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The narratives in this collection represent the voices of students who were enrolled in first-year writing courses at Cal State LA during the Spring 2020 semester. Additionally, we include work by students in one English major course—Literary Los Angeles—which offers insight into the experiences of students navigating critical transitions in the time of Coronavirus. As first-year writing faculty, we design courses that foreground major writing concepts and skillsets—process-oriented approaches to writing, awareness of genre conventions, critical thinking, argumentation and analysis, and information literacy—but our pedagogies also emphasize the value of the unique experiences, knowledges, and literacies our students bring into the writing classroom. We know our students have powerful stories to tell, and we understand the critical importance of providing opportunities for our students to tell those stories in their own words. This is an especially important endeavor for students living and persevering through crisis.

In the introductions that follow, we provide insight into the content of our individual courses, the kind of work we do with our students, and our different approaches to engaging a common conceptual prompt that we hoped would help us to better understand and document our students’ experiences, observations, and perspectives during the time of Coronavirus. We express our different views on the importance of a project like this and offer some discussion on the ways in which the work supported our and our students’ transition to remote instruction. We believe the stories collected here demonstrate the perceptiveness, resilience, and resourcefulness of our students. They represent trials and tribulations but also powerful acts of perseverance. We hope they will provide valuable perspective for those trying to understand the impact of this pandemic on historically underrepresented communities. Show Less

COVID in the Home “Stretch”  

The transition to remote teaching was a difficult one for many of my students in ENGL 1005B: College Composition II. Having already completed a semester and a half of “stretch” composition, all my students were on track to pass the class and fulfill their Written Communication GE requirement, which would bring them each a step closer to earning their colleg . . . Show More

COVID in the Home “Stretch”  

The transition to remote teaching was a difficult one for many of my students in ENGL 1005B: College Composition II. Having already completed a semester and a half of “stretch” composition, all my students were on track to pass the class and fulfill their Written Communication GE requirement, which would bring them each a step closer to earning their college degrees. In the weeks that followed the campus closures, I was shocked by the number of students who started dropping off. Students who were producing A and B quality papers were failing to turn in assignments. Students who hadn’t missed a day of class in two months stopped participating in discussion boards and would go weeks without logging into our online course management system. I knew from conversations with several students that they were having a difficult time negotiating the array of challenges they discuss in these narratives. I wanted to provide them with an opportunity to process these experiences through writing, to continue engaging course concepts, and to account for missed work that could potentially result in a NC for a class they had already demonstrated sincere investment in.  

The prompt for this extra credit opportunity was simple and inspired by this WAC archival project: What has life been like for you during the Coronavirus pandemic? Narratives could take the form of an academic essay, a personal narrative, or something more creative like a journal entry, poem, or collection of sketches. About half my class elected to complete the assignment. Some common themes emerge from the stories collected here: acute awareness of change, adaptability and resilience in the face of struggle, and willful recognition of what might be considered positive outcomes of the pandemic. This last trend surprised me, but I think it speaks to the powerful healing nature of hope. These students are looking through crisis and imagining a better future. I am grateful to my students and the many others who have submitted work for this project. Through their narratives, they have granted me access into the worlds they inhabit; their day to day dealings with family, friends, coworkers, and professors; the pressures they face; their anxieties; their values; and their needs. As the Director of First-Year Writing at Cal State LA, I need this perspective so that I can work with my colleagues to develop a responsive, relevant, and meaningful writing curriculum for our first-year students.

Voicing a Crisis: Rhetoric and Reflection  

Sometimes the hardest part is knowing that so many stories don’t get told. So many of my students did not finish the semester and never had the opportunity to submit for this project. Some of my students lost jobs or housing. Some students who’d been at every class with every assignment completed could not access the internet or contact me. Some were frustrated by quarantine, frightened for (or of) their families or . . . Show More

Voicing a Crisis: Rhetoric and Reflection  

Sometimes the hardest part is knowing that so many stories don’t get told. So many of my students did not finish the semester and never had the opportunity to submit for this project. Some of my students lost jobs or housing. Some students who’d been at every class with every assignment completed could not access the internet or contact me. Some were frustrated by quarantine, frightened for (or of) their families or even hospitalized for anxiety. 

Of those who did finish the semester, very few (less than 15%) chose to submit writing for this project. Shyness, logistics, technology challenges, disinterest, the power of choice itself—many factors were at play. I would have liked to have included more of their essays. Their writing was compelling, insightful, and replete with vivid, lived experience. They wrote about being a low-wage, powerless fast food workers designated as essential, the mistreatment of grocery store employees by insensitive and abusive customers, the challenges of building and maintaining new romantic relationships under quarantine.   

