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Atwood’s Tourists Visit the Classroom:

The Fictional Border in Freshmen Composition

By E. Mairin Barney

When I first began teaching freshmen composition as a graduate student teacher, I held firmly

to the notion that my job was to teach students how to write well, which for me at that time meant that

students ought to be able to follow the conventions of academic writing and English grammar and to

employ mostly error-free prose. “Critical Thinking” was a stated learning outcome for my course, and

even though I had many heated conversations with the other graduate student teachers about what this

might mean, I rarely found a student in one of my classes who seemed to be able to do it. Some of my

students would read the essays I assigned, and some would even seem to think about what they were

reading, but were they thinking critically? I couldn’t say. Still, I dutifully led my students through the

reader, assigned to all sections of the course, and I dutifully encouraged them to write papers practicing

rhetorical modes. It wasn’t long before I realized that my students’ papers all looked the same. There

was little, if any, distinction between one student’s writing and another’s. They all had similar thesis

statements, which, in the case of “good” students anyway, followed the standard model for a thesis

statement: “My paper will show that first generation immigrants have very different experiences from

their children,” one paper read. Another: “In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan demonstrates how the

generational gap in immigrant communities is very important.” While these statements could be said to

reflect the intentions of the text to which the students were asked to respond, they certainly do not

contain any of the students’ ideas, voice, or perspective. Moreover, if “academic” writing could be said

to stem from individuals with distinct ideas, then my students were not practicing “academic” writing.

The distinctions between my students melted further and further away as the semesters wore on, and

there were no rhetorical modes that seemed to emphasize the student’s own voice, and I had the sense

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that “critical thinking” was connected to “voice” in a significant way that I couldn’t pin down. It was

easy to see, however, that the students who could write at the beginning of the course could still do so

at the end, and the students who couldn’t write at the beginning of the course still couldn’t at the end. I

figured there had to be a way to engage all of my students, to help them discover their own voices and

ideas, regardless of their skill levels coming into my class, and perhaps even to make “critical thinking”

and “academic writing” more than just buzz words on my syllabus, but I did not know what it was. It

never occurred to me when I was struggling through my first teaching experiences in grad school that a

new approach to reading assignments might facilitate an improvement in students’ writing.

It is notable that student ideas that came from class discussion inspired me to reimagine my

approach to teaching. My freshmen composition students read Margaret Atwood’s “Man from Mars,”

supplemented by a selection from Russell Brown’s 1980 essay, “Atwood’s Sacred Wells,” which

examines the tourist as a trope in Atwood’s work, pointing out traits commonly identified with Atwood’s

tourists. They are “estranged from the culture in which they find themselves;” they are “uncomfort-

able,” and they must regularly navigate “unfamiliar patterns of behavior;” when they attend to anything,

“their attention is superficial and brief” (Brown 1-2). Atwood’s fiction is full of tourists, vacationers, and

idle sightseers. These characters come and go, sleep and eat, visit places of historical importance – all

with very little sense of presence or purpose. The foreign man who chases Christine in “Man from

Mars” obviously falls into this category, and I hoped my students would make the connection and

develop an interesting analysis of the text. In class discussion, however, one particular student

surprised me. “Isn’t Christine kind of a tourist, too?” she asked. Christine’s tourist status is less obvious

than the Man’s. She is Canadian – she’s lived in Toronto all her life; her home is not far from campus;

she’s familiar with the public transit system. She is the provider of directions and drawer of maps – so

how could she be considered a “tourist”?

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After a cursory explanation of how Brown’s criteria might apply to Christine, the rest of the

students picked up on the notion that Christine might be a “tourist” at the university or even in life more

generally, and her inability to engage meaningfully in anything results in a lack of efficacy as she begins

her career in government. Christine’s identity as a student is merely a plot device in the story – she

does not think or talk about her studies outside of their context. School merely gives her something to

do: “Christine came out of her last examination feeling depressed. It was not the exam that depressed

her but the fact that it was the last one: it meant the end of the school year. She […] went home early

because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do” (DG 17). Unfortunately for Christine, her academic

life is filled with idle and thoughtless sightseeing. Even in Debating Society, where something like

