Then and Now: A Quantum Pedagogy for College Writing
Then and Now: A Quantum Pedagogy for College Writing
Jenn Fishman
Marquette University
Our distance from the past is always changing. Chronology leads us on. Its measured steps cut suggestively straight lines from the present and what we remember to times so far gone we have to look them up. Of course, we don’t all page through the same calendars. Collective movement through time is complex, and though it may seem to march steadily on, the dress and cover are always changing. The intervals between now and then do not stay the same. Y2K was a lifetime ago, and it feels like just yesterday—at least sometimes, to some of us. Time flies, even if certain things seem to take forever. We plan for obsolescence, and we build to last. All around us, there are reminders that we are not a uniform, uniformed corps moving en masse at so many beats per minute. Instead, we teem two step, dubstep, high steppin’ it, a mass of offbeat drummers, while the phenomenology of everyday life queers our efforts to keep pace, to keep up, to follow the clock.
History helps us tell time, whether we chronicle the past for future reference or we house it in plain sight, building monuments, museums, and archives. In our discipline, we use chronotopes and corresponding tropes to shape and reshape our spacetime, hoping to “engender certain possibilities for action” (Jack 2006, 9). By telling and retelling, we recover and reclaim. We set records straight, and we trouble them. As we recycle, remix, and reuse, we also commit powerful acts of identification. We see, unsee, and re-see ourselves. Via textual and contextual rearrangements, we prompt, even provoke reconsiderations (Enoch 2005, 6-7; Royster and Kirsch 2012, 103-104). This happens on the page, in public parks, and in our classrooms, whether our students read and write slam poetry, digital video compositions, or evidence-based, problem-driven, solution-seeking arguments that cut across media and modalities.
All of this comes to mind when I think about the exhibition I would like to design. Housed in the campus art museum or maybe the library, it would help me create context for the new millennium college writing I assign in advanced composition. Teaching reflection essays, research papers, poems, and text messages written by members of the Class of 2005 may or may not count as “doing history.” But most undergraduates at my university are too young to remember the early aughts. Their birthdays post-date the double ohs by an always-growing number of months and years. To give absence presence, to give missed chances texture and make lost time pop, I envision a museum-style installation, 2001: A Writing Odyssey. It would have a grand entrance paved with cellphones. Walking in, anyone who looked down would see short, squatty Nokias, sleek Razrs from Motorola, red and black BlackBerry Pearls alternating with compact grey LGs. Inside, GE Reveal natural light bulbs (c.2001) would illuminate colorful foam chairs (c.2002), where visitors could scroll at their leisure through decades’ old college writing. At the exit, the selfie station would use the earliest commercially available cellphone cameras (c.2003), and prints would be available for purchase in the gift shop along with magic erasers (c.2004) and retro filtered drinking straws (c.2005).
Here, in this museum piece, quantum storytelling invites similar play. Instead of cobblestones made of cellphones and millennial SWAG, I offer linear narrative combined with living story or attempts to represent the less linear mess of liveness, which is punctuated by bits and pieces of what comes before: antecedents, antecessors, and fractals of antenarrative that help us synthesize and connect (Bonifer 2014, 17; Boje and Henderson 2014, 4). As a praxis, quantum storytelling dates back to junior year for the students whose writing features in my course. While some studied abroad and others dived into campus activities, N. Katherine Hayles published an edited collection about nanoculture. In it, Brian Attebery describes quantum storytelling as a technique used by sci-fi writers to suspend readers’ belief in distinct, literal and metaphorical orders. They do it, Attebery argues, in order to portray the possibility of being everywhere all at once and still able to communicate (Attebery 2004). Transplanting this idea into real-world situations, blacksmith and management scholar David M. Boje forged quantum storytelling as a means of managing group communication. Recasting coworkers as part of “storytelling organizations,” Boje and his colleagues studied how, within “collective storytelling systems,” quantum storying or “storytelling-expressive performance” becomes “a key part of members’ past-present-future sensemaking” (Boje 2012, 254). In the academy, we educators know this drill. We perform our stories backwards and forwards in reports and proposals. We story ourselves formally when we seek new roles, less formally when we meet for lunch, and we tell stories to mark milestones: new buildings, new academic years, graduations, retirements. In between, we swap campus lore and cautionary tales, every telling as vital as the stories told.
A writing course may not be a conventional workplace, but it is a work-space with its own story ouvrage. These days, writing courses are interconnected sets of analog and digital, synchronous and asynchronous occasions that bring students and teachers together for shared pursuits. Collaborating as writers, albeit differently experienced and positioned, it’s try and try again according to scaffolded syllabi set to cumulative rinse and repeat. Over ten weeks or twelve or fifteen, a lot can happen. Each course has under- and overlives that yield stories: individual narratives embedded in observation and reflection letters, narrative comments on class evaluations, and more. The longer I teach, the more I appreciate what quantum storytelling can grasp through the interplay of spacetime, syntax, and semantics. It’s a means of tracing pedagogical experience, the chemistry as well as the physics. That’s to say, quantum storytelling offers a way to capture not only the energy and tactility of teaching and learning but also the alchemy involved in piquing students’ curiosity about the past during a present that is tense with historic events: the coronavirus pandemic, long overdue race reckonings, and the interlocking political, economic, and ecological crises that seem to define the Anthropocene.
Quantum storytelling helps me describe the pedagogy I’ve been evolving. It’s an approach that encourages students, as writers, to be in as well as on time, to toggle deliberately between nows and thens, and to recognize themselves—and all of us—as always changing. The source material I use comes from the Stanford Study of Writing Collection, which contains more than ten thousand .txt files shared over five years by a single cohort (N=189) from the Stanford Class of 2005 (Stanford Study of Writing, 2001-2006). As the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 approached, I started teaching some of the 231 files that mention September 11th directly. The earliest is an Instant Messenger away message sent right after 9/11. Assigned now, it prompts real talk among students about texting and the relationship between tech and more recent tragedies. Another Stanford Study selection, a first-year student’s riff on the music playing around campus, sparks in-class conversation about the shaping force of the arts, even when they’re just ambience. Similarly, archived examples of student activism—a proposal for a current-events reading group, a report on community organizing, public talk about the ongoing under-representation of Black students on campus—raise sharp questions about the nature and possibility of progress or just plain change.
