Writing Programs, Veterans Studies, and the Post-911 University by D. Alexis Hart

Author:D. Alexis Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8141-7506-4
Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The task of transfer for student veterans may be one of de-escala-tion. Certainly, many lower-stakes writing tasks exist in the vast bureaucracy of the American military. Yet there remains among many military veterans the sense that each one of their acts con-tributes to a greater purpose or mission, and that each action has compounding effects as it moves up the chain of command. With that realization comes a sense of duty and obligation that, while one that many of us might wish our students to have, in fact bears little resemblance to the potential outcomes of most first-year writing assignments. Student veterans may consider such assignments to be a greater burden simply because much of the writing in their pro-fessional lives led more immediately to significant and/or concrete results. Helping student veterans recontextualize the outcomes of these assignments as developing facility with a writing process and habit of mind that can withstand risks and can generate new ideas, not simply reflect the needs of or obligations to others, is part of the task of transfer, and while most veterans are keenly aware of the ways that their college education may seem “fuzzy” and less concrete in its aims and methods compared to their training in the service, few will likely have given much thought to how that plays out in something like their writing habits. A faculty member's job, then, becomes demonstrating that though the context for writing has changed, the sense that, as Richard Weaver once insisted, “any utterance is a major assumption of responsibility” (6) has not.

Principle 2: Help Student Veteran Writers Recognize the Explicitly Audience-Focused Genres by Which They Communicated in the Military

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