How can narrative writing be leveraged in an ELA classroom aiming to mitigate colonial harm? How do the particular recommendations in your chosen article potentially allow students to develop “reparative” or “restorative” relationships to writing?
Consider your own practice – in terms of narrative, what would you like to continue to do and what would you like to try in your classroom, based on what we’ve discussed and read about in class?
In your response, please remember to view the rubric. A brief overview:
- Approximately 200-250 words
- Specific reference to the assigned reading.
- Description of lesson idea, activity, resource, and/or mentor text. Please include a link to the resource when possible!
I’d like to encourage more verbal storytelling within my classroom. Like Mohamed shared last class, our students are so accustomed to a prescriptive writing process and assigned prompts that it’s hard for them to organize more imaginative thoughts.. At my school, students must complete an oral presentation in each grade; the sophomores always give how-to presentations. With the only requirements being the five-minute time estimate and the speech’s content be about how to do something, my students have really taken advantage of the opportunity to show a piece of themselves that even their friends haven’t quite seen. I’ve had students have us get up and dance salsa, try their homemade ceviche, and even introduce ourselves to one another in American Sign Language. However, DeJaynes makes clear that students sharing their stories should be a regular occurrence in classrooms, rather than a once-a-year project. I was especially interested in her concept of the “cosmopolitan habits of mind” as an approach to encouraging open-mindedness and community within the ELA classroom (DeJaynes, 2018). In order to work to decolonize our classrooms and curriculum, we need to value our students’ stories as texts, validate their experiences, and encourage them to share their stories with one another more often. One specific format in which we could implement storytelling into our classrooms is by using the model of the story slam. At a story slam, ten random audience members are selected (and given five minutes each) to tell a story that relates to a given theme. Although the stories told at story slams are not vetted in any way prior to the event (and we may have to adjust that process as teachers), I think that the flexibility and regularity involved in these events could be helpful in the classroom. They can be standalone activities, scaffolding for a writing assignment, or even anticipatory work for the class’ next novel. Giving our students a space to tell their stories and relate to one another can help build our classroom into a community.
An example of a story slam performance: https://youtu.be/NOl8WZS3Aoc
Narrative writing gives students the tools to transform the breadth of their experiences into essential understandings of themselves and ways in which to construct counter-hegemonic worldviews. Colonial harm, reinforced in classrooms through the endorsement of Eurocentric curricula and harmful language ideologies, can be alleviated through a number of decolonial efforts, one such being the process of “translanguaging” described by De los Rios (pg. 76).
Translanguaging allows for constant interaction of the languages of multilingual students, and highlights the complex relationship in the shifting of languages. This “bilingual arrangement” (77) allows students to utilize their native language(s) to actively think, hear, and write about their lives in ways which may not be conceived by English alone. It celebrates the multilinguistic diversity of students and the fact that languages have many defined dimensions that are often ignore. Furthermore, it allows students to draw from experiences they otherwise may not be able to express in English.
While teaching in Nagasaki, I was able to carry out a project in which students wrote haiku in English. The purpose of this project was to have students examine their relationship with their home and their identities – specifically, about their lived experiences in Nagasaki. Nagasaki, known to the world as the last victim of the atomic bombing, is often overshadowed by its tragedy and forgotten for its beautiful nature and rich cultural and trading history. This project allowed students to identify and repair harmful and Western-imposed views of their home city through their observations written in both Japanese and English. More importantly, their observations of their homes could only be conceived first in Japanese. Through the process of translanguaging, they were able to apply their understandings of home in Japanese and then transform it into a new and enriched understanding.
A particularly resonating TEDtalk that I am sure many teachers have employed in their own classrooms is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The danger of a single story”. She talks about her own experience as a young writer, and how she often wrote about experiences that were not her own, but those that were always reflected in the kinds of books she read – British novels about white people. Upon discovering African literature, she began to write about her life as she knew it and through this discovery, began to unveil the colonial narratives that define our literary experiences and the troubling economic powers of those who impose these narratives. When I think about repairing colonial harm, I often go back to this widely felt talk.
Adichie, Chimamanda N. (2009, July). The danger of a single story [Video]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
Hi Cass, I really appreciate your point about Nagasaki and its rich cultural history that is often erased and overshadowed by the tragedy of the atomic bomb. This example is emblematic of the ways in which “well-intentioned” colonial narratives often emphasize the “damage” experienced by communities. These narratives ironically re-center the colonizer who inflicted this harm and make the story of harm the ONLY story told about a community, as you explain. When I think about our students, I think about how often, especially for seniors applying to college, they are asked to tell a story of themselves as “damaged” by their experiences, so that the benevolent admissions officers can feel good about “helping” them.