A kind of asynchronous peer exchange, such discussions are not easy. The content can be difficult, and without warning, conversations can degrade, lapsing fast into superficial games of pin the tail on the most relatable details. This happens like clockwork when I introduce the 9/11 selections in Week Three but I don’t let it last. Instead, I encourage students to trade their blindfolds for critical lenses. I do not, however, envision advanced composition as a semester-long visit to the optometrist: the kind of course where, unit by unit, students try on different frames to see which ones make them look best. Instead, twice a week for seventy-five minutes I ask everyone to work with their heads on a swivel, planting one foot on identifications while using the other to pivot toward differences that include race, gender, class, writing style, major, and past students’ always increasingly remote emplacement in time. As we pursue inquiry and reflection in turn, we work cycles designed for self-consciousness-raising. This is quantum pedagogy, and my hope is that students take it personally such that, by the end of the semester, they have increased their capacity as writers-in-time.
On paper, it looks easy. We work with the 9/11 selections during the first seven or eight weeks, and then I ask everyone to apply what they’ve learned to self-designed projects, which they pursue for a similar length of time. In a practical sense, the work students do before midterm is similar to the work they do after, regardless of what they self-assign. They read; they conduct inquiries of various kinds; they write regularly; and throughout they exchange ideas and self-reports as well as drafts with one another. This setup is ripe for research, especially studies that examine transfer across different kinds (and degrees) of assigned and self-sponsored writing. For now, at least, I am more interested in learning whether and how the blast from past students has lasting impact. My research questions might be: How do the 9/11 selections (and related activities) loose students from their regular timelines? During and after my course, are students more aware of the tick, tick, tick—its volume, its rhythm, its constructedness? And to what end? My hunch is that working with the 9/11 selections creates a kind of Pandora situation. In the excess of ante-, intra-, and ultra-narratives that emerge, there is not only reflection, real-time effort, and future thinking. There is creativity and critical possibility (Alexander and Rhodes 2011, 196-197). There is also hope. Whether Pandora had a jar or a box, whether she released evils or blessings when she opened it, she found hope. Likewise, there is hope affiliated with the way quantum pedagogy orients us, students and teacher alike, toward self-consciousness-in-time. It’s not the fabulous hope of pipe dreams and wishful thinking. Nor is it hope against hope. It’s a working hope, and when it works it activates “a constant state of response, reassessment, and self-correction” that enables us to become better and better able to “understand ourselves to ourselves” and, crucially, willing to try (Glenn 2018, 4; Rhodes and Alexander 2015).
“It’s a lot,” I can almost hear my students say, but it’s not the (only) end. Through our various activities, we are also reconstituting college writing. Another quantum leap, this is a distinctly heterochronic feat. In science, heterochrony names genetic-level evolutionary changes in an organism’s development. So, for example, in botany heterochrony occurs when genetic, metabolic, and cellular mechanisms respond to internal and external forces such that, voilà, a species of plant starts flowering early or its shoots need less water to spring from seeds (Buendia-Monreal and Gillmor 2018). By contrast, according to Bakhtin heterochrony closely parallels heteroglossia, which translates from the Russian as “varied-speechedness.” To paraphrase: Heterochrony or varied-timeness signifies the presence of coexisting timelines or points of view on time, forms for conceptualizing the world in times that can be characterized by their own objects, meanings, and values (Bakhtin 1981, 291). Although Bakhtin considered the novel the genre best suited to showcasing the essential multiplicity of language and related points of view, he did not restrict either heteroglossia or heterochrony to literary examples (Morson and Emerson 1990, 426, 368). He was ever-attentive to the abundance of viewpoints and timelines at work in nature and across social settings, and I see both heteroglossia and heterochrony , especially the latter, in college writing. Specifically, my advanced comp encounters with caches of past and present college compositions make manifest some of the many timespans, ‘frames, and ‘scapes that coexist within what we call college writing.
To be sure, if we were to put a sample of writing from any college student under a microscope, we would see multitudes. Likewise, if we were to view an archive of writing created by a cohort of five or five hundred, we would find something similar to the nth degree. It’s not just that college writing is large and contains multitudes. College writers do, too. Usually, though, when we read what students write, we are researchers seeking signs of development and change, or we are writing administrators assessing some combination of curriculum, instruction, and learning. When we read as teachers, we tend to be intent on giving feedback or grades. I have done all of these things, and so it surprises me that my experience in advanced comp has been so distinct. I credit the recursivity of my work, the way my most recent versions of the course recurse me through time and both familiar and unfamiliar texts. While I am immersed in decades-old rhetorical analyses, emails, and reports, I am also reading what current students write, and these texts interinanimate each other. Together, they offer a heightened multiperspective on college writing, and they issue a challenge, a dare that is for all of us. It is a combined invitation and incitement to actively and with hope keep forming and reforming writing education along with, across timespace, our roles as educators within it.
There is no shortage of categories for how and what we teach. The menu of pedagogies alone is copious. It includes instructivist, constructivist, and inquiry-based approaches to teaching as well as methods that are critical, feminist, engaged, collaborative, reflective, digital, experiential, inquiry-based, and more. Likewise, there is an abundance of curricular types. Formal schooling involves explicit and implicit or hidden curricula, co- and extracurricular activities, and null curricula, which contain all that is not taught. At a macro level, recommended curricula describe studies associated with a particular level of education, institution, or academic area. At a more micro-level, teachers and students might compare written and taught curricula, contrasting syllabi with what actually happens in and in relation to class meetings. Additionally, assessed or tested and learned curricula are revealed over time through various forms of student evaluation.
Within college curricula, we organize courses into types. Some fill one or more requirements, whether general education or majors and minors, while others are electives. Some courses are introductory, others advanced. There are lectures and seminars; there are courses with practicums or labs; and there are so-called content courses. It’s a hideous phrase, one that implies everything else has no content or substance, the academic equivalent of sugar-free. In many English departments, including my own, content has historically been code for literature; the assumed mode of delivery, the lecture; the curricular counter-balance, the writing course. These played-out associations cast practice as difficult yet rudimentary, preliminary work. Think batting cages or ballet barre. Experts use them to warm up or keep fit, while novices use them over long periods of supervised time to build assets (e.g., physical strength, muscle memory, discipline). College-level equivalents are first-year writing and advanced composition. In a content mind-set, these requirements are places students go to work out grammar, syntax, and citation styles while bulking up any number of good habits (e.g., planning, drafting, revising, meeting deadlines). Exceptions to this way of thinking include courses that feature culturally elite types of writing and opportunities reserved for academically elite writers (e.g., creative writing workshops, honors seminars). There are also welcome challenges to these tired ways of thinking, and they come from all directions: rhet-comp offerings replete with content that cannot be denied (e.g., Feminist Rhetorics, Writing for Health and Medicine); lit courses that center research and writing about everything from history of the book to indigenous art and activism in changing climates.
