Language Arts Journal of Michigan Language Arts Journal of Michigan
Volume 30 Issue 1 Article 10
2014
Talking and Teaching About my Family: Personal Narratives, Talking and Teaching About my Family: Personal Narratives,
Disability, and Writing for Empathy Disability, and Writing for Empathy
Rachel Kooiker
Spring Lake High School
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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Kooiker, Rachel (2014) "Talking and Teaching About my Family: Personal Narratives, Disability, and Writing
for Empathy,"
Language Arts Journal of Michigan
: Vol. 30: Iss. 1, Article 10.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.9707/2168-149X.2042
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48 LAJM, Fall 2014
G
rowing up, I knew from an early age that
my family was weird. Not Malcolm in the
Middle weird or Running with Scissors weird.
We were abnormal weird. Bulk-size boxes
of adult diapers delivered to our home
weekly weird. See, I was the “normal” child sandwiched be-
tween two siblings with a rare musculoskeletal syndrome, and
my mother and grandmother operated a foster care home for
adult women with developmental disabilities. My childhood
was a bit unusual, to say the least, and that turned out to
be one of my greatest assets as a classroom teacher. I didn’t
always see my experiences that way, though. I’m ashamed to
admit this, but for many years I struggled to accept my own
family. I was embarrassed when people stared at us in pub-
lic. I didn’t forgive my sister’s behavioral outbursts. I avoided
having friends over for fear I would have to “explain” the
random women walking around our yard or the strange bab-
bling noises coming from inside the house.
It was not until I was an undergraduate English major
that I began to understand the power of story—in my life
and in the world. Years later, as a high school teacher work-
ing on a writing unit with my tenth graders, I realized that I
did need to “explain” my family to people. My brother and
sister have important stories and no way to tell them. I have
important stories to tell because I grew up with a perspective
on normal and abnormal that most people aren’t privy to. In
this article, I’ll share how that realization led me to develop
some specific and important pedagogical moves in my tenth-
grade English classroom.
I hear the word retard every day. At work. On TV. I no-
tice it a lot in the halls at school. Sadly, its usage isn’t limited
to students. Adults seem to say it just as often as adolescents.
Apparently this is one word that still isn’t taboo enough to
cause a scandal. Sure, there are campaigns against the use
of the word (End the R-Word, for one), and it is often rec-
ognized as a word that is hateful, brimming with the long
history of prejudice and discrimination toward those with
RACHEL KOOIKER
Talking and Teaching About my Family: Personal
Narratives, Disability, and Writing for Empathy
PRACTICE
disabilities. But this word is still common. While often pri-
vately dismayed at the flippant use of this word, what both-
ered me the most was that this usage is just a symptom of a
much larger problem: it is just one of many daily injustices
that people with disabilities are forced to deal with. Often,
these injustices go unnoticed, except by those with disabili-
ties, their friends, and their families.
Despite being bothered by the marginalization of peo-
ple with disabilities in ways both large and small, I didn’t see
what I could really do in my role as a teacher. My wake-up call
came one evening when I read an angry journal entry written
bdy a normally shy sophomore. She had composed a pas-
sionate piece expressing her personal outrage at hearing her
peers use the word retard. In her journal entry, she explained
her very close relationship with a cousin who has a severe
cognitive disability. Coincidentally, I had just written a similar
rant, angered by a co-worker tossing around the word retarded
in conversation with me, completely oblivious to my horror
at the word choice. That journal entry and my experience
highlighted an important commonality; the people using the
language were often unaware of how they were hurting those
around them.
The timing of this student’s journal entry and the ex-
perience that drove my own personal writing spurred me to
develop a writing workshop unit that would specifically ad-
dress what my student and I both knew from our personal
lives—namely, that people with disabilities are marginalized
in ways that are largely invisible to the non-disabled. Since it
is impossible and insulting to assume that one can “try on”
and experience what it is like to have a disability, teachers can
only encourage empathy without “walking in somebody else’s
shoes.” For me, one small step toward solving this problem
was to create a way for students to simply become aware of
other people’s experiences through their stories. Specifically,
I wanted my students to understand why they shouldn’t toss
the word retard around, and I wanted them to know why that
was important to me. I began this process by creating an
LAJM, Fall 2014 49
though it didn’t happen to them. I then introduced the goal:
we would be working on a personal narrative assignment, and
it would be driven by our questions and answers related to
the following questions: What stories really need to be told?
I used this as our inquiry question because it addressed di-
rectly what I wanted to think and write about. The question
was significant and not isn’t easily answered, and it allowed
students to think and write in many directions, so that they
had choice in their writing topics.
