22 Gretchen Moffet – Literacy Narrative

Gretchen Moffet, M.S., will complete her certificate in composition studies in May 2024. She lives in Kansas City where she teaches English and is Director of Humanities at Donnelly College.  This narrated Power Point is a literacy narrative she wrote for English W509, Introduction to Writing and Literacy Studies in Spring 2023.  Professor Kelly Blewett notes, “I loved the pictures, stories, and vibrancy of Gretchen’s multimodal literacy narrative!”

Literacy Narrative

Slide 1: Confessions of a Bibliophile. My name is Gretchen Moffet and this is my story.

Slide 2: I grew up surrounded by books. My dad was a school administrator and my mom was an art teacher. They read to me a lot when I was little. My mom would buy me a Little Golden Book to keep me busy when we’d take our weekly trips to the grocery store. I loved the Saturdays when we’d go out for hamburgers and then visit the library. I devoured Little House on the Prairie books and I remember my dad reading to me about John Muir before we moved to California. Books were entertainment and a significant way that I learned about the world.

Slide 3: Education was a given in my home. I grew up with the expectation that I would not just go to college, but also graduate school. However, I was always conscious that I was not so far removed from this educationally-rich life.

Slide 4: One of my grandfathers grew up in a very dysfunctional home and as a result only went through the 8th grade, but he and my grandmother both valued education and were determined that their 5 boys would all complete college.

Slide 5: My dad was the oldest son and, in spite of the fact that he was valedictorian of his high school class of 13, he struggled his first few semesters of college. Like Mike Rose in Lives on the Boundary, my dad was a first-generation college student, somewhat lost at the big state college and racking up less than stellar grades. He was told he had no leadership ability and college was probably not the place for him. He reached the point that he had decided not to return to college, but my grandparents scraped together some money to help him pay the next semester’s tuition and he went back at their urging.

Slide 6: Once he found a major he enjoyed and figured out how to “do college,” he not only got a bachelor’s degree, but went on to graduate school, earned his doctorate, and dedicated his career to education, focusing especially on students who might be considered the most challenging due to issues including language, culture, and socio-economic status. After being told in college that he had no leadership ability, he went on to be the runner-up for National Superintendent of the Year in 2000. My dad’s experience as a first-generation college student was similar in many ways to Rose’s experience and to many of my current students, most of whom are first-gen. It takes effort on the part of the student and a supportive environment for them to learn how to “do college.” Rose writes that his students in a veteran’s program “needed to be immersed in talking, reading, and writing, they needed to further develop their ability to think critically, and they needed to gain confidence in themselves as systematic inquirers. They had to be let into the academic club” (141).

Slide 7: My own experience was different since my parents were educators and I was always comfortable in school – in fact, my mom was disappointed when she took me to my first day of kindergarten and I hopped out of the car without waiting for her to walk me in. However, I was also aware that not all children had the same opportunities I had. I vividly remember playing with migrant children one summer at the school where my dad was an elementary principal. The school ran a summer program for children of the migrant workers who came to work the sugar beet fields in my Colorado hometown. I was a little 4- or 5-year-old blond who spoke no Spanish, running around with little brown children who were speaking only Spanish. This didn’t seem to bother us kids at all. As an adult, I’ve often looked back on this experience and thought that this was probably one of the first experiences that led to my eventual career working with second-language learners. Even though I was quite young, it made an impression on me that it was important for these children to have educational opportunities like I had.

Slide 8: School was always relatively easy for me and I thrived in my English and music classes. My love for reading never diminished and I’m sure this text-rich environment made writing come naturally to me. Somehow I managed to miss all the traditional grammar instruction because I was always placed in advanced classes. I seemed to just absorb the grammar rules by osmosis, which has always made me wonder about all the time we spend covering the grammar rules in traditional English classes. I wonder if I had spent my time diagramming sentences, would I have still enjoyed reading and writing so much? I have come to realize that too often in developmental English, we have focused on correcting the “deficits” a student has – not having perfect command of English grammar, for example – and “sentencing” them to developmental classes until they are deemed ready to join the “real” college students. Instead of helping them succeed, too often it has resulted in students failing and giving up before they even discover the joy of learning. Rose writes, “By its tedium, the curriculum teaches them that writing is a crushing bore” (211).

Slide 9: In spite of – or perhaps because of – the fact that both my parents were educators, I didn’t initially set out to be a teacher myself. I suppose like many college students, I wanted to blaze my own trail. I studied photojournalism and news writing as an undergraduate, and worked for several years as a photojournalist, writer, and later in public relations and marketing. Throughout college and my early career, however, my heart was continually drawn to working with people from other cultures. In college, I had many international friends who would seek me out for help with their papers. When I worked for a newspaper that also published a Spanish-language weekly, I loved going out on photo assignments and learning so much about the Spanish-speaking community and its culture. It took me back to my younger days growing up with many Spanish-speakers in my hometown in Colorado. When I was marketing director for a hospital, I started an interpreter program for non-English speakers and supervised the interpreters. I also volunteered to be an ESL tutor at the local adult learning center.

Slide 10: Through all of these experiences, I learned that although I enjoyed the jobs I had to that point, my real passion was education and working with second language learners, so I enrolled in grad school and pursued a Master’s in Adult Education with an emphasis on TESOL. My master’s thesis was a qualitative study in which I interviewed Spanish-speaking mothers in a family literacy program. Eventually, I began working as an ESL instructor at the same adult education center where I had been a volunteer. My classroom was located in a pre-school building and I taught English to parents whose children were attending that pre-school. In addition to teaching them English, I encouraged all the parents to read to their children – either in English or their native language. Even though they were there to learn English, I always wanted to encourage them to maintain their native language and teach it to their children.