In a coin toss, even while heads may signal content and garner top priority, all of us who call “Tails!” out of a commitment to praxis realize that we are dickering over two sides of the same coin. Πρᾶξις, a close cousin of practice and process, names theory-based action that reflects not just contextual, practical knowledge and reasoning but also the kind of care for relations that we take when we engage in moral and ethical considerations. Via Greco-Roman-inflected rhetorics, praxis helps us claim the world-making, reality-changing potential of discourse that can be witnessed in canonical texts, on the ground, and online, wherever examples are embodied and enacted by groups or individuals (Zhao 1991; Otis 2019; Lechuga 2020). Pedagogically, though, praxis can be tricky. For example, praxis can seem like a harbinger of loss (e.g., of time, of content), especially when it is associated with crossover or the curricular equivalent of a country Western song that has gained mainstream popularity. When Cedric Burrows discusses rhetorical crossover, he focuses on “the movement of the Black rhetorical presence [...] from the African American community to the white community,” and he brings attention to the commercial profitability as well as the personal and cultural costs that such acts have historically incurred (Burrows 2020, 19). Analogously, perhaps, curricular crossover happens when history shows up to another class, whether it’s copia exercises or reflection in the spirit of the Ignatian Examen (FitzGerald 2020; Pace and Meyrs 2016). Whatever the case, crossover logic cues us to check the balance for losses (e.g., lack of time spent contextualizing or historicizing) and consider seriously their impact.
In writing pedagogy, this kind of thinking lays a trap, and proponents of WAC are used to seeing colleagues get caught in it, convinced they will never recover from cutting content to make way for scaffolded writing assignments and related instruction. I admit, I got snared when I started teaching 9/11 in advanced comp, and I borrowed a melody or two from the crossover blues to explain my course design quandaries. There just wasn’t enough time, I crooned, to build sufficient context. I also worried about managing expectations. So many students arrive to advanced composition expecting skill-and-drill sessions plus endless time spent grooming that most ubiquitous of mutt genres, the research paper. Against this backdrop, my first attempt to broach 9/11 in advanced comp took place one fall in the third week of the semester. It was September 11th, so I shared a short piece by Sandy, a student from Southern California who participated in the Stanford Study.
“September 11th was a Tuesday,” Sandy recalls:
I was wrapping up my summer job at my dad’s office, making plans to drive from SoCal to Stanford for freshman orientation on September 21st. I was scared—everybody was. That day, I didn’t know if all of America was going to blow up; I didn’t know if Stanford would start on schedule. But Stanford did, and my dad and I drove north the next week.
She continues her travelogue, remembering:
We stopped in Sacramento to spend a day rafting on the American River, before heading to Stanford. On September 20th, driving from Sacramento to Palo Alto, we stopped at a small seafood restaurant in Berkeley, CA. The TV was on in the bar, and everybody stopped eating when President Bush addressed Congress.
The President pointed his finger to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda that night, as well as to the Taliban in Afghanistan. He announced the new Department of Homeland Security. He said, “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” He said we would fight the “War on Terror,” and that it would have “decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion.” I realized this meant we would go to war; I was scared.
Looking back, Sandy contrasts her fears with her first impressions of college. She describes orientation as “a whirlwind,” flashing back to days that “whizzed by” and the reporting she did for the campus radio station, including stories about local Muslim American communities. Then Sandy time jumps to graduation, but it’s not the well-publicized commencement address by Steve Jobs that she brings up. It’s the baccalaureate speech delivered by Jazib Zahir, a Pakistani-born major in Electrical Engineering. He “spoke of entering as a freshman right after September 11th,” Sandy remembers, noting: “I knew this had colored my college experience, but it was hard for me to imagine what college would have been like if September 11th hadn’t happened.”
In class, Sandy’s remembrance went over like a lead balloon. I credit my well-intentioned but clumsy commemorative pedagogy. It put a certain kind of stamp on 9/11, which left a clear, if superficial impression. The room was somber while we took turns reading aloud, and students’ comments were circumspect. I imagine they would have responded similarly if I had set up a turntable and put on a turn-of-the-millennium album that sounded vaguely familiar, maybe because their parents also played it and occasionally sang along. Students from New York and New Jersey were the exceptions, sophomores or juniors from the Bronx and Newark. After class, they shared family remembrances along with a sense of relief, as if the twenty-five to thirty minutes we spent talking about Sandy’s experience closed a gap between them and the many markers of absence that made 9/11 present where they were from. Looking back, I see glaringly how I turned Sandy’s story into the kind of commemoration that could only reinforce whatever ideas about September 11th that each student already had. It didn’t matter that Sandy was a synecdoche, that she stood for the 188 other participants in the Stanford Study of Writing, the 1875 other students in the Stanford Class of 2005, or the sixteen million in college her freshman year. Hers was the only story I shared, and alone it couldn’t catalyze anything complex. There has to be plurality for co-memoration: the kind of multivocal talk that prompts memory, countermemory, and inquiry. Powerful stuff, it is co-memoration that can “hail us to a common belonging” not just in a particular place, as Nancy Small illustrates (2020), but also in and across timespace.
Like Mrs. Clavel in the Madeline books read to me when I was a child, I knew something was not quite right (Bemelmans 1937), and I wondered: Do I try again, or do I stick with my regular, more contemporary programming? My answer, on impulse, was to go for it, but I still had to sound out why. I had to work my way toward quantum pedagogy. Not knowing exactly what I was looking for, I considered the kind of invitation I wanted to make. By teaching 9/11 differently, did I want to give students a puzzle to solve or a knot to untie? Was it Rumi’s elephant that I wanted to herd into the classroom so that we could study how our perceptions reflect not only who we are but also when, where, how, and why we make contact? That was close, but I was acutely aware that only some of us would be able to reach for personal artifacts and remembrances of September 11th. What about balancing memory against its lack? No. I tried again, this time picturing advanced comp as a semester-long walk along the fine line between each of us recalling our own experiences and knowing through other means. In my mind’s eye this idea arranged us, a troupe of Philippe Petits, on a series of tightropes strung across course units. We would start as Petit did with assignments set in practice fields using thick ropes tied low, and we would work toward something equivalent to the 131-foot stroll he took between the North and South Towers one Wednesday morning in 1974 (9/11 Memorial n.d.).
