Archiving And Re-Narrating Selves In An Online Writing Course

11/2/2019 The Archive As Classroom
https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/archive-as-classroom/archive2.html 1/37
A/C T H E A R C H I V E A S C L A S S R O O M .
ArchivingandRe-Narrating
SelvesinanOnlineWriting
Course
JOHANNA SCHMERTZ
A B S T R A C T

Archives are primary sources for creating knowledge, not just storing what is
already known (Gaillet, 2012). As both a repository for narratives of literate
selves in community and a tool for creating them, the Digital Archive of
Literacy Narratives is ideally positioned for students to create knowledge
about literacy. If a digital archive is a “digital resource that collects and makes
accessible materials for the purposes of research, knowledge-building, and
memory-making” (Enoch & VanHaitsma, 2015, p. 219), an online writing
course may be considered a kind of archive as well: it stores readings,
exercises, discussions and class writings while enabling students to chart
their own paths through it and contribute to its shape. This piece applies
principles of narrative and archive theory to an upper-division online writing
course. Following Jerome Bruner’s (2004) precept that “Any story one may
tell about anything is better understood by considering other possible ways
in which it can be told” (709), students in my class navigated and curated the
DALN in order to stage and then restage their identities. They cultivated
critical thinking and new identity repertoires by retelling their original
narratives in ways that acknowledged their own performances. By adding
both sets of stories to the DALN at the end of the semester, students in an
online writing course laid the foundation for ongoing self-revisions as well as
made those selves publicly accessible for the construction of new narratives
of literacy.
A P P E N D I X
* * *

When we ‘write’ self, however we do it… we track the elusive and
shi ing traces of the person who bears our name. The self part and the
writing part are inextricably bound together, for when it comes to self,
we cannot help but make what we say we find. —Paul Eakin (2015, p.
12)
A life as led is inseparable from a life as told⎯or more bluntly a life is not
‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold.
—Jerome Bruner (2004, p. 708)
As Paul Eakin and Jerome Bruner tell us, we make the selves we tell through
story: the stories we tell about ourselves shape who we are, and can become.
In a similar way, the stories we tell ourselves about our relationship with
literacy shape that relationship. Literacy autobiographies⎯which expose for
self-examination the role literacy plays in our lives⎯are a “crucial discursive
vehicle for identity formation and representation” (Selfe et al., 2013, p. 1)
because they help students “achieve agency by discovering that their
experience is, in fact, interpretable” (Soliday, 1994, p. 511). Because of their
power to help students interpret their literacy experiences, literacy
autobiographies and literacy narratives have been assigned across a wide
range of gateway or introductory courses, where students are poised at the
threshold of new literate identities: basic writing classes (Soliday, 1994),
professional writing courses (Ryan, 2001), introductory teacher education
and TA courses (McKinney & Giorgis, 2009; Mortimer, 2001), and
apprenticeships for new writing associates (Carpenter & Falbo, 2006).

If literacy autobiographies can help students see that their experiences are
“interpretable,” they are also performances, constructions of self emerging
from a context, and depend in part on how others have described their own
experiences. They should not simply rest as given “truth,” but rather be
opened to reinterpretation and retellings. Accordingly, Bronwyn Williams
(2003) and Kara Poe Alexander (2011) have called for literacy narrative
assignments to be designed in ways that encourage students to re-evaluate
the identities they construct through their performances. And Sally Chandler
et al. (2013) suggest that re-telling our stories can open our experiences to
better stories and stronger identities.
The pedagogy I describe here answers such calls by asking students to retell
their literacy stories in new ways. In a predominantly female, online, and
primarily asynchronous advanced writing class focused on the topic of
literacy, my students created, explored, and revised their literate identities by
shaping them with and against narratives they found in the Digital Archive of
Literacy Narratives (DALN) and told each other. Challenged to retell their
literacy narratives from a new perspective a er time had elapsed, and a er
reading some scholarship about literacy, my students met this challenge
through a range of reflective performances. This chapter describes how I
used the a ordances of archives⎯the DALN and an online writing
environment⎯to strengthen a pedagogical framework that foregrounds the
acts of interpretation, citation, and performance. By virtue of being archived
in the framework of an online classroom, and re-archived in the DALN, the
course’s literacy stories and the students who wrote them became
participants in a kind of expanded and ongoing virtual classroom on the
topic of literacy.

A P E D A G O G Y O F P E R F O R M A T I V I T Y
The course I discuss here was an upper-level writing elective with a large
contingent of transfer students. In the university’s curriculum, the course is
intended to help students master (or reboot) their academic writing skills. My
definition of academic writing is probably more nuanced than my university
expects, however. In particular, it crucially involves reading, or the ability to
engage complex scholarly sources and come to understand writing as a
completion of the act of reading (Bartholomae & Petrosky, 1987).
In more theoretical terms, I regard academic literacy as a process of
excavating and rereading texts buried under other texts, a kind “archeology,”
or “a regulated transformation of what has already been written” (Foucault,
1969, p. 156). Adding Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to Bartholomae
and Foucault, I conceive of academic writing as argument that moves
forward in part by looking back to acknowledge its sources, thereby
consciously situating itself as part of a citational history of related utterances.
For me, the value of a piece of academic writing lies precisely in its ability to
foreground the citational chains of which it is a part, o ering the possibility of
more conscious transformations and redescriptions.
In translating this theoretical framework into pedagogical practice, I try to
help students understand reading as a constructive act and writing as a
performative reinterpretation of previous writings (their own and that of
others). Thinking of my online course as a kind of archive, and my students
as both archivists and contributors to that archive, has extended my theory
and pedagogical practice. An archival pedagogy should encourage students,

