Shoukr, Ahmed

10/19/15
Narratives and Pedagogy
In Its time for class: toward a more complex pedagogy of narrative, Amy E. Robillard
recounts her personal experiences, focusing on her childhood, growing up with her four siblings
and a single mother who had an obsession with time. In her essay, Robillard explores personality
in academic writing to establish that there are different ways of conceiving of time and that
these different ways of conceiving of time are class-based (75). These different ways of
conceiving of time reflect the different values people have as they grow up from different
backgrounds. Moreover, Robillard uses a vulnerable, yet authoritative tone in order to appeal
more personally to her audience in academia, which is mainly composed of teachers and
students. Additionally, she supports her argument through a variety of authors that talk about
personality writing in academics that agree with her assertions and analysis. Therefore, Robillard
uses a variety of rhetorical tools to promote the merits of narrative in academic writing ranging
from her discussing her own experiences to discussing the points of view of other authors.
Robillard begins her essay with discussing the problems of the todays world, describing
its context as increasingly individualistic. She believes personal writing in academics can help
students have a stable ethical and moral footing that allows them to do the right thing whenever
possible. In addition, students can become more class-conscious and self-aware as they develop
more coherent narratives. However, Robillard understands why teachers may choose not to have
students write about their background in academics but she believes their logic is inherently
false. To exemplify, teachers believe that if our students have come this far, inching their way
toward the middle class of the University; why not use this opportunity to help them move a little

bit closer? Why not instill the values of middle class, values like delay gratification and
punctuality (88)? Therefore, teachers choose to not pay attention to students narratives as much
as they try to help them gain new ones. However, Robillard believes by consistently leaving
narrative out of academic writing, we will continue to marginalize the possibilities for workingclass students to develop an understanding of why things happen, their consequences, their
material results in the present (76). As a result of students lacking a coherent narrative, they will
not have a good understanding or connection to the values they grow up learning.
Correspondingly, students would be able to give up their affiliation with their previous class,
giving up core values they grow up with and learn as children. If this could occur, then how can
they be expected to keep any new values they learn as adults in higher education? Robillard
writes during a time where a fast-growing capitalist economy often forces people to do things
outside of their comfort zone to keep pace with everyone else. For example, I used to work at
Frys Electronics as a computer salesman where I gave many customers terrible deals including
computers I knew would not last, performance service contracts that rarely apply, and other items
costumers did not need. Customers come and leave spending more than double what they came
to spend and somehow feel good about it when in reality they got screwed and I came out with a
lot of commission. Making all of those deals made me feel confused because I was not sure if I
was doing the right thing since that is how the system is set up. I took a few hours to simply sit
down and write about my past, all of the people that Ive met and have influenced me in a
significant way, and many of the lessons I have learned throughout this whole time. I eventually
decided to quit my job because it did not embody the values that I grew up learning to be a good
person and offer my help without hesitation to anyone who showed they need it. Robillard argues
that writing a narrative about oneself could help them solve ethical dilemmas they face in their

future and avoid many mistakes because they have a clearer understanding of time, how they fit
in it, and a clear relationship to core values and ethics.
Robillard is addressing a diverse population of people in academia, including teachers
and students from various backgrounds and social classes. Granted, Robillard understands the
culture in academics that papers must be thoughtful, well articulated, and push students hard
towards their writing limits. Therefore, Robillard attempts to change this culture by educating
teachers specifically on the complexity of writing narratives, as they focus heavily on
interpretation and analysis as well. She argues that narratives could be just as complex and
difficult to write as research papers and other forms of writing can because narratives often focus
on the abstract and there is more than one way of telling ones history. For example, Robillard
proposes, as writing teachers, we make more explicit in our classrooms the ways that narrative
and the more privilege genres of analysis and arguments enter animate one another (77).
Evidently, Robillard asks professors to give more space for narrative writing in the classroom
because she believes narrative writing is similar in complexity and challenge as analysis writing.
Telling narratives allows students to analyze their past and become better thinkers just as well as
any other piece of analysis. Furthermore, Robillard believes telling stories of the past involves
selection and interpretation. The choice to tell a story of the past is a rhetorical one (79). Thus,
writing narratives can be as difficult as any other form of essay writing because it requires a
person to pick and choose stories from their past. For instance, Robillard discusses how growing
up with her mother who is always on time led her to become the same way while leading her
sister to become late for her own funeral (75). Accordingly, even though Robillard and her
sister have the same experience with their mother being on time, the way they analyze their past
and its effects on the present leads Robillard to adopt her mothers timeliness while Robillards