I think you might appreciate Eve Tuck’s paper on this topic: http://pages.ucsd.edu/~rfrank/class_web/ES-114A/Week%204/TuckHEdR79-3.pdf
Narrative writing has always been a consistent assignment for students to complete within their schooling, with an emphasis on story telling. Similar to most writing assignments, the school I am currently teaching in has a set of essential criteria for students to include within their writing piece (Create a basic plot, Hook and Satisfy Readers, Sequence Time and Events, Describe the action, ‘Show’ close-up details, and Set the Right Mood). When students are handed these set of criteria to include within their writing, it takes away from the writing experience of story telling. Instead, students are focused on creating a writing piece that fits the needs of this particular rubric and practically go through a checklist within their writing. Within DeJaynes’ article, students are asked to “locate and analyze artifacts from their homes that hold cultural, personal, familial, even political significance.” Allowing students to bring in a particular artifact that exemplifies a significance within their life allows them to be vulnerable and create a canvas for their narrative writing assignment. Students are not required to follow a particular format based on these artifacts, instead they write stories based on the significance within their own lives, which allows their creativity to shine through.
Considering my own practice, I have to assign a set rubric for students to complete different writing assignments, but I have attempted to incorporate engaging brainstorm activities, in order to students to see the value within what they write. When we had completed narrative writing, in the beginning of the year, I had students select their favorite social media picture that they had taken of themselves or an event. I had created a large circle, shaped like a pizza pie, within chart paper and entitled it “Slice of our Lives” and students were able to post that picture within a slice of pie and write a short synopsis of why it was important to them or why it had stuck out amongst the other pictures. This was our entranceway into narrative writing, which allowed students to bring in personal pictures and share them within their class. Students have always been so accustomed to following a specific writing template or follow rubrics that they lose the value of their own writing within it. While they do need to pass standardized tests and my school has a huge emphasis on that aspect, it is important to depict to students that their ideas and experiences are equally as valued within a classroom.
https://twowritingteachers.org/2011/01/24/what-is-a-slice-of-life/
This is my first year teaching seniors. Our first unit was college readiness which includes the Common App College Essay. Students are given a choice of prompts to write about to explain who they are to different colleges. Students are asked to share personal details about their life experiences or to explain their beliefs. Although I have asked for personal story telling in the past, I was still unprepared to deal with some of the responses.
One young woman wrote about having an Israeli soldier aim an automatic weapon at her face when she was 6 years old. Another wrote about her father being an alcoholic and how she was put in foster care. One shared a battle to escape foster care to get home to her mother after a neighbor falsely reported abuse.
I am intrigued by the idea of students bringing artifacts to the class. On page 52, Dejaynes said “…our understanding of the young people we taught deepened (and in some cases was transformed) by reading about the objects they deemed important.” A concrete object can be used to facilitate writing and a connection to one’s identity. However, I wonder if asking students to share personal things with their peers may not be, in certain cases, cruel.
I had asked the student from Palestine if she would peer edit her essay with a partner. She said she didn’t want anyone in the class to read it. I inquired if she would be comfortable sending it out to colleges. Would sending it for a stranger to read be any easier for her? She said she didn’t care.
I strive for my classroom to be a safe space but I don’t know if I am capable of making it so for everyone. Sharing a doll or family statue is one thing. I worry that for some students, asking them to share their lives with a roomful of peers might be too much.
Narrative writing should be creative and give students an opportunity to bring their voices and stories into the ELA classroom. Even so, there are “formulas” and “formats” that students are asked to follow that take away from the full story. Rules that they must write in “Standard” English or include literary devices. I think that a way that students can develop “restorative” relationships to writing is by allowing students to bring their lives outside of school (home, sports practice, family, friends) into the classroom. DeJaynes article discusses using artifacts as a way to bring out a side of our students we would normally not know about. More specifically, “using artifacts in the literacy curriculum creates opportunities for students to bring their home cultures into school. By tracing personal stories through artifacts, youth, and their teachers connect, share, see, and learn to value each other” (2018). I think that bringing artifacts and objects of significance to the classroom, students are able to connect on a more personal level to their peers and realize that they may have more in common than they thought. I feel that it can bring people together that normally would not associate with one another and allow students to see that they aren’t alone in their stories and experiences.