student researchers, and researchers of all kinds to reflect on how literacy
and identity evolve together over time and across communities. It should
also make those citational chains visible by fostering a hermeneutic process
that moves forward (constructively) by looking backward (interpretively).
T H E O N L I N E C O U R S E A S A R C H I V E
Online writing courses are “inherently archival” (CCCC) and contain a
“document trail of interactions,” which students can study, evaluate, and
adjust as the course progresses (Harris, Lubbes, Knowles, & Harris, 2014, p.
109). Where the context of a face-to-face course is largely spoken and
therefore evanescent, the context of an online writing course is easily
accessible/recoverable because it exists as a written record to which students
can repeatedly return and resituate themselves over the course of the
semester. Access to the archive of an online class is of more limited duration
than is the case with other archives; for students the course acts as an
archive for only a semester, though for teachers it can be saved, minus
student contributions, over the course of multiple semesters, enabling them
to study the written record of each class in order to revise the next version of
it.
By asking my students to upload successive versions of their literacy
autobiographies to the DALN⎯a pre-existing archive of literacy narratives that
they can review or add onto in the future, if they choose⎯ I’ve extended the
life of the “archive” of my online writing courses. In this way, two kinds of
narratives are joined: narrative as a technology of the self (Eakin, 2015; Selfe
et al., 2013) as instantiated by the literacy narrative itself, and narrative as a

container of history (White, 1990), by embedding pieces of my course and the
selves it helped produce into the ongoing history of the DALN.
I suggest that because an online course is a kind of archive, online writing
courses should be studied as archives. Jessica Enoch and Pamela
VanHaitsma (2015) argue that a digital archive is a “digital resource that
collects and makes accessible materials for the purposes of research,
archive-building, and memory-making” (p. 219). Online writing courses
facilitate all of these: they store much of the thinking and writing of teachers
and their students and, like other archives, serve as “primary sources for
creating knowledge” (Gaillet, 2012, p. 39).
One key precept of archive studies relevant to online courses and the DALN is
that both the act of constructing an archive and the act of making sense of it
are narrative constructions (Mano , 2004), or in Derrida’s words, that
“archivization produces as much as it records the event” (1995, p. 17). An
archive is a narrative construction created by the archivist who has selected
and organized what is to be recorded, thereby bestowing significance upon
it. Similarly, an online course may be seen to comprise a layering of multiple
narratives, even when “narrative” is not addressed specifically or named as
such in the actual course:
1. the teacher constructs one narrative by selecting and ordering the
content of the course in a particular sequence,
2. students create another through their own written engagement with
course readings, discussions, and assignments provided, and

3. the reflective practitioner examines the resulting archive and takes it
though a new iteration and a new class.
When it comes to interpreting the archive in scholarly research, that too is
structured by narrative principles, such as the sequential ordering of
otherwise unrelated events or artifacts. Hayden White (1990) argues that
history itself is the transformation of archived events into a narrative, and
that this narrative cannot help but be a subjective creation. Also, if, as Paul
Ricoeur (1991) suggests, narrative is constituted by the intersecting life-
worlds of the speaker/writer and audience, “a narrative researcher does not
collect narratives, but instead jointly participates in their construction and
creation” (Loots, Copens, & Sermijn, 2013, p. 110). Bearing such points in
mind, researchers who work with archives need to explain how they go about
constructing their own stories from those archives. As Sally Chandler and her
students note in their project on literacy narratives, “it is important to
recognize that theoretical stories are, in themselves, stories” (2013, p. 84). As
a reflective practitioner, and as a researcher confronted with the task of
connecting all the narratives that attach to my online course, rereading and
reframing the “archive” that I and my students have built together, and
framing it against the backdrop of another archive, the DALN, I sought a
dialogic approach and found it in the methodologies of narrative research.
M E T H O D O L O G Y : W H A T N A R R A T I V E
R E S E A R C H S A Y S

Thus we are forever rescripting our pasts, making sense of the things
that happened in light of subsequent events. This is true not only as
narrators of our own lives, but also of the lives of others. —Molly
Andrews (2013, p. 215)
The path through any narrative is rhizomatic, containing multiple points of
entry and hence multiple paths (Loots, Copens, & Sermijn, 2013). This means
that the stories students tell about their literacy will be performances created
in response to a range of social, discursive, and experiential contexts, subject
to reinvention and redirection as new contexts arise. The online environment
is an important part of the context that frames my students’ and my stories.
Like the rhizome, and like the DALN, which David Bloome (2013) describes as
“unruly,” an online course provides students multiple points of entry and an
opportunity to create subjectivities asynchronously, somewhat
anonymously, and with handy reference to their previous performances. It
also permits students to examine and reflect upon how the course’s
discursive and social contexts shape how they have unfolded their stories
over time.
My method of reading my students’ work acknowledges the rhizomatic
nature of narrative as well; through multiple points of entry I needed to be
able to create “plots” that describe what I find, plots/pathways that enabled
me to return, revisit, and reshape as new connections are made. I took an
approach that narrative theorist Corinne Squire (2013) describes as typical of
narrative researchers: “The simplest approach is to begin describing the
[pieces] thematically… moving back and forth between the [pieces]

themselves and generalizations about them in a classic ‘hermeneutic circle,’
using a combination of top-down and bottom-up procedures” (p. 57).
In practice, this meant that I moved back and forth between my data (the
material archived in my course and the DALN) and my interpretations of that
data. Theories would emerge from my comparing one student’s work to her
other work, or to another student’s work, or by comparing a student’s work
before and a er my course interventions (such as assignments, discussion
responses and paper comments). When a pattern emerged, I would test it by
going back to the evidence, moving back and forth between data and
interpretation until a coherent story developed, with characters joined in a
common enterprise in which each student played a role.
Through this recursive dialogic process, I learned that there was a story to tell
about women’s use of the literacy narrative as a self-building strategy in
online contexts. (Although the few males in my online class did very
interesting self-building work, it did not overtly include the theme of writing
as a means for protecting and maintaining a voice.) I settled on a selection of
writings from four female students: Darby, Vanessa, Navodka, and Tara. Each
of these women used the vehicle of the literacy narrative both reflectively
and reflexively, in ways that illuminate the potential of the literacy narrative
to restage identity. Two di erent versions of each woman’s literacy narrative
appear in the DALN and are accessible through a search using the keyword
“retelling” as well as through the hyperlinks included here.
T H E S T U D E N T S A N D T H E C O U R S E