“critical thinking” might typically be encouraged, Christine does not show evidence either that she is

thinking, or that anyone around her encourages her to do so. The final debate of the academic year

addresses the topic of war: “Resolved: That War Is Obsolete. Her team took the affirmative and won”

(DG 17). If her academic debates are “resolved” from the start, then Christine never has to think about

how to address difficult questions (like war) in real life; she merely needs to locate the preordained

answers and plug them in. She often gets Bs. Her teachers tell her that her work lacks “élan” (DG 18),

and my students notice this, too. In discussion, students chastise Christine for ending her research

project into the Man’s background and the war going on in his country. After poring over magazine

articles and maps related to the war, “finally she had to stop looking at the pictures. It bothered her too

much, it was bad for her; she was beginning to have nightmares” (DG 37). Perhaps forgetting her

winning argument about the obsolescence of war, Christine comforts herself by remembering the Man’s

lack of particularity, which might contribute to his safety: “He would be something nondescript,

something in the background, like herself” (DG 37). Students find themselves angry with Christine’s lack

of confidence, and they comment on her inability to follow through, as well as her low self-esteem.

They explain, “She’s not even trying to succeed because she’s afraid of what she’ll learn about herself.”

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To say that my students surprised me that day would be an understatement. In fact, they

helped me realize that I was part of the problem I had identified in my graduate student teaching days,

that my students’ writing was not interesting, thoughtful, or “good” because I did not encourage them

to write about their own interests and ideas. Their ideas expressed in writing assignments were limited

precisely because I was directing them, and therefore limiting them. “Write about this particular

connection, in these particular texts,” I was telling them. In these situations, what could I hope to get

from my students, except for broken and empty versions of what they thought I wanted them to tell

me?

After reflecting on the thoughtful class discussion about Christine’s status as a tourist, I returned

to Brown’s essay and found that his assessment of Atwood’s concern with tourism works uncannily as a

metaphor for students in Freshmen Composition. Brown argues that the initial state of Atwood’s

tourists is one of alienation, and only through the tourist’s own hard work can she begin to engage

purposefully with her surroundings, and cease getting caught up in the guidebook and memory album

world of textual replicas and mirror images, in which the tourist “prefers replicas and photographs to

the thing itself” (Brown 5). It strikes me that in order to be successful in college, students need to stop

thinking like tourists, who according to Brown, “always see things superficially,” and who suffer from a

“pervasive failure to claim [their] own territory, a failure which inevitably shows up as a failure to assert

identity” (2). In order to do this, the faculty must help them see that the border between student and

scholar is imaginary, help students end the habit of casual sightseeing and finally “claim their own

territory” in the academy. Some students in an academic setting for the first time may find they

sympathize with Christine’s mother, who points out that when dealing with “people from another

culture,” in this case, academic culture, “you could never tell if they were insane or not because their

ways were so different” (DG 32). Indeed, the academic world often seems like a completely separate

culture to first-year students, and acculturation can be a slow process. However, my classroom

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experience tells me that acculturation is possible – by ending the directive, limiting approach many

faculty have historically taken toward student writing, by encouraging thoughtful, independent, and

reflective analysis of short fiction and difficult, academic texts, and by treating student ideas and

experiences as the focus of writing assignments, we can help students begin to think of themselves as

authors and scholars, capable of producing new knowledge. In other words, we need to help our

students put down the guidebook and see things clearly for themselves.

In order to work against this academic tourism, it is not enough to simply switch to literary texts

and hope for the best – we also need to change the attitudes we have toward our students and what we

think they are and are not capable of. It is common practice for instructors to give their students “guide

book” exercises, which are commonly directive and rarely do more than approximate academic work. In

order to get a good grade, students merely need to follow the directions. Rather than finding ways to

think for themselves, even the conscientious students may stop by their teacher’s office with a draft,

asking how to “fix” this paper. In “Between the Drafts,” an essay about finding one’s own voice through

the process of revision, Nancy Sommers uses a guidebook analogy to underscore the problems for

writers who rely on others for direction: “My mother’s AAA guidebook directed us, told us what to see,

how to see it, and how long it should take us to see it. We never stopped anywhere serendipitously,

never lingered, never attempted to know a place” (130). Whether this attitude of faculty as tour guide

comes from a place of intellectual egotism or genuine concern for the ability or lack of ability of our

students, we inadvertently teach students that there are right and wrong ways to think and write,

which, according to Sommers, deprives them of “the freedom of [their] own authority” (131).

