Reflections Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning Volume 16, Issue 2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Editor: Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
Associate Editor: Willma Harvey, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
Assistant Editor: Jessica Pauszek, Syracuse University
Book Review Editor: Tobi Jacobi, Colorado State University
Editorial Board: Hannah Ashley, West Chester University Nora Bacon, University of Nebraska-Omaha Adam Banks, University of Kentucky Melody Bowdon, University of Central Florida Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America/Syracuse University Ellen Cushman, Michigan State University Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon University Eli Goldblatt, Temple University H. Brooke Hessler, Oklahoma City University David Jolliffe, University of Arkansas Linda Adler-Kassner, University of California, Santa Barbara Joyce Magnotto Neff, Old Dominion University Kristina Montero, Syracuse University Patricia O’Connor, Georgetown University Nick Pollard, Sheffield Hallam University Luisa Connal Rodriguez, South Mountain Community College Barbara Roswell, Goucher College Lori Shorr, Office of the Mayor, Philadelphia Amy Rupiper Taggart, North Dakota State Unviersity Adrian Wurr, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Copyright © 2016 New City Community Press
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
Member CELJ Council of Editors of Learned Journals http://reflectionsjournal.net
ISSN: 1541-2075
Cover Photograph by David Burbank
Design by Elizabeth Parks, [email protected] Reflections, a peer reviewed journal, provides a forum for scholarship on public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. Originally founded as a venue for teachers, researchers, students, and community partners to share research and discuss the theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based writing and writing instruction, Reflections publishes a lively collection of scholarship on public rhetoric and civic writing, occasional essays and stories both from and about community writing and literacy projects, interviews with leading workers in the field, and reviews of current scholarship touching on these issues and topics.
We welcome materials that emerge from research; showcase community based and/or student writing; investigate and represent literacy practices in diverse community settings; discuss theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based rhetorical practices; or explore connections among public rhetoric, civic engagement, service learning, and current scholarship in composition studies and related fields.
Submissions: Electronic submissions are preferred. Manuscripts (10–25 double-spaced pages) should conform to current MLA or APA guidelines for format and documentation and should include an abstract (about 100 words). Attach the manuscript as a Word or Word-compatible file to an email message addressed to [email protected]. Your email message will serve as a cover letter and should include your name(s) and contact information, the title of the manuscript, and a brief biographical statement. Your name or other identifying information should not appear in the manuscript itself or in accompanying materials.
All submissions deemed appropriate for Reflections are sent to external reviewers for blind review. You should receive prompt acknowledgement of receipt followed, within six to eight weeks, by a report on its status. Contributors interested in submitting a book review (about 1000 words) or recommending a book for review are encouraged to contact Tobi Jacobi at Colorado State University ([email protected]).
Articles published in Reflections are indexed in ERIC and in the MLA Bibliography.
Contents Reflections: Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning Volume 16, Issue 2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
1 Editor’s Introduction Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi
3 Introduction to the Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing Eileen E. Schell, Syracuse University Ivy Kleinbart, Syracuse University
Veterans’ Writing in Extracurricular Settings 20 Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing Karen Springsteen, Wayne State University
35 Writing to Bear Witness: A Grass Roots Healing Movement Melissa Whitworth, Syracuse University
61 Re-Authoring Narratives: Reflective Writing with Veterans with Spinal Cord Injury Aimee C. Mapes, University of Arizona Michael T. Hartley, University of Arizona
83 A Story Worth Telling: Sharing Stories and Impacting Lives in the Veterans’ Book Group Project at Fort Benning Paige Paquette, MAJ Adam Anderson, SGT La Toya Burnette, SGT JeQuetta Canady, Specialist E4 Brandon Carr, SGT First Class Nathaniel Coakley, Ret., and Staff Sergeant Yolanda Teamer Veterans’ Writing in the Composition Classroom 106 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom Derek Handley, United States Naval Academy
129 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base: Building Strong Classroom Communities Through Engagement and Advocacy Bree McGregor, George Mason University Lourdes Fernandez, George Mason University
Faculty Development for Veteran Friendly Campuses 151 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants: Seizing the Induction Possibilities Sue Doe, Colorado State University Lisa Langstraat, Colorado State University
187 Articulating Veteran-Friendly: Preparing First-Year Writing Instructors to Work with Veterans Thomas Sura, West Virginia University Veterans’ Writing: Creative and Critical Works 207 Heart of the Enemy (Poem) Jenny Pacanowski
212 Review: Generation Vet: Composition, Student- Veterans, and Post- 9/11 University Jeanne Law Bohannon, Kennesaw State University
219 Review Essay: When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans See Me For Who I Am: Student Veterans’ Stories of War and Coming Home Catherine St. Pierre, The Ohio State University
230 Review: Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing & Artwork By Veterans Aleashia Walton Valentin, University of Cincinnati
Editor’s Introduction
Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A & M ’m happy to introduce this special issue University – Corpus devoted to veterans and welcome our Christi Ispecial editors and contributing authors. When Eileen Schell and Ivy Kleinbart first approached me about this special issue, I could not help but reflect on the personal familial connections I have with veterans. As someone whose husband died during military active duty, I am a surviving spouse and will carry this strong identity for the rest of my life. Also, two of my cousins and father-in-law served during the Vietnam War, and my father is a veteran. When I was a professor, I was open about sharing my stories as a military widow in an academic environment that sometimes did not understand military experiences. We had a number of veterans, active-duty, and military family members attending my university. The Naval Air Station was just across the bridge, but some administrators, faculty, and students had little knowledge of what occurred across that bridge. Fortunately, others did cross that bridge to make this institution military- friendly.
1 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
This special issue is another bridge in helping readers understand veteran communities and their important roles within and outside of academia. I have said in previous issues how much I enjoy the word “Reflections” in our journal title. What this special issue proves is that bridges are strengthened between veteran communities and academia when reflections are an important part of this work. Throughout this issue, readers will see the empowering elements of reflection in veteran stories, faculty stories, and scholarship. Reflections also happen with poems, and one is present here too. Without reflections in service-learning, community outreach, and similar endeavors, the bridge will inevitably crumble.
As readers will see when they read the special editors’ introduction, Eileen and Ivy reflect on their journeys in working with veterans. I commend them for walking the walk and honoring veteran communities with this special issue. Enjoy!
Cristina Kirklighter Editor of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning
2 Introduction to the Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Eileen E. Schell, The authors offer an introduction to the special issue on Syracuse University veterans’ writing, highlighting the four major areas of & Ivy Kleinbart, work that emerge in the issue: 1) veterans’ writing in Syracuse University extracurricular settings, whether in community projects and writing groups or specific programs based on veterans’ wellness, healing, and recovery; 2) veterans’ writing in the composition classroom on university campuses or at military bases; 3) faculty development initiatives that help prepare university faculty, instructors, and TAs for their work with veterans in the classroom. A fourth area centers around veterans’ creative works--poetry, in particular—and reviews of the literature of veterans studies and veterans’ writing.
n March of 2010, we started a community writing group for military veterans at ISyracuse University, open not only to students but also to all veterans and military family members in the Syracuse area. With different individual motivations and reasons for starting the group, we decided to focus on how creative nonfiction could be useful in helping our members to explore their experiences in and out of the military. We had no idea what to
3 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing expect at our first meeting on a cold Saturday morning in March, just as our university’s spring break began. We did not know if anyone would show up or how long the group would last. Nevertheless, we were gratified to have four veterans, none of whom we had ever met before, show up to write and work with us. We brainstormed a list of essay topics and then opened a discussion on people’s writing goals and reasons for attending that first session. Two representatives from the VA stopped by briefly, as well, to make sure veterans who attended were enrolled for VA benefits. The Syracuse Veterans’ Writing Group was born.
Now over six years later as our writing group has grown, and our field’s interest in veterans’ and military-affiliated writing has expanded as well, we take the opportunity in this special issue of Reflections to further consider what the act of writing might afford veterans, both within and beyond the bounds of the university. In part, this issue focuses on student veterans, by which we mean veterans in our courses who have separated from the military, reservists who may still be in the military, and active duty service members who are still serving but who may be taking classes on military bases or through online education. We also acknowledge military family members who are in our classes taking courses on the GI bill. In addition, we hope this special issue will raise awareness regarding the uses and outcomes of writing by, for, and with veterans in our wider communities. This special issue, thus, provides readers the opportunity to reflect on the range of meanings that veterans and military-affiliated writers make of the act of writing—whether it is writing in the academic classroom, on university campuses or military bases, or writing in what Anne Gere has referred to as the “extracurriculum,” such as veteran or civilian-led community writing groups, warrior-transition units on military bases, or other specific programs for veterans. It also addresses the capacity of veterans’ writing to affect civilian perspectives and understandings of the military.
In compiling this special issue, we find ourselves in good company with other rhetoric and composition scholars interested in contemporary veterans’ writing. Scholars in our field have been exploring veterans’ writing at conferences, in public readings and performances, and
4 Editors’ Introduction | Schell & Kleinbart in publications in the field. Alexis Hart and Roger Thompson’s special issue on veterans’ writing in the journal Composition Forum in Fall 2013 provides us with a larger sense of the urgency we face in higher education and our larger society when they remind us that the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “will linger for a generation” and more (n.p.). They urge us to remember that as the U.S. military “decreases the number of active duty members, the number of veterans seeking to earn college credentials is likely to increase over the next few years,” and that wars are not over when they are officially declared over; their effects linger in profound ways for decades, and, for some, for a lifetime: “Military family members will continue to use GI Bill benefits for the foreseeable future, and those with families displaced by war will also find their way to US colleges and universities, populating our classrooms with students whose experiences of war will be inexpressibly different than those of our military families” (n.p.)
Following on the heels of this special issue in Composition Forum, the collection Generation Vet, co-edited by Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat and also reviewed in this special issue, documents the entrance of large numbers of student veterans into higher education and especially in our writing classrooms. According to the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Annual Benefits Report, nearly 800,000 veterans and military family members received educational benefits from the post- 9/11 GI Bill during the 2015 fiscal year (10). Doe and Langstraat predict that in the years to come, “veterans will substantially transform postsecondary classroom dynamics, relationships across campus and in the community, and our understanding of the kinds of literacies students bring to our courses” (2). Contributors to Generation Vet share strategies about the pedagogies and needed faculty development strategies to make writing classrooms spaces where student veterans can succeed and feel welcome, as well as sites for critical education (18). In addition, contributors to Generation Vet offer insight into the extracurricular writing opportunities available to veterans and military-affiliated writers such as writing groups and community writing projects.
In recent years at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), panels, workshops, and a special interest
5 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing group on veterans and military-affiliated writers have appeared on the program and have been well attended. The CCCC Task Force on Veterans issued a Statement entitled “Student Veterans in the Composition Classroom: Realizing their Strengths and Assessing their Needs,” in March 2015, offering insights into ways that faculty could see student veterans in the classroom as assets. At this past year’s CCCC (2016), a half-day workshop took place entitled “Working with Military-Affiliated Writers: Research and Practice for Composition Teachers, Scholars, and WPAs,” organized by Mariana Grohowski, the founding editor of the journal of Veterans’ Studies. This workshop offered micro-presentation sessions on writing- related research underway on veterans’ writing—from interviews and surveys with student veterans about their writing experiences to community-based literacy and service learning projects to the reading of literary work being produced with and by veterans. Some of the researchers presenting their work were senior faculty members; others were graduate students working on dissertations. Some of these faculty and graduate students were veterans; others were military family members or civilians. It was clear at this session that there was much to learn, much to understand about this topic, and obvious enthusiasm for continued work in this area, especially with respect to how veterans are finding writing useful not only for their academic training, preparation, professional development, and re-integration into civilian society and the work world outside the military but for helping them reflect on and make meaning of their military experiences and potentially share their experiences with wider audiences beyond the university.
To contribute to these ongoing spaces for scholarly inquiry and creative expression in this special issue, we invited writing teachers and community literacy scholars, student veterans, and veterans from outside the university, to submit academic articles, creative writing, interviews with leading organizations/figures engaged in veterans’ writing and visual art that grows out of and addresses the need for research into veterans’ writing projects. We wanted to showcase a range of voices and perspectives that reached across branches of the military, across generations of service, and across various identity markers. The CFP included the following areas of inquiry:
6 Editors’ Introduction | Schell & Kleinbart
• the range of experiences and approaches explored through veterans’ writing groups and community literacy projects
• questions of how, when, and why veterans decide to share writing with each other and to “go public” with their writing
• analyses of why writing is useful for veterans and the challenges that writing may pose
• issues of sponsorship, institutional support, outreach, and the logistical/organizational challenges of establishing and maintaining veterans’ writing groups or projects
• models for establishing an inclusive culture within veterans’ writing groups and community literacy projects
• pedagogies and curricula aimed at addressing the needs of student veterans and making the university a more inclusive space for veterans
• service learning projects for veterans in the community, as well as projects that involve student veterans’ academic integration through service work
• the benefits, affordances, and constraints of online writing communities and digital technologies for veterans
• attempts at redefining reductive and stereotypical rhetoric about the military and veterans while, at the same time, paying attention to the needed critiques and analyses of established military institutions and the culture of militarism and U.S foreign policy
• analyses of special events, conferences, readings, art exhibits, performances, and publications that engage both veterans and civilian publics in conversations around such issues as
7 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
disability, veteran suicide rates, military sexual trauma, PTSD, moral injury, and reintegration.
We received submissions that covered some of these areas and that also broke new ground. As we worked with the authors in this issue, it became apparent that the articles we received located veterans’ writing in three major domains: 1) veterans’ writing in extracurricular settings outside the typical writing sequences found on university campuses, whether in community projects and writing groups or specific programs based on veterans’ wellness, healing, and recovery; 2) veterans’ writing in the composition classroom on university campuses or at military bases; 3) faculty development initiatives that help prepare university faculty, instructors, and TAs for their work with veterans in the classroom. A fourth area in which we received fewer submissions centered around veterans’ creative works--poetry, in particular—and reviews of the literature of veterans’ studies and veterans’ writing.
Veterans’ Writing in Extracurricular Settings Half of the essays we selected for this special issue deal with veterans’ writing in extracurricular settings. Karen Springsteen and Melissa Whitworth both engage with questions of what writing can do for veterans in the context of veteran-led community writing groups, what it means to bear witness to war through writing and active listening, and the impact veterans’ writing can have in reshaping civilian attitudes towards veterans and war. Springsteen’s “Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing” draws on four examples of veterans’ compositions, spanning the genres of documentary film, personal narrative, poetry, and editorial writing, to demonstrate the transformative potential of civilian encounters with veterans’ writing. Springsteen suggests that civilians seek out such encounters through literature, film, and other artistic media, as a way of gaining a deeper understanding of veterans’ experiences. She also discusses the value of veterans’ writing groups, such as Warrior Writers, the group that initially connected Springsteen (a civilian) to a community of veteran writers and artists and started her on a journey that has become both integral to her scholarship and deeply personal. For civilians, Springsteen says, bearing witness to war demands a willingness to enter more deeply into conversations about war and to exercise one’s
8 Editors’ Introduction | Schell & Kleinbart full imagination in wrestling with the heightened “moral complexities of postwar reconciliation.” She cites Marilyn Valentino’s 2012 CCCCs address in claiming that compositionists have an “ethical obligation” to engage in this work and argues that civilian acts of witness are vital to bridging the military/civilian divide.
Whitworth’s essay, “Writing to Bear Witness: A Grass Roots Healing Movement,” grows out of her work on a 10-part series on veterans’ issues published by the Ithaca Voice—a project she refers to as “one of the most significant—transformative, even—projects of my 17-year career as a journalist.” Whitworth borrows from the testimonials and perspectives of veterans in the Central New York area, as well as psychological research on the therapeutic efficacy of writing for veterans, to make a case for the value of community writing groups and artists’ collectives in providing a “grass roots” healing experience for veterans. Writing, Whitworth claims, helps to restore a sense of purpose and connectedness for veterans struggling to integrate back into civilian society, particularly for those suffering from post-traumatic stress and moral injury. Whitworth is the only writer in this special issue to discuss the impact moral injury can have in the lives of veterans. As described by author and psychiatrist, Jonathan Shay, moral injury results from the violation or betrayal of a soldier’s core sense of “what’s right” (5). Whitworth cites both Shay and Edward Tick on the subject of moral injury, as well as the notion that bearing witness to war and its impact on the lives of veterans must be understood as a national/collective project in which civilians play an integral part. Shay argues that “healing from trauma depends upon the communalization of the trauma--being able safely to tell the story to someone who is listening and who can be trusted to retell it truthfully to others in the community” (4). In keeping with this principle, Whitworth interrogates her own role as a civilian/journalist-witness and offers insights into how the experience of listening to and reporting on veterans’ issues informed her journalistic ethics.
As we have observed ourselves, many veterans who become involved in community writing groups and artists’ collectives of the sort Springsteen and Whitworth write about, eventually come to define their purposes as writers in audience-focused terms. However, even
9 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing in more limited contexts in which veterans are prompted to write solely for themselves, writing can still play an important role in constructing identities and fostering personal goals. For example, in their essay, “Re-Authoring Narratives: Reflective Writing with Veterans with Spinal Cord Injury,” Aimee C. Mapes and Michael T. Hartley document their research on the role reflective writing played for a small group of veterans with spinal cord injury and disease (SCI/D). During a 5-day outreach project held at the University of Arizona in October, 2013, which was designed to encourage veterans with SCI/D to pursue a college degree program, Mapes and Hartley facilitated a series of writing workshops intended to foster participants’ process of “reauthoring” their own narratives in ways that were grounded in personal experience and helped to clarify and solidify their senses of “who they are and who they want to be.” The article explores the ways in which writing facilitated participants’ meaning-making and adjustment processes, enabled them to form stronger bonds and connections to one another that resulted in inner- group motivation and encouragement (from a cohort who could really understand) and offered a space for participants to forge educational and other life goals. Mapes and Hartley argue that “Reflective writing afforded [veterans] a powerful context to imagine possibilities informed by previous experiences with war, injury, and transitions to civilian life.” Like other authors in this special issue, Mapes and Hartley also discuss the importance of recognizing the function of military discourse in shaping the culture of their writing group at AU. Not only did military discourse form a foundation of mutual trust upon which participants could build deeper relationships but also “The shared sense of military culture among the participants offered a powerful way to translate a past sense of competence into present and future interactions.”
The last of four articles we’re categorizing under the heading of the “extracurricular” is a co-authored piece written by Paige Paquette, an assistant professor at TROY University, in conjunction with six veterans (MAJ Adam Anderson, SGT La Toya Burnette, SGT JeQuetta Canady, Specialist E4 Brandon Carr, SGT First Class Nathaniel Coakley, Ret., and Staff Sergeant Yolanda Teamer) who participated in a reading and writing group called “Story Swap” under Paquette’s leadership at the Warrior Transition Battalion (WTB) at Fort Benning. The WTB, as Paquette explains, is a medical
10 Editors’ Introduction | Schell & Kleinbart treatment facility for soldiers dealing with illnesses or injuries, “many [of which] were sustained during combat or training.” It is a place of great uncertainty for recovering service members, as they wait for the military to decide whether they’ll be transferred “back to a unit or out of the Army.” Paquette describes her process and motivations for obtaining a grant from the Maine Humanities Council to start a reading group in the WTB with the help of Nate Coakley, her co- facilitator. She notes that she expected Story Swap to “encourage reading and discussion of various forms of literature” but was surprised to find that the group “create[d] an outlet for storytelling and writing through the reading group structure.” Her co-authors each provide a brief narrative of their experiences participating in the group, and through these narratives, we get a sense of the range of experiences, identities, motivations, and literary affinities present within the group. As Paquette points out, one refrain common among these narratives is that Story Swap provided a support network that felt like “family” during a difficult time in these veterans’ lives. It’s clear that the participants were profoundly affected by the experience of reading and discussing literature in a small group setting and sharing their honest responses. Several of them describe how Story Swap fostered new literacies for them as readers and writers. Paquette concludes that “Story Swap brought a group of men and women, who spent most of their days waiting on the Army, appointments, and others’ decisions, to a new dynamic in which they were intellectuals who were reading, questioning, debating, and speaking out on their understandings of literature.”
In different ways, all four of these articles acknowledge the uniquely powerful experiences that writing groups and workshops can provide for veterans. In addition to offering a supportive and collaborative atmosphere for veterans, writing and reading groups also foster opportunities for veterans to explore and make meaning of their military experiences among an audience of other veterans before sharing their work with a broader public. Taken as a group, these articles suggest new possibilities for the capacity of writing to help veterans cope with post-traumatic stress and moral injury, as well as disabilities, physical injuries and illnesses. Writing in these contexts also seems to foster goal-setting, identity construction, and intimate forms of group bonding premised in part on a shared military discourse combined with a shared desire to engage in decidedly
11 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing non-military forms of open expression and (in some cases) literary or artistic collaboration. The extcurriculum of veterans’ writing, though, is only one part of the story; another part of that story is centrally located in writing programs on college and university campuses.
Veterans’ Writing in the Composition Classroom As noted earlier, scholarship on how to design veteran friendly writing courses has begun to appear with increasing frequency in journals, edited collections, and on conference panels. What, however, should such a veteran friendly pedagogy look like when student veterans do not self-identify as such, when they are “stealth” veterans in the classroom? In “Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom,” Derek Handley argues that a citizen pedagogy, grounded in principles of rhetorical education and focused on issues important to local communities, is a productive way to address the needs and presence of “stealth veterans” in writing classrooms. Stealth veterans are those who do not self-identify as student veterans on paper and in classrooms but who are, nevertheless, older and who may not feel that they fit in with the traditional 18- 22 year old college student profile. Handley, himself a Navy veteran and a stealth graduate student veteran, shares his own struggles with returning to the college classroom as an African American male veteran and an MFA student after a long stint in the Navy; he shares his own frustration and confusion about confronting academic protocols and modes of speech and writing that seemed inscrutable at first. Partly out of this experience of being a transitioning student veteran in graduate school and partly out of a desire to better reach all of his community college students, Handley crafted a citizenship pedagogy centered around a theme of local concern in Pennsylvania, hydrofracking, which encouraged his students to engage as writers and as citizens interested in issues affecting their local community. A citizenship pedagogy, Handley contends, challenges student veterans to consider how they might “serve” in other ways.
Handley addresses a veteran-friendly pedagogy in a community college setting, but what does a writing classroom look like when those teaching are not veterans and when the environment is a voluntary education center (VEC) on a military base? VECs are
12 Editors’ Introduction | Schell & Kleinbart spaces on military bases where veterans can take undergraduate and graduate college courses and continue their education while serving. Given that setting, how do the dynamics of classroom interaction and authority shift? Bree McGregor and Lourdes Fernandez engage these questions in “Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base: Building Strong Classroom Communities Through Engagement and Advocacy,” exploring what they call the flip side of transition, when instructors adjust to teaching in a military setting. They offer a study of five adjunct instructors, representing a community college in the area and a university in Missouri, who are teaching at the Quantico VEC, which is mainly utilized by active duty Marines, although civilian contractors and military family members can take classes as well. They chronicle how four of the five adjunct instructors at the Quantico VEC, unfamiliar with the military and teaching in a military setting, undergo a major transition as they learn more about how to best serve the needs of their military and military- affiliated students. McGregor and Fernandez insightfully document the learning curve these teachers’ experience, but they also explore the effects that contingent faculty status has on these instructors’ ability to access professional and peer communities. Without office space or professional development support directly at the VEC, these instructors created their own structures of community, support, and advocacy directly in the classroom with their veteran students. Thus, as instructors, they underwent a significant transition phase as they adjusted to the environment, created new teaching strategies to best serve their students, made use of the knowledge students brought with them to the classroom, and struggled to understand what their students might need. Studies such as McGregor and Fernandez’s give readers the opportunity to consider how education for service members begins long before they reach the traditional college campus. Their essay also demonstrates how studying the transition process for instructors working with veterans may ultimately help others on college campuses prepare to better serve their veteran students, a topic explored in two essays on faculty development and teacher preparation.
Faculty Development for Veteran Friendly Campuses The essays in this area offer insights about the process of faculty, instructor, and TA preparation for working with student veterans.
13 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
The topic of transition, as raised by McGregor and Fernandez, both for student veterans and the faculty who teach them, permeates Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat’s essay “Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants: Seizing the Induction Possibilities.” Doe and Langstraat document the curriculum, process, and outcomes of their faculty development workshops “Working with Post-9/11 Student-Veterans: A Faculty Primer,” which they developed with Colorado State University’s Institute for Learning and Teaching (TILT), and the Adult Learner and Veteran Services Office (ALVS). Experienced writing teachers who are also military family members, Doe and Langstraat offer strategies and insights about how to prepare faculty for working successfully with veterans, emphasizing a focus on “strength-based pedagogy,” one that emphasizes the strengths veterans bring to higher education and the classroom as opposed to deficit-model approaches. They also describe how student veterans, as part of the workshop, led discussion on case studies that help faculty puzzle through responses to different pedagogical challenges they and their student veterans may be faced with in the classroom. They argue that such faculty workshops not only provide preparation for faculty to enter into working with veteran students in successful ways but that they also help faculty figure out how they are part of “the important project of college as a reintroduction into civilian society, a bridge between military service and civilian workplaces and communities” (22). Moreover, Doe and Langstraat’s model of faculty development positions student veterans as leaders and resources rather than as object of study--an important “flip of the script” about student veterans.
Coming at faculty development from a departmental and writing program administrator (WPA) oriented perspective, Thomas Sura shifts the discussion of faculty development to a special interest group model of teacher preparation, one that writing program administrators and teacher educators may want to consider for their programs. First, though, he asks the important question: What makes an institution “veteran friendly,” a label and ranking often adopted by campuses or awarded for complying with specific criteria. How can universities adopt an approach to teacher preparation centered around a learning paradigm, one focused on “uncoverage” and on helping teachers own the idea of creating a veteran friendly campus? To address how such an approach might work, Sura offers a microstudy
14 Editors’ Introduction | Schell & Kleinbart of how instructors at West Virginia University responded to a micro-curriculum meant to inquire into the processes, background, and pedagogy needed to work successfully with student veterans. Through the varied components of the curriculum, instructors and TAs not only learn strategies for pedagogical preparation, but they familiarize themselves with the scholarship on veterans in the composition classroom. They also engage in reflective writing about what they are learning and how they want to apply that learning to their classrooms, identifying gaps and fissures in their knowledge and in the infrastructure of the campus. Taken together, Doe and Langstraat and Sura’s essays and curricula for faculty development demonstrate the value of homegrown leadership, learning, and training on these issues, with ties to the larger body of literature on veterans, transition, pedagogy, and higher education.
Creative Works and Reviews This final section opens up possibilities for how creative works by veterans and scholars can shape public dialogue about war and military service. Jenny Pacanowski, an Army veteran of the Iraq War, poet, public speaker, writing group facilitator, and actor, offers up a poem that boldly testifies to the radicalizing impact war can have on both soldiers and civilians as they become increasingly consumed and carried away by the violence that they are immersed in on a daily basis. “Heart of the enemy” tells the story of a U.S. medic who first encounters an Iraqi child when her convoy arrives to provide medical care for the child’s village. She holds a stethoscope to the child’s heart and listens, in an intimate gesture that speaks nostalgically to the mission of “winning hearts and minds,” but as the poem progresses, both the medic and the child begin to transform. The tension crescendos until the child ultimately commits an act of terrorism that pushes the medic to a point of unbridled rage. Through the child’s act of destruction and the medic’s raw and uncensored language, Pacanowski conveys a visceral sense of the damage done to both of these characters. Her poem provides a painfully vivid illustration of the kind of “indignant wrath” Shay refers to in Achilles in Vietnam as a telltale sign of moral injury and “the first and possibly primary trauma” affecting Vietnam veterans (21). He describes this intense form of rage as “arising from social betrayal that impairs a person’s dignity” and being capable of “ruptur[ing] social attachments” (Shay
15 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
21). Indeed, it is a rage that Pacanowski’s speaker acknowledges she doesn’t know how to “come home / From.”
Two reviews and a review essay round out perspectives on recent scholarship in veterans’ studies, rhetoric and writing studies, and creative work by veterans. Jeanne Bohannon reviews Doe and Langstraat’s edited collection Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University, praising the volume for its “consistently networked connections between students and instructors in compelling examples that include prose, poetry, and personal narratives that point to both challenges and successes in composition classrooms that serve veteran communities and veteran- students.” This volume, often cited in this special issue and in a variety of publications in our field, has become a significant resource for the field. Catherine St. Pierre, in her review essay examines two significant books: See me for who I am: Student Veterans’ Stories of War and Coming Home edited by Chrisinger, and When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home by Caplan, as works that “both challenge readers to disrupt the limiting narratives available to veterans to hear fuller stories.” St. Pierre notes that both Caplan and Chrisinger encourage listening and storytelling: “Caplan encourages people to listen to veterans’ stories,” and Chrisinger gives civilians a “way to start” that listening process by reading the work of twenty student veterans.
Creative scholarship by and for veterans and larger publics has become an increasing resource for scholars in our field, not only modeling how veterans use writing to make sense of their experiences and develop a public voice but also offering mixed media examples of publication. Aleashia Walton Valentin’s insightful review of Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing & Artwork By Veterans edited by Aaron Hughes and Rachel McNeill, Artists; Lovella Calica and Kevin Basl offers us the opportunity to see how writing and the arts are helping “warrior writers conquer the divide between the public sphere and veteran experience, (from Vietnam to Afghanistan), one line at a time.”
Conclusion We hope the pieces in this special issue will not only contribute to ongoing conversations about working with veterans in our
16 Editors’ Introduction | Schell & Kleinbart writing classrooms but also that this issue will further expand that conversation to include other sites where writing can contribute to the process of healing, reintegration, public action, and education for veterans, military families, and the civilian communities that engage them. From this work of writing, storytelling, and listening can come the capacity and the means to better consider what going to war and coming home actually means. Veterans’ writing can change the narrative about military service and war by dispelling stereotypes of veterans, empowering and aiding veterans’ reintegration and healing processes, engaging civilian publics more actively in conversations about the military experience, and correcting and filling gaps in the historical record. If we wish to challenge the actions and policies of a society and a citizenry that sent its military personnel to war in the first place, we must work to deepen and extend these types of conversations.
17 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Works Cited
CCC Veterans’ Task Force. “Student Veterans in the Composition Classroom: Realizing their Strengths and Assessing their Needs,” CCCC, March 2015. http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ resources/positions/student-veterans Doe, Sue, and Lisa Langstraat. Generation Vet: Composition, Student- Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Utah State UP, 2014. Gere, Anne Ruggles. “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition.” CCC, vol. 45, no. 1, 1994. pp. 75-92. Hart, Alexis, and Roger Thompson, guest editors. Composition Forum, Special Issue: Veterans and Writing, vol. 28, Fall 2013. Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Scribner, 1994. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Benefits Administration. Annual Benefits Report: Fiscal Year 2015. 03 February 2016. http://benefits.va.gov/REPORTS/abr/ABR- Education-FY15-02032016.pdf
18 Editors’ Introduction | Schell & Kleinbart
Eileen E. Schell, Ph.D., is Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence and Director of the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Doctoral Program at Syracuse University. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and creative nonfiction in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition and the Honors Program. She is the author of five academic books/edited collections. She has worked with veterans off and on since 1986, when as a college student, she helped a WWII bomber pilot edit his memoirs. For the past decade, Eileen has run a nonfiction writing group at the Nottingham Senior Living Community in Jamesville, NY where she has worked with a number of veterans from WWII and the Korean Conflict. She co-founded the Syracuse Veterans’ Writing Group in March 2010 with colleague Ivy Kleinbart. She is co-editor for the forthcoming anthology from the Syracuse Veterans’ Writing Group entitled The Weight of my Armor (New City/Parlor Press).
Ivy Kleinbart teaches academic writing and creative nonfiction in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition at Syracuse University. She also works as a visitor and coordinator for creative nonfiction courses taught through Project Advance, a program that offers college courses in high schools. She received an MA in English in 2009 and an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University in 2007. Her work has appeared in Bateau and NoTell Motel. Ivy co-founded the Syracuse Veterans’ Writing Group in March 2010 with colleague Eileen E. Schell. She is the lead editor for the forthcoming anthology from the Syracuse Veterans’ Writing Group entitled The Weight of my Armor (New City/Parlor Press).
19 Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing
Karen Springsteen, Four examples of Iraq veterans’ self-sponsored writing and Wayne State University media compositions are reviewed in order to develop a rhetoric of “witnessing” (Oliver, “Witnessing and Testimony” 80) with which to engage veterans’ writing. Particular attention is paid to how this rhetoric can help reframe anxieties that accompany faculty work with veterans in composition classes and in higher education more generally.
n her August 2, 2011 column, titled “On War, Guilt, and ‘Thank You for Your IService,’” West Point Professor of English Elizabeth Samet argued that the ritual of US citizens thanking troops for their service is a “poor substitute for something more difficult and painful—a conversation about what war does to the people who serve and the people who don’t.” That conversation can be difficult to initiate in a nation that has seen fifteen years of a post-9/11 global war on terror conducted, for the most part, outside its own borders. US civilians may assume, for example, that all recent veterans have deployed to Iraq or
20 Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing | Springsteen
Afghanistan and—out of ignorance, curiosity, or concern—have the desire to ask: “What was it like over there?” “Did you see any action?” Or the lesser spoken (I hope) “did you ever kill anyone?” To some veterans and their family members, such questions may seem foolish or smack of a certain voyeurism. In the words of former Marine and Assistant Professor of English Galen Leonhardy, “asking a person whether he or she has killed another person does seem to push the limits of propriety” (346). Yet, “action”—killing and combat—is a truth of war. It is as undeniable as it is ineffable: overwhelming, seemingly beyond words. Faced with the moral complexities of postwar reconciliation, in the midst of ongoing US military action and with serious stumbling blocks to the kind of deeper conversation Samet calls for, how many of us—veterans and civilians—turn off, tune out, go numb?
In this essay, I argue that veterans’ self-sponsored writing and media compositions offer a way to reconnect veterans and civilians with one another and with the necessity of communicating about war and its lasting effects. I first review one example of such work: Iraq veteran Zach Skiles’ recent feature length documentary, “Veterans ‘On Killing,’” which takes as its central organizing feature dialectical engagement with an academic text1. I then address some implications of this and other forms of veterans’ self-sponsored writing and representation for those working with veterans in higher education, particularly in college writing classrooms. I contend that academics must be able to work deftly with some specific ideological tensions (i.e. differences in values and beliefs) that veterans’ writing can make poignant and pressing, and I suggest that a rhetoric of witnessing may be useful for doing so. I draw this rhetoric from the work of feminist philosopher Kelly Oliver, from Iraq veterans’ creative writing, and from my own experience as a civilian supporter of the national Warrior Writers organization, a nonprofit that offers veterans’ writing workshops and community literacy events in major cities nationwide.
1 My review of Skiles’ documentary was first published by the online organization Military Experience and the Arts: militaryexperience.org
21 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Zach P. Skiles’ “Veterans ‘On Killing’” In a playlist of eight videos available on YouTube, each of which is 9-12 minutes long and has been viewed anywhere from 126-1200 times, Skiles shares the voices and faces of veterans as they read and respond to passages from Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman’s book, On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society, which Skiles read while receiving treatment at an in-patient PTSD clinic in Northern California called the Gateway House. By first reading a passage from the book aloud for the camera and then offering his or her own perspective on that passage, twelve veterans (of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Kosovo) bring Grossman’s research to life. When, for example, Grossman writes about how citizens today are mostly insulated from death—our meat is pre-packaged; medicine prolongs life; mortuaries take care of our dead—Iraq veteran Jose Arias reflects on how death is treated in war, discusses how “our honor code prevented us from talking about it” and suggests that “we create the bubbles we want to live in.” When Grossman cites the term “operant conditioning” from B.F. Skinner’s work, Iraq veteran Mack Butler follows up by talking about what had become “natural” from his military training. Relating an experience from combat, he talks about the “path of least resistance” and the power of automatic, as if instinctual, response.
In another passage, read by Skiles, Grossman uses the term “combat exhaustion” to describe a scenario in which the current physical and logistical ability to sustain combat outstrips humans’ psychological capacity to endure it. Grossman notes that never before have troops had to stay in such a continual state of fight-or-flight, and seldom have they experienced such high levels of imminent personal risk without respite. In response to this passage, Skiles tells us that, in his first two weeks in country in 2003, he got eleven total hours of sleep, a point about sleep deprivation echoed by Javier Juarez, a veteran of Kosovo and Iraq: “when I came back and I would tell people I didn’t sleep for a year, physically you might’ve but even then your brain didn’t.” The vigilance and danger has been so extreme in some cases that, as Iraq veteran Irwing Lazo puts it in the documentary, “in a sense, you have to play like you’re dead already”—a practice Lazo sees extending into veterans’ postwar lives as well.
22 Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing | Springsteen
At home in the US, sitting on their porch, two veterans (not identified by name) tell us that the effects of such service aren’t as noticeable “until you get out and maybe are a civilian…I think it’s been promoted, like, I think in the military it’s better to be wound up and uptight.” The need to shift mindsets and come to terms with the ways in which a military may commit what Grossman calls “psychological warfare” upon its own troops, was a need Iraq veteran Tasia Flores put this way before the camera:
It’s much like in basic training when you do say “kill, kill, kill.” It’s just another word … but reading this book, I see how it can affect people, you know. Learning that “kill” is not a bad word to knowing, like, yes it is, and it has a profound ripple effect not only on my life or the person that was affected by it, but their family and, you know, their community.
For all of us, the personal reflections and real responses to Grossman’s work captured in Skiles’ documentary speak to the larger psychological and moral context of war and post-traumatic “stress,” which now seems too plain a word. Nancy Sherman has written extensively about “moral wounds” (“Soldiers” B6; Afterwar 4), and healing from those wounds, she argues, is collective work; it is critically connected with the creation of culture in which veterans “do not view their war as a private burden banned from their families and communities” (The Untold War 7). Skiles’ documentary helps advance this effort by teaching that veterans’ issues leaving the service or coming home from one or multiple deployments are not pinned to individual defect or aberration; in fact, the documentary makes clear in its engagement with Grossmans’ work that no vet is alone in feeling the mind-body effects of a military’s systematic, years-in-the-making, training apparatus. In this way, Skiles’ work is humane, powerful, and humbling.
Implications for Higher Ed What are the implications of Skiles’ work for those of us in higher education? If the men and women we see on screen were to be among the many students who now attend college on the Post 9/11 GI Bill or with the assistance of Vocational Rehabilitation benefits, would we have any good sense of where they are coming from (cf. Chrisinger)?
23 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Many institutions, my own included, have earned “military friendly” designations, an achievement that both enhances recruitment of veterans as students and warrants discussion about how to follow through, continually, on the promises of that label. Aware of the sort of responsiveness to academic work generated in Skiles’ documentary, university faculty and staff members realize that, although veterans on campus may be first-year students, they are not eighteen year- old freshmen and may have very different orientations to schooling, to professors, and to assigned material than many of their “peers” with whom we are more accustomed to working (cf. CCCC “Student Veterans in College Composition Classroom: Realizing Their Strengths and Assessing Their Needs”). Writing specialists, in particular, recognize that because first-year writing courses are almost universally required for graduation, often with small class sizes and one-on-one feedback, we are uniquely positioned to connect with veterans, some of whom may wish to draw directly upon military experiences in the educational context (cf. Hart and Thompson). To the extent that writing faculty are among the first points of real pedagogical contact for veterans, we know that we cannot afford to remain uneducated about veterans’ prior experiences; however, we may not wish to pin veterans down, pressing them for information or placing upon their shoulders an onus of disclosure that they do not want (cf. Morrow and Hart). We have, surely, an abiding interest in the intrinsically compelling aspects of veterans’ writing as a literature or as a mirror unto cultural conditions, yet we also have what past CCCC Chair Marilyn Valentino notably called “an ethical obligation” to react responsibly to veterans in the classroom (170).
For our part, composition researchers have been vigorous in our support of veteran students and thorough in our consideration of veterans’ texts. The more difficult move, in my view, has been to negotiate a level of self-conscious engagement with explicitly ideological dimensions of veterans’ representation. For example, I support Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). But what do I do with that commitment when I show up at the Veterans Resource Center on campus to facilitate a five-day academic writing orientation for new student veterans from across the map? My past assumption has been that those who occupy institutional advocacy positions may be better served by an amiable neutrality, which would, hypothetically, remove obvious agendas and open the door to deeper interpersonal
24 Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing | Springsteen relationships with vets. However, that assumption must be monitored and questioned. The same may be said of the assumption that any critique of the US military, especially any critique based in opposition to militarism or anti-war sentiment, would be received as relatively incompatible with a pro-veteran stance. One may wish, for example, to be “against the war but for the troops.” However, as Samet points out, there are inherent contradictions and difficulties in such a position. “Most [people] fail,” she writes, “to consider the social responsibilities such a stance commits them to fulfilling in the coming decades.” Indeed, many in higher education have lingering anxieties about the depth of commitment required when working with veterans and about where to draw lines between activist, supporter, teacher, and friend. Our questions may include the following:
1. How can civilian or noncombat veteran faculty, who haven’t “been there,” possibly understand, imagine, or relate to the experience of deployment, war, and homecoming? Wouldn’t it be better to keep our mouths shut or place certain topics, such as war, and genres, such as personal writing, off limits in the classroom?
2. How might a veteran or a civilian on campus reconcile pride in military identity with some of the dark aspects of military experience, such as veterans’ suicide and military sexual trauma?
3. Don’t faculty members need to be therapists to work with veterans or military family members who want to talk or write about their experiences as such? If it is increasingly clear, as Professor Joyce Goldberg wrote in a 2011 column detailing a military history course she taught in which she felt overwhelmed by the demands of veteran students and their families, “just how unprepared universities are to deal with the needs of these student veterans or their relatives,” then how do we get prepared? Whose job is it to “deal”—a rather unfortunate phrasing?
In what follows, I seek to demonstrate how a rhetoric of witnessing can be useful for addressing these questions. Though this rhetoric
25 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing of witnessing offers no easy answers or innocent positions, it can, I believe, encourage readers, writers, listeners, and speakers to hold their anxieties, contradictions, and competing points of view in suspense, staying present in a potentially conflicted conversation about the effects of war on us all. Specifics regarding who can speak with most authority about war, when conversations about military experience are appropriate and welcome, what being a veteran or a civilian signifies in our time, why violence seems so attractive, abhorrent, or inevitable, and where to look for truth and support for the living, can then be accessed through a connection with veterans’ writing and self-representation that is more informed, thoughtful, and sustained. Such is the rhetorical power of witnessing, outlined in the remainder of this essay.