I’ve taught online courses in a range of subjects—advanced writing, gender
studies, and film⎯for several years. My students in these online courses are
overwhelmingly female, many of whom need the flexibility of online
instruction in order to meet a range of work, family, and school obligations.
The women at the center of this piece took an online advanced writing
elective populated by interdisciplinary humanities majors, future teachers
and social workers, and English majors. These women seem to share a
common feature besides competing demands on their time: perhaps
because of the gender roles they are expected to inhabit, they tend to
associate writing with creating identities and voices that otherwise could not
exist, in some cases seeing it as an outlet for survival and in others simply as
a vehicle for creative expression. Each of them “struggled to find a voice in a
public setting [and] found one with pen and paper” (Kowis, 2016b, p. 1). They
tend to relate literacy to identity, using it to find a voice. As one such woman
insightfully observes in her literacy narrative, growing up female can both
force and enable women to lead a passive life in which reading and writing
play a compensatory role (Southworth, 2016). In addition, the digital
literacies students have already been exposed to (social media, email, online
discussion forums, etc.) have naturalized public archivings of self in ways that
“pen and paper” cannot, empowering students who might otherwise feel
voiceless to become “both users and producers of archives” (Purdy, 2009, p.
34).
I wanted my students to learn about literacy as a topic, articulate their
relationship to it, and self-monitor both their reading and writing processes. I
organized the readings, discussions, and writing assignments into three

sections of the course archives, according to which of the following questions
they helped answer:
1. What is Literacy?
2. What is a Literacy Narrative?
3. What about the “Narrative” Part of Literacy Narrative?
In the beginning of the course, students read a literacy autobiography by
Barbara Mellix (1987) in which she reflects on her multiple uses of language
and literacy, frequently quoting from her previous writings. This reading
introduced them to literacy as a topic, suggested the deep (o en fraught)
connections between literacy and identity, and provided them with a strong
example of the genre.
Next, students charted their own path through the DALN, using the search
term “identity” and others of their own choosing. They shared their curated
exhibits as a basis for interviewing each other, looking for common themes
and possible story structures of their own. In a subsequent class-wide online
discussion, they reflected on what they had learned about literacy and
identity through these exercises. They then wrote their first literacy
autobiography.
A er an interval of a few months in which they read academic articles on
literacy and the interactions between narrative and identity, students wrote a
second, completely di erent, literacy narrative from a perspective absent in,
or di erent from, that of their first life story. This second “retelling” was

guided by a prompt in which I suggested to students that they might revise
their stories with an eye to revising their identities, following a precept of
Jerome Bruner (whom they read) that “any story one may tell about anything
is better understood by considering other possible ways in which it can be
told” (2004, p. 709). They contributed both stories to the DALN, using
“retelling” as a keyword or as part of their title, and concluded the course
with a portfolio. (See Appendix for assignments).
Throughout the course, I encouraged students to see all the course content
as part of the literacy world created for the purpose of the class, and
therefore available for their use: they could cite themselves, stories in the
DALN, course readings, prompts and feedback from me, posts from class
discussions, and interviews with their group members. In other words, the
course was meant to be understood as an archive they could draw from and
interact with. The online format of the course lent itself well to self-
monitoring and reflective identity work because of the fact that all
assignments, discussions, and class interactions were archived in one place:
the course shell.
D A R B Y , V A N E S S A , N A V O D K A , A N D T A R A
The women I’ve selected for a closer look represent a range of ways female
students have narrativized their lives through my course, against the
backdrop of the DALN and across both tellings and retellings. In my reading
of the larger narrative these stories tell, Darby metonymically represents the
female writer who consciously and deliberately writes her way from
subjection into subjectivity in what she refers to as a “therapeutic measure

against my history” (2015b, p. 5). Archetypal as she/her story may be, she also
exemplifies the student who is able to critically examine her own narrative
constructions of self, seeing them as the fruit of a subjective but fully
intentional writer. The other three women develop di erent facets of self-
construction and performance. Vanessa’s entire trajectory through the
course is a kind of self-building performance, one that mirrors the
relationship she constructed with an ex-boyfriend through writing. Using her
interactions with classmates and the course in much the same way she used
written interactions with her ex, Vanessa’s construction of a literacy success
story is “an intersubjective accomplishment” (Bucholz & Hall, 2005).
Navodka incorporates a wide range of classmates’ voices and contributions
to the DALN in both her first piece on reading and her second, playfully
reflexive account of writing. In both cases, she explores what Walter Ong
(1986) calls the “supreme power of literacy,” concluding that her introversion
and literacy mesh to enable her to construct an identity that spans time and
space. Tara reflects on the tools of narrative itself in order to deliberately slow
them down and transform her story.
F R O M S U B J E C T I O N T O S U B J E C T I V I T Y : D A R B Y
In the end, autobiographies are a reflection of the mind of the writer.
There is an innate intimacy to the act of retelling memory, and also an
impossibility for objectivity. —Darby Brady (2015a, p. 5)
Like any narrative, a literacy narrative is a performance that selects and
foregrounds one set of details and memories out of other possible sets. The

organization of these details into some sort of sequence in order to create a
meaningful whole is referred to in narrative theory as emplotment.
Emplotment requires the prior existence of previous plots, cultural story
forms, and archetypes commonly shared in one’s culture.
Darby’s work in my course demonstrates an emplotment of identity that
relies on common narrative conventions yet reflects on its own narrative
performances. Her first narrative, “Literacy Autobiography,” centers on a
childhood trauma (Brady, 2015b). She prefaces it with a line she attributes to
Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside
you.” She explains that she learned that her words had no value from
growing up in a household with an abusive father and a mother who bound
her to silence. She personifies herself as “the floral wallpaper on our dining
room wall, muted and pleasant” (p. 3). Going to school was both a physical
and emotional escape, and when she read Maya Angelou’s autobiographies
she “discovered a sister who knew me and had witnessed what I witnessed”
(p. 3-4). Writing became her voice and her identity, a way of telling her own
story to herself that she has maintained up to the present.
Darby’s second literacy narrative, “The Impossibility of Objectivity in
Narrative,” is a narrative analysis of her first (Brady, 2015a). She begins by
explaining that autobiographical writing is made up of selected memories
told from a particular vantage point. She states that a er reading Jerome
Bruner’s (2004) “Life as Narrative,” she could not escape acknowledging that
cultural/historical factors influencing her state of mind have made her
account partial and subjective.

