Places of Composition: Writing Contexts in Appalachian Ohio

Places of Composition: Writing Contexts in Appalachian Ohio Nathan Shepley n her 2007 Composition Studies article, "Fear, Teaching Composition, I and Students' Discursive Choices: Re-Thinking Connections between Emotions and College Student Writing," Sally Chandler argues that when looking at students' writing processes, we should see students' emotions as both individually based and socially constructed. This dual focus. Chandler explains, locates the act of writing at the intersections of "home discourses students bring to their writing, the particular version of academic discourse demanded by the assignment, and the emotional discourse evoked by the context(s) for composing, to name a few" (64, emphasis added). To my thinking. Chandler does an admirable job of exploring how student writing is embedded in emotional experiences. However, I would like to dwell a bit longer on context. More specifically, I would urge us to continue to think not just about the general term context, but about the ways that geographic place and cultural location affect students' writing. Recall Gloria Anzaldua's groundbreaking book Borderlands, which encouraged theoreti- cal reconsiderations of how different writers use concepts of location and space to promote identification and differences, communal knowledge and extra-communal knowledge. Although Anzaldua's focus was South Texas, her concerns speak to the experiences of people in other regions who must negotiate their identities in complex ways, even regions that do not appear striking for the constraints and struggles of their inhabitants. One such region is Appalachian Ohio, a 29-county expanse of Appala- chian foothills in southeastern Ohio where roughly 1.5 million people live (Vital Statistics). The region comprises nearly a third of the state's terrain, but differs topographically and culturally from the rest of Ohio, its citizens demonstrating lexical and phonological differences from the rest of Ohio (Flanigan 345) and receiving economic assistance from the Appalachian Re- gional Commission. In this region lies one doctoral-granting university, Ohio University (OU), whereas the other, more populous Midwestern two-thirds of the state have eleven doctoral-granting universities. So OU largely imports students from the other parts of the state. Metropolitan Columbus, near the center of the state, serves as the largest single provider of OU college students as well as the area in the state with the most OU alumni (Ohio University Fact Book). Its influence in populating OU is followed by Cleveland to the north and Cincinnati to the west. Appalachian Ohio, by contrast, provides fewer OU students than the rest of the state notwithstanding the region's proximity to OU (Ohio University Fact Book). And Athens, where the main Composition Studies 37.2 (2009) / ISSN 1534-9322 campus of Ohio University is located, sustains itself in part by catering to the college student population. Given these facts, OU's Appalachian minority occupy a complex space. They come from, and for college remain in, their home region, but their time at OU may amount to an experience in at least two other cultures: academia and non-Appalachia. In one sense, Appalachian Ohio students who find themselves in this geographic and cultural place have not left their home cultures; in another sense, they are a cultural "other." One of the scenes where this identity issue appears vividly is where students receive their first formal exposure to the cultures of academe: in the first- year composition course. My larger concern is not with Appalachian Ohio alone, but with the places where established composition and literacy research stop and where problems that I have witnessed with my own first-year composition students begin, a borderland between the recognized and the overlooked. We in composition have begun to interrogate ways in which place factors into our teaching and learning (Cushman, "Location," "Sustainable"; Mauk; Reynolds, "Composition's Imagined") and into our social positioning (Reynolds, "Ethos as Loction"). But we have done less well at accounting for the limitations of our writing pedagogies when teaching students who identify strongly with a specific locale and culture that are apart from academe. We would be ethi- cally and intellectually remiss to tailor our pedagogies only to students who demonstrate a high comfort level with college writing. This paper reviews some of the work of rhetoric and composition scholars in discussions of place, and to enhance our awareness of how place-related factors may limit and/or bolster our pedagogies, it presents a case study of two geographically and culturally different student writers at Ohio University The fact that learning occurs in context-rich environments, settings with traditions, norms, values, and physical limitations, has received some noteworthy attention in literacy research. Namely, Shirley Brice Heath ex- plored many literacy practices of two specific communities in the Carolinas' Piedmont in her 1983 book Ways with Words. But Heath's focus remained on pre-school