Coming of Age in the Era of Acceleration: Rethinking Literacy Narratives as Pedagogies of Lifelong Learning

How Ageism Limits Composition

As mentioned, age studies scholars have worked to complicate overly simplistic, sentimental, ahistorical conceptions of how people negotiate the aging process—but not simply to challenge the status quo. At stake for these scholars is a belief in what it means to be human and which pressures and attitudes we acknowledge as valid in the aging process. The problem with ageism, as Sarah Lamb defines it, is that it “goes beyond prejudice against particular older individuals to entail a broader, pervasive aversion to and embarrassment about the condition of old age in general, in oneself and others, and in humankind” (xi). If this is true, then age studies scholars find themselves in matters of temporality and identity, critically reconsidering the intersection of both terms in the hopes of avoiding regressive, anachronistic, and sentimental characterizations of people and aging that essentially “strip us of our own future” (Andrews 303). In other words, unconsciously adhering to ageism restricts our view of what is possible for ourselves and the people we age with. This has significant implications for composition instructors who design curricula, develop relationships across campus and communities, and work alongside students. While a complete review of age studies is beyond the scope of a single article, we present the following three specific lessons because they highlight certain ideological beliefs that limit composition studies.

Limit One: The Ideology of Autonomous Aging
Age studies scholars challenge the assumption that we as individuals possess complete control over our own lives, including our health and social circumstances; that if we exercise, eat well, and make wise decisions, we will inevitably enjoy a long, fulfilling life with an appropriate and just conclusion (Lamb; Calasanti and King; Beauvoir). Instead, age studies scholars illustrate that the commitments, obligations, and goals we set for ourselves will inevitably change, whether we wanted them to or not, during a long life (Bateson). In other words, because we are individuals who live socially, the individual changes we experience as we age also have social consequences. By contextualizing personal experiences and changes as socially situated, age studies scholars highlight how simplistic conceptions of society, self-identity, and old age undergird an ideology of autonomous aging.

Unraveling the persistent beliefs that make an autonomous ideology of aging possible also raises critical questions of concern for composition studies scholars—in particular, how assumptions about age impact how composition studies scholars conceive of literacy learning temporally. Simple conceptions of age presume that once we become adults our goals, obligations, and relationships will not change until we reach a very old age marked by a rapid decline of our body and mind. A belief that adults completely control their goals and relationships oversimplifies the complexity of life experiences, which limits their access to the necessary resources to develop new literacy practices. A failure to conceptualize old age beyond simplistic, flat assumptions is a failure to acknowledge the complex challenges and conditions we all experience. More specifically for composition scholars, a failure to conceptualize age is a failure to conceptualize the reasons we read, write, and communicate with one another.

It also fails to recognize the social history of the kinds of relationships we build, maintain, repair, leave, and discard over the course of a life. As Ingrid Arnet Connidis describes in “Intimate Relationships,”

As we age, we experience change in our own lives and in the social worlds we inhabit; the longer we live, the more we experience change as a constant feature of our lives. Anticipating living longer also means that when we begin our relationships with others, the reality of a lifetime commitment is a much longer reality. Finally, spending a longer time in a stage of life that is not dominated by paid work can redefine gender relations. (129)

Her comments provide a stark reminder that as we live longer lives, we must consider how relationships will need to change as well. Falling into the autonomous age trap obscures how we can use reading and writing to construct relationships and support systems.

Limit Two: Our Culture’s Obsession with Youth Rhetoric
Youth (as a concept of development) is frequently described in terms of vitality, health, and opportunity. The rhetoric of youth relies on a logic that Simone de Beauvoir explains well: “since the child is a potential active member, society ensures its own future by investing in him, whereas in its eyes the aged person is no more than a corpse under suspended sentence” (Beauvoir 217). In this sense, an obsession with youth rhetoric has the self-defeating consequence of propagating a message and ideology that relies on the belief that as long as we are not old, we still have a future—we still matter to society. In “Resisting Age Bias in Digital Literacy Research,” Lauren Bowen suggests that persistent ageist stereotypes are supported by numerous age-based assumptions. Most important is the fact that she connects youth-centered ideologies and youth-centered rhetorics of literacy to our current technological and cultural moment. “By paying closer attention to the work of older adults,” Bowen writes, “we begin to make transparent the ageist ideologies that infuse our professional and public discourses on literacy, learning, and technology, and to move beyond such youth-centered understandings” (Bowen 602-03).

A youth-centric bias, as Beauvoir and Bowen encapsulate it, suggests that society makes resources available to young people but not to old people. As Bowen and McKee and Blair make clear, having access to the appropriate resources and being supported and encouraged by those around us are vital to develop new literacy practices. As such, a youth-centric bias limits whom composition studies effectively reaches, who can find composition instruction valuable, and with whom our students interact through reading and writing and speaking. It also reinforces how that society continues to distribute resources to younger people.