Cue the circus music and the New York City street sounds. I liked the way a high-wire act brought to the fore an embodied commitment to practice along with the performative nature of writing, and I appreciated the way it dramatized related risks. As I submitted Fall 2019 grades, I began prepping for the next semester, collecting materials and plotting activities. I toggled between the slow work of deidentifying and formatting two dozen of the 9/11 selections from the Stanford Study Collection and making quick sketches of major and minor course assignments. As I worked, I pictured a circus of tightrope walkers. Some carried weighted aluminum poles and juggling pins. Others carried umbrellas and top hats; they flipped shiny coins high in the air; they released white pigeons that, from a distance, might pass for doves. If I got carried away, my flights of fancy helped me formulate pressing questions. In class, what might prompt students to wonder with a sense of exigence about 9/11? What might pique their curiosity about the looks and feels of their 2005 counterparts? I wasn’t sure, so I made lists. I jotted down strategies that might help students tap what they already knew, and I added ideas for how they might learn new things fast, blitzing through available resources to answer immediate questions. I also compiled prompts that might help everyone slow down and address questions that warranted more thoroughgoing approaches. Within the course that emerged, I saw a wealth of possibilities, including a chance for me to mix teaching and mentoring even though I didn’t see advanced comp becoming a full-blown undergraduate research experience.
I also did not, could not, foresee what came next. My calendar still holds space for the international conference I was set to attend March 11-14, 2020 in Xi’an, China. One week later it shows how I planned to shuttle between the CCCC annual convention and my shotgun kitchen two miles across town, where I intended to cook for anyone willing to crowd into Charlie House. Around that time, my photo album shifts from its usual mix of color or black-and-white cat and food pics to the stylized, cartoon-like images I took from the start of the Great Pivot Online until shortly after my second Pfizer shot. In that interval, I learned to track my time on task, and even now I fill computation notebooks with daily entries mathed in fifteen-minute increments: R for research, T for teaching, S for service, and so on. According to my records, I spent the summer of 2020 attending crack-of-dawn online write-on-sites, doom scrolling, and clicking through available resources, anxious to expand my perspectives on teaching and learning.
In those first COVID months, new tools for telling time seemed to proliferate, including tips for gaining “temporal agency” over the “enforced presentism” of the just-declared pandemic (Ringel 2000). My favorites came from anthropologists who study “time-tricking,” a kind of sociocultural legerdetemps that involves “the development of individual, intersubjective and collective strategies for stretching and bending time in relation to one’s needs, preoccupations and ‘deadlines’” as well as strategies for “making sense of both unexpected changes in well-established temporal frameworks and conflicts between contradicting time-frames and temporal orders” (Moroşanu and Ringel 2016, 18). In retrospect, quantum pedagogy looks a lot like time trickery, specifically “future-tricking,” which is an “attempt to subject the future content of the progression of time to [one’s own] agency” (Ringel 2016, 26). At some level, all pedagogy might be understood this way, as forward-driving activity through back-engineered pathways that lead, over time, toward pre-set course goals and learning outcomes. That said, the pandemic really put educational abracadabras to the test. Indeed, COVID-19 and the rest of the 2020 plagues—anti-Black racism, anti-Asian racism, antisemitism, gender-based violence, gun violence, anti-democracy, climate crisis, war, hate—did more than scuttle our sense of time. They also raised the stakes. Again and again, we tagged events #unprecedented. It didn’t matter how long we quarantined the mail, how often we wore the same clothes, or how many times we forgot to unmute on a video call. However mundane our day-to-day lives, however profane our experiences, we suddenly were living history.
In the split of a slow motion second, between undergraduate advising in Fall ‘19 and the start of Spring ‘20 classes, the first cases of coronavirus were diagnosed around the world, and everything changed, including our relationship to 9/11 (Tichopád, Pecen, and Sedlák 2021; CDC Museum 2022; Spiteri et al. 2020). Suddenly, September 11, 2001 was a point of reference, a way to make the present relatable. More than one newspaper recalled that Nostradamus had seen COVID-19 coming along with Napoleon, Hitler and SARS (Daily Star [Online] 2020). Financial times used a different line to make the unknown more known. As China closed to live Nova Scotia lobsters, for example, the ED of the Lobster Council of Canada reassured: “Anyone who was in the industry through the last twenty years with 9-11, SARS, the H1N1 flu pandemic and the great recession knows that these things happen” (Johnson 2020). Describing the same period of time, one journalist identified the twenty-first century as an age of black swans or “low-probability, high-impact events” that stretched from “9/11 to President Trump’s election and Brexit” with “the coronavirus epidemic [...] unlikely to be the last” (Mead 2020). Far from it, COVID-19 numbered just one among the bevy of birds come home to roost, among them the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, January 6th, and the end of Roe. But the vox pops did not, could not, foresee it. In January 2020, an American golf pro interviewed in Foshan, China, offered: “The best way I can describe this is it’s like the quiet of 9/11 or after a hurricane hitting Florida” (Hardwig 2020a). Having survived both, he looked ahead with confidence, certain “that by April 1 we start to get back to normal” (Hardwig 2020b).
Ah, what fools we were. “Poisson d’Avril!” Nostradamus might have cried, watching us tangle like fish in the nets of early pandemic prognostications. For Michel de Nostradame, April fish were the chumps who still followed the Julian calendar after the switch to Gregorian and celebrated New Year’s in early spring. Fast forward a few hundred years. By the time we set our clocks ahead in 2020, it seemed clear (at least to many of us) that coronavirus was no joke. Certainly, the students in my classes were no fools. Not then; not the following academic year, when I taught exclusively online; not in Fall 2021, when we met face-to-face and masked in a building named Lalumiere. Throughout, everyone grappled with dark thoughts that matched dark times, colored by not only the ‘rona but also flagrant systemic racism, unmistakable climate crisis, and rising antidemocracy. On one hand, the quantum pedagogy I developed over this stretch reflects my long-term interest in histories, historicism, and historiography (Fishman forthcoming). On the other hand, it is the scion of a very specific time. Less a reaction than a response, quantum pedagogy emerged along the feedback loop Rachel Gramer associates with responsivity: rhetorical activity that involves not just call and response but also intentional interruption and attunement toward ethical change (2014).
Then and now, I ask myself if it makes sense to teach 9/11 in advanced composition, when I could revert to something more present, less tense. So far, my answer is yes, and I head to class with once hot-off-the-press news stories that equate the start of the pandemic with September 11th. The first time, it was a surprise that students were so quick to call out the time difference, the disparity between the pandemic’s incessance and the moment-by-moment-ness of 9/11:
8:46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 (BOS to LAX) crashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
9:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 (BOS to LAX) crashes into the South Tower of the Word Trade Center.
9:37 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 (IAD to LAX) crashes into the Pentagon.
9:42 a.m. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounds all flights in U.S. airspace.
9:59 a.m. The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.
10:03 a.m. Flight 93 (EWR to SFO) crashes in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
10:15 a.m. The E Ring, a section of the Pentagon, collapses.
10:28 a.m. The North Tower of the World Trade Center collapses. (9/11 Memorial n.d.)