Witnessing The idea of witnessing veterans’ writing first occurred to me when I started to work with Warrior Writers, and it came in response to my own concerns over my qualifications and right to work with this organization, having little family history and knowledge of the military when I began. Drawing the term “witness” from Warrior Writers mission statement (“About Us”), I first conceptualized witnessing as being a witness to, and thus took on the role of quiet observer. This ostensibly passive stance allowed me to actively focus on the role of the self and carve out time to come to terms with my own position in the world of veterans representing war and peace. At an early workshop, for example, when an Iraq veteran offered the word “chains” to prompt our writing, I thought of my own relatively sheltered experiences and wondered: what I could possibly come up with about chains? I composed the following response, which I have shared in the book Generation Vet: Veterans, Composition, and the Post-9/11 University (Doe and Langstraat) but repeat here as an origin story that set in motion my current focus on the ideological dimensions of working with vets. I wrote:
Ever since I moved to the North Country [an area of upstate New York], I have been collecting bits of printed matter related to the war and its aftermath… My collection is like one of those paper chains we made when we were kids—each person’s little strip hooking onto the next. A Sesame Street themed booklet
26 Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing | Springsteen
for kids whose parents are deployed, taken from a kiosk at the Watertown mall; an Ottawa newspaper with the front page headline: No Peace for Vets; the card a ROTC officer gave me when I told him I took a year of Arabic; the half-ass note written by an Air Force recruiter as an excuse for Sarah [my student] to go take her ASVAB; the free Fort Drum newspaper I snagged at Valero [a gas station] while the guy in front of me bought a case of Old Mil at seven forty-five in the morning. There are so many more little pieces I could add to this chain, including the pages we are all making right now. When the Veterans Taskforce tries to tie yellow ribbons on the trees next month, I want them to tie these paper chains instead. Some of us don’t care for yellow ribbons unless they end war. (Springsteen 141-2, italics in original)
When we were done writing, each workshop participant read aloud what we had written. I went last, and when it was time for the next prompt, my co-organizer, Iraq veteran Nathan Lewis, responded to the words I had just read by asking the group to compose something starting with “Dear Veterans Taskforce.” As both Lewis and I were members of the Taskforce at the time, his graceful gesture made it clear that, like links in a chain, our variable positionalities are tied together: yoked. And I believe it is the quality of these connections that lies at stake as universities wake up to the increasing presence of veterans on campus.
Research can quantify things like funding for veterans’ programs, square footage for resource centers, job openings for support professionals, and trainings for faculty and staff. Harder to quantify and impossible to mandate is the nature of beliefs, attitudes and values about, towards, and among veterans—ideological matters— that take shape within these efforts. “For so many years now,” writes Iraq veteran Drew Cameron,
the wars waged by our country have influenced our daily rituals, our morning consciousness. For some the recognition is very close to home. For all of us though, war, as it does, continues to pressure the very fabric of our culture and worldview. Have we not all become veterans of war then? It is this very question of responsibility, of openness and honesty, that reveals the essence
27 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
of conflict and how it shapes our collective lives. When someone says: “I cannot know what it was like over there,” we want them to. When someone says: “I can’t imagine how it must have been,” we need them to. When someone says: “I cannot,” they must. (qtd. in Lewis, I Hackey Sacked vii-viii)
I repeat this quotation every chance I get, as the imperative of Cameron’s call, his provocation, and the question of responsibility led me to step beyond my initial idea of witnessing as watching and summoning any direct experience that would implicate me in the scene of veterans’ writing. I would have agreed with Edward Tick then, as I do now, that “it is imperative for the health of our veterans that they experience other ordinary Americans … as walking with them and accepting accountability for our wars” (238). Yet, at the same time, I could have fallen easily into a category of citizens who, while the country was in the middle of a decade long war, placed our focus elsewhere on priorities that now seem shallow. Bridging that gap of alienation, Cameron’s call has been an invitation for me, as I hope it will be for others, to move productively into what Oliver describes as a second side of witnessing, one which may be useful for negotiating the ideological tensions outlined above.
In “Witnessing and Testimony” Oliver argues that “witnessing” is a double-sided term (80). On one hand, witnessing retains the sense of being an eyewitness to historical facts and actual events, as in its juridical use (like in a courtroom). On the other hand, witnessing, for Oliver, includes the sense of “bearing witness to [some] truth about humanity and suffering that transcends those facts” (81, italics mine). The notion of seeing with one’s own eyes (“what went on over there”) is paired with the notion of testifying to that which cannot be seen (bearing witness). And it is this realm of the unseen—what Oliver calls witnessing “beyond recognition” (Witnessing 20)—where we may fully absorb Cameron’s non-literal question, “have we not all become veterans of war then?” Applied to veterans’ writing, witnessing is about more than getting together and telling stories of what happened in the most literal sense. Witnessing involves telling some truth that touches the lives of everyone.
28 Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing | Springsteen
For civilians, adopting a rhetoric of witnessing may mean tracing our own allegiances to military service, war, and the prospect of peace. We may need to disrupt a sense of dislocation from these matters (i.e. a sense that, because we have not served, it is not our place to “go there”) and enter into dialogue with veterans, if “only,” at first, by engaging with their self-representations and writing. Samet points to this need for engagement by conveying the words of an officer who says: “People thank me for my service, but they don’t really know what I’ve done.” Knowing deeply what veterans have done is, in my view, a lifelong commitment, requiring civilians’ introspection much more than gratitude. As Samet writes, “Thanking soldiers on their way to or from war isn’t the same as imaginatively following them there.” Veterans’ compositions can help that imagination along. For example, in a poem from Warrior Writers’ third anthology, After Action Review: A Collection of Writing and Artwork by Veterans of the Global War on Terror, Lewis writes:
If things were the other way around
20 year old Iraqi soldiers would write home to girlfriends about the cold New York winter. About watching snow blow from frozen lakes.
A Captain would stand under a tall pine in Appalachia and call home to Baghdad on a satellite phone. He’d try to be cheerful and tell them about skunks, hummingbirds and the mountains.
Children would scribble the number and type of every enemy vehicle in Crayon…
Iraqi soldiers would take reenlistment orders under the St. Louis arch, in the shadow of the Washington Monument. Two hundred protestors march down Haifa Street demanding an end to the war… (11)
In this poem, Lewis draws on what he has seen as an eyewitness to war to paint a picture that does not exist yet speaks truth about human suffering, the waning innocence of children, the split consciousness of
29 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing a nation. With this act of witnessing, Lewis opens up an imaginative space where we can move beyond what Oliver calls “the melancholic choice between either dead historical facts or traumatic repetition of violence” (“Witnessing and Testimony” 81). The writing turns things around, remakes the common sense of war. And in this remaking lies the power of witnessing to bring us beyond a state of stale relations, hollow platitudes, and fear on all sides.
Using a rhetoric of witnessing to engage with veterans’ poetry, documentary, reflection, and, in the final example that follows, narrative can challenge reductive representations of veterans (such as stereotypes of veterans as heroes to be put on a pedestal, ticking time bombs, or sad souls in need of help) and turn those representations into something more nuanced and truthful. For example, when Iraq veteran Ivan Lopez opened fire at Fort Hood in April 2014, injuring 16 people and killing four, including himself (Tan), Iraq veteran Jon Turner wrote a letter to several newspapers and media outlets offering his condolences to the family members of those who were part of the tragedy, including Lopez, and setting the record straight about the reality of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which, arguably, had not been fully recognized as a factor in Lopez’s actions, given that Lopez served a relatively short deployment (of four months) and had an occupation (driving a truck) that some assumed would place him on the periphery of conditions associated with PTSD. Titling the letter “Many Faces of War,” Turner wrote:
As a two time veteran of the Iraq war in 2005 and 2006, as an infantryman with the marines, as well as being a purple heart recipient for a minor shrapnel wound, and having been diagnosed with severe Post Traumatic Stress and two Traumatic Brain Injuries, I must depict my own unhealthy emotions that have risen from the response [to] this past week’s shooting by the officials who have publicly made claims that PTSD is not an issue. In 2007, as an alcoholic who underwent two rehab treatments before the age of 22 because the only way I could deal with my deployments was by staying drunk, I was discharged from Camp Lejeune and into the civilian populous who had an even lesser understanding of war, the effects of war, or the impact of Post Traumatic Stress.... I was fortunate enough to have been introduced to a small veteran
30 Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing | Springsteen
population in Vermont who believed in alternative methods to what was, and continues to be, provided in attempt to reduce the symptoms of PTSD, but the reality is, many of us will not find a healthy outlet. For the past 7 years I have travelled the country working with veterans by utilizing creative writing and artistic expression to make sense of the triggers, dreams, behaviors and methodology that we have adapted since [we] returned home. Having worked with hundreds of veterans, having heard many sides to many stories, having seen the impact war has had on those who served as well as their family members, spanned over several generations and times of conflict, I can and will always say that, regardless as to whether or not we saw death, touched the hearts and minds which we were intended to do, or whether we drove trucks and served for only 4 months overseas, PTSD is real and it has the potential and ability to rub off on those around us and leave anyone who was exposed to war and trauma in a state of confusion.
In this letter, Turner draws on both sides of the act of witnessing. Turner first turns his own face to the light by testifying to trauma he experienced personally before moving into a discussion of war’s intergenerational and vicarious effects. In this way, Turner both identifies with a tragic dimension of Lopez’s actionsand meets that tragedy with truth; Turner steps through his own specific embodied history in order to illuminate some vital and shared aspects of the human condition—namely, the need for honesty, humility, and communion in the wake of war.
Such is the double-sided work of witnessing in this letter and in other examples of veterans’ self-sponsored composition presented in this essay. These veterans were not writing and creating for a grade or for college credit but out of a desire to communicate, to enhance and clarify the public’s understanding, and to speak a collective truth, not just a personal one. Witnessing demands that collectivity. It is a communal activity rooted in individual experience but not stuck there. By adopting a rhetoric of witnessing, then, compositionists need no longer leave it to some other part of the university or society to “deal with” veterans and their relatives. We are those relatives—if not by blood, then by kinship in other forms.
31 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Works Cited
CCCC. “Student Veterans in College Composition Classroom: Realizing Their Strengths and Assessing Their Needs.” NCTE. org, National Council of Teachers of English. March 2015. Web. 11 June 2016. Chrisinger, David, ed. See Me For Who I Am: Student Veterans’ Stories of War and Coming Home. Excelsior College, 2016. Print. Doe, Sue and Lisa Langstraat, eds. Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11University. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2014. Print. Goldberg, Joyce. “Why I Can No Longer Teach U.S. Military History.” Chronicle.com. Chronicle of Higher Education. 18 September 2011. Web. 11 June 2016. Grossman, David. On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995. Print. Hart, D. Alexis and Roger Thompson. “’An Ethical Obligation’: Promising Practices for Student Veterans in College Writing Classrooms.” NCTE.org. National Council of Teachers of English. June 2013. Web. 11 June 2016. Leonhardy, Galen. “Transformations: Working with Veterans in the Composition Classroom.” Teaching English in a Time of War. Spec. issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College36.4 (2009): 339–52. Print. Lewis, Nathan. I Hackey Sacked in Iraq. Burlington, VT: Combat Paper Press, 2009. Print. Lewis, Nathan. “Turn Tables.” After Action Review: A Collection of Writing and Artwork by Veterans of the Global War on Terror. Barre, VT: L. Brown and Sons Printing, 2011. Print. Morrow Sean and Alexis Hart. “Veterans in College Writing Classes: Understanding and Embracing the Mutual Benefit.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student-Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Eds. Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2014. Print. Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print.
32 Veterans’ Writing and a Rhetoric of Witnessing | Springsteen
Oliver, Kelly. “Witnessing and Testimony.” Parallax 10.1 (2004): 79- 88. Print. Samet, Elizabeth. “On War, Guilt and ‘Thank You for Your Service.’” Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg LP. 1 April 2011. Web. 6 November 2013. Sherman, Nancy. “Soldiers’ Moral Wounds.” The Chronicle Review, 16 April 2010, p. B6-9. Print. Sherman, Nancy. The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010. Print. Sherman, Nancy, Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Print. Skiles, Zach P. “Veterans ‘On Killing’”. YouTube.com. YouTube. 9 April 2015. Web. 9 December 2015. Springsteen, Karen. “Closer to Home: Veterans’ Workshops and the Materiality of Writing.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student- Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Eds. Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2014. Print. Tan, Michelle. “Hood Shooter to Police: ‘You Better Kill Me Now.’” Armytimes.com. Military Times & Sightline Media. 23 January 2015. Web. 11 June 2016. Tick, Edward. War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2005. Print. Turner, Jon. “Many Faces of War.” 11 April 2014, 10:05 a.m. Facebook post. Web. 11 June 2016. Valentino, Marilyn J. “Serving Those Who Have Served: Preparing for Student Veterans in Our Writing Programs, Classes and Writing Centers. WPA 36.1 (2012): 164-78. Print. “About Us: Veterans Transforming Their Lives Through Art.” Warriorwriters.org. 2015. Web. 11 June 2016. Warrior Writers. After Action Review: A Collection of Writing and Artwork by Veterans of the Global War on Terror. Barre, VT: L. Brown and Sons Printing, 2011. Print.
33 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Karen Springsteen is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. She currently teaches first- year composition and coordinates Community Writing initiatives for the department’s Composition Program.
34 Writing to Bear Witness: A Grass Roots Healing Movement
Melissa Whitworth, During the post 9/11 period, veteran writing programs—led Syracuse University by grassroots movements such as Warrior Writers and the Combat Paper Project—have proliferated across the US. Clinical and anecdotal evidence shows writing is an effective means to address the trauma of warfare; focusing on the unnatural experience of combat, PTSD and moral injury. Most importantly, the writing groups provide an informal, supportive and communal environment in which veterans share stories with each other, and with the civilian population. This essay follows the story of Nathan Lewis, an Iraq War veteran and an influential (and beloved) member of the veteran writing community. It blends journalism, by a writer following the “Solutions Journalism model, with academic inquiry—from the perspective of the soldier/veteran and the journalist/witness. Nathan’s story of war trauma and writing (through multiple interviews) is threaded through seminal moments in post-war literature, trauma theory and the concept of witnessing.
Nathan’s Story athan Lewis lifts the lid of a large plastic grey vat. “Shredded uniforms” Nit says on the outside, in thick black
35 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing marker. Inside are the slivered remnants of hundreds of military uniforms, like multicolored confetti: shreds of blue from the Navy, yellow from desert camo worn by the Army in the Arabian Desert, and green from the Marines’ woodland camouflage.
Lewis is an Army veteran—he served with Charlie Battery 1st of the 14th Regiment, the 214th Brigade Artillery out of Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He did his pre-deployment training at White Sands, New Mexico, an old military base where General Patton tested tanks. He was trained to become an expert in “Multiple Launch Rocket Systems” artillery.
“We shot cluster bombs,” he says. He spent most of his six-month deployment in Baghdad, but traveled all over Central and Southern Iraq. He was 18 when he entered basic training and 20 when he went to Iraq.
But now, at 33, he is a master papermaker and writer, living in the farmland outside Trumansburg, NY. He is one of the thousands of veterans who report symptoms of PTSD, but Lewis prefers the term “war trauma,” because he feels it’s more accurate to his (and other veterans’) experience.
He is having trouble inhaling enough air—inflamed respiratory disease, his doctor says. He suspects it’s caused by the smoke from “burn pits” that blaze all day at the Army bases in war zones, and the depleted uranium used in U.S. weaponry, which becomes airborne.
Lewis is a longtime member of two sister organizations: the Combat Paper Project and Warrior Writers. He runs five to six writing and paper-making workshops a year, helping hundreds of veterans and military family members in the transition from war zone to home life.
The projects also help these communities tell their stories and communicate their military experience through art, he explains. The veterans he meets at workshops donate huge duffel bags full of uniforms they no longer need or want. “They want us to use them for future projects and workshops; the fibers are added to our collective
36 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth lineage. We will never run out of uniforms,” says Lewis. Most of the uniforms are painstakingly shredded by hand, cut with scissors into postage stamp-sized pieces.
Lewis took up papermaking in 2006, and he began taking part in— now hosting—dozens of writing, papermaking and book-binding workshops. “I think I have milked as much therapy out of papermaking and writing as I can at this point. Now I am more focused on the craft of it. I have much more to learn and intend to keep making art that focuses on militarism and my experience in Iraq.”
He is tall and slender, with muscular arms. On his right forearm is a four-inch tattoo of a paperclip, a symbol of resistance in World War II that has now come to be a symbol of non-violent protest. During Vietnam its meaning endured and came to stand for “People Against People Ever Re-Enlisting, Civilian Life Is Preferred.” His studio is full of symbols. Above the vats of uniforms is a heavy chain stretching across the wall; it is decorated, like a charm bracelet, with helmets, boots, beer cans and the empty prescription bottles of painkillers, psychotropics and sleep aids. That was part of a piece of performance art he and two veteran friends put on in downtown Ithaca.
“That is what you carry around with you. Most people got it,” he says.
The Hollander beater—a machine developed by the Dutch in the 1600s, although Lewis’s is from the 1970s—whirs and spins. The uniforms, mixed with water and beaten for two hours, become a clay- colored pulp, like oatmeal.
“I think it is a lifelong thing, you are not going to wholly cure yourself of it,” he says of the psychological burdens he struggles with. “It comes and goes in severity, you don’t totally undo war trauma.”
Last September, Lewis lost a close friend, Jacob George, who had helped him and many others, confront mental illness. George could no longer cope, and he committed suicide.
37 Refl ections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Figure 1 Nathan Lewis pictured in his Trumansburg, NY studio. Here he uses a Hollander beater to turn shredded military uniforms into paper pulp. Photograph courtesy of David Burbank.
38 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth
“I think that veterans commit suicide not just from the horrors and trauma of the military and war,” Lewis said, “but because they return to a society ravaged by a decade and a half of war with no end in sight.” He explained some of the difficulties that come with reintegration:
At the core of it is a distrust and an angry bitterness at society, culture, and country that put me in that position and created the war. When you talk about adjustment issues… that is a really big thing. I feel really betrayed. People are congratulating you and treating you as this wonderful thing, [a hero], and I think of it as something completely different. That is a recurring problem.
More than any other effect from the war, it is this injustice that troubles him the most. That is the root of his war trauma, he says. “I don’t believe the war I participated in was just. It was not even legal,” he says.
Papermaking and writing has helped in many ways. “It is a great expressive tool,” he says. “You are not going to write away all your problems. But this is a good first step. … It’s a safe space. We don’t judge or critique anyone’s politics, religion, or experience. What do you get out of a writing group? Community, understanding, engagement, all these wonderful things.”
He keeps the door closed while he is spinning the fragments so the noise does not disturb his neighbors. But as the Hollander whirs to a halt, he throws open the doors and starts pouring the pulp into vats and then “sheets”—screens of mesh framed with wood. Lewis works overlooking cornfields, berry farms and dense woodlands. Bees look for a home in the studio rafters. Across the way, a neighbor mows her lawn.
He is making new batches of paper today using one of his favorite techniques: while the pulp is still wet, he uses stencils to form faint images in the paper—it’s called pulp painting. Then, once the paper is dry, he can layer these images with text and ink drawings.
39 Refl ections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
While training at the White Sands Missile Range, Lewis collected remnants of war on walks in the desert, which he removes from an old cookie tin today. There are 50 caliber bullets, his dog tags, which have grown rusty, machine gun belt “linkage” and a “humanitarian service medal” given to him by a friend. There’s another medal for service in the war on terrorism and a plastic toy soldier. He uses them for stencils now. He is known, amongst the paper-making community for his faces using bullet stencils. He carefully presses the bullets into the wet pulp, stands back for a moment, and then wipes his hands.1
Figure 2 Nathan Lewis uses a variety of techniques when making paper, including “pulp pressing” - using his dog tags and other military paraphernalia to imprint into the wet pulp. Photograph courtesy of David Burbank. unmeDiateD stoRytelling: an ethiCal impeRatiVe I met Nathan Lewis for the fi rst time in February 2015 when I started a writing project that became one of the most signifi cant— transformative, even—projects of my 17-year career as a journalist. Our meeting was the starting point for a ten-part series about veterans for a small but ambitious local newspaper in Ithaca, The Ithaca Voice, founded in 2014 by a young and dynamic journalist, Jeff
40 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth
Stein. The first time I sat down to interview Nathan, we talked at length about his work for Warrior Writers and the Combat Paper Project. Warrior Writers was founded in 2007 by Lovella Calica in Philadelphia, and since then, the organization has proliferated across the East Coast, along with many other veteran writing groups, such as the Veterans Writing Group in Washington DC, NEA’s Operation Homecoming, the IVAW’s Warrior Writer Project, workshops at New York University, and the Syracuse Veterans’ Writing Group in Syracuse, New York. This year alone, Lewis will have hosted five workshops, some on military bases for service men and women still in active duty.
The series for the Voice aimed to address the varied problems facing the veterans of Central New York. In Tompkins County alone (the county in which Ithaca is located), there are nearly 6,000 veterans (five percent of the population); all of them face challenges of reintegration after their military careers. The series was guided by the Solutions Journalism Network, a national organization that promotes, funds, and consults with journalists on work that seeks resolutions to community problems. The idea is that, as journalists, we have a responsibility to research and report on organizations and social services established to counteract the stories of injustice or struggle we uncover. And so the series was divided into five themes, each with two parts: a “problem” within the veteran community and then a “solution,” be it a solution in action already or a possibility or plan for the future. The five themes were structured around issues of health (mental and physical), homelessness, incarceration, employment, and the unique challenges faced by women veterans. The series began with a data-focused introduction, announced by the editor as the start of an in-depth series that outlined the alarming statistics—such as high rates of homelessness, unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction, suicide and incarceration for non-violent crimes—that disproportionately affect the veteran population. I then focused on personal stories and those individuals and programs within the community working to solve those problems. As part of the solutions side to the piece, I covered the work of treatment courts in Binghamton, NY and Buffalo, NY (which offer rehabilitation instead of jail time). The Solutions Journalism model seemed to be, for me, advocating a more involved role for the journalist – an ethical drive to not only report on the solutions side to a story but to push
41 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing for those solutions to happen. And so, a local veterans’ advocate and I lobbied several local judges who were slow to adopt the treatment court model in Central New York. The Voice became involved in a local job fair for veterans, providing social networking and publicity for the event; we also worked to establish connections among women veterans in disparate communities. We ran a piece highlighting the work of the Cornell Small Farms Program, led by director Anusuya Rangarajan, which was awarded a $712,500 grant in February 2015 to help launch 20 veteran-owned farms in Upstate New York and initiate a network connecting them all. Lastly, with the help of a freelance film producer, the editors at theVoice and I made a short documentary film about the work of a formerly homeless veteran, Martin Warren, who is now a crisis outreach worker across 13 counties of Central New York, with an organization called Soldier On. The Voice concluded that the real victories for the veteran community were taking place outside of public policy. Veterans were not waiting for government programs or funding to catch up to the needs of their community. I saw farms, cooperatives, writing groups, support groups, and other means of connection springing up with no impetus from larger organizations. In the case of writing groups, I was surprised to find that the VA was taking the lead from veterans; a national infrastructure of writing groups already existed, with little or no impetus from the VA.
It also became abundantly clear to me that, for many veterans, bearing witness to the experience of war in a supportive group atmosphere was an essential first step towards healing and recovery—or perhaps even just acceptance. The writing groups that Nathan leads start with a discussion forum where the assembled veterans talk to each other and share their experiences. Many are resistant to writing in the early stages, he says. Yet they come all the same. From that act of talking and sharing there is a logical and instinctive, next step: writing is a “natural, and obvious progression,” says Lewis. This is why grass roots “healing” movements such as Warrior Writers have had such success in forming meaningful connections within our communities and why they have grown at such a fast rate during the post 9/11 era.
42 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth
Throughout the eight-month period of my investigation, Lewis’s insights guided me through the sometimes insular world of veterans and recovery. Although communities—especially in liberal college towns like Ithaca—have learned crucial lessons from the Vietnam era, many veterans still find their homecoming to be a supremely isolating experience. All the veterans I spoke to talked of an overwhelming sense of loneliness when they returned from service. Their civilian communities don’t understand what the military experience is like, and often friends want to help but have no idea how to ask. Naturally—and rightly—the veteran community is suspicious of members of the media, seeing their personal stories being spun in ways that make them uncomfortable, or woven into a wider editorial narrative over which they have no control. Seeing one’s stories of trauma and recovery in black and white, and in a public forum, can be re-traumatizing. Secondary trauma was the absolute antithesis of everything I wanted to achieve as the orchestrator and writer of this project. If—and this happened on occasion—a veteran told me his or her story of war trauma but decided it would be too painful to see printed, then that story stayed between us. However, most of the veterans I interviewed said that the decision to allow me to share their stories with a wider public was a therapeutic and positive one, especially once we had built a bond of trust.
In Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s seminal work, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Felman writes:
[T]estimony has become a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times—our relation to the traumas of contemporary history…As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory. To testify is to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for the truth—is to accomplish a speech act, rather than simply formulate a statement. (5)
Felman points out that “the appointment to bear witness is, paradoxically enough, an appointment to transgress the confines of that isolated stance, to speak for others and to others” (3) —the isolated stance being that of the trauma survivor, for the experience of trauma and PTSD is marked by a solitary, inward turn. Once
43 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing the survivor has shared their story (or testimony), Felman suggests that the responsibility or burden becomes a communal one. And with that comes a huge responsibility on the part of the secondary witness bearer (or in this context, the journalist) to both represent the survivor and transmit that story to a wider audience.
During the summer of 2015, I interviewed over 50 veterans and veteran advocates. Nearly all of them talked about sharing their experiences in various contexts: writing came up again and again as a means to do this. And I realized the experiences I was having while listening to them were not just those of a journalist in pursuit of a story, but something much more powerful. In War and the Soul (2005), Edward Tick emphasizes the importance of storytelling and listening in the healing process for veterans. He writes, “It is important not only that the veteran tells his story but that he experiences it as being heard…The public platform is necessary for the story to get passed on and become part of the community’s collective wisdom and mythic history” (221). The more interviews I conducted, the more I realized that I was bearing witness to the stories of men and women who felt, at large, completely unheard (and certainly not understood) within our community. Just listening to someone’s story was an essential act of connection. The journalistic compulsion to complete the story I was writing became intertwined with the surprisingly complex act of sitting and listening. As a secondary witness, I felt an overwhelming sense of duty to that story.
Tick recognizes the role of both psychotherapy and veterans’ groups in fulfilling the veteran storyteller’s need for an audience or witness, but he argues that “Storytelling at its most effective must go beyond the therapeutic setting and an exclusively veteran audience to take place before members of the general populace” (222). Moreover, he cautions that “Media-carried stories… do not have the same healing impact as personal storytelling. It cannot be overemphasized that, in order to heal, survivors need to gather and share in a living community” (222). Writing the series for the Voice, I was acutely aware of the dangers of engaging in this mediated form of story- telling—that, through me, the impact—or healing power—of telling and bearing witness could become diluted or distorted. My role, I knew, was to tell a person’s story as simply and directly as possible. I
44 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth could describe the objects in Nathan’s studio and set the scene of the rural idyll with its buzzing bees and the quiet work of an artist. But when it came to his words—and all the words spoken by veterans— my job was to stand back. The stories needed no embellishment or input from me, other than to set the stage for their telling. Of course, the interview process pulls a story out into the light, and the material needs editing, but the quotes and their context can still remain pure throughout this process. In covering veterans’ experiences, this pursuit of unmediated storytelling became an ethical imperative.
“Being Heard”: The Importance of Communal Storytelling to Reintegration During one of these interactions last spring, Eamon Coyne, an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran living and working in Ithaca offered a post-Vietnam interpretation of his homecoming experience. He’d returned from active duty, completed an MBA at Ithaca College and started his own business—a CrossFit gym with an almost cult-like following in Ithaca. He had been reading the veterans series and— although he doesn’t often share his experiences with others, let alone with journalists, he agreed to talk about his feelings of isolation since leaving the military. He had not taken part in writing groups, but he and his fellow veterans talked to each other and recognized that storytelling was a means to adjust to civilian life after serving in the military. At the heart of what he told me was a feeling that his experience was not well understood by the larger civilian public:
I love this country more than I like breathing some days. But the abuse ... Well, it’s not abuse exactly, but the operational tempo of being in the military... I was deployed full-time for four years: First combat zones, twice on a boat, six-month deployments, year- long deployments. And if you’re not deployed, you’re training. So you’re always building up and always ready... I was able to see more and more of the war machine, for the lack of a better term. The issue that I’m having—and that a lot of veterans are having—is coming back and trying to reintegrate into a system or into a society ... It’s not like Vietnam right? So it’s not like they [civilians] disrespect veterans, but the veteran is living in a different relationship with their experience than they were before
45 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
they joined the military.
When we spoke, Coyne was eight years out of the military. It’s called “separation” when a serviceperson leaves to re-enter civilian life— like the end of a marriage. He was still struggling with the feeling of a previous identity unraveling and a sense of isolation in his new life. There is a sense that our community can never understand what it’s like to go to war and isn’t much inclined to try:
I’m not a jaded veteran. Like I said, I love this country… but there are definitely some things that can be fixed. And instead of trying to reintegrate people into society as normal operating members of the social machine we need to remember that veterans are learning how to live with their experience ... And I don’t want somebody that’s never gone to war to feel guilty they have not experienced that. But we as a country, as a whole, as an aggregate, have a really hard time recognizing the impact of sending your kids off to war to fight this unknown thing. I think civilians need to start taking on some of that burden. Does that make sense?
It did make sense. In fact, it’s a point that Tick makes when he argues that “veterans’ stories need to be told in a way that transfers the moral weight of the event from the individual to the community…. Otherwise, a survivor might endlessly repeat the details of an event but not experience the release of related emotions, the accurate reordering of history, or the making of meaning” (223). And it further drove home why Lewis’s work—and his colleagues’—was so important to the veteran community. Writing groups have helped thousands of veterans, who like Lewis and Coyne, struggle with the aftermath of wartime deployment to process and make meaning out of their experiences.
Lewis talks not only of war trauma, but of “moral injury” too— the daily guilt he says he carries for being part of a war he quickly ceased to believe in. While PTSD and moral injury have become common terms in the therapeutic environment, moral injury is only just gaining recognition in mainstream media and popular culture. In 2014, Syracuse University launched the “Moral Injury
46 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth
Figure 3 The detritus of warfare: Nathan Lewis collected shell casings, medals and other military objects while on pre-deployment training at White Sands, New Mexico. Photograph courtesy of David Burbank.
Project” to raise awareness regarding this crucial aspect of veterans’ experiences. In April of 2015, the university co-sponsored its fi rst conference on moral injury with LeMoyne College, led by a team of faculty, veterans, psychologists, artists, and spiritual leaders. Then in April 2016, Le Moyne College hosted the project’s second annual conference called “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Moral Injury and Military Veterans.” The panel, led by Pamela Johnson, a professor of the School of Social Work at Syracuse University, addressed how moral injury is currently being defi ned and addressed. In the simplest terms, the “injury” occurs when a service man or woman either performs an act that goes against their own moral code, or witnesses a trusted ally, commander, or system (such as a nation’s war mission as a whole) break that code (Johnson). In my interviews with Vietnam veterans this moral code came up again and again. Deeply patriotic young men had fought in a war that caused them to lose all sense of trust in the US military system and the government’s global ambitions at that time. I realized, as I sat with a man who cried bitterly about his experience in Vietnam; that it was this betrayal that was the war trauma he could not recover from. It took very little to bring him to tears when discussing his broken sense of patriotism—even 40 years later—he added. In the opening
47 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing lines of Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character moral injury is traced back to the Iliad. Shay writes, “Homer emphasizes two common events of heavy continuous combat: betrayal of ‘what’s right’ by a commander, and the onset of the berserk state” (xiii). Lewis told me that the topic of moral injury is a common one in all the writing groups he runs. For veterans, it is not a new term, nor a new experience.
Much of the healing process for veterans is interwoven with the communal nature of the groups Lewis runs (many of which are closed to civilians)—where veterans read out their work and comment and discuss. Theirs is not the kind of writing process want-to-be novelists dream of: a cabin in the woods, splendid isolation alone with one’s budding creative genius. No, veteran writing is intrinsically about the communal act of writing, reading and sharing. Veterans I spoke to pointed to the communal nature that is intrinsic to the military experience. Service men and women work in carefully structured teams, not alone. Says Lewis:
It’s really nice to be in a room of other folks. Of course, it’s made a lot easier being in a room with those who have been in the military. Picking up the pen for the first time and not coming at it from a craft or competitive side was important for me. For sure, we are competitive in a way: we are determined to write something and use it for a wider purpose. Someone will read something that just blows you away, it is so good. And everyone gets that was an awesome piece, right? Other folks want to do that, too. That is incredibly inspiring.
After several weeks of working on the series, an Ithaca-based Vietnam veteran invited me to a regular breakfast group that he and other Vietnam combat veterans had started decades ago. This is where it became clear that the healing movement was based in grassroots organization and informality: Five men, a weekly breakfast, and a lot of shared stories. It was a mark of acceptance—trust, even—to be invited to sit with them one morning.
48 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth
The veterans’ writing groups that have sprung up across the country, all informal in nature, tend to use some version of the typical MFA creative writing workshop model. Says Lewis:
Sometimes people don’t want to read their work aloud but they are encouraged to. Maybe three or four out of the group will say, ‘No, I’m not going to read.’ Then one by one they will fall. The whole stereotype of the touchy-feely writer, I think people who live, or have lived, in the military find it hard at first. It’s as if writing [about trauma] is a betrayal, but then when people do it, they start to feel like the whole burden is being shared. We are all bearing witness. That starts to feel really powerful.
Writing as Therapy Lewis points to the increase in evidence-based treatments for war trauma. In fact, writing has been shown—dating back as far as Freud’s theory of “scriptotherapy”—to be useful in clinical settings. Patients can examine anxieties and abuse (Freud’s patients dealt with childhood and sexual abuse, rather than war trauma but the principle still applies) in the written format that are otherwise unspeakable. Exposure therapy—retelling in writing and then in a workshop forum with other veterans—turns a traumatic event over and over until it loses its hold. James Pennebaker, arguably the godfather of the writing-to-heal movement, conducted a series of studies, starting in 1983 that examined the impact of writing about what he calls “emotionally significant” issues. “What we found in that first study was that writing about a traumatic experience was associated with improvements in physical health,” he said in a 2013 interview (Hurley Moran). “People in the experimental group went to the student health center at about half the rate as people in the control group.” The studies became a book, Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain (first published in 1990 and now in its 3rd edition).
In response to the rise in writing groups, the VA commissioned a study in 2015 to examine the effects of participating in “expressive writing” exercises on veterans struggling with reintegration into civilian life. “Randomized Controlled Trial of Online Expressive Writing to Address Readjustment Difficulties Among U.S.
49 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Afghanistan and Iraq War Veterans” was authored by Nina Sayer, Siamak Noorbaloochi, Patricia A. Frazier, James W. Pennebaker, Robert J. Orazem, Paula P. Schnurr, Maureen Murdoch, Kathleen F. Carlson, Amy Gravely, and Brett T. Litz. In the study—led by Sayer of the Center for Chronic Disease Outcomes Research, with both the Minneapolis VA Healthcare System and the departments of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology at the University of Minnesota—nearly 1,300 returning veterans reporting reintegration problems were given daily 20-minute writing assignments. (Pennebaker’s original 1983 study used daily writing doses each 15-minutes long.) The subjects were asked to “write about their deepest thoughts and feelings concerning a significant life event” (382) The study found that “expressive writing, a simple, resource-efficient intervention that can be implemented online without clinician involvement, may be a promising strategy for improving symptoms and functioning among combat veterans who experience reintegration difficulty” (389). Sayer and her co-authors concluded: “Online expressive writing, a simple, resource-efficient intervention that can be implemented online without clinician involvement, may be a promising strategy for improving symptoms and functioning among combat Veterans who experience reintegration difficulty” (389). Expressive writing was found to be more effective than factual writing (or no writing at all) in reducing physical complaints, anger, and psychological distress, all associated with PTSD. This was the first time writing was studied at the VA specifically as a way to help veterans cope with reintegration. “What does it cost to start a writing group?” asks Lewis. “absolutely nothing. What can you gain from it? Everything.”
Other well-known survivors of war trauma have spoken openly about the role writing has played in their healing process. Kurt Vonnegut wrote of his survival—hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, where he was being held a prisoner of war—of the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Between the American and British air forces, who conducted the bombing raids, 135,000 civilians were killed. When Vonnegut returned to the surface “all organic things were consumed,” he said in a 1974 interview with Joe David Bellamy and John Casey. “We walked for miles before we saw anybody else” (163). Slaughterhouse-Five is a response to what he witnessed. In the book, he uses the genre of science fiction—and specifically the trope
50 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth of time travel—to frame the fractured memories, flashbacks, and loss of chronology that are common with PTSD.2
In the interview with Bellamy and Casey, Vonnegut describes the nature of memory after a traumatic experience, and his compulsion to write:
…I came home in 1945, started writing about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and WROTE ABOUT IT. This thin book is about what it’s like to write a book about a thing like that. I couldn’t get much closer. I would head myself into my memory of it, the circuit breakers would kick out; I’d head in again, I’d back off. (163)
In another interview with Robert Musil in 1980, which appeared in Nation magazine, he said the following about the compulsion to write about trauma:
…It seemed a categorical imperative that I write about Dresden… I had to say something about it. And it took me a long time and it was painful. The most difficult thing about it was that I had forgotten about it. And I learned about catastrophes… that there is some device in our brain which switches off and prevents our remembering catastrophes above a certain scale… (230)
Lewis talks of the depiction of war trauma in novels like Slaughterhouse- Five as satisfyingly accurate depictions of how traumatic memory functions. “That’s exactly what it’s like,” Lewis says. “The memories. One day, 12 years ago feels real close. Like it’s breathing in my face. Other times it’s an arm’s distance away and other times it’s a mile away. That’s the reality.” Countless other veterans share similar stories: traditional therapies used to treat war trauma do not work. Psychotherapy, sedatives, psychotropics, sleeping pills: the veterans I spoke to said they were not a solution to war trauma. They point to the fact that while the medical term is PTSD – which stands for post-traumatic stress disorder – many veterans do not consider their condition to be a disorder, but instead a natural human reaction to
51 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing the unnatural conditions of war. “I don’t believe we are disordered,” says Coyne.
Journalists, too, when working in extreme conditions, may find themselves affected by post-traumatic stress, and other reactions to the unnatural experience of war, such as moral injury. In his memoir, Dispatches, Michael Herr writes hauntingly of his own imperative to communicate his experiences as a reporter in Vietnam:
After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and the images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories.… However many times it happened, whether I’d known them or not, no matter what I’d felt about them or the way they’d died, their story was always there and it was always the same: it went, ‘Put yourself in my place.’ (31)
Both Herr and Vonnegut’s roles as primary witnesses of war trauma complicate their roles as writers. Vonnegut, in his interviews, talks candidly about the journalistic and writerly imperative to record. His role as witness was first and foremost as a soldier in, and a survivor of, the Second World War. Yet, when he came to write about the experience from some considerable chronological distance (Slaughterhouse Five came out in 1969, 24 years after the bombing of Dresden) he turned to a blend of journalistic instinct and novelist’s ingenuity. The passages in the novel that deal with the very real events of Dresden are, arguably, the moments when the solider-witness becomes the journalist-witness. This is an ongoing discussion amongst war correspondents who experience danger and the threat of death alongside veterans, and yet are expected to also embody the role of impartial recorder of events: War correspondents such as Herr often experience their own kind of moral injury as they grapple with multiple roles—complicated further by an editorial imperative to catch the fickle attention of their editors and readers. That moral quandary is supported by the web of self-reflective reasons to be there in the first place: the pursuit of truth? The uncovering of atrocity? Voyeurism? Careerism? Addiction? Or all of the above? Nonetheless, both Vonnegut and Herr shared a sense that writing could restore a focus on the experiences of the common soldiers whose viewpoint provides an essential, but frequently ignored, component of the
52 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth meaning of war. That viewpoint is an important counterbalance to the propaganda often used to justify and garner support for US military actions.
The networks that veterans like Lewis are forming in this post 9/11 era are allowing the public more and more opportunities to bear witness to the direct testimony of the veterans’ experiences of war. This unmediated storytelling—which is therapeutic in both the artistic process, and in the end result—comes from writing, but it also comes from visual art and performance art too. For Lewis, the means of production—the act of papermaking and the labor and artistry that involves—are as important as writing: most recently his hand-made paper artwork has been displayed at The Brooklyn Museum in New York. His prose and poems are regularly published in the handsome annual Warrior Writers books. Yusef Komunyakaa, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Vietnam veteran, has praised the work therein, saying the community “cultivates a needful dialogue” for those “amidst the process of confronting themselves as a means of returning from the war” (qtd. in Calica and Basl 1).
Figure 4 For Lewis, the means of production—the act of papermaking and the labor and artistry that involves—are as important as writing. Here he uses his dog tags as part of his papermaking process. Photograph courtesy of David Burbank.
53 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
For Lewis, writing has offered a path to peace and meaning. “In terms of being mentally stable or emotionally stable it can be hard. But now I have this sense of driving purpose. Writing groups provide meaningful communities. If I never got my chance to tell my story, find people who cared and listened, I don’t know…” he trails off. “It means something to do things that feel good. Writing feels like I am helping dismantle this machine.”
Conclusion Since the Voice’s veteran series concluded in the fall of 2015, I have stayed connected to the veterans I met and remained deeply invested in their stories. I came to think of projects like Warrior Writers and Solutions Journalism as the new New Journalism—veterans speaking directly to the public about their own experiences of war, either through their own writing projects or in the context of news pieces that grant them substantial space to tell their own stories in their own words. Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1973 anthology of New Journalism that journalists in the “new form” have gravitated towards “that rather elementary and joyous ambition to show the reader real life – ‘Come here! Look! This is the way people live these days! These are the things they do!’” (Wolfe 33).
