Douglas Haynes Assistant Professor of English University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

1. Personal Narrative Writing as a Tool for Cross-Cultural, Service Learning in Nicaragua and Beyond Douglas Haynes Assistant Professor of English University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

2. The Course:Travel Writing in Nicaragua • Three week study of the practice and theory of writing personal narratives based on immersion in Nicaraguan culture (including home-stays and regular collaborative work with Nicaraguans). • Before departure, we discuss personal narratives by non-Nicaraguans about Nicaragua; critical theory about travel writing and representation of the Other; and craft texts about journaling, interviewing, participant observation, and composing and structuring personal narratives.

3. The sites: Managua & La Paz de Carazo • Two community development projects supported by Compas de Nicaragua, a New Hampshire-based non-profit organization (www.compas1.org). • In Managua, students work with Women in Action, a community center serving a settlement of very low-income, mostly single mothers. • In La Paz, students work with an agricultural cooperative called Brothers & Sisters in Reconciliation, installing bio-gas stoves for cooperative and community members.

8. Course Learning Goals • Create a clear, descriptive, and detailed written narrative rooted in personal experience and knowledge of the techniques and particular problems of travel writing. • Understand ethnic, class, and gender-based critiques of travel writing. • Enact a self-reflective, participatory research process that includes experiential learning and collaboration with study abroad site residents. • Demonstrate cultural self-awareness and a more nuanced understanding of multiple worldviews, communication styles, and ways of living.

9. How Personal Narrative Writing Helps Accomplish Cross-Cultural Learning Goals • Before departure, it helps students become more self-aware about their own culture and their preconceptions of the foreign culture they will be immersed in. • While traveling, it helps students document and reflect on how they perceive the place and culture they’re immersed in.

10. Personal narrative writing helps students document and reflect on how their home place and culture appear different from the point of view of their immersion in a foreign culture. • After returning home, it helps students represent their foreign experiences more accurately and self-reflectively to people in their home culture. • It also provides a way to better understand and chart how students’ perceptions of their home culture have changed.

11. Kinds of Personal Writing that Promote Cross-Cultural Learning • Writing that requires students to talk to and spend time with people in their host site. • Writing that documents and imagines how students and their home culture are perceived by people in their host countries. • Writing that requires students to not just document what they see and do, but also what they feel and think.

12. Writing that requires students to break down divisions between them and their host culture by not using the 3rd person (they/them) when describing people in their host culture. • Writing that portrays dialogue between cultures (exchange of information and values). • Writing that is full of sensory details, quotes, and conversations.

13. Writing Coursework • Journaling/blogging: cultivates self-awareness and observational skills by documenting both internal and external experiences in detail. • Personal narrative essay: makes observations and reflections meaningful and accessible to outside audiences through story-telling. • Self-evaluation: re-connects students to the course learning goals and asks them to assess their progress in achieving them.

14. Daily Journal Process • Daily journal entries in multiple formats (double-entry/ freewrite/ clustering/ lists/ sketching/ collaborative entries with hosts). • Prompts as tools for reflection on specific moments. • In-class scene writing and field site summary. • Regular response to three organizing questions: What surprised me? What intrigued me? What disturbed me?

15. Daily Journal Entry Characteristics • Date, time, and place of observation. • Specific facts, numbers, sensory details. • Quoted words, phrases, conversations. • Questions for future investigation. • Self-reflection on the act of journaling and host perception of it.

16. Personal Narrative Essay Process • Students discover themes by reading their journals and marking related passages. • Students identify personal questions and internal changes that arose during their immersion. e.g. Little did I know that when I left my house, home and loved ones to travel abroad, I would find another home and family and find myself struggling to return to the place I originally called home. This idea led me to question the concept of home: Where is it? Why do we feel compelled to return to it? Is it a physical place or a feeling? --Natalee Kasmiskie

17. Students build scenes (rooted in a specific time and place with specific characters), around journal passages that show how they changed and began resolving their personal questions. e.g. Miurel told us that she would very much like to see the U.S. and the Statue of Liberty in Nueva York. She had the same eyes as her mother and her brother; big, brown, and hopeful. I told her with the same hopefulness that I would love to return to La Paz. The morning after this conversation I began to process what had happened. ‘Until that point,” my journal tells me, ‘I was happy that I got to leave. But then I realized I can’t bring my Nicaraguan family to the U.S., nor will they probably ever travel to my home’ . . . Muriel taught me that this is her home, that she cannot just pack her bags like I can, and that the people you surround yourself with make up the place you call home.” --Natalee Kasmiskie .

18. Self-Evaluation Process On the last day of class, I ask students to respond in writing to the following questions: • What did you learn about U.S. culture and how it has produced your own values and worldview? • How did U.S. culture affect how you viewed and interacted with Nicaraguans? • How was your research self-reflective and participatory? How did you collaborate with people to gather information and insights?

19. What Students Learned About U.S. Culture and How it Shapes Them • I realized that . . . I’m focused on being a consumer to do things, that is what my culture has taught me. When we played soccer [in La Paz] I noticed that their ball was a basketball and it was half-deflated. They didn’t see the ball and think ‘I can’t play soccer until I get a new soccer ball.’ In the U.S., I would have told my children to wait to play until I could buy them a new soccer ball. --Laura Leyh • I didn’t just step into another national culture; I stepped into an educational culture that is different, too. . . [In the U.S. educational system] more emphasis should be put on writing as a way to serve, and learn from, the supposedly uninformed. --Adam Woods

20. How U.S. Culture Shaped Student Response to Nicaraguans • It was difficult to break down the boundaries that my culture had created for me. I was initially very untrusting of [Nicaraguan] men, not knowing if they were genuinely interested in speaking with me . . . Over time the cat calls and stares began to be less distracting. --Ashley Beyer • I feel the need, from my shame over having a more privileged and secure life, to represent the Nicaraguans as one dimensional . . . only the positive side. But I’d be dehumanizing them to represent their lives as worse or to represent them as simply their best attributes . . . we didn’t see as much of the frustration the Nicaraguans feel in daily life because we changed their daily life with our presence. --Chris Mayer

21. How Student Research was Participatory & Collaborative • Spending a day with a member of Women in Action and living with a host family gave me the chance to observe the way people talk and interact with one another. I noticed what they valued by their daily activities. --Elise Stuebs • Some of the best insights I got came when I talked with Harry Wilson, caretaker of the Women in Action Center. He told me his life story . . . Talking several times with him gave me a new look at the power of a government, especially in poorer nations. --Seth Heeter • I used the group I traveled with as sources . . . I hope to continue mulling over what changes happened to us, because what they share with me reflects on my experiences. --Natalee Kasmiskie

22. Ways to Use Writing to Continue Cross-Cultural Learning and Collaboration • Revising and publishing essays. • Contributing excerpts from student journals and essays to study abroad host organization newsletters and websites. • Sharing student writing at meetings of host organizations and families. • Including reading of student writing at fundraising/awareness-raising events on campus and in U.S. home communities.

23. Resources • Fieldworking: Reading & Writing Research. Bonnie Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater. 3rd edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. • Methods For Teaching Travel Literature And Writing: Exploring The World And Self. Eileen Groom. Peter Lang, 2005. • The Other. Ryszard Kapuscinski. Verso, 2009.

24. Resources • Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Eds. Mark Kramer & Wendy Call. Plume, 2007. • Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan. U of Michigan Press, 2000.

25. The Writing Process Connects People Across Cultures & Bears Witness