My students were familiar with the writing workshop
methods that were used, and so little direct teaching was re-
quired to establish workshop procedures. My writing work-
shop format was shaped by Penny Kittle’s methods (as de-
scribed in Write Beside Them), and I started the writing process
by working through my own rough draft right in front of
students.
Day 3: I wrote a rough draft that told the story of an
experience that my sister had on the school bus, here is an
excerpt:
Most of the stories about my childhood are funny,
if only in the way that the absurd becomes laugh-
able when there is no other way to treat it. But
many of the stories I have aren’t funny, not in any
sense. For example, the many fire drills my older
sister endured, while I looked on, passive.
My sister and I rode the bus to school for 35 long,
dreadful minutes, and sometimes these bus rides
were extended by perfunctory fire drills. The big-
gest kids, usually a couple of meaty sixth grade
boys, routinely volunteered to jump down first so
that they could help the smaller ones down when it
was their turn. One by one, students big and small
were safely hoisted by their armpits to the ground.
I was already waiting in the parking lot when I saw
my sister’s chubby body fill the emergency exit.
“One, two . . .” the sixth graders counted, and
my sister spread her arms, waiting to find helping
hands.
But on “three” there were no helping hands. There
was air. There were the flailing arms of my sister as
she fell two feet, face-first, to the pavement. There
was me, a third-grader, looking on. Nobody else
knew that Amber’s blood didn’t clot. Nobody else
knew that any bleeding, internal or external, major
or minor, could be fatal for her. But I stood silent.
Rachel Kooiker
inquiry-based writing unit that my students and I would work
through together using a workshop process.
The Writing Workshop
Out of necessity, the writing workshop was tied into a
required piece of writing for tenth grade students, the per-
sonal narrative. The narrative was ideally suited for the in-
quiry and thinking that I wanted my students to engage in.
Below, I describe each day of the workshop, with individual
class periods lasting 70 minutes each.
Day 1: Before any writing took place, we engaged in a
simple frontloading, pre-writing activity. First, I shared with
students the poem that I had written in response to my ex-
perience with a co-worker (see below). Then, we had an in-
depth class discussion in response to the question, “How
do you deal with negative experiences?” We discussed how
we respond internally, externally, emotionally, physically, and
more. Then, in groups of three to four, I asked students to
work together to create a one-page document (this could be
a chat, graph, comic, list, etc.) that illustrated how they get
past negative experiences. This moved us to think about how
we process our reaction and work through the negative to get
back to positivity.
Once students completed this work, we shared out. Stu-
dent responses varied, but a common thread that we identi-
fied was that in each process of working through negativity,
students had an outlet for the experience. The outlets identi-
fied by students included confiding in a parent or friend,
venting in a journal, or engaging in physical activity. After
this debriefing, I asked students a more challenging question:
what would happen if the outlets you had were limited or
non-existent? This was an intentionally difficult question,
and I left students to think and write silently for the last five
minutes of class. We did not share our thoughts or writing
out loud; it was my intention to have students mull over this
problem for a bit.
Day 2: Referring to our previous discussion, I intro-
duced both the inquiry question that would drive our writ-
ing and the writing workshop. I told students that, for me,
writing was an important way of moving beyond negative
experiences. I explained that I noticed how many of them
were emotionally impacted by my poem: they expressed out-
rage or sympathy; they asked questions about my family; they
demanded to know who would use such a word. It seemed
like my sharing of a personal poem allowed them to tap into
the feelings that negative experience caused for me, even
50 LAJM, Fall 2014
Talking and Teaching About my Family: Personal Narratives, Disability, and Writing for Empathy
could work on their own writing. The students who were
shocked by the bus incident couldn’t believe this story. Their
words and comments continued to reflect sincere compas-
sion and empathy. Throughout this drafting, sharing, and
revising process, students were also sharing their own work
with me and 1-2 classmates, using the same peer revision pro-
cess I modeled. We were also calling attention to and work-
ing on important writing skills; I was showing them how I
reorganized my piece for this effect or that, and I was mod-
eling word choice revision. Most importantly, we discussed
throughout the commenting process how my story (which
was really my sister’s story) was evoking empathy and com-
passion. We were beginning to answer our big question—
What stories should be told?—by looking at the effect of our
personal stories had on our classmates.
