excerpt, I discuss with my students–and one in particular (Diana)–the meaningfulness of autoethnographic writing for those who do it: retelling the event,
What kinds of questions do I ask people to get a discussion going on Sheila’s drag racing autoethnography? I ask them, “How is it one and how is this valuable for the writer?”
Crickets again.
I rephrase: “Do you think it was meaningful for Sheila?”
Nothing.
“Did you find it interesting to read a piece about Sheila’s family’s involvement in illegal drag racing?”
Diana nods.
I call on her: “why?”
She says, “it’s not something you often get to read about.”
I use this as a platform for talking about what does or doesn’t often get included in academic discourse: only polite topics, such as Biblical tropes in Moby Dick or flood-tolerant rice—yet, when we move to examining difference, beyond polite silence, we learn things, and we test theories. Doing autoethnography doesn’t ensure meaningfulness, but it invites us to experience writing thus.
Reflecting on this moment in my classroom, I am in complete agreement with my student, Diana: illegal drag racing clubs do not often get featured in academic writing. When she saw they could be, the line between authority and experience eroded a bit. If Sheila could contribute an illegal drag racing subculture to the scholarly record on American life, couldn’t Diana do something similar, too? What about her high school girls’ soccer team? Wasn’t there a subculture there? Yes, there was. Robert Putnam had suggested that opportunity-unequal America had many failing “supportive institutions” (229). Her soccer team was possibly one of them, and she asked me if I thought it might work. I did, but did she want to try that out? She did. OK. Diana had a chance at meshing worlds–the athletic and the scholarly–on the screen.
My fieldnotes suggested my revised, autoethnographic PBC was working toward a meaningful, inclusive research-writing culture in my composition class. I kept writing fieldnotes, not questioning whether my narrative records of in-person class meetings were the place to look for the emergence of this culture.
IV.
And then the pandemic hit. You can see me above in that moment, alone in my classroom in March 2020. Facing the unknown, I had questions. How would this transition affect our research-writing culture? Would it disappear? I had gone from knowing exactly what I thought I ought to be documenting (everything important was happening in our big meetings, right?) to not knowing if I’d ever have anything important to document for the rest of the term.
Once my school’s traditional operations ground to a halt, I was simply worried about delivering accessible instruction online for the first time. I worked to create a curriculum that would keep our major tasks intact, while minimizing bandwidth. That is to say, I had deep concerns for some of the participants in our writing culture, who I feared I might lose. These come across in an entry from 3/31, when I’d begun to teach writing from a recliner in my basement. Without the physical meetings, foregoing Zoom in the interest of accessibility, I made the interactive aspect of my teaching the Google chat. Scott Warnock writes that one strength of online writing instruction is the fact that much of it is conducted in writing. My optional one-to-one meetings would be a place for sharing our values—except when life intervened. In March 2020, none of my students died, but many lost family members to COVID. These stakes reminded me to be as flexible as possible. Still, trying to be a flexible, compassionate veteran member of our researched writing culture seemed impossible at times, as my March 31, 2020 entry shows:
I wouldn’t have even scheduled digital office hours if my students hadn’t asked for them, and now I am on this screen and I see these students both are there—I can’t speak with them—and I know I need to go to another document to meet with my advisee, Amanda. I have got to go. My office hours are 1-2, so there’s no violation there, but electronically, there is a moment when I say “bye” while my students are there, and that is basically against my religion not only as a teacher but also as a person (as I like to say, I am willing to sacrifice the future for the benefit of the present). I cut and run. I tell myself it’s not bad, but I feel bad about it. Close the window.
I could see the capital letters, the first of their first names, on the screen–I wanted to chat with them–and I had to go. What would they make of me? What was happening here? I wrote them emails apologizing, asking them to write me back if they had questions. In this case, it did not seem to matter.
Healthy cultures are participatory. Was the robust researched writing culture I’d been striving for in the classroom too much to continue in this moment? Compared to other semesters, yes. My whole program had its highest rates of students either earning a D or F or withdrawing on record.
V.
