by Rebecca S. Borah, PhD

Early this past quarter, I spent an afternoon replying to my composition students’ emails in which they pitched their ideas for a first-person research assignment involving a nonprofit social-service agency.  After sending affirmative replies to the first few, I paused before rejecting one email concerning a medical marijuana-advocacy group.  I saved my reply to this student for last and put off the likely thumbs down by asking some basic questions to determine how much thought the student had invested in the topic.  (You never can tell when they’re 100% serious at this point.)  Once finished, I took a few quiet moments to consider how long it had been since someone had wanted to write about marijuana.

 Thinking back over the twenty-plus years I had been teaching writing in one form or another, I couldn’t recall giving the all-clear to a “weed” paper or something similar in at least ten years; nor do I even recall a student pitching one since I started teaching at the University of Cincinnati in 1999.  Using a service-learning approach which deals primarily with social-justice issues had undoubtedly contributed to this drought, but I was still puzzling over this oddity as I went to bed that night.  For me there are certain student-paper topics that have come up over the years with which, for various reasons, I just don’t want to deal.  Abortion, gun control, flag burning—the list isn’t actually that long, but I had to stop and ask myself why I might be steering clear of these issues while I was willingly taking on other complex and controversial problems such as poverty, homelessness, climate change, and sustainability.

When I was growing up in the late 1970s, the radio station in my hometown of just under 3,000 residents had a popular call-in show hosted by a local woman named Fran Bartleby.  She had three uncomplicated rules when it came to topics suitable for discussion: no medicine, no politics, and no religion.  “Folks,” Fran would say at the start of each show, “we need to stick to these rules to keep the conversation friendly and respectful to all concerned.”  I suspect the “no medicine” rule was recommended by the station manager to avoid legal problems.  However, the “no politics” and “no religion” rules were probably at the host’s discretion.  This was a bit ironic because on Sundays Fran became Rev. Bartleby behind the pulpit of a local church. 

Compared with current talk-radio shock jocks, Fran and her show might seem a little bland; however, to tell the truth, she did not need to be provocative.  She knew her audience.  Her listeners wanted to hear the local news, share favorite casserole recipes, send get-well wishes, and seek gardening advice.  I can only recall a few times when Fran had to admonish callers.  She had established safe ground where she and her audience could trust each other.

Years later, when I taught my first English composition courses as a graduate teaching assistant, I learned that I needed to establish ground rules or boundaries of my own when I designed assignments and helped my first-year students imagine the audience(s) they would be addressing in their written assignments.  What I did not initially understand was that establishing these boundaries was not only for my students’ benefit but for my sanity as well. At the time, I already had a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Education under my belt, but the five-year gulf separating me from my students was not really wide enough to create a natural-dividing line of age, especially when it came to dealing with personal writing and my evolving concept of myself as a teacher. 

During the first term in graduate school, all new teaching assistants were required to use a model syllabus and an assigned text.  We also had to teach the same basic assignments and follow the prescribed schedule.  In the future we would have more freedom to experiment and tweak, but for now we were to conform and follow the prescribed path.  I can’t recall the specifics of the “canned” assignments, but they used broad and open-ended prompts such as “The first time I _____.”  I shouldn’t have been surprised to get responses dealing with nitrous-oxide huffing and first sexual encounters.  Hey, it fit the blank, right?  I wanted to follow writing theorist Peter Elbow’s admonition to “write without teachers,” but admittedly, it was a caricature of Rev. Fran’s voice, not Elbow’s, which echoed in my head, “Sorry, folks, NO writing about your experiences with laughing gas, NO first sexual encounters, and NO weird stuff either!”  Luckily, my inner prude lost out to my better judgment, so a list of no-no rules wasn’t the first thing out of my mouth.  If there was going to be a comfort zone in my class—scratch that—our class, we would need to negotiate boundaries and establish clearer ground rules. 

Over the years, these boundaries have evolved to encompass not just writing topics, but guidelines for dealing respectfully with peers.  I don’t mean to give the impression that part of my syllabi is up for grabs every term.  I simply work hard to establish a sense of community in the classroom, and that means students have to be invested in their own education.  For my classes, we start by taking responsibility for our behaviors and choices by helping shape the ground rules.  At some point a student brought up “PG-13″ from the movie rating system, and it stuck as a shorthand term for those first-week ground rules.  I’ve taken flack from a colleague who rightly insisted, “Our students don’t live PG-13 lives.”  However, unlike the movie rating, our “PG-13″ rules can change from term to term and even be renegotiated during a term.  Yet, somehow, we always seem to reach a recognizable middle ground where, by and large, nobody feels too restricted, embarrassed, or disrespected-including me.  Besides, like I said, we can always renegotiate.

This brings me back around to that darned worrying topic proposal.  I don’t think it’s a copout to be honest and say, “It’s not your topic that’s at fault.  I’m human, too, and I’m just not ready to deal with this issue.”  However, just because I didn’t want to approve a topic before doesn’t mean it’s going to be off limits forever.  Prior to the time I took on service learning, I prided myself in camouflaging my politics and personal opinions.  In fact, I accommodated students perhaps a little more than I should have to avoid offending them.  Maybe it was time I risked getting offended?  It wouldn’t kill me if we agreed to change the route to help this student reach our destination: a solid piece of writing which met the project’s goals.  Frost, Steinbeck, and Kerouac would have approved, so why not reshape the assignment and revise my boundaries? 

When I opened my email the next morning, I was glad to see a well-reasoned and thoughtful reply to my questions from my student about his proposed medical marijuana topic.  I had a few more questions, but I gave him a tentative thumbs up and let him know I was genuinely looking forward to discovering a subject I hadn’t read about in a long time.

Rebecca S. Borah, PhD
Associate Professor of English
College of Applied Science
Human Media & Cultural Studies
University of Cincinnati

Tags: audience, boundaries, English composition, Fran Bartleby, graduate teaching assistants, ground rules, Peter Elbow, politics, research assignment, service learning, social-justice issues, student paper topics

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Art of Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.