Moreover, the faculty-directed approach also seems to inhibit what many of us think of as

“critical thinking.” In Teaching Critical Thinking, bell hooks says, “[Critical thinking] is a way of

approaching ideas that aims to understand core, underlying truths, not simply that superficial truth that

may be most obviously visible” (9). For hooks, there is a close connection between “students’ will to

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think, and their will to be fully self-actualized” (8), which reinforces my presumed connection between

“critical thinking skills” and the development of students’ own voices and ideas. Directive guide book

exercises don’t require students to think, and only reinforce the lesson they learned in high school –

writing is boring, and serves as a test of how well they have mastered the instructor’s ideas imparted in

lecture. For example, summarizing is a useful skill and a necessary first step in any writing project that

engages with a text. However, summarizing should never be the sole purpose of a writing project, and

students should rarely be encouraged to summarize “objectively.” In fact, I often dispense with the

word “summarize” altogether in order to avoid these problematic associations. In Rewriting: How To Do

Things with Texts, Joseph Harris encourages use of the phrase “coming to terms.” Starting with the

premise that “all readings are interested” (15) as opposed to objective, Harris encourages students to

summarize texts in ways that demonstrate “what [their] perspective[s make] visible” (20).

Appropriate use of subjectivity is difficult for students when reading an essay common in

composition courses because the argument and supporting details seem clear and convincing. In these

cases, students often confuse directions to “generate an argument” with disagreement, since they can

see no other way of adding their own opinion. This is where literary texts prove useful. In “The Detail

vs. The Debate: Literature, Argument, and First-Year Writing,” Faye Halpern agrees that short, often

oversimplified, argumentative essays encourage students to enter a pre-established and narrow debate

by relying on counterargument strategies, but literature, which students often view as “either pure

pleasure or pure distraction” (145), allows them to recognize that “phenomena that might not seem

overtly argumentative” or even seems “immune to interpretation” (145) can be interpreted and

debated in order to create meaning and significance, “teaching students how to claim and prove that

one interpretation is better than another” (147). I find “coming to terms” with a literary text can be a

very productive exercise for precisely these reasons; in order to show “what their perspectives make

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visible,” students must establish their own parameters for argumentation, and literature gives them the

space in which to do it.

In these ways, then, literature acts as a “passport” for students who wish to participate more

actively in the critical thinking and creation of knowledge that distinguishes a scholar. When a teacher

begins the term with a difficult literary text, students easily recognize that it provides clues for readers

to decipher. Before class, each student reads and “comes to terms” with the text in writing, providing a

description of what his or her perspective makes visible about the text in question. Throughout

discussion, they recognize the validity of multiple understandings of a given text, and they practice,

often before I tell them to, the art of providing evidence for their readings. From here, it is easy to lead

students into a metadiscussion about the academic practices of argumentation and support. As a group,

we discuss what makes specific moments of the text stand out, and question how students might be

able to more easily recognize salient parts of these texts. They discuss the difference between

experiential and textual evidence, and what each lends to an argument.

Not all literary texts are equally useful, however, and we need to be careful to select texts that

are provocative, texts that allow students to see clearly what was hiding in plain sight all along. In my

experience, Atwood’s fiction is particularly useful in helping students overcome what I’m calling

academic tourism because of her “inversion” technique, noted by Reingard Nischik in “Murder in the

Dark: Margaret Atwood’s Inverse Poetics of Intertextual Minuteness,” in which she argues that Atwood’s

stories undermine “conventional thought patterns, attitudes, values, and textual norms by turning them

on their heads” (6). Students often recognize textual details that work against their learned perceptions

of culture, and they find they need to do more than simply think about what the texts might mean; they

are simultaneously compelled to identify and respond to questions raised by Atwood’s critical portrayals

of cultural conventions. This can be difficult for them, but it is a road worth pursuing. As Brown

reminds us, “Moving through Atwood’s landscapes, we find ourselves among objects that have meaning