She proceeds to use a formalist framework suggested by Bruner (2004) to
analyze her first narrative. She identifies what Bruner would call the mythos
of her piece, its roots in what are understood to be universal human themes.
She analyzes a passage as follows: “When I wrote, ‘I maintained my sense of
obedience by keeping my mouth closed but released my pain through
poetry. Every word I’d wanted to say and every argument I wanted to have I
wrote down instead,’ I was conveying the universally identified and
understood battle for independence while straddling the line between
obedience and defiance” (Brady, 2015a, p. 2). A er identifying her use of a
recognizable narrative mythos, she goes on to analyze how her word choice
and repeated metaphors (the floral wallpaper) reflect this universal theme.
Darby concludes by considering that her story was filtered through the eyes
of her childhood self, and that while it is her truth, the other witnesses and
participants in her story would have di erent perspectives. She does not
wish to write those stories, but she considers that possibility. Darby’s ability
to use elements of narrative theory to describe how she emplotted her story
suggests that students can cultivate critical thinking and new identity
repertoires by not just telling their literacy narratives but also revisiting them
to observe how they’ve been told.
S E L F A S I N T E R S U B J E C T I V E A C C O M P L I S H M E N T :
V A N E S S A
As I racked my brain to remember… something to make my story the
same as the others or even make up a story, I realized I do not need
their stories. —Vanessa Patterson (2016a, p. 1)

Like Darby, Vanessa sees literacy as therapeutic, something that lets her
“express my thoughts and not keep them inside me and torture me”
(Patterson, 2016a, p. 1). The identity Vanessa creates from my course is what
Mary Bucholz and Kira Hall (2005) term an “intersubjective accomplishment”
as much as it is an individual creation. While it is she who constructs and
owns that identity, her story is a kind of co-creation made possible by the
repertoire of story forms available to her through her classmates, the DALN,
and her narrative positioning relative to her audiences.
Literacy narrative scholars note that their students’ literacy narratives follow
common cultural “master” narratives, performing, for example, the roles of
prodigy, victim, and literacy winner (Alexander, 2011; Williams, 2003).
Vanessa began my course playing the role of literacy “rebel” (Williams, 2013).
As preparation for writing their first literacy autobiography, I presented
students with the following question: “You’ve now had several encounters
with the stories people tell about literacy’s influence in their lives: Mellix, the
DALN, and your interviews with each other. How does/did hearing the stories
of others help you define your own experiences?” In the subsequent online
discussion, she said exposure to all these stories was unhelpful and
confusing: unlike everyone else, she had no memories of how her literacy
developed, and she hated reading and writing.
This claim was clearly not a recipe for success in an advanced writing course,
much less a class centered on the topic of literacy. So her “rebel”
performance provoked concerned responses from her classmates and me,

responses that somewhat predictably invoked another cultural narrative: the
literacy success story or, as Harvey Gra (1991) would describe it, the literacy
“myth” that proposes that increased literacy leads to increased success. Her
classmates and I encouraged her to look outside schooling for her use of
written language, suggesting that literacy was situational, purposeful,
context-dependent: she just had to look harder for it. If she did, she too could
be a literacy winner/write a good literacy narrative/earn a good
grade/graduate/achieve her dreams/etc.
Vanessa responded to her classmates’ and my schooling with the revelation
that literacy was in fact crucially linked to her identity, but that it was not
linked to a historical past but rather located in the immediate and ongoing
present. She shares with the class a story of how she constructed a new self
and a new relationship with an ex-boyfriend through a series of daily emails.
She also finds a story frame for the literacy-as-success-story that she believe
she needs in an anonymous DALN literacy narrative, found and shared by
one of her group members, called “Writing Is My Therapist” (2014). These
dialogues become the base of her first literacy autobiography, “Literacy, Life
and Me” (Patterson, 2016a). In it she describes how the history of her emails
provided a kind of history of her own evolving self as she attempted to pick
up the pieces a er her breakup.
Vanessa reads these emails as an archive she is expertly positioned to
narrate. Each daily email served as a kind of “journal entry,” revising and
elaborating on the ones before it, such that over time she could see her
emails developing a beginning-middle-end structure and exposition of a
central point that propelled her forward to the next email. She describes

how, as a result of her emails, her ex-boyfriend renewed phone contact and
“eventually a er each phone call and emails analyzing our discussions and
asking questions and getting answers, we finally arrived at a good place”
(Patterson, 2016a, p. 3). Her boyfriend told her she should be a writer.
In this first literacy narrative, Vanessa performs a reformed, transformed,
literate self who is positioned relative to the expectations of others (her ex,
her classmates, the DALN, myself) and emplotted across epiphanies that
serve as turning points. Noting the patterns in others’ stories, she writes, “in
all of the narratives I read they all began as mine did, with the frustration and
the anxiety and the hate, but in the end there was an understanding and an
appreciation for it [literacy]” (Patterson, 2016a). In the end, Vanessa finds a
way to tell the same story as others do, but without “making up” a story.
Creating the success story she needs to better fit the circumstances in which
she finds herself, in “Literacy, Life, and Me” Vanessa constructs a narrative
that goes beyond herself, changing her relationship to both the class and her
ex in ways that actively cultivate her own agency.
In the interval between her two literacy autobiographies, Vanessa read
essays by Walter Ong (1986) on literacy, Jerome Bruner (2004) on self-
narration, and Kara Poe Alexander (2011) on literacy narratives. In her second
essay, “Retelling My Story: Understanding How Literacy Saved My Life,”
Vanessa recasts her first literacy autobiography as a representative literacy
event, a “little narrative” (a term she takes from Kara Poe Alexander) in which
she had cast herself as the heroic protagonist (Patterson, 2016b, p. 5). She
revisits her previous observation that the successful experience of writing
emails to an ex demonstrated that “literacy is my autobiography” (p. 2). She

