For me, the teaching of writing begins with the recognition that the identities students’ possess and the experiences that inform those identities are, as Nancy Sommers artfully articulates, the “dictionaries of
their lives” – the lens through which they interpret and navigate the world, and, by extension, the writing they produce (425).  In this view, students themselves are sources for writing, as legitimate and worthwhile as any piece of external scholarship, and the traditional either/or dichotomy of academic or personal writing gives way to the realization that academic writing is intrinsically and inescapably personal. At the risk of sounding mawkish, therefore, I view writing and the teaching of writing as practices that should be liberating, empowering, affirming, and always, always grounded in a student’s sense of self.  
 

To facilitate these emancipatory possibilities among the students I teach, I encourage students to consider their histories, passions, and long-term aspirations as springboards for academic inquiry. As an example, in my Fall 2018 “Academic Writing and Research” course, I asked students to compose a literacy and learning narrative as their first major assignment, wherein they were tasked with defining who they are now, who they would like to be in the future, how their literacy and learning experiences shaped both, and what they might need to learn about in order to become the person they aspire to be. In explicitly connecting learning to identity construction, students begin to understand and demonstrate that learning and knowledge begins, first and foremost, with themselves – that they are the catalysts for academic inquiry. The essays they composed were accordingly reflective of both academic and personal writing, and the insights they gleaned about themselves helped students brainstorm topics for future course projects.

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As a way to further engage students’ experiences and interests as resources for writing, I likewise strive to integrate opportunities for students to both compose multimodally and analyze multimodal compositions, especially since texts composed exclusively via word processors are not the only or even primary compositions that proliferate today. For this reason, my students and I unpack the rhetorical choices that inform multimodal compositions such as memes, advertisements, news stories, and music videos, and we consider the various ways in which these rhetorical choices impact us and others. In so doing, I believe students become better engaged members of society, capable of understanding, analyzing, and responding to the texts they encounter both within and beyond the academy. Ultimately, it is through this critical engagement that I believe students can effect positive change as they advocate, not only in the interest of furthering themselves, but on behalf of others as well.