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packed into them[…], so that the work itself becomes [a] signpost, pointing out the ‘underground’

realms” (6). Like Atwood’s tourist characters, students may, at first, “get only unsatisfactory glimpses of

these mana-endowed things” (6), but a mere suggestion that the reader might be missing something

keeps students coming back to the text, and in some cases, even competing with one another for the

“best,” most interesting, or most complex reading. In other words, they find they are no longer

satisfied with academic tourism. They want to find the signposts and learn to read them. They make

connections to a previously unidentified bigger picture, which is only discovered through serious

reflection on their own experiences and ideas. In the writing classroom, such reading practices work

best when paired with slow, careful attention to essay building and revision strategies as student think

and re-think, which takes time, but the rewards are manifold for both students and teachers. Writing

about a theme, character, or set of details in isolation often seems (and sometimes is) meaningless, but

making connections to their personal experiences and uncovering important lessons and messages is

interesting, exciting, and even fun. Students are often surprised at how invested they become. They

start to think like scholars, “interpreting signposts” for themselves.

When asked to explain what they see going on in Atwood’s “Happy Endings,” for example,

students may first look for what they believe is the “correct answer;” usually, they see a writer giving

advice about writing, and not much more, but they quickly recognize details that point to more than one

way of understanding the text. Thoughtful students recognize Atwood’s criticism of middle class ideals

to which everyone is supposed to adhere. Some students call this a “social script,” reminiscent of

Nischik’s assessment of Atwood’s work. The scripts that structure John and Mary’s story are each

recognizable to students, either from their own lives or from popular media, and Atwood’s criticism of

these structures is biting. In “B,” Atwood calls into question the Beauty and the Beast narrative, a

“script” with which most students are familiar:

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[Mary’s] friends tell her John is a rat, a pig, a dog, he isn’t good enough for her, but she

can’t believe it. Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. The other

John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if

the first John is only squeezed enough. (HE 69)

Mary doesn’t want to admit that John is really a Beast – “a rat, a pig, a dog” – perhaps because she has

internalized this popular script. Even if it takes them a while to explain how or why Atwood does this,

students can see that this script is paired with evidence of rigid gender roles, heterosexism, and middle

class notions of success and happiness. Atwood uses critical language that’s just obvious enough – these

are the “signposts” Brown mentions.

Mariya, an immigrant student who speaks English as a second language, recognized Mary’s folly

in expecting life to work out according to a preconceived notion of “happiness,” and wrote an essay

about social reliance on unattainable ideals. She writes in a “Coming to Terms” assignment1:

The desire to catch the uncatchable happiness and make it tangible, clear and simple, to

fit it into the socially acceptable and approved shape, to color it safe, to name it an

appropriate name – all this is very human. We walk through our lives with it – and it

looks back to us from the pages of the happy family magazines, from the cinema screens

– with happy people’s life stories. It talks to us through our parents, our neighbors,

through our school teachers - they tell us that when we grow up, we’ll definitely be

happy: we’ll “have worthwhile and remunerative jobs,” a “charming house,” and of

course every John will find his Mary, fall in love and get married, having two kids.

Margaret Atwood in “Happy Endings” identifies this picture-perfect happy trap the

person gets herself into, and how one day real life taps us on the shoulder: John “merely

1 Student texts are used with permission. Students’ names have been changed.

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uses her body for selfish pleasure and ego gratification of a tepid kind,” while Mary

hopes that inside John “there’s another, much nicer John.”

Mariya developed her own writing prompt in class by brainstorming questions about the meaning of

“happiness.” Her feelings of frustration resulting from standing in grocery store lines, face to face with

glossy images of what her mostly American classmates referred to as “the American Dream,”

contributed significantly to her project. (“It’s everyone’s dream,” Mariya insisted in class discussion,

“and Margaret Atwood is Canadian.”) Like much of Atwood’s fiction, “Happy Endings” prompts students

to question social norms. Encouraging students to do so in ways that call on their own experiences

allows them to notice how their own ideas help establish meaning.