How can 102 minutes compare with an outbreak still sloughing its way toward endemic, they ask (Zarefsky 2022)? Timelines trace recovery efforts at Ground Zero from September 12, 2001 onward. Meanwhile, long-haulers, pundits, and some public health experts note that it may be years before we can say, truly, that we are living in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic.
Such time-bound moments of dissonance go to the heart of quantum pedagogy, which invites us to hold contradictory ideas in productive tension across time. Yes, both 9/11 and the coronavirus pandemic were global events that stopped air traffic and pushed the stock market into freefall. In the US, both elicited almost immediate, racially biased scapegoating. But each has its own politics, and they inhabit duration differently, even if we count the long contrails of antecedents and aftermaths that extend before and after 9/11. Because we can no more force chrono-spatial awareness than the “aha” moments associated with crossing other thresholds of understanding (Downs and Robertson 2015, 116), quantum pedagogy entails creating timespace for such learning. It involves capaciously staging and restaging the taught versions of curricula, trusting that one or another arrangement of reading, talking, and writing will help students have experiences that hone their sense of themselves and others as writers in time. Simultaneously, quantum pedagogy encourages performance appreciation, a sense of writing as action, plus the kind of respect for risk that enables writers to take it.
Organizationally, the rhythm of advanced comp is regular. Meet for class on Tuesdays and Thursdays; reading responses due Wednesdays; weekly writing due Sundays by 11:59pm (Central). Against the steadiness of this rhythm, we syncopate. With Sunday writing as course material for the following week, the curriculum moves in as many directions as there are students. Mixing small steps with giant strides, we are definitely not a uniform, uniformed corps that keeps perfect time. But we don’t completely lose it either. Instead, I prompt students to practice telling time by interweaving work with the 9/11 selections and work on a personal archive. The latter, a variation on the theme of portfolio assignments, serves multiple purposes, including self-study. To begin, I ask students to compile three to five examples of each of the following:
academic writing (in the major)
academic writing (nonmajor)
work-related writing
personal writing
public writing
writing you’re proud of
writing that sounds like you
wildcard (any other writing)
As they search and make selections, I ask them to consider the whats and whys of their choices and also to notice how the results of their decisions situate and resituate them in time. Each semester, there are sophomores, juniors, and seniors equally surprised to discover the distance between themselves and their first-year writing seems wide. Across the board, students’ reflections suggest that the affective aspects of archiving complement what they discover through analysis, including close scrutiny of the sentences they have written, the arguments they have made, and the audiences they have addressed during college. Students also complete a short demographic survey, which mirrors one taken by Stanford Study participants in 2001, and I post the results along with archive samplers (e.g., three to five texts per person) as a reading assignment. In the margins of our shared PDFs, students get to know each other as writers while they comment on commonalities, identify patterns of difference, and mark outliers. The resulting conversations snap college writing into focus, and they lay a foundation for future comparisons that reach across time.
To further enhance comparability, I share two lists, starting with the Beloit Mindset List for the Class of 2005. It includes the following kinds of items:
Most students starting college [in 2001] were born in 1983.
Recording TV programs on VCRs became legal the year they were born.
The U.S. Senate has always had a daycare program.
Most of them know someone who was born with the help of a test tube.
The precise location of the Titanic has always been known.
Lasers have always been marketed as toys.
A browser is not someone relaxing in a bookstore; a virus does not [only] make humans sick; and a mouse is not a rodent.
With a life expectancy of 77 years, they can anticipate living until about 2060. (2005 List)
Unfortunately, there is no true equivalent for the Class of 2025. In 2019, the Mindset List moved to Marist College, where its compilers reinvented it as “a cultural compass that tracks the challenges and celebrates the accomplishments of each incoming college class.” Despite these differences, I share the Class of 2025 list. It characterizes students entering college in 2021 as:
Starting a poetry renaissance
Bringing awareness to veteran college students
Adapting to a virtual college experience
Enduring an unprecedented public health crisis on campus
Redefining arts and culture
Building Gen Z e-commerce
Demanding justice and sustainability in globalized fashion
Eroding the death penalty
Witnessing the first U.S. state to decriminalize drugs
Experiencing a re-emergence of White Supremacy in America (“The Marist College Mindset List”)
We may compare apples and oranges, but our exchanges are lively, especially our speculation about what Marist compilers might say about the frosh of 2001. We also talk about whether anyone perceives so-called defining phenomena in their everyday lives, and we pause to consider the differences between clock time and what Henri Bergson distinguishes as durée or time as we live it (1910/2015). Fresh from these conversations, we turn to the 9/11 selections, which an advanced comp alum, Madi Ernst, and I have organized into an online reader called Aftermaths. Working together over two semesters, we doubled the number of texts that I teach, all culled from the Stanford Study writing samples that mention September 11th directly. Although not all of them are about 9/11 per se, the reader as a whole demonstrates how, for one group of students, that day and its aftermaths became part of both college and college writing (Fishman and Ernst 2021).
We spend about a week reading around, and then, to answer some of the many questions that accrue, we spend a day doing blitz research. In class I prime: Take twenty-five minutes to investigate some of the sights, sounds, and information flows of the early aughts. Use the internet and sources you deem viable, and save the URLs to share with the class. Ready?, I ask, as students rearrange themselves into groups and log onto shared Google docs. Get set. Each time, I can almost hear the rev of search engines. Go! As quiet clicking descends over the room, some students search for the music, movies, and TV shows that were popular while members of the Class of 2005 were growing up. Others sweep the internet for information about available technology and turn-of-the-millennium sources for everything from phone numbers to news. At least one group surfs Stanford’s digital archives for a sense of campus culture, student-sponsored and otherwise. After fifteen minutes to organize their finds, groups report out, and we revel in the magic of such seemingly trivial pursuits. Students’ quick, concentrated work yields any number of fun facts. It also turns up details that make the past crackle with texture and pop. We ask: What determines which is which? How would we choose what to investigate further? What makes some things but not others worth the time?
These questions carry us into the remaining weeks before midterm. While students finish their personal archives, they also complete one of four Aftermaths assignments:
Annotate several selections in the reader, adding headnotes and footnotes with the next advanced comp cohort in mind.
Compose an introduction to a section of the reader that does not have one or create your own section from available selections and write an introduction to it, keeping future advanced compers or another specific audience in mind.
Create a reading guide to one or more sections of the reader, writing to a specific audience of your choosing (e.g., fifth graders, social work students).
Wild card: Propose your own Aftermaths-based assignment, making a case for its purposefulness (re: yourself, re: others) and its equivalence to the above (re: inquiry, composing, overall time on task).
