The role of imagination in education is sometimes underestimated by teachers and researchers even though it can produce significant social and educational outcomes in classrooms. However, facilitating, channeling, and sustaining imagination for productive outcomes involves considerable work. In this panel, the speakers demonstrate the performative value of literacy narratives. Literacy narratives are sometimes treated as “pedagogy-lite” as teachers prefer to train students on high-stake genres of writing (see the debates in the 2003 special topic issue of College English). However, creativity, imagination, and play have significant implications for students’ social, psychological, and educational development. After the ground breaking 2002 article by Deborah Brandt and Kate Clinton “Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice,” teachers and researchers have turned their attention to the performative side of writing. Rather than solely being a representation of one’s language development, literacy narratives can clarify one’s vision and pathways, resolve ideological conflicts, develop an empowered self, construct new identities, and develop resistant knowledge and skills (see Suresh Canagarajah’s 2020 Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing). In addition to such social and psychological benefits, literacy narratives can help students renegotiate grammatical and writing conventions, develop a metacognitive awareness of dominant norms, and find spaces to represent their voices effectively. These functions of literacy narratives are especially valuable for minoritized and multilingual students who feel overwhelmed or alienated by the communicative norms of the academy. The presenters merge their roles as teachers and researchers to articulate how they labored to set up learning environments, construct pedagogical activities, and interact with students to facilitate these writing outcomes. While doing so, their work yielded for themselves perspectives on entrenched educational power structures, an understanding of the intercultural barriers students face, and insights into their own unrecognized biases. This panel provides three perspectives on the ways in which imagination performs serious educational, social, and psychological work through the writing of literacy narratives.

Speaker 1, in “Literacy Narratives, Creativity, and Critique: Insights From Neuroscience Research,” will argue that literacy narratives enable students to resolve past and present identities and to construct future personal and cultural possibilities. Drawing from research in neuroscience, in particular the work of Sebastian Seung in Connectome: How the Brain’s wiring Makes Us Who We Are (2012) and Susan Greenfield in You and me: The Neuroscience of Identity (2011), Speaker 1 will suggest that recalling “stories” of literacy acquisition can help students gain awareness of past identities, which can enable them to recognize their potential to succeed as they negotiate unfamiliar academic demands. As Greenfield explains, experiences can be viewed in terms of narrative or stories, which are registered directly in the brain when we recall different roles within these stories. Speaker 2, in “Decolonizing Literacies Through Imaginative Writing,” will draw from the postcolonial perspective on autoethnographies as speaking back to power (as Mary Louise Pratt defines it in her 1991 article on contact zones) to discuss how multilingual students’ writing led to critiquing dominant academic ideologies. The serial drafting and teacher and peer feedback led to critical reflections on norms, motivating students to mesh vernacular Englishes and heritage languages in their writing, and to redefine their understanding of literacy. Speaker 3, in “More Like Ellipses than Periods: Experimentation and Play in Audio Literacy Narratives,” demonstrates how audio literacy narratives provide students with the opportunity to break free from certain conventions of alphabetic reading and writing (critiqued by Damián Baca in his 2009 article “Rethinking Composition, Five Hundred Years Later”) by considering a broad range of literacy practices. As a result, they offer writers the chance to demystify literacy norms and develop more complex views of writing and identity.

The Presider will open by setting the scene on controversies relating to the role of creative writing and imaginative classroom activities in academic writing programs. After his 4 minute introduction, each panelist will speak for 12 minutes each on their classroom experiences. For the remaining 20 minutes, the panelists will answer questions, elicit from the audience their experiences with literacy narratives, and share pedagogical strategies that can generate beneficial outcomes for teachers and students.