In my own classroom, I would like to give students the option to use all of their languages in their narrative writing. By this, I mean that they can bring in their home languages, slang that they use with friends, phrases their family uses, as well as academic language if it fits their story. More than anything, I want their story to be authentic. More specifically, if they were to select an artifact such as, a toy that their parents gave them, I would want to hear the real-life dialogue related to the situation in whatever language they feel is best suited to describe it. I think that allowing students to use multiple dialects and languages in the classroom is important because it gives them more ownership over their writing and makes the writing more meaningful.
I feel that this can relate to the video we saw last week, “3 Ways to Speak English” because Jamila Lyiscott makes it her point to express that all of these ways of speaking English play an important role in her life and interactions with others.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jamila_lyiscott_3_ways_to_speak_english?language=en
Narrative writing I find the next frontier I want to conquer in my classroom. The best way I would describe the narrative writing techniques I implore to be artificial thus far. “Create a diary journal entry from this characters perspective.” Or “write a letter to this character.” I try to do this to help students explore avenues creatively, but as with most students, I don’t feel they connect with our mentor texts. As I have read in “Writing Across Culture and Language” by Christina Ormeir-Hooper, mentor texts need to be accessible for students to transact with a text. As Hooper also writes students need to understand genre and purpose as well when it comes to writing assignments. So often I will give extension activities like “write a journal entry from a certain characters point of view” students often get confused with these assignments because they are not familiar with this genre of writing. I think narrative writing can connect to this idea, but only if the narrative writing assignments are relevant to the students lives and if they understand the genre they are asked to write. Del Rios writes how narrative writing and the artificats created from narrative writing gives students “the opportunity to develop alternative perspectives, think more critically about systems of belief and question assumptions and biases” (p. 49). We are about to begin our unit on The Holocaust, the most difficult part of the unit is to get students to gain an understanding of the lives of the people in Eli Wiesel’s Night and the horrors they experienced. Using narrative writing, I would like to connect how a different culture like Jewish people in Europe may connect to my students backgrounds.
Resources:
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1078-narrative-in-the-classroom
https://secure.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Books/Sample/58531SampleChapter.pdf
I have tried my absolute best, and continue to, foster a sense of “identity” in all units that I teach in my school. With the first unit on “Inside Out & Back Again” a poetry collection from the viewpoint of a Vietnamese refugee during the Vietnam War, and our second novel “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, I have included “narrative writing” and projects in both units. First, I had the students create a project (both creative and written) on “What is Home?” In this project, students were to define the concept of home in their own terms and through their own experiences, and then make a “creative” version of this—using photos, drawings, or a 3D built creation. For TKAM, students created “multiple identity silhouettes” in which I asked them to think about how they identify themselves in the world, and use photos, clip art, and drawings to fill their silhouettes, without directly saying their name or who they are. In each of these, I tried to connect essential questions and enduring understandings to their own, personal, life outside of our school. In both projects, not only did I learn an immense amount about my students that I may not have gotten, but my students were able to learn about each other through presentations and discussions. This reminded me a lot of the artifacts project in the DeJaynes article. The project that Mr. Curmi builds allows students to create “sociocultural conversations,” ones that they may not have had if this kind of project was not offered in his classroom. By using artifacts that are meaningful to them in either a cultural, personal, familial, or even political way—it forces students to analyze themselves, but also learn and interact with other peers in a meaningful way they may not have had opportunities to otherwise. I think doing these kind of projects breaks away from this colonial normalities and ideologies and that many be in place in many schools. Instead of specifically sticking to a script and having students do the mundane writing assignments/projects that are always having them analyze someone else in literature, I think allowing them to analyze themselves in the concepts being taught in conjunction with literature can be extremely eye-opening.