My experience with a text like “Happy Endings” demonstrates that literature (and Atwood

especially) allows for discussion about important concepts in composition practice that don’t come up

organically with more traditional essays. As Nischik pointed out, Atwood’s work does not only call social

norms into question, but textual norms as well. For example, the advice for writers that students

identify in their initial reading leads them to question the notion that their essays ought to have a neat

and tidy conclusion – one of many “conventional textual norms” that Atwood’s fiction “turn[s] on its

head” (Nischik 6). The “tell-us-what-you-told-us” model seems quaint, and for some students, silly, after

discussing Atwood’s assertion that the “only authentic ending,” in writing and in life, is death: “You’ll

have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don’t be deluded by any other endings,

they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive

optimism, if not downright sentimentality” (HE 71). What motivates YOUR conclusion? I ask my class.

“Happy Endings” also allows for an engaging discussion about authorial power, language and structure

choices, and audience. Most importantly, the use of literature keeps the discussion focused on student

ideas – about both textual interpretation and concepts like style and tone.

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Many would respond that literary texts in composition-focused courses do not provide students

with adequate examples to imitate. This argument supposes an understanding of writing that I feel is

problematic -- is it the job of the English department, or the University at large, to teach students how

to imitate those authors deemed by this or that professor to exemplify “good writing”? Or is it our job

to train students to participate in a discourse of ideas that is ever-changing? If we adhere to the latter

view of writing as a vibrant, living, social practice that progresses through nuanced consideration of

ideas, then faculty ought to teach composition such that we make a certain amount of room for risk-

taking and even messiness; students can easily understand writing as a means for an author to claim her

own territory, assert her identity, and confidently explain her ideas. This approach helps students

understand writing as a process in which they can take part, and I believe quite strongly that students

may be able to imitate another writer’s process or approach, but they should not be encouraged to

imitate the voice or ideas of other writers.

Class discussions about Atwood’s short fiction also provide a useful context for self-reflection

and allow space for something akin to what I imagine as “critical thinking.” When 24 students in a room

all understand a fictional text differently, it’s easy for them to recognize that they have something to

bring to the conversation, and early in the term, we start trying to identify everyone’s “lens.” I give

regular low-stakes writing assignments asking students to reflect carefully on where their analyses of

texts come from – another reading experience this text reminded them of, an important childhood

lesson, a family relationship, etc, and we talk as a group about how these experiences help us form a

personal way of “reading” and understanding the world around us. In “Unfinished Business: Education

without Necessity,” Richard Smith argues that education is most worthwhile when it is allowed to be

“emotional and embodied” (Smith 477). A personal lens, which students feel is uniquely theirs, gives

them a sense of agency and purpose as they set about the task of making meaning. Smith suggests that

giving students a personal stake in a course “anchors the participants […] as flesh and blood individuals

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and not […] note-takers, brains on trolleys, or examination question spotters” (488). Once identified,

their lens can allow them to read meaning into more than just texts. Students often report interpreting

conversations with family members through their newly discovered “lens,” or even once-passively-

watched TV commercials; these experiences lead me to conclude that encouraging students to develop

and own their ideas results in a higher degree of student success, if success is measured in terms of the

degree of students’ confidence, thoughtfulness, and originality.

While Atwood’s short fiction in the composition course can help students to develop unique

ideas and challenge presuppositions, it is equally important to complicate their initial reactions to

literature with influential and difficult academic essays, which are sometimes but not always related to

the stories we discuss. The next writing project, then, is what Kristin Dombeck and Scott Herndon call

“reading the levels” (37). Students begin with a reflective piece in which they “came to terms” with the

literary text, and later they repeat the same project of “coming to terms” with a challenging academic

text (like Adrienne Rich’s “Notes on a Politics of Location,” Michel Foucault’s “Panopticism,” or bell

hooks’ “The Oppositional Gaze”). In small groups, they must determine how their ideas in the first and

second projects might complicate one another. This work prepares them to write a formal essay, which

as Dombeck and Herndon point out, “teaches them to see that thinking is actually taking place at the

moments they feel most stuck” and “allows them to exploit their lack of authority” (37). This

assignment allows students to interpret texts, challenge those interpretations, and argue for a

perspective that’s based in textual evidence and personal experiences. For me, this assignment

exemplifies a pedagogy that approaches students as if they are budding scholars who have something

interesting to contribute to academic discourse. Rather than perpetuating the notion that I have all the

knowledge, and that my purpose is to fill up their previously empty heads, I try to encourage them to

locate the ideas they already have and develop new ways of thinking that grow logically out of their life

experiences. However, the “reading the levels” assignment can also demonstrate – often much more

