Scars in the Classroom is a fascinating article about the experiences of college-level writing instructors with the dramatic material that students often present. I’ve read the article three times, and haven’t quite found the focus (it could be me), though it addresses all sorts of interesting issues, such as the prevalence of “cutting” in student communities, how instructors deal with extremely personal writing that often hints or is explicit about abuse, the use of student essays (with permission) in academic scholarship by professors, and even truthfulnes of narratives created from trauma.

Here’s a thought-provoking discussion between two instructors, Hood and Berman, about the authenticity of the writing created around trauma:

 More broadly, Hood also wonders about the veracity of coherent narratives created out of trauma. Frequently, she says, such written narratives will “be very detailed, be able to tell everything. There are no gaps in the story, there’s no collapsing of history, there’s no remaking of history, remaking a chronology, for instance, which happens frequently in the telling of a traumatic event. There are all sorts of things that characterize the telling of a traumatic event that don’t occur in writing,” Hood says.

“I can tell a perfectly coherent lie about a traumatic event. I’m not sure I can tell a perfectly coherent traumatic narrative about my own trauma.”

Berman writes that he doesn’t question the accuracy of student writing. And when students do acknowledge they weren’t entirely truthful, he writes, “This usually happens not because they wish to portray themselves as victims of trauma but because they are not yet ready to acknowledge the full extent of the trauma they experienced.”

Via Inside Higher Ed