The Vietnam era formed the backdrop for the development of New Journalism—with its innate realism and activist imperative. Likewise, Solutions Journalism has developed in a post 9/11 world and takes on a similar role when it comes to this social imperative. The New Journalist movement’s impetus is paralleled by the social responsibility that marks Solutions Journalism. Writers like Vonnegut and Herr became literary beacons for the anti-war movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Activism and the use of writing as a tool to record personal acts of witnessing became one and the same. Fast forward to 2016 and Solutions Journalism calls for a similar model, one that incorporates storytelling and social justice. But there is also a value in veterans’ own writing communities that non-veterans cannot replicate in other settings, no matter how vital wider community involvement in veterans’ reintegration struggles is. I asked Lewis about the connection between the writing of his Vietnam-era predecessors and veteran writing groups today. He said:
54 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth
Some of the first, some of the most complete accounts of war and some of the best writers of poetry about Vietnam were published by Vietnam veterans. I think they set a precedent to write about war. They got a lot of people who wouldn’t necessarily be writers, just like those involved with Warrior Writers, to write about war – people who wouldn’t necessarily identify themselves as writers.
There is a quiet activism in the work that Lewis does. It’s not explicit, but his desire for peace comes to define him as much as his written work where writing, recovery and activism co-exist. I asked him how politics plays a part in the workshops, especially when he hosts writing groups on military bases with active service men and women participating. Not everyone who teaches and writes with him defines him or herself as a peace activist, he says. They focus on the coming home process, on atonement, and on not dehumanizing but humanizing the enemy. It is a deeply personal communal experience and yet one that is not wary of other military service personnel. “People would think that because you are a peace activist, you are really critical of the veterans. But no one ever levels that charge,” he says. Ready access to self-expression within a writing community that accepts all political viewpoints marks an evolution of the peace movement. Every veteran is respected; their only task is to write.
This is why many of the writing workshops are closed to civilians. Within the non-military community the individual experience—and story—of each veteran often gets lost, scooped up and incorporated in a wider, societal narrative. “There’s definitely a lack of ... of understanding,” says Coyne. As civilian members of society we are missing both a connection and a responsibility: a call to bear witness, with all the healing potential that such a collaboration holds. Coyne speaks of the continued gulf between civilian and military experience. He, of all the veterans I interviewed, left me with the most poignant reflection on the importance of the simple act of storytelling:
You asked me a question earlier about what the civilian population needs to know, what they can do, how they can help veterans. As a veteran, I don’t want anybody’s sympathy. When people thank me for my service on Memorial Day, it makes me insane. I want understanding and I want people to understand that they’ll
55 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
never understand, and to be okay with that. If we’re able to create an environment of support, then the stigma could change. Sometimes we just want to tell our stories and be heard.
Notes
1 This is an excerpt from a ten-part series I authored on veterans, which ran in the Ithaca Voice during the summer of 2015. I retained full rights to this material. The series deepened my commitment to veterans’ issues and led me to reexamine my own journalistic ethics in bearing witness to veterans’ stories.
2 Vonnegut was never diagnosed with PTSD – a study by the VA notes that PTSD was not used as a term until 1980 (Friedman). http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/PTSD-overview/ptsd- overview.asp
56 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Nathan Lewis and Eamon Coyne for their time, insights and invaluable contribution to this essay.
57 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Works Cited
Bellamy, Joe David and John Casey. “The New Fictions: Interview with Innovative American Writers.” Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney Allen. The University Press of Mississippi, 1988, pp. 156-167 Calica, Lovella and Kevin Basl, Editors. Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing and Artwork by Veterans. L. Brown and Sons, 2014. Felman, Shoshana. “Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Written and Edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Routledge, 1991. Friedman, Matthew J. “PTSD: National Center for PTSD.” PTSD History and Overview. August 3, 2016. http://www.ptsd.va.gov/ professional/PTSD-overview/ptsd-overview.asp Herr, Michael. Dispatches. Vintage, 1991. Hurley Moran, Molly. “Writing and Healing from Trauma: An Interview with James Pennebaker.” Composition Forum, vol. 28, Fall 2013. http://compositionforum.com/issue/28/pennebaker. php Johnson, Pamela J. Opening remarks and moderation. “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Moral Injury and Military Veterans.” Conference, April 9, 2016, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY. Musil, Robert. “There Must Be More to Love than Death: A Conversation with Kurt Vonnegut.” Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney Allen. The University Press of Mississippi, 1988, pp. 230-239. Pennebaker, James W. Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. Guilford Press, 1997. Sayer, Nina A., Siamak Noorbaloochi, Patricia A. Frazier, James W. Pennebaker, Robert J. Orazem, Paula P. Schnurr, Maureen Murdoch, Kathleen F. Carlson, Amy Gravely, and Brett T. Litz. “Randomized Controlled Trial of Online Expressive Writing to Address Readjustment Difficulties Among U.S. Afghanistan and Iraq War Veterans.” Journal of Traumatic Stress, vol. 28, no. 5, 2015, pp. 381-90. Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Scribner, 1994.
58 Writing to Bear Witness | Whitworth
Tick, Edward. War and the Soul. Quest Books, 2005. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. Random House, 1969. Wolfe, Tom. “Seizing the Power.” The New Journalism, edited by Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson. Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 23-36.
59 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Melissa Whitworth is a British journalist and second-year English Literature MA student at Syracuse University. She received her BA from Exeter University in the UK and began her career at The Times of London, later working for The Telegraph in the newspaper’s NYC bureau. In 2015, she began her Master’s at Syracuse University, College of Arts and Sciences, focusing on Modernism, post-war literature and trauma theory. Most recently, her journalism has appeared in a local newspaper, the Ithaca Voice. There, she wrote a ten-part series on veterans in Central New York and the issues they face transitioning from military service to civilian life. In the summer of 2016 she wrote a five-part series on refugees in Ithaca, NY, as the city awaits approval by the State Department to become a refugee resettlement location. Whitworth is interested in the ways in which academia and journalism—particularly the “Solutions Journalism” model—can intersect and inform each other.
60 Re-Authoring Narratives: Reflective Writing with Veterans with Spinal Cord Injury
Aimee C. Mapes, Ph.D., University of Arizona This article describes a community outreach project for veterans with spinal cord injury and disease (SCI/D) that & Michael T. Hartley, was particularly effective as a short-term veteran writing Ph.D., group. Sponsored by a grant from the Paralyzed Veterans University of Arizona of America, The University of Arizona hosted an outreach project for veterans with SCI/D in October 2013. When situated in a trusted community of veterans with spinal cord injury and disease, reflection afforded a space for re- authoring experiences wherein veterans were able to make meaning from military experiences. In this manuscript, we highlight reflective writing as a fundamental component of the community outreach because reflection was essential for identifying and sharing strengths to carry forward.
riting groups for veterans of military conflicts are not new. WYet there’s a continued interest in their potential for supporting veterans in transition. In a recent issue of Veterans in Higher Education, Marcia Baxter Magolda declares that supporting veterans begins with their “meaning making and self-authorship” (86) best prompted through acts of “reflection,
61 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing writing and discourse” (86). To be sure, serious reflective writing emerges as a core activity for supporting veterans in community writing groups and in various curricula in higher education. For veterans’ groups across the nation, according to Eileen Schell, a common purpose is “providing a space for veterans to engage in defining and representing their military experiences for themselves and for various publics, often through first-person writing.” Journal writing and reflective writing emerge as tools for fostering self- authorship, but how to help writers harness personal experience through narrative into various publics remains a complex enterprise. Courses in English, in particular, have the potential to support or disavow veterans’ experiences. Often student veterans need to write “frankly about their war service in a safe and confidential environment” (81), expounds Baxter Magolda, but institutions fail to provide a safe, trusted environment for doing so. In veteran writing groups, it is essential to provide a supportive context that privileges writing “with a community of veterans” (Schell).
In this article, we describe a community outreach project for veterans with spinal cord injury and disease (SCI/D), and we highlight how reflective writingwith a community of veterans was fundamental to the success of the project. In other venues, we discuss the efficacy of the outreach camp for helping veterans with SCI/D navigate the demands of new injuries and transitions to civilian life (see Hartley & Mapes). Sponsored by a grant from the Paralyzed Veterans of America, The University of Arizona (UA) hosted a small-scale educational and outreach project for veterans with SCI/D in October 2013. A product of collaborations between faculty in psychoeducational and disability studies, the writing program, the student veterans center, and the disability resource center, the five-day camp included morning and late afternoon recreational activities with reflective writing activities in between. An explicit outcome of the outreach project was to help veterans with SCI/D establish community connections to motivate them to pursue college, as previous research confirms the importance of community (Branker; Vance & Miller; Ruh, et al.). During the camp and in two separate follow-up interviews, one at six months and one at twelve months, camp participants frequently referenced the importance of being prompted to reflect, to write, and to discuss as a group. On the final day of camp, we began to realize the significance of reflective writing when veterans presented a card of thanks to
62 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley coauthors of this article—each coordinators of the project. Composed and signed by the group, the card read:
Thank you for the time spent making each of us feel so comfortable. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity for each of us. We gained more than we ever expected when we applied to this camp over the summer. We not only learned about going to college as Disabled Veterans & Adaptive Sports. We learned even more about ourselves. Many of us accomplished things we never thought of even trying. We shared some of our innermost thoughts and feelings with ease knowing that no one in the room would see us in a different light after hearing. We all had something in common. A new family bond was formed this week at the University of Arizona.
At the least, what we learned with and from veterans was how reflective writing provided effective support, and similar approaches could benefit student veterans in other contexts and community veteran writing groups. Alexis Hart and Roger Thompson, as guest editors of a special issue of Composition Forum dedicated to Veterans and Writing, call for better support for “warrior writers,” especially to diminish the problem of a military-civilian gap for student veterans. A large percentage of veterans who served in the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan are not enrolling in college because of an absence of accessible information, effective outreach, and, unfortunately, an absence of veteran-friendly practices (American Council on Education). Baxter Magolda argues that integrating veterans should involve allowing them to write “about their military experiences, using reflection to make meaning from these experiences” (85). In our outreach project, veterans praised the reflection activities that prompted participants to narrate experiences and to re-author them with a cohort of veteran writers through a process of reflection, writing, and group discourse. While this outreach project is unique because of the intersection with adaptive sports and veterans, uniqueness also represents situatedness. We believe that reflective writing instilled hope and optimism for valuable futures and has since become part of a structured resilience intervention (see Stuntnzer & Hartley). When situated in a trusted community of veterans with spinal cord injury and disease, reflection afforded a space for re-
63 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing authoring wherein veterans were able to make meaning from military experiences. Reflective writing created a powerful context to imagine possibilities informed by previous experiences with war, injury, and transitions to civilian life.
Theoretical Framework and Community Context Importantly, writing—and literacy—is fundamental here. In her book Reflection in the Writing Classroom, Kathleen Yancey contends that “literacy is connected to our meaning making” (175). Reflection as a practice fosters a model of review and meta-analysis to discern patterns and generate a new way of thinking about a situation (see, for instance, Gutiérrez & Rogoff; Gutiérrez; Yancey). In this project, reflection through writing provided what we call a space forre- authoring narratives. A space of authorship, according to Baxter Magolda, involves enabling individuals “to situate themselves in their own experience” and establish an understanding of who they are and who they want to be (89). It requires drawing meaning from past experience through the process of reflecting on, writing about, and discussing it with a trusted group of people. It can’t be overstated that the conditions for re-authoring involved, firstly, a community of veterans with SCI/D and, secondly, a series of reflective writing prompts across the five-day period that enabled a space for authoring. The writing prompts began with (1) setting goals for a five-day camp; (2) reflecting on a past event when you were at your best; (3) setting long term goals; (4) reflecting on goals set for the camp; (5) designing a playlist for you at your best narrative (see Appendix).
In the outreach project, reflection privileged the role of identity and the ability to narrate experiences as examples of agency. Our understanding of identity and agency builds from a situated learning theory outlined by Dorothy Holland, William Lachicotte, Barbara Skinner, and Carole Cain in Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Employing a cultural analysis of learning across settings, Holland and her coauthors blend Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, Vygotsky’s theory of play in childhood development, and Foucault’s strategic model of power to define identities in practice and figured worlds. Through this multi-framed analytical lens, figuring a world is a form of authoring through artful “orchestration” whereby individuals engage in a process of “arranging the identifiable social discourses/practices
64 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley that are one’s resources (or voices) in order to craft a response in a time and space defined by other’s standpoints in the activity” (Holland, et al. 272). Holland and her co-authors provide case studies of figured worlds in different social contexts, such as how new members of an AA community perform testimony or how college women respond to the discourse of romance. In each case, actions and storytelling are examined as individual agency in response to specific social environments through which people construct and are constructed by cultural discourses. Opportunities to narrate experiences are central to this process, which reflection and writing can foster. In this way, reflection allows writers to construct imaginative play worlds through writing. Imagination promotes newly authored identities that influence actions in subsequent contexts, a process Holland et al. refer to as “identities in practice” (270).
In terms of how to foster re-authored identities in first-person writing, project coordinators emphasized the writing prompt called “You at Your Best” to generate positive narratives of resilience for veterans, which aligns with research on identity and narrative in rehabilitation counseling (see Davis & Novoa; Dunn & Burcaw). From a resilience perspective, what matters most are the relationships between intrapersonal resilience factors, such as locus of control, emotional self-regulation, spirituality, commitment, and interpersonal resilience factors, such as social and family support (Hartley). All of these factors work together with a cumulative effect (i.e., the more success from meeting challenges, the more resilience builds upon itself). At the UA camp, as a result, participants were involved in individual and small group work designed to share memories and dreams with other participants who had similar concerns and interests (Kennedy & Duff). In this project, veterans with SCI/D offered tangible voices of difference, and in our analysis, we privilege their emic perspectives because it is through their voices that we were able to understand how reflection fostered re-authoring narratives.
Project Context The main objective for the UA camp was for veterans with SCI/D to establish connections in order to motivate them to remain active with adaptive athletics and to pursue college. Veterans with SCI/D were recruited from different Veteran Affairs rehabilitation facilities
65 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing across the country. Various centers distributed information brochures for the camp and helped to identify potential applicants, including centers in Atlanta, Boston, Miami, Norfolk, and Phoenix. Veterans with SCI/D who participated in the project were diverse in their military experiences, as depicts in Table 1. Participants agreed to participate in follow-up interviews once the camp was completed.
Table 1: Outreach Project Participants Age Gender Military Injury Complete/ Years since Level Incomplete Injury Anton* 23 Male Navy T7 Complete 1 year Emilio 30 Male Navy C3-4 Incomplete 2 years Violet 44 Female Aur Force L4-5 Incomplete 3 years Andy 32 Male Army T11-12 Complete 3 years Laura 38 Female Army T3-4 Complete 3 years Eve 36 Female Army MS N/A 4 years James 50 Male Army MS N/A 7 years Franz 30 Male Army C5-6 Complete 8 years Porter 40 Male Army T6-7 Incomplete 10 years Cole 44 Male Army T7 Incomplete 10 yeasr Jackson 49 Male Army T4 Complete 12 years Wes 46 Male Aur Force C6 Complete 16 yeasr *All names are pseudonyms
Data for the research included field notes from the camp experience and, primarily, interviews. We conducted an in- take interview prior to the camp and two follow-up interviews after the camp. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using an iterative process to look for how participants used language for social positioning (see Patton). In first review of data, we identified language references, charted frequencies, and then analyzed how “patterns in vocabulary” represented social dynamics, metaphors of understanding, and a shared repertoire (Blommaert 29). During constant-comparative analysis more stable categories gained prominence, which were continually refined and verified. Code patterns were triangulated across interviews to capture participants’ perspectives. Data were sorted into two stable parent codes, each with nested
66 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley
“sub-codes” (Saldaña 77). During the process of coding data, we tracked discussions by participants about the relevance of writing with veterans. Within the code of reflective practice, the importance of reflective writing emerged as supporting veterans to narrate past events with future contexts in mind. After coding and analysis, member checking was performed to confirm the validity of code patterns: Participants received a final report at 12-months after the camp via email. We then conducted phone interviews a week after sending the report. During final interviews, we asked participants to confirm results accurately reflected their experiences during and after the camp. In our analysis, we forefront participant voices in order to situate disability from a “disability rights movement’s position” (Linton 11).
Re-Authoring Narratives: Writing With/Writing Forward We knew the camp had a tremendous impact once we learned at the six month post-camp interview that eight of the twelve camp participants had either enrolled in coursework or applied to a college degree program. Overwhelmingly, camp participants identified reflective writing as providing a source of strength to set and pursue personal goals. Though the writing group was part of a short-term, five day outreach camp, it nonetheless modeled a series of reflective writing activities that provided a scaffold for looking back, discerning patterns, and moving forward with new understandings. The trajectory of writing prompts began with setting goals for the camp and then reflecting on “You at Your Best,” a prompt that directed participants to recall a time in their lives when they felt they were at their best. They were asked to think about what happened, what they did, and why this was their best self. Then they composed narratives, including as much rich detail as possible. On the second day, they partnered up to read their narratives, and partners were directed to listen to the story and subsequently identify qualities of the narrator that encapsulate or represent what was best about their actions, thoughts, and responses. In the narratives, some veterans described first experiences with injury. Others described loss of loved ones. A few described events in active duty, such as Franz, who focused on dealing with feelings of guilt after his injury:
67 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
In my case, it was after the fact I started having all these feelings of guilt having to get the Medevac to leave my man behind and things of that nature. But I deal with it the best I can. When you become military, you do military things. You hang up your boots. Hang up your sword. You hang up your M16 or rifle, and move on with life. You can’t stay stuck in a rut. And you don’t realize it when you’re at war.
While many narrated military experience, others considered roles they had taken on more recently. For instance, Cole focused on his current work with community youth. He described:
I’ve always been a big community advocate. I had an after school community center in one neighborhood and all that kind of stuff. God keeps up my spirit even though I don’t have a ton of money to help people. Now I’ve been put in the position to help people. I am in the position from a time-wise standpoint that I can do a lot more to help some of these kids that are able bodied and don’t understand that they are blessed every day. They need to put more effort towards their education if they ever want to see a better life.
Collectively, we listened to each narrative and discussed how our experiences revealed shared strengths of persistence and optimism. We talked about our best qualities, staging a trajectory of reflective writing that moved toward setting goals for future contexts.
For veterans with SCI/D in this project, reflective writing felt transformative, we argue, because participants reclaimed experiences for empowerment through a process of re-authoring with a trusted community of veterans. Across follow-up interviews and based on notes taken during the five-day camp, many participants referenced the benefits of reflection, and they told us about the ongoing impact of sharing strategies for responding successfully and creatively to spinal cord injuries and diseases. Across the data, we noted two major themes for modeling inclusive veterans’ writing groups. Firstly, valuing veteran community and military discourses emerged as inextricably connected to their desire to engage the camp. Secondly, participants
68 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley reacted positively to writing reflective narratives, describing it as a source of motivation.
Valuing Veteran Discourses: “A Brotherhood” A crucial element of the outreach project involved the how of communication and discourse, which depended on writing with veterans. Baxter Magolda argues in her theory of self-authorship that reflection works as long as it involves productive discourse (86). We learned immediately how important discourse functioned for the group on the first day of camp. A dozen veterans with spinal cord injury and disease—some in wheelchairs, some with other assistive technologies—arrived and taught us appropriate greetings, a fist pump rather than handshake. Most proceeded to identify in terms of their military branch of service, calling out Air force, Navy, Army, or Marines. In the next few days, identification with other veterans proved to be essential to building community. Similar to a common dialect, frequent references to military language allowed participants to affiliate with and embody values of loyalty instilled within the military, a trend outlined in previous research on supporting the transition from military to civilian contexts (see Demers; Hall; Schading).
The shared sense of military culture among the participants offered a powerful way to translate a past sense of competence into present and future interactions. For example, Cole described the experience in the following way: “We all coalesced, from being individuals, we all coalesced and became a unit… It’s something that’s instilled in us when we come [into the military]. And it’s something hopefully we carry on through the rest of our life.” The term “unit” tapped into his past while also allowing him to carry it forward into the future. According to another participant, Anton, the experience was “fantastic” because “there was that much of a group of people in the same situation trying to do the same thing. It was like, it was like our own little clique.” The shared values practiced through military language seemed to impact how participants connected with one another. Building upon cultural ways of knowing in the military created a bond and established interpersonal skills of belonging and peer support. Across the interview data, participants referenced
69 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing others speaking their language and bonded through military discourse, which they described as forming a unit, a brotherhood.
On a second level, the camp was designed to privilege a social model of disability in which adjusting to disability is more than adapting to biological impairments (see Conyers); it is also contesting dominant cultural perspectives that position people with disabilities as diseased, broken, and in need of fixing (Longmore & Unmansky; Smart). Highlighting the unique community that emerged, Violet noted that it was important “as a veteran to see and talk with other veterans from across the United States that aren’t just settling with a disability but still trying to live their lives and be a positive part of everyday life.” Another participant, Laura, described the experience of being with a disability community as “very motivational.” She explained, “So it was really compelling; it was really a good thing for us to get that little bit of a bond in that short time.” Another participant, James, explained the importance of being with other veterans with SCI/D:
We all know we’re living the same thing. We know nobody’s getting off easy. We’re all in chairs. We’re all suffering from skin sores over time and urinary tract infections. We’re all suffering from the same thing over the course of the life of our injury. We’re all going to have the same issues to deal with, so nobody’s getting off easy, but we share our experiences with each other and help each other avoid the pitfalls.
Violet, Laura, and James all represent a common perspective of veterans in the camp about the importance of interacting with a supportive disability community. A commitment to a social model of disability, we believe, was fundamental to discussions during camp.
Many of the veterans claimed that experiences at the camp contributed to their ability to make changes in their lives. Indeed, at the six month interview, eight had tangible plans: Four participants had applied to four year university programs, seeking a bachelor’s degree. Three had enrolled in college courses. One applied to and accepted an internship with the military that included computer security training. According to Anton, the camp “showed how much more was out there for someone in a wheelchair…. I did not know
70 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley what was available for people with disabilities and for veterans.” Andy said, “I wasn’t planning on going back to school anymore and going to your camp got me interested in going back to school and finishing.” And for some, like Emilio, it reenergized their desire to work with communities. Emilio described a long term goal to create a supportive disability community to offer resources in his hometown:
I mean, I think my idea comes from just being a representative or liaison, someone that whether it’s from a desk or an office— whatever it might be. But as long as I’m there and we have a group of people that are actively working and I can help people with disabilities that they don’t know anything about like employment, education, volunteering, and other resources for their needs. All that kind of stuff I think the DRC concentrates on like school and education. So, I’d like to do the same, but for an agency I guess or an organization.
The experiences at camp continued to resonate for participants, and in concrete ways, they were making plans to be ambassadors for veterans with spinal cord injury and disease in other contexts—some in small behaviors and others, like Emilio, with largescale plans for building supportive communities. In the next section, we examine how the positive effects of forming a unit fostered a space of authoring in reflective writing, and we explore why opportunities for reflective writing with a community of veterans with SCI/D had resonance beyond the five day outreach camp.
Reflection: “It was more; it was much deeper than I expected.” One agenda of reflection activities was to promote goal-setting in a safe space so that activities provided a scaffold for looking back, discerning patterns, and moving forward with new understandings. With each story, more qualities of strength emerged. Every day of the camp, we made time for reflecting, writing, and discussion. Every day, participants gained more confidence to respond to each other’s narratives and to emphasize strengths. During follow-up interviews, first at six months and then at 12 months, all campers mentioned the impact of reflection. Eve, a woman with spinal cord disease, explained it best:
71 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
What you all put into it was really good. When I went there, I had never, I had no idea, and never expected what I got out of it, what you guys gave us with respect to the different schools, and different activities. It was more; it was much deeper than I would ever have expected it to be. You kind of touched, kind of made us, dig deeper into our personal selves and thoughts.
Eve left motivated by reflective practice. Like others, she shared how surprised she was to feel touched by reflective writing and by sharing them with others. Another camper, Jackson, described the group as experiencing “epiphanies.” He elaborated, “It was kind of nice to see that with some of the people there—how they opened up to the group. I thought the group epiphanies were very well set up and gave us plenty of opportunity to talk with each other and get to open up to each other.” Systematic reflection created opportunities for these veterans with spinal cord injury and disease to affirm their experiences. It seemed that productive group discourse about first- person writing contributed to new understandings.
In this way, reflection provided a scaffold for looking back, discerning patterns, and moving forward with new understandings. Narrating or figuring positive identities helped participants creatively apply personal realizations from the camp to other contexts in their lives. James noted, “Personally, not only did it help me physically because it reminds me of things that I did before and will continue doing, but emotionally it helped me quite a bit because I still have a lot going on here, and I’m self-conscious about things of that nature.” For James, during opportunities to reflect with other people with SCI/D, the camp promoted a productive space to work through some emotional needs. In addition to creating a context for expressing emotions, many participants said listening to other camp participants’ experiences and dreams left the deepest mark. Laura noted:
When you see and feel the strength, the motivation, the endurance, from all of the participants, you can see it from the youngest all the way to the oldest. You could get different perspectives. It was really, really, really cool to know that you’re not alone, you’re not the only person out here. You’re not crazy. There are other people going through the same types of things and they are making it.
72 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley
Like Laura, participants often remarked on the benefits of reflective writing for promoting a sense of strength and motivation, which was a pattern in the interviews.
Importantly, first-person writing provided a space for re-authored narratives. In particular, according to Porter, the final writing prompt of creating a playlist of songs for “You at Your Best” allowed him to imagine stories as social histories. Composing a playlist became a mechanism for re-authoring his life story and carrying forward his personal and social history. He equated the ability to tell stories to being like a troubadour:
I keep on thinking about the song assignment. I keep on hearing my son say, “Dad, you should’ve put on that one and that one.” Contributing something. I keep on saying, “That would’ve been a great one.”… You hear a certain song and it takes you back to a certain point in time, even to a place. When you’re a storyteller, it’s another euphemism of life telling a story. I figure a troubadour is a storyteller because troubadours are special. They used to go from town to town every day in history carrying history on and keeping it alive, which I think is what you’re doing in your own way.
Opportunities to share stories and reflect upon the meaning of these stories generated new understandings of a situation. Participants felt empowered to do so, and Porter specifically referenced the reflective projects as a factor. He said, “The feeling of just being educated again, even on a small scale, like in the classroom, the projects. It was really interesting to me. It helped me understand that I could do that kind of thing. Confidence and knowledge you can do it. Get out there and do it and find out. I mean, things to look forward to, good options in your life.”
Similarly, Franz spoke to the goal of reflection and described that he generated a new way of thinking that acknowledged his lived experience but did not give way to feelings of disappointment:
73 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
There was another thing I thought was really good—the classes you guys had where we each took time to reflect on ourselves, our injury, our goals, our strengths because that’s something the person in the chair doesn’t think about. At least I didn’t until I got back into school. I really felt my role was being in a chair until the day comes that I get to die. And it doesn’t start off that way, but slowly your world closes in on you over time. And you do less, and less, and less, and your world gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And during those introspective looks at yourself and what it is you wanted out of life because the thing I learned is just because I’m in a chair doesn’t mean I can’t do the things I always wanted to do.
Porter and Franz each illustrate how participants of the camp continued to see themselves as carrying stories and personal histories forward. Consistent with figured worlds (Holland et al.), these stories become an opportunity to re-author meaning and to promote resilience (Hartley).
Writing With/Writing Forward It was partly the reflection prompts, partly identities as veterans with SCI/D, and partly the unique social space distinct from typical home life for these veterans that coalesced into a remarkably supportive context, where writing and discussion moved us collectively through a trajectory of reflection on past events, writing about those events, sharing them, and then setting goals for future contexts. The reflective prompts of the writing group sustained a twofold engagement, where writers narrated stories about selves in action, thus constructing identities, while a group of veterans responded to narratives with insights to carry forward. An important layer emerges in these imagined, co-constructed narratives. The cacophony of voices, as defined by Bakhtin, represents a complexly interwoven psychic-social space that “fills personal authorship with social efficacy” (Holland, et al. 272). According to Holland and her coauthors, “Vygotsky’s understanding of play is crucial to this argument. Just as children’s play is instrumental in building their symbolic competencies, upon which adult life depends, so too social play—the activities of free expression, the arts and rituals created on the margins of regulated space and time—develops new social competencies in newly imagined
74 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley communities” (272). These play worlds rehearse a disposition that comes to permeate actions in everyday life. It became apparent that the five-day outreach camp at The University of Arizona evolved into a space for “free expression.” In a tangible way, the veterans’ writing group in this outreach project sustained a context for narratives to circulate as both intrapersonal stories and durable public discourses.
For the participants, many describe the activities of the camp as creating a type of free expression, of making worlds that also developed new roles or imagined selves to carry forward to future contexts. Participants described the importance of sharing stories with other, which helped to identify specific strategies to model in their own lives. The benefits of sharing stories in trusted community align with research on recovery to injury and disease in rehabilitation counseling (see Williams, et al.). The intersection of disability and military experience made the five-day outreach program unique. The structured reflection activities allowed participants to recognize historical and cultural shared resilience practices that can be brought to bear in different settings, so as to gain dexterity with applying these practices in current and future contexts (see Miller; McGeary; White, et al.). Equally relevant was the process of self-authorship through identities in practice. Cole, for instance, explained how the experience of reflecting and writing in the group impacted him. He described, “Everybody sees themselves as somebody. And so, you do your best. We’re not saying you’re out on the street as nobody. I just try to make sure everybody feels they’re special. And you guys did that.” Participants needed to be valued, Cole implies, and the UA outreach camp for veterans with SCI/D created a space to be valued. Reflective writing was essential for capturing this experience and for facilitating this meaning-making process. Re-authored narratives became opportunities to find strengths. These voices coalesced to say, powerfully, that shared reflections reaffirmed one’s sense of self and value in the social world.
Conclusion: Moving Forward With Veterans Initially, during the five-day outreach camp for veterans with SCI/D, project coordinators planned to emphasize adaptive sports with minor activities in reflective writing, but there were days when, after lunch, participants wanted to remain in the classroom to share reflections
75 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing even though they would be late for the next sport activity. The voices of these veterans with spinal cord injury and disease confirm Hinton’s assertion that writing environments must be flexible to allow veterans moments to reflect and to share experiences while also being respectful and attuned to their values. To support veterans is to respect their rich, cultural experiences. Hinton argues that composition instructors can better support veterans if we consciously make visible the cultural knowledge shared across “their military, educational, professional, and rhetorical experiences.”
Re-authored narratives, it seems, afforded strategies for thinking through prior experiences and imagining future roles. The benefits of reflective writing described by the veterans resonate with findings in Hinton’s qualitative study. She proposes that writing curricula should embrace veterans’ abilities to reflect on previous experiences “and connect those prior experiences to current successes and failures.” With reflective writing, however, it’s important to be goal- oriented and to foster productive discourse that functions to abstract principles from a prior situation to different contexts. The veterans in our project reminded us that opportunities to reflect and abstract new understandings from previous experiences is fundamental to the process. Second, it’s important to allow student veterans to choose topics of reflection. Cleary & Wozniak argue that “writing projects that are personally meaningful as well as goal-oriented” are imperative for veterans in transition. In the same way, reflection can provide the most appropriate curriculum of flexibility and openness to create personal meaning when it calls for figuring worlds that rehearse positive identities.
Because of the profound feedback about camp from the participants, we want to highlight aspects of reflective writing for subsequent veteran writing groups. One lesson is creating an environment that privileges veterans’ cultural ways of knowing, using these experiences for activities of reflection, writing, and discourse, which is in line with other scholarship on veterans’ writing groups (see Baxter Magolda; Hinton; Schell). Project coordinators learned that veteran culture was an important identity affiliation, and it was beneficial to embrace this cultural knowledge. Respect for military discourse helped to construct a collective identity among participants and functioned both as a
76 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley common dialect and as a means to affiliate with and embody values of loyalty and commitment in military experiences (see Demers; Hall). Hinton argues that student veterans exhibit a strong “collectivist identity,” and our experience with this camp demonstrated that the collectivist identity can be harnessed for effective veterans’ writing groups. So, too, Cleary and Wozniak suggest that “writing teachers can use veterans’ collaborative inclination both to support veterans in their classes and to value veterans.”
A second lesson from the camp is specific to veterans with disabilities: what made the outreach project unique was the intersection of disability and military experience. Schell warns those interested in establishing veterans writing groups should understand that “writing’s effects must be presented in a complex and multi-faceted ways, and veterans’ own aims and purposes must be paramount.” In our outreach camp, it was essential to draw from a social model of disability in previous research to resist or temper negative discourses informed by ableism and to situate disability as experienced complexly and differently across contexts (see Conyers; Longmore & Unmansky; Smart). As stated before, the context at University of Arizona could support multi-faceted aims of veterans with SCI/D because of collaborations between student veterans’ center, the department of disability and psychoeducational studies, and the writing program. All were especially relevant for creating a supportive social situation where veterans with disabilities could respond effectively to cultural norms. Aspects of the reflective writing, however, could be adapted to other sites with an equally robust partnership. We argue that building upon veterans’ experiences requires affirming military culture and, when necessary, disability culture as “linguistic and cultural-historical repertoires” that offer resources from which to make meaning (Gutiérrez & Rogoff 22). To cultivate resources for meaning making, we believe in activities of free expression that re-author narratives through reflection, first-person writing, and productive discourse with communities.
77 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Appendix: Reflective Writing Prompts
(1) Set goals for the immediate future. a. What do you want from this workshop? b. What do you want from this semester?
(2) Reflect on an event when you were at your best. a. Write detailed narrative of event. b. Share with a partner. c. Partner describes qualities demonstrated in the narrative. d. Share in large group.
(3) Carried Dreams. Setting longer term goals for one or two roles in your life. a. Participants identify their important life roles and set goals. b. They narrate success at one or two of these goals using qualities defined during You at Your Best Reflective Writing.
(4) Reflect on the goals set for the workshop or semester. a. Reflect on tasks of the immediate semester or workshop. b. Assess the goal setting and make plans for the future.
(5) You at Your Best Playlist. a. Design a Playlist as a theme for “You at Your Best.” b. Reflect on and describe how the playlist tells a story of “You at Your Best” to motivate you in future contexts.
78 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley
Works Cited
American Council on Education. Serving those who serve: Higher education and America’s veterans.2008. Retrieved from http:// www.acnet.edu/ Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Editor Michael E. Holquist, translator Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981. Baxter Magolda, Marcia. “Ideas for Self-Authorship Curriculum for Students with Military Experience.” ASHE Higher Education Report, vol. 37, no. 3, 2011, pp. 81 – 91. doi:10.1002/aehe.3703 Blommaert, Jan. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Branker, Cheryl. “Deserving Design: The New Generation of Student Veterans.” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009, pp. 59-66. Cleary, Michelle Navarre & Kathryn Wozniak. “Veterans as Adult Learners in Composition Courses.” Composition Forum, vol. 28, Fall 2013. Retrieved from http://compositionforum.com/ issue/28/adult-learners.php. Conyers, Liza M. “Disability culture.” Rehabilitation Education, vol. 3, 2003, pp. 139-154. Davis, Christopher G. & Danay Novoa. “Meaning-making following spinal cord injury.” Rehabilitation Psychology, vol. 58, 2013, pp. 166-177. doi:10.1037/a0031554 Demers, Anne. “When Veterans Return: The Role of Community in Reintegration.” Journal of Loss and Trauma, vol.16, 2011, pp. 160-179. doi:10.1080/15325024.2010.519821. Dunn, Dana and Shane Burcaw. “Disability Identity: Exploring Narrative Accounts of Disability.” Rehabilitation Psychology, vol. 58, no. 2, 2013, pp. 148-157. doi:10.1037/a0031691 Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translator Robert Hurley. Pantheon, 1979. Gutiérrez, Kris. D. “Developing a Sociocritical Literacy in the Third Space.” Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 43, no.2, 2008, pp. 148 – 164. Gutiérrez, Kris D. and Barbara Rogoff. “Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice.” Educational Researcher, vol. 32, no. 5, 2003, pp. 19 – 25.
79 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Hall, Lynn. K. “The Importance of Understanding Military Culture.” Social Work in Health Care, vol. 50, no.1, 2011, pp. 4-18. doi:10.1080/00981389.2010.513914 Hart, Alexis and Roger Thompson. Editors. “Veterans and Writing.” Composition Forum, vol. 28, Fall 2013. Retrieved from http://compositionforum.com/issue/28/from-the-editors.php. Hartley, Michael T. “Assessing and Promoting Resilience: An Additional Tool to Address the Increasing Numbers of College Students with Psychological Problems.” Journal of College Counseling, vol. 15, 2012, pp. 37-50. Hartley, Michael T. and Aimee C. Mapes. “Resilience and Sports: An Innovative Approach to Rehabilitation Counseling for Veterans with Spinal Cord Injury.” Journal of Military and Government Counseling, vol. 3, no. 3, 2015, pp. 172 – 194. http://acegonline. org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/JMGC-Vol-3-Is-3.pdf. Hinton, Corrine. “The Military Taught Me Something about Writing: How Student Veterans Complicate the Novice-to-expert Continuum in First-year Composition.” Composition Forum, vol. 28, Fall 2013. Retrieved from http:// compositionforum.com/issue/28/novice-to-expert.php. Holland, Dorothy, et al. Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press, 1998. Kennedy, Paul and Jane Duff. Coping effectively with spinal cord injury. National Spinal Injuries Centre, 2001. Kennedy, Paul, et al. “Coping Effectiveness Training Reduces Depression and Anxiety Following Traumatic Spinal Cord Injuries.” British Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol. 42, 2003, pp. 41-52. Longmore, Paul and Lauri Umansky. Editors. The New Disability History: American Perspectives. The New York University Press, 2001. Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. The New York University Press, 1998. Miller, Eric D. “Reconceptualizing the Role of Resilience in Coping and Therapy.” Journal of Loss & Trauma, vol. 8, no. 4, 2003, pp. 239-246. McGeary, Donald D. “Making Sense of Resilience.” Military Medicine, vol. 176, no.6, 2011, pp. 603-604. Patton, Michael. Qualitative Research and Evaluation. Third edition. Thousand Oaks, 2001.
80 Re-Authoring Narratives | Mapes & Hartley
Ruh, Debra, et al. “Helping Veterans with Disabilities Transition to Employment.” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009, pp. 67-74. Saldaña, Johnny. Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Second edition. Sage, 2013. Schading, Barbara. A Civilian’s Guide to the U.S. Military: A Comprehensive Reference to the Customs, Language, & Structure of the Armed Forces. Writer’s Digest Books, 2007. Schell, Eileen. “Writing with Veterans in a Community Writing Group.” Composition Forum, vol. 28, Fall 2013. Retrieved from http://compositionforum.com/issue/28/writing-with-veterans. php. Smart, Julie. Disability, Society, and the Individual. Second edition. PRO-ED, 2008. Stuntzner, Susan and Michael T. Hartley. “Resilience, Coping, & Disability: The Development of a Resilience Intervention.” VISTAS ONLINE 2014, 2014. Retrieved from www.counseling. org Vance, Mary Lee and Wayne K. Miller. “Serving Wounded Warriors: Current Practices in Postsecondary Education.” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009, pp. 18-35. Vygotsky, Lev. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Process. Editor M. Cole. Harvard University Press, 1978. White, Brian, et al. “Considering Resilience in the Rehabilitation of People with Traumatic Disabilities.” Rehabilitation Psychology, vol. 53, no. 1, Feb, 2008, pp. 9-17. Williams, Nancy, et al. “Rising from the Ashes: Stories of Recovery, Adaptation, and Resilience in Burn Survivors. Social Work in Health Care, vol. 36, no. 4, 2003, pp. 53-77. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Logan: Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998.
81 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Aimee Mapes is Associate Director of the Writing Program at The University of Arizona where she teaches first-year writing and approaches to teaching writing. With a Ph.D. degree in Literacy, Language, and Culture, she focuses on literacy and identity. Her research interests include sociocultural literacy studies, composition studies, student development theory, and qualitative methodology. She can be reached by email at: [email protected].
Michael T. Hartley received his Ph.D. degree in Rehabilitation Counselor Education from The University of Iowa. His experience includes working as a certified rehabilitation counselor as well as training certified rehabilitation counselors to work in a variety of settings, including postsecondary education. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Disability and Psychoeducational Studies. His research interests include professional ethics and the ethical obligation to promote disability advocacy and resilience as critical rehabilitation counseling outcomes. He can be reached by email at: [email protected].
82 “A Story Worth Telling”: Sharing Stories and Impacting Lives in the Veterans’ Book Group Project at Fort Benning
Paige Paquette, with MAJ Adam In the fall of 2014, Troy University partnered with the Anderson, SGT La Alabama Humanities Foundation, working in conjunction Toya Burnette, SGT with the Maine Humanities Council, to provide a veterans’ JeQuetta Canady, reading group to wounded warriors at the Warrior Specialist E4 Brandon Transition Battalion at Fort Benning, GA. The program, Carr, SGT First Class Nathaniel Coakley, Story Swap: Literature and the Veteran Experience, consisted Ret., and Staff of five, ten-week sessions. During weekly meetings, veterans Sergeant Yolanda came together to share dinner and swap stories. While reading Teamer and discussing short stories, novels, poetry, essays, and art, the veterans learned much about each other and themselves. In this article, Paige Paquette, an assistant professor of English and the group facilitator, will discuss her involvement in the planning and implementation of the program. Six of the participating veterans will share their experiences in a literary program that allowed them to realize they all have a story worth telling.
Everyone has a story. Some stories have been written, some have been told, and some are just waiting on the opportunity. —Paige Paquette
83 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
n 2014, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) tasked the Maine Humanities Council (MHF) to work with Itheir counterparts across the United States to develop veterans’ book groups. The Maine Humanities Foundation’s final report on Veterans’ Book Group Project listed three main project goals. The first was to “provide a veteran-centered setting and context for veterans to connect with one another, build relationships, and share experiences.” The second was to “create an opportunity for veterans to give a voice to and reflect upon issues of particular interest or concern.” The third goal was to “engage with materials that will allow veterans to see their own stories as part of a larger human experience, connecting them with others across time” (Sinclair 4). Having four military bases within the footprint of Alabama, the Alabama Humanities Foundation (AHF) was eager to participate in the program; TROY University received a grant from the AHF to start a book group at Fort Benning, an Army base in Georgia. AHF provided initial information, an outline of the Maine Humanities Council’s purpose and goals, sample syllabi and other suggestions that were provided by the Maine Humanities Council. The Humanities Councils entrusted most of the planning, reading and implementing to the facilitators.
