Freewriting My Way to Critical Teaching

So last week I brought Theme for English B by Langston Hughes to our Writing 1101 course as the starting point for Writing Into the Day. We generally begin class this way with a point of inspiration and time to just write anything that comes to mind.    

The day I brought the Langston Hughes poem was the second day of class.  As I sat writing with students also writing around me, I had one of those moments when I was struck by an immediate idea about what I wanted to say about this poem.  (I don’t always just have a spark of an idea right away when I write... sometimes I can’t think of anything to say.)  But in this moment I was immediately reminded of a recent conversation with a friend and my ideas just flowed out onto the page in a messy and sprawling kind of way.  I put pen to paper and just freewrote my thought-flow onto the page,   

 I learned this strategy of freewriting from Peter Elbow... and it is one of the most useful tools to me as a writer.  Just get your thoughts down on the page.   Keep your pen moving.  Even if you are writing “I don’t know what to write...”  It frees my thoughts up (even at 8:00 am) to go in directions I didn’t even realize I wanted to go.  

When I did this writing in response to Langston Hughes, I knew that issues of race, class, gender and sexuality... issues of identity... are concepts that I want to be visible part of our conversations in class.  And I did choose Langston Hughes’s piece about school writing for that reason, but I guess as I sat down to actually write alongside students and Langston (via the coffee stained poem glued in my daybook) I started thinking newly about my own position as white, middle class teacher and feelings of insecurities in broaching issues of race, even as I know intellectually that I want to and need to.  Writing into the day with the Langston Hughes poem let me start to articulate ideas that had been simmering that I didn’t even realize I needed to think through.