Theory and practice

A Bad Taste in My Mouth: 

How Prior Experiences and Knowledge Affect Students

Bad Broccoli: How Greens Made Me Blue

One childhood Sunday of mine, I sat at the dinner table with the breeze from the open dining room window ruffling a grocery bag of snack cakes that hung from the chair next to me. It was possibly the most temptation-filled moment of my seven-year-old life, but my mother kept a close eye on me as she stirred the stir-fry on the stove. Pretty soon, there was a plate of chow mein, water chestnuts, carrots, and far too much broccoli in front of me. It seemed as though Mom had given me all the broccoli, in fact, and I practically gagged every time I had to take a bite with her stern eyes watching me. The proximity of the frosted creme cakes didn’t do the sulfuric greens any favors in my mind either. So, I finished the meal dreaming of what could be filling my belly instead; that was the case with many of my meals growing up. 

My mother’s good intentions didn’t stop me from hating broccoli. As I got older, I would shiver a little inside whenever I saw waiters walk by with it on their big, metal trays; I would always choose the french fries as my side; I would walk past the frozen bags of vegetables in the store and never even look back. I could not separate broccoli from my memories of unappealing forkfuls of the stuff. It left a bad taste in my mouth. 

What Does This Have to Do With Theory?

The experiences we have inform other experiences. Angela A. Lunsford points out that this, too, happens with writing (54). This means that, unfortunately for some people, writing happens to be their childhood broccoli—at least to some degree. The many red-marked essays, the formulaic rigidity of five-paragraph themes, and the hand cramps from writing lines after misbehaving all start to mix together in a big, unappetizing dish that can stain memory and the present all at once. Lunsford describes her study in which she “asked people all over the United States to recall their earliest memories of writing”; she found many of the participants’ “prior experience with writing had been negative, and this attitude and these feelings went with them throughout their lives so that they dreaded writing or felt inadequate when faced with a writing task” (54).  

One immediate takeaway from Lunsford’s words is that what we do in the classroom lingers—for better or worse. Of course, as a future college English instructor, my students will have already had their own formative writing experiences, and there’s no changing the past for them. Thankfully, it is possible to help them form new associations and create encouraging spaces that can help them along on their journey to become less intimidated and more effective writers. Lunsford herself says that “prior experiences can be mitigated or changed, and that often happens as writers become more confident or encounter more positive experiences with writing” (54). Eventually, I started seeing menu-pictures of broccoli sides that looked a little more inviting; my friends would order well-seasoned florets and convince me they were actually tasty; I tried a parmesan-crusted bite of broccoli bake that didn’t make me feel sick. Things started to change, at least a little bit, and I knew I could handle the whole being healthier thing. 

What happens when students start to feel better about writing in these scenarios, then, is that they start to let go of this idea that writing is only ever what and how they knew it to be. Writing is not one form or act—it isn’t even a few forms or acts—because writing is something that is impacted by “histories, processes, and identities” of individual writers (Yancey 52). Factors like audience and context can change across time and across genres as well, so it is best for students to learn to focus on rhetorical situation when writing instead of on paragraph counting. Students’ writing situations are, after all, as unique as they are. Of course, while the standardization of writing as whole is something to avoid suggesting or enforcing in the classroom (we have to let go of the five-paragraph essay), there must be some criteria established for assuring progress and pinpointing what successful writing looks like in certain areas. Some of the most notable versions of these criteria come in the form of genre conventions.  

As I mentioned in a previous post, writing is always a conversation that transcends time and space. Part of the reason for this is that genre conventions inform the writers of today while simultaneously shifting with them and their ever-morphing needs. The way one student goes about writing a poem, for example, probably stems from what they have observed in the poems of the past and present that they have encountered. Walt Whitman and Tiana Clark might as well be whispering in the young poet’s ear about line breaks and imagery. In other words, students and writers use what prior knowledge they have in order to complete tasks, and the genre conventions students think they’ve observed are part of that prior knowledge that can really come in handy. When I started to really eat broccoli of my own free will, I knew I could eat it with cheese and probably like the taste and not get funny looks from the people around me. I had prior knowledge that this was an acceptable thing. What I didn’t dare to do, though, is eat it with chocolate sauce instead. Not only did this not match the conventions of eating broccoli for health and enjoyment, but it would also have earned me some disturbed stares at the Golden Corral. 

Some forms of prior knowledge are clearly not as applicable or helpful as others. One of the main principles in the pedagogical textbook How Learning Works does, after all, state that “[s]tudents’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning” (Lovett et al. 42). So, how can educators best handle the ways in which prior knowledge and experiences influence students in multiple ways, especially regarding more negative associations?

Practice: Negative to Positive

In my time at the KSU Writing Center, I have looked over many a literacy narrative. This sort of assignment usually asks students to write a personal narrative essay about their own experiences as readers and writers—usually ones that changed their views of reading and writing for the better. I think that a slight alteration to this could serve the dual purpose of helping instructors assess students’ negative experiences with writing and also enforcing some more genre-focused standards that students can take note of alternatively to the five-paragraph essay. 

I propose that students write about a negative experience they had with writing or reading and then reflect on why that experience was negative. The instructor could then use this essay to help propel students into a more positive headspace for writing by directly addressing these negative sets of negative prior knowledge. The students would also be given more freedom for creativity within a narrative essay, and they would form new connections with writing and how it can vary within genres like this one. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to enjoy a nice broccoli salad.