Limit Three: Prevailing Views of Successful Living
Age studies scholars complicate pervasive, binaristic depictions of old age that represent people as having aged either successfully or unsuccessfully. As Lynne Segal notes, such binaries do not acknowledge “how we always struggle throughout our lives to become, and remain, the person we feel ‘we are,’ striving to retain some sense of selfhood and agency” (“The Coming of Age Studies”). Other scholars, like Mary Catherine Bateson, challenge narratives found in traditional biographies of extremely “successful” people because they describe a person’s life experiences in a linear trajectory: one that implies that “successful people” decide early in life to achieve a particular goal (one they have already achieved before they tell their story). Further, such narratives imply the successful person required little or no assistance from others, including any social or economic privileges provided by race, class, or gender. Such narratives, scholars argue, evaluate older individuals in terms of a characterization of success that is based on preconceived notions about particular lifestyles.

Bateson and others teach us that how we conceptualize aging and “being aged” is intimately connected to how we characterize our achievements—the threshold moments in our lives that we sometimes retroactively (and inaccurately) attribute to individual decisions. Reconsidering what counts as evidence of achievement and success in the context of a whole life means reconsidering the persistent stereotypes and ideologies that inform prevailing views of being “successfully aged,” especially those associated with success during a time of economic dislocation and social change. “When the choices and rhythms of lives change,” Bateson notes “as they have in our time, the study of lives becomes an increasing preoccupation” (4). Her call seems especially relevant now.

Opportunities for Composition Studies
Adopting an age studies approach provides an opportunity for composition studies to extend its scope of research, to develop theories of composition based on life experiences as socially and historically contextualized, to be proactive in developing new courses of study that reach across disciplines, and to develop composition pedagogies that account for changes people experience over the course of a whole life. It also provides exigency to critically approach and contribute narratives of lived experiences. For that, scholars need a site to collect and contribute life stories, a place where critical engagement with narratives offers opportunities to transform limits into lessons.

In “Beyond Repair,” Lauren Bowen argues that for the past sixty years AARP has been “craft[ing] a curriculum of aging—one based on Christian, middle-class values and aimed to ‘promote independence, dignity, and purpose’ in later life” (441). She suggests that “AARP frequently reinforces rhetorics of gerontechnology by presenting limited ideas about what technologies can mean for the lives of older adults” (448). The “curriculum of aging” she criticizes reduces old age to a process of decline which “potentially limits the literate and rhetorical development of older adults” (437). Bowen’s use of the term curriculum, however, reminds us that ageist ideologies are not inherent, but are learned and reinforced. Developing an age studies pedagogy is important to resist the current “curriculum of aging” that limits how we can conceive of our future.

In the remaining space, we propose an oral history collection event that employs the DALN as a space where students can work alongside instructors to actively develop, model, and promote sophisticated, nuanced conceptions of age. Our proposed pedagogical approach is supported by recent research on emerging uses of the DALN in English studies and composition courses, and we foreground our proposed use of the DALN in the fourth category identified by Comer and Harker: “expanding and complicating students’ and teachers’ understanding of literacy practices” (76). This research-oriented approach characterizes uses of the DALN by teacher-researchers who work at the intersections of literacy studies and various subfields of the humanities: disability studies, sonic rhetoric, service-learning, gerontology, and many others.

Scholars repeatedly remind us of the importance of inviting students to work alongside us as we participate in ongoing discussions and debates related to literacy. For instance, in Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement, Linda Flower issues a particularly relevant challenge to the field: “How can teachers and students learn not only to speak up and against but also learn to speak with others . . . ?” (81). In Literacy as Involvement, Deborah Brandt beckons scholars to “see literacy as a growing metacommunicative ability—an increasing awareness and control over the social means by which people sustain discourse, knowledge, and reality” (32). For her, “social involvement becomes the key model for literacy and literacy growth” (32). And as Daniel Keller argues in Chasing Literacy, “Our participation means we can give some shape to the conditions of literacy” (169). For these scholars, literacy provides a contact point to engage with communities, and taken together, they offer scholarly exigencies to collect oral histories.

It is by situating the DALN as a resource for critically contextualizing theories, methodologies, themes, and ongoing debates in aging studies that we promote progressive development of the DALN as well as students’ and instructors’ attitudes about older adults. We believe this assignment sequence seems particularly well-suited for supporting a pedagogy working at the intersections of literacy and aging studies. While we offer this assignment as a way to promote the kind of robust contributions we imagine for the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, we would consider the following section a success if our recommendations spark ideas we have not considered yet.