writes this second narrative as she imagines she might tell the story of her
experience in my class at some point in the future, characterizing her first
piece as an “old assignment” that causes her to struggle to “remember” the
circumstances that surrounded its writing (even though there were less than
two months between the two versions).
Reading the first literacy autobiography from
this imagined future perspective, she re-
evaluates the lesson she learned about her
initial confusion and resistance to the topic of
literacy (what I have called her “literacy rebel”
performance). She decides that the reason she could not summon up
memories of literacy, the way her peers and the contributors to the DALN did,
is not because literacy is of her present moment, her day-to-day life, which is
what she had theorized in her first literacy autobiography. Instead (another
epiphanic turning point) her inability to recollect early literacy moments
showed that she had “interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that
without tremendous e ort [she] cannot separate it from [herself] or even
recognize its presence and influence” (Ong, 1986, p. 23). She notes, “It’s funny
how you catch things the second time around” (p. 5), an acknowledgment of
the benefits of rereading. Vanessa’s “intersubjective accomplishment” now
brings academic writers Bruner, Alexander, and Ong into her understanding
of her own literacy. As such, she narratively positions herself to become the
hero of my own “success story” as a teacher: an “intersubjective
accomplishment” for both of us.
Audio File 1. An audio file included in
Vanessa Patterson’s DALN submission
[Transcript]
0:00
0:00 / 0:00
/ 0:00

D I S T A N C E ( D ) L E A R N I N G F O R E N G A G E D
I N T R O V E R S I O N : N A V O D K A
A major part of who I am is defined by what I have read and written; I
am defined by literacy. —Navodka Carter (2016a, p. 1)
Navodka chose “introvert/introversion” as one of her search terms in her
exploration and curation of the DALN. She found and connected with a video,
“Reading and Introverts,” about how reading and writing enable the
development of an inner self and a sense of power for introverts (Dotterman,
2013). She explored the connection between literacy, identity, and
introversion through both of her literacy narratives. The first, “Who Am I
Without Literacy,” focuses primarily on reading (Carter, 2016a). She observes
that reading is bound up with her earliest memories and is inextricable from
her sense of self. It is an “internal library” where she and her sister stored
“pets we did not have, games we did not play, and lives we did not lead” (p.
3). It provides information that gives her something to say when she joins an
oral conversation.
Like Vanessa, Navodka has read Walter Ong’s (1986) essay “Writing Is a
Technology That Restructures Thought” and questions the possibility of
writing a reliable literacy narrative at all: how, assuming one has
“interiorized” literacy in the way Ong suggests, is it possible to examine a self
that might exist apart from that literacy? She concurs somewhat reluctantly
with Ong’s claim that literacy assumes a “supreme power” (1986, p. 23),
noting it has shaped her in ways she might not be capable of recognizing.
Observing that she experiences through reading things she is too reserved to

do in reality, she wonders if literacy has reduced, rather than expanded, her
identity (Carter, 2016a, p. 2).
Navodka’s second essay, “Retelling My Story: Literacy and Me: Who I Am In
Five Pages,” continues her theme of introversion, but it is more playful and
both argues for and performatively demonstrates how writing gives her a
voice she would not otherwise use (Carter, 2016b). The second essay appears
to resolve the existential crisis posed in the first. She begins at a traditional
starting point for literacy narratives, early education, and explains that her
first grade teacher learned to engage her despite her introversion through
worksheets and small writing assignments: “these written tasks helped my
teacher see that I wanted to participate, but I had to do so in other,
nonverbal, ways” (p. 2). She brings her writing into the present, saying that
writing is still her preferred mode of communication because it helps her
organize her thoughts without interruption. Returning to Ong’s (1986) claim
that writing is “unnatural,” a “technology that restructures thought,” she
retorts that “talking to people in a crowded room and making conversation
with complete strangers is unnatural for me; chiming in on an online
discussion board with complete strangers or inputting my opinion on a blog
for class is completely natural” (Carter, 2016b, p. 3). She then makes the point
that for her, writing is the equivalent of speaking, dramatically shi ing her
narrative position by addressing the reader directly: “You were here because I
invited you in. I love writing because it helps span the distance between time
and space” (p. 4).
A er this point, Navodka’s writing becomes
self-reflexive and experimental, and she
0:00
0:00 / 0:00
/ 0:00

wonders if she lived in an oral culture, such as
those described by Ong, “would my stories
still be the same?” (p. 6). By ironically
subtitling her essay “Who I Am in Five Pages” (my suggested page minimum),
she seems to acknowledge both the necessity and impossibility of
containing a self in a written archive. Placing herself at a distance by
performing another iteration of self, she uses writing to solve the problem
that writing has created. Writing allows her to engage with the problem Ong
poses, over time and across the archive of her identity. And the fact that her
literacy narratives were generated in an inherently archival medium (the
online course), and enter a new archive by way of being uploaded to the
DALN, means that she has extended her identity into a larger public space, a
benefit that Comer and Harker (2015) ascribe to participation in the DALN.
T E C H N O L O G I E S O F S E L F A N D S L O W A E S T H E T I C S :
T A R A
My story is unlike any she has written before. —Tara Kowis (2016b, p. 6)
It’s frequently asserted that generational knowledge and the sense of a
common history are being erased by continually emerging technologies of
communication. In “Self and Self-Representation Online and O ,” John Paul
Eakin (2015) disagrees with this premise, reminding us that narrative persists
through all forms of human expression and is a “technology [that] is capable
of contracting to satisfy daily digital interventions and of expanding to
measure the life course” (p. 11). For Eakin, narrative subsumes and survives
other technologies. As we have seen, Vanessa’s daily emails with her ex, and
Audio File 2. An audio version of Navodka
Carter’s narrative, included in her DALN
submission [Transcript]