All of these options involve deliberate time-toggling, which complements the way reader-based prose is always written to be read in the future (Flower 1979). Students who pick either of the first two assignments combine their own recent experiences as readers of Aftermaths with targeted research into whatever they decide will help the next group, keeping in mind our always-growing distance from 9/11/2001. Students who make reading guides face the same march of time, but most conduct research in consultation with their future selves, picking audiences that reflect their post-graduate plans to be teachers, social workers, and community or youth group leaders.
Option four, the wild card, invites students to choose their own Aftermaths adventure, and the results run the gamut. One semester, Ryan, a New Yorker, created an anthology of 9/11 selections with explicitly East Coast perspectives; Jenna recorded audio versions of several selections as well as a framing interview with me; and Clare designed a six-panel graphic novel-style illustration of the opening selection, an AOL Instant Messenger away message that begins, “I hope that you and your loved ones are safe.” Katherine, a double major in English and computer science, undertook a big data analysis of all 231 9/11 selections, while Seamus, an English and history double major compiled a companion volume of COVID-19 college writing. Unlike the students who picked options one through three, the wildcard group may have moved more horizontally across present-tense interests than vertically, toward the future or the past. Yet, Ryan’s chapter reflects where he came from as well as how he saw himself in the present moment of our class, and Clare’s artwork allowed her to get back to something she loved but hadn’t had time to pursue while in college. By the same token, Katherine pitched her distant readings of the 9/11 selections as steps toward hypothetical future projects, and Jenna had future advanced comp students in mind as the audience for her podcast-like final product.
The return on quantum pedagogy may stand out most in retrospect. In wrap-up discussions that I conduct like focus groups, I find out students feel good, in a general sense, about becoming more aware of and more informed about 9/11. I see heads nod in agreement with the several who describe how researching 9/11 has changed what they think about current social and political issues. Students also connect learning about 9/11 with better understanding and relating to others, an idea that seems especially poignant when they explain who they have in mind (e.g., parents and grandparents, future students or patients). In lieu of a midterm, I also ask everyone to write “projections” or letters addressed either to members of the Class of 2005 or to students entering college in the 2040s. Both versions of this assignment involve writing imaginatively across time. Those who choose Aftermaths authors as their pen pals have to stop thinking about their counterparts as such. Writing in the present, they have to conjure Sandy and others from the reader as full-fledged adults, contemporaries of their parents. By contrast, students who write to future frosh have to envision themselves as forty-somethings and then, from that vantage, cast back on their college years to offer advice that might help the next generation look ahead.
It’s a tough assignment, and not everyone can stay in character. Nonetheless, the letters are full of bravura examples of time-trickery. Students deploy any number of rhetorical moves to introduce themselves effectively, to share as well as solicit meaningful details, and to connect across timespace with their imagined readers. Moroşanu and Ringel, the anthropologists who study time-tricking, focus mainly on “stretching” and “bending” time as a means of exercising agency over it. Quantum pedagogy seems to capacitate students for something else. Rather than trying to control or reshape (i.e., manage) time, throughout the semester, students in advanced comp grasp ways to traverse it, bridging and mediating chronological distances for an array of communicative purposes. They write to learn, and they make good use of writing for self-expression, from phatic comments in online discussions to personal commentaries like the “projection” letters. The last Aftermaths assignment positions them as teachers, helping others understand both the 9/11 selections and being in time, while creating personal archives helps them take action in the second half of class, when they must design projects that require them to take risks as writers and seek growth as well as impact. One semester, for example, after midterm Blake chose to conduct genealogical research. He visited regional and national archives and recorded oral histories, and then he wrote poems with long, informational precis. His project honored his oldest participating relatives and enriched family knowledge. Another student, Sophia, recorded a series of TikTok videos about healthy vegan Italian recipes. The videos were fun, the recipes looked tasty, and the project as a whole demonstrated how health, wellness, and cultural identity can be combined. Madison talked with peers about obstacles to belonging on campus and then made a solution-seeking podcast, while Elena sought “silver linings” in her own and other students’ COVID-era struggles, producing a documentary-style video that showcased survival, learning, and hope.
If there were a genealogy of contemporary instructional approaches, it would show quantum pedagogy as close cousins with other rhetorical feminist teaching and mentoring praxes. This kinship is legible in the ways quantum pedagogy yokes students’ self-actualization as writers with ethical, justice-oriented action undertaken through writing (Glenn 2018, 144). By foregrounding deliberate play, quantum pedagogy also invites students to be aware of the constructedness of time, to notice the tick, tick, tick and consider their own and others’ relationships to it. Again and again, quantum pedagogy stages opportunities for students to step forward and back, learning through movement across time about the workings of identification and disidentification, learning how to set and reset themselves along with their clocks (Glenn 2020, 338). Play, embodied graphically and by human and nonhuman bodies, is serious as well as tactical. In both ritual and theater, play can move us “in and out of time”; on the street, through activism, play helps everyday actors remake reality (Turner 1973, 214; Bogad 2016, 228). An element of quantum pedagogy, play provides a means by which students can attend to the riotous differences inherent in heteroglossia and varied-timeness, and they can practice tuning to the responsibility that comes with engaging those differences critically and creatively.
Even more signally, the priority that quantum pedagogy places on play aligns with the strong current of critical imagination that runs through rhetorical feminism from the wellspring of Jacqueline Jones Royster’s historiographical work. Discussing the genesis of authority, specifically that of African American women writers, Royster brings attention to Swahili concepts of “individual presence within time.” They distinguish sasa or personal time (e.g., “the present, the immediate past, and also the immediate future”) from the zamani dimension, the timespace location of people who, no longer remembered personally by others, “joi[n] the collective or the community of spirits and achiev[e] collective immortality” (Royster 2000, 79). Concerned with nothing less than “negotiat[ing] what constitutes history,” Royster argues for “imagination as a critical skill” and a “strategy for inquiry” hallmarked by “a commitment to making connections and seeing possibility” (2000, 80, 83). There is, Royster and Gisa E. Kirsch emphasize, a powerful invitation deep-seated within critical imagination. It is a challenge to researchers and scholars to balance ongoing evidence-based work (e.g., recovery, reclaiming) with “re-forming not only what constitutes knowledge but also whether and how we value and accredit it” (Royster and Kirsch 2012, 20). Embracing play as well as practice, practice, practice, quantum pedagogy infuses a similar spirit into the classroom, into the collaboration of teaching and learning.
