Many Developmental English courses at Community College of Philadelphia are part of an academic program called the College Achievement Partnership (CAP). Students come to this program from all backgrounds and experiences, and it is impossible to describe them with a common characteristic though one might assume, as do the students themselves, that their placement in CAP means they are less than: less than college students, less than writers, less than developed. Such an assumption, as I try to convince students, says little about their ability and potential but, instead, has everything to do with deeply embedded perceptions. Understandably, placement in a developmental English course confirms their self-perceptions and expectations. And it is, in fact, these pervasive, destructive self-perceptions, not writing ability or potential, which are the most serious obstacle to students' success in and attitudes about college.
The challenge for students and for us is to transform perceptions and expectations. Students need to gain sufficient confidence to believe in themselves, and they need a context, abundant with renewal and affection, in which to do so. In writing courses, specifically, they need to perceive themselves as authors not only of written texts but as the authorial voice of their academic experience. Our students don't lack voices; rather, they are lacking the guidance and creative context in which writing is understood through the shaping of relationships, and that the shaping itself, the composing, requires an authorial presence at its core.
Students repeatedly tell me they've been writing on their own for years-to escape, or because no one will listen to them, or because what they were required to write and read in school didn't have much to do with their lives. They have notebooks filled with poems but show them to no one. The relationship between writing and voice, for many of them, hasn't been given a chance to develop except, perhaps, in isolation.
When I got the idea to start the CAP literary magazine, I knew little more than that it would be a magazine written and edited by students taking developmental English classes. I didn't understand a lot of what I do now about the power of students' creative writing, specifically poetry, to motivate academic success, student retention, and social interaction. I didn't even know if we would receive enough manuscripts to publish a first issue. I only knew I wanted to try to provide some enjoyable context in which CAP students could express themselves and feel more involved in their college experience.
The magazine quickly became much more than that. Now, with our fifth issue forthcoming, it has become a valuable, established classroom resource and extracurricular activity involving a large number of students and faculty working collaboratively. Our circulation is 4,500 copies; our editorial board this semester is comprised of more than fifty students, faculty, and staff; we just hired our first student Managing Editor; we're an officially recognized student organization with an annual budget; each April to celebrate the magazine's publication, we host a day-long, open reading by students, faculty, and staff, during which the CAP student writers and editors receive awards and recognition. This semester, some of our student editors and I presented papers at conferences, for example last month at the National Association of Developmental Education. The magazine's growth and potential are exciting, to say the least, and we are constantly discovering new ways to involve more students and acknowledge their accomplishments. Everything about this magazine, from the start, has been positive, fun, and rewarding. It has had and continues to have the enthusiastic support of faculty, staff, and administrators.
In a two-semester course sequence I recently designed and am teaching, students who place in the lowest level CAP course spend the first semester doing creative writing, mainly poetry, and reading writing by peers. Choosing to begin with this particular group of students was important to me because they are typically most at risk for dropping out or not passing. I had three main goals: to provide an environment in which students could have fun with words, to keep students in class all semester, and to motivate them to continue with me in the next semester's English course and become the new editors of the magazine. Our "textbook" for the course is an anthology of student writing selected from the first four issues of the CAP literary magazine, accompanied by discussion questions and creative writing experiments, as I like to call them.
The entire course sequence is an experiment and, although I was confident it would succeed at least as well as any course I've taught, I've been amazed by the students' engagement and interest. At the end of autumn semester, I had more students still enrolled than in any CAP class I've ever taught; almost all of them are now in the second semester, reading and editing the submissions to the magazine. In addition to their academic progress so far, the students have become friends; they support and look after each other. Rounding this out, each student this semester has a faculty partner with whom they evaluate magazine submissions in person and bye-mail.
I'm not suggesting the magazine, or this academic experiment, or even poetry itself is a panacea. But it's clear, when students read peers' creative writing, especially poetry, they eagerly immerse themselves in close, analytical reading with far greater attention to grammar and punctuation, figures of speech, structure, and meaning. In the first weeks of last semester, I listened, in awe, as students discussed metaphor and irony and commented about line breaks, rhyme, and organization. They're tough critics and equally generous praise-givers. They're each other's audience and models. They listen to each other.
These voices of authority are the focus of the class, establishing a context in which self-perceptions and relationships are transformed through reading and writing. Possibilities take hold, and students begin to realize that college can be different from previously unfulfilling educational environments. They find inspiration and strength in the written word.
Late last semester, after we discussed two poems by a former CAP student, a student in our class, Kyia Rawls, who had been quiet and often withdrawn most of the semester, said, "When I read his first poem, I just thought this is crazy stuff! But after I read the second one, I understood what he went through in his life. When I read poems like this by other students, I don't feel so alone." The rest of the students couldn't wait to voice similar thoughts.
I would say that was the best day of the semester except that there were so many days like it, when writing and affection transformed us. I should tell you about the day Francisco Severino handed me a two-page poem and said, "You know I'm not a poet."
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Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2007