Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
7.2

Jennifer Case

“Toward a New, Broader Perspective”:
Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview

I have taught the narrative interview in three different states, but my admiration for the assignment as a pedagogical tool has fully taken root at the University of Central Arkansas, a comprehensive regional public university that draws students from Arkansas and the surrounding states. Though there are exceptions, the students and community in central Arkansas tend to be conservative, and because of our location in the Bible Belt, they also tend to be very religious—enough so that, when I had my students write environmental manifestos after reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain manifesto—a text that playfully and forcefully challenges human exceptionalism—one of my most insightful students wrote in all caps and italics that humans were, indeed, created to have dominion over the earth.

Like much of the Midwest and the South, my community also recently experienced historic flooding. In May and June 2019, the Arkansas River rose to historic levels, breaking previous flood records by more than two feet. The river covered the top of my daughters’ favorite playground, destroyed homes, and cost the state an estimated $23 million a day. The flooding has been clearly linked to climate change. Although the Biden administration is giving new—and much-needed—attention to climate change, large-scale action continues to face resistance, especially in politically conservative regions such as Arkansas.

In the context of such natural disasters, I can sometimes hardly believe we still need to “prove” that climate change—or racism or sexism or any other form of injustice—exists to resistant students. Nonetheless, we do, and as everyone who has engaged social and environmental justice issues in the classroom knows, instructors must be prepared not only to teach the text, but also to respond to students’ emotional reactions, whether those reactions take the form of anger, denial, apathy, fear, indecision, horror, or despair. We must be prepared to respond to climate denial and microaggressions, and to compassionately address misinformation and to meet students where they are. It can be a challenging task. But in my years teaching, I’ve discovered that one assignment, more than any other, has helped my students localize and engage complex environmental and social justice issues: the narrative interview. By asking students to interview another individual and draw insight from that conversation, the narrative interview helps students learn to listen empathetically and gives them a space in which to grabble with others’ lived experiences. This leads to insight, perspective, and a better sense of the complexities of our interconnections and shared life on earth.

I, of course, am not the first to use the narrative interview as a pedagogical tool with social and environmental justice in mind. In his well-renowned book, Composition and Sustainability, place-based compositionist Derek Owens describes an oral history project that requires students to interview community members and then write an essay based on that interview. The assignment comes near the middle of the semester, after students have written about their personal experiences of a place, and before they begin researching an environmental or social issue that affects that place. Interviewing a community member, Owens argues, can help students connect to and engage more in their local environments, and in conjunction with other place-based assignments, can help them become engaged members of their communities.

Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elisabeth Chiseri-Strater’s ethnography textbook Fieldworking, which is now in its fourth edition and is often used in advanced composition courses focused on writing for the community, asserts that students will become stronger writers and researchers through ethnographic work, and that ethnography, even within their local communities, allows students to “develop a greater understanding of the self as they reflect on their encounters with the ‘other’.”

Even more recently, Amanda Wray makes a case for ethnographic creative nonfiction assignments in her scholarly essay, “Contesting Traditions: Oral History in Creative Writing Pedagogy.” Using her own classroom as an example, and an assignment in which Wray asked students to interview community members in a neighborhood experiencing gentrification and radical change, Wray argues that oral history projects not only “help students to get out of their heads and out into their community […]. But also, oral history engages students in an embodied research process that makes lessons of audience awareness far more real than any other exercise could and arms students with practical life skills, such as interpersonal relationship building and ethical practices of representation.” In addition, she echoes Derek Owens when she says oral history can “connect the university to the communities that support and sustain us.” In other words, narrative interviews and ethnographic research can ground students in the communities in which they live and teach them how to responsibly engage with those communities through their writing.

The Assignment

At its most basic level, the narrative interview requires students to interview someone other than themselves, and then write a compelling, cohesive essay using that interview. Rather than take the form of a transcript, however, the essay must take the form of a narrative or profile. It must set a scene, offer vivid character description, integrate dialogue, and explore a particular theme. In other words, it must end up reading more like a feature profile found in a trade magazine or a work of longform journalism, rather than a memoir, personal essay, or lyric essay—the more traditional forms taught in university creative nonfiction courses. Often structured as a “day in the life” piece, it places the interviewer and interviewee in a particular moment together and requires fieldwork, community engagement, and the ability to balance another’s story alongside one’s own.

I have taught narrative interviews—a kind of ethnographic research—for a handful of years now: in place-based composition courses, in food writing courses, and in creative nonfiction and literary journalism courses. In my place-based composition courses, I have students interview a member of their community or hometown. In my food writing courses, I require my students to write narrative interviews about local farmers, restaurant owners, food service workers, and home cooks. In my literary journalism courses, I let students choose the general topic they are writing about, but I then require them to locate someone in their community who can speak to that issue, and we discuss how to make those interviews compelling components of their essays. Although the content of these essays are different, in each of these classes I spend a week foregrounding interview skills, I give students a week or two to conduct their interviews, and then we discuss how to craft an essay around the material they receive. We explore how to balance their voices with their interviewees’ voices and how to shift the focus of the essay from what the student believes, has experienced, or has come to understand, to what the interviewee’s responses reveal about the world.