Perhaps most importantly, quantum pedagogy shares a conviction with other rhetorical feminist praxes and with rhetorical feminism itself: hope. As Cheryl Glenn explains, regarding the concept she originated, rhetorical feminism forges “a new pathway that begins at the nexus of rhetoric, feminism, and hope” (2020, 334). In the quantum classroom, hope springs eternal, but it does not come cheap. Instead, the confidence in possibility that constitutes and is constituted by quantum pedagogy has a real “the show must go on” quality to it plus a healthy dose of something else, something speculative and at least a little bit extraordinary. Alongside all that rinse and repeat, all the try, try again, quantum pedagogy is the rabbit pulled from the hat. Naysayers will call this hocus pocus, but anyone who has ever watched a magician perform that trick knows two things: the power and the promise of the pull, and the way hope abides in the preceding moment. Hope lives in the beat before the ears or the colored scarves begin to appear. Hope lies in the flash of the coin on its last flip before the tightrope walker catches it, bows, and continues crossing.
If hope can’t be taught, it can be practiced, and it can be shared. In advanced composition, I use the 9/11 selections to help create a Pandora situation, but there is plenty of material out there. At some point when I ask myself if I should keep teaching Aftermaths in advanced composition, my answer will be no, and I’ll leave behind the 9/11 selections to assign something else in their stead. When the time comes, however, I suspect I’ll take quantum pedagogy with me. Like the funambulist who might lose a pin or leave behind a wire but keep walking, I know it’s not about the props. The pedagogy is the practice.
In writing education there is always more: more to do, to teach, to learn. It piles up. Great drifts of more join heaps of could and mountains of should, making it hard to rig a tightrope, let alone walk all the way across. There will never be enough hours in a day or a semester, although we can look ahead to the next and the next, across dimensions of individual and collective time. For sure, it can seem like a grind. But it can also look like the horizon. Squint just a little bit, and it looks like the edge of possibility. I get glimpses while teaching advanced comp. All of a sudden, during class or while clicking through e-comments on an assigned reading, there is crackle and pop. I look up from the last projection letter or project proposal, and zap! In such moments of reflection in and on action (Schön 1983), I see us reconstituting college writing. It looks like this:
Scene 1
Day One, Week One opens with a writing exercise that takes about fifteen minutes:
On a loose sheet of paper: Write your name (first and last) at the top; then, offer a writing prompt: a question or topic or set of instructions that gives someone a good starting place for a few minutes of writing.
Hand your prompt to the person on your right; receive a prompt from the person on your left.
Via your laptop or tablet: Open a Word document or equivalent and type the prompt you’ve been given along with the name of the person who wrote it; then write for five minutes in response.
When I call time, hand the prompt you were given to the person on your right, and receive a new prompt from the person on your left.
Pick one of these two options: Either type the new prompt into your document, noting the name of the person who wrote it, and then write for five minutes in response or stick with the first prompt you received and keep writing.
This exercise confirms that advanced comp is, literally, a writing class. It also introduces students to quantum pedagogy by asking them to engage deliberately with both time and writing. At some point during the discussion that follows, I ask: How did that first five minutes of writing feel? What about the second? How do you relate your experience to what you wrote? To how much you wrote (i.e., how many words, how many sentences)? What else stands out to you? As students respond, they evidence how easily we experience as different the same assignment and the same period of time. The snippets they read aloud further nuance and trouble our ideas about the same. I look up, and in my mind’s eye I see a fine line zigzagging across the monolith of received college writing. I squint just a little bit, and the line, really a crack, looks like possibility.
Scene 2
(A montage.)
At least once a week, we dedicate a good fifteen to twenty-five minutes to in-class writing, and I credit the discussions that follow with fast-tracking our formation into a functional, if temporary storytelling organization. In one of his earliest publications on the subject, Boje explains what he means by this term. “In organizations,” he writes, “storytelling is the preferred sense-making currency of human relationships” (1991). Of course, storytelling differs across organizations. In advanced comp, which is a pop-up org with a lifespan of fifteen weeks plus finals, telling stories about writing helps us quickly amass a sense of who we are in relation to each other, time, and writing. We also glean a collective sense of ourselves through our interactions over course materials, including the 9/11 selections and the bad ideas about writing we encounter in Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe’s eponymous collection: rhetoric is synonymous with empty speech (Roberts-Miller 2017), only geniuses can be writers (Edwards and Paz 2017), writers must develop a strong, original voice (Thomas 2017), and the traditional research paper is best (Lockett 2017).
The underlife of the course also contributes, starting with “the private conversations students have with one another, the notes they write to themselves and then scratch out, the things they’re writing when [I] thin[k] they’re taking notes,” and other similar in-class activities (Brooke 1987, 144). There is also spillover. It carries into hallway talk, text messages, and students’ regular or chance meetups in other classes or the student union, at a basketball game or an afterparty. Through the web of such exchanges, they develop more than “their own stances towards class activity” (Brooke 1987, 144). They forge in-jokes, nonce terms, and shared points of reference. They help turn advanced comp into a storytelling organization, and in doing so they shape the immediate context in which they deliver “storytelling-expressive performance[s],” including course assignments (Boje 2012, 254). Along the way, they make and remake college writing as well as their sense of it—and mine.
Scene 3
It’s midterm, and I’m downloading students’ personal archives. When I open them, the first thing I do is skim the selections they’ve chosen for each category. I pay particular attention to the final three: writing you’re proud of, writing that sounds like you, and wildcard. From semester to semester, I see:
A cross-disciplinary range of assigned academic writing
Notes that students have written to themselves by hand and via computer or phone apps
Creative writing, especially poetry, written in the context of coursework, campus groups, and private journaling
Letters and email messages
Memes
PowerPoint presentations
Published and unpublished journalism
Several college application essays
A brochure
An informational website
A timeline
Along with the range of genres and media, the pre-college backtracking stands out to me. In class, students ask if it’s okay to include earlier writing either as its own category or in lieu of college writing they don’t have. There is always someone who has no personal writing—or none that they wish to share, which is fair. Workplace writing stymies others. Often, what students write at work is not theirs, whether they sign nondisclosure forms or write exclusively on proprietary platforms. It’s the students who can’t identify any college writing they are proud of or anything that sounds to themselves like themselves who give me pause. It’s a different kind of crackle and pop I sense as I suggest they fill in the blanks with whatever they’ve got. In response, they select high school writing that won prizes, articles published in school newspapers, and academic writing that earned high grades. At some level, it’s all college writing, and not just the application essays. After all, directly or indirectly it helped each student write their way into college.
To complete their personal archives, students also create categories. Zap! They choose social media writing, uploading screenshots from Twitter and Instagram. They choose email, and in both cases, they take my suggestion and make edits that help them retain their own and their interlocutors’ privacy. Students also pick writing in languages other than English. They choose academic and nonacademic examples in Spanish, Chinese, Polish, French, and Italian; occasionally they choose a computer program or a series of mathematical equations. Their cover letters, which act as finding aids, reveal different undergirding logics for completing the assignment. They offer hints and clues about what I, as a reader and teacher, should attend to. They help me recognize college writing in medias res, as it is being made and remade.
