3.3: Body Blogs in Context

Through their body blogs, my students began their journey to take on new understandings of themselves as writing yogis. To further exercise their embodied imaginations, we also read articles that acknowledged the importance of incorporating embodied experience as evidence into our writing, a common feature of contemplative learning which adds attention to personal presence and social transformation along with subject matter knowledge and rational empiricism. For example, we read Linda Brodkey’s Writing on the Bias to talk about how our writing is “biased” by our experiences and ideas even when we don’t use the word, “I,” directly. Brodkey becomes a way for students to understand the basics of situated knowledge, or the ways their social and material locatedness shapes the meaning they write themselves to. She also helps me frame these lessons for transfer, so students understand that what they are learning in my classroom are lessons about the situatedness of knowledge claims and, therefore, of writing. They begin to understand that there is something fundamental about these ways of thinking about knowledge in all their classes across the many discourse communities they must join as students—even if stylistic functions of writing (as a means to build knowledge) acceptable in my class are not similarly so in their science or engineering classes. Putting Brodkey in play with our own quest to unveil the physical aspects of writing helps them see how the body becomes a marker for the personal in their writings. Because they’ve often questioned the ability to gain authority in their writing by simply leaving out personal markers like, “in my opinion” or first-person pronouns, generally, my students relate to Brodkey:

Brodkey wants her reader to see that … sometimes the rules [of academic writing] need to be broken. I began to think about how much this was true, that it is important to deviate sometimes in order to explore new terrain to not only be successful in writing but in other aspects of life as well …. I have had a very successful golfing career because I broke some of the rules, tried new things, and was able to learn from them— and this [risk-taking] was the main reason in my growing as a writer this semester.

The personal and the body collide and mingle in this response. Students, as this example shows, begin to apply their knowledge of other body skills to the writing process, giving them a store of information based on the physical skills they import into my class, like golf. When put into embodied dialogue with what they know and love, suddenly writing becomes a physical process much like their other activities, allowing this student, in particular, to apply the lessons of risk-taking she originally learned on the green to her writing process and the meaning it generates. The degree to which this kind of transfer makes writing more accessible for our students cannot be overstated. Either can the ways my student insists on developing a habit of taking risks because of this transfer, which opens her up for failure but also for greater success.

To advance these insights, we read articles by Nancy Sommers on how writing can happen while “standing,” away from the computer,¹¹ while cooking or completing other daily tasks. Writing doesn’t just move us, it moves, my students learn as they open and expand their definitions of the writing process to include the body. These articles make writing seem real to my students because they help demystify the process. The myth of sitting down to a computer allowing words to spill out from the fountain of genius is challenged, and students seem relieved. Despite the fact that the myth has never been the reality of their writing experiences to date, they often import these whimsical views of writing to my class. Anne Lamott’s (2005) Shitty First Drafts helps to break this stereotype too. And, Natalie Goldberg’s discussion of freewriting in Writing Down the Bones (2005) as a way to get your body to convince your mind to generate ideas helps students realize they don’t have to wait for their minds to do the leading; that their bodies can help them reach their writing goals too. We also read Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson’s anthologized article, Multitasking State of Mind (2009), which suggests that college teachers must help students learn to overcome the multitasking minds they’ve had no choice but to develop in our technologically-demanding world. The article looks for possible tools to achieve a transformation of mindless students into mindful ones and ends with the idea that bringing in a yoga teacher to our classrooms might be a good place to start. I tell my students that is exactly what we are going to do, of course. By this time, students are generally intrigued and ready to experiment with yoga—even if they are still nervous. In the next two interchapters, I explore how I introduce students to a yoga-writing practice, scaffolded by our body blogs. In the following chapter, I take time to explore first why feminist contemplative pedagogies give meaning to students’ explorations of embodiment in ways other pedagogies cannot as fruitfully explain or uphold.