I’ve assigned narrative interviews and stressed interviewing skills for a number of reasons. First, I firmly believe in place-based pedagogy and the narrative interview as a means of enacting place-based pedagogy not only in the composition classroom, but also in the creative writing classroom. Narrative interviews bring students’ communities into the classroom and reveal the place-specific relationships in which students are enmeshed. Second, the narrative interview is an incredibly common “form” of creative nonfiction, especially in environmental writing, food writing, and literary journalism. Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, is essentially a compilation of narrative interviews. In each chapter, she visits a coastal community facing the effects of climate change, interviews residents or climate experts, and uses those profiles and interviews to build a compelling depiction of our nation’s vulnerabilities and psychological/climate needs. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s Pulitzer-prize winning essay, “A Most American Terrorist,” first published in GQ, is another useful example. In it, Ghansah travels to South Carolina after white supremacist Dylann Roof opened fire on Black churchgoers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Ghansah’s quest: to interview witnesses, victims, and community members as well as individuals who knew Roof. The resulting piece reads like a narrative—describing in scene what Ghansah saw, experienced, and discussed during her reporting process—while also offering gripping commentary and reflection on the state of our nation. Most features in glossy magazines, in fact, read like Rush’s and Ghansah’s pieces, as do many profiles of farmers, restaurants, cultural scenes, and chefs (see Mark Arax’s “A Kingdom of Dust,” Richard Horan’s Harvest, Beth Dooley's In Winter’s Kitchen, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder’s “The Seeds of Ancestors,” and Michael W. Twitty’s “I Never Had Eaten in Ghana Before. But My Ancestors Had” for just a few examples). Teaching my students how to approach such projects thus gives them the opportunity to practice and build skills they will need to establish freelance careers, as well as the confidence and wherewithal they need to consult others for creative projects.

Third—and most important to the topic of this piece—I’ve found that narrative interviews help students break down and complicate polarized notions of truth when it comes to social and environmental issues. The narrative interview requires students to grabble with others’ real, lived lives, and to see the way lived experience often blurs idealistic truths. The assignment challenges their assumption that “environmentalism” (or any other ‘ism’) is purely the domain of a particular political party, and it creates a safer way for my conservative students to enter the environmental dialogue.

With this in mind, a colleague and I taught a service-learning course in Fall 2018 on “writing about place.” In addition to teaching a variety of place-based texts and giving students the opportunity to write their own place-based narratives, we also worked with the activities director of College Square, a senior living facility connected to the university, to pair each student with a resident. We held a class session at College Square early in the semester, introduced our students to their assigned residents, and gave the students and residents time to schedule a longer interview. Most students met with their residents for an hour or two later in the week, though a few decided to meet over a meal at a local restaurant instead. Some had such a good time talking that they scheduled multiple one-hour interviews over the next few weeks.

Once the deadline we gave for conducting the interviews had passed, my colleague and I guided students through the writing and revision process. We presented sample essays to the class and discussed how to organize their essays around a narrative and thematic thread. Students then drafted a narrative interview based on their conversations with their residents, conducted a peer review, and turned in revised essays to us. After we commented on their essays, the students revised their work once more. As a class, we then worked together to create an anthology by ordering the essays, drafting an introduction, completing layout, and copyediting and proofreading—all before sending the final document to a local printer. At the end of the semester, we returned to College Square to present copies of the anthology to each resident the students had interviewed. The residents were overjoyed to see their stories in print, and many of the residents asked for additional copies to give to their relatives as gifts. The students, similarly, praised the project in end-of-the-semester evaluations. Some even mentioned that it was the highlight of their college careers.

Despite the project’s ultimate success, my creative writing students were initially hesitant and scared. They weren’t used to interviewing others or using interviews to find material for creative projects. However, they grew more comfortable after a weeklong lesson on the interview process, during which we discussed effective techniques, worked together to brainstorm, polish, and refine potential interview questions, and practiced interviewing each other. They each went on to conduct interviews without issues, and by the end of the project, they all reported that they enjoyed the interview experience. Many students even commented that they found it to be empowering, and a few maintained relationships with their interviewees after the project’s end—meeting them for a burger once a month, or returning to College Square routinely to play card games. In addition, the essays they wrote only further convinced me that the narrative interview is a useful tool for localizing stories of global change, both environmental and cultural—especially perhaps in places such as Arkansas, where students tend to think that global forces occur “out there,” rather than in and on their often-quiet, often-rural hometowns.

For instance, one resident told the story of a family farm that was lost to industrial agriculture, and the grief that went with that. One resident told the story of Madison, Arkansas, a small river town shaped by natural disasters, the building of levees, and most recently the steady depopulation of rural communities. One of my male students ended up interviewing his grandmother and was surprised to note that while she spoke enthusiastically about her memories as a child and young adult, as well as her retirement years, she spoke only minimally, and not particularly enthusiastically, about her experience as a housewife. He had expected her years as a mother to be the happiest and most fulfilling, but they weren’t. He left the class with a very different understanding of gender roles and the experience of women in his community.