(Lights fade. Stage is reset.)
After each scene there is always another, just as any number of scenes precede the first. Too, for each scene we happen to see, there are countless others playing out simultaneously. Ante-, intra-, ultra-: college writers are always writing, and college writing is always more than we say it is. To be sure, partial ideas have served us well in plenty of situations, and they will continue to do so, not least because “there is no such thing as writing in general” (Wardle 2017, 30). But narrow definitions of college writing are also bad ideas that we can and should work actively to name while, at the same time, we do well to keep learning from students all we can about the ultracurriculum or college writing writ large.
Cue the circus music and the New York City street sounds. Sometimes there’s only a fine line between ground and sky, especially when the stakes are high. And when are they not for college writing, which is continually strung and restrung between retention and graduation rates, measures of ROI, and indicators of students’ success? All the more reason for writing courses to stage occasion after occasion for students to see themselves, their past-present-future selves, as writers. All the more reason for writing educators to stage opportunities—in class, in retrospect, in anticipation—for students to be and feel seen as writers. This, too, is quantum pedagogy. With other rhetorical feminist praxes, it supports writing students’ self-actualization (Glenn 2018, 144), their formation and transformation, along with their increased capacity to act, to make an impact. So, on Day One of Week One in advanced composition the first thing I do after the opening exercise is move students into small groups for introductions. We don’t do the usual recitation of names, ranks, and majors. Instead, I ask students to tell each other their names and the names of the students whose prompts they decided to use. I also ask them to share the prompts themselves and at least one observation about what they wrote in response. When we come together as a full group to rinse and repeat, we are a classroom of writers getting to know each other as such, and there are sparks.
The crackle and pop both illuminates and casts shadows over our sense of whether and how we are the same. It also casts in relief how quickly, how easily college writing spills over the edges of our pre-existing categories and expectations. The prompts students give each other offer roadmaps that are rife with invention. They promise to move us in as many directions as there are students:
Write a letter to your twelve-year old self.
Write about your pet and what they are like.
It’s fifty years in the future and the first day of the end of the world.
Explain the steps to laying down a floor, and give details regarding the materials and acquisition even if you don’t know them.
Write about a time that brings you joy.
If you could travel to the past and change one thing, what would it be and why?
What do you love to do and what do you most desire to explore in life?
This is what happens, or what can, “every time a student sits down to write for us” (Bartholomae 1986, 4). They choose one or more languages, discourses, and genres. They choose letters and words, unless they choose some other symbolic system. They choose who they are, and they choose who we are in relation to them, even when they ignore us or put us under erasure by writing to themselves and to each other. On Day One of Week One, the result is fragments of antenarrtative, genre sketches galore, and associations that span the curriculum and travel far beyond it. From the jump, we are inventing and reinventing college writing.
Once more, cue the music and the noise. The desire for more is what got us into this Pandora situation, or so the story goes. Once upon a time, as if there were such a thing. As if there really were just one time. As if once were enough and that loneliest number didn’t leave us hoping for more. This sense of things, this continuous pull is a source of momentum for quantum pedagogy. It keeps me teaching 9/11, at least for now, and it’s what sets the world of Colum McCann’s great 9/11 novel spinning on its axis. His intricate plotlines co-memorate September 11th via a cast of characters that includes Tillie, a thirty-something grandmother and hooker; Corrigan, an Irish monk; Clare, the Upper Westside wife of a judge; and a basement full of computer hackers in northern California. The novel is set on a single day, August 7, 1974, and the hackers spend much of it cold-calling phone booths in New York City. They grow increasingly intent on getting real-time reports on Philippe Petit, who makes his famous tightrope walk between the Twin Towers that morning. McCann captures the trickiness of timespace travel, even moment to moment, and the conversations that take place between Compton, one of the hackers, and his NYC phone booth interlocutors sound like a game of telephone. “You’re tripping, aren’t you?,” a vox pops in New York asks, before reporting to anyone on the street who will listen: “I got some whackjob on the phone from California. He says the guy’s from Palo Alto. The tightrope walker’s from Palo Alto” (2009, 181).
On 9/11/01, I was just an hour or so north of Palo Alto. I was asleep when my housemate, an arts administrator who was always on the phone with New York, called to wake me up (Fishman forthcoming). It was just weeks before the Class of 2005 started college at Stanford, and it was just months before we invited a random sample of them to join the Stanford Study. It takes me back, even while I look ahead to next fall and the next advanced composition cohort. In an interview, McCann describes the feeling he gets at the top of a project, explaining: “Every time I get to a new novel I feel like I’m in university again” (McCann n.d.). It’s not nostalgia, at least not in a simple sense. It’s more complex, that feeling of holey jeans and having no money, which McCann recalls, or my vivid memory of the answering machine clicking on and the hubbub of the first Stanford Study event. Whatever that is, it’s deeply, deliciously related to what comes after it. It’s that feeling of “Oh boy!” which is what Dr. Sam Beckett said each time he jumped to another life and time on the TV series Quantum Leap. It’s the deep breath in, which comes right before whatever comes next. It’s the feeling that McCann describes, when he observes that “we are funambulists,” and “[t]his is the beauty of story-telling or story-making . . . all those journeys we’ve not yet taken” (McCann n.d.).
Several colleagues shared their time and insight with me while I worked on this essay, including Madi Ernst, Leah Flack, and the RSA CWPAs: Jeff Ringer, Kathryn Valentine, and Kuhio Walters. I am ever-grateful for the always good company of my “cracking dawn” write-on-site comrades, especially founder Stephanie Kerschbaum and WOS regular Ikram Masmoudi. I also appreciate the generous attention that Paul Walker and the reviewers of this piece offered, especially (and very genuinely) Reviewer 2. Advanced composition students, including but not limited to the several whose work I mention, are a continual source of instruction, delight, and surprise. No work that draws on the Stanford Study of Writing would be possible without Andrea A. Lunsford, the extended team of colleagues who lent their creativity and expertise to that project, and the student writers who shared with us a substantial slice of their writing lives from 2001-2006 and, in some cases, well beyond. As for the deep breath in, I and so many others learned from Kate Singletary (13 November 1946 - 23 August 2022).
Jenn Fishman is a college writing educator whose scholarship, teaching, and professional leadership advance writing research, undergraduate research, and community-oriented work in rhetoric and composition/writing studies. A recipient of the Richard Braddock Award, she is the Principal Investigator of three grant-supported research projects. Her publications include Telling Stories: Perspectives on Longitudinal Research, The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies, The Research Exchange Index, and special issues of CCC Online, Peitho, and Community Literacy Journal. Past President of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, she is currently Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Norman H. Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University.
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