literacy, and her findings apply more to children than to college students. Since the 1980s, ethnographies like Heath's (e.g., Beth Daniell's A Communion of Friendship) have turned our attention to the myriad of motivations and consequences that correspond to specific communities' engagement in literacy practices. In such studies, the subjects often belong to a small and relatively remote community, and their literacy acts usually entail more factors than we might initially suspect. The subjects may be children, children and adults (Heath), college students (Reynolds, Geographies), or adults (Daniell). Regardless of their subjects' demographics, one of the researchers' goals is to raise awareness of how specific social and physical places constrain and permit how learning takes place. 76 Composition Studies This body of work has taken us a long way toward acknowledging the role of place in meaning-making practices, though fewer scholars turn to the more fickle subject of how physical and/or cultural borderlands inform learning. One is Nedra Reynolds, who studies several small-scale borderlands that affect students at the University of Leeds (UK). In Geographies of Writing, she became a participant observer who joined cultural geography students in Leeds-area fieldwork, her data showing that attitudes towards neighborhoods aiïect individual and collective actions, despite whether those attitudes are supported by facts. Noting that modern cities "work to keep people apart" (Geographies 148), Reynolds uses the perspectives of Leeds residents to show how city parks and streets become contested spaces, and to show that the attendant and resulting patterns of thinking may affect surrounding social, economic, and educational landscapes. Like me, Reynolds grounds her work in borderland theory and focuses on college students. Johnathon Mauk, too, explores borderland, community colleges, which are academic spaces but which increasingly rely on com- muter students who juggle multiple academic and nonacademic identities (369). However, to use Burkean concepts, the actors, agencies, and scenes connected to some institutions are perhaps even more problematic than those described by Reynolds and Mauk. What happens when the scene is at once academic (a university town) and in both a stigmatized region (Appa- lachia) (see Preston 399) and a non-stigmatized region (the Midwest)? What happens when the academic center of the scene is populated by students, or "actors," who come primarily from regions with wealthier and better equipped education systems than the "other" students (Vital Statistics)? What forms of agency do this scene's Appalachian minority have in their efforts to participate with their peers in the place's academic culture—a culture that requires nearly every student to learn new conventions (Bartholomae; Cushman, "Location" 358)? In today's move toward globalization, this perspective might seem to head so far inward within national borders that it neglects the outer world's array of borderlands and rhetorics. But I would argue that, theoretically, the reverse is the case, that by seeing how place shapes writing done by students even in Ohio, the S0:caned "heart of it all" in the United States, American scholars and instructors can better understand cultural dimensions of writing and learning that apply regardless of national borders. Perhaps then we can account for the presence of culture in knowledge production and continue to uncover how this process works, as Karen P Macbeth urges (181). Even familiar borderlands give us opportunities to help students engage in culturally conscious writing. To address such oversights, this study describes some of the challenges that confi-ont college students, variously associated with rural Appalachia, who take first-year composition among predominantly urban and suburban Places of Composition 77 Midwestern peers. Although no two borderlands are the same, descriptive research concerning how members of one borderland negotiate their sense of place with academic writing may allow for teaching and theorizing that transcend the hills of Athens, Ohio. Originally, I studied the writing histories and experiences of flve students who were nearing the end of their flrst-year composition classes at Ohio University However, I soon learned that one of the flve students, whom I call Kevin, did not identify as Appalachian, though he lived in Appalachia, and he was in fact born in Illinois. I could have viewed Kevin's information as extraneous to my concerns, and at a glance this seemed the best option. But a closer look showed me that the information he provided gave me some much-needed perspective. As a contrasting example, his comments led me to reorganize my analysis so that I could see more acutely how ties to spe- ciflc cultures and places factor in to one's writing process. Thus, I restricted my analysis to Kevin in relation to a student named Matt, who claimed to identify strongly with Appalachia and Appalachian culture. Matt was in the flrst-year composition class I was teaching at the time. Kevin was not.

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