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successfully than discrete rhetorical mode or 5-paragraph essays, which do not challenge students – that

they still need significant practice mastering the forms of academic discourse. In other words, their

essays will often be messy, and contrary to prior course goals of “error-free prose,” I go out of my way

to let them take risks and make mistakes in their essays. The emphasis on revision keeps the focus in

each writing project on making authorial choices in order to clarify and develop ideas, rather than

polishing and editing for “correctness.” If the students are thinking about what they write, and writing

about ideas that are truly compelling to them, then they will want to be engaged in a writing process,

and editing will happen more naturally.

Texts are fundamental to the success of this classroom strategy; the reading assignments need

to be complicated, not straightforward, challenging to social norms, but not in predictable ways. These

qualities in a text make critical thinking more than a helpful skill; it’s a necessity. Atwood’s “The Animals

Reject their Names and Things Return to their Origins” from The Tent is just such a text. Atwood

criticizes the act of assigning human meaning to animals based on human-constructed myths, while

simultaneously doing exactly that. The animal characters might be obviously symbolic, or they might

not be, or the whole prose poem could rather be a kind of meditation on the role of language in the

formation of identity, on both a local and global level. Implicating language itself, the bear says, “I take

back what you have stolen,/ and in your languages I announce/ I am now nameless./ My true name is a

growl” (TT 78). Making sense of this text requires students to examine critically their own uses of

language, their own habits of naming. What do they call “normal,” and why? What do they take for

granted? How might others see things?

In a “reading the levels” project dealing with this text, another student, Erin, demonstrates what

I consider “critical thinking.” In this essay, Erin, who self-identifies as a Black lesbian, explores the

limitations of traditional gender identification using bell hooks’ theory of “The Oppositional Gaze.” She

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analyzes the animals’ rejection of their socially assigned roles using hooks’ advice that Black women

“assert agency by […] cultivating awareness of politicized looking relations” (hooks 208). Erin writes:

Bear is the first […] to assert agency; he states that he will not be any definition that

society has “pinned on” him. He says, “I’m not your coat, rug, glass-eyed trophy head/

[…] and that’s not me/ in outer space with my spangled cub.” Bear wants to rid himself

of society’s stamps, whose ink covers his soul and possesses it as if it were not his own.

These categories are society’s way of claiming individuals in order to control them. […]

How is this justifiable? Perhaps we feel a need for such categories. Perhaps we comply

because we fear that without this control, the world might unravel, just as “the

sweaters wound back into their balls of wool.” [TT 78-79]

This brief excerpt contains a clear example of two things that are important to me in a freshmen

composition course. First and most importantly, the piece demonstrates the student’s own ideas and

preoccupations, which came up repeatedly in class discussions. Erin’s responses to texts were always

rooted in her personal experiences of social inequalities, especially regarding the acceptance and/or

rejection of her sexual identity. What I find most interesting, however, is Erin’s answer to her own

question, “how is this justifiable?” She complicates her original response to the poem by interpreting

textual evidence that doesn’t seem to fit her analysis: “perhaps we feel a need for such categories.”

When Erin cites the line in which “the sweaters wound back into their balls of wool,” she’s calling

attention to the fact that, despite her dislike of the categories she so often criticizes, they might exist for

a reason. If the reason can be discovered and articulated, then Erin, a sociology major, might be in a

position to do something about them. Traditional compare/contrast essays rarely encourage students

to look beyond the similarities and differences of two texts, but Erin clearly pushes beyond comparison

of Atwood and hooks to examine the implications of her own thinking, resulting in a complex reading of

a text, which requires engagement and commitment to revision on her part.

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In teaching students about personal, competing interpretations of literature, we also teach

them to reflect on who they are and how their identities and backgrounds influence their interaction

with the world – the beginning of what I would call “critical thinking.” This is precisely the value of

Atwood in the classroom, according to Brown, who argues that her work warns us against being a tourist

who “accept[s] the surface” while remaining “blind to the depths” (10). Education, then, can operate as

a talisman against “the danger that we will only see the thingness of things,” and its purpose is to

“struggle against being caught in a world of dead and dying objects” (7). To live an academic life is to

plumb the depths for meaning and not come up completely empty handed. In other words, one key to

academic success might be learning to reflect on and make sense of one’s own experiences with a

critical eye. From this perspective, everyone is both a student and a scholar at all times. There is no

border for the tourist to cross; she must simply stop thinking of herself as a “tourist.”