As an Assistant Professor of English at TROY University and because of several personal connections to the military and a passion for learning, I felt like a reading group with veterans was an excellent opportunity; I applied for one of the AHF grants. I had never facilitated a group such as this so my initial goals were modest: to encourage reading and discussion of various forms of literature; however, I had no idea the program would create an outlet for storytelling and writing through the reading group structure. The book group became a sounding board and community for many of the participants who felt as if their voices were no longer important, re-established a feeling of camaraderie that many soldiers craved, and inspired several of the veterans to continue to use reading, and writing, as ways in which their feelings could be expressed.
After receiving the grant from AHF, I began to plan the veterans’ book group program. As previously mentioned, the AHF passed down information from the Maine Humanities Council with
84 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette recommended readings and an explanation of the supervisory roles. There were other recommendations, but much of the implementation of the program was left to the team I rallied around me. I chose to recruit participants for the reading group at the Warrior Transition Battalion (WTB) at Fort Benning. Soldiers and Veterans live at the WTB during times when they receive medical treatment for injuries and ailments. Some of the injuries may not be military related, but many were sustained during combat or training. This battalion is referred to as the “transition” battalion because most soldiers transition back to a unit or out of the Army from this point.
Implementing an outside program on a military base is not always an easy task. As I sought out a way to connect with the veterans at the WTB, I met Nate Coakley, a veteran who worked with soldiers at the Fort Benning Warrior Transition Battalion and served as president of the Fort Benning Wounded Warrior Association. Nate assisted me in acquiring permission from the Battalion Commander to implement the program.
Once I had permission to provide the program to veterans, I developed material for recruiting, a syllabus, and a basic plan for the program. While speaking with Nate, I realized it could be difficult to recruit veterans by advertising a Veterans’ Book Group. The Alabama Humanities Foundation adopted the title Literature and the Veteran Experience, but we were worried veterans would not relate to that title. One of the nurse case managers, who helped with recruiting veterans, recommended we call our group Story Swap. Our program title became Story Swap: Literature and the Veteran Experience (LVE); however, most of the veterans fondly refer to it as Story Swap.
One recommendation from the Maine Humanities Councils’ program was to have a scholar, veteran co-facilitator, and a site coordinator. I felt it would be most beneficial to find veterans to fill both positions. I knew how to select stories and other literary pieces for students, but selecting meaningful literature for soldiers was challenging. After recognizing Nate’s passion for veterans and his position in the WTB, I knew that he must be a part of the implementing of Story Swap: LVE. Nate wore many hats in our program: recruiter, site coordinator, and a participant. The recruiter is responsible for providing information
85 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing about the program and inviting the veterans to participate. The site coordinator secures the location and assures that it is ready for the meeting each week. Because he was a veteran also, Nate often shared his thoughts about the readings during the meetings.
The veteran co-facilitator of the program served more than thirty years in the United States Army. COL (Ret.) Tom MacGregor was a chaplain for much of his Army career. He both led and counseled many soldiers during his time in the military. He also has three sons, a son-in-law, and a daughter-in-law who are currently serving in the Army. I knew that he was the perfect veteran co-facilitator because he could relate to the veterans, provide expert guidance, and understand the various emotions behind such a tremendous life transition. As the co-facilitator, Tom gave me insight from a veteran’s perspective, and he brought wisdom and perspective into the group. During one of the meetings for our first Story Swap: LVE session, we read a story about a soldier returning home. Tom shared that he often provided redeployment training, preparing soldiers to return home from war, while he was in Iraq. Several of the soldiers in the group commented on the value of having that type of training. When Tom realized these men and women had not received the training, he was able to provide them with a brief overview and help them relate the strategies to their current situations.
Our program was designed to meet one night a week for ten weeks, and we repeated the ten-week curriculum five times. Each participating veteran received a notebook with weekly readings and a novel to discuss during the last week of the session. The AHF grant monies also funded a light dinner each week. Food is always a selling point, especially since most of those attending lived in the barracks. The first iteration of Story Swap averaged six veterans per meeting. By our fourth iteration, we were averaging twelve to fifteen veterans. We had veterans who were active-duty, reserves, National Guard, and retired. After the first session, the AHF requested I try to recruit at least eight to ten veterans in the program per session. Because many of these veterans had medical appointments and health issues, it was sometimes difficult, and stressful, assuring that we had a strong representation in the meetings. However, as the veterans began to see value in the program, they began to take ownership,
86 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette and they recruited others in the WTB to join Story Swap. One of the many unpredicted successes of the program was that we had veterans ranked Private to Colonel. During the first meeting, the soldiers set the precedent that there was no “rank” during our meetings, so enlisted veterans spoke freely to and among officer veterans.
A typical meeting started with a light dinner and conversation, and then the group moved into a time of literary discussion, which typically moved to life discussions. Throughout our sessions, we read a variety of short stories, poems, and novels. There were several poems and short stories that became favorites and, even though many of the same veterans participated in multiple sessions, these literary pieces were popular each time the participants read and discussed them. A few of the favorite poems were “We Wear a Mask” by Paul Dunbar, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, and “There’s a Whole in My Sidewalk” by Portia Nelson. The poems stimulated discussion as to how they related to the veterans’ lives, and they also inspired several of the veterans to write their own poetry and share it with the group. Of course, the veterans enjoyed many of the short stories from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. They also appreciated short stories and essays such as “Three Questions” by Leo Tolstoy, “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, and “I Miss Iraq, I Miss My Gun, I Miss My War” by Brian Mockenhaupt. The books and novels we read included Of Mice and Men, The Forever War, and The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life that Follows. Of all the novels we read, the one which seemed to be most enjoyable to the veterans was Certain Jeopardy, written by Jeff Struecker, a retired Army Chaplain whose personal story is featured in the book and movie Black Hawk Down. This is the first in a series of his military novels. The novel shares the adventures of a team of soldiers, a special unit, as they travel across the world in a moment’s notice to rescue and protect others in harm’s way. After the veterans completed the novel, Jeff came to discuss it with them and share his thought process while writing.
Because this program was in its initial implementation, I felt as if I were a first-year teacher in many ways. I did not know what to expect, so I focused on the goals provided by the Maine Humanities Council. I wanted the veterans to read the literature I selected and to discuss it during our times together. Even that was more of a challenge than I
87 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing anticipated. Some of the veterans had injuries that made it difficult for them to read or comprehend. There were others who were busy with various appointments. Still others wanted to just enjoy dinner and the conversation without doing much reading. I learned that shorter stories, essays, and poetry made it more likely that the veterans would read the material prior to coming to the meetings. There were times in the different sessions I heard comments that told me the veterans who weren’t reading had started to do so. As time went on, most of the veterans began to read the literary pieces I provided for the week because they found value in sharing their thoughts based more upon their experiences with the pieces we were discussing.
Since much of my English educational background is in writing, I hoped I would be able to incorporate writing into the program. Even though I often suggested and encouraged writing within the Story Swap sessions, I did not include writing in the curriculum because it was not part of the Maine Humanities’ Council’s project. In the last session, however, I started seeing small pieces of writing emerge. On two separate occasions, both Nate and I stepped out of our comfort zones and shared poetry we had written. Initially, we allowed the veterans to read and discuss our work without revealing ourselves as the authors. Then, after sharing that we were the authors of the poems, many of the veterans started to talk about stepping out of their own comfort zones by writing and described how they began journaling their thoughts, feelings, and plans for the future. A few weeks later, one of the veterans sent a poem to share with the group when we next met. She also shared that she hopes to write a book about her health journey.
In future sessions with veterans and any other people in the group with whom I interact, I will provide journals at the beginning of the program and encourage each participant to take their thoughts, feelings, and stories and use them to write poems and narratives. In the past, we read the literary pieces and discussed their significance to each reader. In addition to this aspect of the program, I will slowly introduce the participants to writing poetry, essays, and short stories. Even the youngest of these veterans had wisdom and experience he or she could share with the literary community. It is important to develop ways to build their confidence to do so. I will determine ways
88 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette in which I can transfer their enthusiasm for discussing the reading to writing about their own journeys and battles they face.
Although I can share the details of the program as the developer and facilitator of the Story Swap: Literature and the Veteran Experience program at Fort Benning, the true results of any program must come from the participants. To help veterans in the group tell the story of the project, I composed and distributed a series of questions relating to their military careers, their introduction to Story Swap, experiences they have had in the program, and outcomes (including introducing writing into their lives). I asked them to use my questions as a springboard to construct individual narratives about their experiences in the program. I offer their responses here in order to provide insight into the impact of Story Swap on its individual participants.
MAJ Adam Anderson As a military brat, a husband, a father of five kids, and a retired, commissioned officer in the military for more than twenty-two years, I’ve experienced the military from many angles. I have served in the U.S. Army National Guard, U.S. Army Reserves, and the U.S. Army as an active duty soldier. I have held many titles such as Platoon Leader, Executive Officer, Detachment Commander, and Company Commander. I have deployed twice to Afghanistan (2006-2007 and 2013-2014). However, I had never really encountered an opportunity to share about my experiences in a meaningful way until I started attending Story Swap.
In 2014, I found myself at the Warrior Training Battalion (WTB) at Fort Benning, GA. The sense of being a part of something that was meaningful, purposeful, and bigger than I had been was what drove me in my military career, and now I was trying to determine what my future would be. After about a year at the WTB, my nurse case manager told me I should go to Story Swap. I found myself thinking like one of my kids, “I’m going to go, but that doesn’t mean I will like it.” I was surprised the first night at how much I enjoyed the discussion. I immediately felt welcome and included. I saw merit in
89 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing the program because it helped me to put things into perspective and open myself up to differing ideas and opinions.
In the military, you do not always have the opportunity to disagree, but in Story Swap meetings we were able to debate the merits and authors’ intent in a friendly environment. Veterans were required to leave their ranks at the door, so I had the opportunity to interact with soldiers of all ranks, from PFC to COL. As other Story Swap members shared their personal stories, I was able to get to know others and establish friendships with many of them. I believe sharing my own story opened doors for me to use my experiences to help several of the other soldiers in the group.
At one meeting, there was a young Soldier who had started attending a couple of weeks prior, mainly for the free food and because his buddy was there. He had remained more of an observer than a participant. He listened but had not engaged, often keeping his head down as he listened. That night, we seemed to have come to a general consensus as to what we thought the story was about when this young man looked up and said, “I don’t agree.” Paige tilted her head to the side, smiled at him, and asked him what he was thinking. The group listened, validated, and discussed his thoughts. Although it was a challenging conversation, it was inclusive and supportive, and it started him on the path to becoming one of the more vocal members of the group.
I retired out of the Army during my time in Story Swap. This program helped me work through the honest realization that I was leaving the Army for good, and this would be the end of my Army career. There would be no MAJ Anderson anymore, no authority or responsibility. My Story Swap family, helped me to understand that, while this chapter in my life was over for good, it is not the end of my story. My mission wasn’t the Army; the Army was just a mule that I rode for a period of time. I now have the opportunity to use all I learned in the military to make a difference in the lives of others.
SGT La Toya Burnette I have been an Army reservist for eight years, having deployed twice to Afghanistan. When I’m not soldiering, I am a LPN. If I have
90 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette learned anything in my years, it is that life throws unexpected curve balls at you. When I was injured in Afghanistan, I received orders to go to the Warrior Transition Battalion (WTB) at Fort Benning. I wanted to come to the WTB, get whatever treatment I needed, and then move on with my career, but I found myself in a place where I didn’t even like me. I had only been at the WTB for a few months when an officer in my unit invited me to Story Swap. I found excuses not to go for several weeks, but she continued to invite me. Finally, I came to a Story Swap meeting, and I felt like I had found a place I could belong. It’s ironic. I thought I didn’t want any friends, yet it was the people in the group that drew me in. I enjoyed spending time with them, listening to their thoughts on the readings, and then sharing my own ideas and opinions. The literary pieces we read in Story Swap gave me a voice and a platform on which I could be me.
I have always enjoyed reading, so I cannot quite understand why I didn’t really read the literary pieces when I first started attending. As I continued to recognize this “voice” that I was developing, I realized that I could share more and provide more input if I read everything we were going to discuss. The short stories and poems broadened my horizons. I can look into the literary pieces and put myself in the shoes of the characters, authors, or speakers in the work. I found myself thinking, “This is how it made me feel” or “This is how I would feel if this happened to me.” Participating in this group reminded me of my love for poetry, and I even developed an appreciation for art. I never would have considered that I would be able to look at a picture to find meaning in it, place myself in the picture, or listen to others to hear their perspectives.
I remember one particularly lively discussion around the essay, “The Worst Day of My Life is now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction” by Steve Kandell. As we began talking about the essay, we all referred back to where we were on 9-11. Many of us decided that 9-11 was one of the main reasons we joined the Army. We also realized that, even though we all witnessed the same day in history, we each had a different experience, memory, and outcome from the tragedy. That is one of the author’s points in the essay. He saw the 9-11 Museum as a reminder that his sister’s body was never recovered from the World Trade Center, while others had a different experience and
91 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing understanding. As he sat in a room set aside for those who were still missing remains from their loved ones, he discussed how others just did not understand the conflicting feelings he had. All of the members of the Story Swap group could relate to that notion as well. Many of us do not have visible scars. Our scars are hidden, emotional rather than physical. People with whom we associate, even other soldiers, do not understand exactly how we feel, what we think, or what burdens we carry. So it would be even more difficult for civilians to understand…even our biological families.
Story Swap has changed my life. I have been encouraged to read more, and I have especially been inspired to write. In the past, I would often let lesson-learning or memorable moments pass by, virtually unnoticed. Now, I stop and write about them. I believe a pen is a powerful weapon I can use to protect me in my day-to-day living. Since I have been at the WTB, I have not felt the constant support from others I felt when I was deployed anywhere else other than Story Swap. Just this past year, when I lost my grandmother to whom I was very close, I found my birth certificate and learned my biological father’s name. I had an opportunity to meet my father for the first time. Discussing the readings and re-establishing my “voice” gave me the confidence to connect with an entire family I did not know existed and had never met. Throughout the whole journey of loss and discovery, my Story Swap family walked alongside me.
Through reading and discussing literature, Story Swap has provided a place where I could share my thoughts and experiences and learn from others. I have come from a place of self-inflicted isolation to one in which I participate in everything: Story Swap, guitar lessons, singing performances, deep sea fishing excursions, and so much more. As the poem, “The Mask” showed us, we do not have to wear a mask all of the time. I found that Story Swap was a place where I could come, scarred and wounded, and be inspired to become more than I ever dreamed I could be.
SGT JeQuetta Canady After seven and a half years in the Army as a military analyst, I never anticipated I would spend almost two years of my life at the WTB. My immediate family, including my husband and three children, live less
92 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette than an hour from Fort Benning, but during the week, it seemed like they could have been on another continent. I truly believe the Lord knew I needed the type of supportive family Story Swap provided.
I am the only veteran, other than Nate, to have participated in all five, ten-week sessions because I happened to be in the right place at the right time the first night the program started. As I walked through the Warrior Training Battalion (WTB) building the first night of Story Swap, my nurse case manager grabbed me and told me I should go into the meeting. Because I was new to the WTB, I really did not know anyone yet. At the meeting, I quickly realized I was the only female veteran in the room. Although I was really quiet the first session, I recognized this was the opportunity for me to be a part of something important while I was at the WTB. I had been assigned to the WTB to have surgery, so I was focused on having that done, healing, and returning to my unit. As I continued to attend Story Swap meetings, I started to feel a sense of freedom and relaxation I was not finding anywhere else. During the first session, Story Swap helped me to focus more on my surroundings, people, reading opportunities, and new relationships.
From the beginning, I understood Story Swap was something special. I enjoyed reading and tried to do so whenever I could, but I had never been in a situation where I could hear others’ interpretations and share my own. As I heard others share what was sometimes personal information, I started to feel a little more comfortable with the possibility of sharing. It was a bit awkward for me at times, not because of the group make-up or because I did not have anything to share, but I felt as if I had not gone through many of the situations others in the group experienced. I had not been wounded in combat or faced danger in the ways they had. It made me feel as if I could not relate and might not have anything to contribute. However, once I started sharing, I found out how great it felt to be able to express my opinion and to hear others’ thoughts in relation to mine.
Near the end of the ten-week session, I received unexpected news. I had an aggressive form of breast cancer, and I would have to begin chemotherapy the next week. My whole world began to spin, but it was my own family and my Story Swap family that encouraged
93 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing me as I prepared for a new, fierce battle. I guess I could describe my experiences with Story Swap as those of faith and friendship. In session three, several other ladies joined the group. These ladies provided much support and encouragement throughout my cancer journey. When members of the group said, “If you need anything, let me know. I will do anything to help,” they meant it. I had group members stop by to see me after a treatment, bringing me treats and goodies, and both Paige and Nate came and sat with me during a treatment.
It is amazing how something I appreciated because it was a chance to step out of the “real world” and move into a world with a variety of characters, stories, and poems became such a crucial part of my life. On Thursdays after I had a chemo treatment, I did my very best to still attend Story Swap meetings. The literature provided my mind an escape, and the friends there were like a breath of fresh air. It is ironic how things change. When I started coming to Story Swap, I felt like I had not experienced the battles many of the veterans in our group discussed. And now, I realize I have faced my own battle, one to which most of my Story Swap family members cannot relate. They have not given up on trying to understand my battle, and they have fought it with me in any way they can.
One of my favorite pieces we read together was, “The Worst Day of my Life has now Become a New York Tourist Attraction” by Steve Kendall. I have always felt like many people do not understand war, loss, and sacrifice. I recently wrote a poem challenging people to remember that Memorial Day is more about sacrifice than cookouts and swimming. I feel like Kendall truly understands the consequences of evil, war, and sacrifice. This entire essay is a poignant piece, but I believe the culmination of it is when Kendall discusses the gift shop and how everything that happened seems to be packaged up into a “been there, seen that” t-shirt or hoodie. I have made great strides in my cancer journey, but as I continue to walk through the consequences, I realize many times people do not understand or “get it” because of ignorance or maybe apathy. Reading literature and sharing thoughts and opinions with others is a great way to expand one’s knowledge and understanding.
94 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette
I have started reading more literature and other types of writing since I have been involved in Story Swap, and I look at the pieces I read much differently now. I look for how the piece speaks to me and try to determine how it might speak to others. I have become more dedicated to journaling. Paige suggested I journal about my cancer journey, and I used that as an outlet. I will continue to journal as I move on to new phases of life. As I said before, I have written a few poems, and I believe one day I will write my own story in hopes of inspiring someone else who is facing a similar battle. In the Army, we all have a battle buddy. Soldiers never leave their buddies, and they help their buddies when one feels as if he or she cannot continue. Story Swap has provided me with many battle buddies who have walked with me over the last year or so. I know they are always there to help me carry on. Now, that is a story worth telling.
Specialist E4 Brandon Carr I served in the U.S. Army Reserves for three years as a Human Resources Specialist. I always longed to be a part of something bigger than myself. Everyone has seen the commercials on t.v. about “being all that you can be,” “being an Army of ONE,” and “being Army Strong,” and even though I knew that those were just catchy slogans, I wanted to be a part of the Army family. Because of circumstances in my life, I chose to serve as a reservist rather than going active duty, so I could serve the people in my community as well as my country. Having enlisted long after 9-11, I knew the chances were good that I would be called up to active duty and deploy, but I was ready to serve.
I received orders to deploy to Afghanistan in 2014. To say I enjoyed my deployment may sound weird to many, but, while I was there fighting, I felt I was able to do my duty and protect others at home. I felt a sense of accomplishment. There was also a closeness I felt with my battle buddy and others in my unit. I had never experienced this type of family feeling with others. My military career came to a screeching halt when I was injured, and I returned to the “old me” by way of the Warrior Transition Battalion (WTB) at Fort Benning, Georgia.
For seven months, I lived at the WTB while I struggled with my identity and issues. I isolated myself from others. I didn’t want to
95 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing recognize where I was in my life or deal with all of the issues my injury brought both physically and emotionally. One day a battalion nurse case manager told me about Story Swap. She told me that there was FREE food, and I’m not sure I heard what else she said after that.
When I first heard about Story Swap, I thought it was going to be a book club. Reading is not on my top-five list of things to do for fun, so I was not sure that I was going to like it. As soon as I arrived, I was hooked. It did not take long for me to realize others attending Story Swap dealt with similar things like I was experiencing. That was the first time that I realized there were others who really wanted to help me, not because it was their job, but because they genuinely cared about me. I would also say that Paige, our facilitator, was another reason I came back. She always maintained a bright outlook in our group conversations and encouraged us to share. I knew she really wanted to hear what I had to say. I will always believe the literature we read and the people I met in Story Swap helped me more than months of therapy.
I must confess I am not really a reader, but I am a talker. If the reading we had was more than just a page or two, let’s just say I opted to learn from others. The literature we read each week really did make an impact on my life. I never realized stories written by some dead old guys could speak to me and my life experiences. It was also encouraging to hear how it spoke to others. Many times we would start discussing a story, and then one person’s response would fuel another’s. I remember the second time I came to a Story Swap evening. I decided this was the week I was going to share my thoughts. I usually struggled with giving my opinions, yet when I did speak, I realized the group embraced my thoughts and made me recognize that, again, I was a part of a family.
My favorite piece of literature we read was “The Mask” by Paul Dunbar. I remember reading poetry in school, but I never allowed it to speak to me. After Paige shared a little about Dunbar’s background, I realized he and I had several commonalities. Someone in the group read the poem, and I remember thinking, “YES! This is me.” The poem captivated me, and I still think of it regularly. There are many other stories and poems which impacted me during the two sessions
96 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette
I participated in with Story Swap. I often found myself carrying our conversations back to the barracks after we finished.
Story Swap was, and will always be, a safe-haven for veterans and civilians to come together and explore the mental and emotional effects of the traumatic events in their lives. This program encouraged me to step out of my own darkness and to allow others to walk with me through the process. It helped me see I do not have to wear masks with everyone. I realized life is so much better when you can share your thoughts and opinions with others who understand. I would love to say Story Swap inspired me to become an avid reader, but that would not be true. It did motivate me to write more and to use my writing as an outlet of expression.
I am out of the military now and back at work in my job in human resources. I have no idea where my life will go in the future. I do know Story Swap filled a gap for me when I was trying to make my way back from a world of isolation. Programs like this are crucial in the lives of people who need to know they still matter to the world. I will be forever grateful to those old (and mostly dead) authors, Paige, and TROY University for bringing the brightness back into my darkened world.
SGT First Class Nathaniel Coakley, Ret. When I was first introduced to the Literature and the Veteran Experience program, I recognized the value of an opportunity to both introduce veterans to literature and to bring those at the Warrior Transition Battalion (WTB) into a more intimate community. As a veteran myself, having served twenty-one years and having deployed to Panama, Honduras, Kuwait, and Iraq, I had an appreciation for the Army family and its appeal to many soldiers. With my current position as WTB Staff Operations and Training Specialist, one thing I focus on is resiliency training. I knew that Story Swap had the potential to create a familial atmosphere and assist with recovery and resilience, but I could not have imagined the impact it would have on the participants, myself included.
97 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
My official title and role in the Story Swap program was Site Coordinator. I participated somewhat as a co-facilitator, bringing up military-related ideas and concepts of which Paige, the scholar/ facilitator, would not be aware. There were many times that I was also just a veteran participant. I often found myself sharing my experiences and discovering new thought patterns. One of my most significant moments in Story Swap was actually during the inaugural ten-week session. After one Thursday evening meeting, Paige and I were walking out together, doing what the military calls an after- action report on the evening. Paige, who had only known me a few weeks, discerned that I was dealing with some heavy issues in my life. She recognized something my co-workers of seven years did not notice. When I say that Story Swap changed my life, it was actually this 30-45 minute talk with Paige that affected me the most. It can be difficult at times for veterans who are dealing with their own issues to work with those at the WTB. That night, I was in a dark, dark place and was on the cusp of losing confidence and hope in myself. Paige’s poignant words jolted me and helped me grasp the understanding that I am worthy. I realized that I had been entrusted with the lives of many other soldiers in the organization. I was also reminded of the importance of taking a moment to look into others’ eyes and see beyond the masks they wear.
I had not thought much about this concept of wearing masks to cover up what we are really thinking and feeling until we read the poem, “The Mask” by Paul Dunbar. After reading this piece, I was able to relate to it on both a personal and professional level. As a soldier, leader, or parent, it is sometimes necessary to wear a mask to protect others in our care. It has been interesting to see how this poem has spoken differently to me over time based on my changing circumstances. During the second group reading of the poem, Paige shared Dunbar’s biographical background with us. I felt as if I understood the poem even more once I realized he was raised in a very different racial environment than most African Americans during that time period. He probably often felt forced to wear a mask to hide the variety of emotions and experiences he faced. As I mentioned earlier, one of the characteristics of the military that has always appealed to me is a sense of family. In retrospect, I realize that there have been times with the Story Swap family when I have been able to remove masks
98 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette that I still wear with my own biological family. Removing a mask and being accepted is a powerful feeling.
It is difficult to describe Story Swap, but I characterize the program as an experience where you come together, enjoy fellowship, laugh, and sometimes cry… all without being judged, evaluated, or probed. I am an extrovert; although I am comfortable talking to crowds, it was only during our Story Swap meetings that I was able to open up and share several personal experiences. My participation in Story Swap has motivated me to read more literature, personal essays, and novels. Art has taken on a new meaning since I have learned more about putting myself “in” the picture. I believe the area in which I have been challenged to stretch the most is my writing. I have used poetry to express my thoughts and feelings. It is rewarding to share it with other veterans and see they really “get it.” After five, ten- week sessions of Story Swap, I have come to define the group as a place where your words and views really mean something and can help others see that reading and discussing literature is an important vehicle for self-expression.
Staff Sergeant Yolanda Teamer I have spent much of my adult life in the military, twenty-nine years and seven months. I cannot say I have loved every minute of it, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. I have worked in human resources as a military reservist, and I am a Juvenile Justice Officer for the State of Florida. I am proud to have contributed to the protection of people here and in harm’s way. During my military service, I have been deployed to Bosnia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I consider it a privilege to have been given the opportunity to serve my country, to lead, teach, and mentor many other young men and women who have answered their nation’s call to service.
After Afghanistan I received orders to come to the Warrior Transition Battalion (WTB) at Fort Benning. I have been here for a year and a half. Up until recently, I thought I was feeling better, so I was expecting to return to my reserve duty status soon. Just a few months ago, I found out I would be retiring instead. It was a tough pill to swallow, and I am thankful to have such a supportive family at
99 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing home and my Story Swap family to help me as I transition from the career I have cherished for so long.
I had been at the WTB for about six months when another soldier invited me to come to this reading group called Story Swap. I did not think I would enjoy something like this. I planned to attend one meeting so that the person who invited me would stop asking me to attend. When I arrived at Story Swap, I saw it was a very friendly atmosphere. I found this group to be an opportunity to talk about different issues I might be experiencing, and I realized others were going through many of the same things I was. I never knew reading short stories and poems could be a great catalyst to conversation. I realized early during my time in the group it was much more valuable and interesting to read all of the literary pieces every week. It allowed me an opportunity to contemplate my thoughts and opinions as I read to prepare to articulate them better to the group.
After participating in three, ten-week sessions of the program, I have realized literature has something to offer every reader. An example of this is my favorite poem, “The Mask” by Paul Dunbar. While reading this poem, I realized almost everyone wears a mask; some people wear several of them. Typically, we wear masks to keep people away or to draw others toward themselves. I found myself considering all of the masks I wear. As a soldier, leader, daughter, mother, wife, friend, and employee, I often find I need to put on a different mask. In most of my roles, there are times it is not acceptable to show my true feelings. When we gathered together, all labels and ranks disappeared. We were just people who had thoughts, opinions, dreams, disappointments, and goals.
Many of the participants in Story Swap have become more than just friends; they are my family. Story Swap has shown me the value of reading, and we can usually find a point at which we relate to something we have read. I have not started writing much during my time at the WTB, but I know writing will be an excellent way for me to transition when I retire from the Army. My story is about to change a bit, but I am confident that I can share it with others and, hopefully, make a positive impact in their lives. We all have a story someone needs to hear. We may never write our stories, but we
100 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette need to evaluate them and determine how they can benefit others. As veterans, we have dedicated ourselves to positively impacting our country. That does not change because we are no longer in the military. We may start a new chapter, but we should never stop swapping stories and impacting lives.
Conclusion: Paige Paquette As I assess the project, I realize that Story Swap: Literature and the Veteran Experience not only met all of the initial goals for the program, but it far exceeded my expectations. It is apparent that Story Swap provided an environment in which veterans connected, built relationships, and shared experiences. Most of my veteran co-writers validated this in their discussions about the program. The word “family” is used often among the Story Swap members, and in the military, that is not a word soldiers use casually. Soldiers assigned to the WTB are all in a state of transition, waiting to determine whether they will continue to serve their countries or find it necessary to alter their career goals. Story Swap provided those veterans attending the group a reason to come out of the barracks and to break out of the isolation that can so easily grip us all during times of uncertainty. The program provided the veterans with an atmosphere in which sharing personal stories was accepted and encouraged. The veterans also experienced, possibly for the first time, the ability to talk about their military experiences openly and freely with others who understood.
Many of the veterans in the group recognized they had a voice. Having worked in a structured environment like the military, the opportunity to speak freely and express personal thoughts might not have been available to these veterans. Although many of the veterans did not know what their futures held at the time, Story Swap allowed them to step out of the “Army of One” mentality, as Brandon shared, and move towards a new place in their lives where they were individuals and were encouraged to think for themselves. Through reading, these veterans discovered that others within the group had similar thoughts and understandings. They also recognized there were authors, poets, writers, and even artists, who had similar experiences and situations.
101 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
There were several other discoveries these veterans made beyond my goals for the program. I saw men and women, many much younger than I, discover or re-discover themselves as they related to the literary pieces and the others’ thoughts shared within the group. It was in these moments, when they seemed to be most vulnerable, that the others reached out and embraced them. Many times when we face uncertainty, we either run from others or run toward them. I believe the literature drew these men and women together during their uncertain times, and that brought forth the creation of this new family many discussed in their writing.
In their information about the program, the Maine Humanities Council described the veterans’ book group concept as one bringing, “diverse people who share a common experience together in a relaxed setting, offering opportunities for reflection, and to be part of a community” (Sinclair 2). These achievements were the beginning of the literary experience for the Story Swap veterans. The participants in the program came because of free food and an opportunity to spend time with others. Many of them admitted that they did not read when they initially came to the meetings. As the participants found they had many commonalities and began to grow closer together as a group, they also started to read more. Most of my co-writers were involved with Story Swap for two or three sessions. I watched them move from the fellowship of others to engaging in their own forms of reflective writing or thinking.
Story Swap brought a group of men and women, who spent most of their days waiting on the Army, appointments, and others’ decisions, to a new dynamic in which they were intellectuals who were reading, questioning, debating, and speaking out on their understandings of literature. As each veteran became more aware that he or she each had a story to tell, I began to hear more about writing in journals, poems, and even writing books. Many of the veterans participating in Story Swap have started a new chapter in their lives, one away from the Army, and the reading and writing experiences they have had will travel with the into those new lives. They take with them the stories they heard from other veterans about transition, loss and healing, the memories and friendships they made as they read and discussed literature and some began to share their writing, and the
102 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette advice and encouragement they gave each other as they transitioned. Story Swap veterans are also taking a voice, an admiration for reading, and an appreciation for the discoveries they make about life and themselves through writing. Although most of these veterans feel as if their military careers have ended before they should, each has realized the value of sharing their thoughts and experiences in a circle of other veterans. As Jequetta put it, those are definitely “stories worth telling.”
103 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Works Cited
Sinclair, Elizabeth. Literature and Medicine for Veterans. Portland: Maine Humanities Foundation, 2015. Print.
104 A Story Worth Telling | Paquette
Dr. Paige F. Paquette is an Assistant Professor of English at TROY University. She has taught at TROY for fourteen years. Because TROY is a military friendly university, many of her students are soldiers. She spends much of her own time volunteering on Fort Benning, GA, working with military teens, families, and veterans.
Adam Anderson retired as a Major from the United States Army after serving 22 years. He currently works in a federal government position.
La Toya Burnette is a Sergeant in the United States Army Reserves. She has served in human resources for 8 years. In her other career, SGT Burnette is a LPN.
JeQuetta Canady is a Sergeant in the United States Army Reserves. She has served as an intelligence analyst for 7.5 years. SGT Canady also owns her own business, Canady Global Systems. This company helps new business and entrepreneurs acquire direct access to financing or establish business credit.
Brandon Carr served as a Specialist in the United States Army Reserves for 3 years in human resources. He currently works in human resources in Atlanta, GA.
Nate Coakley retired as a Sergeant First Class in the United States Army after serving for 21 years. He worked at the Fort Benning Warrior Transition Battalion for 7.5 years and recently started a position as a Training Instructor at the Fort Benning Maneuver Center of Excellence in the Combined Arms Training Development. Nate is also the president of the Fort Benning Wounded Warriors Association.
Yolanda Teamer retired as a Staff Sergeant in the United States Army Reserves after serving 29.7 years. She currently works as a juvenile justice officer for the State of Florida.
105 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom
Derek G. Handley, United States Naval This essay supplements previous studies on effective strategies Academy for instructing veterans in the first year writing classroom. Those studies typically focus on students who identify as veterans, but there are many veterans entering American universities who do not reveal their past military experiences. This essay explores one approach of developing a first year writing course that responds to the experiences of “stealth” veterans while simultaneously meeting the educational needs of all the students. I contend that a rhetorical education approach to writing instruction allows veterans to connect their writing with both citizenship and their former military service, and may reduce the divide between veteran and non- veteran students. I focus on how a citizenship pedagogy could allow veterans to see a stronger purpose for their academic work and to develop an understanding of how citizens can make decisions through inquiry.
ust a year after deploying to the Middle East for the start of Operation Iraqi JFreedom, I returned home to Pittsburgh and ended my active duty career of nearly eleven years in the Navy. I was disoriented to say the least. Initially, I noticed how removed
106 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
many civilians were from what was happening in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan and how little they knew about the military itself. Some people seemed more concerned about who was winning American Idol than how many Americans, Afghans, and Iraqis were dying in the two wars. Unfair assessment? Perhaps. But in 2004, I felt that only fellow veterans and I were “conscious.” I felt we were the only ones who were aware that life and death decisions were taking place every minute and that those decisions affected the lives of many people we knew and served with. In my mind, many civilians were like zombies, the walking unaware, staggering from reality show to reality show and preoccupied with things that really didn’t matter. I will not speak for all veterans, but I believe that sentiment is similar for many of us, including the veterans in your classroom. Real or imaginary, I always felt a divide between the civilian world and the military.
That divide seemed even wider when, a few months after leaving active duty, I pursued a graduate degree in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh. I was attracted to the program because it required graduate literature courses as part of the creative writing curriculum. Not only did I want to write like Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, I wanted to study their work, too. I quickly discovered that an MFA program is about as far away environmentally as you can get from active duty military life. I was excited to be in this new world, but I was definitely an outsider. My fellow graduate students dressed differently, ate different foods, and spoke differently. I often remark that my first language was African American Vernacular English, but I also had become fluent in Navy Military discourse. It is a discourse heavy on dark humor, clichés, and acronyms. For example, “HM3 Jones said to go into PRIMS and fill out the PARFQ before the PRT next week.” In reading that sentence, a person in the Navy would know Jones’ job in the military and about how long he has served. The Navy member would also know the computer program used to fill out specific health readiness form that is required before taking the physical fitness test. Military discourse crams as much information as possible into the minimal amount of words and sentences. This is intended not only to maximize efficiency but also to ensure that military personnel who joined out of high school can fully grasp the information. But my comfort with military discourse also led to my feeling like an outsider in the classroom. There is a
107 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing considerable gap in the types of writing that take place between the military and academia.
When I began my graduate program, the quality of my writing when compared to that of my fellow graduate students was atrocious. Ten years had passed since I earned my undergraduate degree, and academic writing was a distant memory. My reentry into academic writing was a graduate level literature course I took the first semester of my MFA program, and it was a disaster. My paragraphs were too short, and I did not provide enough detail to support my arguments. To say the least, the class was a struggle, and I came close to quitting graduate school after earning less than stellar grades the first semester. In addition to my writing struggles, the academic vocabulary confused me. The professor and other graduate students were speaking in English but none of the words made sense to me. What did they mean by “scaffold,” “public sphere,” and “sublimity?” And I wondered who is this Foucault fellow, and why do my classmates keep saying his name? Not only did I feel lost in the class, but I also struggled to stay engaged in classroom conversations because they did not seem connected to events or discussions happening in the outside world. Despite my struggles in graduate school, I refused to ask for help. I did not want to be identified as the “military guy” who couldn’t hack it in the classroom. In fact, I resisted the military identity altogether. Initially none of my fiction writing included any military stories. I wanted to blend in, to be a stealth veteran.
A stealth veteran is a veteran who does not identify as such in the classroom because he or she does not want to be objectified as a veteran, be perceived somehow as less than whole, or be requested to tell war stories. Drawing from the research of DiRamio, Ackerman, and Mitchel, Ann Shivers-McNair writes that some veterans simply want to be part of the community and avoid uncomfortable conversations with classmates (224). I also suspect that some student veterans want to put their military past behind them and assume a new outward identity as a student and a civilian. That was the situation for me, and it was a feeling that I carried throughout graduate school. However, my military past still informed my academic choices, and it was a major reason why I decided to pursue a doctorate in rhetoric and composition. There seemed to be more “order” in this area
108 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
of English studies, and it offered a way to directly connect course material with current events. But more importantly, by studying and teaching rhetoric and composition, I felt that I could give back to other veterans and nontraditional students returning to the academic classroom. This work would be another way to serve.
My personal experiences in graduate school influenced my approach when I began teaching first year writing at the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) in Pittsburgh, PA. I wanted to design a first year writing course that met the writing needs of all students but that would also have special appeal to any veterans in the class. In my own teaching, I never ask if anyone is a veteran. I respect the fact that someone may not want to share with the whole class that they served in the military. On the first day of class, after I share my military background, some veterans self-identify during class introductions. Others may wait until the end of the semester to share with me their former military affiliation. Even if my students do not identify themselves as veterans, I can usually spot the stealth veteran by their punctuality, classroom discipline, or the vocabulary they use in their writing.
The central point in my pedagogical approach to teaching writing has been to focus on course content connected to real-world issues outside of the classroom – to see writing as a form of citizenship. Michael Hale asserts in Radical Teacher that teaching the immigration debate in his composition classroom provided his students “the opportunity to develop their writing skills by confronting a demanding issue that was being discussed in their homes, in their places of worship, in their local and national newspapers, and in the streets of their community” (1). He terms it “socially conscious purpose-driven writing” (Hale). Along those lines, I wanted my class to become a space for inquiry, deliberation, and action on arguments taking place in the local community. This issue-centered approach stems from my experience of feeling alienated in the classroom and wondering why some of my instructors were reluctant to connect the material in our graduate courses to discussions or debates outside of the classroom.
Following Carnegie Mellon University’s Interpretation and Argument course structure for their English 101, I designed a course that
109 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing focused on whether or not Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling known as hydrofracking should be allowed in Western Pennsylvania. This debate was very heated when I first developed the course in 2011, but not much was known about the hydrofracking process at that time. I centered the course on developing writing skills, but I also asked students to fully engage in contributing to conversations taking place outside of the classroom, and to work together in deliberating over the various positions surrounding the issue. This process shrinks the divide between veterans and civilians while allowing them to think and write critically and analyze a civic issue that directly affects them.
Creating a citizenship pedagogy With the aid of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, more veterans are enrolling at community colleges than at any other type of institution for higher education (Corley). According to CCAC’s website, 94% of our graduates live and work in western Pennsylvania. This means that veterans are not only enrolling in community college but many of them are likely to stay in the area when their education is completed. Veterans are already a part of communities in which new ideas and perspectives need to be heard. These students, through their jobs, families, and social groups, are already living what ancient educators called “vita activa -- the active life” (Enoch 5). Not only are veterans participating in their community’s events, they are also voting in higher percentages than nonveterans. According to the US Census Bureau, “Seventy percent of veterans cast a ballot in the [2012] election, compared with 60.9 percent of nonveterans” (“FFF: Veteran’s Day”).
Since my institution is a community college, students should take an active role in the conversations concerning the local community. Therefore, I think it is important that the issue chosen as the topic of my writing course should have a direct impact on my students’ lives and communities. The whole course can be developed around this single topic. Veterans and civilian students alike can become active in an important local issue. Analyzing and deliberating a local issue like the risks and benefits of Marcellus Shale drilling in Western Pennsylvania enabled my students to more readily identify the stakeholders (some of which they knew personally), to recognize
110 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
the locations being discussed, and to find local outlets through which to enter the conversation. I call this a citizenship pedagogy.
To clarify what I mean by citizenship, I draw from Robert Asens’s idea that citizenship is “a mode of engagement” (190), and from William Keith and Paula Cossart’s view that citizens can simultaneously “enable or embody citizenship” through a set of deliberative, communicative, and discursive acts (46). Viewing citizenship in this manner allows for citizenship to be seen not only as a specific act such as voting but also as a “process that may encompass a number of different activities” which can include writing and communication activities in the classroom (Asen 195). I argue that citizenship in the classroom means writing, speaking, deliberating and participating in conversations and decisions that affect the community. A citizenship pedagogy is grounded in the notion that writing should engage issues outside of the classroom. The mere fact that students are deliberating over and forming arguments about public issues that affect their community is an act of citizenship.
