Liberating Narrative

Why were immigrant students who had overcome truly daunting obstacles being told by educators—or even telling themselves—that their stories don’t . . . “make you special”?

These are the opening lines of a literacy narrative for a first-year college composition class at the City College of New York, written by a young woman I’ll call Lindsay:

This writing as personal essay for college application, you have to show yourself to the admission officers that what make you special and why they should accept you to the college. Also, as an English learner, it is challenge that achieve these goals using English correctly and accurately to write down the idea from the brain . . .

I wonder is there any experience that sound interesting in my life because my life seem common as others, and my life seems not much interesting.

Lindsay emigrated from China first to Venezuela and then to the U.S. She is quiet in class but writes with a vibrant clarity that sweeps aside her grammar imperfections. 

I can understand why she was anxious about engaging with the complexities of the college admissions essay in her third language. What I found more surprising, given her background, was her struggle to find “an experience that sound interesting.” 

The following semester, I again started the semester with a literacy narrative, a personal narrative about a reading or writing. Once again, another quiet and gifted student who I’ll call Annika wrote about her difficulty finding a suitable life experience for her admissions essay.

My first draft talked about how hard it was to leave my grandmother, the conversations I had with her before leaving, the way I felt when I moved to a different country and the promises I made to myself that everything I’d do and accomplish would be for her. Then, between my counselors and teacher’s feedback, we concluded it was a repeated story between students. All of us had the repeated topic since we all were in an international high school and most of us were immigrants and English learners and we all left someone important back in our countries. I needed something to tell why I was or am the way I am and what I wanted to do with that. I continued looking back to my life and digging into my feelings and experiences through my easy-short life.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. Having worked as a private tutor for many years, I have heard many well-off students and parents wish for a harrowing experience that would make for a dramatic admissions essay topic, and they were only half joking. Why were immigrant students who had overcome truly daunting obstacles being told by educators—or even telling themselves—that their stories don’t, as Lindsay put it, “make you special”?

---

The college admissions essay (CAE) is a formative writing experience for millions of students hoping to enroll in American universities. Because of its high stakes, these students often put more time, thought, and revision into the CAE than anything a college professor will ever assign them. It is one of the most personal pieces of writing they will ever do, and it’s submitted to faceless readers with the power to determine their future. That’s a fairly toxic combination, and we haven’t even gotten to the format of the CAE itself, which doesn’t resemble any writing assignment that most of them have previously encountered.  

“What are colleges looking for in your application essay?” asks the College Board: 

Colleges look for three things in your admission essay: a unique perspective, strong writing, and an authentic voice. People in admissions often say that a great essay is one where it feels like the student is right there in the room, talking authentically to the admissions committee!

Admission essays are very different from the 5-paragraph essays you write in English or history class! Great essays are built around stories, not arguments. They reveal your character, not rehash your achievements. The best essays focus on moments when you changed, learned, or grew as a person.

In other words, kids, all you have to do is to write well in a genre you have not learned in school, display a “unique perspective” that you doubtless don’t possess, and do so with the “authentic voice” that most professional writers spend lifetimes trying to achieve. 

In a seminal 1996 essay, composition and rhetoric scholar Karen Surman Paley describes the CAE as a “rhetorical paradox” whose enigmatic prompts (which vary from year to year but have kept their basic function) serve to socialize students to the shrouded power dynamics of higher education. Paley locates the paradox in the “imperative to self-disclose in the admissions process that is mystified as an invitation.” James Warren, another composition and rhetoric scholar, emphasizes a different kind of paradox in the semi-duplicitous nature of the CAE genre: “a persuasive essay masquerading as a personal narrative.”

As the usefulness (or at least infallibility) of standardized tests has come under greater scrutiny in the 21st century, the essay has increasingly become the greatest focus for the crazed college competition.

As the usefulness (or at least infallibility) of standardized tests has come under greater scrutiny in the 21st century, the essay has increasingly become the greatest focus for the crazed college competition. Just as the SAT was once able to brand itself as a unique measure of intelligence until it became obvious that scores were directly tied to wealth and test prep, the CAE now symbolizes the blend of creative self-promotion and respectful obedience that colleges are looking for.

Of course, the admissions essay is judged on scales that are at least as culturally biased as the SAT. Ralitsa Todorova, a developmental psychologist who researches access to higher education, has demonstrated that first-generation college students are at a disadvantage in understanding what the genre implies but does not directly say. As a result, they are more likely to write straightforward narratives that address the explicit essay prompts—but not the implicit ask for an expression of their “true” selves. 

---

After I read Annika’s narrative, I hastily changed my composition class’s third unit, which we were about to begin. Instead of reviewing the classic persuasive essay, we would study the CAE as a way of unlearning its more insidious lessons. I wanted to help them reflect on their own writing experiences and introduce Amy Devitt’s concept of “critical genre awareness”: the idea that—by understanding the rules of a genre, why they exist, and what power dynamics they uphold—we empower ourselves to decide when to follow those rules and when to subvert them. 

I began the unit with a free write in which students reflected on their admissions essays, which most had written almost exactly a year ago. First, I asked them to simply remember what they wrote about. I then had them reflect on what aspects of their essay made them proud or unsatisfied, and finally I asked whether they felt it was, as one of my reflection assignment prompts put it, “an authentic representation of who you are” or “a performance you were putting on to get into college.” 

