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From village to college: Writing the rural experience
Abstract
This ethnographic inquiry into rural literacies begins with the researcher's initiation into three rural villages in three midwestern states. Sociolinguists affirm that notions of communicative competence vary among communities. What many observers might consider rural "small talk" actually serves to strengthen bonds among villagers who live in small, "sealed" communities. The author's college students who come from rural areas often exhibit the same traits in their writing as they do in their public discourse, producing low-risk essays of limited general interest. The patterns these beginning writers display can be traced not only to home literacies but to their socialization into the rural school system. For many rural students, reading and writing are solely school activities, divorced from the realm of usable knowledge delivered through storytelling and hands-on experience. The writing that matters in the rural high school is generally estranged as well from the authors' personal reflections upon their experiences. Students learn to defer to outside sources in hastily produced term papers which they and the rest of the community consider satisfactory demonstrations of competency. The researcher's on-site visits to student teachers confirm that this narrow conception of literacy is deeply entrenched in the rural educational system. The final section describes the experiences of rural students in the researcher's writing workshop. More specifically, it narrates the reactions of three local students to their college composition classes. In each case, the student's conceptualization of community influences his or her performance in the workshop. For those students for whom "community" includes a lack of diversity, the experience of being Othered by classmates or faculty has predictable consequences. But by making the rural experience an explicit object of analysis, the composition teacher can encourage her students to reflect upon the consequences of those socializing forces. College writing teachers can help young rural writers discover the empowering potential of literacy, especially by discouraging the formation of yet another sealed community.
Subject Area
Language|Language arts|Cultural anthropology
Recommended Citation
Kruse, Martha J, "From village to college: Writing the rural experience" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9538622.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9538622