Although I am labeling my approach “citizenship pedagogy,” we do not discuss the word citizenship in my class. In the first week of class, I write the word community on the blackboard and have the students write their own definition of the word. We then spend the entire class period trying to come to a consensus on a definition that the entire class can agree to use for the duration of the semester. This exercise serves a dual purpose: first to try to get everyone involved in the class discussion, and second, to get students to begin thinking critically about a concept that they may previously have taken for granted. Often the conversations converge on the question of whether or not community simply means the neighborhood in which one lives, or also includes the activities in which one participates. For instance, a single mother argued in class that the low-income neighborhood where she lived was not her “community” because she did not associate with anyone there and did not involve herself with any neighborhood activities. The argument some made in response to her was that because she lived in that neighborhood, she was still a part of that community. In the end, the class recognizes that people belong to multiple communities including neighborhood, work, school, and even digital communities. I also add to the discussion that our
111 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing classroom is now a community and that we should try to be respectful of one another. This idea on its surface may be initially difficult for some veterans in the class to accept because we often see ourselves as separate from civilians even when we are no longer directly active in military communities. Nevertheless, I continue to reinforce the idea that our class is operating as a community throughout the semester.
This dynamic conversation on establishing a class definition of community is then supplemented by having the students read an excerpt from Sharon Crowley and Michael Stancliff ’s, textbook, Critical Situations: A Rhetoric for Writing in Communities. The authors define community as the place “where our strongest commitments lie. It is where we have our closest connections, our greatest pleasures, and our most serious problems” (8). It is that last clause that we most often have to add to our class definition and which, for me, is the exigence of the course. How does a community discuss, resolve, or address “our most serious problems” or what Crowley and Stancliff call “critical situations?” This is the gateway to discussing the word “critical” and its definition as being a “the practice of inquiry and analysis.” It is through these initial conversations that I could reach any stealth veteran in the class to help her or him see that this course will discuss “serious problems” and perhaps offer solutions that could benefit a variety of stakeholders. Our work as veterans often involves helping people and helping solve complex problems.
The civic issues focus I adopted is also connected to Jessica Enoch’s definition of rhetorical education where she “equates rhetorical education with any educational program that develops in students a communal and civic identity and articulates for them rhetorical strategies, language practices, and bodily and social behaviors that make possible their participation in communal and civic affairs” (Enoch 8-9). The rhetorical skills are developed for a specific purpose – to engage with a civic issue and to extrapolate from that engagement rhetorical moves that can be applied to other situations. Likewise, military training is designed to prepare service members to be able to perform a specific task. Rhetoric can provide a focus on the process of discovering, making, refining, delivering, and listening to messages, whether they are oral, written, visual or digital, all of which is important to citizenship. Deliberating with fellow classmates over
112 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
key issues is just as important to citizenship as writing, speaking or voting on an issue.
In my classroom, I have found that a rhetorical education approach to writing instruction allows veterans the option to connect their writing on citizenship with their former military service, which is one of the highest forms of civic commitment. This approach echoes the classical rhetoric ideas of Isocrates and Quintilian. These classical aims of rhetorical education are highlighted in the Mt. Oread Manifesto where William Keith and Roxanne Mountford assert that,
We seek a world in which Citizens recognize the limits and possibilities of a given mode of communication for their purpose and the needs of the audience and situation...and average citizens can ask productive questions of politicians, employers, business and community leaders, and each other, as fellow citizens. (“The Mt. Oread Manifesto on Rhetorical Education 2013” 3)
A rhetorical approach can help ease veterans into the academic classroom. Mallory and Downs have written of the difficulty that veterans have in entering the academic discourse community. They argue “that it is not only veterans’ positions that change in entering college, but their language and discursive knowledge” (Mallory and Downs 54).
Since the students were writing their essays on local issues, I was well aware of the potential political nature of the course and how that might affect my students and the work we were doing together. I am ever mindful of Maxine Hairston’s declaration that the social goals of the teacher should not be placed before the educational needs of the student (476). Her belief is that the first year writing class is not a place for politics and ideology and that the focus should remain on students improving as writers. In contrast to Hairston’s view, James Berlin argues that every teacher and every classroom practices an ideology. He states, “Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed” (135). In response to both of those composition theorists, I practiced what I call the ideology of neutrality during classroom discussion. This meant
113 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing keeping my personal beliefs on the local issues to myself while still making sure multiple positions were being discussed during the discussion. In other words, I was more interested in students making a well-constructed argument than what position on the issue the students took. Having said that, I still debate with myself whether or not this is the best approach because my students were always asking me what my position was on the issues. Nevertheless, my primary focus was on assessing students’ writing abilities and following the first year composition outcomes that were developed by the Council of Writing Program Administrators.
Three key features I used to develop a writing course focused on citizenship include the following:
1. Choosing a local issue with multiple viewpoints. Veterans, like all students, need to know how their work in the classroom matters outside the classroom. Mike Rose in his article “Reclaiming Education” talks about working with Vietnam veterans and refusing to develop a course around grammar. Rose focused on teaching four skills to the veterans: “summarizing, classifying, comparing, and analyzing” (11). To accomplish these goals, he often connected academic articles with more common sources such as magazine and newspaper articles. For instance, Rose describes how veterans used theories developed by Sigmund Freud to analyze why a person committed a murder as described in the local paper (15). I took a similar approach of connecting the classroom material with the larger community.
Since most of the students who attend CCAC live and work in Western Pennsylvania, they have more at stake in decisions that affect that region. Although the college is set in urban Pittsburgh, the students are from very diverse backgrounds, including suburban settings. Therefore it was important to choose an issue that could affect them either directly or indirectly. As mentioned above, I chose the debate over whether or not Marcellus Shale drilling should be allowed in Western Pennsylvania. Stakeholders attached to this issue included environmentalists, hunters, fishermen and women, labor unions, municipalities, school districts and many others. Of course the veterans were among these stakeholders, along with the rest of
114 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
the students. Just like in the military, the students were able to see themselves as being part of something larger than themselves.
The Marcellus Shale debate was beginning when I first designed the course, so I was able to squeeze two semesters and one summer session out of this important issue before it was clear that drilling/fracking was indeed going to take place in the state. The following year, the op-eds I had used in the course had become dated, and conversations about fracking had shifted in other directions. However, I do believe a local connection can be made to any larger national conversation that is taking place. Other topics for my classes included Weapons on College Campuses in Pennsylvania and the Rising Costs of Pennsylvania Colleges. An idea I have for a future class is the arguments/discussions of Syrian refugees being relocated to the local area.
2. Engaging credible multimodal sources – To help situate students in the topic and a range of sources, I provided op-eds, film trailers, industry commercials, political speeches, and website links on hydrofracking, including a dramatic production about the Marcellus Shale debate that was produced by the Program for Deliberative Democracy. Initially, my reasoning for doing nearly all of the research to set up the topic was to allow students to concentrate on improving their writing. Many students placed in English 101 had gone years without being in an English classroom, and their writing needed considerable attention. In addition, as community college students, their school work was balanced with full-time jobs and raising families. Since teaching those initial classes, I have involved the students in assembling reading materials, asking each student to find one source to share with the whole class.
Despite my efforts to remain “neutral” and balance sources on the topic, one of my students pointed out that a majority of the newspaper sources used for the course were from what was considered by some as the city’s liberal leaning paper. I remedied that concern in subsequent classes by providing equal amounts of sources from the city’s other newspaper.
3. Creating scaffolded assignments: The students were required to complete four major writing assignments and to give a group
115 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing presentation, moving from summarizing to analyzing to arguing to contributing to a group presentation.
• A Summary: students summarized a number of distinct arguments and synthesized these articles into a coherent discussion of an issue and problem. Reading and summarizing opposing arguments deepens students’ knowledge about the issue.
• An Argument Analysis: students explained, in their own words, another writer’s argument. I introduced the students to Toulmin’s Model of Argumentation, Aristotle’s three appeals, and Lloyd Bitzer’s “Rhetorical Situation” so that they would have a framework and a vocabulary with which to analyze the texts. This also provided them with a starting point from which to write their own arguments. I expected the students to have difficulty with the language, vocabulary, and concepts of Bitzer’s article which many of them did. But I wanted to use the essay as the starting point for students to begin thinking about writing as a way of affecting decisions.
• A Conversation Contribution: students drew from the course readings and class discussions to write their own argument that contributed to the Marcellus Shale debate. By this time in the course, they were fully immersed in the conversations and wrote very compelling papers drawing from multiple sources. Some of these were the best essays I had read in a first semester writing course. As Rose noted in his research, veterans can grasp academic concepts and theories when they are used to analyze real-life situations outside of the classroom.
• Entering the Conversation – group presentation: Each student was placed into a group and tasked with developing a strategy for where and how to offer their contribution to the larger community conversation.
116 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
The first two major assignments are “scripted,” meaning I am very specific in telling the students what I want to see in their written assignments. This format helps veterans, in particular, to ease into the discourse community. Angie Mallory and Doug Downs write that “in military discourse everything is scripted: how beds are made, pots are cleaned, missiles are loaded on airplanes: what an off-duty enlisted soldier does when meeting an off-duty officer in an off-base supermarket” (59). These military scripts remove any ambiguity about what is expected from the military member.
For instance, my first assignment was designed to both ease the students into and to provide a rhetorical approach to writing. The purpose of the first writing assignment was to ground the assignment in context in order achieve “rhetorical clarity” which means that students should be able to know the “subject, audience, purpose, and form of their work” (Gottschalk and Hjortshoj 33). The format of the following assignment is derived from Duerden, Garland, and Helfers’s “Profile assignment:”
Major Assignment# 1: Critical Situation: You have just received a phone call from your elderly relative. Several people have knocked on her door asking her for a donation and to sign a petition to keep “some sort of drillers” out the area. She refused to sign the petition, but she wants you to gather information about Marcellus Shale and explain why this is issue “is such a big deal with folks.” All of her neighbors are talking about it.
Solution: In an internet search you discover an Op-Ed in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette titled “The bottom line on Marcellus Shale” http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09200/984698-109.stm. With this article as your primary source, you decide to write a summary of the arguments connected to Marcellus Shale drilling.
Purpose: Your purpose in this paper is to inform your relative about the current debate on Marcellus Shale drilling and the issues involved in the discussion.
Audience: Your audience is your relative and her neighbors that
117 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
may read the document. Since you are writing for audience, you may have to define unfamiliar terms regarding Marcellus Shale
Constraints: Be sure to consult our textbook/handout on summarizing.
Students in the class may have had family members or friends who faced this kind of scenario. In fact, I had one student whose grandfather received an offer from a drilling company to drill on his land. It is this type of citizen stakeholder I wanted my students to have in mind when completing this writing assignment.
Another significant component of my course was group work. In the military, one often thinks in terms of unit goals and not in terms of individual achievement. Therefore I agree with numerous rhetoric and composition scholars who argue it is important to have group work in the classroom. Galen Leonhardy notes the importance for veteran students as well. He observes that “Small groups seem to facilitate class discussions, which allow veterans to establish in-group relationships and non-veterans to ask questions—questions that some students deeply long to have answered” (346). Group work not only encourages veterans to interact with their classmates in a productive manner, it also helps them to learn from other writers.
I accomplish group work in three ways. First I have students read each other’s drafts before the final assignment is due. On establishing peer editing groups, Leonhardy notes small groups can offer additional support to veterans by allowing them “to have their work read, quite often for the first time” (346). This small group activity is not unfamiliar to veterans in their former military lives. Study groups are often used by service members when preparing for military tests such as promotion exams or service related tests. Peer editing groups also give students insight into each other’s ideas on the civic issue. One student wrote, “I read in someone’s essay, something that I had never even considered; if Pennsylvania drills more it could create enough natural gas to sell to other countries and possibly use the proceeds to decrease the national debt.” This comment shows how peer editing can also serve as an informal deliberative forum.
118 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
Second, I introduce the students to collaborative planning as defined by Linda Flower in Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing - which helps them become aware of themselves as writers and situate writing as a problem-solving activity (Flower). Collaborative planning is done in the early stages of writing their long essays to stimulate their metacognitive awareness as writers and to guide their planning process. To create this awareness, a writer can use what I call a M.A.P, (metacognitive awareness planning) checklist. The checklist is a list of questions designed to stimulate a writer’s thinking about what he or she plans to do as they are writing the essay. Some questions may include
What will be the most interesting part of the essay? What are my assumptions about this project? What are my expectations for this assignment?
The idea for checklists stemmed from my time in Navy flight school where we had to memorize and use various checklists when starting, operating, and shutting down a naval aircraft. These checklists were not simply step-by-step procedures to be followed without thinking; but rather, these checklists helped aviators to remember how the aircraft operates and how its system functions. Accordingly, a pilot could handle an emergency procedure much more accurately because his or her mind has already been “primed” when going through these checklists during the pre-flight brief and aircraft start up. Although writing an essay is not the same as flying a multi-million dollar aircraft, the premise is the same: having a checklist to help the writer plan her or his task. Many veterans would be familiar with using checklists. This sort of assignment that provides specific questions for student to ask each other offers a way to stimulate conversation between civilian and vet that concentrates on the assignment at hand while simultaneously establishing a classroom relationship between veteran and civilian.
The final group work activity is that students are grouped together based on having the same position on the issue. Each group then develops a specific way to have their position on the issue enter the conversation outside of the classroom. They must give a presentation on the method of dissemination they choose for “entering the
119 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing conversation” on the issue. This assignment is often the most popular with the students, including the veterans. My students have developed Facebook pages, composed and submitted op-ed essays, developed informative videos, and actively participated in issue- specific blogs. One notable example was when a group opened a forum for discussion on the website GoMarcellusShale.com. One of the students attempted to open a critical-rational discussion on the drilling debate. However, other members of the site did not accept his “neutral” stance and accused the students of having an ulterior motive. In the excerpt below, R.I. was the student in my class:
Reply by F.J. on December 16, 2011 at 9:08pm
Wow my first reaction - smell bait + see troll = move on. Truly state your aim, R.I. I do not believe you are «looking for constructive criticism». You have a motive, why not be honest.
Reply by R.I. on December 17, 2011 at 2:50pm
I believe I did truly state my aim, F.J. I only want to stimulate critical thinking and rhetoric from my readers,» is my goal clearly stated. I am looking for constructive criticism but I have yet to receive any from any of my readers, your post included.
Reply by F. J. on December 17, 2011 at 4:11pm
You are not “stimulating critical thinking” you are looking to debate - huge difference. You have a point of view. State it clearly. Clearly state what your desires are with regard to your question. You are not fooling the majority here. Say what you really want!
You will convince no man of any one thing. You can only present them with facts and they choose to accept or reject them. State your facts, back them up and move forward.
What is your point with regard to fracking and do not repeat «to stimulate critical thinking», just say it.
120 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
If you cannot state I am for it or against, your play here is clear.
Good luck, may God bless you.
For this genre, the student did not present a “believable appearance” to the other members of the blog because he used academic discourse (Hauser 77). Although he wrote a persuasive piece in the class, he simply wanted to hear other perspectives from the blog participants. This student was not the only student to use academic discourse in the realm of social media. Other students cut and pasted large chunks of their essay to their Facebook walls. Because of these instances, I reemphasized, in subsequent classes, the importance of knowing your audience and of how writing style must be changed when using certain social media platforms.
What was more important with this group assignment was that the students were sharing their work outside of our classroom. This was often done with friends and family. Here is an excerpt of a student who gave his perspective on Marcellus Shale to a friend.
After writing my papers for this class on Marcellus Shale drilling, I am convinced that there are risks, and safety factors that surround the whole process. My friend from high school Josh works for Marcellus Shale…Since high school Josh has worked several different jobs. He opted not to go to college. He seemed very enthusiastic about the job he has with them…We sat for hours talking about his job, went back and forth about the good things and the bad things that come with drilling for Marcellus Shale gas. I tried to explain to him how it can harm the air we breathe, the water we drink, and how the process creates methane gas which is so bad for the environment. I even tried to sell him on the alternatives that are out there such as hydro-power, wind power and solar power. (S.M. reflection essay).
S.M. tries hard to persuade his friend to change his attitude about Marcellus Shale. He used what he learned in the class to argue a position. Even though the friend’s mind is not changed, S.M. is contributing to the larger conversation on Marcellus Shale.
121 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
I also believe this group assignment worked well for some veteran students in the course because they were grouped with students who held opinions similar to their own on the community issue, which could foster their willingness to participate in group activities. In addition, veterans could contribute to the success of the group by tapping their leadership and teamwork skills (Morrow and Hart 43). However one of my veteran students did not like this final group project at all. Unfortunately, he was placed in a group where some members failed to do their part. He wrote,
I think that this project was a good experience to end the semester with theoretically. The semester from start to finish evolves into expressing an opinion through a certain vehicle where people will be affected by your words. However, future projects like this should be handled by the teacher, not the group. This means that the teacher should designate a final decision-maker based on age, attendance, grade, and/or experience within each group. Immature and tardy idiots should not be able to share their ideas because they will not be there to follow through. It should be based on team cohesion, not the delusion of an individual who makes it sound real and enticing. And somewhat unexpectedly, I was the first to send an e-mail about our project when a member volunteered to gather and share everything prior to me doing it. There needs to be a strict, centralized management of the group in my opinion, but it was an excellent opportunity to finish. (M.K. reflective essay)
What is interesting about this essay is that this student was a stealth veteran and never revealed to me his veteran status. His use of words such as “team cohesion,” and “strict, centralized, management” indicated to me a military background--a suspicion that I would later confirm after the course was over.
Not all of my veteran students felt the same way about the group assignment. As a rhetoric and composition scholar, I liked to believe that all my students would see this course as a training ground to develop their rhetorical skills before entering a larger community conversation; however, my student J.V., an Iraq war veteran, connected the course to a much more important purpose. His group
122 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
decided to construct a detailed letter to the editor to send to the local paper. J.V. writes,
I was reminded about through the submission process is that we live in a country where we can voice our opinions freely, without fear of being incarcerated or persecuted. Having been one who defended these freedoms and rights that this country had, it gave me a renewed gratitude and honor to have taken part in preserving these freedoms, such as something as simple as submitting a letter to an editor. Things that some can take for granted. Ultimately, it wasn’t so much the fact that I believe I could make a difference through one essay sent to an editor of a newspaper. What meant most to me is the fact that I and any other citizen of America can send an essay to a newspaper or any other media outlet and freely share their opinion. (J.V. reflection essay)
J.V.’s essay captures the idea of how military service is an important part of citizenship and how civilians who are engaged in civic engagement are showing the greatest support to veterans.
Conclusion Despite some of the drawbacks, I think this course achieved the goal of getting students, both civilians and veterans, working together on issues in their community through writing. In essence, they became citizen-writers. In Pedagogy, Charles Tryon argues that, “a composition class that nourishes citizenship should convey the connections between the classroom and the so-called real world, which seems to exist everywhere else” (128). More importantly, a citizenship writing course allows veterans, whether they are stealth veterans or not, to see a clear purpose for their academic work and to develop an understanding of how citizens can make decisions through inquiry.
I believe this course played to the strengths of veterans as well as to other non-traditional students because it allowed them to draw upon their life experiences in classroom discussions. Some of the traditional age students clearly benefitted from interacting with veterans and
123 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing non-traditional students. Veterans, like other students, will be more engaged in the class discussion and offer insightful information that will be more useful to the other students when they are encouraged to share their thoughts and opinions (Morrow and Hart; Leonhardy). For instance, one non veteran student wrote in her class reflection essay, “my peers came prepared and their perspectives were diverse. I think that stems from the fact that our class, as a whole, was an older group, which is true of most community college courses. I’ve always done better in situations where the maturity level is higher, which is something I rarely found in high school.” Veterans, like any other group, contribute to the diversity of the student body in ways that can benefit everyone in the class.
The course that I have laid out in this essay is a course rooted in my own experiences as a stealth veteran returning to school who wanted to make a stronger connection between academic discussions and important civic issues. I wanted to find a way to help bridge a very noticeable divide between civilian students and veterans who may have seen more of the “real world” than the traditional college student. Understandably, this citizenship approach to teaching writing may give the veterans in the classroom a slight advantage because of their experiences of serving in the military but, as one of my former student veterans shared, it also informs veterans as to how important that service is to their community.
Although I am not certain how this course would be received if taught by a non-veteran professor, if I were to speculate, I think a veteran would still appreciate both the theoretical and practical nature of the course -- a learning environment where, students become informed citizens and are able to speak or write about one particular issue and contribute to a larger conversation. I hope veterans leave the class more confident in their writing abilities and more respectful for their non-military classmates who are also expending considerable mental energy grappling with critical issues. The development of their argumentation skills will benefit veterans and non-veterans alike by helping them learn how to address issues outside of the classroom.
Ultimately, I believe a citizenship writing course is one way for student veterans and, more importantly, civilian students to discuss issues
124 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
larger than themselves. I hope that it begins the process of shrinking the military/civilian divide while simultaneously beginning the process of learning to be more effective citizen writers. Ideally, the hope is that students develop analytical and communicative strategies that would be available in their mental toolbox when they discover an issue they care strongly about. I accept that these are lofty goals. As military members, we need more civilians to be engaged in important issues because we are led by and follow the orders of civilians. Therefore, we must have critically informed civilians when it comes time again to decide when and where to send their military in to war. To me, that is the most important issue --- citizens in a democracy must be able to analyze and critique information before allowing our representatives to send this nation’s women and men off to war.
125 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Works Cited
Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189–211. Print. Berlin, Professor James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900 - 1985. 1st edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Print. Corley, William. “Not Your Granddaddy’s Veteran: Disaffiliation and the Composition Classroom.” Build It and They Won’t Come: Action Plan for the Stealth Veteran. Houston, TX.: N.p., 2016. Print. Duerden, Sarah, Jeanne Garland, and Christine Everhart Helfers. “Profile Assignment.”Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition. Ed. Duane Roen et al. Urbana, IL.: NCTE, 2002. 152–164. Print. Enoch, Jessica. Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865- 1911. 1st edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Print. “FFF: Veteran’s Day 2015: Nov. 11, 2015.” N.p., n.d. Web. 10 June 2016. Flower, Linda. Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing. 4th edition. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1993. Print. Gottschalk, Katherine, and Keith Hjortshoj. The Elements of Teaching Writing: A Resource for Instructors in All Disciplines. 1st edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. Print. Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.” Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. Print. Hale, Michael. “‘Teaching the Immigration Debate in Freshman Composition’ by Hale, Michael - Radical Teacher, Issue 84, Spring 2009 | Online Research Library: Questia.” N.p., n.d. Web. 5 June 2016. Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Univ of South Carolina Press, 1999. Print. Keith, William and Paula Cossart. “The Search for “Real” Democracy: Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation in France and the United States, 1870–1940.” Rhetorical Citizenship
126 Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First Year Writing Classroom | Handley
and Public Deliberation. State College Pa: Penn State University Press, 2012 Leonhardy, Galen. “Transformations: Working with Veterans in the Composition Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 36.4 (2009): 339–352. Print. Mallory, Angie, and Doug Downs. “Uniform Meets Rhetoric: Excellence through Interaction.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Ed. Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Utah State University Press, 2014. 51–72. CrossRef. Web. 8 June 2016. Morrow, Sean, and Alexis Hart. “Veterans in College Writing Classes: Understanding and Embracing the Mutual Benefit.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Eds. Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Utah State University Press, 2014. 31–50. CrossRef. Web. 8 June 2016. “The Mt. Oread Manifesto on Rhetorical Education 2013.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44.1 (2014): 1–5. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web. Rose, Mike. “Reclaiming Education.” Dialogue on Writing: Rethinking ESL, Basic Writing, and First-Year Composition. N.p. Print. Shivers-Mcnair, Ann. “A New Mission: Veteran-Led Learning Communities in the Basic Writing Classroom. Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Ed. Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Utah State University Press, 2014. Stancliff, Michael, and Sharon Crowley. Critical Situations: A Rhetoric for Writing in Communities. New York: Penguin Academics, 2008. Print Tryon, Charles. “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition.” Pedagogy 6.1 (2006): 128–132. pedagogy.dukejournals.org. Web.
127 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Derek Handley is currently on military leave from the Community College of Allegheny County to serve as an Officer-Instructor in the English Department at the United States Naval Academy. In addition, he is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation examines citizenship -- both as a concept and as an act -- as a mode of rhetorical resistance by African Americans to urban renewal and housing policies during the Long Civil Rights movement. He holds a B.A. in English Arts from Hampton University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh.
128 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base: Building Strong Classroom Communities Through Engagement and Advocacy Bree McGregor, George Mason University In this paper, the authors introduce the voluntary education center (VEC), which is a multi-school campus located on & Lourdes Fernandez, military bases in the United States and worldwide that offers George Mason University accredited undergraduate and graduate degrees to service members and their families. The VEC combines military and higher education elements, offering a productive site of study for the complex interactions between writing instructors and student-veterans in this community of practice. Findings from interviews with five VEC writing instructors offer perspectives on teaching student-veterans in a non-traditional academic environment and illustrate the strategies faculty deploy as they engage with student-veterans, as well as the resources and support they seek. Implications for faculty in traditional higher education settings who work with increasing numbers of veterans are explored.
When I’m [teaching Marine college writing students] on base I say, ‘Listen, I’m a hippie. My family said I was so crazy for teaching here. But I love our soldiers and I think the best thing we can do for them is not send them to war... but whatever, that’s a different [conversation].’ And so I say, ‘You guys should teach me about military life.’ So
129 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing from then on, every class it’s, ‘Let’s teach [the instructor] about the military. Who has something you want me to learn?’ And then they all tell me . . . one person will tell me one thing before we start class. —College composition instructor, Marine Base Quantico Voluntary Education Center
Introduction s the 9-11 GI Bill is increasingly used, and as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have slowed down, and the military has reduced Aits force, service members are leaving the military and going or returning to school to finish their degrees. Increasing attention is being paid to the unique experiences of this population (Morrow & Hart; Hinton, “Front and Center”) and to the ways in which they are similar and different from non-traditional, adult learner populations (Arminio, Grabosky, and Lang; Doe and Langstraat; Hinton, “Front and Center”). Attention has also been given to the need for training writing center tutors who work with veterans and to the cultural shock some veterans experience when entering traditional colleges and universities (Hinton, “Front and Center”). Even as researchers are paying increased attention to the challenges veterans face as they transition from the military into universities, the voluntary education center (VEC), where many service members first access higher education while still serving, remains an understudied site1.
VECs, located on military bases worldwide, offer a physical site for service members to enroll in accredited undergraduate and graduate degree programs and attend classes. While aspects of writing instruction in VECs have been described (Hinton, “Front and Center”; Shivers-McNair), and while the military community’s sense of collaboration and teamwork operates in the writing classroom has been explored (Hinton, “Front and Center”), there is an incomplete picture of the ways in which universities and colleges operate within these military environments. More specifically, the participation of writing instructors in VECs sheds light on the ways that faculty
1 The military and the university already have an enduring historical-cultural relationship, dating back to the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which led to the formation of colleges that provided education and training in military studies (Arminio, Grabosky, and Lang, 2015).
130 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez engage with the military students on their own turf and how faculty deploy resources, make-do, and integrate into these communities as they teach.
In this article, we focus on the VEC civilian faculty experience to illustrate the resources and support instructors perceive as important, available, or in need of improvement as they transition from the college campus to the military base VEC campus to work almost exclusively with student veterans. In doing so, we hope to “flip the script” ontransition , a term commonly used to describe veteran students leaving the military and entering the university, and instead offer a different perspective by investigating the experiences of VEC faculty who transition from the traditional university campus to a hybrid military-university environment.
Like the self-described “hippie” who asks her students to teach her something about the Marine Corps at the start of each class meeting, these contingent instructors, as they engage in their teaching, often have no previous experience working within military environments. The interviews we conducted with writing faculty illustrate their motivation and the strategies they deploy to support and advocate for veteran students as faculty work through the limitations and constraints of their own knowledge and experience and the VEC campus. In doing so, we show that while these writing faculty experience limited membership in professional communities of practice, they endeavor to seek professional support outside of the VEC and work towards creating supportive communities of practice within the classroom. Although the experiences of writing instructors in the Quantico VEC echo and magnify the experiences written by and about instructors working with military students on traditional college campuses, the VEC faculty show us student- centered strategies and behaviors developed to address the specific needs of the military student, which can inform our teaching and community building in our own, more traditional classrooms.
The VEC, given its hybrid configuration as an educational site that straddles both the military and academic communities, represents a unique ecological framework for teaching and learning communities, and it provides an ideal opportunity to observe the needs of writing
131 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing instructors and the ways that they engage in new communities and develop mechanisms to succeed. A communities of practice approach (Wenger; Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder) offers the opportunity to explore how writing instructors operate in the periphery as they learn how to navigate that new environment. Wenger, in his seminal work Communities of Practice, conceives of situated learning “as a historical- cultural theory of learning” (32) and consider learning “an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice” (31). Writing instructors, as they become part of the community of the VEC, engage in the socially situated learning of the center, where their learning of Marine culture is “an integral part of the generative social practice in the lived world” (Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning 35). As outsiders to the military, but insiders within higher education communities, writing instructors have opportunities to deploy tools and resources that might help them integrate as new members to the community of the VEC. They also face unique challenges and opportunities to solve problems as they encounter unfamiliar rules and environments. We were particularly interested in the ways that the civilian writing instructors, as they transition from the university campus to the military base VEC campus, identify and disidentify with military students in this community of practice. The instructor’s narratives of practice both highlight the successes and challenges of teaching in a new community of practice and reaffirm their commitment to serving this community of students.
Overview of Quantico Voluntary Education Center Marine Corps Base Quantico is located in Virginia, 40 miles south of Washington, DC along the Interstate 95 commuting corridor. The Marine Corps refers to this base as “The Crossroads of the Marine Corps” because it “is perhaps the only command whose mission touches the farthest reaches of the Corps; decisions made here impact Marines aboard ship, fighting in the Global War on Terrorism, on guard duty at embassies across the globe and reserve duty throughout the United States” (“History”). Quantico VEC contracts with seven universities and community colleges: Averett University, Central Texas College, Northern Virginia Community College, Park University, University of Maryland University College, Florida Institute of Technology, and Old Dominion University. The VEC provides these schools with administrative and teaching space within
132 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez the center. Two of these schools offer face to face college writing courses in the VEC. In addition to face to face and online classes through seven contracted schools, Quantico provides free services and support for Marines, their families, civilian employees, and reservists in the VEC: educational and tuition assistance information and counseling, transcripts review for military-related education and training, and testing to include GED and college entrance exams. Because of their accessibility and convenience, VECs on military bases worldwide serve as points of entry to higher education for many service members who will later transfer to traditional college and university campuses. Armino, Grabosky, and Lang report that “SVSM [student veterans and service members] often have taken college courses either before entering the military or during their military experience. In fact, very few SVSM had not taken a college course before arriving at their current institution” (97).
The VEC facilities consists of two repurposed buildings that split into several wings, and schools occupy designated wings. Located within each wing are classrooms and office space for schools’ on-site satellite coordinators, and at least one classroom per wing is designated as a computer lab, which consists of 28 student desks outfitted with desktop computers with retractable monitors. In addition to their use for evening class instruction, these computer lab classrooms also function as testing centers during daytime operations. Notably absent from the VEC, however, are offices and communal working spaces for instructors, and a writing center or communal working space for students. Centralized departmental programs and their operations are also absent from the VEC and are usually located at the main campus of each institution represented at the VEC.
There are three primary groups at the VEC: administrative staff, students, and writing instructors. While students have access to the VEC during both daytime and evening operations, daytime service and support offered by counselors, education technicians, and on-site satellite coordinators concludes at 5 PM, and evening instruction in the VEC begins after 5 PM, which results in little overlap between support staff and instructors.
133 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Administrative staff includes a combination of government-employed civilian staff and contractors who function as site manager and school coordinators. The government-employed civilian staff ensure the efficient operation of the center, including managing and adjudicating issues with university contracts, and coordinating operation of the facility. School coordinators are employed by the schools that offer courses in the VEC. The on-site coordinators provide support to the adjuncts, ensure the adjuncts have access to the classrooms and technology available, and work to enroll students in the courses. The on-site coordinators also promote the courses and solve issues for students as those issues arise.
Although the VEC students include military family members, contractors, and civilians at the base, the vast majority are active- duty Marines and veterans. One of the schools allows civilians from the nearby community college campus to take coursework at the VEC if desired, and the base allows for this arrangement. Students range in age, ethnicity, and other demographic factors. There are five writing instructors currently teaching at the Quantico VEC. Two employed by a university whose main campus is located in Missouri, and three employed by a community college whose main campus is located near Quantico. These instructors are adjuncts in the VEC. All have prior teaching experience, but four had never worked with a military student body before teaching at the VEC.
Framework for This Study In its most elemental state, a writing community has at a minimum writing instructors, courses, and students. What has the potential to emerge from this basic framework is a sense of identity formed through further development of an internal, cohesive community and external, networked relationships. The value of community in the formation of a collective program identity, vision, and mission, which points to teaching and learning as part of a social process with shared responsibilities has been studied (Lerner; Townsend). Nearly a half-century of scholarship in writing program research has firmly evidenced the inherently dynamic nature of writing communities, which arise from ecological frameworks situated within fluctuating institutional landscapes (Reiff, Bawarshi, Ballif, and Weisser). To be successful, a writing community must be fundamentally protean
134 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez in nature (Taylor), able to transform and adapt in response to the context of the local environment (Gunner; McLeod; O’Neill; White). In addition, there are ethical implications inherent to a program beholden to multiple constituencies with conflicting interests and agendas (Leverenz). At the Quantico VEC, the multiple constituencies that are present include the military community of Marine Base Quantico; the VEC and its staff; civilian college and university writing instructors; and the community of students, mostly active- duty Marines with some retirees and civilians. As our interview findings will show, an external networked relationship among faculty fails to emerge. While the ecological design and operation of the VEC places some limitations on opportunities for this faculty cohesion to materialize, we argue that faculty still actively engage in building community within their classrooms, in order to better support their VEC students.
We decided on two methods to begin the research of the site: a site visit to observe the space and the basic features of the facility, and a 30-minute interview with each of the five writing instructors working at the VEC. Having taught or worked in military base education centers ourselves, we relied on grounded theory (Glaser, Strauss, and Strutzel; Strauss and Corbin) as a research methodology to prevent or reduce bias in our own findings by allowing patterns or themes to emerge naturally from broadly constructed interview questions. We chose to conduct semi-structured interviews with five open ended question designed to elicit responses that would yield information on how the instructors view themselves as members of the education center communities, with respect to the staff, the students, and each other, and to help us determine what resources faculty expressed needing (directly or indirectly). Once interviews were completed, we independently read the interview transcripts and identified emerging themes, and then we met to discuss and code for those themes. Below are the emerging themes we agreed were present and a brief discussion of each through communities of practice, a social theory of learning theory (Wenger).
135 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Faculty Voices: VEC Writing Instructors Stories and Experiences In the sections that follow, we organize the stories and experiences of civilian VEC writing faculty into the following general categories: how the instructors perceive veteran students; the concerns instructors have about how to best support veteran students and the strategies they deploy; and the challenges the teachers face professionally in the VEC and how they cope. These categories also highlight the way instructors identify and participate in communities of practice within the military education center. Similar to the methods of Estrem and Reid, who in their essay “What New Writing Teachers Talk About When They Talk About Teaching,” investigate how teaching assistants professionally develop, in this study we also “turn to the words . . . themselves, exploring what they say about teaching and what that might reveal about their [VEC writing faculty] learning processes” (451).
Instructor perception of veteran students A teaching environment composed mostly of military students provides focused insights into the veteran student population in new ways that, while surprising to the VEC faculty, is likely obvious to service members themselves. For example, from the outset of our interviews with writing instructors, they consistently described discovering these students as more focused and mature than their civilian counterparts. Instructors discussed their new perception of this population by contrasting it with previous experiences in civilian learning communities. One participant described the population as follows: “They are older, a lot more mature, typically than my experiences teaching on campus. A lot of them write about joining the military when they were young, at 18 years-old, and it changes their lives, so I definitely see that the change in the behavior and how seriously they take their work.” Another participant explained, “They are so mature, the Marines have such a mature, motivated demeanor that it kind of rubs off on the students, and I don’t really have to deal with behavioral issues, I really don’t.” As instructors reflect on the student’s level of maturity, they also express surprise and challenge their assumptions as they learn more about how veteran students interact in the classroom. Previous research illustrates the importance of acknowledging the individual experiences of veterans and their
136 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez relative willingness to share those experiences in the traditional college classroom (Morrow and Hart). In the VEC, veterans seem to be more willing to openly discuss both their experiences and viewpoints, perhaps because they already identify with the student community. One instructor describes this built-in student community as diverse and advantageous in several respects:
And then they are, you know, very good at working together, and they have some of the most well-articulated and diverse opinions about life and the government that I was not anticipating, and a lot of them are from other countries and were serving to get citizenship and I was like, oh, I didn’t know that happened. . . . and they are very comfortable being critical about any, you know, not critical negative, they’re just very comfortable being, I don’t understand this thing or that this action makes sense so they have this maturity that was very, very nice, and they had a sense of community.
In the VEC classroom, instructors adjust their perceptions and are able to leverage the strengths of the military students, who within his or her own community shows focus, maturity, and a sense of belonging that in turn shapes the instructor’s teaching experience and the classroom community. As one instructor describes it, Marines are intentional in their classroom participation, a focus and determination that seems to stem from their identification with one another as service members:
I’ve taught on traditional campuses and I’ve taught on military bases and I find that there is an intentionality in the students on the military base and a focus in the students that kind of creates a positive energy. So I would contrast it that way, that the traditional campus students are involved in all sorts of fun activities -- that’s a good thing (laughs) but sometimes it’s harder to build a community because they have so much going on already. Whereas students at the military base seem to almost be expecting a community or engaged and waiting for the community to happen.
137 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
As writing faculty recognize the community that Marines are already engaged in, they begin to move towards engaging the VEC classroom community in its own terms on its students’ home turf. Being aware of the “broad range of veteran’s experiences is a vital first step toward engaging productively with them as students” (Morrow and Hart, 35), and instructors seem compelled to know the students better and to acknowledge their experiences more fully, and most significantly, to acknowledge how the military student contributes to the community of practice within the classroom. This deeply rooted ethos for the military student emerges through the explanation given by one participant:
I think too, you know, just being with this special group of people like that, say just in writing assignments or things that you give them that they need like a narrative or something, you find out a lot more things about people that you had no experience with before you know. Like saying, hey, what did you do on your summer vacation, like no one cares what you did on your summer vacation, okay? When someone’s writing me a paper about I saw five of my friends getting blown to shreds, you’re kind of like sitting, you’re there, reading all the 50 essays, and you’re crying and you’re like, why are they asked this question? So that part of their lives is not just about here’s your essay number three, it’s looking at you saying oh my god, you’re like 25 years old and you’ve seen this and you’ve done that and taken this personal, like, look at these -- you guys are kids to me, okay? And just thinking it’s so way past did you hand in your essay number three and take into account that this is part of what you’re doing. You’re trying to make your life better, you’re getting an education, but still we have that bagged on your shoulders.
As they get to know these students, instructors begin to adjust their assumptions and attitudes towards student veterans and find such engagement influences their teaching practice. One writing instructor drew motivation, support, and energy from participation in the teaching of military students. She describes it this way: “I’d had a really intense and negative spring semester, and I was exhausted and burned out. And then I went and taught at Quantico, and they just brought me back to life . . . because they were so willing to engage
138 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez with the ideas and to wrestle with different points of view and to be critical thinkers and do the writing. . . .” Instructors who teach at the VEC have the advantage of engaging with military veterans in a site where the student-veteran connection is always present; unlike more traditional classrooms, where research indicates the student might choose not to identify as a veteran (Morrow and Hart), the VEC provides a unique opportunity to meet military students in their own environment, and instructors find the value in adapting their own pedagogy as they learn the community. As the following section shows, learning how teachers adjust some of their teaching practices as they learn the community, offers valuable insight into more thoughtful approaches to teaching veteran-students that more fully acknowledge their contributions to the writing classroom.
Supporting veteran students in the VEC As instructors continue to engage with students through writing and pedagogy, they begin to express concerns specific to the population. While some of the concerns are related to the limitations of the VEC environment, other concerns are specific to the military students’ needs. The presence of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veteran students in particular seems to mediate the need for instructors to build community with students and to overcome challenges in access to information and resources for both instructors and students. There is a growing body of research involving veteran students in higher education and PTSD (Arminio, Grabosky, and Lang; Church; DiRamio and Jarvis; Elliott, Gonzalez, and Larsen), which includes recent attention to these students in the composition classroom (Thompson; Selting; Wood), where writing assignments often challenge them to surface major life experiences. In the introduction to Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University, Doe and Langstraat point out that “many composition curricula foster or even require personal writing, and student-veterans may find themselves writing about traumatic experiences that may, in turn, pose ethical and pedagogical challenges for writing instructors” (3). One writing instructor in the VEC described it this way: “You know we have students in there that have been deployed like two or three times. We have people coming in with their [service] dogs, and we have traumatic brain injuries, and we have things that you can’t really push aside and pretend like it’s not there . . .” A similar concern is expressed in “Faculty as First
139 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Responders: Willing but Unprepared,” where author De La Ysla worries that many writing teachers -- herself included -- “lack a clear sense of what to do or what to say when meeting wounded warriors in person or on the page” (97). As De La Ysla’s narrative of her own troubling experience with a veteran student in her composition course shows, it’s important to have a better understanding of how to handle PTSD when it emerges in the composition classroom. The writing instructor in the VEC, teaching a classroom full of veteran students, is likely to continuously meet the wounded warrior in person or on the page. And how that meeting plays out depends largely on the knowledge, tools, and resources at the instructor’s disposal, with potentially profound impact to the student.
The role of writing in helping students surface difficult experiences including the topic of PTSD is described as a frequent occurrence in the VEC classroom: “I get a lot of writing about their situations,” explained one instructor. “A lot of them write about PTSD -- they will tell me that. One student had to check in to an institution because his PTSD was so severe, and [he] was going to be missing class.” Another instructor reported similar sentiments of both concern about issues of PTSD and the frequent presence of it in the classroom; to address these concerns, she encouraged dialogue, building rapport and trust with the students and a discourse community that neither glorified or villainized war, but instead viewed it from less emotionally entrenched perspectives of history and military science. She explains:
I had two Marines that came back with PTSD … so they joined my writing class and they were very open to sharing what they could with me, and so I learned about PTSD, and I learned about some historical events. They would talk to me about battles and they would talk to me about major engagements. It gave me a depth of understanding [about] a lot of the modern military situation -- modern historical situation -- that I would never have had elsewhere. And I’ve had a lot of students like that. But I just feel like sometimes they want to know it’s okay to express themselves. We all do, you know?