This was followed by a lesson on genre in which we used movies and music to collectively define the concept, made a list of writing genres, then created a list of rules for the CAE genre. Once we established the concept of genre, we moved into criticism. This lesson centered on Tina Yong’s excellent Ted X talk where she explains how many non-white and immigrant students feel pressured into writing “trauma essays” for their CAE. She goes on to show how this creates an internal belief that they are meant to present their life stories as ongoing triumphant tales of individual hard work overcoming this or that unfortunate societal injustice or inequality. 

Yong’s lecture led a number of students to share their own CAE stories in class. One student originally wanted to write her essay about a Bengali lyric but was advised that it would be too unfamiliar to American admissions officers. Another recalled being told not to write about her Christian faith because it might be divisive. We discussed how these stories echoed Yong’s critique of the CAE’s version of “authenticity”: unique, but not too unique; honest, but not controversial. 

That set us up for the final phase of the unit: subverting genre. We watched Studio Binder’s introductory video essay about how some of the most successful movies succeed by both following and upending audience expectations for a given genre. Then I introduced my unorthodox essay assignment, a task I hoped would allow students to better recognize the ideology embedded inside the CAE through a new genre that turned the CAE inside out. I called it the “liberated” college essay:

Imagine you are guaranteed admittance in City College, and the point of your college essay is to help school officials get to know who you are to best help you thrive and succeed as a student here. You would be liberated from having to present yourself in a way designed to impress other people, and instead tell university administrators what would help you (and perhaps others) to succeed. There are thousands of other essays being submitted. Try to make yours stand out!

As a class, we came up with some rules for this “liberated” college essay. For instance, whereas a genre rule for the CAE is that you should make yourself seem unique, we discussed how it would be more persuasive in the “liberated” essay to demonstrate that your issues and struggles are actually common to many other incoming students. 

---

The unit was only partially successful, which was perhaps inevitable given its rushed creation and experimental design. The biggest flaw was that I compressed a number of distinct lessons into just a few weeks. As I rushed to move from understanding genre to subverting it, most students didn’t make the leap along with me. Many wrote impassioned “liberated” essays about how the administration could better help them, but in post-unit reflections they wrote that they weren’t clear on how this assignment connected to our discussions about the CAE. 

On the other hand, what worked very well was giving students the space and tools to critically look at and share their experiences with the CAE. Some connected strongly with Yong’s critique of the “trauma essay”:

It was weird and not at all comforting knowing that I was writing something that forced me to dig into my personal life and extract the bits and pieces I knew would be appealing to a stranger that was responsible for reading it and deciding if the author was capable and deserving to be accepted into college. Without a single word of feedback on it, of course.

Others felt validated about their CAE choices:

I made a great emphasis on not displaying any trauma stories . . . because it felt like to “perform” for white institutions and gain pity from them for college education. I’m proud of this decision because I kept my integrity.

But the most common sentiment expressed in my students’ reflections was the ambiguity familiar to many writers. Some wrote about the pride in their hard work mixed with frustration at their inability to fully express themselves. Others articulated their resentment of the CAE’s power dynamics alongside their gratitude at being put in a position to experience self-awareness through writing:

I believe that this college essay it’s just a small performance for them to get to know me. However, I am glad that I wrote this essay because it gave me the ability to know myself more.

These reflections are testaments to a belief many teachers hold deeply: that writing a personal narrative, painful and frustrating as it often can be, is a powerful tool of knowledge and expression. But like any powerful tool, it can cause harm if used improperly. Reading some of my students’ reflections about their CAE experiences, I felt like a doctor witnessing the effects of an unethical medical experiment.

---

In future classes, I will either give this unit more room in the curriculum or cut the “liberated” essay idea. In this second approach, I’ll import my lessons on CAE and critical genre awareness into the literacy narrative unit to encourage students to explore alternative themes discouraged by the admissions process: community rather than individuality, ambiguity rather than simplification, and even (gasp!) emotions like sadness and anger. 

we can help our students develop the critical courage to decide how they want to tell their story moving forward.

In her literacy narrative, Annika shares that she ended up satisfied with her new essay topic: how life in America has caused her to rethink gender relationships in her family back in Colombia. Lindsay also was ultimately happy with her CAE. In both cases, I wasn’t surprised. Both have the makings of great writers. And it’s likely that neither of them would have chosen to write about their CAE in these narratives if the story didn’t have a triumphant conclusion—because the CAE itself taught them that your story is only worth telling if it ends on a note of hopeful resiliency. 

With all due respect to these students—two of my many favorites—I’m not convinced that their CAE stories have happy endings. That would be to ignore the lesson that Annika was forced to internalize: that her migration story wasn’t sufficiently unique or special and that she needed to move on from the wrenching separation from her grandmother because, as she devastatingly writes, “we all left someone important back in our countries.” 

First-year college writing teachers love reading our students’ personal narratives. But we usually don’t think about how our classrooms exist in the shadow of the CAE and how it is, whether we like it or not, the archetypal personal narrative assignment. If we shine a critical light on that shadow, we can help our students develop the critical courage to decide how they want to tell their story moving forward.

Photo by Sebastian Latorre on Unsplash.