https://ibb.co/whb5wTX
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/45524/how-teachers-can-see-students-identities-as-learning-strengths
Narrative writing can be leveraged in an ELA classroom aiming to mitigate colonial harm by teaching, accepting, and encouraging translanguaging in the classroom. In terms of narrative writing, I believe colonial harm can stem from simply having students attempt to narrate a moment in their lives, in English–especially if these moments are attributed to their native tongue. Translanguaging, as defined by Cati V. de los Ríos, “refer[s] to a pedagogy that involves the hearing or reading of lessons in one language, and the development of the work (oral discussions, the writing of passages, performances) in another language or vice versa (García). This pedagogy intentionally uses two languages flexibly in a bilingual arrangement to promote bilingualism and biliteracy (Bartlett and García 17)” (de los Ríos 76-77). I have been fascinated with the practice of translanguaging since last semester, when Nisa visited our course to talk about her students. Personally, I have been working with current and former ENL students, and I am constantly amazed at their gracious attitudes towards teachers that value their experiences. Allowing translanguaging in the classroom allows students to develop a “restorative” relationship to writing, by providing them with an outlet where they are able to write freely in a language that is second nature to them–rather than pushing “English, English, ENGLISH.” I would like to experiment with translanguaging assignments to figure out how to successfully implement them, while continuing to foster an environment where my students are willing to share their unique experiences along the way.
For those of you who may not know or remember Nisa, here is a link to who she is, and what her (amazing) students are like!
https://www.cuny-nysieb.org/classroom-videos/ambassador/sunisa-nisa-nuonsy/
The most rewarding experiences in education for me have not come from student achievement by educational standards. What puts a smile on my face and allows me to drive home believing I had a great day at work is when my students have activated their curiosity and imaginations. It is giving students the desire to learn and use what that have learned in new ways that I believe will make them life long learners.
Narrative writing is my favorite tool for the job. I open up with a piece of literature to get students thinking, to make them curious. I engage them with two sides of an argument and then instead of having students write an essay based on a specific prompt, I allow them to use their previously learned materials to develop a world from their own imaginations. All of our students have a story to tell, and open narrative writing allows all students to freely express themselves.
Rios raised a point that really got me thinking, are we measuring and promoting Enlish skills or language skills? The two can be very different, particularly from the standards I have seen. There are ways in which our students are not given the credit they deserve because they are measured by a standard of English. A great idea from the article to promote language was to have a socratic seminar that allowed students to speak in their native language. Anytime I am speaking with a Spanish speaker I find that we are both speaking “Spanglish.” It helps! I think the bilingual strategy can help so many students to develop both their speaking and listening skills because, how do they engage, become curious or imaginative if they don’t understand?
The poem, “when I grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities” was a very remarkable piece about our interconnectedness. We are social creatures who influence each other and transform one another in many ways. I hope that to my students I am an open minded listener and reader and a voice of opportunity.
The video is a conversation about the loss of curiosity in education today and how learning has become a chore ostracized by many students.
“Using artifacts in the literacy curriculum creates opportunities for students to bring their home cultures into school. By tracing personal stories through artifacts, youth and their teachers connect, share, see, and learn to value each other.” I think that this is a fantastic way of allowing students and the teacher take pride in who they are as a person. This is great practice for students to retake or reshape narratives about their identity. The author of this article Tiffany Dejaynes mentions that by allowing students to bring in artifacts and partake in this curriculum students are more likely to open about who they are and what their identity is. She mentions that often students in a school will not truly get to know their fellow peers. Artifacts are a great way for students to get to know about each other and the world and it allows for students to develop a more cosmopolitan view of the world. Dejaynes mentions that the most effective way of modeling this is by having teachers bring in artifacts of their own and having them share their own memories about those artifacts, similarly to how Mr. Curmi shared his experience in Malta with his students. Certainly, an activity such as this would require a safe space. In reading the article, “Create a Safe Space by Modeling Vulnerability” by Amanda Blaine she mentions that she starts off the narrative unit by sharing a memoir of her own. But she creates this safe space by allowing students to know that she’s going to share something so personal to her class that she’s afraid. Which is amazing way to create this atmosphere where students would feel comfortable in sharing their stories. I think what I would want to try in my own classroom would be learning how to model vulnerability. I would also consider teaching ethnography/identity through artifacts.
By the time students arrive in middle school, writing becomes more like an exercise in physical prowess than an exercise in self expression. Writing has become so routinized and standardized that structure strangles the life out of student ideas. Students are taught to adhere to the conventions of writing arguments, text analyses, expository, and research papers with the threat of failure if they dare to deviate from their proscriptions. Narrative writing, on the other hand, is free from these constraints. Narrative writing allows students to communicate using language that are more familiar to them, as well as to blend various languages and dialects to paint a more accurate picture of their true-to-life stories.