A third instructor expressed a need for support in working with students suffering from PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI):
140 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez
“I think it would be a great idea to have some kind of training for teachers that addresses those issues and how to deal with that.” To illustrate her concerns, she shared a story about a student she’d taught two semesters prior: “I had a student . . . who had a traumatic brain injury . . . who kept swearing, like every time he would respond, and [I] found out that was part of his brain injury. So it’s like, to a traditional classroom teacher that would be totally unacceptable, but what do you do in situations like that where maybe somebody can’t really help themselves?”
Although counseling, support systems, and resources are in place for service members and their families on the military base, there is a disconnect between VEC writing faculty and these resources. This same instructor felt deeply motivated to better understand and support these students. She explained,
I didn’t go to Afghanistan, and I wasn’t in a war, so I don’t [say], ‘oh yeah I know how you feel,’ because I don’t. But I have to take into account when this kid says, ‘I really can’t do this because when I sit down for a long time like I just -- I can’t. My brain just stops,’ because [he has] traumatic brain injuries. So all those things I’m learning now affect everything I can do in that classroom. You know what I’m saying?
In addition to a perceived lack of information and resources, instructors’ efforts to support the needs of these students are also stymied by the physical constraints of the VEC. Several logistical issues emerged, and the lack of offices or work space for instructors outside of the classroom was of particular concern. One instructor explained:
I had a student two semesters ago literally came up to me and said he told me things about being deployed and in war that he’s never ever spoken to anybody else since he’s been back. So those kind of things like we need to learn how to deal with that and to stand there at the front of the classroom with nowhere to go is really hard to do. You know, number one I didn’t just deal with it because I have to deal with it, you know. It’s difficult but to say,
141 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
“I can’t take you anywhere right now to talk to you about this because there’s nowhere to go.”
Because this instructor was cognizant of the impact of her limited knowledge of the community, she diligently sought out support and resources in service to students’ performance and learning and mental health:
What I started doing on the Blackboard pages was anything to do with veterans -- military life -- I have it built on my Blackboard page where to get help for this. And nobody told me to do it, but I’m like maybe you need someone to help you with this. Here’s our counselors at [school’s main campus] here’s the people at the [Department of Veterans Affairs], so if you need it, there it is. All you have to do is click-click, and it’s done for you; you don’t even have to go look for it. So that’s something new I took upon myself to try to learn how to be a part of their world because I’m not military.
In the process of providing students information and resources on “anything to do with veterans,” the instructor’s own knowledge and understanding of this unique community of learners began to grow as well, and she became more fully integrated into the community of practice of the classroom. Like Shivers-McNair describes in her own experience of teaching in education centers, “we [faculty] created our own space” (232), the ways VEC writing instructors traverse lesser known teaching environments and engage in communities as they learn about these communities can offer insight to all writing instructors who work with veteran students and find themselves in foreign territory.
VEC writing instruction in the absence of professional and peer communities VEC writing faculty interviews underscore the value of teacher engagement in any college campus classroom where non-traditional students are present, and they also present concerns that are specific to the military and the material limitations of the non-traditional educational space of the military VEC. In our research, this non- traditional space seems to have one more significant impact: faculty discussed at length the challenges of not having a community
142 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez of peers to discuss their day-to-day activities with, and they all described at length how they experience and overcome this lack of professional community of practice, often in stark ways. As one participant states “I am often the only person, and so . . . you just feel like you’re forgotten. There is no sense of community and it doesn’t seem relevant or purposeful, so it’s odd. . . . And I think if something were to happen to me no one would know about it until they found my body [laughs].” This statement, though given partly in jest, illustrates the extent of isolation experienced by writing faculty in the VEC. Wenger’s social theory of learning, especially the concept of identity as being “concerned with the social formation of the person” (13) suggest that individuals who lack professional peer engagement and support are likely to struggle due to the lack of “social systems of shared resources by which groups organized and coordinate their activities, mutual relationships, and interpretations of the world” (13). Because the writing faculty share a social system through the experience of teaching classes at the VEC populated mostly by veteran students, they are positioned to become ideal peer support networks for one another, yet these networks remain untapped due to limited access to office and communal space within the VEC and contractual obligations to home institutions. We argue that this fragmented professional community, despite instructors’ best efforts to make do with less, impacts the teaching of the students, and it shows the extraordinary resilience and versatility of faculty engaged in fragmented communities that are less than optimal for professional development.
While one instructor enjoyed the independence this environment imposes, most indicated at minimum a curiosity about who their colleagues are and what kind of pedagogical work they do, and some recognized a value in having the opportunity to elect to develop such connections. One instructor described it this way: “I don’t think I’ve met the writing instructors from the other universities. . . . But that would be interesting to have a meeting with all the writing instructors, you know, how we [teach writing]. . . . I would be interested in how other professors approach it.” Klausman defines participation as a critical factor in creating “a shared sense of purpose and community that crosses ranks and gives rise to communities of practice” (264), something that instructors desire, but are not able to achieve fully, given the organizational constraints of the VEC.
143 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Three instructors expressed deep value in peer-to-peer community building. One instructor described the sense of community as essentially disparate: “It’s like my family at [college’s main campus] and it’s not at all like that on base.” Another instructor situated her concerns more generally in the contingent nature of on-base instruction: “I think also a lot of our faculty that teach [at Quantico] are adjuncts, and that’s probably true of the others, and so adjuncts need a lot of support, and they need a lot of support emotionally, pedagogically. They need someone they can talk to.” Another instructor supported this supposition by reflecting on her own needs as contingent faculty at Quantico. She illustrated her concerns this way:
I don’t know anybody. Which is kind of sad in a way. . . . I mean I think it’s nice if you have that community of people who do the same thing that you do because . . . You can share ideas, what’s working for you, what’s not working for you, and you know, just learning from each other. . . . you’re physically isolated, and then you feel you know... I know most adjuncts don’t have an office because we kind fly by the seat of our pants. We go here, you know you, gotta go teach there at 8 and there at 12, so that’s the dynamics of this kind of profession for adjuncts, but sometimes it’s -- maybe someone wants to talk.
Due to the lack of a cohesive professional community of practice, four out of five instructors described how they rely on their prior experience and prior connections and relationships for academic- related support. They all discussed reaching out off-site to their school’s main campus and asking for pedagogical feedback from others when needed. Instructors mentioned support staff, former colleagues, former professors, and other instructors from their organizations not employed at the education center as sources of support. However, they do this at the expense of peer community building on the VEC campus, which is a missed opportunity to engage with other instructors working with this same population of veteran students within the same constraints of the VEC and military communities of practice. The value of these absent community interactions amongst peers are expressed by one participant who stated:
144 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez
To me I guess the only limitation is a lot is done in between the halls in a regular academic community. You know, whether it is high school or junior high or college, you have some of those feedback that you give back and forth. But being one of the only English instructors [in the VEC], you don’t get as much of that back and forth. Most [VEC faculty] are science and math and computer instructors, and that’s a completely different approach to teaching in education and thinking, so I miss that periodically.
This instructor’s statement echoes Klausman’s argument of community serving one of the three pillars of a successful writing teaching and learning community to “bolster” the work done by writing faculty.
Conclusion Our findings represent a point of entry for research into this community of practice and do not yet paint a complete picture, but the consistent patterns that emerged in writing faculty interviews indicate the civilian instructors’ commitment to military students and the strategies and advocacy they use to support the needs of veterans in the diverse community setting of the VEC classroom. In the case of Quantico, the challenges in forming and maintaining professional and peer communities of practice for writing faculty within the VEC campus served as the impetus for creating robust communities of practice within the writing classroom for veteran students, as faculty learned how -- primarily through their own initiative -- to provide pedagogical support and advocacy for veteran students. In doing so, they learn to challenge their preconceived assumptions and attitudes about veterans as they engage in the teaching experience at the VEC.
While VEC staff and on-site school coordinators must continue to improve support for faculty who lack cohesive communities of practice at VECs, and while faculty must continue to advocate for better support and professional development when working with the military community, we must also recognize that the experiences of writing instructors at the VEC provide substantial insight into the veteran-student community of practice. Faculty at VECs continuously work towards understanding and including the voices of veterans in the classroom and acquire a unique perspective on the needs of
145 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing the veteran student, which is critical to developing a productive community of practice. These lessons are also critical to changing our own assumptions about veteran students. The VEC writing faculty possess a great deal of hard-won knowledge and experiences that should be tapped into as writing instructors continue to expand their network of resources and support in service to these students.
We also need to give greater consideration to the higher education experiences of veterans before they transition from military to traditional university settings. Understanding how veteran students operate in the non-traditional education setting of the VEC, where they transition between the military community and the academic community with every class meeting, provides us with a more complete picture of the population. The VEC offers an important site of study not only because faculty have developed a unique set of skills and tools, but also because it yields greater insight into the veterans’ experiences before they transition into more traditional college settings. By better understanding this community of practice and how they transition, we can become better advocates for our veteran students and the faculty who serve them.
146 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez
Works Cited
Arminio, Jan, Tomoko Kudo Grabosky, and Josh Lang. Student Veterans and Service Members in Higher Education. New York, NY: Routledge, 2015. Print. Church, Thomas E. “Returning Veterans on Campus with War Related Injuries and the Long Road Back Home.” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability 22.1 (2009): 43-52. Web. 1 April 2016. De La Ysla, Linda S. “Faculty as First Responders: Willing but Unprepared.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student-Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Eds. Sue Doe and List Langstraat. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2014. 95-118. Print. Estrem, Heidi, and E. Shelley Reid. “What New Writing Teachers Talk about When They Talk about Teaching.” Pedagogy 12.3 (2012): 449-480. Web. 1 April 2016. DiRamio, David, and Kathryn Jarvis. Veterans in Higher Education: When Johnny and Jane Come Marching to Campus: ASHE Higher Education Report, 37.3 (2011). Web. 2 March 2016. Doe, Sue, and Lisa Langstraat, eds. Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. University Press of Colorado, 2014. 1-27. Print. Elliott, Marta, Carlene Gonzalez, and Barbara Larsen. “US Military Veterans Transition to College: Combat, PTSD, and Alienation on Campus.” Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice 48.3 (2011): 279-296. Web. 15 March 2016. Glaser, Barney G. “The constant comparative method of qualitative analysis.” Social problems 12.4 (1965): 436-445. Web. 01 Feb 2016. Glaser, Barney G., Anselm L. Strauss, and Elizabeth Strutzel. “The Discovery of Grounded Theory; Strategies for Qualitative Research.” Nursing Research 17.4 (1968): 364. Web. 01 February 2016. Gunner, Jeanne. “Decentering the WPA.” WPA, Writing Program Administration 18 (1994). Web. 15 March 2016. Hinton, Corrine. “‘The Military Taught Me Something about Writing’: How Student Veterans Complicate the Novice-to- Expert Continuum in First-Year Composition.” Composition
147 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Forum. Vol. 28. Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition, 2013. Web. 13 February 2016. Hinton, Corrine. “Front and Center: Collaborating with Marine Veterans in the Writing Center.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student-Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Eds. Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2014. 257-281. Print. “History of Marine Corps Base Quantico.” Marine Corps Base Quantico. Marines. (n.d.) Web. 20 March 2016. Klausman, Jeffrey. “Toward a Definition of a Writing Program at a Two-Year College: You Say You Want a Revolution?.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 40.3 (2013): 257. Web. 15 April 2016. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 1-29. Print. Lerner, Neal. “What Is the Writing Center?” A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators. Ed. Rita Malenczyk. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2013. 223-235. Print. Leverenz, Carrie Shively. “Theorizing Ethical Issues in Writing Program Administration.” Rose and Weiser (2002): 103-15. Web. 25 March 2016. McLeod, Susan H. Writing Program Administration. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2007. 7-22. Print. Morrow, Sean, and Alexis Hart. “Veterans in College Writing Classes: Understanding and Embracing the Mutual Benefit.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student-Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Eds. Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2014. 31-50. Print. O’Neill, Peggy. “What Are Educational Standards?” A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators. Ed. Rita Malenczyk. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2013. 336-345. Print. Reiff, Mary Jo, Anis Bawarshi, Michelle Ballif, and Christian Weisser. Ecologies of Writing Programs. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015. 3-18. Print. Selting, Bonnie. “The Value of Service Learning for Student- Veterans: Transitioning to Academic Cultures through Writing and Experiential Learning.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student- Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Eds. Sue Doe and Lisa
148 Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base | McGregor & Fernandez
Langstraat. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2014. 240-256. Print. Shivers-McNair, Ann. “(Becoming) At Ease: A First-Year Writing Class on a Military Post.” College Composition and Communication 66.2 (2014): 231-233. Print. Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. “Grounded Theory Methodology.” Handbook of Qualitative Research 17 (1994): 273- 285. Web. 01 February 2016. Taylor, Tim. “Writing Program Administration at the Two-Year College: Ghosts in the Machine.” WPA: Writing Program Administration (2009): 120-139. Web: 14 April 2016. Thompson, Roger. “Recognizing Silence: Composition, Writing, and the Ethical Space for War.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student- Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Eds. Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2014. 199-215. Print. Townsend, Martha A. “What Are Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines? A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators. Ed. Rita Malenczyk. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2013. 77-90. Print. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wenger, Etienne, Richard Arnold McDermott, and William Snyder. Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Harvard Business Press, 2002. White, Edward M. Developing Successful College Writing Programs. San Francisco: CA; Jossey-Bass Inc., 1989. Wood, Tara. “Signature Wounds: Marking and Medicalizing Post- 9/11 Veterans.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student-Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. Eds. Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2014. 156-173. Print.
149 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Bree McGregor is a doctoral student in the Writing & Rhetoric Program at George Mason University, and her research interests include the spaces and networks of non-traditional writing students, the rhetoric of writing program administration, and veteran studies. She teaches composition, basic writing, and technical writing for Arizona Western College, with an emphasis on ethnographic research and multimodal composition. She has taught undergraduate writing courses in Marine Corps base education centers, and she volunteers as a writing tutor for student veterans. Recent conference papers include technology access and use in writing intensive courses at a major research university, the role of transition for writing students in the military base education center, and non-traditional communities of practice for writing faculty. She received a B.A. in English from the University of West Florida, and an M.A. in English and Graduate Certificate in Professional Writing from Northern Arizona University.
Lourdes Fernandez is a doctoral student and graduate assistant in the Writing & Rhetoric Program at George Mason University. She is also Assistant Director of the undergraduate composition program and teaches composition and technical writing courses. She has taught math, reading, and writing at military education centers in Italy and Germany. Her research interests include rhetorics of institutional responses to issues in the public sphere, rhetorics of sexual assault, and veteran studies. Recent projects include research on campus sexual assault as part of a multi-disciplinary university research grant and work on non-traditional writing communities of practice. She received her B.S. in Business Administration-Finance from the University of South Carolina, an M.A. in English from Austin Peay State University, and a Graduate Certificate in Professional Writing and Editing from George Mason University.
150 Faculty Development Workshops with Student- Vet Participants: Seizing the Induction Possibilities
Sue Doe, Colorado State University While many colleges and universities have earned a “military friendly” designation, too few offer opportunities for faculty & Lisa Langstraat, to learn about military culture and the specific issues facing Colorado State University student veterans as they transition from active duty to student status. This article chronicles the authors’ experiences with and approaches to a workshop series, “Working with Post-9/11 Student-Veterans: A Faculty Primer,” which we have facilitated over the last several years at Colorado State University. Stressing the importance of a strength-based (versus deficit) model for the workshops and the integral role of student-veterans’ participation in the workshops, the essay offers an overview of strategies, common themes, materials and outcomes for faculty development workshops about this important issue.
A Short Course on Student-Veterans in the Classroom: Sponsored by the CSU Institute for Learning and Teaching (TILT)
Over a quarter of a million veterans are currently enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities, and a quarter million more have applied for GI Bill education benefits. In total, nearly 2 million
151 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
military personnel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are eligible for the 2009 Post-9/11 GI Bill.
In many ways, CSU is well-situated to respond to the needs of this student population; we have earned a “veteran-friendly” designation and have initiated efforts to identify and reduce barriers to veterans’ educational goals, to assist veterans as they transition from active duty to college life and to provide timely and accurate information about veterans’ benefits and services.
As we continue to strengthen programs, we need to focus our efforts at the pedagogical level. According to a 2010 NASPA report, student-veterans often report a sense of isolation on campus and frustration with traditional students: they express concern about entering into a potentially liberal college culture that may conflate anti-war sentiment with anti-military sentiment, and they can face difficulty finding mentors amongst faculty whose values may differ significantly from their own.
Not only are some student-veterans struggling with financial pressures and dealing with physical and mental health disabilities (including the “signature wounds” of TBI and PTSD), they also share the challenges many nontraditional students face, such as childcare, “relearning” study skills, and understanding (often unspoken) academic expectations. Only a well-informed faculty can understand and address such challenges to ensure retention and degree-completion. This short course draws from recent research on best practices for working with student-veterans.
(Offered Fall 2009, Spring 2010, Fall 2010, Spring 2011, Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015)
ince the enactment of the 2009 GI Bill—the most generous in history in terms of financial support for veterans seeking Spost-secondary degrees—most universities and colleges have recognized the lucrative potential, as well as the socially responsible necessity, of working with student-veterans. Many have instituted
152 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
“military friendly” initiatives, such as VA participation in financial aid and advising services, student-veteran orientations, veteran centers and lounges, support for student-veteran organizations, and specific dispensations (e.g., early enrollment in required courses) for student-veterans who are accorded only 36 months of support to complete their bachelor’s degrees. These are important efforts, but they alone cannot ensure student-veterans’ success in post-secondary institutions. Unless faculty are aware of the interests, circumstances, and strengths of this particular student population, we miss an important opportunity to foster veterans’ success.
Yet, as Hart and Thompson note in their landmark 4C’s survey and report, “An Ethical Obligation,” “few [faculty] have received formal training on veteran issues, military culture, or military writing conventions” (4). We can assume that, just as 71% of the general public admit to knowing little about veterans’ experiences and common military mores and practices, many faculty have little more than moderate understanding of veterans’ experiences as they transition from active duty to higher education (Kirchner 115). While faculty can take advantage of webinars (such as those offered by The American Council on Education or Student Veterans of America) to get up to speed, relatively few faculty participate in webinar options, not only because faculty are unaware of the need but also because they prefer professional development options that address their institutions specifically. Moreover, when colleges and universities do offer faculty development workshops, Hart and Thompson found that institutions too often engage a deficit model, focusing not on the significant contributions that student-veterans bring to campus but on pathologized versions of PTSD and other signature wounds associated with combat veterans’ experiences.
This essay opens with the announcement for the faculty workshops we have offered every semester over the past seven years at Colorado State University. As the announcement emphasizes, the workshops have focused on greater understanding of the local CSU student- veteran population and on a strength-based pedagogy. The workshops have also been informed by our longitudinal study of over twenty student-vets—a study that we began in 2009. These workshops have been driven by an effort to address the gaps that we had come to
153 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing see in campus support; CSU, as a “military-friendly’ campus, offers significant resources and support to most veterans through our Office of Adult Learners and Veteran Students (ALVS), as well as the Veterans Affairs representatives who work with advisors and the Registrar’s office. Nonetheless, opportunities to educate faculty about the new student-veteran demographic have been uncommon, and we wanted to drive home the idea that this kind of sweeping educational opportunity had not been seen since the passage of the Montgomery Bill in 1945. Just as the Montgomery Bill advanced a new WWII middle class by providing educational opportunities to those who otherwise would have been unlikely to obtain college degrees, the 2009 GI Bill was designed to meet the needs of Post-9/11 veterans who were expected to number two million by 2014. While it was clear to us that the teaching and learning opportunities associated with such an initiative would be unequaled in our generation, we were dismayed by the lack of attention to faculty development. In many ways, it seemed that the all-too-common gap between student services and academic faculty was being reasserted, and the stakes seemed far too high to only offer workshops to members of the English department, without sharing research with faculty across the curriculum. Given our backgrounds as military family members (Sue as a military spouse, Lisa as an Army brat), our efforts to develop veteran-specific composition courses and the longitudinal study we had recently launched with an early cohort of GI Bill recipients, we realized that there might be few others more interested in developing a professional development series than we were ourselves.
We developed the “Working with Post-9/11 Student-Veterans: A Faculty Primer” workshops in concert with CSU’s Institute for Learning and Teaching (TILT) and the Adult Learner and Veteran Services Office (ALVS). In addition to our role as workshop leaders, we arranged for an array of co-facilitators—ALVS representatives, non-tenure track faculty from STEM and Liberal Arts colleges, graduate student instructors, and graduate students conducting research on veterans’ issues. The earliest versions of the workshop were designated “short- courses;” they were a total of four hours over a two-day period and entailed the following topics:
154 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
Working with Post-9/11 Student-Veterans: A Faculty Primer (Version 1)
Session I: Demographics and Pragmatics: What Do We Need to Know about Post-9/11 Student Veterans? • A Demographic Overview of Student-Veterans at CSU* • Understanding the Basics of the Post-911 GI Bill, the VA, and Reservists* • Strength-based Pedagogy and Student-Veterans: Avoiding the Deficit Model • From Active Duty to College Campus: Teaching to Address Student-Veterans’ Transition to Civilian Life • Signature Wounds: What Do Faculty Need to Know about TBI and PTSD? • Pedagogical Scenarios: Developing Strategies for Teaching Student-Veterans • Student-Veteran Panel: Veterans’ Transition Experiences
Session II: From Military Culture to Academic Culture: Pedagogical Responses to Cultural Clashes • Understanding Military Culture: Authority, Decision- Making and Self-Reliance • Tensions between Traditional Students and Student- Veterans • Disconnecting Anti-War Sentiment from Anti-Veteran Sentiment • Pedagogical Scenarios: Drawing from Critical Pedagogy and Mediation Strategies to Open Dialogue When Cultures Clash
After a few semesters, we redesigned the workshops into a single, two-hour format, in hopes that more faculty and staff could find time to participate. The first hour provided information and conversation about four key issues:
• U.S. Veteran demographics (see Appendix 1)
• Veterans’ experiences transitioning from active duty to student status (see Appendix 2)
155 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
• Veteran services at CSU (including services for those experiencing PTS)
• Features of strength-based pedagogy for student veterans (see Appendix 3)
We found after some experimentation that it was preferable to open the first half of the workshop only to enrolled faculty and staff. They needed an opportunity to learn about veterans’ issues, to ask questions, and share experiences with one another—without the fear of saying something “wrong” in the presence of student-veterans. Many also needed the chance to express their conflicted feelings about how to support their student-veterans without necessarily supporting war in general or these wars in particular. As one participant, a young female graduate student instructor who experienced challenges from an older, male student-veteran, explained, “If they [student veterans] were in the room, I’d be afraid to talk about the guy, because he made my life harsh for a while.”
We have found, therefore, that an open discussion of veteran-related issues and an enhanced understanding of military culture that such a discussion entails, offers participants a chance to develop a new vocabulary, even as they develop greater understanding of key challenges faced by student-veterans. In the particular case mentioned above, the graduate student instructor came to understand that, while gender and age differences certainly exacerbated the situation (and the student-veteran should be held accountable for inappropriate behavior), it is vital to understand that he was responding inappropriately in great part because of a clash of cultures— the military and the academic. As we note in the strength-based pedagogy handout (Appendix 3), newly-separated veterans “may expect a certain kind of authority at the front of the classroom and misunderstand the cultural shift demanded by a new form of authority and expertise.” This instructor reported that she has since worked to clarify assignment expectations and to help her students articulate “meta-awareness” about why certain features of her assignments are open-ended and designed to inspire creative problem-solving. This meta-awareness about the process, not just the product, associated with completing an assignment, has subsequently helped this
156 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
instructor’s student-veterans, like many other students, to be more receptive to assignments that require veering from the “dress-right- dress” structure of assignments that a commanding officer might issue while on active duty.
We began our workshops with introductions and sharing of the issues that most concerned faculty and staff. Some reported feeling bullied by student-veterans who had corrected them in class on issues ranging from domestic politics to policy in the Middle East. Others expressed uncertainty about how to respond to deployments of those on active duty reserve status, even though policy in this regard is well established in the university’s Faculty Manual. Some wondered how to enforce absence policies for those undergoing surgery or regular appointments at the VA. Another faculty member asked: “If a student-veteran disappears inexplicably for an extended period or shows signs of anxiety or stress, do I communicate with the GI Bill certifying official, the ALVS, the student’s advisor, or the counseling center?” Some worried that they might get the veteran in trouble if they reported excessive absences or other challenges, and some worried that as civilians, they lacked credibility in the eyes of veterans. Some asked why veterans who were clearly suffering from injury often refused to go to the Office or Resources for Disabled Students but instead struggled despite repeated failure. Some voiced frustration when student veterans who were clearly failing didn’t simply withdraw from the course. These and many other questions came up, allowing us to address the profile of veterans who were unlikely to seek help or document disability and for whom, as had been drilled into them, “failure was not an option.”
We also used the opportunity of the workshop to explain to faculty why some veterans might miss classes for reservist obligations, why missing an appointment at the regional VA hospital might mean not getting another appointment for six months or more, and our legal obligations to veterans. For example, we informed faculty about Executive Order No. 13607 (2012), otherwise known as the Principles of Excellence, which “ensures Federal military and education benefit programs provide service members, veterans, spouses, and their families deserved information, support, and protections” (Kirchner 114). Included in this order is the requirement to accommodate
157 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing student veteran absence if it occurs due to service obligations. We were able to talk about why a break in continuity of courses could jeopardize GI Bill benefits, which would have implications not just for coursework but for rent and living expenses. We discussed strategies for meeting such needs without compromising standards. And we were able to talk about the role of pride among military service members and their family members. Here we emphasized the challenge of re- entering the general population when fewer than 1% of U.S. citizens have served in the military. Additionally, we addressed that veterans’ special status as members of that 1% can contribute to a sense of otherness and marginality that is also tinged with pride or even indignation when so few Americans are fully informed about current conflicts and military culture. For veterans, we explained the situation in civilian contexts, such as our own college campus too often seems to be about self-actualization or even self-absorption, when the entire point of their recent experience has been about looking out for others and an associated commitment to fellow service members and units.
In these ways and others, we worked toward emphasizing the ways in which military experience enhances the strengths and academic potential of many student-veterans. We called on faculty to recognize veterans as adult learners who, having served in the military, possess skills, attitudes, and strategies conducive to learning. Often exposed to diverse cultures, most have developed time management strategies, are accustomed to holding themselves to high standards, can articulate an idea with clarity, have worked collaboratively toward an objective, demonstrate disciplined thinking and attention to detail, and work toward the polished completion of projects. Workshop participants soon realized that these habits of mind positioned veterans to be among the more mature and sophisticated of students in classrooms (see Appendix 3). Even as we made these points, however, several student veterans who participated in the workshops challenged the strength-based characterizations that seemed to glorify all veterans, merely because they were veterans. Respect and admiration, one participant emphasized, had to be earned; he explained that he had, indeed, worked with any number of veterans who simply “were not good people.” The uncritical valorization of veterans can be nearly as limiting as a pathologized characterization, since such generalizations
158 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
fail to deepen our understanding of veterans and instead reassert stereotypes.
After this initial discussion in the workshop, we turned to the topic of the transition from active duty to student status, which not only offered us an opportunity to discuss one of the most research-rich areas of scholarship about student-veterans but also gave us a chance to talk about features of military culture that most faculty—and indeed, most civilians—have very little awareness of. Reminding faculty that student-veterans are often undergoing a dramatic change (and challenge) to their identities, we discussed the key points in Appendix 2, “Transitioning from Military Service to Academic Contexts.” While all of the points included in that document are important for faculty to consider and to address, we found that many participants were especially concerned about the tensions they observed between student-veterans and traditional students. Some workshop members recounted situations in which veterans seemed to dismiss, belittle, and even bully traditional undergraduates. One faculty member interpreted a student-veteran’s behavior as “smug and superior, when it’s not the fault of the non-veteran student that he or she hasn’t been to war.” By emphasizing why veterans may have a hard time connecting with traditional college students and how transition periods are particularly difficult and generative periods, we suggested to faculty that they speak to the veterans in their classes about such issues and work to demystify expectations regarding interactions among students.
One veteran, we’ll call him Jake, relayed his experience in his first college course at CSU: On the first day of class, the teacher asked students to pair up and interview one another; they were then going to share one interesting fact about their interviewee with the class as a whole. When Jake dutifully explained to his interviewer that he had returned from Afghanistan less than two months prior, his classmate asked, “Oh, were you there on vacation?” Jake responded with disgust and frustration, blurting out, “You need to get your head out of Facebook and see what’s happening in the world.” He explained that, on reflection, he regretted his comment, and he apologized to both the student and teacher for it. But his classmate’s lack of attention to the recent wars was unsettling to him on a deep level. Jake
159 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing recommended that faculty make it clear they are available and willing to meet with student-veterans to talk about specific challenges such as this, especially if course content might initiate conversation about current military actions. In response, we developed some simple language that faculty might include, modify, or strengthen on their syllabi to foster such connection:
Student Veterans: I am delighted that CSU encourages veterans to study here, and I hope that you will visit me during office hours, and let me help you in any way.
Discussion of transition issues, we found, usually leads to comments and concerns about signature wounds, particularly Post-Traumatic Stress or PTS. And here we use the acronym PTS, rather than PTSD, because most professionals, such as Paula Caplan, former President of the American Psychological Association and authority on bridging the military-civilian divide through conversation, now agrees that post-traumatic stress is often not a function of disorder but a natural and appropriate response to unnaturally difficult situations. Our most recent versions of the workshop, however, de-emphasize the issue of PTS. In earlier workshops, we dedicated a considerable amount of time to its discussion as our Adult Learner and Veterans Services (ALVS) coordinator shared statistics and characteristics of PTS/D. She pointed out PTS can affect everything from where student-veterans sit in a classroom, to whether a student-veteran is willing to discuss certain issues. As we gained more experience working with faculty and staff in the workshop, however, we grew more sensitive to our increasing sense that, no matter how much we emphasized the complexity and diversity of PTS in a two-hour workshop, the stereotype of the ticking-time-bomb veteran often took hold of the group, making it difficult to reel the conversation back toward strength-based approaches. To address this problem without minimizing the impacts of war, our ALVS coordinator switched tactics: rather than focus on PTS, she offered information about CSU services available to student-veterans; for instance, our Occupational Therapy program offered specific assistance with attention and concentration issues; math tutoring was available in face-to-face settings, and the Student Veterans of American (SVA)
160 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
chapter offered an opportunity to engage with fellow veterans and advocate for their support.
One of the student-veterans who participated in both our study and the workshops described PTS this way:
Since most Americans are not experts on Afghanistan and Iraq, terms are thrown into the media whirlwind, so that we may all understand what troops feel. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is one such term. I absolutely despise this diagnosis as it serves as a convenient string of words supposedly capturing the essence of nearly every serviceman and woman who has experienced some significant event. It also implies that something is inherently wrong with service members by the mere definition of the word disorder. Why do these men and women who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan have to have a disorder?
This veteran, who chose the pseudonym, Phineas, feared that the association of veterans with an inherently pathological and dangerous kind of PTS might lead to an insidious form of persecution masquerading as care and concern. He explained,
I refuse to be diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, as that would imply that something is wrong with me. I do not require someone to tell me that I have seen some messed up things. I already know that. I saw those things and I was there when they happened. I can decide how those memories affect me. I have reflected upon my past a great deal and found my own ways to benefit from my experiences. It may be reasoned that my belief that I do not have a problem is a problem in itself, but I simply cannot claim issues that do not exist…[Yet] My past has only ever adversely affected individuals I have interacted with. I was denied a job I was qualified for because the hiring official hinted that she feared I may snap and go on an office rampage. My polite and friendly attitude stoked her fears to the point in which I could not be hired. Her presumption presumably stemmed from reading my resume while watching the 24 hour news circuit, so the equation of veteran plus Iraq plus Marine infantry apparently equals I will snap without notice, snatch up my automatic rifles
161 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
and explosives I obviously possess and relapse into some war crime mode I must have been in.
We could see many faculty coming to new insight when Phineas explained that, in fact, PTS had made him a better person:
My confidence is leaps and bounds beyond where it once was. I have been actively targeted for death and I survived. If that doesn’t boost your ego, nothing I can think of will. I no longer toil over what I deem unimportant details. I do not care that I missed two questions on a hundred question exam. That is still a 98%, but I honestly would have panicked in earlier life. No past actions can be taken back; instead, I have to focus upon what is now and what lies ahead. I know that I have done well as long as I am happy. I do not become angry nearly as fast as I used to. My temper used to cause me to lash out, but I can control my anger today and harness it to allow coherent and precise thought. It has taken practice. Above all, a new sense of what is important in life has been gifted to me: life. I could come up with another full list of positive life lessons I have learned, but that would require too much space.
As Phineas’ explanation suggests, veterans themselves are aware of the stereotypes and their own pathologization. At the same time, the best conversations were between veterans. For example, after Phineas shared his perspectives on PTS at one of our earlier workshops, another veteran who experienced PTS in very different ways, explained why he valued the designation because of the much-needed accommodations he received upon registering with our Resources for Disabled Students office. He explained that he was “that” veteran who sat with his back to the wall, had bad days when he couldn’t make it to class, and who tried, especially with fellow-veterans, to de-stigmatize PTS. Congenial and supportive, the conversation between these two men clearly struck a chord with the workshop participants who observed two men of honor with very different experiences of and attitudes toward PTS. This kind of exchange almost always occurred in the workshop, which is why we always moved inexorably toward student-veteran leadership of a panel in
162 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
which they spoke candidly and as subject-area experts on “being a student-veteran.”
Thus, in the second hour of the workshop, we place a panel of student-veterans at center-stage and encourage conversations between vets, and between vets and workshop participants, about classroom scenarios involving veterans. Over time, we have realized that these panels are the most important facets, of the workshop, and we have invited a diverse group of student-veterans to participate in these panels—representatives from multiple military branches, combat veterans, non-combat veterans, women, veterans of color, Liberal Arts and STEM majors, liberals and conservatives, etc. The diversity of the panelists has reflected the diversity of veterans in general, and with few exceptions, the student-veterans we have invited have been quick to say “yes.” Placing them at the front of the room, they find themselves in a position of authority, performing a poised and professional carriage, or making a clear effort to look non-military in sloppy t-shirts, ball caps, and jeans. At the same time, student veterans have seen faculty in a new light when positioned differently. In this context, the veterans found the faculty open- minded, student-centered, and eager to learn, complicating their view of the professors who until then may have seemed singularly interested in their research.
Once the student-veterans take the floor for the panel discussion, we distribute a set of scenarios (see Appendix 4) and divide the room into small discussion groups. The small group conversations then give way to whole-class discussion, which without fail are animated and full of insight. We attribute any success here to the articulate and engaged veterans who openly share their perspectives, experiences, and concerns about higher education and to the faculty and staff who are willing to shift roles. In addition, the scenarios we distribute are helpful in that they structure the topics and concerns of the whole- group conversation. Given time constraints, we typically distribute two scenarios for discussion. The two that we will spotlight here are based on the published account of combat veteran Michelle Wilmot’s experiences in college classes (“Scenario 1”), and the experience of one of CSU’s student-veterans, Daniel (“Scenario 2”), who initiated conversations with CSU administration on an important campus
163 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing policy. We’ll discuss each of these scenarios and responses to them, but it’s important to note that, because the scenarios were founded in “real” situations, they encouraged respectful and thoughtful conversation. They also, however, provided some distance for participants and led to powerful conversation, often about issues that would otherwise be difficult to discuss.
We ask the student-veterans to read and consider the scenarios before arriving. Faculty and staff participants read the scenarios after the student-veterans are introduced. Once the reading period is over, we begin conversation by simply having faculty-staff reiterate their sense of what had happened in the scenario so that we can see how they frame these situations. We then ask a series of questions such as why the event occurred and how it might have been handled differently or been avoided altogether. We then invite student-veterans to offer their insights, and at that point, we consciously fade from the scene, positioning the veterans front and center. They have no problem with their leadership of the discussion, demonstrating not only their ability to listen to what participants have to say but also their willingness to share their perspectives. At this point, the faculty-staff participants seem barely aware of how the tables have turned, with all eyes and ears now directed toward the student-veterans who meaningfully engage in conversation with faculty for the better part of an hour. On many occasions, we have watched faculty relax as the transformation unfolds, and they become learners, and the veterans became teachers. In early workshops, we reserved substantial time near the end of the workshop for synthesizing the conversation and pulling it back to the research materials we had provided. But in time, we realized that the best strategy was to let the veterans and faculty-staff sum things up on their own. We always concluded each workshop with a brief feedback survey, and invariably, faculty state that the workshop was profoundly effective because of the student-veterans’ role in the discussion.
Because the student-veteran-facilitated discussions of the scenarios are so integral, we want to spend some time here explaining why we chose the two scenarios and how both the student-veterans and faculty-staff responded to each one. The two scenarios that we chose to highlight here, both deal with forms of PTS, but we have not used
164 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
the two in the same workshop and have instead presented other scenarios that deal with different pedagogical situations involving veterans, such as how faculty have responded when student-veterans miss a considerable number of classes but have not registered with our Office of Resources for Students with Disabilities (such registration would authorize special consideration and alternative assignments) or how faculty might address the needs of a student who is a military dependent whose parent is deployed. These two scenarios have been most provocative and have elicited moving insights and more open discussion that we initially thought possible in the workshops.
The first scenario (see Appendix 4) is derived fromThe Girls Come Marching Home: Stories of Women Warriors Returning from the War in Iraq, Kirsten Holmstedt’s series of essays about women veterans of the Iraq War. One of Holmstedt’s interviewees, Michelle Wilmot, talks about her experiences upon returning home after a tour of duty in Iraq and enrolling in a college philosophy course. As the scenario explains, Michelle felt silenced in the course, invalidated by the instructor and the traditional students in the class who had no idea she was a veteran (like many women vets, Michelle chose to assimilate, rarely identifying as a veteran). When a traditional student, however, made a blanket statement about troops who were killed in action in Iraq, Michelle could no longer remain silent and exploded in anger, saying, “I was in Iraq for a year, so I should be fucking dead? Really? Why don’t you come over here and fucking kill me? Come on. Do it!” (191). Obviously, this scenario could easily reproduce every stereotype about the ticking-time-bomb veteran. But as the veterans facilitated discussion about it, they acknowledged that potential, yet curtailed it by asking questions that invited faculty- staff participants to trouble the easy stereotypes and to complicate the scenario in productive ways.
Their first strategy was to focus not on Michelle’s motivation but on the instructor’s role in the situation. They asked faculty to comment on the fact that the instructor remained silent during the exchange between Michelle and her classmate. They asked what the instructor might have done to prevent such an exchange in the first place. The workshop participants responded vigorously: If the instructor knew the class would be discussing controversial issues relating to war,
165 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing she should have ensured everyone would be heard in a respectful and empathetic manner. One veteran panelist stated his belief that the instructor failed in virtually every way, as she didn’t prepare the class for the conversation and, after the students’ exchange, she missed an important teachable moment, in which she could have provided what we might define, in writing circles, as a “structured reflective activity” to ensure that the situation was diffused and so that all of the students could consider the exchange and refine their positions about the topic. The veteran panel adroitly managed the conversation— and added their own perspectives—when faculty and staff suggested a multitude of contradictory actions the instructor might take: Send Michelle to counseling, and don’t allow her back into class until there’s evidence from professionals that she wasn’t a threat to her classmates. Send Michelle to student conduct for uncivil behavior and swearing in class. Ask Michelle to meet privately with the instructor to discuss her experiences and get insight about how Michelle could feel safe again in the class. Mediate a meeting between the classmates to give them a chance to understand one another’s perspectives and to heal from the hard feelings.
Of course, like the faculty-staff participants, the student-veterans had disparate ideas about solutions, and as they spoke to one another about how to handle this situation, they dispelled any notion of a unified “veteran” identity. Neither the veteran panel nor the faculty participants forced a conclusion to this debate about best practice and ethical action; instead, participants obtained a repertoire of possible strategies for addressing difficult conversations and honoring both veterans’ and traditional students’ experiences.
Perhaps one of the most resonant outcomes of discussing this scenario, however, was the way it challenged deeply-held gendered assumptions. When one of the student-veterans said he would respond differently if “Michelle was a Michael,” while another veteran, whose fiancé was also a female medic and served three tours of duty, asserted that the sex of the veteran shouldn’t matter. This sparked a lively conversation about gender stereotypes and the hypermasculinity of the “soldier” trope. In this scenario, Michelle Wilmot’s fury, experience in combat (which, it is important to point out, was not officially recognized as combat until 2014), and her threat of violence born of PTS were
166 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
the traditional masculine characteristics associated with service members. Several participants noted that they hadn’t realized how deeply gendered their assumptions about veterans were until this conversation made those assumptions clear.
It is unlikely that this kind of discussion would have been possible without the opportunity to discuss the scenario and to observe the veterans’ conflicting responses to it. It is also important to note that Michelle Wilmot continues to advocate for veterans—particularly as an artist who paints her wartime experiences and has had multiple art shows over the last five years. In her painting, she explores anger and PTS as, definitively, women’s realm. In a recent interview she explains, “A lot of what is in the media about the military is about sexual trauma. Rape is more palatable to (Americans) than a woman serving in combat. That women are able to defend themselves, able to kill, that is just not part of the gender stereotype” (quoted in Kazikof). Sharing with workshop participants, Wilmot’s work and life beyond the explosion in her first-year philosophy course worked to vex implicit bias about female veterans and about veterans who experience PTS.
The second scenario we’ll discuss here was recommended by one of our participating student-veterans, whom we will call Daniel. We decided to use the scenario after Daniel mentioned his attempts to express concern about veteran-related issues with CSU’s administration. His story elicited so much conversation and shared frustration among those present that we thought it would be a worthy scenario to integrate into subsequent workshops.