her incorporation of them into a larger life narrative, validated this capacity of
narrative to shrink and expand to contain a range of stories. She realized she
did not have to make up a story to tell a story about how literacy shaped her
identity: narratives about literacy already existed, and she had life
experiences that both fit and illuminated those narratives. Narrative became
a technology of the self for Vanessa, her email archive and the materials of
the course serving as the contexts she drew from.
By contrast, Tara already seemed to take it for granted that narrative is a kind
of technology of the self and does not appear compelled to construct a
master narrative of her literacy for my course. A writer of fiction, she was
comfortable choosing the little narratives that she finds most revealing,
looking for how she can expand the genre of the literacy narrative. She
seemed to understand that her autobiography will be selective, structured by
critical incidents in her life that she will foreground or omit as they reinforce
whatever theme she chooses to represent her story. As we will see, she
counters the speed of technology by slowing it down, understanding that she
can manipulate narrative with the help of other technologies.
In “Literacy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” her first literacy
autobiography, Tara explains that her group’s explorations in the DALN led
her to see two common themes: positive early positive family experiences
with literacy, and aversive patterns associated with schooling (Kowis, 2016a).
She identifies these narratives and from them creates a third narrative she
calls “the ugly.” She describes how she worked through a “bad” experience
with reading in grade school (being forced to read aloud in front of the class)
to reading aloud to herself (good), and from there to reading and writing her

own material (ugly, but still good). Her narrative scope was small and her
emplotment tight, with a chronological plot structure (fourth grade⎯>fi h
grade⎯>high school) that mirrored the dialectic resolution of her argument
(bad + good = ugly). She concludes that for her, literacy will always be an
“ugly” process of engaging in a “daily struggle with new techniques and
visions.” These “new techniques and visions” will play a role in her second
literacy autobiography.
In my written response to “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” I noted that it
was clear to me that Tara had consciously cra ed her piece as a story and
asked her to consider two things: 1.) How she had emplotted her story,
defining “emplotment” as “arranging events into a narrative leading to a
particular end point in the present moment,” and 2.) What kind of self
emerged from her emplotment. In “Living in an ‘Ugly’ World,” her second
literacy autobiography, she experimented more consciously with story as
fiction (Kowis, 2016b). Her story is told from the perspective of Xander, a
fictional character whose existence/non-existence depends on where Tara is
in her struggle with the “ugliness” of writing. (At the beginning of the story, he
has just been thrown into the trash.) The remainder of the story is Xander’s
account of the ups and downs of Tara’s creative process though journals and
story ideas.
In this second story, Tara’s father plays an important role as a literacy
sponsor (Brandt, 1998), or in the terms of narratology, a donor (Propp, 1968).
The key turning point in Tara’s narrative⎯and the moment that gives birth to
Xander⎯comes about when Tara’s father surprises her with a typewriter they
had examined together in an antique shop. In On Slowness: Toward an

Aesthetic of the Contemporary, Lutz Koepnick (2014) explores a “slow”
approach to creative work, a “deliberate exploration of the specificity of
[one’s] respective tools of mediation… so as to unlock untapped modes of
experiencing the real” (p. 13). With the typewriter as her new writing tool,
Tara engages in a kind of aesthetic slowness. Xander reports that when Tara
sat down with her “new” typewriter, she “began to type what she saw outside
her window. It felt like nothing she had written with before. Although she was
ecstatic to have her new typewriter, she realized that this new machine
would add an ‘ugly’ element to her creative process. She had to relearn how
to type” (Kowis, 2016b, p. 5-6). Xander is created (and periodically destroyed
and recreated) through a process made deliberately di icult. Tara’s
typewriter represents the “ugliness” of the creative process that she
described in her first literacy autobiography. Another kind of donor or
sponsor, the typewriter is a tool that slows down time and makes her attend
to her surroundings in ways she was unable to do before. Xander “lives” to
the extent that Tara is able to focus on the tools that create him, taking stock
of her own processes of mediation.
S U M ( M O N ) I N G U P S E L V E S I N D I A L O G
Through writing literacy narratives with and against their own stories and
those of other contributors to the DALN, students in my class created
dialogic, intersubjective selves. Darby uses elements of narrative theory to
describe how she emplotted her story and came to an awareness of how she
had used literacy to rewrite trauma. Vanessa co-constructs an identity in
relationship to others and her own writing by continually returning to her
own words a er the passage of time. Navodka consciously uses the

distancing of time and place created by literacy and online learning to create,
and archive, a self that has permanence beyond the moment of its utterance.
And Tara uses stock plots and narrative devices to theorize her own writing
process as a narrative of its own.
Each of these women became conscious of the connection between
storytelling and identity-formation, came to see writing as integral to their
identities, took control of her self-stagings through revision, and begin to see
literacy as an idea worth developing theories about. As their teacher, and
subsequently as a researcher, I attempted to be dialogic as well, creating a
narrative from their narratives and moving recursively back and forth
between the di erent selves we created separately and together. I hope all of
us⎯including the readers of this piece⎯take from our interactions with texts
the sense that archives and selves are not finite, and work together.
V A N E S S A , T A K E T W O
I conceive of literacy as performative and best understood as an archeology
that uncovers and exposes prior readings. Thus, I hope to encourage a
pattern of critical thinking where students uncover buried texts, expose them
to daylight, and revise them for present contexts. As I (re)read the archive
that is my online course, it is clear my students have gained strategies for
approaching complex texts. I do not know if they take from my courses the
value of returning to a text to reinterpret it. However, I have some evidence
suggesting that they do.