First Step: Defamiliarizing Students’ Conceptions of Age
Drawing from Brandt’s definition of literacy as a “metacommunicative ability” (Literacy as Involvement 32), we suggest that the first step toward an oral history collection event should encourage students to develop a literacy of age. More specifically, students should grapple with age studies scholarship and other critical texts that illustrate different cultures’ views and treatment of older people. We offer the following texts as a potential starting point for scholars new to age studies.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age provides scholars with an essential entry point to defamiliarize common conceptions about age. She describes how various societies have conceived of old age and older people. Her text offers scholars a wide historical and cultural view of aging as entangled with attitudes, beliefs, and geography. She argues that we do not have complete autonomy over our bodies or our own ending, but that the values of each society impact how people define, experience, and treat old age. She offers compelling reasons for why “old age can only be understood as a whole” (13).

While age studies scholarship often focuses on old age, we believe asking students to consider the social and historical contexts of youth can be constructive as well. In Conflicting Paths: Growing up in America, Harvey Graff examines contradictions and continuities of growing up across three centuries (eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth) in America. He finds that the early twentieth century marks “the appearance and substantial impact of large-scale changes” (302) that are “still in progress” (305). He argues that changes in family structure, education, and laws restricting work performed by children undergird current “institutional age segregation” (303). We believe his historical context could provide the basis for meaningful class discussions about classroom dynamics as well as thinking about how conceptions of youth are entangled with the organization and distribution of resources our society provides (or does not provide) to people in different age categories. Grappling with historical perspectives, depictions, and conceptions of youth can help identify how to alter or build different institutions and communities.

One particular limitation of Graff’s text, however, is his choice to separate women’s experiences from men’s. He acknowledges this limitation and states:

A strategy of placing women on a path of their own rather than alongside their brothers, thus emphasizing commonalities, might be construed as assigning them a minority status by reification of a separate sphere. The dangers of marginalization are greater, however, when young women are included within paths of growing up that are defined primarily by male experience. Women also fall prey to male numerical domination of available first-person sources. (29)

Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life, however, provides a compelling counter-balance by focusing solely on the experiences of five older women, making their experiences primary rather than marginal. Her intention is to provide models of living for other women who are also building their lives by improvising with the new social and cultural opportunities (Graff would call them paths) that were unavailable to them before the mid-twentieth century, which is decades after Graff defines the “large-scale changes” (Graff 302). When read next to Graff, Bateson provides an opportunity to think about and discuss historical moments as entangled with whose life experiences we acknowledge and value.

 Taken together, these three texts defamiliarize our notions of age by providing social and historical context. They also provide a language for students to discuss age and aging in their own lives. Because we believe a substantial portion of our proposed oral history assignment should involve developing a socially and historically contextualized conception of age, we also suggest other constructive, but shorter, readings.

Kathleen Woodward’s “Performing Age/Performing Gender,” for example, uses an age studies approach for her feminist critique of simplistic depictions of old age in popular movies. Her article mentions six different concepts of age (biological, chronological, social, cultural, psychological, and statically aged) to argue against characterizing old age as one-dimensional—specifically, as a state of only mental and bodily decline. Further, Woodward presents an argument that men and women experience aging differently. In “Intimate Relationships,” Ingrid Arnet Connidis also uses an integrated age studies-feminist approach to investigate the historical and social impetus for the kinds of personal relationships we construct. Her article highlights the importance of thinking about age when we consider the types of commitments and obligations we want to create for ourselves, especially as we live longer lives. Ricca Edmondson applies a humanist lens to age studies to consider direct questions about how older people are regarded. She asks: “Are older people on the whole to be regarded negatively, as occasionally amiable burdens to their friends and society, or can there be a real point to having them around” (201)? Drawing on the humanist idea of wisdom specifically, she provides an ethnographic account of the life of Edward and his community of Inis Oirr to show how a community perceives older people impacts the roles older people can take on. She finds that because Inis Oirr values older people, Edward was able to take on and, in turn, inspire the concept of wisdom. She argues, “The way people think about older people and ageing . . . has an undeniable influence on policy and behaviour” (202).