On the CSU campus, like many other campuses around the nation, a protest group called “The Genocide Awareness Project,” sponsored by organizations like “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust,” “Created Equal,” and the “Center for Bio-Ethical Reform,” regularly stages a display on our “Free Speech Quad.” The display is an installation of sorts, featuring a series of huge posters each ten feet high and firmly braced. This tableau depicts fetuses in various states of dismemberment, bloody afterbirth littered with infant’s feet and hands, and other graphic, violent, and disturbing images. The Genocide Awareness Project targets colleges and university campuses,
167 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing claiming that “Public universities ostensibly promote ‘genocide awareness,’ but no discussion of genocide is complete without an assessment of whether and why abortion is genocide.” This exhibit has prompted protests, such as the one at Pomona College, where students described the posters as “triggers.” Across the country, at the University of Georgia, the Women’s Studies Program teamed with the Sexual Health Advocacy Group to shield onlookers from the graphic images, blocking them with sheets of fabric held up by protestors (see Seitz; Jones; McLaughlin).
Daniel pointed out that for veterans suffering from PTS, even a surprising sound can set off an anxiety attack. Here, Daniel’s confirmation of PTS demonstrates a moment of difference among veterans when considered alongside the earlier points made by Phineas who rejected outright the entire label of PTS. Daniel, meanwhile, maintained that the posters with their vivid depiction of blood, cadavers, and violently dismembered remains could be potent triggers for veterans recently returned from war. He discussed his own efforts at controlling his reactions and mentioned that he was getting counseling, but that it was going to take time. Perhaps most importantly, he talked about his appeals to university officials to ban the posters. He reported that administrators defended the free speech area of the campus plaza. However, Daniel continued to press, believing that university administrators would be persuaded by a rational weighing of rights. He pointed out that the posters represented a violation of his safety on a campus that he knew to be military-friendly, offering a welcoming and supportive campus climate. He explained that other veterans had similar responses to the posters, though they were less likely to voice their experiences because of the ongoing stigma of PTS. The posters were, he explained, akin to shouting “Fire!” in a movie theater and hence did not qualify as free speech. Ultimately, however, no administrator was willing to support his request, which led to Daniel to believe that the university had failed in its promises and its mission.
Daniel’s willingness to talk about his PTS in light of these events offered an exceptional moment among our workshop experiences. First, he had shared this story without our prompting; in virtually every other case with the student-veterans panels, the vets waited for
168 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
the scenarios we provided and the participant questions that followed. While they were enthusiastic about responding, they usually didn’t introduce new discussion topics. So when Daniel did so, we felt we had been gifted a scenario that would generate new discussions in future workshops. With Daniel’s permission, we began to use his scenario regularly, and Daniel even offered the published poem about soldiers that he had sent to university administrators when his plea to put an end to the placards was denied. That poem, which we include here and which he valued greatly, may help to explain the higher purpose that he felt he was responding to without the full understanding and much less appreciation of civilian administrators who responded.
Daniel’s description of his own post-traumatic stress response in light of the abortion posters helped us understand what re-traumatization feels like for veterans. He described a classic stress response of elevated heart rate, clammy palms, an inability to think clearly, a sense of disorientation in time and space, and a combination of raw fury and helplessness. He described the necessity of getting away from the site as quickly as possible, and he explained the way the images haunted him for days afterward, generating flashbacks that left him feeling as bad as he did after combat. Daniel’s description also helped us to see how disappointing and even damaging the “balanced” approaches of the university can be to those who feel they have earned something more than even-handed neutrality and what can seem a parsimonious dispensation of respect in light of the sacrifices made in the course of military service. Indeed, what seems to have bothered Daniel in part was the cool evenness of the academic approach that the CSU administration took in this case. For people like Daniel, who have served “at the tip of the spear,” such disinterest can seem like a jolting betrayal of trust. Daniel’s sharing of the poem with us and his request that we distribute it through the workshop conveyed his sense of disillusionment with civilian culture and his eagerness to explain himself and his fellow service members—what they risk and what they sometimes lose. Interestingly, advocates of other causes who were present, such as Pro-choice advocates, sought to join with veterans on activism against the posters, attempting to create a most unlikely alliance. Whether such an alliance would be good or bad or was even likely to materialize, we cannot say. On our campus, we never saw it occur despite initial enthusiasm.
169 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
We have learned much from watching student-veteran and faculty interactions. In concert with the claims of Angie Mallory and Doug Downs, we have found that among the many challenges student-veterans face are misplaced expectations of faculty. Given student-veterans’ recent experience with leadership models that are quite different from how leadership is enacted in the academy, the resistance to open-ended assignments, like the dissatisfaction with a faculty member’s casual appearance, can be perplexing. As Mallory and Downs point out, the dissonance in leadership models is compounded by discomfort with the central tasks of higher education in which students are called to question unqualified claims, to embrace uncertainty, to find their own way rather than be mission-directed, to immerse themselves in ideas rather than commit too early to a single idea, to value and embrace multiple perspectives, to reject dichotomous thinking and be suspicious of polarized views, to revise one’s thesis regularly when presented with new information.
Faculty workshops about student-veterans can step into this terrain, preparing faculty to consider the important project of college as a reintroduction into civilian society, a bridge between military service, and civilian workplaces and communities. College can be a place for shifting an initial disappointment in the seeming absence of leadership into an appreciation for leadership’s varied forms. College can broaden a student-veteran’s repertoire of acceptable models of authority and can unsettle rigid values inculcated in military contexts. But if faculty hope to foster such new understandings, they need far more nuanced insight about the identity work that such efforts entail for student-veterans.
We believe that student-veteran advocates in the higher education setting might engage student-veterans in a kind of comparative literacy exercise, in which the values and norms of military life are brought face to face with varying civilian values. Objectifying such differences, making them explicit and worthy of study, might be one way to engage student-veterans in this effort as an intellectual exercise that is worthy of their commitment and talent. The substantial project of reconfiguring military norms into approaches that are workable in civilian environments can draw specifically on the strength-based approaches that are common to military habits
170 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
of mind. And given the potency of the induction processes that service members have been through in their military service, it may make sense to acknowledge that military service involves “forms of specialized literacy learning that leave a lasting imprint, often becoming central to the identity of the people who experience them” (Doe and Doe). Acknowledging the value of this imprint to future negotiations of leadership and authority could be seen as a central instructional role of college faculty working with student-veterans. Without such bridges, civilian life might remain a disappointment, the best years of the young veterans’ life already behind him or her.
Given that military induction literacies obtain their focus from stakes that could not be higher, there is likely no comparable form of induction back into civilian sectors. But we can certainly do better than the military’s own “transition assistance,” which too often involves superficial out-processing that blithely launches the veteran back into the civilian context. Such shocking abandonment suggests not just a casual disinterest in the veteran’s unspecified future but a betrayal of the thoroughness with which induction into the military was conducted. Weak transition processes then too often also compound in civilian society where the challenges of transition are simply not understood, much less taken up, largely because so few people understand the task at hand. The civilian setting of college offers various ways in which reintegration can be made explicitly meaningful, even if it is inevitably, also, difficult. Eschewing the thorough efficiencies of military induction in favor of messy and varied analytical approaches can prepare the student-veteran for the variety of persons and experiences he or she will encounter in civilian life and provide tools for the evaluation of options. Student- veterans might come to understand in a critical and analytic way why induction is so powerfully efficient (and necessary) in military settings and yet also undesirable in civilian ones.
Our workshops only began to address such complex topics since we attempted, in only modest ways, to introduce student-veterans to faculty and vice-versa. We want to confront the misapprehensions of veterans by faculty and vice versa, to address beginning assumptions in which faculty tended to lump all veterans together, seeing them as broken survivors of combat, and veterans tended to see universities
171 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing as hotbeds of liberal politics where one need always to keep the guard up when dealing with faculty. Over the course of a workshop, those assumptions had substantially faded. However, we also found that on our campus the needs of veterans were not stable but even today are shifting. Over time, fewer of the student-veterans we encountered were in need of immediate transition assistance from combat contexts. Instead, veterans’ diverse, often non-combat military experiences, required increasingly nuanced responses, and more and more of the student-veterans that we observed, wanted new experiences that helped them to separate from the military. This portion of the student-veterans population wanted full immersion in the civilian college environment—to essentially undergo a kind of full and fast induction into civilian life through the structured pathway of college.
Hart and Thompson’s national survey points out the various classroom experiments undertaken to address student-veteran demographics, including classroom models that singled veterans out for cohort instruction, models that adopted military themes/ topics, and models that went for veterans less directly by establishing veteran-friendly policies. Their examination of these efforts suggests that early efforts may have focused on the student-veteran as combat veteran and on stereotypes about military service that filled in for evidence-based understanding of the varied experiences of military service. At the same time, while most veteran-friendly faculty today realize there is no consistent experience of military service, much less a universal experience of combat, they also recognize that there are features of military experience that are predictable and important to recognize. Such features include respect for rank, an appreciation for disciplined ways of thinking and acting, vigilance in regard to safety, and high expectations for performance. These elements cut across time, space, branch, and even MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) and therefore all faculty should know them.
Each time, as our workshops approached their end, it was common for the faculty and staff to offer their thanks to the veterans for participating in the workshop. Nearly every time, this moment led to broader faculty-staff statements of thanks to the veterans. These statements of appreciation occurred in ways that were organic and earned. They offered the civilian faculty-staff space and opportunity
172 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
to legitimately state their appreciation in ways that far exceed the predictable and clichéd “Thank you for your service.” The effect was to offer a small gesture of healing across the military-civilian divide. As we might expect, the student-veterans returned the favor, warmly accepting the professors’ thanks and offering their own.
173 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Appendix 1 Fact Sheet: OEF/OIF Veterans by the Numbers (U.S.)1
Over 2 million U.S. citizens have served since 9/11. This is one half of one percent of the American population. In contrast 12% of population served in WWII and 2% in Vietnam.
Demographic Breakdown • 89% male; 11% female • 64% under age 30; 30% between 30-34; 5% over 35 • 74% white, 10% Latino, 7% African-American • 48% of OEF and OIF veterans are married. Post 9/11, one in five veterans is divorced. • Vets are the parents of 6 million of children. • 93% have high school diploma; 15% have a bachelor’s degree • 11% are officers and 89% are enlisted
OEF/OIF Veteran Challenges • 50% report mental or physical injury as result of OEF or OIF wars • Over 3000 OEF/OIF veterans in the U.S. today are homeless • Unemployment rates for OEF/OIF veterans vary between 10-20% depending on demographic group. Women veterans are particularly hard hit by unemployment with a rate estimated to be double that of males in the same demographic group. Most current figures: For October 2013 the post 9-11 veteran unemployment rate is 10% (9.5% male, 11.5% female), which equates to 246,000 unemployed post 9-11 vets. This number does not include the approximately 1 million that are in some type of civilian schooling or training. The national unemployment rate is 7%. • Suicide rates for OEF/OIF vets ages 20-24 are 2-4X higher than the civilian rate
1 Most data derived from “All Volunteer Force: From Military to Civilian Service”—Civic Enterprises 2009, a public advocacy group families and wounded vets ; 2) 88%—disaster relief; 86%—at-risk youth; 82%—older Americans; 69%—the environment
174 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
Veteran Survey Highlights • 13% report their transition home is going well • 90% believe Americans can learn something from the example of national service of veterans • 90% strongly believe national service is a basic responsibility of every American • 70% are motivated to volunteer in their communities but of this group, over half of those who have not yet volunteered said they had trouble finding information on service opportunities and have not been invited to participate where opportunities did exist. Causes vets are particularly passionate about are 1) 90%—military
175 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Appendix 2 Transitioning from Military Service to Academic Contexts2
The transition of a veteran from military service to a college environment produces a unique set of challenges and stresses. Reintegration challenges faced by Post-9/11 veterans include:
• Developing a primary identity other than as a service member. • Difficulty relating to and connecting with traditional college students. Age differences and the experience of service and/ or combat frequently cause veterans to feel alienated from traditional college students. Typical student concerns like grades, parties, and joining organizations seldom have the same significance to veterans, who often voice a sense of greater maturity and seriousness than traditional students. • Finding importance and meaning in experiences and ideas that are not urgent or that don’t affect a great number of people. Campus life and concerns may seem trivial compared to those found in service. • Negotiating the structural and procedural differences between the military and higher education bureaucracies (e.g., knowing the rules and mores of the campus, where to go to get things done, how to address professors and others in positions of authority). • Making a much greater number of decisions in a far more complex world. While the potential consequences of a combatant’s decisions are staggering, the total number of autonomous daily decisions is quite small when compared to college life. • Negotiating collaborative and small group discussion activities. Military decisions are often made quickly and individually (by a superior), so veterans may need time to 2 Information adapted from two sources: 1) “Research for Returning War Veterans.” www.jmu.edu/counselingctr/Resources/veterans.html and 2) “Best Practices for the “Classroom” www.dva.wa.gov/ veterans’ success include relationships, social support, and access to alternative solutions when problems arise.
176 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
adjust to the deliberate discussions and collaborative decision- making common in college pedagogy. Concrete outcomes of collaborative work may address this issue. • Developing a sense of safety on campus (e.g., choosing classroom seats that allow for monitoring of others and rapid escape, such as sitting with their back to the wall and near a door). • Negotiating financial challenges and change of status connected to income. • Boredom (e.g., missing the task-focused, hectic schedule of service and/or the adrenaline rush experienced in the ‘high’ of battle). • Having difficulty returning to their role as children of their parents. The maturing process of service may cause younger veterans to be less accommodating to parental expectations and demands. • These issues, when coupled with the challenges related to returning to general civilian life, place returning veteran students at a significantly higher risk of dropping out. The key variables for
177 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Appendix 3 Teaching Student-Veterans: Strength-Based Pedagogies
Student-Vets are engaged, adult learners and: • Are mission and project oriented and hence complete tasks • Are time conscious and hence manage time toward completion • Are able to give and receive orders • Respect authority • Generally speak with clarity and conviction • Maintain awareness of the “guy” or “gal” next to them—look out for buddies • Have often traveled and seen some of the world
Challenges they may face: • Although high school graduation rates are higher than the national norm, they may have struggled with their studies • May not have grown up in reading households • May be first-generation college • May feel that the defining experience of their lives is over • May expect a certain kind of authority at the front of the classroom and misunderstand the cultural shift demanded by a new form of authority and expertise • Misunderstand priorities, perhaps advantaging surface polish at the expense of deeper critical thinking • Have little or no familiarity with the “look” of academic products
Many student-veterans: • Are prepared to be asked their opinion on world events • Seek opportunity to share knowledge gained during service • Look for peer leadership opportunities • Respond well to mentoring and seek it in the academy • Wish to be held to a high standard • Possess particularly strong speaking skills • Seek explicit guidance but may be served by expanding their repertoire into less explicit guidance and will cooperate (and grow) if the rationale for the approach is explained. Explain why it’s important for the student (and student-veteran in
178 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
particular) to develop his or her own topic for a research paper • Demonstrate high levels of professionalism and polish in finished products
179 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Appendix 4 Pedagogical Scenarios for Discussion
Scenario 1: Michelle In The Girls Come Marching Home: Stories of Women Warriors Returning from the War in Iraq (Stackpole Books, 2009) Kirsten Holmstedt tells the story of Michelle Wilmot, a 24 year old Latina Army sergeant who had just returned home from Iraq. Wilmot joined the Army when she was 17, and like many other veterans re-entering college, Wilmot chose to assimilate and not draw attention to her veteran status. Holmstedt explains, “If she was going to talk about the war, she preferred to discuss it with people who had been on the battlefield and had gone through similar experiences” (192). In a philosophy course, students were discussing the ways that moral perspectives on war had changed throughout history when a fellow student expressed her position that “what American soldiers were doing in Iraq was wrong and that they all deserved to die” (191). Wilmot’s response was immediate: “Excuse me?” Wilmot said. “I was in Iraq for a year, so I should be fucking dead? Really? Why don’t you come over here and fucking kill me? Come on. Do it!” (191) Holmsted explains that Wilmot often felt silenced in her college classes, and that, in this altercation, “She reverted to her role as sergeant, and the person she was talking to became a private” (193). “Wilmot felt her entire year on the battlefield being invalidated by this student and the others, including the instructor, who remained silent” (193). She explains that “It sickened her to look at her classmates. . .. If she had to listen to anymore students talk about the war as if they knew what was going on, she would get up and smash a desk over their heads” (215).
Scenario 2: Daniel Daniel, a student-veteran explains the difficulty presented to student- veterans who experience PTSD by calling attention to the giant anti- abortion placards that are posted in the free speech area several times a year. These placards, he points out, are PTSD triggers for many student-veterans. Daniel states, “Those who have been in combat do not need to be revisited by images of dismembered body parts.”
180 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
When Daniel asked that university officials prohibit the placards, he was told that they were exhibited in the free speech area on campus, and thus the university would not refuse the anti-abortion group an opportunity to express their perspectives. Daniel, in a response to the university, acknowledged that he and other vets are fully aware of the importance of the free speech area. However, he also pointed out that one person’s freedom of speech cannot impinge on another’s safety, and these placards do just that.
Daniel’s continued requests that the placards be banned have gone unanswered. To drive home his point to university officials that he understands freedom of speech better than most, he sent them this poem:
181 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
It is the Soldier By Charles M. Province*
It is the Soldier, not the minister, who has given us freedom of religion. It is the Soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the Soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to protest. It is the Soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial. It is the Soldier, not the politician, who has given us the right to vote. It is the Soldier who salutes the flag, Who serves beneath the flag, Who allows the protester to burn the flag. And whose coffin is draped by the flag.
*©Copyright 1970, 2005 by Charles M. Province
182 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
Works Cited
“Best Practices for the Classroom.” Department of Veteran Affairs, Washington State. Nov 2014, www.dva.wa.gov/benefits/partners- veteran-supportive-campuses Caplan, Paula J. When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans. MIT Press, 2011. Doe, Sue. “The Uneasy Civilian.” Syracuse University Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF). May 1, 2013, vets.syr. edu/the-uneasy-civilian-on-campus-with-faculty-and-student-vets/ Doe, Sue and William W. Doe, III. “Residence Time and Military Workplace Literacies.” Composition Forum vol. 28, Fall 2013. compositionforum.com/issue/28/residence-time.php Genocide Awareness Project. www.abortionno.org/college-campus-outreach- gap/. Accessed 1 June 2016. Hart, D. Alexis and Roger Thompson, “An Ethical Obligation”: Promising Practices for Student Veterans in College Writing Classrooms.” www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Groups/ CCCC/AnEthicalObligation.pdf Holmstedt Kirsten. The Girls Come Marching Home: Stories of Women Warriors Returning from the War in Iraq. Stackpole Books, 2009. Jones, Jaleesa. “Anti-abortion Group Sparks Controversy on UNC Campus.” USA Today—College, 1 Apr. 2014, college.usatoday. com/2014/04/01/anti-abortion-group-sparks-controversy-on- unc-campus/ Kazikof, Lois. “Field Medic in Iraq Turns to Art, Writing.” SFGate. Mar. 2014, www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Combat-veterans-art- opens-dialogue-on-war-4926877.php Kirchner, Michael J. “Supporting Student Veteran Transition to College and Academic Success.” Adult Learning, vol.26, no. 3 Aug. 2015, pp. 114-123, dx.doi.org/10.1177/1045159515583813 Mallory, Angie and Doug Downs. “Uniform Meets Rhetoric: Excellence through Interaction.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University, edited by Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat. Utah State Press, 2014, pp. 51-72, dx.doi. org/10.7330/9780874219425.c002 McLaughlin, Sam. “Anti-Abortion Activists Stage Demonstration on Sixth Street.” The Student Life. 11 Dec. 2013. tsl.news/ news/3651/
183 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Province, Charles M. “It is the Soldier.” George Patton Historical Society. www.pattonhq.com/koreamemorial.html “Research for Returning War Veterans.” James Madison University. Nov. 2014, www.jmu.edu/counselingctr/resources/for-veterans. shtml Seitz, Blake. “Pro-Abortion Students Build Wall Blocking Graphic Pro-Life Campus Display.” The College Fix. 4 Mar. 2014, www. thecollegefix.com/post/16591/
184 Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants | Doe & Langstraat
Acknowledgements
We wish to heartily thank Col. (Ret.) Jenny Pickett, former Director of the CSU Office of Adult Learners and Veteran’s Services, whose indefatigable work on behalf of student-veterans at CSU has left a legacy of support and respect; Major Erin Hadlock and Rebecca McIntyre, research assistants extraordinaire; the CSU College of Liberal Arts Faculty Development Fund for support for this research; and the dedicated faculty, staff and student-veterans for their enthusiastic participation in and insightful contributions to the workshops discussed in this article.
185 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Sue Doe teaches courses in Composition, Autoethnographic Theory and Method, Reading and Writing Connections, Research Methods, and GTA preparation for writing instruction. She does research in three distinct areas--academic labor and the faculty career, writing across the curriculum, and student-veteran transition in the post- 9/11 era. Coauthor of the faculty development book Concepts and Choices: Meeting the Challenges in Higher Education, she has published articles in College English and Writing Program Administration as well as in several book-length collections. Her recent collection on student-veterans in the Composition classroom, Generation Vet: Composition, Veterans, and the Post-911 University, co-authored with Professor Lisa Langstraat, was published by Utah State Press (an imprint of the University Press of Colorado) in 2014.
Lisa Langstraat is Writing Center Director and Composition Placement Director at Colorado State University, where she teaches courses in Composition theory and pedagogy, critical theory, feminist and queer theory, and rhetorical theory. With Sue Doe, she edited Generation Vet: Composition, Veterans, and the Post-911 University (2014), and her recent research has appeared in JAC, Michigan Journal of Service Learning, and various edited collections. In addition to her current research related to post-9/11 student-veterans, she is working on a monograph, Vintage Rhetorics: Old Things, Material Agency and Collector Cultures, which examines the current swell of interest in vintage, antique and retro objects in light of feminist material culture theory and the affective economies that circulate in and around specific vintage objects and the sites of their acquisition and use.
186 Articulating Veteran- Friendly: Preparing First-Year Writing Instructors to Work with Veterans
Thomas Sura West Virginia The CCCC position statement on student veterans (2015) University reminds writing program administrators (WPAs) of their responsibility to prepare faculty to understand not only the challenges these returning students may face but also the assets they bring with them. This essay argues that writing programs must develop faculty education programs that go beyond solo workshops to articulate what it means to be veteran friendly. Specifically, this essay identifies and describes a special-interest-group (or SIG) model for instructor education. This SIG relies on a micro-curriculum to promote a mode of “uncoverage” in learning about student veterans (Reid, 2004). Instructor reflections from a pilot program identify and define characteristics that help to articulate what veteran friendly means in local contexts including awareness of student-veteran issues, empathy toward student veterans, and confidence in working with student veterans.
s veterans continue to return home from deployments around the globe Aand seek education, colleges and universities also seek means of acting as veteran-friendly “sponsors of literacy” in order to aid student veterans’ learning and success
187 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
(Brandt 166). While much of this veteran-friendly sponsorship takes the form of infrastructure or curriculum, writing program administrators (WPAs) and other teacher educators (TEs) need fluid, adaptable solutions for preparing teachers to work with student veterans. This essay focuses on one such effort to prepare faculty to offer veteran-friendly courses through a locally developed special- interest group (SIG) of like-minded instructors in the undergraduate writing program. This SIG is infused with a four-part micro- curriculum that promotes a mode of “uncoverage”—active inquiry rather than passive information reception—in learning about student veterans (Reid). Through their reflective writing, the participating instructors suggest that articulating what counts as veteran friendly is a far more complex endeavor than they first believed. The findings overall suggest that participating in the SIG may increase instructor awareness of student-veteran issues, increase empathy toward student veterans, foster instructor confidence in working with student veterans, and reveal additional challenges that require attention. In sum, the SIG model and curriculum enables instructors, WPAs, and other TEs to articulate what it means to be veteran friendly in their local contexts.
Theorizing Veteran-Friendly Education Research on student veterans reveals an existing gap between what educators know about this group and how they can implement effective means of preparing faculty to work with them. Much of the current conversation focuses on what faculty need to know about student veterans including their similarities to other adult learners (Cleary; O’Herrin), red tape they encounter in the academy (Glasser, Powers, and Zywiak), their academic strengths and issues (Dalton; Ackerman et al.), and their signature wounds like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) (Ackerman et al.; Baechtold and De Sawal). This knowledge most often translates into veteran-friendly “administrative” solutions and campus support structures like veteran centers, admissions policies, or special courses (Mallory and Downs 53; Loring and Anderson 100). Yet even these articulations of what is veteran friendly have their limitations, especially in the classroom.
188 Articulating Veteran-Friendly | Sura
For example, two existing classroom articulations of what is veteran friendly are veteran-cohort courses and military-themed courses (Valentino; Keast). Veteran-cohort courses, analogous to learning communities, may have issues with enrollment and socialization. The writing program described in this essay implemented veteran-cohort courses many years ago. Once implemented, the courses struggled to succeed for several reasons. First, only one or two sections of the courses could be offered, and if the times were not amenable to the veteran students, then enrollment suffered and the courses were cancelled. If the courses did have enough students to proceed, then instructors reported challenges in contending with the social bonds among the students. In other words, the veteran-cohort courses could produce such a safe haven for military culture that the social bonds threatened to subsume the learning goals, and the instructors still felt ill-equipped to address the challenge. The solution eventually disappeared, but the need to support student veterans remained.
A second articulation of what counts as veteran friendly is veteran- or military-themed courses, which tie writing to readings and issues related to military life. Veteran-themed courses, too, may face enrollment challenges. Scholar and instructor Darren Keast’s description of his own veteran-themed course suggests full student enrollment with only a few student veterans. While the course runs, Keast reports different tension points including civilian students’ uncertainty about the curricular focus on military issues, as well as student veterans’ own reluctance to dwell further on those topics. Keast’s experience demonstrates that veteran friendly does not necessarily mean focusing course content on military culture, a topic that some student veterans may be all too ready to leave behind.
In the end, neither of these veteran-friendly solutions focuses on preparing the classroom teacher, leaving scholars and teachers to argue “there is an urgent need to share best practices, to exchange ideas, and to conduct research” focused on what veteran friendly means in the classroom for faculty who feel poorly prepared (Ackerman et al. 13; De La Ysla 98). While each approach has potential, depending on the context in which it is implemented, WPAs and TEs also need different approaches to veteran-friendly instruction that focus specifically on developing instructor knowledge rather than
189 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing infrastructure or curriculum. Effectively implementing this focus first requires paying special attention to its underlying education theory: a learning paradigm.
Scholarship on teaching and learning contrasts an instructional paradigm and a learning paradigm as two different approaches to education. An instructional paradigm focuses on covering information and content delivery. Teacher education events that adhere to an instructional paradigm are alluring because they can be delivered simply in a finite amount of time (e.g., a brown-bag lecture or workshop) and replicated infinitely. They might even be emailed as a list of bullet points. The danger that teacher education events like these present is the promotion of a “case-closed” mentality— “I needed information. I got the information. I am now veteran friendly.” This fits the “happy slogan” form of what it means to be veteran friendly that Ackerman et al. warn against. This concern also surfaces in Keast’s writing on veteran-friendly courses:
At one meeting of faculty who wanted to work more closely with vets, it was suggested that the group make signs for professors to put up in their offices that identified them as vet-friendly, similar to ones put out by the Queer Resource Center, or place a special symbol in the class schedule. I opposed this for seeming to imply that those without the marking were by default anti-veteran, and for the way it turned a personal position into bumper-sticker politics.
In this recounting, the signs are more indicative of a desire to be veteran friendly than they are of clear outcomes or expectations. Although these visible signs can be meaningful and valuable, Keast’s concern is warranted. The research reported here suggests that adopting a learning paradigm approach to faculty development can help instructors push past the “case-closed” mentality that can accompany a workshop or visible sign. In order to accomplish this, WPAs and TEs must envision more than the standard presentation or workshop (Blalock 558). They must envision a learning paradigm. This means that instead of merely covering the relevant information, teacher education programs must press for what rhetorician and WPA Shelley Reid has identified asuncoverage —a key principle
190 Articulating Veteran-Friendly | Sura of a learning paradigm. Whereas a coverage model focuses on “comprehensiveness and scope” of content—fitting the definition of an instructional paradigm—the uncoverage model relies on “exploratory, inquiry-driven, reflective study” (Reid 16). The ideal result of this uncoverage model is “a way of knowing some ideas about teaching writing while leaving them open to further inquiry” (25). A good example of an uncoverage model in action comes from Aiken, Beard, McClure, and Nickoson’s article on micro-studies. Here, Aiken et al describe low-stakes, semester-bound attempts by rhetoric and composition graduate students to conduct authentic field research as part of a course on research methods. While this “hands- on” research experience did not exactly yield high-caliber results that would pass muster in a scholarly peer review, the experiences of the students yielded rich learning about how to conduct research successfully. Instead of simply covering the information the graduate students needed to know (instructional paradigm), the students developed their knowledge by exploring, inquiring, and reflecting on their experiences (learning paradigm). The SIG model described here applies this same theory of learning to preparing instructors for work with student veterans.
The Veteran SIG: A Learning Paradigm in Action Building on this depiction of a micro-study, I sought out program instructors interested in offering veteran-friendly writing instruction at West Virginia University (WVU), an R1, land-grant institution with a student population around 31,000. WVU currently enrolls approximately 400 student veterans and another 313 student veteran dependents. The institution’s undergraduate writing program uses a two-course, portfolio-based writing sequence, offering roughly 75 sections of each course per semester. These courses are taught by the program’s graduate teaching assistants (roughly sixty) and lecturers (roughly twelve).
The anchor for the SIG was a short-form syllabus or micro- curriculum, aimed at generating exploration, inquiry, and reflection on student veterans. The SIG’s micro-curriculum asked for five hours of training focused on working with student veterans. While this number could be adjusted to suit various contexts, it worked in the current context for several reasons. First, it struck a balance
191 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing between rigor and flexibility. Five hours of professional development represented a significant investment of instructors’ time, whether graduate teaching assistant (GTA) or lecturer, yet the requirement was constrained and flexible enough to be achieved in a semester or over the course of an academic year. In fact, as part of their ongoing professional development in teaching composition, all of the graduate instructors in the program were regularly required to complete five hours of professional development activities each semester. The five hours required for the SIG fit neatly into that program and aided the instructors in meeting their obligation. This approach also created space for the SIG to become a process of learning and avoid some of the drawbacks that could accompany solitary, check-the-box workshops or information-dump lectures.
The five hours themselves were designed to equip instructors with baseline knowledge, expose them to research on student veterans, and engage them in dialogue and reflection. To achieve this, the SIG began in the fall with a general information session. This session explained how the SIG worked, introduced instructors to contextual institutional policies related to student veterans, and reviewed some of what researchers already know about working with this student group (e.g., the CCCC position statement on working with Veteran Students).
In addition to explaining the SIG process to instructors, the second and third goals of this general information session were vital to its mission. The institution where the SIG took place has its own policies for student veterans (as other institutions surely do), and often, these policies can be complex and easy to misinterpret. For example, the institution maintains a policy that if active-duty service persons are deployed during or after the twelfth week of the term, then they should receive a final grade equivalent to what they had achieved up to the time of their departure unless there is a course-critical component that must be completed after the twelfth week. Locally, many active-duty service members and instructors missed the detail about course-critical components, and in a portfolio-based writing course, the portfolios qualified as a course-critical component. It was important for instructors to understand the complexity of policies like this one, so that they provided students with accurate interpretations
192 Articulating Veteran-Friendly | Sura and wise counsel about proceeding. At this institution, these active- duty service persons sometimes requested and received Incomplete grades for the term so that they could fulfill their military obligations without failing the course, withdrawing, or starting the course over again. If an institution implementing this model did not have specific policies for working with student veterans and active-duty service members, the SIG could provide an opportunity to articulate and clarify appropriate course or program policies for things like activation or drills (Bauman).
Finally, this information session presented a summary of existing arguments about working with student veterans. These arguments were not framed as “answers,” per se, but rather as premises that instructors could practice and test. For example, the session included the idea that student veterans will be loathe to visit a writing center, because a writing tutor is outside the “chain of command” (Valentino 174). Any WPA or TE coordinating a session like this can likely anticipate a member of the group immediately offering the exception: “I had a student veteran in my class last year who always went to the writing center.” While anecdotal evidence exists to enervate almost any generalization, the important thing for the SIG was to identify the tension between formal and experiential knowledge to create a site of inquiry, analysis, and idea formation. This rhetoric permeated the micro-curriculum because these tensions played a vital role in fostering a learning paradigm within the SIG. In the previous example, the desired outcome was not a definitive answer about whether or not veterans visit writing centers. Instead, the desired outcome was instructors’ (that is, everyone in the room) heightened sensitivity to the role writing centers may or may not play in their student veterans’ education. In this way, the rhetoric of the SIG fostered a shared sense of power and need for collaboration. All participants were learners.
To build on the premises established in the initial session, the second focus in the micro-curriculum was a student-veteran roundtable, which extended power sharing to student veterans by providing them with a platform for telling their own stories. Keast describes a similar dialogue in his work on veteran-friendly writing courses; however, his takes place in the classroom between student veterans
193 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing and civilian students. The difference here was that student veterans met with instructors without the constraints of classroom dynamics. The student veterans were not enrolled in the instructors’ sections or even necessarily taking the course at the time of the panel. The objective of this time was to demonstrate reciprocity—a tenet of service learning and sponsorship—through dialogue. Instructors asked student veterans questions about their college experiences and learning styles. Student veterans described their experiences in the classroom and asked questions of the instructors. There were two general things that happened during this dialogue that are worth noting. First, the student-veteran testimony corroborated many of the premises from the initial information session. Second, instructors began to grapple with questions of how to best accommodate student veterans in their classes as well as accommodate their other students. In other words, they began to encounter some perceived dissonance between the two groups. For example, instructors heard a student veteran say that PowerPoint presentations carried great currency for disseminating information in the military and that the student veteran valued them highly. For the instructors, this was also a direct nudge toward a more lecture-based (i.e., instructional paradigm) classroom as opposed to the active-learning classrooms (i.e., learning paradigm) espoused by the writing program. These instructors began to grapple with whether or not to accept student veterans’ opinions whole cloth. They had to balance the “wants” of some students with a pedagogical approach that may, in the end, create some discomfort but also yield greater results. Again, the value here was not necessarily the resolution but the overt consideration of the issue and the discourse it created.
The third and fourth components of the micro-curriculum called for instructors to turn to current scholarship on student veterans and to each other. If these components are completed sequentially, this research activity moves instructors from face-to-face testimony to a literature review mode, an apt mode especially for graduate teachers.1 Through the texts, instructors continued to uncover ideas about working with student veterans—how they might differ from traditional students, what they have in common with other adult learners, what activities might engage them—based on questions or incongruences generated by their learning thus far. The reviews that the instructors wrote were less a critique of the research—
194 Articulating Veteran-Friendly | Sura though that mode of writing was near impossible to avoid—and more exploratory in which they examined their experiences in light of what the research suggested. They also brainstormed how they might apply the research to their own teaching. To foster community and dialogue within the group, the instructors shared these reviews with the WPA, as well as with each other in the fourth component of the micro-curriculum—an instructor roundtable. Therefore, the instructors were processing the information they gained, and they were sharing it through dialogue directly with other instructors. This provided a new context to analyze their formal and experiential knowledge and to connect their explorations and inquiries to those of others. As the SIG ages and grows, this component also presents an opportunity to invite back other instructors who have completed the micro-curriculum so that they can share their expertise and ongoing challenges.
The final component of the micro-curriculum is devoted to reflective writing. This portion of the curriculum is vital to the process for two specific reasons. First, by producing “reflection-on-action,” instructors create frames for the mess of information they encounter from their students, their reading, and their discussions (Schön 157). It is in this way that the writing becomes epistemic, producing knowledge about the topic that the instructor may continue to analyze and test. Second, the reflective writing provides another structure that supports a process of reflective practice that begins with the instructors’ initial training. By being prompted to write reflectively at various points in their time as instructors, faculty development programs can foster a culture of reflective practice (Bamberg 150). This culture is crucial in order to “raise the overall level of instructional effectiveness” (Bamberg 157). In other words, the learning paradigm approach espoused here has additional implications for general faculty development. It is valuable for supporting student veterans but may be adapted to address other faculty development needs.
Examining Effectiveness: The SIG’s Outcomes To date, there are sixteen instructors working their way through the SIG and its micro-curriculum. Five have completed the entire curriculum. While any effort to assess programs supporting student veterans will ultimately seek data on those students’ grades or
195 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing retention rates, it made sense to begin assessing the SIG model through instructor outcomes. To do so, I collected and analyzed the reflective writing of the five instructors who completed the micro-curriculum.2 Through the descriptive first-cycle coding of the instructors’ reflective writing, it became apparent that their reflections were not only describing their personal growth but simultaneously articulating what veteran friendly could and should mean in the context of the SIG and the writing program. As a result, second-cycle coding focused more explicitly on describing attitudes toward student veterans, pedagogy, and instructor efficacy. In other words, the instructors’ reflections helped assess the SIG’s application of a learning paradigm approach but also helped to further articulate what it means to provide veteran-friendly instruction.
One of the strongest themes to emerge from the instructor reflections was a greater awareness of student-veteran issues. Each of the reflections recounted new instructor insights and attitudes toward student veterans. For example, one instructor reported that it was “frustrating to hear from the student veterans that the VA was so unhelpful.” While abstract insights like these uncover the complexity of challenges facing student veterans, what is missing is an explicit connection to tangible outcomes like enforcement of classroom attendance policies when a student veteran must wait months on end for a specified and unchangeable appointment at a VA clinic. Nonetheless, this awareness did extend to considerations of how instructors do or do not identify student veterans in their courses. For example, another instructor recorded a need to be “mindful of and respectful toward my veteran students’ desires to either keep their veteran status concealed or to share it with me or the class.” This instructor attitude aligns with other research on student veterans suggesting that disclosure of status or experiences remain at the student veterans’ discretion instead of being prompted by the instructor. Finally, a third instructor conveyed that “to be a successful instructor one must be compassionate. Listening to the veterans share their experiences in and out of the classroom during our roundtable discussion only reaffirmed that to be my best instructor self—often the key is just to listen.” This reflection seems especially relevant to the SIG as a whole because of the ways in which it resonates with the uncoverage approach. It suggests that the listening, dialogue, and processing has itself made its way into the instructor’s attitude and
196 Articulating Veteran-Friendly | Sura pedagogy and that learning about student veterans is not complete but ongoing with each student veteran encountered.
Like the instructor who identified listening as a vital part of working with veteran students, other instructor reflections also provided insights related to pedagogy. That is, instructors reported having new ideas about effective teaching practices to use with student veterans. These practices ranged from assignment design, to responding to student veteran writing, to choosing materials for class. For example, in terms of assignment design, one instructor reports that “in future sections, I plan to offer projects with focused goals but that are broad enough for a student veteran to, if they choose, write about their experiences.” Here the identification of choice surfaces again, but this time it pertains to paper topics instead of status disclosure. The instructor refrains from requiring or removing writing about military experience and instead empowers the student to make his or her own decision. Other instructors grappling with questions of appropriate content reached conclusions or at least decisions about their goals for content. One instructor recommends “carefully choosing texts that do not entirely shut out conversations of potentially heavy topics such as war and the military but that do not endanger the mental or emotional wellbeing of my veteran students.” Likewise, another instructors sums up concerns about content by stating “course themes and assignments should be sensitive to political issues, war, and military service, never forcing students to write or share about their experiences, and avoiding polarizing or triggering discussions, visuals, or readings.” In both instances, some of the practices identified in other sources on working with student veterans are surfacing in the instructors’ attempts to make meaning of their experience. In this context, the provenance of the idea is less essential than the instructor’s ability to recognize and articulate its importance.
In addition to instructors’ increased awareness of issues student veterans face and their connections to the classroom, some instructors reported feeling greater efficacy as a result of their participation in the SIG. One instructor felt empowered to “correct any potentially detrimental situations” within the classroom, while another reconsidered “constructing syllabi and interacting with all students, not only veterans.” As much as anything, these feelings of
197 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing preparedness might be the most beneficial for instructors because they are making decisions about how to work with student veterans and students in general. Most salient was one instructor’s reflection on how the pieces fit together. The instructor wrote that
in each of these experiences, from the introduction to the… veteran-student writers project, to the roundtable discussions with veteran students themselves, I feel confident in my abilities to work with and instruct veteran students in my classroom and in accessing the larger community of [my school] for assistance if needed to help me assist my students.
For this instructor, the confidence derives from the experiential and formal knowledge gained through the SIG and extends through the classroom to the community. It seems that part of the new confidence simply comes from the fact that the instructor no longer feels isolated. The instructor knows there are others working to increase their understanding of student veterans and that there are resources available to help, connecting the classroom to the larger infrastructure. The instructor is able to keep learning without the pressure of “knowing it all.”
While awareness, pedagogy, and efficacy were the dominant themes in the instructor reflections, there were two others that—though not pervasive—make important contributions to articulating what “veteran friendly” can mean. One of these themes was the need for ongoing inquiry into working with student veterans. For example, the instructor that focused on listening also wrote “through my training I have learned that I need to learn more.” A second instructor commented “I hope to continue attending these discussions and to further my engagement with the community of teachers of student veterans.” Because the SIG model purports to emphasize uncoverage rather than coverage and adopts a learning paradigm approach to these conclusions, the notion that more remains to be learned is a welcome sight because it suggests that this approach can foster the desire and maybe even commitment to sustained inquiry. Nonetheless, the limited presence of this attitude in the instructor reflections, suggests only that it is possible and certainly does not happen automatically. To foster this attitude, the current articulation
198 Articulating Veteran-Friendly | Sura of the SIG may require more explicit connections to this outcome, as well as further investigation into methods that may foster greater recognition of this need.
The final theme that emerged from the instructor reflections related to infrastructure. What is deeply impressive about this reflection is its connection back to the concept of sponsorship—particularly how sponsors have the power to aid or hinder the sponsored (Brandt 166). This instructor reported gaining significant knowledge from the SIG, but the instructor also took issue with the idea of veteran-friendly courses at all, due to the limitations of the institution’s infrastructure. The instructor identified several problems that made the educational context far less than friendly for student veterans, including an inability to designate specific courses as veteran friendly in the campus registration system, the fact that student veterans often must register for courses before the veteran-friendly instructors receive their course assignments, and, as Keast also argues, the possible inference that if some sections are veteran-friendly others must be unfriendly to veterans. These are fair critiques of a system attempting to provide necessary consideration for student veterans while also grappling with the local constraints present in any context. And just as the most prevalent themes from the instructor reflections can contribute to articulations of what exactly is “veteran friendly,” this instructor’s insights can help point the way as well.