I was able to follow the work of one student⎯Vanessa⎯into an online class
she took with me the following semester, a film survey course. In this film
course, Vanessa did well in general, catching onto and applying film terms
and concepts well. Where she set herself apart from the other students (who
had not taken the course I describe here) was in the archeological approach
she took to the course’s final assignment, which was to be a close reading of
any one of over 20 films students saw for my course. More than any other
student in the class, Vanessa treated the task of interpretation/close reading
as both a recursive and constructive act involving retracing old pathways to
forge new ones.
Vanessa was one of only two students (out of 50) to pick Citizen Kane, a film
that explicitly poses the problem of the connection between story and
identity. Citizen Kane proposes knowledge, particularly knowledge about
another person, to be a kind of archaeology. The film begins with a reporter’s
question about the identity of Charles Foster Kane and the meaning of his
last word “Rosebud,” continues through several partial narratives of people
who knew him, and ends in the vast archeological site of Kane’s belongings,
where the “answer”⎯a childhood sled⎯is profoundly unsatisfactory.
Vanessa takes up the reporter’s journey where he le o , choosing the puzzle
that Kane’s second wife Susan is working on as the place to begin her own
excavation. She traces each instance of the puzzle’s appearance in the film,
treating the puzzle as an artifact that can uncover both the film’s theme and
its formal structure. She concludes that the puzzle is a metaphor for both the
object of the search and the search itself: “The puzzle is the motif that
(ironically) pieces the movie together,” she writes. By choosing Citizen Kane

as her film and taking up reporter Thompson’s quest, she seems to
acknowledge that reading requires rereading and that she as a reader has
the authority to rewrite both story and protagonist, narrative and identity: in
fact, she refocuses the Rosebud quest away from the reporter and instead
puts Susan, and her puzzle, at the center of Citizen Kane.
A R C H I V A L P E D A G O G Y A N D T H E D A L N :
R E T R A C I N G O U R S T E P S F O R O U R F U T U R E
P A T H S
Artifacts collapse space (artifacts from di erent times and places are
extracted from their original contexts and resituated side by side in one
“container”) and expand time (by crossing it, preserving artifacts in and for
the “now” of the user, and allowing future users to add to their contents). The
“archive” that appears at the very end of Citizen Kane becomes the starting
point for Vanessa to construct her own narrative, the place where she joins
the quest for the meaning of Kane’s life. I suggest that archives are where we
and our students need to begin the sort of (performative, archeological)
inquiry that acknowledges the inquirer’s role in organizing the artifacts of life
into coherent narratives of self and community.
The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) can serve as both a
repository for narratives of literate selves in community and a tool for
creating them. By curating selections from the DALN, archiving their own
stories in the course and then writing them again in a
write⎯>archive⎯>rewrite process, students in my online writing course laid
the foundation for ongoing self-revisions as well as made those selves

publicly accessible for the construction of new narratives of literacy. What
future users and researchers of any archive, whether a literacy narrative, the
DALN, or an online course, might begin to focus on more deliberately is how
that archive functions as an agent of change. In particular, an archive’s
potential to store and sustain both selves and the cultural systems of which
they are a part, while bearing witness to change over time, enables both to
move forward as long as there are people willing to read⎯and reread⎯them.
* * *
Placing students’ excavations and constructions of self within the larger
archeological project that is the DALN has been a helpful addition to my
pedagogy because the act of engaging primary sources and charting a path
through them grants students agency to see themselves as part of larger
narratives which their performances can help shape. My use of the DALN in
this class was confined mostly to the invention and pre-writing process.
However, in future classes, I can imagine asking students to excavate/re-
enter the DALN again, as part of a revision process. A er students write their
first autobiography or a dra of one, they might choose new keywords based
on their work, finding new primary sources and charting di erent pathways
through the archive to come up with new frameworks for the self.
As more retellings like those of my students are added to the DALN, literacy
researchers will be better able to study how performativity works in learning,
both in the genre of the literacy narrative and in constructions of identity. For
example, I have introduced the concept of emplotment to graduate students
in a class on literacy, and then asked them to locate my undergraduates’

stories in the DALN in order to consider how each story’s re-emplotment in
the second version changed things like stance, agency, and authority.
How⎯once students are aware that their essays are performances of identity
that they have some control over⎯do these performances change? What are
the some of the consequences of adopting a self-aware approach to identity
construction? These are some questions that educators and literacy
researchers might study if contributors to the DALN return over time to
archive new stories and selves in it.
R E F E R E N C E S
Andrews, M. (2013). Never the last word: Revisiting data. In M. Andrews, C.
Squire & M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Doing narrative research (pp. 205-222).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Alexander, K. P. (2011). Successes, victims and prodigies: “Master” and “little”
cultural narratives in the literacy narrative genre. College Composition and
Communication, 62(4), 608-633.
Bartholomae, D. & Petrosky, A. Ways of reading: An anthology for Writers (9th
ed.). New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012.
Brady, D. (2015a). The impossibility of objectivity in narratives. Retrieved from
http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/35180c50-5a80-4d08-9bdf-22fa6bbeaeef

Brady, D. (2015b). Literacy autobiography. Retrieved from
http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/d0a27f16-c654-4986-be4d-04fea9c02b80
Bloome, D. (2013). Five ways to read a curated archive of digital literacy
narratives. In H. L. Ulman, S. L. DeWitt, & C. L. Selfe (Eds.), Stories that speak
to us: Exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. Logan, UT:
Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press.
Bruner, J. (2004). Life as narrative. Social Research, 71(3), 691-710.
Buchholz, M. & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural
linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7, 585-614.
Carpenter, W. & Falbo, B. (2006). Literacy, identity, and the “successful”
student writer. In B. William (Ed.), Identity papers: Literacy and power in
higher education (pp. 92-109). Logan, UT: University of Utah Press.
Carter, N. (2016a). Who am I without literacy? Retrieved
from http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/afcc3ae2-68d5-4932-b870-
d7784bb72d35
Carter, N. (2016b). Retelling my story: Literacy and me: Who I am in five pages.
Retrieved from http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/afcc3ae2-68d5-4932-b870-
d7784bb72d35

Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). (n.d.).
Establishing a statement of principles for Online Writing Instruction (OWI).
Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/owiprinciples
Chandler, S., Castillo, A., Kadash, M., Kenner, M. D., Ramirez, L., & Valdez, R. J.
(2013) New literacy narratives from an urban university: Analyzing stories
about reading, writing, and changing technologies. New York: Hampton
Press.
Comer, K. & Michael H. (2015). The pedagogy of the Digital Archive of Literacy
Narratives: A survey. Computers and Composition, 35, 65-85.
Derrida, J. (1995). Archive fever: A Freudian impression. (E. Prenowitz, Trans.).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dotterman, A. (2013). Reading and introverts. Retrieved from
http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/99284cfa-cd11-4042-a73b-d3d61aecf64b
Eakin, J. P. (2015). Self and self-representation online and o . Frame, 28(1),
11-29.
Enoch, J. & VanHaitsma, P. (2015). Archival literacy: Reading the rhetoric of
digital archives in the composition classroom. CCC, 67(2), 216-242
Foucault, M. (1969/2002). Archeology of knowledge. (A.M. Sheriday Smith,
Trans). New York: Routledge Classics.

Gaillet, L. L. (2012). (Per)Forming archival research methodologies. CCC, 64
(1), 35-58.
Gra , H. J. (1991). The literacy myth: Cultural integration and social structure
in the nineteenth century. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Harris, H. S., Lubbes, T., Knowles, N., & Harris, J. (2014). Translation,
transformation and “taking it back”: Moving between face-to-face and online
writing in the disciplines. The WAC Journal, 25, 106-126.
Koepnick, L. P. (2014). On slowness: Toward an aesthetic of the
contemporary. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kowis, T. (2016a). The good, the bad and the ugly. Retrieved
from http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/7e625e8f-685d-4802-a4f5-
5fbbc1a2d49d
Kowis, T. (2016b). Living in an “ugly world.” Retrieved from
http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/9beef3a4-7942-4937-8a7d-dc4d832c011c
Loots, G., Coppens, K., & Sermijn, J. (2013). Practicing a rhizomatic
perspective in narrative research. In M. Andrews, C. Squire, & M. Tamboukou
(Eds.), Doing narrative research (pp. 108-125). Los Angeles: Sage.
Mano , M. (2004). Theories of the archive from across the discipline. portal:
Libraries and the academy, 4(1), 9-25.

McKinney, M. & Giorgias, C. (2009). Narrating and performing identity: Literacy
specialists’ writing identities. Journal of Literacy Research, 41, 104-109.
Mellix, B. (1987, Summer). From outside, In. The Georgia Review.
Mortimer, V. (2001). Composing ourselves: Literacy autobiographies of new
TAs. A/B: Auto/biography Studies, 16(1), 127-140.
Ong, W. S. J. (1986). Writing is a technology that restructures thought. In G.
Bauman (Ed.), The written word: Literacy in transition (pp. 23-50). Oxford.
Oxford University Press
Patterson, V. (2016a). Literacy, life, and me. Retrieved from
http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/e203633d-2230-4c47-9b2c-9594f3e9ce79
Patterson, V. (2016b). Retelling my story: Understanding how literacy saved
my life. Retrieved from http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/e203633d-2230-
4c47-9b2c-9594f3e9ce79
Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folktale (2nd ed.). Austin: Texas University
Press.
Purdy, J. P. (2009). Anxiety and the archive: Understanding plagiarism
detection services as digital archives. Computers and Composition, 26(2), 65-
77.

Ricoeur, P. (1991). Life in quest of narrative. In D. Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricoeur:
Narrative and interpretation (pp. 20-33). London, Routledge.
Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and Narrative. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Ryan, C. (2001). The editorial eye/I: The role of critical literacy narratives in
the professional writing classroom. Composition Forum, 12(2), 137-56.
Schmertz, J. (2018). Writing our academic selves: The literacy autobiography
as performance. Pedagogy, 18(2), 279-293.
Selfe, C. L. & the DALN Consortium. (2013). Narrative theory and stories that
speak to us. In H. L. Ulman, S. L. DeWitt, and C. L. Selfe (Eds.), Stories that
speak to us: Exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. Logan,
UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press.
Soliday, M. (1994). Translating self and di erence through literacy narratives.
College English, 56(5), 511-26.
Southworth, V. (2016). Tools and tirades. Retrieved from
http://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/6fab4685-b292-431a-88b4-8c1f82ef04ef
Squire, C. (2013). From experience-centred to socioculturally-oriented
approaches to anrrative. In M. Andrews, C. Squire & M. Tamboukou (Eds.),
Doing narrative research (pp. 47-71). Los Angeles: Sage.

White, H. (1990). The Content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical
representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Williams, B. (2003). Heroes, rebels, and victims: Student identities in literacy
narratives. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 47(4), 342-45.
E D I T O R S
KATHRYN COMER, MICHAEL HARKER & BEN
McCORKLE
P U B L I S H E D
B Y
(cc) BY 4.0. All rights reserved Design: HTML5 UP

Archiving And Re-Narrating Selves In An Online Writing Course

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Archiving And Re-Narrating Selves In An Online Writing Course

Similar to Archiving And Re-Narrating Selves In An Online Writing Course (20)

More from Sabrina Green

More from Sabrina Green (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Archiving And Re-Narrating Selves In An Online Writing Course