But our inclusive, meaningful researched writing culture could still be found. Again, this culture needed in my view to be organized around valuing and doing source-based persuasive writing. Taking that matter of valuing seriously is important here. Yes, it mattered that students were being asked to use a methodology valued on campus. I knew, though, how the desire to finish an assignment could crowd out intrinsic purposes—a fact at odds with Delpit’s curricular ideal. To be the most inclusive, meaningful cultural hub it could be, my revised task asked for more than local connections to national theories. My revised task asked my students, instead, to autoethnographically mesh themselves into their writing as value-seeking cultural participants, and with good reason. Jenkins et al (Lankshear and Knobel) use the term, “participatory culture,” to describe communities that organize around self-sponsored new media use. It has a core of enacted shared values (all actors believe “their contributions matter” and emphasize “creating and sharing one’s creations” with digital tools with others (15). Consider how a user discussion page for Mini Metro, a transportation video game, hosted on Steam–a distribution service–might serve as a cultural hub. Mini Metro lets a gamer choose from a range of models, nearly all of which are based on real subway systems. A novice user might search this board for tips from a veteran on how to manage Hong Kong’s surging growth. She would find the post, “I Cracked Hong Kong,” waiting for her (DiMono). All actors on Steam’s Mini Metro discussion board or another participatory culture may make meaningful contributions, but they are definitely not all the same, with veterans offering novices “informal mentorship” (Lankshear and Knobel 15).
What was possible in this disrupted, now digital class? I had students disappear, but most of my students still demonstrated they had meaningful work to do, and so did I. We were playing with our values in our rabbit holes.
Here is another entry from April 21, 2020:
I am typing at the edge of the table and then cut back to the kitchen. Everything’s OK. That is Coronalife: eviscerated boundaries, and good things happening sometimes, too.
So it gets to be 20 minutes before the start of Dwayne’s chat. I run downstairs and open it up. He is writing his autoethnography on being in an African American family subculture with parents who are front-line health care workers in COVID times. To do this important work, Dwayne has been using our grid–a heuristic detailing likely sections of the autoethnography (intro, theory, background, etc.)–effectively, including the subheadings, so I know where he is at. I can see he’s taken my advice to read deeper into Putnam on either families or race (he went with families). …I want him to know I think he’s using Putnam well now, but he needs other, secondary sources on COVID in general and COVID on African-American families in particular–the latter of which he is looking at as a topic but without much of an emphasis on his own family’s subculture. He has to get himself in the paper more, too, even though I see him there near the end. He has to get his family’s subculture into the thesis, too.
Then, he arrives on the document, as I am midcomment.
I bounce over to the chat zone, typing, “Hi!”
“Hi!” he replies.
I say, “I’m going to keep going, but while I do, could you think of questions you’d like to ask me?”
He says that sounds great.
As I further pull my thoughts together, he tells me he’s feeling much better about the piece now. He’d struggled to get started, but here it all is, even though he needs more support. What does he want to know?
He says doing personal writing is very difficult for him.
I reply that I am sympathetic to that–and I want to and do emphasize that the focus of this autoethnography IS NOT autobiographical writing. Autoethnography is an alternative to academic writing that leaves its experiential foundations out to charm readers into thinking its claims transcend specific places and times. Sure, that might make a reader feel confident, but it can leave a novice writer without a clear path to follow in order to become better. To try to provide such a path, I say what’s important is connecting “his local” with “something global”—showing how his family’s subculture intersects with, says something back to, research on families in general and during COVID times.
Then, he asks me what belongs in the background section. I say it’s a place for public data, so I go to the lesson plan where I provided a bunch of links on this, and I copy and paste. I say that the New York Times data he has are good but that he could also consult these other sources.
He tells me I give very useful feedback, and that means a lot to me. This is what I do, after all, isn’t it?
I am thinking I need to get to my next appointment.
I ask him if he knows what to do and remind him to reach out to me if he’s not. He says he’s all set.
I close the chat and discover that I can’t recover any of it. That is really bothersome to me, because I am interested in holding onto these chats–both so I might help Dwayne and so I might have an empirical basis for my work as a researcher. I think, It’s there, somewhere. That’s what Google does, right?
I write a little note saying I’ll come back, and hope the chat’s previous content will appear.
I go to Diana’s paper immediately, and she is there. Wow. Good. Whiplash.
This is intense activity that doesn’t make a sound other than my clicking keys and an occasional rub of the bottom of a coffee mug on my end table. That’s Coronateaching.
It reminds me of a principle I learned when I went to a Pearson workshop that began with a question: “What is it I do that can’t be replicated?”
Giving substantive feedback can’t be replicated. That is one soul meeting another halfway. You can’t manufacture that in advance. You have to be t h e r e. And I was, tonight.