In my experience as a ninth grade ELA teacher, students experience a significant amount of anxiety about their writing proficiency. Much of this anxiety derives from a mistaken belief that there is a right way and a wrong way to write. I found deJaynes’ use of artifact writing to foster cosmopolitanism extremely appealing when thinking of restoring these relationships between writing and students. deJaynes describes cosmopolitanism as “the opportunity to develop alternative perspectives, think more critically about systems of belief, and question assumptions or biases” (49).
I try to center narratives in the American Literature course I teach. We spend a lot of time reading and analyzing the personal narratives of individuals throughout American history, particularly figures who were socially or politically marginalized. One of the first projects students submit is a “My American Identity” project in which students create a poster, website, or written product that describes elements of their identity and their relationship to America. It’s always been a revelatory assignment, but I was fascinated by Tiffany DeJaynes use of artifacts and will attempt to incorporate it in next semester’s project.
Narrative writing can be leveraged in the ELA classroom aiming to mitigate colonial harm by encompassing a diverse collection of multicultural authors, with various messages and genders. In other words, by harnessing authors that represent our students, their cultures, their ideas, their struggles, instead of simply focusing on the “dead white writers”, (whom, happen to be mostly men) and incorporate a diverse collection of narrative literature, teachers can tap into engagement in reading and transversely, writing. According to “Writing from La Panza!: Exploring Monologue Literacies with Emergent Bilinguals”, de los Rios states, “As the teacher, I hoped to inspire lifelong writers and to push their thinking about gender and sexuality. Although teachers are often encouraged to teach scripted, standardized content and avoid all aspects of gender and sexuality in the classroom…” (75) I can understand and relate to the pressures that are placed on teachers to teach classic literature that our students cannot begin to relate to or even care about because it is not relevant or interesting to them. However, years into my teaching career I am fortunate enough to be able to teach non-typical books and encourage narrative writing as a conduit for formal writing by teaching novels such as With the Fire on High where a Senior girl struggles with juggling a baby, school, and idealizations of college and a career. Her story is one that engages my students, especially the young ladies in my classes who are forced to simply read books about boys, by boys. Teaching Inside Out and Back Again, about a young Vietnamese girl who talks about her experience fleeing and finding home as well as, texts such as, Esperanza Rising and Shadowshaper that offer students an exposure to many different languages, cultures and ideas. The not so coincidental outcome is that students WANT to write personal narratives, share their experiences, ideas and language with me, my coteachers and their peers.
Furthermore, translanguage education that goes beyond the ideas of bilingual classrooms and allows students to read and write stories about their culture enables students to be comfortable in their environment. Reading narratives that incorporate some aspect of culture such as a different language, is encouraging for students who are multi or bilingual. I would like to incorporate more of this pedagogy and encourage students to speak in the language they are most comfortable with and explore how to get students to writing in ways that exploit thier global citizenship.
Thus, for these reasons I feel encouraged by this reading and cannot wait to expand on my current pedagogy and dig deeper to encourage narrative writing as a means of connecting with literacy.
Week 1 submission; Upending colonial barn in ELA
The assumptions about students, learning and English education that undergird my school’s requires curriculum and assessments is that students want to read non-fiction more than fiction. Further assumptions, with regards to assessment, students are fluent in testing vocabulary. This is an error and injustice. Recently, my school has teamed with the Middle School Quality Initiative to promote reading. The covers of books that have been purchased represent my student body (finally)! The amount of fiction, as opposed to non-fiction has finally flooded our bookshelves. But, this is not enough to equip students from different backgrounds (socio-economic, culture, and immigration status) with the tools they need to engage with the texts. This seems to be a different beast. De los Rios states, “Ethnic studies approaches to ELA are not simply about the inclusion of literature by writers of color or the celebration that people of color also have/has ‘heroes and great civilization’…Rather these approaches foreground anti-colonial perspectives of US literature, history and culture, highlighting processes of (anti)imperialism and (anti)racism in and through literacy instruction.” (5, de los Rios, et al.) As de los Rios illustrates, it’s not enough to take the talk, we (teachers) must also walk the walk by interacting, acknowledging and highlighting the injustices past, present and future to try to make change. Thus, debunking and discussing American history atrocities such as slavery, Japanese internment vamps, modern racialization using the novel “The Hate U Give“ are ways to evoke change within our students perception of equality, equity and entitlement.