Another student asked her resident “How would your life be different if you hadn’t grown up in your hometown?” And the resident replied, “Well, if I didn’t grow up there, I might not have been Presbyterian. I might have been Lutheran like my cousins, or not Christian at all.” And for the first time, my student realized that where you grow up could influence your religion. My student kept repeating this, astonished, throughout her essay and the semester—your faith may be the product of your hometown more than some ultimate, universal truth.

Perhaps most interesting in the context of this discussion, one student ended up talking with his resident about the history of the University of Central Arkansas itself. His resident had attended UCA in the 1940s and told him that students once paid their room and board by the month, rather than by the semester, and all of the food served on campus was once grown on a campus farm. The student was astounded that college life in Arkansas had changed so drastically in only two generations, and that the university had in fact utilized more sustainable practices in its past. Although very few of my students mentioned climate change directly—this was a class on “writing about place,” and so the course framework hadn’t required it—in reflecting on these changes, my student wrote, “the eventual industrialization and expansion of our community appears historically inevitable, but was anything but. […] We may often think of the place we inhabit as essentially stationary […] to conceive of the ground on which you stand as so drastically different from its current form puts things in a new, broader perspective.”

The Pedagogy of Context

Understanding climate change, social justice, and human-environment relations requires this new, broader perspective. It requires students to see local changes and understand them in the context of global processes. It also requires a shifting of our pedagogy approaches. Here, I’m particularly intrigued by the emerging field of indigenous creative writing pedagogy, which calls on creative writing instructors to engage indigenous understandings of the rhetorical situation and the storytelling act. “As storytellers, we and our students connect to more than simply other works to be imitated,” Ryan Neighbors stated in his talk on indigenous creative writing at the 2019 Creative Writing Studies Organization conference; “We are linked with the story, the listener-reader, the land where we speak-write, our cultures, and the various histories of story, audience, land, and culture.” Unlike the traditional Western workshop, where students submit essays we tend to dissect as if they were artifacts, Neighbors stressed the way in which storytelling, from an indigenous perspective, is very much alive. Speakers and readers retain as much agency and influence as the writer or text, and “the world around us also influences the storytelling event.” In other words, all participants—reader, writer, speaker, listener, place, culture—work together to create and remake meaning.

Although much more can and should be said about the rich ways indigenous creative writing studies and place-based creative writing pedagogy can be placed in dialogue with each other (research I am eager to read), what strikes me is this: 1) both call on us and students to recognize creative writing as a place-making act that speaks to and from and is responsible to community, and 2) in many ways, the narrative interview, as a form, a genre, and an assignment, facilitates exactly this kind of thinking. By widening the scope, and helping students place their own stories and experiences in context with those of someone other than them, my students began to conceive of their lives and choices as part of a larger pattern and web of relationships. By interviewing a retiree and becoming responsible for that retiree’s story, my students quickly became enmeshed. They saw their words as connected to another’s words, and they saw their futures connect to another’s past.

This summer, I had the opportunity to teach the narrative interview again in an online food writing course—adapting it for the unique circumstances generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although I at first worried I’d have to scrap the assignment—how could I teach the narrative interview when it would be irresponsible to require students to talk to strangers face-to-face?—I instead persevered, changing requirements and expectations as needed. I allowed students to complete their interviews via Zoom, FaceTime, or the telephone. We discussed how to add vivid details and create scenes even if you can’t view the location in person. We discussed how to make the unique context of the summer a part of the project, whether through the questions they asked or the telling of the story itself. My students, as always, blew me away.

They told the story of a family-owned rabbitry that provided the only locally produced food source in a small, rural town. They told the story of a Black-owned coffeeshop that received an increase in business in response to #BLM. They told the story of a restaurant owner who downsized in the face of the pandemic and now works out of a food truck. They told the story of a community garden that has seen an influx in visitors as neighbors have searched for respites and greenery during quarantines. The stories my students heard during their interviews challenged and changed their understandings of food, food cultures, and food communities, but they also made my students, as writers and people, even more a part of their communities. By putting on a mask before entering a restaurant, by purchasing red velvet chicken and waffles, by helping to fill a terra cotta pot with compost created from community food scraps, and by simply listening to the experiences of others, my students this summer gained a new understanding of place, connections, food webs, and food justice.

This is why I am always excited to teach the narrative interview. One assignment can’t do everything, but time and time again, the narrative interview gives my students insights that I, alone, would never be able to impart. Whether interviewing a restaurant owner or a retiree, my students see how their communities and cultures have changed and transformed. In doing so, my students leave with a better sense of themselves, and this particular moment in time, as only one moment in a much larger, interconnected, ever-changing story. And if they see themselves as members of an ever-changing, rather than a fixed story, hopefully they will be less resistant to, and more able to psychologically embrace, the need for large, cultural shifts in the face of challenges such as climate change—a force that, like the Arkansas River last spring, is going to assert itself formidably during their lifetimes.

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Jennifer Case is the author of Sawbill: A Search for Place (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in journals such as the Rumpus, Orion, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sycamore Review, Fourth River, and the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as the Assistant Nonfiction Editor of Terrain.org. You can find her at www.jenniferlcase.com.

Rachel May
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Gail Folkins
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