Six-Word Memoirs as an Assessment Tool
This spotlight examines six-word memoirs as a form of assessment for writing programs and writing centers. Each author has explored using six-word memoirs and reflective writing with graduate teaching assistants or undergraduate tutors in various ways. Each reflects on how they used these memoirs in their institutional contexts–for assessment, broadly, and more specifically for professional growth; for creating personal connections; for enhancing emotional intelligence; and for evaluating training needs.
Six (Words) is Enough: Memoirs for Assessment
Kim Hensley Owens
Yongzhi Miao
11.1
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Six-word memoirs have a long and storied history in creative writing, and have moved well beyond the first such memoir--“For sale: baby shoes, never worn—often, possibly apocryphally, attributed to Ernest Hemingway. While Hemingway may have written the first, it was Larry Smith who in 2006 coined the term “six-word memoir” (“Six Words Gets to The Point”). The genre has continued to captivate creative writers even as it has moved into other spaces. The robust website sixwordmemoirs.com invites submissions from anyone, categorizing them by topic and offering contests that are themselves six words, such as “Swimming in sixes: Your ‘swim’ story” (“Six Word Memoirs”). The form is also taught in K-12 classrooms, with Edutopia but one website that offers detailed lesson plans for six-word memoir activities in that context (“How to use 6-word memoirs”). Classroom applications for six-word memoirs have expanded to include higher education, too, and applications beyond the classroom have expanded as well. Click here to continue reading.
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Creating Space for Writing Tutor Vulnerability:
Six-Word Memoirs in the Writing Center
Elizabeth Leahy
11.1
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Writing centers are borderlands where students negotiate new literacy practices, take chances, and begin to feel less alone as they develop as writers. They are also vulnerable spaces, not just for the students who visit, but also for the staff who work there. When Kim invited me to participate in the six-word memoir project, I recognized it as an opportunity for my student staff to reflect on the incredible work they perform. I also hoped the memoirs would help me better understand the working conditions and emotional labor of my staff.
In this essay, I describe an approach to six-word memoirs for writing center staff development. After briefly discussing the emotional dimension of writing center tutoring, I’ll describe my institutional context and the artifact collection process. Then I’ll share my findings, including the most salient themes. The memoirs demonstrated the complexity of tutor experiences as they acclimated to their roles and offered an important record of the labor, working conditions, and embodied aspects of tutoring. The memoirs also allowed tutors an outlet for processing their emotions, functioning as a space for reflection and growth. Click here to continue reading. |
Six-Word Memoirs as Programmatic and Pedagogical Reflection
Jennifer Stewart
11.1
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Sometimes it feels like knowing if the work I do as a Writing Program Administrator (WPA) is successful is just vibes. Yes, I keep up with recent administrative and pedagogical movements in scholarship and at conferences. Yes, I collect assessment data for our classes. Yes, I continuously observe faculty to shape and hone the work of the program. Yes, I train, guide, and evaluate graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). But for me, much of the teaching and WPA work I do is inspired by formal and informal discussions with peers and colleagues about the work we do; this project is no different. I’d read the Composition Studies six-word memoir piece, and when Kim mentioned using it with her GTAs, something sparked. I was already working on institutional ethnographic work in our program, studying my teaching observations, and considering preparing materials to submit for a CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence. I believed asking GTAs to compose six-word memoirs about their pedagogical experiences would be an excellent way to get more data about the functioning of my program and would foster their own pedagogical reflection. While this piece will detail how this project developed and what I discovered about the program, my GTAs, and myself in Fall 2023, this project is still a work-in-progress, so I will also describe the data collection and implementation changes I plan to make as I move forward with the six-word memoir project in 2024. Click here to continue reading.
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Six Words Toward Knowing and Feeling
Katherine Fredlund
11.1
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Ever since I read Catherine Denial’s “A Pedagogy of Kindness,” I have tried to center kindness as essential to teaching during my semester-long TA training course. As Denial explains, kindness pedagogy asks teachers to start from a place of trust, to extend generosity, and to understand the difference between being kind and nice. (Kindness is having an uncomfortable conversation when there is no way a student can pass the course; niceness is avoiding discomfort by telling the student they can try to pass the course when you know they cannot.) In Denial’s words, “To extend kindness means recognizing that our students possess innate humanity, which directly undermines the transactional educational model to which too many of our institutions lean, if not cleave.”
Rather quickly after making this shift, I realized that kind teaching requires emotional intelligence. Indeed, research has repeatedly demonstrated that “teacher emotional intelligence has a significant impact on the teaching and learning process, [influencing] student learning behaviors, engagement, and academic performance” (Su et al. 2). So while I use six-word memoirs to check the pulse of my overworked TAs and let me know how I can provide support, I have a second goal for these exercises: to help my graduate students further develop their emotional intelligence, something I believe is key to their capacity to teach well while navigating the stress of graduate school. Click here to continue reading. |