Choice was an important aspect of this final writing task of our Spring semester.  Each of my classes had the choice to write on a pre-pandemic topic, or the modified, of the moment, Coronavirus option. Most students opted for the writing task that allowed them the most topic freedom. Their Coronavirus option was: 

Option #2: Voicing a Crisis: Rhetoric and Reflection 

Background: We’re living through life-changing, historic times, full of emerging stories. So, who will be telling your stories? In past eras literature and composition were primarily practiced by a rarified few, and consequently a limited number of perspectives were written down. As a result, few voices were heard and many stories were lost. Today, however, more people are educated and literate than at any other time in American history. Additionally, the information age gives us exciting new options for data collection, storage and management. Due to these factors, we have more opportunities than ever to create inclusive histories. So, who will be telling your stories about the Spring of 2020? 

Topic: Write an essay in which you identify, explore and compose an argument about an aspect of the Covid-19 Pandemic relevant to your life, your career aspirations or your view of the world in general. This topic asks you to voice your experience of now while building an argument about some aspect of our current public health crisis. For instance, if you are interested in public health, you might examine public health practices, public health research trends, public health messaging or some other aspect of public health policies. Or, you might look at how the arts have responded to or been affected by this crisis and then create an argument about best practices for that field. You might argue for the benefits the arts provide mental health in times of crisis. Perhaps you are interested in how social media has helped or hindered some aspect of this pandemic? Maybe you’re interested in how computer modeling has been useful for governments or to the public? Perhaps you are fascinated or personally consumed by issues in the medical field. You may approach this topic from any direction you wish, so long as you to position yourself and your essay clearly in the midst of our current planetary health crisis, whether on that global scale, or at a local, statewide, nationwide scale. 

Student Stories LA  

I was teaching English 2600 this spring, Literary Los Angeles, and when I created a blog for students to post, most of my submissions came from this class. I have selected the contributions here because I these students agreed to participate. In the class we had been discussing Los Angeles as a paradox, Los Angeles light or dark, and what I found from the student poems was an incredible sense of love for the city, and yes, even of hop . . . Show More

Student Stories LA  

I was teaching English 2600 this spring, Literary Los Angeles, and when I created a blog for students to post, most of my submissions came from this class. I have selected the contributions here because I these students agreed to participate. In the class we had been discussing Los Angeles as a paradox, Los Angeles light or dark, and what I found from the student poems was an incredible sense of love for the city, and yes, even of hope. However, some of the other pieces really capture the sadness and fear many students felt as we confronted the pandemic. I know from talking to these students that writing about what was happening was cathartic for them, and two of the students became so inspired by working on their pieces that they decided to make writing a regular part of their life. I am deeply thankful for all the students in the class for handling the transition to working online with grace, but especially thankful for those who took the time to write these pieces and share them. You can see the blog with my posts at https://studentstoriesla.com/

The following is a collection of short narratives, journals, and creative/poetry pieces that were written by my English 1010: Accelerated College Writing students. These students proved to be a highly motivated and dedicated group–eager to jump into our class topics and often delighted me with their curiosity and creativity as thinkers and writers. My fear was that the abrupt end of our face-to-face classes would halt the intellectual and emotional spirit we had fostered prior to the Coronavi . . . Show More

The following is a collection of short narratives, journals, and creative/poetry pieces that were written by my English 1010: Accelerated College Writing students. These students proved to be a highly motivated and dedicated group–eager to jump into our class topics and often delighted me with their curiosity and creativity as thinkers and writers. My fear was that the abrupt end of our face-to-face classes would halt the intellectual and emotional spirit we had fostered prior to the Coronavirus lockdown.  I did lose some students as we moved into the uncharted territory of remote learning; I also feared a loss in the connection we had worked so hard to build; yet, I ended up feeling grateful and humbled at the swift transition the majority were able to make.  Despite the seemingly insurmountable and disheartening changes to their first-year college experience, my students demonstrated a remarkable resilience which I believe is revealed in their work below.  

For the purposes of the WAC stories archives, my students were given creative and personal freedom to tell their stories however they wanted, responding primarily to the question: “What has life been like for you during the Coronavirus pandemic?” 