I am certainly not suggesting here that all students will develop a unique voice or set of ideas

that will contribute usefully or productively to the academy or society at large, but I believe they are

much more likely to be able to do so if we give them room to experiment with language and ideas that

are meaningful to them. Faculty should strive to avoid the insinuation that students are insignificant –

tourists in academe – which students can intuit through the nature of petty and meaningless writing

assignments or through the subtle, destructive power relationships in the classroom, as noted by

Richard Smith, that present the instructor as the knowledge salesman, while the student remains a

“passive consumer” (Smith 489). The work we give our students must demonstrate our respect for both

their ideas and their right to express those ideas. Difficult, meaningful work focused on their ideas and

experiences, supplemented and complicated by texts that are important to academic professionals,

provides this outlet. This approach gives students the space and freedom not only to learn what they

think but also how to analyze, convey, and revise their ideas. Sometimes, this work starts from notion

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that they cannot accomplish what I’m asking them to do, but once they overcome this notion, they

produce texts that their peers find both interesting and useful.

To make this model work well, an instructor must also think of herself as a student – capable of

learning from each of the vibrant minds in the classroom. If we agree that the “border” between

student and scholar is a fiction, then faculty complacency is as much a danger to students’ academic

development as their own “tourist” mentality. Maintaining our curiosity, a willingness to learn from our

students, will be our own talisman against boring student papers and the trend toward dumbing it

down. The goal of writing-intensive courses should be to encourage students to put their ideas on

paper and own them. Let them know that not everyone will like what they say, but the question they

need to worry about is whether or not they are being honest with themselves. Part of identifying as a

scholar is to think of oneself as an intelligent person with important ideas to contribute. If a student is

treated like her ideas don’t matter, or like the instructor is more concerned with her comma mistakes

than the interesting ideas she risks stating in a given paper, then that student will have difficulty finding

a personal stake in her own writing.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Atwood, Margaret. “Happy Endings.” The Story and Its Writer. Ann Charters, ed. Sixth Edition.

Bedford/St. Martin, 2003.

----. “Man From Mars.” Dancing Girls and Other Stories. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1982.

----. “The Animals Reject their Names and Things Return to Their Origins.” The Tent. New York:

Doubleday, 2006.

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” Teaching Composition. T.R. Johnson and Shirley

Morahan, eds. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002: 73-100.

Brown, Russell M. “Atwood’s Sacred Wells.” Essays on Canadian Writing. (Spring 1980): page numbers

unavailable.

Dombek, Kristin and Scott Herndon. Critical Passages: Teaching the Transition to College Composition.

New York: Teachers College Press, 2004.

17

Graff, Gerald and Andrew Hoberek. “Opinion: Hiding It from the Kids (With Apologies to Simon and

Garfunkel).” College English. 62.2 (Nov 1999): 242-254.

Halpern, Faye. “The Detail versus the Debate: Literature, Argument, and First-Year Writing.” Integrating

Literature and Writing Instruction. Judith H. Anderson and Christine R. Farris, eds. New York:

Modern Language Association, 2007: 135-149.

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts. Logan: Utah State UP, 2006.

hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge, 2010.

----. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Reina

Lewis and Sara Mills, eds. New York: Routledge, 2003: 207-221.

Moneyhun, Clyde. “Literary Texts as Primers in Meaning Making.” Integrating Literature and Writing

Instruction. Judith H. Anderson and Christine R. Farris, eds. New York: Modern Language

Association, 2007: 211-230.

Nischik, Reingard M. “Murder in the Dark: Margaret Atwood’s Inverse Poetics of Intertextual

Minuteness.” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassins: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Sharon Rose

Wilson, ed. The Ohio State UP, 2003: 1-17.

Smith, Richard. “Unfinished Business: education without necessity.” Teaching in Higher Education. 8.4

(2003): 477-491.

Sommers, Nancy. “Between the Drafts.” Composing Knowledge. Rolf Norgaard, ed. New York:

Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.