It is my belief that great things happen when we empower students and approach the classroom in a manner which calls for power with rather than power over mindset. Inviting student voice, allowing them to share their stories and having those stories inform the curriculum allow for the building of strong relationships which both allow for autonomy and respect of the teacher as an authority figure. When these students are children of color it allows for a new, more diverse narrative to be privileged and sends the message that their stories are ones worthy of being heard and shared. It allows for them to see themselves and their peers as legitimate sources of knowledge and experience. In the article on articles and authorship written by Tiffany Dejaynes she shares that “artifactual literacy is about exchange; it is participatory and collaborative, visual and sensory. It is a radical understanding of meaning-making in a human and embodied way”. She goes on to share that “using artifacts in the literacy curriculum creates opportunities for students to bring their home cultures into school” and that “by tracing personal stories through artifacts, youth and their teachers connect, share, see, and learn to value each other (48). This ability to be able to begin to see the people they encounter every day as not merely classmates or walking stereotypes but as humans with a valid and valuable lived experience allows for students to begin to form and perhaps even repair relationships with students they may have written of or even participated in bullying on an earlier occasion. In their reflection of their own artifacts and in their writing about the meaning and significance behind this material thing students are allowed to take pride in and honor their own culture in a way they may not ever have been able to or “allowed” to before. This article reminds me a lot of the “Where I’m From” poem that is typically done at the beginning of the year in many ELA classrooms. This assignment while it aims to get students into writing about their lives asks them to use such a narrow means of doing so that it actually stamps out divergent thinking and does not allow students to truly delve into the parts of themselves they might choose to share. I feel like I have shared this many times and I am going to continue to strive to bring this thought of mine into reality. I would like to try photovoice with my students. I would have them take pictures of things like “the place that makes them feel safest “ or “the piece of clothing that makes them feel strongest” maybe even a photo of their favorite street.
Narrative writing has always been a struggle for me to teach. Not because I don’t enjoy it or because I don’t find it valuable, but I’m unsure how to teach the skills. For some students, it’s easy just to write a narrative; They have a story, they have strong writing ability, and they have a desire to write. However, what about the student who has a story to tell, but does not possess a strong writing ability, or a desire to write? Or perhaps your students want to write and have a story, but don’t know how to write a narrative. I have found it very difficult to teach narratives the same way I teach everything else. I was taught to teach through novels, stories, and other pieces of writing. With any other type of writing, I associate the skills needed to complete the task with a novel or series of readings. As a class, we will use the novel to teach the skills needed to finish the writing assignment. However, when I attempt to teach narrative writing, there seems to be a gap between the novel/text and the writing assignment students will have to accomplish. This is one of the main reasons I found Dejaynes’s article “What Makes Me Who I Am?”: Using Artifacts as Cosmopolitan Invitations.” In her article, she focuses on the use of “artifacts” or physical objects to engage students in narrative writing. She states that by giving students the ability to trace “personal stories through artifacts,” we are allowing our students to “connect, share, see and learn to value each other.” It also gives students the opportunity to “develop alternative perspectives.” The use of artifacts or physical objects as a tool to engage students in narrative writing never occurred to me. My mind was so set in a text or a novel that I didn’t let myself stray from this idea. This article showed me that texts and reading is not the only way to teach narrative writing. Sometimes students need the inspiration to write before they learn the skills. This use of artifacts can give some of my students the exact kind of motivation necessary to take the next step into the skills.
We always preach, whether knowingly or unknowingly, about what is proper academic or eductional speech to our students. When they write an essay or short response, we tell them to write in a professional tone and not like how they text. While this is beneficial and needed for our kids, one can see the viewpoint of a student of the frustrations behind the constant push. They speak in a certain and always foor as long as they have been alive. It can feel constricting to them and their iedentity, even if it is something they need for the future. Narrative aan be that release fir our students. Within the world of a narrative text, they have the freedom to express more of their idenitity. They can create the language they want and the dialect they want their character to speak in. Students can break from the norms put opon them and be more creative with their writing in a way they are rarely if ever told to be. Exposing students to various forms of narrative writing would allow students to see the bredth they can have. By seeing so many different styles, students can get an understanding of what is entailed and find a style that fits their personality and voice. It can also help students create deeper connections both themselves and their classmates. In the Dejaynes article, it mentios the use of artifacts to bridge that gap. Having students bring and discuss items that have a deep meaning or connection to them can help with this struggle of identity and voice that many have. By having them bring in an object they have a strong connection to, it may persuade them to be more open with themselves and with peers. Dejaynes gave an example on page 53 of a student who was once shy and didn’t connect with other students, but after the activity, she felt like she know everyone better, building confidence and reinforcing her idenity as a student and a person.