Each Student is a Story: Captured Voices in a Topsy-Turvy Time

From the beginning of the beginning, humans lived and then told narratives about tragedy and triumph. Themes of birthing and themes of dying–the foundation of humanity. Themes of relationship and religion. Themes of love and lust, faithfulness and infidelity, fulfilled hearts and broken hearts. Themes of what was lost and themes of what was found. Good vs. evil. Right vs wrong… And chronicles of plag . . . Show More

Each Student is a Story: Captured Voices in a Topsy-Turvy Time

From the beginning of the beginning, humans lived and then told narratives about tragedy and triumph. Themes of birthing and themes of dying–the foundation of humanity. Themes of relationship and religion. Themes of love and lust, faithfulness and infidelity, fulfilled hearts and broken hearts. Themes of what was lost and themes of what was found. Good vs. evil. Right vs wrong… And chronicles of plagues, epidemics, and pandemics. Science fiction thrillers about diseases that devour humankind get made into movies. Fantasy, reality, or both? —Melissa Martin

Topsy-Turvy…

The Coronavirus changed the way we learn, socialize, and work.  Almost overnight, in order to slow the escalation of the virus, schools closed and turned to remote learning.  This rationalized disruption included the closure of movie theaters, dine-in restaurants, bars, clubs, gyms, amusement parks, museums, places of worship, parks, hiking trails, and even Disneyland and all beaches.  We were asked to avoid social gatherings, limit non-essential travel, and avoid contact with others by social distancing, an overused phrase that has monopolized our tongue. The Public Health Department asked us to please wear a mask in public at all times for an indefinite time.  As we are intensely bombarded with such life-altering changes we should not rely on our gray matter to preserve substantial moments, so we turn to ink to provide a portal into our topsy-turvy lives where those we once hugged tightly now stand six-feet apart due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The only way to slow things down is to tell about our world and our place during this pandemic through our stories. 

Each person is a story…

The future will be looking back on the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 through the written word. Articles in newspapers will be documented; short stories will have heroic protagonists; scripts will personify the virus, and a relentless villain will emerge; history books will be printed for future students to skeptically read what we are currently and unquestionably living. It is true that right now we are living history every day, so why not write about it!  Writing allows us to record those moments that in time will cease to exist; it reminds us that our past was and is real.  While actively living through this rationalized disruption the possibility of forgetting this new way of life may seem inconceivable; however, when we are finally allowed to drop an overbearingly heavy item, do we not do so quickly?  It then falls to the ground, and we walk away to greener pastures.  Just as heavy items are dropped surprisingly quickly with such intense speed, so are heavy times.  We can only be reminded of their burdensome weight through ink stains for writing certainly endures longer than memory.  

Captured Voices…

With this being said, my goal these last few months was to capture the voices of my students through their uncertainties, certainties, joys, fears, realizations, laughter, chaos, and blessings as this pandemic unraveled.  In order to understand how the Coronavirus affected the lives of students I had to slow things down.  The way to slow things down is to break things down, and my students did this as they engaged in essential questions through specific prompts; such engagement allowed students to discover their unrecognizable new world. Being a First-Year College writing course where students are still developing writing strategies to explore, interpret, and communicate information about themselves and their lives through writing, aside from creative assignments, students were encouraged to respond to each prompt using focused topic sentences, and they received credit based on completeness, unity, organization and clarity. The following prompts were based on New York Times articles from The Learning Network, and assignments took various forms as narrative paragraphs, opinion editorials, picture prompt responses, and even poetry to help inspire their writing and further develop their craft: In TOGETHER/APART the question “How are you staying connected during this time of social distancing?” is asked; in the prompt EMPTY SPACES students looked at the powerfully desolate images of historical landmarks in the visual article “The Great Empty” and they answered a more playful question: What typically-crowded places do you dream of having all to yourself?; in INFODEMIC students looked at the idea that the virus is not the only danger, so is the misinformation about the pandemic that all forms of social media are spreading (some students went so far as to investigate bogus information using the suggested techniques explained in the article); in prompt MR. ROGERS students turned their attention to their community/family and shared with us heroic acts both big or small; and while some chose to respond to prompt PLAY IT LOUD and share how music creates a sense of belonging during such an isolating time, other students chose to write about how they are getting their sports fix in PLAY BALL (or not); once again visual prompts made students laugh via memes in prompt HA HA! IS IT OK TO LAUGH DURING DARK TIMES? while the images in LIFE AS WE KNOW IT pushed them to compare their own housebound lives to people in the images wearing comfy clothes surrounded by stacks of TP; using the same picture prompts students embarked on the final prompt of the semester, prompt 5-7-5, where they wrote three traditional Haiku poems from the perspective of one of the people in the picture proving that few words can leave a poignant message. These prompts helped them identify personal and meaningful moments that relate to the larger context of life in the time of Covid-19, as well as chronicle their cloaked lives ultimately monumentalizing “what it was to be them” during this pandemic.