Expressivist Pedagogy: Re-conceptualizing Writing through Narratives of Self in a Postsecondary Writing Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What magic transpires when we give our academic experiences a personal tongue? This research sought to unravel the alternative knowledges spawned through heretical texts when students begin to trust their own experiences to lead them to meaning. To understand this, I taught and observed an Expressive Writing classroom at an Arts College in Lahore, Pakistan. I specifically wanted to explore: 1) How do students re-conceptualize writing after taking a course built on expressivist principles? 2) How does student writing change over the course using a rhetorical analysis as a guiding framework? and 3) How do student writers respond to an expressivist pedagogy? Using a narrative action oriented case study design, I collected data through semi-structured interviews with two participants, student writings, classroom observations, reflexive diary and exit tickets gathered from all students enrolled in the course. The study showed that students re-conceptualized writing as dialectical, relational, communal, situated, liberating, intuitive and transformative. Students took control of their narratives, wrote for a real audience in conversations with one another, started to understand life through the stories they chose to tell, developed their own voice/s in the midst of others, and saw their own lives as sources of meaning. Knowledge was no longer conceptualized as some elusive entity “over there,” external from them. Overall, the writing workshop model of the course was a palatable experience for the majority of students while some found that writing in discourse communities felt disconcerting. Student writing displayed a preliminary understanding of rhetorical conventions (discrepancy between defining good writing and writing good writing) and contained resonant passages (writings with added presence) of gendered rhetoric typifying Shock Expressive Writing—deeply visceral writing which shocks the reader into revisionism, meta-transcendence and/or alternative thinking through authentic expression. Based on the findings of this action research, implications include recommendations for teachers who want to teach expressive writing which centers indigeneity, decolonizes writing pedagogy, and is rooted in holistic education and a pedagogy of love (bridging the gap between the academic and the heart). Concomitantly, this study also makes a case for the language of love—a novelty—to permeate academia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".