Purposeful Collisions:
Journal Dialogue in the College Classroom

The February and March 1990 issues of Word Works provided an overview of journals including advantages, common problems, and strategies for successful use. This issue will consider how journals work as dialogues.

Students "converse" with themselves, and of course their teachers, by writing journal entries. But they also converse with other students when they trade entries, discuss entries in class, or apply them in subsequent assignments. Since journal dialogue, like oral conversation, is recursive, students write more. Ideas get embellished, developed, and polished.

Through this process, students often discover new ideas about the course material, which further extends and deepens their understanding of the conceptual relationships built into the original journal assignments. Overall, students start to see the whole course better by working intensively with its parts through journal writing and related class discussion and activities. They often engage more actively with the discipline as a result, immersing themselves more fully into the stream of academic dialogue.

With dialogue as the generative core, journals become part of the larger process of writing and teaching, especially reflective writing and teaching. Like other kinds of writing, journals accomplish what Lucy Bradley-Springer claims for all kinds of writing; they "increase the creative potential and creative productivity of a discipline" ("Discovery of Meaning Through Imagined Experience, Writing, and Evaluation," Nurse Educator, Sept./Oct. 1990).

On the following pages are examples of journal use in four disciplines at BSU. These examples show the range and richness possible in journal dialogue.

From U.S. History Since 1865: Todd Shallat

Journal Assignments in Todd's course give students a way to interact with course concepts and reading assignments, and to see connections between their experience with history in this course and the discipline in general. The following is an excerpt from the syllabus.

Students will comment on readings and do the in- class writing assignments in a loose-leaf binder or spiral notebook--a personal journal. . .Feel free to reflect on historical issues in your world at large, whether issues raised in this class or other classes, historical theories in politics and the movies, or personal concerns. . .Entries will be checked from time to time and graded for completeness and insight.

Week 2: Troubled Peace: Reconstruction and the New South" [Students see clips from two films and complete assigned readings.]

Journal: Historical writing is built around a main argument or "thesis." (Historians write to persuade you of something. That opinion or interpretation is the essay's "thesis"--its central point). What is the thesis of the Burns essay on reconstruction? How would you characterize his interpretation? Pro- southern? Anti-southern? Quote a sentence or two from the essay that seems to capture his thesis.

Week 4: "Shame of the Cities: National Politics and Social Reform" [Students see clips from three films and complete assigned readings.]

Journal: Compare the description of working conditions in Storming Heaven with the account given by Smith in "How the Other Side Lived." Are the two accounts in agreement? Which account is more believable? Which author seems more optimistic about the plight of the working class?

Week 13: "The Seventies: Nixon and the Me Decade" [Students see clips from two films, complete assigned reading, turn in a paper.]

Journal: No formal entry but, if you like, reflect on the legacy of the Viet Nam War. How does the memory of Viet Nam affect the way Americans think of their world and themselves?

From English Composition: Martha Sipe

Martha uses journals to get students to call their own reading process into awareness. They are encouraged to discuss their ideas about the text from different perspectives, first with themselves in the journal, and then with their peers.

Course Overview of Journals

Excerpts from course handout, "Guidelines for Journal Entries":

Critical reading can be broken down into three areas: reading for information, reading for experience, and reading as a writer. Look at the piece in one or more of these ways as you read and write.

1. Reading for information. When reading for information, you read and report the information you glean from the text, but go beyond mere summary. Try reading for information the author is stating or implying about society, individuals, human nature, certain times or places. What does the author want you to learn?

2. Reading for experience. Experience can be thought of in two ways. First is your emotional experience in reading the text. Try to be self- aware as you read to catch and record your surprise, anger, and so on. Emotional response can also take the form of delight in the beauty of the writing or the satisfaction of having read something particularly well-written. But go beyond the record of your response. . .Analyze what in the text caused you to respond the way you did. The second way I refer to experience here is to your personal experience. . .What memories does the work trigger. . . Record your memories (Briefly. This journal is not a memoir.) and connect them with the text.

3. Reading as a writer. When you read as a writer, you see how the writer made the piece effective. What techniques did he or she use? In discussion of Maya Angelou's essay, for example, the authors point out how she changes person (I/they/we) in the course of "Graduation." How does that give her story more movement?

When responding as a writer, look at how the essays are put together. What rhetorical decisions did the author make? What was the writer's purpose and how is it revealed through structure, for example. . . You may find out that in the process of analysis what you thought was reading for experience will bleed into reading for information or reading as a writer. . . .

From Integrated Language Arts: Norma Sadler

Norma uses the journal as a centerpiece for the course. Journal entries give rise to other writing in the course. Norma has developed her journal assignments in part from her own journal writing. The following are some reflections Norma wrote for us on her use of journal.

The Journal As a Tool for Writing a Reflective Paper

In the fall of 1994, I taught Integrated Language Arts for the first time. I decided to give students a chance to write on course content in a reflective manner, making use of expressive and transactional voices, as I did in my own writing. While I chose to include other writing activities as lead-ins to the paper, journal writing (in a course focused on integrating language arts) seemed an especially appropriate precursor to a reflective paper. My goal: To have students travel through course content, via journals, as a means of understanding expressive voice, and to use the journals as the vehicle for using that voice in their papers.

