Category: Narrative and Pedagogy
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Category Description: While its primary focus is on writing and rhetoric pedagogy, this category takes a broad approach to applying narrative in any pedagogical stage and context. Sources in this category consider how storytelling can be incorporated into assignments, used as a classroom activity, used as a reflective tool for instructors, and more. Some sources also consider narrative's implications for marginalized students as well as justice-centered pedagogy.
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Sources
Annotation: Revision sometimes seems more metaphor than real, having been variously described as a stage, an act of goal setting, a method of correction, a process of discovery, a form of resistance. Revising Moves makes a significant contribution to writing theory by collecting stories of revision that honor revision’s vitality and immerse readers in rooms, life circumstances, and scenes where revision comes to life.
In these narrative-driven essays written by a wide range of writing professionals, Revising Moves describes revision as a messy, generative, and often collaborative act. These meditations reveal how revision is both a micro practice tracked by textual change and a macro phenomenon rooted in family life, institutional culture, identity commitments, and political and social upheaval. Contributors depict revision as a holistic undertaking and a radically contextualized, distributed practice that showcases its relationality to everything else. Authors share their revision processes when creating scholarly works, institutional and self-promoting documents, and creative projects. Through narrative the volume opens a window to what is often unseen in a finished text: months or years of work, life events that disrupt or alter writing plans, multiple draft changes, questions about writerly identity and positionality, layers of (sometimes contradictory) feedback, and much more.
Positionality Statement: I am one of the editors of this book, which interestingly did not initially feature "story" as prominently as it ultimately does. The editorial team came to this project thinking about how to *show* revision through screen shots, track changes, multiple drafts, and so forth. Once we received proposals and then chapter drafts, however, we began to find ourselves really taken by the stories of revision our contributors were telling. We realized that story is *showing* in ways we hadn't fully acknowledged early on. I think readers will find themselves somewhere in this book, whether graduate students navigating the peer review process for the first time, parents balancing life with writing and administration, faculty of color accessing their power, or veteran scholars working through a concept or idea over a period of years. The stories in this book are about revising writing as much as they are about revising one's personal and professional sense of self.
Annotation: Minds Made for Stories is a great resource for those students or teachers who are new to the idea of viewing writing as narrative in the classroom. Newkirk first defends the idea that all writing is storytelling (see Walter Fisher's work for more on this), then gives examples of storytelling within different genres. He includes classroom activity ideas as well as discussion questions. The book is extremely friendly and readable while still providing research-based insights.
Positionality Statement: My interest is storytelling within the classroom--specifically, writing as storytelling within the classroom--so I was very excited to discover this resource. I'm using this book in my own classrooms in order to support a storytelling-themed course which I hope to research. All of that leads me to view this source very favorably, as I already accepted the main premise of the book (all writing is storytelling). Those who do not accept that premise may or may not find the evidence he provides persuasive.
Contributor: Caylie Cox (
caylie.cox@tcu.edu) contributed this source citation on February 27, 2025.