Day 6: To help answer our main inquiry, I added more
to my own narrative. The next section of my piece addressed
how the experiences my sister had growing up shaped the
ideals and values that I now hold and wanted to share:
I don’t know what made me start thinking about my
sister’s school experiences so much. Some people
might have just shook their heads in disgust and
walked away from the memories. I couldn’t, can’t,
and now won’t shake them off. Yet, I didn’t have
a sudden epiphany. There was no revelation from a
burning bush telling me to go forth and teach. But
eventually I centered on the idea that I learned to be
tolerant and was given different ways of looking at
the world through reading. I also wrote. I wrote to
understand, I wrote to tell others about the world
of disability that I grew up in.
And that is what is powerful about teaching. It
doesn’t always take walking in someone else’s shoes
to be able to care about their lives; sometimes it is
only listening to the stories that they tell. So this is
what I think about when I think about teaching. I
think of the silent torture of those kids who are
placed in the position of being a victim, but aren’t
allowed to have a say. I think of the untold or un-
heard stories like my sister’s. In her case, disability
stops people from looking beyond her grubby ap-
pearance and listening to her stories.
Sometimes it is race, poverty, or appearances, but the
fact remains that there are a lot of things that stop
us from listening to and caring about the people we
I was too afraid to do anything. At nine years old, I
was learning from my peers that people like Amber
didn’t deserve any better.
Luckily, Amber suffered only minor scrapes and
bruises; physically, anyway. The bus driver wrote up
an incident report, I’m sure, but the whole ordeal
was discussed as an unfortunate “accident.” I knew
better. Everyone knew better.
I shared this narrative with my students using Google
Drive, and I invited them to comment on what they read.
When my students commented on my draft, they didn’t only
comment on the writing, they also responded emotionally
and empathetically to my sister. One boy lambasted my lack
of response with the comment, “She could have died.” Many
students wrote about how sorry they felt for Amber. Others
expressed disbelief: how could students have actually done
that? I think they were all a little bit like the nine-year-old me,
unwilling to accept that cruelty kids can be cruel, too.
Days 4-5: After reading and commenting on my rough
draft, students set out to write their own narratives. I made
revisions on mine and thought about what to share with
them next. In the second draft of my narrative, I added the
following piece:
When my sister was a tenth grader, a popular boy
in her high school class exposed himself to her in
the hallway. This pervert didn’t receive so much as
a detention. If I were a teacher at that school, I’d
want him in shackles and chains, paraded around
the school for all to see his punishment. For weeks,
my mom tried to get the school to punish this cretin
in some way. I’m not sure what happened; may-
be none of the school employees could verify the
story. Maybe some people could, but didn’t step
up to help out. Maybe the old saying “boys will be
boys” was spoken at some point. All I think that
I know for sure is that if an incident like this had
happened to another kid, a kid the teachers knew
and loved, there would have been a bit more done
about it. But there my sister was, a victim not even
adults would stand up for. At the time, I was a sev-
enth grader who was pretty oblivious to Amber’s
struggles. There is no way I could have imagined
what that humiliating experience was like for her
or my mom.
My students continued to comment with fervor on my
draft. I had to ask students to stop commenting so that they
LAJM, Fall 2014 51
Rachel Kooiker
sometimes. Mary calls me ‘E’ because she can’t
pronounce Megan. She calls George ‘Orssshhaa!’
Mary has probably heard my mom and dad scream
my brother’s name so many times she started calling
him that. I have grown up just knowing the ‘little
sayings,’ as we call them, and figuring out at an early
age that some people have challenges makes my life
seem extremely easy.
Megan’s narrative also included an episode where anoth-
er girl grew impatient with Mary, and wouldn’t play with her
because she grew frustrated trying to understand her. Megan
left her audience with this plea, which I pass on to you:
Everyone should learn to speak Marrish. If we
could all see the world through the eyes of a child
with special needs, we would be so much better off.
That is how Mary has made me a better person and
shapes my life.
Another student, Andrea, shares in her narrative her
experiences growing up with a mother who struggled with
alcoholism and a father who had an untreated mental illness:
Most eight-year-old children don’t know much
about the real world, and most eight-year-old chil-
dren haven’t a worry in the world. Most have their
own possessions and have a loving family who they
live with for their countless years before leaving the
nest. I, however, was not a normal eight-year old-
child. When I was eight years old, I wasn’t frolick-
ing around a playground or at a bowling birthday
party; I was being taken away from my biological
family. My mother was a green thumbed gardener,
fantastic cook, avid reader, and an alcoholic. She
struggled with drinking problems throughout most
of her life and developed a brain tumor at the age
of about thirty five. She was in no way fit to take
care of two rambunctious children. As for my fa-
ther, his struggle wasn’t a physical addiction, but a
mental illness. Anger seized him as a lion would a
lamb, and he had fits of rage. Often times without
warning, he would leave our family alone while he
went away for weeks at a time.
