Week 2: Literacy Narrative

My Literacy Narrative:

A Testament to the Power of Teaching

It all began on my first day of preschool at three years of age. My love of reading and books flourished under the protective wing of my teacher Sylvia, the nurturing and wise owner of the preschool. Sylvia allowed each child to discover their own unique personality and to develop an understanding of this personality through books. She encouraged my love of fairy tales and fantasy stories, and after I took certain books home to read with my parents, she questioned me about my favorite parts of each story, and prompted me to vividly imagine the lives of the characters I encountered in books. I credit this early experience at preschool with initiating a lifelong love of reading and learning; perhaps even more importantly, it instilled a confidence in my own ability to interpret and creatively engage with literary texts. I expressed this passion for reading in the short stories and poems I wrote as a teenager and young adult, when I found myself drawn to creative writing in particular.

As I advanced through the education system (and through life), I encountered other teachers who facilitated my passion for reading and writing in different ways. While these teachers presented markedly different teaching styles, they all engaged my thoughts and stimulated my thinking by showing authentic interest in what I had to say, and for this I am grateful. My high school English teacher, in a class called “Dreams and Myths,” encouraged me to take a psychoanalytic approach to literary texts, which opened up a new way to look at literature and solidified my interest in majoring in English in college. In a different way, my history professor at the University of Oregon helped me to discover my critical and analytic skills, and encouraged me to pursue my interest in the connections between history and literature, particularly in contemporary writings on the American West.

As I proceeded to earn a Masters degree and then a Ph.D. in English at the University of Oregon, I found that my initial zest for creative writing was squelched as I was trained (disciplined?) to produce tightly argued, convincing, and highly theoretical analytical essays. While I value my training as a literary scholar and critic, following this path also meant that something had to be left behind: the creative impulse that was rooted in a simple love for words and language. As an English instructor at Foothill College, I have tried to express and transmit this love of language in the classroom, but the conventions of academic discourse and the realities of life as an instructor often place constraints upon the “pleasurable" aspects of reading texts. 

I focused on the work of contemporary Native American and Chicano/a authors in my Ph.D. dissertation and book, and this specialization provided a way to rediscover my early love of language, as I examined the ways in which particular postmodern authors (sometimes playfully) created multivocal and multigenre narratives in order to critique dominant narratives that assumed the disappearance or inherent "savagery" of their cultures. Being able to pursue this literary interest enabled me to achieve more of a balance between reading for sheer enjoyment and the rigors of being a thinker and teacher in an academic setting. Yet even as I analyzed these texts out of a genuine interest in their content and style, the learning process involved in becoming an academic thinker and writer was full of stumbles, doubts, and roadblocks. It involved persevering when I was overwhelmed by the highly theoretical and difficult conversations that I encountered with my graduate student colleagues and within the dense texts that we read. I learned that taking the process step-by-step, one article or book at a time, and engaging in informal conversations with my peers, helped to alleviate this frustration and anxiety, although it never erased it entirely. This process of being trained to be an academic, to think and write like an academic, gradually took hold as I persevered through my graduate program each year. This, then, is what I have taken away that I think might be valuable for my teaching: the importance of perseverance and of not letting self-doubt take over, as self-doubt can drag us into a dark abyss, keeping us from simply accomplishing the tasks at hand. This psychological aspect of the student experience plays a large and often overlooked role in student success rates.

I believe that my early teachers played an essential role in instilling a sense of confidence in my own ability, which served me even as I was wracked with self-doubt during the Ph.D. process. Their authentic engagement and deep understanding have prompted me to continually strive to improve as a teacher, to approach this job with integrity and also a commitment to staying balanced in other areas of life. In the words of author John Steinbeck, “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist . . . Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”