RT3 The Ethics and Politics of Writing Lives 11:00MST, December 11, 2020

Abstract

In this short presentation, I want to share my experience of teaching a collection of letters written by the women of Newfoundland and Labrador to the province’s first premier, J. R. Smallwood, in the first decade following Confederation in 1949. Many of these letters feature irregular or unconventional spelling and grammar. In many instances, spelling and grammar choices reflect local dialects. They also reflect limited access to formal education. How do students interact with primary materials that do not conform to their understandings of spelling and grammar? What assumptions do they make about the writers? And how might those assumptions shape classroom conversations?

Bio

Sonja Boon is Professor of Gender Studies at Memorial University. She is interested in bodies, stories, identities, and theories.

Abstract

We reflect on our experiences teaching Black literature and individual and collective traumas related to identity-based pedagogy. Through autoethnography, we analyze our critical practices of 12+ combined years of teaching experience. We share our experiences to influence educators, teacher educators, and curriculum writers to improve the teaching of Black literature.

Bio

Kimani Mitchell is a Black educator and doctoral candidate in San Antonio, Texas. She studies the experiences and language practices of Black educators.

Hosanna Caraballo-Coronado teaches high school and is a graduate student of English in San Antonio, Texas. Her interests include African-American literature, Black life writing, and feminist studies.

Abstract

Based on Indigenous scholarship, anti-oppressive perspectives and my experience in the classroom teaching Indigenous lifewriting, I will discuss the possibilities (and the limits) of a pedagogy based on self-reflection in a context in which transformation, social change and decolonization are central objectives of the learning process. How do colonial dynamics intervene in the classroom? If personal engagement is part of Indigenous pedagogies, what does it change to take seriously these pedagogies in our teaching? What are the challenges? What are the benefits of teaching self-awareness?

Bio

Élise Couture-Grondin is a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University and Concordia University. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her research examines autobiographical writing by Indigenous women and develops ethical readings of these texts from a settler feminist position.

Abstract

‘People’s lives are more important than my words.’ Teaching the ethics of life writing is an essential and popular part of my memoir course. I query the absolute right of memoirists to tell the stories of others – often incidental characters or those who haven’t consented to their inclusion or description.

Bio

I have taught the ethics of life writing (my PhD topic) to diverse students of varied disciplines at all levels from no formal education to PhDs and beyond since 2012. I’m currently writing a book on this for students and tutors. My BBC broadcast on ‘Other people’s stories’ is here.

Abstract

At Agnes Scott, I teach a course in queer life writing, in which we read the memoirs of gender and sexual minorities. Students see how people represent themselves textually, engage different media available to the authors, read silences and spaces of absence, and consider how to affect positive social change.

Bio

Nicole Stamant, author of Serial Memoir: Archiving American Lives (Palgrave, 2014), teaches at Agnes Scott College, an historically women’s institution in Decatur, Georgia, to a minority majority population. There, she teaches and writes about the intersections of life writing and gender, race, sexuality, identity, foodways, and graphic narrative.