Dwayne is writing to me from NYC. Diana, from the capital region. And I am in my basement in Plattsburgh.
Left to my own devices, I compartmentalize. I will “do home” in the morning and then “do work” after I drop my daughter off at school. Coronatimes do not easily allow for this–for Dwayne or Diana or me–and especially not in the pre-vaccinated moment witnessed here. But we do our collective, flexible best in this moment of dented beauty. We are all getting somewhere with our commitment to making academic writing argue that our everyday lives reflect and have additions to make to scholarship on class segregation, on the American Dream during the COVID lockdown. We are all trying to do our jobs: Dwayne and Diana, as students in my first-year writing class; me, demanding and modeling engagement in academic writing in my role as teacher-writer. The “whiplash” I feel, the comments back and forth in the chat, the wait time as I read Dwayne’s work in my own painfully slow way: so much of this is not what I had in mind when I had imagined the researched writing culture I hoped to be a part of this semester. Looking at the work Dwayne is doing in stitching together experience and authority as an academic writer, however–and experiencing it myself in real time, too—our researched writing culture lives here in this mashup (meshup?) of NYC, Albany, and Plattsburgh.
VI.
Could most of us enact our shared values during these times? Could most of us do meaningful, inclusive academic writing as a pandemic raged? In our dented beauty, the answer is an encouraging yes.
I close with an excerpt from April 23, 2020:
I wondered if I could get my students writing autoethnographies at all in this remote setting. Could I? Could they?
Was it weird, impossible, or stupid, for me to ask them to write these things–to respond to Robert Putnam, to include bits of story, to do a thing called an autoethnography in this isolating, gravid context?
I get a research paper draft from Sofia on growing up in one NYC neighborhood and going to high school in class segregated America. At a substandard high school for working class kids in the shadow of Wall Street–where the global economy sits dormant, in a Coronacoma.
And there is life. And literary, scholarly life!
I get a draft from Sharon, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, experiencing racism and the American Dream in the NYC suburbs and documenting it in my class.
I get a draft from Mollie, who isn’t focusing on a local case yet, but here she is doing something brilliant in seeing that Ayurveda reflects the ideal of valuing all kids as “our kids.”
I get these papers. They are making connections to Robert Putnam. They are writing about their lives, their worlds, and I have a front row seat to this beautiful work.
That is academic writing.
I circle back to my first entry of the term:
What interests me is how the place-based case has made academic writing meaningful for diverse learners, then, and how making it more autoethnographic might make it even more meaningful; in my autoethnography, I will study this transition in my courses’ researched writing culture.
It is happening. It is real, and it is good work. I don’t know what else to say then, except that I am tired and ecstatic. Beauty persists here, in this scattered class of autoethnographic writers—plus me—finding a way to value our theory-testing, story-centric, many-voiced works-in-progress.
Works Cited
Adams, Tony, et al. Autoethnography. Oxford UP, 2015.
Behrens, Laurence, and Leonard Rosen. What It Takes. 2nd ed., Pearson, 2013.
Brodkey, Linda. Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Minnesota UP, 1996.
Chang, Heewon. Autoethnography as Method. Left Coast Press, 2008.
Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. The New Press, 1995.
DiMono. “I Cracked Hong Kong.” Steam, 2017, https:/steamcommunity.com/app/287980/discussions/0/135509724376353545. Accessed 15 January 2022.
Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. 3rd ed., Norton, 2014.
Hardee, Jay. “Code Meshing and Code Switching.” Antiracist Praxis, American University, 2020, https://subjectguides.library.american.edu/c.php?g=1025915&p=7749939. Accessed 15 January 2022.
Hillocks, George. Research on Written Composition. NCTE, 1986.
Lankshear, Colin, and Michelle Knobel. “DIY Media: A Contextual Background and Some Contemporary
Themes.” DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies, edited by Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel, Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 1-24.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992.
Putnam, Robert. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Simon and Schuster, 2015.
Tombro, Melissa. Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom. Open SUNY Textbooks, 2016.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together. Basic Books, 2012.
Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online: Why and How. NCTE, 2009.
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Introduction: Are You Part of the Conversation?” Other People’s English: Code-
Meshing, Code-Switching, and African-American Literacy, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young et al. Teachers College Press, 2014, pp. 1-14.
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, pp. 110-118, https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/english/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2021/01/Use-They-Own.pdf. Accessed 27 Sept. 2022.
SUNY Council on Writing 
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