Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure

Part 2: Student-Centered Teaching

Part 2 STUDENT-CENTERED TEACHING 27460 part 02.indd 71 27460 part 02.indd 71 10/2/07 2:06:11 PM 10/2/07 2:06:11 PM 27460 part 02.indd 72 27460 part 02.indd 72 10/2/07 2:06:11 PM 10/2/07 2:06:11 PM 73 If, as Patty suggests, cutting is highly contagious and likely to “infect” others who come into contact with it, how can teachers prevent students from becoming at risk when they read essays and stories about selfmutilation ? And how can teachers prevent students from becoming at risk when they write about cutting? Should they be permitted to write about it? What are the educational and psychological benefits of allowing—or encouraging—college students to read stories about cutting and to write about their own experiences? Are college students susceptible to the same contagion that threatens high school students, and, if so, how should teachers address this problem? These are some of the questions I explore in the next chapters. Before doing so, I should describe my experience with the “pedagogy of self-disclosure.” As Patty states, the reader-response diaries gave her and her classmates a “safe haven” so that they could write about experiences they could “never say aloud—to anyone.” To understand how she and her classmates could write safely about cutting and related topics, I need to summarize briefly how I became interested in “risky writing,” “risky reading,” and, by implication, “risky teaching.” I have been using reader-response diaries in my literature-andpsychoanalysis courses since the middle 1970s. Diaries to an English Professor, published in 1994, is based on the diary entries that students wrote over a period of several years. The diaries are both private and public : private in that I am the only person who reads and comments on them, public in that I read aloud three or four entries each week before returning them to the diarists. I always read the diaries anonymously, and there is no discussion of them. Students draw their own conclusions about 27460 part 02.indd 73 27460 part 02.indd 73 10/2/07 2:06:11 PM 10/2/07 2:06:11 PM 74 PART 2 the entries they hear me read. In effect, the students speak through me in their diary entries. Students who do not want me to read aloud their diaries write the word “no” at the top of their entry. Each semester, several students do not want their diaries read aloud during the beginning of the term, but only one or two deny me permission by the end of the semester, when trust has been established. Over the years, thousands of my literature students have written tens of thousands of reader-response diaries. Students tell me, in both signed and unsigned evaluations written at the end of the course, that they enjoyed this aspect of the course more than any other. Since they write on topics of great personal importance to them, the diaries are often better written than their formal, graded essays. I am careful not to “psychoanalyze” my students when reading their diaries. I limit my comments to supportive remarks, suggestions for further readings, and grammatical and stylistic suggestions. For example, I wrote on Patty’s diary that I was not familiar with the Web site Half.com on which she had bought her copy of Surviving Literary Suicide. To her statement that she found it helpful to learn the statistics of suicidal thinking, I wrote, “Yes, this is important for a high school teacher to know.” Her wry comment that she often contemplated suicide in her youth but decided to “wait and see if things get better. If not, I can always kill myself later!” prompted my response, “good decision!” Struck by her admission that her husband did not know about her history as a cutter, I wrote, “Then you’ll need to be careful about this diary.” And when she thanked me for the course at the end of the diary, I wrote, “Thank you, Patty, for your excellent contribution to the course. Your diaries , especially this one, have been outstanding.” Since the publication of Diaries to an English Professor, my writing and research have focused largely on pedagogy. Students in my graduate and undergraduate literature courses write weekly reader-response diaries in which they discuss their feelings and thoughts about the texts...