Texts that deal with age-related topics are not limited to scholarly texts, of course; composition instructors can find a variety of relevant news articles, literary texts, music, films, radio programs, and television programs. A quick search reveals a range of news articles that purport to relay critical, in-depth investigations about old age. For example, in “The New Reality of Old Age in America,” Jordan Mary and Kevin Sullivan offer the experiences of two white, healthy, married couples just below the cusp of financial security (and the complete autonomy that presumes to come with it) as the reality of life experiences during retirement. The New Yorker, however, provides a thorough discussion of stereotypes that limit how people conceive of old age. Ceridwen Dovey’s article, “What Old Age is Really Like,” also provides a long reading list of poems, novels, and scholarship relevant for critical depictions and discussions of old age. Other articles from the BBC, CBC, and New York Post present younger adults and older adults building partnerships to navigate the rising housing costs in cities. In addition to economic value, the new intergenerational housemates also express social, personal, and professional benefits. Asking students to read and search for recent articles is an important step to develop more sophisticated conceptions of age.

Second Step: Investigate the DALN and Apply Lessons of Literacy and Aging
This step emphasizes both playing with the archive and analyzing narratives. It is meant to offer instructors and students a meaningful way to compare and interpret contributions to the DALN that both implicitly and explicitly deal with aging. In “The Pedagogy of the DALN,” Comer and Harker report that the most common use of the DALN in classrooms is archival. “As a research site,” they write, “the DALN offers students the same potential it offers all academic stakeholders: the opportunity to access, investigate, and compare first-person accounts of literacy (and, often, related artifacts) that would be nearly impossible to gather individually” (70). As such, the DALN regularly functions as a resource of “assigned and suggested readings,” as a database for students’ individual research projects (69). A typical pedagogical sequence, according to the authors, involves self-guided exploration of the archive, followed by textual analysis of a selection of narratives, and a final step of synthesizing observations in the form of an academic research paper (70). Along these lines we envision instructors employing a version of the following prompt, which we have adapted from existing teaching resources on theDALN blog (https://thedaln.wordpress.com/daln-resources/):

For this part of the assignment, we will work as a class to investigate the relationship of aging and literacy by exploring the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. Your first task is to revisit themes/topics/theories related to aging and literacy we have discussed to date. With the goal of identifying 3-5 narratives, search the archive for keywords/tags related to our ongoing discussions about aging. Read/listen to/watch the narratives you find, recording observations and insights. As you watch these narratives, consider the following questions:

·      How are these narratives similar?
·      How are they different?
·      What role do attitudes about aging play in these narratives about literacy?
·      In what ways, do your individual experiences with literacy and aging impact your interpretation of these stories?

Finally, in a 5-7 page paper—and incorporating at least 2 secondary sources from our class—analyze the 3 DALN entries you have identified. In your paper, be sure to compare and contrast your narratives, noting meaningful trends and connections to reading and themes from our class.”

At base, this approach asks students to play with and investigate the archive in a manner that emphasizes suspending judgment and comparative analysis. Employing the DALN for comparative analysis “may help students develop a critical perspective on their personal histories within larger community and cultural contexts and position their resulting insights within scholarly discourses on literacy” (Comer and Harker 69). In more ways than one, both aging and literacy studies seek to impart critical frameworks and an awareness about how and why we develop particular attitudes about aging, reading, and writing.

Third Step: Conducting an Oral History Collection Event
A primary goal of an age studies approach to pedagogy is not to stand back and interpret narratives, however, but to use literacy practices to engage with communities and community building. And conducting oral histories is an effective method. As Stephen Caunce explains in Oral History and the Local Historian, collecting life stories that focus on a particular part of life or that cover a large portion provides scholars with a method “to examine life at a level of detail that would be quite impossible to achieve for whole populations, but which is essential for understanding the complex web of forces that make up all societies” (28). Conducting interviews also provides insight into experiences of marginalized groups such as inmates, people of color, women, LGBTQ+, and older people. He also argues that collecting and listening to stories from those we rarely hear must be a priority (84), otherwise we risk perpetuating stereotypes and learning only about individuals from “normalized” groups or from those with social and economic leverage. Asking students to read about oral history as a research method will help them understand their work as important and subversive.

To begin collecting the narratives, students and instructors should consider the location of the event because the location can impact the story. As Mark Riley and David Harvey point out in their work recording interviews with farmers in the actual fields, having the chance to see or interact with objects can provoke more detailed memories and contribute more meaningful descriptions. Of course, not all students or narrators can reasonably conduct site-specific interviews; however, conducting an event on-campus provides an opportunity to promote or combine university resources (e.g., writing center, library, or makerspace) or university events (e.g., art exhibits, guest speakers). In addition to physical interview sites, instructors and students can consider digital technologies to interview people in communities previously unreachable during a semester.

We also recommend students conduct practice interviews during class, where they can ask specific questions and consider when to interject (or not) during an interview. Introducing students to active listening tactics would be particularly beneficial as would allowing students to practice in small groups in order to notice biased questions, answers, or responses. Instructors and students can also consult the DALN blog for more resources and support; especially relevant is the “everybody has a literacy story” event.