sister completely abandons it. Similarly, the culture in academics, especially in western societies,
requires that work that is done by students in the classroom to be able to provide topics to discuss
and add onto. Robillard argues that narratives fulfill this cultural requirement because they are
inherently abstract pieces of writing that require the student to selectively choose events and
make a narrative out of them. For example, Robillard discusses how her past can be viewed in a
good light because she was well fed and could get ice cream or a popsicle whenever she wanted.
In comparison, she could view her past negatively, recalling how she ate mostly oatmeal that was
bought on store credit and how one of her sisters beat her. Robillard asks, without the stories,
without the concrete, from what might one abstract? to show that narratives are the bases of
abstract thinking since all abstract thinking is based on some concrete facts or details. Therefore,
the narratives students write can have positive value to their critical and analytical thinking
because they allow them to put together abstract history from concrete stories. In this way,
students can grow significantly as people and have the ability to adapt to new environments and
challenges as they meet them.
Finally, Robillard uses a number of authors that discuss the relationship between class,
academics, and narrative to prove her thesis that narratives must be an integral part of academics.
This allows students to better understand their history, and have a more coherent personality that
is better able to deal with challenges that they face. First, Shirley Brice Heath has recently
established that, for what we might call nontraditional students, writing is not tied to school in
in the way the discipline of composition tends to imagine it is. Students from the working class
dip into and out of college, pulling from it what they [see] as current needs (233). Clearly, the
nontraditional students are not as well integrated into the school as regular students, so they
have a much harder time developing their character around education, as they are simply going

to school and treating it as they treat all other activities in their lives. Therefore, incorporating
narrative writing into schoolwork would help students feel much more connected to education
and have a narrative they can use to help them deal with problems in the future. In addition,
Robillard cites Heath arguing Academic discourse may serve traditional students well as they
work their way through the academy, but in todays new capitalism, with ever-increasing
emphasis placed on flexibility, teamwork, and risk-taking, all of our students will likely find
themselves adrift (76). Hence, Heath agrees with Brice that students often fee disconnected and
therefore narrative writing would help them from finding themselves adrift. Similarly,
Thompson and Webb describe how narrative is also an integral part of peoples history as they
live through it and that there is no reason to not include narrative in academic writing. Martha
Marinara further adds personal narratives offers the unique opportunity to help students
negotiate the borders between work and school, past and present, self and other (8). Therefore,
it helps students better view the world around them from a perspective unique only to them, and
have a more malleable and coherent identity, able to respond to problems in the future.
In conclusion, Robillard calls for reexamination of the significance of personal
narratives to more privileged genres like analysis and argument because personal writing
depends heavily on the way stories are chosen to tell a specific narrative, and in turn, how that
narrative is interpreted. Other authors, such as Webb, support her argument that the common
cultural conception of narrative as somehow not as effective at pedagogy as other forms of
writing are false. For example, Webb argues, those in authority have already determined how
students should learn and how they will continue to learn (77). Finally, Robillard believes that
writing narratives could help further improve the academic environment because it allows

students to learn about their own history in a way that is unique to them and enables them to face
future problems and obstacles with confidence that they are doing the right thing. The context
that Robillard writes in, the misleading culture she disproves, and the large variety of authors that
support her assertions allow Robillard to prove the importance of narrative writing in pedagogy.