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Introduction: Writing with Emotion

I begin with quotations from the final reflection essays of two students in my community-based learning course, Writing With the Community. In their essays, students were to reflect on the writing project they produced in collaboration with their assigned community partner. I highlight these reflections because each student connected their writing projects to their emotional experiences.{1} Julia, assigned by the community organization to write a newsletter story about an innovative literacy program for socially isolated immigrant families, explained how “writing with emotion” was both a conscious aim in communicating with her audience and potentially in conflict with the “truth” of her story:

In writing this piece, I considered my audience and felt as if it was most important to try and engage the pathos of the audience, to tug at their heartstrings. Writing this story was an emotional experience for me, too. I felt as though I really connected with the families I observed and talked with, and I wanted to do more for them. I tried to balance this writing with emotion with trying to stick to the truth of what I was trying to report so the story might be received and understood in a more honest way. (Julia 2015)

Lucas, too, articulated “conflicting” emotional experiences while writing his profile story of Dolores, a Central American immigrant and single mother supporting three small children while attending school for her education certificate:

One of the biggest challenges I had in completing my profile story about Dolores was coping with and understanding the emotions that came out when writing about our conversations. I felt conflicting emotions while writing this story, as both an “outsider” (an ethnographer) and an “insider” (the person of an immigrant household). It bothered me that I felt as though I was hiding my identity and my emotional responses for the purposes of being an “academic.” I am uneasy about the story I have written because it evoked such strong emotions. (Lucas 2015)

These student reflections suggest much to unpack and consider, as the students articulate concerns I will return to throughout this article. Briefly, though, their essays reveal two key points worth underscoring: first, both students draw a clear connection between their writing and their emotional experiences; second, both articulate their sense of discomfort or uncertainty about what to do with that emotion in writing their piece.

In this article, I propose that we take up Megan Boler’s call for a “pedagogy of discomfort”: a purposeful way of examining uncomfortable emotions we (and our students) might otherwise resist or deflect, such as “defensive anger, fear of change, fears of losing our personal and cultural identities,” as well as guilt and the discomfort produced when we are forced to question our beliefs and assumptions (Boler 176). To this list, I would add other emotions experienced and expressed by the students in Writing With the Community, including embarrassment or shame, unease, and empathy—emotions that students often experience in community-engagement courses. Instead of understanding student emotion as something to suppress or redirect, I make a case for emotion as a pedagogical strategy by outlining three ways we might enact a pedagogy of discomfort in community-based writing courses: scaffolding emotions to support students’ experiences with community partners; encouraging students to inhabit what Boler calls a more “ambiguous self”—one that breaks with inscribed habits and beliefs; and foregrounding an understanding of emotion as a form of critical inquiry.

In the last two decades community service learning in college-level composition has been hailed as revolutionary for both faculty and students and as transformative for composition studies; yet while this work has provided us with models and strategies for rethinking our pedagogies as opportunities to connect the classroom and the community, emotion has not figured prominently in this scholarship either as a practical element of consideration or a rhetorical strategy.{2} There has been excellent scholarship recently on teaching and writing in collaboration with community partnerships, and on a wide range of topics including literacy development, service learning and social change, diversity dialogues, and writing transfer. However, community-based writing theory and pedagogy, like our broader field of composition studies, has yet to consider emotion as a powerful medium for critical inquiry and action in community-engaged writing courses.{3} In this essay, I bring together these two threads—emotion in composition and community engagement—as I further connect emotion in community-based writing to social justice theory.

There has been an increase in recent work (mainly from the field of organizational psychology) connecting social justice theory to emotion, with scholars arguing for a more sustained integration of justice and emotion through a focus on the interplay of affect and cognition. Perhaps because this scholarship is not concerned with theoretical models for writing studies, this connection between emotion and social justice has been underexamined by composition scholars. One exception is Shari Stenberg who, following the work of feminist scholars in composition-pedagogy such as Lutz (1988) and Worsham (1998), reexamines emotion as a source for social change and argues that “emotion serves as a key site of investigation for those of us interested in connections between pedagogy and social change” (349). While I find Stenberg’s link between emotion and social change a helpful starting point, her focus is on how students respond with emotion to texts in the composition classroom, rather than how they write with emotion. I push Stenberg’s claims a step further, as I contend that this call to reconsider emotion as a central part of how students experience themselves and the world holds particular relevance for community-based writing classes, where students’ emotion is often inseparable from their desire to help change unfair and inequitable social conditions. Using my course as an example, I show that emotion was part of how students gained knowledge about the community organization, the individuals they were interviewing and writing about for the organization, and the larger social issues and structures these individuals and organizations were navigating. In so doing, I argue that emotional experiences are more than just a significant feature of the students’ education process in community-based writing courses; emotions reflect students’ identities within social situations and provide a means through which students might analyze social discourses and power relations.{4}