In the fall of 2019, I found myself frustrated by trying to teach a short narrative section in my rhetoric and research class. I was struggling to connect, in my own mind, the narrative unit to the rest of what I was teaching. Worse, I had completely failed to connect this short unit on storytelling to the study of rhetorical arguments and researched essays. I had been mulling over it for some time when I received an email from the writing center reminding us that we would see several scholarship applications soon. Then it clicked.

BACKGROUND

In my past life, I was a student emerging from poverty, working too hard, too long, and running from a “rough” life where abuse, tragedy, and trauma were normalized and education was a flimsy lifeline; I was a student who understood that failing meant a lifetime of “rough.” In that past life, I learned that storytelling was one of the most powerful survival tools I had. It was the tool that helped me find money, resources, information, and support.

I learned this as a Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program Scholar (The McNair Scholars Program), which is a federal TRIO Program. TRIO refers to variety of federally funded outreach and support programs that create access to higher education for underrepresented populations. The McNair Scholars Program is a two-year program that prepares students to apply to graduate programs in academic fields. We focus on writing and research as well as socialization and emotional intelligence. McNair taught me to control my own narrative so that it benefited me. Two years after graduating from the program and starting a PhD program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I returned to Boise State in the summer as a writing consultant. After graduation I worked with the program full-time for two years.

As a McNair writing consultant, I had taught several generations of scholars to use story in the same way, starting with teaching them to write engaging, thoughtful statements of purpose that used a combination of narration and exposition to help grab their audience’s attention. I taught my scholars to be “the girl who had to stitch her own leg in a skiing accident” instead of the student who “wanted to study human anatomy since high school” to a graduate school search committee.

We discussed and demystified the inherent inequitable reality of how college is funded, explained that most of the time the search committee would be made up of well-meaning folks whose privilege made it hard for them to see past the things an academia built for white middle- and upper-class students rendered important, things they decided showed potential. I taught them that the humanity that connects all of us shares a common truth―people love a good story. Tell it right and the search committee will remember the “boy who slept in his car for two years because it was the only way he could afford to be part of the Robotics Club” despite his less than perfect GPA and GRE score. Tell it right and they will want to meet the “boy who dumpster dived to build his robot” even though his CV lacked internships and conferences. Tell it right and they want to fund “the boy who won that competition with his trash-robot.”

Why not lean into what I was good at? I would teach my students that narrative, exposition, and audience awareness can be the key to getting exactly what they want. I would use real-world, important shit―money―to show them how to read a rhetorical situation and use their growing rhetorical skills. The assignment, under all the outcomes and academic language, would be simple. The students would try to meet their purpose―getting paid―by figuring out what the audience wanted―a reason to believe that if they gave this student the scholarship, this student would do something with it, this student would finish their program; this student would win―and give it to them.

The goal of the unit would be two fold. First, I would show my students that writing is important to them, that it can have a real impact on their real world.  We would write the scholarship essay; I would show them or walk them through the process of writing for a scholarship essay. We would go through each step. We would locate SLCC’s scholarship applications, analyze the rhetorical situation, create a timeline and plan, write emails for recommendation letters, workshop the scholarship essays, and apply for the scholarship. Just as importantly, I would connect this assignment directly to learning narration and exposition.

This unit would directly connect the strategies they were learning―to tell a story with real-world consequences for the purpose of winning a scholarship, which is real in a way that the possibility of publishing or doing a reading just isn’t. A scholarship is money in the hand; it is being paid for their story. I wanted them to see that being able to tell a story rhetorically and get what they want from the audience is a marketable skill.

Would this unit be about all the higher ideals we embrace and try to pass on to our students? Would it teach habits of the mind, give them a deeper understanding of humanity, teach them to love the complex beauty of rhetoric? Nah, this unit would offer my students one of the survival skills of being a BIPOC, immigrant, refugee, working class, poor, undocumented, or first generation in academia. It would teach them how to craft a narrative about themselves that doesn’t showcase their poverty, their pain, or their trauma as the reason they deserve support. It would show them how to write a narrative that didn’t turn them into inspiration porn for the scholarship committee. Instead, they would learn to write a narrative that invited the reader to see their strength, their power, their grit. Take the boy in robotics club: his narrative didn’t focus on why he was homeless or where his parents were, instead it spent two paragraphs talking about the local auto parts dealer who saw what he was doing, offered help, equipment, and parts because that is how the people in their community supported each other.

THE LESSON PLAN

As I developed this lesson plan, I knew I needed to focus on three things:

1. explaining to the students how to shape a rhetorical story―that is, a story with a very specific end goal
2. making the rhetorical situation transparent to the students
3. teaching strategies for writing good narratives

Part 1. The Handout

I created the following handout for my students. I called this “The Everyday Writing Task” because, as students, filling out applications for funding is something they will do often. It will be a normal task for them until they graduate. Then we spent a day in class discussing the scholarships, explaining the process, and looking up where the money was coming from. We all created an account and signed in.

Part Two: Making the Rhetorical Situation Transparent

Rhetorical storytelling is a fancy way of referring to a story that is told to persuade a certain action. Among the Pueblo tribes there are teaching stories that are told the exact same way every time because the goal is for the children to memorize the story and the structure. Tribe members can start the story and have others chime in with the exact same wording, rhythm, and emphasis. We see rhetorical storytelling when politicians tell stories in a congress―they are using the story to persuade others to vote a specific way.

To teach the concept and process of rhetorical storytelling, I began by drawing the rhetorical triangle on the board and asking the students to think about who the audience was, what they wanted and how best to give it to them. Through guided discussion, we ended up with the following on the board:

Part Three: Narrative Strategies

From here I focused on teaching different strategies for writing narrative. I provided examples of short essays that were created to persuade readers toward a certain action. We brainstormed, drafted, revised, workshopped. During this process, I used my own experience as an example and I kept asking questions about how the student was meeting the purpose of this―how does this convince the reader that you will finish your program? How will this show your reader that you have really considered your goals?

For example, one early homework assignment was this:

CONCLUSION

Looking back now, I realize that so much of teaching comes from drawing on our own experiences, on our strengths, and on being empathizing with our students. I was struggling because I was not connecting the assignments to any of those things. Once I stopped to think about my experience, about what I care most about, and what my students really need, I was able to create an assignment that worked for me and them. This assignment will continue to remind me that no matter what concepts or content I am teaching, if I make the effort, I can offer it to the students in a way that connects to their lives. I can show them how the things I love―reading, writing, and rhetoric―are important in real, lived-experience ways.