Slide 11: Shortly after I finished my master’s degree, I became a mother. My children have also had a big impact on me in terms of literacy and education. When they were babies, I was inundated with all the conventional “wisdom” about everything that I just had to do as a parent if my children were going to thrive. Frankly, I found it all too overwhelming, so I decided I would do two things – teach them about Jesus and read to them. Both of my children are neuro-diverse – my son has multiple disabilities and my daughter has severe ADHD. Parenting them has helped me develop the patience I have needed in my work with developmental English students. Being a parent myself has also helped me appreciate all the extra work required of college students who are also parents. In his book, Rose writes of Lucia, a bilingual psychology student and mother who sought help at the tutoring center where he worked. In order for her to be able to focus on her studies, all the other pieces of her life had to fall into place, especially childcare and transportation (185). As a mother, I understand these challenges.

Slide 12: One literacy moment that stands out in my mind is one with my own son who is almost 22. He has cerebral palsy and other health issues. He had severe seizures as an infant (200-300 a day) which were treated with a radical brain surgery (a hemispherectomy in which doctors removed the right side of his brain) when he was 8 months old. He has been seizure-free since then, though he continues to have physical and intellectual challenges. When he was in second grade or so, I remember an IEP meeting in which the teacher said in a disappointed tone, “Raef is at the very low end of the reading chart for his age level.” My response was, “You mean he’s actually ON the chart! That’s fantastic!” After all, this is a kid working with half a brain – if he can read, even at a lower level, then that’s a win in my book.

Slide 13: I have always gotten so frustrated by the focus on student deficits instead of focusing on their strengths and working from there. Raef had an IEP throughout his school career and understanding that whole process has been tremendously helpful to me in my current work since every year I have a few students who had IEPs themselves in school. I do my best to help these students recognize and work from their strengths and it’s so rewarding to see them grow and succeed, especially when I get to see them walk across the stage at college graduation. Rose also writes of the importance of setting up the right conditions to focus on strengths instead of differences. “If you set up the right conditions, try as best you can to cross class and cultural boundaries, figure out what’s needed to encourage performance, that if you watch and listen, again and again there will emerge evidence of ability that escapes those who dwell on differences” (Rose 222).

Slide 14: My career in education has been a bit of a winding path. After working at the adult learning center, I moved into higher education. I started out working with international students which was interesting, but in 2014 I landed at my current institution, Donnelly College and I feel like I’ve found the place I belong as an educator. Donnelly is a small Catholic College in the urban core of Kansas City, Kansas. We are an open enrollment college and a big part of our mission is to serve those who might not otherwise be served. Donnelly has been the most diverse college in the Midwest, according to U.S. News & World Report, for six years running and about ¾ of our students are first generation.

Slide 15: I was hired to work with developmental English students at Donnelly, which sounds like a departure from my previous ESL work, but in reality about 80% of my students are second-language learners – either immigrants, refugees, or students who grew up in Spanish-speaking homes in the U.S. The rest of my students tend to be non-traditional students who are returning to college – or attending for the first time – with the goal of bettering their situation in life or pursuing a new career. Donnelly students are much like the students with whom Rose worked during his career. He writes, “Ours is the first society in history to expect so many of its people to be able to perform these very sophisticated literacy activities” (188), so it should be no surprise that “our schools have always been populated with students who don’t meet some academic standard” (7). Rose writes about the challenges of moving from the streets of L.A. to the top levels of American education. He writes that the journey “will call for support and guidance at many, many points along the way” (47). Rose’s experience is not so different from many of our Donnelly students and that is why we try to surround our students with support at many levels, from instructors, tutors, counselors, advisors, and more.

Slide 16: When I first started at Donnelly, developmental English students had to pass two non-credit English courses before they could take college-level courses, such as Comp I. Many students were successful in this program, but it delayed their path to graduation and I wondered if there were a better way. After some research, I proposed and implemented a Success First Accelerated co-req program in which students take Comp I like all other freshmen, but they take an additional non-credit course in which we spend time on all the topics we don’t have a lot of time for in Comp I – reading strategies, writing strategies, grammar, vocabulary, etc. It’s been exciting to see that the majority of students in Success First do, indeed, succeed in Comp I and leave well-prepared for further college coursework. In my work with Success First students, I’ve come to appreciate Rose’s view on the value of learning through practice and making mistakes. He wrote of his own experience as an undergraduate “struggling to express increasingly complex ideas, and I couldn’t get the language straight” (54). In other words, he had valuable insights to share, but he needed to learn to express his ideas in a way that people could understand. While some grammarians might simply focus on the errors, Rose counters, “Such sentences can be seen as marking a stage in linguistic growth … Developing writers will grow through them if they are able to write for people who care about language, people who are willing to sit with them and help them as they struggle to write about difficult things” (54).

Slide 17: It’s exciting to see my students succeed because they are the ones who will be the change-makers and future leaders of our urban community. One of the core values of our college is community and our students are not just consumers, they have so much to give back. Every year in my classes we have a service learning project called Project L.O.U.D. (Literacy Outreach to Urban Districts). My students study about literacy and we go to a nearby elementary school where they read with the schoolchildren and give them new books to take home. This project is always a highlight of the semester for my students and I love it that the children are taking books home to read with their families.

Slide 18: It is interesting to reflect on my literacy and life experiences and to see how these experiences have led me to my work today – work that is both challenging and rewarding. I can relate to Rose who writes, “People who work in tutoring centers and preparatory programs get used to spending intense bursts of time with their students. You get closely involved for a few weeks or a few months, and then you send them off. And you wonder. You know some won’t make it. There’s too much working against their success. … There are some, though, who do make it. Even those you thought were doomed” (204). I have learned not to try to predict who will succeed or fail. My job is to give my best to each one of my students and to support them on their journey.

Works Cited

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Free Press. 1989. Print.