Day 10: The read-around could not have gone better.
Students were engaged, and they were proud of and invested
in their stories. Still, we needed to revisit our original inquiry
question: What stories really need to be told? Students re-
flected on this by writing in their journals for approximately
fifteen minutes. I prompted them to consider the stories
that their classmates had told, and to think about why it was
walk this earth with. There are things that hold peo-
ple back from telling their stories, too. Some people
can’t write or speak for themselves.
“It is really cool to see why you wanted to be a teacher,”
was the first comment I received on that section of writing.
In this round of peer revision, I asked students whether or
not the conclusion was definite enough. I wasn’t attempting
to lead them to the correct answer—I was actually worried
about the conclusion in my narrative. I still felt as though
I hadn’t really said what I felt needed to be said about what
teachers and schools can do for or to people with disabilities.
My students agreed. They told that they wanted a stronger
conclusion, one with more emotion. This is what my stu-
dents led me to write and understand:
For me, the choice to become a writer and an English
teacher was driven by the realization that if I wanted the fu-
ture to be a safer, more aware place for people of all perspec-
tives, then I needed to be a teacher. Now, as a writer I have
to tell stories about the worlds I live in. Now, as an English
teacher, I need to show my students that listening to the sto-
ries of others creates one world linked through the power of
our shared experiences.
Days 7-9: While that excerpt is the end of my personal
narrative, it isn’t the end of my writing experience with my
students. We needed to polish and share our writing. We used
two days to discuss grammatical revisions to our work, and
the last day of our unit was a writing celebration. I had seen
many version of my students’ narratives, and I was excited to
hold a read-around of all our work on the day the narratives
were due. I explained how we would share our writing: one
person at a time, sitting in a comfortable circle with hot co-
coa, and each writer could share as much or as little as he/she
pleased. Students were apprehensive about reading in class,
but quickly became engaged as they listened to the words of
their classmates. The narratives were deep, thoughtful, and
often profound.
One thing that I couldn’t help but notice was that many
students had reflected on their experiences with disabil-
ity. Most memorable was Megan’s essay, which she proudly
agreed to let me share excerpts of here. She wrote about her
sister Mary, who has a disability that, along with other things,
affects her speech. She and her family have taken to calling
Mary’s way of speaking “Marrish.” Megan reflected about
what this has taught her and others here:
Mary is my little angel sister. From the outside she
looks and acts like a “normal” kid, but on the inside
she is a little mystery that even my family can’t solve
52 LAJM, Fall 2014
Talking and Teaching About my Family: Personal Narratives, Disability, and Writing for Empathy
Retard
Talking about her fifth hour class
She slung one word through the air
Carelessly
Without being the slightest bit aware
Of my disdain
For the term
She did something that revealed
A portion of her character
And mine
I kept my jaw sealed
If that had been a student of mine
I might have asked
“Could you choose another word”
Out of the vast array of words
in the English language
the many nouns and adjectives at our disposal
she arrives at that one
without knowing, of course
what it is like to have a disability
without knowing, of course,
what it is like to hear the word retard
thrown around here and there
synonymous with gay, stupid, bad
synonymous with you-
if you happen to be “slow”
if you happen to be disabled
if you happen to by my sister
if you happen to be my brother
but unlike the n-word – unlike
other derogatory labels
there hasn’t been enough
fuss and commotion
to carry through a linguistic revolution
but rather those with ignorant minds pollute
our word population with an n-word dilution
come on-
could you choose another word?
—Rachel Kooiker
important that those stories were told. Their writing revealed
that many had gained new knowledge about one another,
and that the process of writing and listening to stories had
opened up new ways of looking at each other, as demon-
strated in this student reflection:
I thought it was a very powerful, profound, and beautiful
story, and it brought tears to my eyes. Most of us don’t share
our backgrounds with each other, and Megan’s story showed
that you never know when something you say or do might
mean something more, which can be good and bad.
The overall experience with this writing workshop has
affirmed the power of storytelling for me. I believe that sim-
ply sharing my stories with my students may be the most
powerful tool I have for changing minds and our world. To-
gether, voices like Megan’s and mine can combine in power-
ful ways. I am no longer the wary nine-year-old schoolgirl
who doesn’t know how to protect her sister from school bul-
lies. I am a teacher who can both tell stories and help students
tell stories that can help change us all.
Rachel Kooiker teaches English and Psychology at Spring
Lake High School. She spends her non-school hours in Hud-
sonville, with her husband, daughter, dog, and horses.
