Julianne Newmark

"Connecting Composition Students to Zitkala-Sa through WAC: From Her 'School Days' to Theirs"

Abstract: This paper offers methods for teaching Zitkala-Sa’s accounts of her boarding school experience to undergraduate students in the first- and second-year composition classroom, drawn from my teaching experiences at two large state universities, Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. While these two institutions have many differences, my experiences teaching Zitkala-Sa’s autobiographical accounts have been similar. First- and second-year students are generally unaware of the history of forced assimilation to which Native school children were long subjected; additionally, my students have never heard of Zitkala-Sa. To surmount these challenges and to create a rewarding learning experience, I provide my students with a historical context for Zitkala-Sa’s narratives and I pair the autobiographical accounts with other pertinent writings of their day, particularly, and most dramatically for my students, with the text of the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act and Henry Dawes’s 1899 Atlantic Monthly essay “Have We Failed with the Indian?”

In this paper, I argue that a “Writing Across Communities” pedagogy is particularly appropriate and effective to teach this material, as in this “new” version of WAC (an acronym that most recognizably stands for Writing Across the Curriculum) both community and writing become simultaneously implicit and explicit in classroom practices. Zitkala-Sa’s boarding school narratives, taught alongside other historical documents and essays, teach students in the writing classroom about the fraught history of formalized and forced Euro-American education of Native students. But my students do more than learn about Zitkala-Sa, Henry Dawes, and the Dawes Era; students learn strategies of negotiation and revision and come to appreciate their new classroom community, within which we build a “writing community.” My experience here at New Mexico Tech has indicated that Tech students, as well, benefit from community-centered approaches to writing that attend to disciplinary genres and a writing-to-learn philosophy.