This instructor’s reflection provides a vital perspective on the limitations of the SIG and its potential impact within the local context. Due to constraints that seem beyond the control of an individual instructor (e.g., the student registration system and the timeliness of teaching assignments), this reflection suggests that the scope of the SIG is, simply, too small. The only solution the instructor envisions is for every course to be veteran friendly. At the same time, this instructor’s sobering assessment of the SIG further underscores the inherent value of an uncoverage approach to teacher education. The instructor’s participation in the SIG has literally uncovered challenges that the WPA and others must address in order to enhance the effort to provide veteran-friendly courses. A presentation focused only on delivering the information that instructors “need to know” about student veterans, may have completely overlooked the local,
199 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing contextual issues that undermine the goal. This approach uncovered them. Furthermore, these revelations support an understanding of providing veteran-friendly courses as an ongoing practical and rhetorical process rather than something an institution simply is or is not. As a result of these observations, the writing program can work to address these issues through action and advocacy. The program’s documentation of veteran-friendly courses carefully articulates what veteran friendly means in the local context and works to disabuse students of the notion that other courses are simply unfriendly to veterans. The documentation also lists the course numbers of instructors participating in the SIG so that student veterans can make more informed choices or seek opportunities to enroll in specific courses if they choose to. The writing program shares this information with the campus veterans’ office, student advising, and the student veterans’ Facebook group in order to disseminate the information as widely as possible. Finally, producing and sharing these efforts has generated increased visibility for student veterans throughout the institution, which has resulted in ever-greater opportunities to move closer to the overall goal of every course being veteran friendly in tangible and observable ways.
Conclusion Going forward, the themes that emerged from the instructor reflections—awareness, pedagogy, and efficacy, along with the desire for ongoing inquiry and critique of infrastructure, provide a useful framework for articulating what exactly “veteran friendly” can mean in the context of a faculty development program. Ideally, these insights will help WPAs and TEs form outcomes for faculty development focused on student veterans that can then be measured and assessed. In sum, these outcomes are as follows:
By the end of the Student Veteran SIG curriculum instructors should
• Feel greater confidence working with student veterans
• Demonstrate greater awareness of issues (benefits, financial, academic, cultural, and wellness) affecting student veterans
200 Articulating Veteran-Friendly | Sura
• Describe changes or adaptations in their teaching based on their SIG work
• Understand institutional policies and resources related to working with student veterans
• Identify a need for continued inquiry on working with and understanding student veterans
This list is certainly not exhaustive, but it provides a touchstone for advancement. Future research will bring even greater clarity to this list through corroborating or refuting these outcomes and perhaps even building a more robust list as other program contexts create their own SIGs.
With this list, this writing program has a shareable sketch of where the SIG’s micro-curriculum performed well (e.g., awareness and confidence) and where gains could be made (e.g., infrastructure). The program is also able to clearly and confidently articulate to multiple audiences what veteran friendly means in the context of West Virginia University. Amid the abundance of scholarly work discussing student veterans in higher education, this study helps WPAs and TEs answer the call to prepare instructors to work with student veterans. On a practical level, this model can benefit both participating instructors’, as well as programs’ overall efforts to define veteran friendly within specific locales, enabling both to engage more fully and purposefully in their sponsorship of student veterans.
201 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Notes
1. Though ideally completed sequentially, the SIG is flexible enough that instructors could begin their work with any of the first four components. The final reflection would still need to be completed last for obvious reasons.
2. This study received an IRB exemption (#1507745004).
202 Articulating Veteran-Friendly | Sura
Works Cited
Ackerman, Robert, David DiRamio, and Regina L. Garza Mitchell. “Transitions: Combat Veterans as College Students.” New Directions for Student Services 126 (2009): 5-14. Wiley-Blackwell. Web. 16 Jun. 2015. Aiken, Suzan, Emily J. Beard, David R.E. McClure, and Lee Nickoson. “An Introduction to the Work (and Play) of Writing Studies Research Methods Through Micro Study.” The CEA Forum (2013): 127-154. Print. Baechtold, Margaret, and Danielle M. De Sawal. “Meeting the Needs of Women Veterans.” New Directions for Student Services 126 (2009): 35-43. Wiley-Blackwell. Web. 16 Jun. 2015. Bamberg, Betty. “Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice: A Program for Continuing TA Preparation After the Practicum.” Preparing College Teachers of Writing: Histories, Theories, Programs, Practices. Ed. Betty P. Pytlik and Sarah Liggett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 147-158. Print. Bauman, Mark. “The Mobilization and Return of Undergraduate Students Serving in the National Guard and Reserves.” New Directions for Student Services 2009.126 (2009): 15-23. Wiley- Blackwell. Web. 23 Jun. 2015. Blalock, Glenn. “Faculty Development in English Studies: An Overview of Resources and a Suggested Sequence.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 8.3 (October 1, 2008): 555-586. CrossRef. Web. 2 Sep. 2014. Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication 49.2 (1998): 165-85. Print. Cleary, Michelle Navarre. “What WPAs Need to Know to Prepare New Teachers to Work with Adult Students.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 32.1 (2008): 113-28. Print. Dalton, Kelly Singleton. “From Combat to Composition: Meeting the Needs of Military Veterans Through Postsecondary Writing Pedagogy.” Thesis. Georgetown, University, 2010. Proquest. Web. 18 May 2015. De La Ysla, Linda S. “Faculty As First Responders: Willing but Unprepared.” in Doe and Langstraat. 95-116.
203 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Doe, Sue, and Lisa Langstraat. Generation Vet: Composition, Student- Veterans, and the Post 9/11 University. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2014. Print. Glasser, Irene, John T Powers, and William H. Zywiak. “Military Veterans at Universities.” Anthropology News 50.5 (2009): 33. Wiley Online Library. Web. 5 Jun. 2015. Keast, Darren. “A Class for Vets, Not by a Vet: Developing a Veteran-Friendly Composition Course at City College of San Francisco.” Composition Forum 28 (2013). Web. 10 Dec. 2013. Loring, Rosalind, and Edward Anderson. “The Considerations in Planning a College Prep Program for Veterans.” Adult Leadership 20.3 (1971): 100-102. Web. 26 May 2015. Mallory, Angie, and Doug Downs. “Uniform Meets Rhetoric: Excellence Through Interaction.” in Doe and Langstraat. 51-72. O’Herrin, Elizabeth. “Enhancing Veteran Success in Higher Education.” Peer Review 13.1 (2011): 15-18. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Jun. 2015. Reid, E. Shelley. “Uncoverage in Composition Pedagogy.” Composition Pedagogy 32.1 (2004): 15-34. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 May 2014. Schön, Donald A. Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1987. Print. “Student Veterans in the College Composition Classroom: Realizing Their Strengths and Assessing Their Needs.” Conference on College Composition and Communication. NCTE.org. Web. 29 May 2015. Valentino, Marilyn. “Serving Those Who Have Served: Preparing for Student Veterans in Our Writing Programs, Classes and Writing Centers.” Writing Program Administration 36.1 (2012): 164-178. Print.
204 Articulating Veteran-Friendly | Sura
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many instructors and student veterans who participated in this project as well as all of the thoughtful readers whose feedback consistently improved the manuscript. This work was also supported by a Riggle Fellowship for Faculty in the Humanities at West Virginia University.
205 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Thomas Sura is an Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Program at West Virginia University. His research focuses broadly on faculty and curriculum development related to the undergraduate writing program at West Virginia University. His current focus has led him to launch the West Virginia Green Zone (WVGZ) along with Howard Davidson, a former U.S. Army Sergeant. The WVGZ is a program to prepare faculty and staff for working effectively with student veterans that synthesizes academic research with student-veteran voices through a service- learning course.
206 Heart of the Enemy
Jenny Pacanowski The day you waved at me For the first time The convoy was Transformed Into a parade I lowered my weapon Waved back like a beauty queen In desert camo… A parade of freedom Of winning hearts and minds Of this liberated country My mission was clear I was present We had arrived To help To save To heal To love
We convoyed into your village With our green ambulance The leaders Presented you and the other children For US To poke and prod with our instruments Of medicine
207 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
I taught you about cough drops How not to swallow it Whole To take in the medicine first You nodded And I smiled I listened to your hearts The bounding and the slushing As blood pulsed through your veins My heart burst with purpose We lived another day Together Immersed in war
I left You stayed I was assigned To the road To convoys You went to begging Then to rock throwing We laughed when we saw you Flicking US The bird
Until … The explosion silenced us Your screams were deafening Or was it mine?
I scrambled around the crater The dust was blinding Until I saw the blood
Desert sucks up blood Quicker than water
I saw you! Running away With that cell phone That detonator In your little brown hand 208 Heart of the Enemy | Pacanowski
Die You Little Motherfucker You were no longer a child With a beating heart Sucking on cough drops YOU ARE A THREAT Running across your desert Of Sand that rakes my skin Much like your existence Rapes my idealism
Die you Little Motherfucker You have come into a world That hates you Wants to kill you You little terrorist We can’t tell the difference between insurgents and civilians You all look the same to us Different than US You are the enemy Die you little motherfucker
I see 2004 like a movie Reeling backward in my mind Drawing forth the Moving targets I mean…. Civilians I mean…. Children I mean…The Detonators
You are THE blurry in my pictures You are as indistinct as the shambles of concrete You call “home” How do I return home?
What if I said I didn’t know? I didn’t know how to stop the machine Not the convoy Not the war Not even myself
209 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
I reached out… But my weapon Separated us I wanted to pull you in Close But, All you could feel was Cold hard steel
What if I said I was sorry We ever occupied You I want to hold you Redefining Love unconditionally Giving you my blood After we had gutted You Your country Please help me Put away My gun My armor My hate And redefine my love For humanity Including you Please Let me come home Please Let us all come home From the war Inside US ALL
210 Heart of the Enemy | Pacanowski
Jenny Pacanowski is a poet/combat veteran/facilitator/public speaker/actor. She collaborates with Impact Theater, Poetic Theater Productions, Bedlam Outreach, The Military Resilience Project along with many other organizations. Most recently, Jenny has performed at the Lincoln Center Atrium, The New York Cultural and Ethical Society, Poetic License: Kicking down Doors, LaGuardia Community College Veteran Week, Aquila Theater@ GK arts center and many more. Her goal is to help veterans and civilians by healing the wounds of war and military culture through the arts. Jenny hopes by creating smoother reintegration programs; it will facilitate lowering the suicide, homelessness and addiction epidemics that plague our veterans.
211 Review: Sue Doe and Lisa Lanstraat (Eds.). Generation Vet: Composition, Student- Veterans, and Post- 9/11 University
Jeanne Law Bohannan, Kennesaw State ue Doe and Lisa Langstraat’s edited University collection of theory, practice, and Spersonal stories from both teachers and veteran students provides insights into how the field of composition serves and networks with increasing numbers of the specialized veteran-student population. The most significant contribution this collection makes lies in its consistently networked connections between students and instructors in compelling examples that include prose, poetry, and personal narratives. The essays all point to both challenges and successes in composition classrooms that serve veteran communities and veteran-students. They also connect back to Reflections’ generative mission of bringing teachers, students, and community partners to talk about public service-writing.
The editors present a comprehensive introduction that points readers to particular locations in the text for theory, pedagogy, and empirical studies. They organize the text into three parts: I- understanding veterans
212 Reviews as students; II- negotiating veterans’ stories for public audiences; and III- creating veteran-friendly writing praxis. This organization furthers the connections between theory and real-world challenges that instructors and veteran-students face as they navigate academic and public writing spaces.
The introduction succeeds in providing a road map for the pieces in the collection, but, given the precise discourse of the topics covered, as well as the sometimes jargon-y language that inevitably comes with discussions of specific communities, I would have liked to have had more explanation and definitions of the alphabet soup of abbreviations peppered throughout many chapters. Otherwise, the collection is accessible to both first-time and seasoned instructors.
Erin Hadlock and Sue Doe’s chapter, “Not Just Yes Sir, No Sir” offers readers a small case study of veteran-students at Colorado State University. The authors describe deeper understandings of the rhetorical abilities and limits of veteran-students and how such understandings are vital to composition instructors who want to engender agency and voice for this student population. The authors present excerpts of students’ perceptions of how to use agency and rhetorical genre from military experiences to create a bridge to academic writing. Through surveys, interviews, and document analysis with eleven veteran-students, the authors offer pedagogical recommendations on how to overcome challenges in veteran-students’ demonstrating agency. My primary critique of this chapter is that it demonstrates the need to better explain the terms with which first- time or non-military readers may not be familiar. Otherwise, it offers findings that will be of interest to readers seeking to understand veteran-students’ agency and how to connect that agency to academic writing in public spaces.
Linda De La Ysla’s “Faculty as First Responders” is a gripping personal account of her role in an incident that occurred at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), where a student- veteran wrote of his “addition to killing” stemming from his active duty experiences in Iraq. Although De La Ysla’s narrative is compelling, it is nonetheless an emotionally difficult read. She weaves in her practice of Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” theory
213 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing and briefly describes the narrative essay assignment that started the chain of events that led to her student being suspended from campus. The bulk of the essay, however, is a re-telling of the nationally covered events resulting from the student’s disturbing essay. The story has a somewhat productive ending, though, as faculty and administration at CCBC created a college-funded support network for veteran- students, including psychological counseling and a “veterans success committee.” This narrative is a must-read for instructors, as it presents the complexities of doing public writing and how students perceive it. De La Ysla’s piece connects strongly with Reflections’ scope in providing a thought-provoking example of how messy public writing can sometimes be. It also offers a solutions-based community connection that teachers and students alike can identify with. De La Ysla gives recommendations for creating community partnerships on campuses to address veteran-students specific needs. Her story also provides a strong link to the realities of negotiating public rhetorics with student-writers.
Section II is arguably the strongest and most inspirational set of essays in this collection. Authors discuss the materiality of writing and how veteran-students operate within its various formal and informal, physical and digital spaces. Eileen Schell and Ivy Kleinbart describe in a side-by-side narrative the genesis of the Syracuse Veterans’ Writing Group and how they combined their civilian expertise of writing instructor (Eileen) with creative writer (Ivy) to create and co-lead a writing group that helped veteran-students share their personal and professional stories in a public space. Like other essays in this section, the authors draw on the success of Maxine Hong Kingston’s community writing groups for motivation. They further use Kingston’s idea of writing as a process to encourage veteran- students to write their stories as a means of making public their personal struggles of re-integration into civilian culture. Several personal narratives from group participants highlight this chapter, which adds richness to the community service themes in the essay.
In chapter 8, Ashly Bender explores how active-duty military writers use multimodal genres such as videos, blogs, and social media sites to connect with family, friends, and even global audiences. She describes “dub videos,” which have become popular ways for active-military
214 Reviews writers to communicate across geographic and cultural boundaries. She then discusses practical ways that composition instructors can connect this type of public, cooperative communication with collaborative writing. Bender argues that these public multimodal compositions not only serve the purpose of linking with loved ones but also serve as sites for active-duty writers to divest issues of trauma that they experience on the battlefield. She concludes that the circulation of multimodal texts on social media, their connections to audiences and feedback, and their partiality for re-mixing genre opportunities, makes social media composing a viable entry point to open up spaces for multimodal writing in composition classrooms and for meeting veteran-students’ expectations of what and how they will write in academic genres. Her conclusions are well-received, but what I found most interesting was how the above considerations could help integrate returning veteran-students into communities of their school peers outside of military service. This essay will be of specific interest to Reflections readers who want to integrate civic writing into their curricula.
In Section III of this collection, Ann Shivers-McNair provides a pilot study in basic writing. Her findings show interesting trends of specific interest for teachers who develop extended composition courses. She describes a pilot learning community for veteran-students at a mid- sized regional university in the Deep South with a strong ROTC, reserves, and veteran presence. For the study, she partnered with a former student and developed a cohort of veteran-students in an expanded composition course modeled after Arizona State’s Stretch Program. The essay details recruitment strategies, acknowledged study limitations, participant demographics, and survey methodology. I especially appreciate how in-depth Shivers-McNair narrated her involvement with the Veterans Affairs (VA) office on her campus and how she worked with former veteran-students to assess the cohort’s experiences. Her vivid reflections on the study, its future possibilities, and the attitudes of her colleagues make this piece a must-read for both part-time and full-time instructors seeking campus community involvement in research with student populations.
Bonnie Selting then offers an examination of service-learning strategies for veteran-students in chapter 11. She draws primarily on
215 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing empirical research studies conducted with veteran-writers to make a case for composition courses themed specifically on service-learning to meet the expectations of veteran-students. She connects service- learning with learner-centered teaching, which will be of special interest to Reflections’ readers. She then uses research written in the field of adult-learning to connect the impetus for service-learning to returning military students. I appreciated the explicit connections Selting draws between service-learning and adult-learning, Her pedagogical conclusions and framed student examples clearly show how these two practices together impact the expectations of veteran- students.
Doe and Langstratt close out the collection with a reflective, compelling case study from Corinne Hinton that focuses on veteran- students’ perceptions on composition courses and connections to their previous learning in military discursive spaces. Through interviews with twelve former marines, Hinton gleans their attitudes towards teaching and learning in composition courses across several four- year colleges in multiple regions of the U.S. The primary goal of Hinton’s study was to expand understandings of the perceptions of these enlisted veteran-students towards their educational experiences and their own rhetorical behaviors as they navigated these academic spaces. She includes a nod that describes the intersections of WAC and writing center collaborations between peer tutors and veteran- students as part of her interview questions on writing process and experiences. Hinton’s findings include reflections of participants regarding community, feedback, and limitations. Of particular interest is her finding that veteran-students actively solicit feedback from their peers, both veteran and civilian, which feeds into their embodiment of teamwork as vital to success in academics as well as on the battlefield. Participants unanimously echoed their Corps training in terms of teamwork, when they reported that their attitudes in class were those of responsibility for their fellow learners and their desires to help make them stronger in their writing. As the daughter of a marine reservist, I felt an intrinsic recognition for the authenticity of Hinton’s study methodology and results. The study provides a valid snapshot of how veteran-students interpret classroom interactions and collaborative learning. Findings also illuminate possibilities for writing center practices, including how to make writing center tutoring appeal to veteran-students’ prior learning. Her inclusive
216 Reviews narrative wraps up a collection that provides much-needed insights into how instructors approach pedagogies for the surging, specialized population of veteran-students.
Overall, the essays in Generation Vet provide Reflections readers with interesting and diverse accounts of how teachers and students do the work of public writing in different contexts. The collection offers theoretical arguments as well as practical “how-to” tips that are readable and do-able for seasoned as well as emerging teacher- scholars who are interested in public service-writing. This collection serves the diverse fields of public composition in the same vein as veteran-students serve our country.
217 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars.
218 Review Essay: Paula Caplan. When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans David Chrisinger. See Me For Who I Am: Student Veterans’ Stories of War and Coming Home
Catherine St. Pierre, The Ohio State eterans are cast into two roles in University American public discourse: Hero V(Hawrot Weigel and Detweiler Miller) and Threat (also called Rambo (Schell & Kleinbart, Valentino); Ticking Time Bomb (Hawrot Weigel and Detweiler Miller, Wood); and Victim (Katopes) among others). Only half of one percent of Americans serve on active duty, so the gap between military and civilians is wide. In their books, Paula Caplan and David Chrisinger disrupt and nuance rhetorical constructions of veterans through radical reframing of PTSD and trauma.
On first look, Caplan, a Harvard psychologist and the student veterans at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, who Chrisinger highlights, seem to have relatively little in common; the authors belong to different generations and intellectual traditions. Despite their differences, these books enrich one another. When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans and See Me For Who I Am: Student Veterans’ Stories of War and Coming Home both challenge readers,
219 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing disrupt the limiting narratives available to veterans, and replace them with fuller stories. Caplan encourages people to listen to veterans’ stories, and the twenty student veteran essayists in Chrisinger’s text give citizens a way to hear first-person stories about military service, transition, and reintegration into American society. This student writing may be particularly compelling for teachers wondering who student veterans are or for community learning contexts.
Paula Caplan asks ‘what is a sane reaction to war?’ and cautions: “We need to think long and hard about where to draw the line between a normal, understandable response to war and one that is otherwise” (Caplan 21). Pathologizing and labelling intense reactions to war mental illness (as in the case of PTSD) allows civilians to distance themselves from war and to deflect responsibility to trained professionals. She argues that ordinary citizens can help veterans by listening and engaging with their stories and advocates for compassionate engagement. She provides suggestions for ways to listen with respect.
Caplan claims that listening can communicate respect, belonging, and healing compassion. Each person tells their own life story, to themselves and others, and sharing the story increases a sense of value and being seen. Caplan argues that non-therapists can help veterans by listening without judging, advising, or rushing the speaker.
Caplan explores problems veterans face. Instead of the tragic but familiar litany of homelessness, addiction, and unemployment, Caplan discusses eight common consequences of war: trauma, grief and sadness, fear and anxiety, guilt and shame, rage, conflicts of values and crises of meaning, betrayal and mistrust, and isolation, alienation and numbing. Those consequences resonate within the pages of See Me For Who I Am. Given Caplan’s focus on responses to trauma and war, she does not explicitly discuss benefits and strengths resulting from military service. In addition to trauma, I show that the student veteran authors testify to the value of their maturity, mindfulness, resilience, teamwork, and altruism, among other traits.
220 Reviews
Trauma Caplan defines trauma as something unbearable, which varies based on factors including personal history, coping strategies, the nature of the event(s), expectations and resources available to people in the environment (35). Some sources of trauma associated with the military are witnessing or causing death and destruction, losing faith in the government that committed to the war, uncovering lies or deception, friendly fire, learning that unnecessary risks were taken, and sexual harassment and assault (Caplan 35-40).
Travis Jochimsen writes about “Sharing the Cost of War.” His uncle survived Vietnam and does not speak about his experiences there. Jochimsen respects his uncle but chose to tell his story to an artist who created art based on his story. Jochimsen concludes:
I saw firsthand what ‘bottling it up’ can do to a person. …. Maybe that old stigma that tells a man he can’t talk about his feelings is gone in today’s culture—maybe it’s not. I believe that if sharing your experiences can somehow help you move past the costs of going to war for your country, you should do it (82-3).
This praise of storytelling illustrates the philosophy linking Caplan and Chrisinger—if telling veterans’ story can help, then we should listen. However, chosen silences should also be respected.1
Grief and Sadness Caplan discusses grief for fallen comrades, which is more developed in the section on guilt. She also acknowledges that home often fails to live up to fantasies created during deployments. Disillusionment with home occurs in at least four narratives. Three authors claim that they weren’t fully home when they returned to the US from deployment (Makuski, Pozolinski, Ruesh). Cody Makuski reveals “halfway through the deployment, I wanted nothing more than to be at home, safe and sound in my barracks room with a case of beer and a relaxing song on the stereo … But when I got home, I really wasn’t ‘home’” (127).
1 Roger Thompson wrote about respecting veterans’ choices to be silent in “Recognizing Silence: Composition, Writing, and the Ethical Space for War”
221 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Matt Fortun experienced sharp homesickness during his service and deployment, which took him far away from Wisconsin. Each homecoming was a little bit less enthusiastic. He tries to gloss over his hurt, but wonders: “Although I never saw any combat during my deployment, how could my friends and family have been so sure I would return home at all?” (Fortun 98). Fortun’s question reveals the awareness of danger and anxiety he experiences about deploying to a war zone.
Fear and Anxiety Caplan identifies disagreements with people who hold your life in their hands as a source of anxiety. A few of the student veteran authors allude to conflict with specific individuals but overall the authors highlight comrades to praise them. Caplan also discusses the hypermasculine culture of the military as a source of anxiety. Caplan wrote her book before the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and she included fear of discrimination as a particular anxiety for LGBT veterans. None of the authors disclose LGBT identity in their essays, but several of the young men speak about military service as a way of testing and proving their manhood. Zachary Ruesch reflects: “a part of me wanted to be tested by the experience of violence in combat” (142). After homecoming, Ruesch experienced anxiety. Despite reluctance to appear weak, he approached professors when he experienced difficulties and found that they “helped me to improvise, adapt, and overcome” (147). I hope many students follow Ruesch’s example to communicate with faculty and join peer communities to meet their learning needs.
Guilt and Shame Caplan explains the presence of survivor guilt, the feeling that something is wrong because others died and the survivor lived. Chase Vuchetich recounts survivor guilt in a haunting essay. His battalion suffered heavy casualties in Sangin, Afghanistan. The question of why Vuchetich survived haunted him; he abused alcohol for a time, but reports that his drinking is under control. Substance abuse as a coping mechanism is a common thread for those who survived trauma (including Coward and Ruesch). There are no easy answers for grief and guilt after death and injury, but refusing to listen to
222 Reviews these stories or invalidating a veterans’ feelings with words like “you shouldn’t feel guilty” shuts down the conversation and possibility of understanding. When confidences are misunderstood or sacrifices are denigrated, some veterans report flares of anger.
Rage Caplan argues: “Rage is a common feeling for veterans—rage about their own helplessness or powerlessness to have made things turn out better, rage about lies they were told … rage about feeling disconnected from loved ones when they come home, rage at how things had changed” (Caplan 48). However, she categorizes rage as a secondary emotion, which defends the psyche from intolerable emotions like fear, shame, guilt, helplessness or hopelessness (49). Rage is the least emphasized by the student veteran authors. But Aaron Lewis, who spoke about living with terror and vigilance, acknowledges anger and its connection to other emotions: “When veterans come home from war, though, they may fear what all the anger, violence, and danger have done to them. I know I do” (149).
Conflicts of Values and Crises of Meaning2 Conflicts of values arise often from situations when the enemy looks like civilians, and the veteran is plagued by ethical choices they make or by situations that compromise their values. Yvette M. Pino, one of two female contributors, recounts how her journey from ignorance to understanding about Iraq and her empathy for the people in Iraq who lost their homes, worked for low wages, persevered despite corruption, endured frequent raids, and hope to give their children better lives. Pino’s perspective is unique for this collection. She earned a BFA and founded the Veteran Print Project, an organization that pairs artists and veterans; veterans tell their stories and artists creatively interpret the stories. This listening and sharing answers Caplan’s calls to listen to veterans and make their stories more widely known in a different medium.
2 For a fuller exploration of dimensions of a crisis of meaning, readers might consult Beyond Duty: Life on the Frontline in Iraq by Shannon Meehan and Roger Thompson, a memoir about a decision Meehan made that led to civilian deaths and the psychological effects of the tragedy.
223 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Betrayal and Mistrust Feeling that the government, recruiter, or leaders have lied or misled a veteran, can lead to a sense of betrayal and mistrust. Kyle Nowak broadened my tacit understanding of the dangers of war by historicizing how deadly disease has been when compared to direct combat fatalities. Nowak’s essay recounts his experience of Gulf War Syndrome; he lost 85 pounds in 8 weeks and experiences pain and exhaustion. Nowak felt that he was unjustly treated like a “malingerer,” although he always gave his best to the Army. The sense of betrayal is palpable: “The day I was discharged, I threw all my uniforms, medals, awards and anything military-related in a dumpster on the base. … I do not think I will ever be a fan of the military again” (112). Nowak explains that he wrote his essay because he needed to tell his story and wanted to raise awareness about severe illnesses affecting veterans.
Isolation, Alienation, and Numbing Caplan explains that sometimes veterans find their experiences unspeakable. They try to protect loved ones with silence, which can lead to a sense that they are separate and impossible to understand. Tyler Pozolinski’s sparse assonance opens: “Alone. Alienated. Abandoned” (102). He describes recurring nightmares and the perpetual question “Who have I become?” (103).
Sara Poquette, a female veteran, puts gender on the table with “Earning a Seat at the Table.” Her service has been discounted and devalued. When she experienced numbness, hypervigilance, and panic attacks after mortar attacks and an IED, she asked a health care provider if she might have PTSD, but the woman laughed and told Poquette only men who saw combat have PTSD. The health care provider did not listen or respect Poquette’s honesty and experience because it broke her expectations; I hope those who read Caplan’s and Chrisinger’s books are better listeners. Poquette includes her story to educate readers about women’s contributions and presence in the armed forces. Poquette’s essay is one of two by female veterans. The inclusion of additional female student veterans would enhance this collection.3 3 Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq is a good collection of writing by female military-affiliated writers, but the contributors do not share much about the experiences of female student veterans. 224 Reviews
Strengths Geoffrey Norfleet’s essay “See Me For Who I Am” gave the book its title; he challenges and invites readers to release biases to know him. Norfleet shares that most civilians who learn of his military service want to know if he killed anyone; he wants them to ask anything except that “narrow-minded and ignorant” question (37). The other common civilian response to veterans is “thank you for your service.” This phrase has become a platitude.4 Leon Valliere and Zach Trzinski each share experiences with that exchange. Valliere’s story about traveling in uniform for Independence Day shows absurdities of being venerated as a hero, and Trzinski educates readers about some of the different jobs service members do; he wants people to meet individual veterans and thank them for the right reasons.
If I were planning a service learning course or community writing group for veterans, I would share these articles with facilitators, because they break the habit of expecting to find pain or trauma in veterans’ stories and remind us of the variety of experiences student veterans possess.
Other essays in Chrisinger’s collection illuminate positive facets of veterans’ experiences. Ryan Callahan celebrates the maturity and perspective he developed from a decade in the Army. Sean Casey praises his mentors, who helped him grow into a leader. John Elbert chronicles the history of veterans’ transitions to civilian life over the last hundred years and suggests that resilience can be developed and learned. Maturity, leadership, resilience—student veterans possess and develop these traits and more.
Josh Thunder, Ross Petersen, and Brett Foley talk about rituals and altruism that might change how we think about veterans. Thunder shares the rituals he has crafted for practicing mindfulness, which bring him peace. Petersen explains how he became a bone marrow donor and saved a life. He concludes “I bet my story probably isn’t what you’d expect to hear from a veteran” (63). That surprise exposes how narrowly veterans’ stories are constructed.
4 Elizabeth Samet’s op-ed about “Thank you for your service” is worth reading.
225 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Finally, Foley recounts running a 50 mile ultramarathon in 11 hours with Chrisinger to raise money for a nonprofit “The Mission Continues” that supports veteran transitions to civilian life. Foley’s account of suffering with a friend for a good cause, physical and mental exertion in adverse conditions, support from family and friends, persistence on a long and challenging journey and ultimately savoring victory serves as an apt metaphor for veterans’ experiences in transitioning back to civilian life. The road can be long and hard, but companions like teachers, friends, and mentors can help reach goals that seem otherwise impossible. With guides like Caplan, Chrisinger, and the student veteran authors, we are ready to travel away from the limitations of the hero/threat binary.
Caplan and Chrisinger’s reframing of veterans’ experiences will interest people who work with public rhetoric and arguments of definition. The books are a valuable resource forReflections readers who are developing service learning projects and courses around veterans’ writing or oral history. The books serve as resources to scaffold discussions of the ethical and political implications of work with students, veterans, facilitators, and community stakeholders. Their books are both thought provoking and accessible. I hope that Caplan and Chrisinger succeed in calling more Americans to listen to veterans.
226 Reviews
Works Cited
Bowden, Lisa, and Shannon Cain, editors. Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq. 1st ed., Kore Press, 2009. Caplan, Paula. When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans. MIT Press, 2011. Chrisinger, David, editor. See Me for Who I Am: Student Veterans’ Stories of War and Coming Home. Hudson Whitman / Excelsior College Press, 2016. Katopes, Peter. “Veterans Returning To College Aren’t Victims, They’re Assets.” Community College Week, vol. 21, no. 15, 2009. Open WorldCat, http://proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/ login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true &db=tfh&AN=37199802&site=ehost-live. Meehan, Shannon, and Roger Thompson. Beyond Duty: Life on the Frontline in Iraq. Polity, 2011. Pino, Yvette M., and Veteran Print Project. “Veteran Print Project.” Veteran Print Project, 2015, http://veteranprintproject.com/. Samet, Elizabeth. “On War, Guilt and ‘Thank You for Your Service’: Elizabeth Samet.” Bloomberg, http://www.bloomberg.com/ news/2011-08-02/war-guilt-and-thank-you-for-your-service- commentary-by-elizabeth-samet.html. Accessed 24 Mar. 2012. Schell, Eileen E., and Ivy Kleinbart. “‘I Have to Speak Out’: Writing with Veterans in a Community Writing Group.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University, edited by Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat, Utah State University Press, 2014, pp. 119–139. CrossRef, http://www.upcolorado.com/ book/9418. Thompson, Roger. “Recognizing Silence: Composition, Writing, and the Ethical Space for War.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University, edited by Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat, Utah State University Press, 2014, pp. 199–216. CrossRef, http://www.upcolorado.com/book/9418. Valentino, Marilyn J. “Serving Those Who Have Served: Preparing for Student Veterans in Our Writing Programs, Classes, and Writing Centers.” WPA, vol. 36, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2012, pp. 164–178. Weigel, Bekah Hawrot, and Lisa Detweiler Miller. “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and the Returning Veteran: The Rhetorical and
227 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Narrative Challenges.” Open Words: Access and English Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 29–37. Wood, Tara. “Signature Wounds: Marking and Medicalizing Post- 9/11 Veterans.” Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University, edited by Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat, Utah State University Press, 2014, pp. 156–173. CrossRef, http://www.upcolorado.com/book/9418.
228 Reviews
Catherine St Pierre is completing her PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies at the Ohio State University. Her research interests include the experiences of military and veteran students, transfer of learning, literacy narratives, and writing pedagogy.
229 Review: Lovella Calica and Kevin Basl (Eds). Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing & Artwork By Veterans
Aleashia Walton . arrior Writers: A Collection of Valentin, Writing & Artwork By Veterans University of Cincinnati Woffers a voice for soldiers speaking their truths and a rare glimpse inside their hearts and minds for the civilians who remain homeside, creating an open channel to the lesser known, (and rarely discussed), personal details of warfare through poetry, creative nonfiction, and photography. Editors Lovella Calica and Kevin Basl are helping warrior writers conquer the divide between the public sphere and veteran experience, (from Vietnam to Afghanistan), one line at a time.
The concept of warrior poetry isn’t a new one. War has long inspired prose. Since the Iliad, one of the oldest poems in the Western world, the voices of soldiers have led battles both on the field of warfare and on the rocky terrain of creative writing and poetry. What makes this collection different? The works included in Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing & Artwork By Veterans were written by veterans working through their experiences in a
230 Reviews workshop led by a non-federally funded veteran support group called ‘Warrior Writers’.
Photographer Greg Broseus poignantly summarizes his collection titled, ‘Re-Deployment,’ as well as the entire anthology, by stating: “I believe there is a barrier between soldiers and the civilian population that leads to misunderstandings and hinders the ability for civilians and veterans to relate their trauma to one another. My work serves as a catalyst to bridge that gap and create a dialogue of understanding” (194). On the opposite page, Broseus includes a photograph of an anguished American soldier with the barrel of a handgun in his mouth, bullets scattered on the table before him.
Within this anthology’s attempt at creating a dialogue between veteran and the civilian population, some of the soldier’s accounts are inspiring, while others are more far more despairing.
In Elaine Little’s creative nonfiction piece, ‘Kabul Dolls,’ she describes her experience in Afghanistan when she sponsored a man who sold dolls handmade by Afghan women who had little to no other means of supporting themselves. The author describes her impression of Afghan women in burqas, “...it wasn’t just the garb that seemed restrictive; everything a woman did seemed to be circumscribed” (60). This included their ability to obtain gainful employment after their husbands died, leaving them with nothing. Little shares the story of how she helped the man selling the beautiful dolls by assisting him in getting a vendor’s license in Bagram (the base she was stationed on). The inspiring tale gives the reader a peek into Afghan life and how American soldiers stationed there interacted with them (and their culture).
In stark contrast, Alexander Feeno’s free-verse letter poem, ‘Sorry For Not Being Sorry,” tells a darker, more haunting tale, in which the author apologizes for not being sorry that he kicked a begging child in the chest (an unnamed child, who worked with other children to block the door of the Feeno’s vehicle, whom he can’t forget). He asks for the child’s forgiveness, “I was an angry young man with a gun strapped to my hip. The weight of it was like a hot burning coal, stuck deep in my pocket… It burned me. In turn, I burned you… I
231 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing hope you can forgive me. Not just for my sake, but for your own… In this life, what we carry is what we give” (113).
Feeno’s strength lies in his stark openness while facing an action that many would work to cover up. As he reimagines what he thought had occurred, along with what likely happened, Feeno acknowledges his mistake and reaches out to the child he injured to apologize, yet can’t feel entirely sorry for what he did because he saw the child as his enemy at the time. Taking a deeper look at the work, the reader can see that this poem likely represents a transition for the soldier, who is still working to unpack his wartime actions, as well as the events that took place during his time served in the military.
One of the book’s strong suits is that it offers up such honesty. It focuses on the veteran experience without judgement, both in form and topic. This collection includes well-polished gems right alongside of rough hewn fragments from budding writers and artists, giving it the sense of a genuine dialogue.
As a criticism, the flow of the anthology seems too staggered and slightly disorganized. While the editors seemingly make an attempt at starting with wartime activity as it’s experienced from the beginning of a soldier’s career, then wrapping up with re-deployment and PTSD experiences, it isn’t sectioned out well enough for the reader to see clearly.
Overall, this collection is best enjoyed piece by piece. Readers might find that the trauma described by some authors is difficult to take in. And of course, that’s the point of it. The beauty in this collection is that it’s about surviving and turning pain into poetry. It’s about opening doors of communication that were once closed. And although some of the works are utterly heart wrenching, the reader can’t help but be pulled back in. Not just but the powerful photos and imagery presented within the collection, but also by the proverbial olive branch it extends, from its poet warriors to civilian readers.
In order for anthologies such as this one to be truly successful, it’s important to remember that creating a point of dialogue for veterans
232 Reviews and civilians to share experiences is not a silver bullet - but a process. In Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition, Paula Mathieu points out:
In order to move from the category of possibility to reality… one must see utopia not as an abstraction or an idealized blueprint but as a continually open vision toward which one keeps working (18).
Using rhetoric within veteran support communities as a bright burning torch of hope with which we can empower members, is not the result of one quick action or program. Such flames begin with a spark but require time to grow strong and burn bright. This is an active process that carries an investment of time. Editors Calica and Basl demonstrate that they are indeed nurturing the torch.
233 Reflections | Volume 16.2, Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
Aleashia Walton Valentin is a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati, with a Master’s Degree in Composition and Rhetoric and a Bachelor’s Degree in journalism from Northern Kentucky University. Her teaching interests include creative writing, rhetoric, composition, and business communications.
234 To request your complimentary review copy, please visit: macmillanlearning.com/reflectionswinter2016
Writing Communities A Text with Readings First Edition
STEPHEN PARKS Syracuse University
December 2016 (©2017) Paper | 400 pages ISBN 978-1-4576-6742-8
Writing Communities is an exciting new text and reader for introductory composition from Bedford/St. Martin’s that connects students to neighborhoods and writing courses to communities. The text promotes involvement in and advocacy of social issues such as education, housing, and cultural justice, and assignments provide students with opportunities to put concepts into practice, such as setting up community writing groups, hosting events, and producing publications. A rich variety of readings ranging from personal narratives to educational scholarship help show students the myriad ways in which writing makes things happen in the world.
The skills students learn from Writing Communities will prepare them for any collaborative work they may take on—in any community they may be a part of—in college and beyond.
For more information or to request your review copy, visit www.macmillanlearning.com/reflectionswinter2016 or contact your local Macmillan Learning representative.
www.macmillanlearning.com
Advertisement Purchases Reflections | Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning
Reflections publishes a lively collection of scholarship, essays, poems, interviews and reviews in a forum that brings together emerging scholars and leaders in the fields of community-based writing and public rhetorics. Authors published in Reflections include • Jonathan Alexander • Isabel Baca • Paul Feigenbaum • Lauren Goldstein • Eli Goldblatt • David Green • Veronica House • Tobi Jacobi • Julie Jung • Vani Kannan • Paula Mathieu • Steve Parks • Octavio Pimentel • Amy Taggart
Specifications for Advertisement: Designed ads are to be placed in high-resolution (more than 300 pixels per inch) JPEG files. The trim size is 6X9 with a small margin. PDFs and TIFF files are also acceptable. Ads should be converted to grayscale. Ad copy that needs to be designed can be sent as a word document. Deadline to submit Advertisement to [email protected] - February 17, 2017.
Full Page Advertisement for Spring 2017 Issue - $150.00 Half Page Advertisement for Spring 2017 Issue - $75.00
Please make checks payable to: Reflections/NCCP c/o Steve Parks, The Writing Program, Syracuse University, 235 HB Crouse, Syracuse, NY 13224
Visa or Mastercard Accepted.
Name ______
Institutional Affiliation ______
Preferred Mailing Address ______
City, State, Zip ______
E-mail address ______Phone Number ______
Visa or Mastercard # ______
Expiration ______
Billing address for credit card, if different from above:
______
______
Signature ______
237
Subscription Form Reflections | Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning
Reflections publishes a lively collection of scholarship, essays, poems, interviews and reviews in a forum that brings together emerging scholars and leaders in the fields of community-based writing and public rhetorics. Authors published in Reflections include • Jonathan Alexander • Isabel Baca • Paul Feigenbaum • Lauren Goldstein • Eli Goldblatt • David Green • Veronica House • Tobi Jacobi • Julie Jung • Vani Kannan • Paula Mathieu • Steve Parks • Octavio Pimentel • Amy Taggart
Subscriptions
______Individuals: $20.00 for one year, $45.00 for three years
______Institutions: $50.00 for one year, $100.00 for three years
Is your institution a subscriber to Reflections? Please find out by going to http://reflectionsjournal.net/subscribe/institutional- support/
Subscribe online by going to http://reflectionsjournal.net/subscribe/ or please make checks payable to Reflections/NCCP c/o Steve Parks, The Writing Program, Syracuse University 235 HB Crouse, Syracuse, NY 13224
Name ______
Institutional Affiliation ______
Preferred Mailing Address ______
City, State, Zip ______