I knew too that my students, when teachers themselves, would probably be expected to assist their students' development of voice. Seeing aspects of the writing process modeled in the college classroom would give these future teachers a means of using the writing process, as well as a finished composition on integrated language arts, using the expressive voice. Learning about voice in general, and their own "voice" in particular, gives college students an understanding of the writing process at a fundamental level.

I also wanted my students to see themselves as writers and to understand, as I did, that the more one writes, the better writer one becomes. Journals help writers reach this goal. Students use their journals to experiment, to learn more about themselves as writers, to write for the pleasure that it gives them.

So we used journals from the beginning. Students worked with peers, and each week wrote two pages out of class on selected topics given the first week of the semester. Each week in class, peers wrote back one page to those two pages.

Entitled "A Journey Through The Language Arts," the journals turned into dialogues through the focus on specific topics. Not surprisingly, students wrote about fears, joys, frustrations, stress, things they loved, things they hated. They wrote, alone, for themselves. Yet, having an audience of one peer, they wished to communicate, needed to talk, and they did, their writing serving a purpose far beyond the requirements of connecting with course content. But just as they strayed comfortably from the topic, they also came back to it again. I do the same kind of floating and sorting when I write. It's the way the mind works on writing. Things appear to be falling apart when they are coming together.

I arranged for other prewriting activities between the journal assignments and the reflective paper. Students wrote summary/reaction papers on an event, such as a bilingual, literacy, or math conference, the Dias de Los Muertos exhibit, or the Gap theater production. Using expressive and transactional modes, students wrote clearly focused one-page papers.

After students had written for three-fourths of the semester, they completed another assignment-- one that hooked journal writing to the reflective paper. Essentially the paper asked them to:

* choose three possible topics from their journal for their reflective pape

* pick one of the three and explain their interest in this topic

* describe the purpose of their paper

* review their journals for ideas to use in the paper

* list journal ideas, ideas from text, class notes or other resources in a cluster, web, chain or other spatial format

* meet in small groups to discuss paper topic, purpose, and ideas and receive suggestions from student colleagues

One week later, students brought rough drafts or parts of rough drafts for critiques by group members. To create an atmosphere of trust, I shared many pieces of my own writing, in various stages of development. I talked about how we were not alone--that we were in this together--this business of learning how to combine expressive and transactional voice.

The approach to reflective writing--the use of "I" to relate their ideas and feelings about their topics, notes, text, journal entries, and library sources--worked. Most of the papers were well- written. Students seemed more comfortable writing about their chosen topic with their own voice intact, and many of their papers had flecks of gold-- stylistic devices. I found that students, who discover the power of voice, with the help of journals, improve the ease with which they write and the quality of what they write.

From Community Health Nursing: Joanne Springer, Pam Gehrke, Judy Murray

Courses in Baccalaureate Nursing use writing in a number of ways, of which journals are one component. They provide the personal, reflective dimension of the students' experience.

NU-316-317, Mental Health/Illness Nursing Joanne Springer

In journals for this course, students write about self-awareness issues. They note their own strongly held biases and how biases might affect their work with mental health clients, record their impressions on the first day in a psychiatric hospital (and explore myths). They also write a brief autobiography telling me about themselves, the way they learn best, and about issues that might affect their work with clients with mental illness. They assess their own anxiety levels and coping strategies during the semester. They also review assigned videos, include newspaper articles and cartoons related to mental health issues, review movies that include MH concepts.

NU 418-419, Community Health Nursing Pam Gehrke, Judy Murray

Excerpts from "Family Assessment Guide"

Your are allotted 4 clinical hours for family home visits. This time allows you to prepare for the visit, implement the visit, coordinate or evaluate community resources, and complete the appropriate documentation.

All clinical information that is collected and recorded will be kept in a folder. To maintain confidentiality, use only client initials in your folder. The folder will be turned in weekly to your clinical instructor. The folder will have the following components:

1) Journal/self-reflections: Begin this section the first week of your family experience. Include your feelings, questions, and observations about this community health nursing role, potential dilemmas for practice, and ongoing informal evaluation of your performance. Use this as an informal dialogue between yourself and instructor about your family experience. Please plan on documenting the use of your time.

2) Weekly Report of a Visit (Form A or Form B): Complete Form A or B weekly once you have selected your client family. Use Form A if you are assigned to a home health or public health agency. If you use Form A, you also must include a coy of the weekly charting from your agency. If you use Form A, you must include also a copy of the weekly charting from your agency. Use Form B if you are in an agency that has not charting forms (i.e. Headstart, BSU Homemakers).

3) Family Assessment Data: Early in the semester, select the family assessment form you will use. Put the form in your folder and record the actual family assessment data collected. This may also include other assessment tools; i.e. depression scales, ecomaps, genograms, family apgar, strength and concern list, etc.

4) Final Evaluation: By week 15, complete a personal evaluation of your family nursing process.