Soul Work

Metaphor

Metaphor is useful in calling students’ attention to something other than what is or what appears to be. One might enter the landscape of transformation through a “personal engagement” with metaphor (Dyson, 2010, p. 15). However, Participant 5 discusses the difficulty for students involved in this engagement: “They struggle with metaphorical thinking, the ambiguity, to live in the ambiguity.” In English courses, my students want a list of words or phrases to use in specific instances. They often want to see models of essays as well. They would like to be told, in many cases, what is or is not “right.” However, for deeper transformation, a less detailed map is ideal. Teachers and learners, who let go of the myth of control, allow the space for ambiguity and uncertainty, crucial components of transformative learning (Poutiatine, 2009).

Truth

Constructivism serves as partial solution to illusory teacher control. One teacher explains, “I try to make a really big free and secure space where they feel free enough and comfortable and secure enough to exchange versions of truth so that we can all just be as honest as we want” (Participant 1). In constructivism, the student and teacher collaborate in learning through “power sharing” (Fume, 2005, p. 54). Sharing the truth of experiences can lead to transformation since others’ truths often lead to cognitive dissonance. Learners are transformed when they move towards reinterpretation not rote memorization (Jones, 2009). As a result, the use of truth in soul work is the sharing of one’s experiences and power in a safe space. Further, sharing of truth includes slowing down. One teacher recollects, “So not only did I stutter when I was in school because I was afraid to reveal myself I was afraid of the blank page because I was afraid to reveal myself. And when I learned how to slow down, inhale and tell the truth when I talk I quit stuttering” (Participant 6). The open dialogue of truth allows room for exploration of the blocks to clear writing and thinking, which in many cases come through the inability to be transparent or vulnerable.

Consciousness

When consciousness emerges during the participants’ experiences with soul work, it appears as a process of becoming more aware of something beyond the self or surface. Participant 4 exhorts, “Let the writing take you where it wants to go. But there’s that struggle between the conscious, the planned versus the unplanned.” During soul work, some teachers may make this struggle between conscious and unconscious motivations explicit, even necessary, for clearer writing and thinking. Engaging in struggles with the conscious and unconscious selves leads to awareness of identity and the transformation of the person (Kovan & Dirkx, 2003). Because conscious and unconscious awareness are often not chronological or time dependent, the attraction to unifying or complementing the two areas could be new connections or interpretations to old events and ideas. The English classroom seems a likely place for such a struggle of consciousness in part because teachers expect learners to engage the whole self within the drafting and revising space. One writes from one’s history and the history of the human race with an effort to connect experiences to new lines of future thoughts and actions. Dyson (2010) offers the idea that one cannot change another’s consciousness; it is a self-authoring process. Participant 2 connects a rise in consciousness to the self-authoring phenomenon. She discusses the work of Paulo Freire’s community groups that assisted “with literacy, critical consciousness, and helping people become educationally aware of their own power that they were—it was called self-empowerment, education for critical consciousness, increasing people’s political abilities and actions” (Participant 2). The identity formation as a result of heightened consciousness in students in this vein signals an understanding of the self as an agent of change through self-authoring. One can write from the place of transformation by being made aware of one’s power to self-actualize.

Creation

The empowered, self-authoring student creates something new on paper from an internal connection of unique experiences and ideas. One teacher describes the condition of many writers who enter the self-authoring experience for the first time with old, unexamined habits of mind. She says, “So if a child was mistreated or starved or neglected or spanked or any kind of [negative] thing, at that time, it became known to the child through the senses and during the time that trust was being developed. So the child would create a world from that instead of [positive] experiences” (Participant 2). Questioning the personal within the writer seems necessary to seed new inventions. The new worldview of the young learner, then, is a guarded and narrowed one. Some educators describe their method of creation as opening a space for new birth. One teacher shares the following:

I’d just say, “What do you think? That’s nice, isn’t it?” I wouldn’t tell them why I was doing what I was doing. But just to keep hearing it and hearing it, for me that was the experience of the soul of the work. It was coming into me, and I wasn’t creating a barrier. (Participant 5)

Dyson (2010) focuses this: “Guiding others in learning situations, or in counseling situations, rather than telling, directing, instructing, and controlling others, is a way forward and potentially leads individuals to self-evaluation, self-monitoring, and self-control” (p. 13). Teachers bridge students over depths where the evaluation of the myths, metaphors, and images of the unconscious occur. Participant 2 recounts a story of an inventive student attracted to creativity yet unable to cross the distance between his world and the perceived world of academia:

And so when he creates the wrestler, he has to give a whole, like a name, an identity, a whole background. So there’s a lot of writing in there involved. And he gets very passionate about this thing, about this online wrestling and his characters. (Participant 3)

As a projection of the self, perhaps, this student is able to create something significant through writing about the wrestler as if he is a real being. When the self is stuck in writing because of oppressive form or expectation of order, a method identified here is the creation of a fantasy world that connects what is important to the writer practically in order to help form the writer academically. The creation matters first, the process of reproducing the method only later.

Dialoguing

Because many English students enter a course in composition with some baggage from past writing teachers or past life experiences with caregivers, dialoguing seems less like a tool for the “Call” theme and more like a movement toward complementary space. Simply put, transformative meaning becomes much more relevant through “critical discourse with others” (Kitchenham, 2008, p. 113). Dialoguing is engaging in the conversation. Inviting the silenced or oppressed learners to talk or to have the floor for a time aids in the creation of a new voice. One teacher tries to identify learners who could use dialogue with a writing experience: “Dialogue with them, talk to them, particularly ones who are struggling with where to go with it” (Participant 5). Besides its guiding function, dialoguing with learners pushes beyond maintenance and into transformative learning, or at the very least, into critical reflection—a preliminary phase in transformation. Dialogue, like discourse, “has as its goal reaching a common understanding and justification of an interpretation or belief. People present reasons for their beliefs, weigh the evidence given in others’ arguments, consider alternative perspectives, and come to a tentative best judgment” (Cranton & Carusetta, 2004, p. 289). Teachers who find a place for open dialogue in a secure space position students in a transformative space. Transformation of meaning perspectives occurs when something dissimilar with one’s worldview leads to critical reflection of one’s system of belief (Jones, 2009). A teacher uses soul work when he or she dialogues with learners at the locations of their struggles to help them articulate the systems of belief or knowledge being held together partially by unconscious adherence to myths, metaphors, and images of the past.

Questioning

Like dialoguing as a method of movement in soul work, questioning seeks multiple voices to process meaning. Most participants in this research delight in the use of questions. One says, “I ask questions and help them, just kind of coach them, really, until they empty” (Participant 1). The questions require a response or movement into the conversation, an emptying of the prior static positioning. Another recollects, “There is a lot of participation and a lot of questions. So that slows us down a lot but I do like that. I want them to ask questions” (Participant 4). The questioning movement takes time, perhaps because it requires two-way communication and critical reflection on the assumptions and underlying meanings within the messages conveyed. She continues, “Sometimes just one teacher’s question will do it. The right question” and “Yeah I think it’s important to ask the right question and again it would be what touches that center of a person … You’re jolted sort of” (Participant 4). Of all the information possible, one phrase or sentence can blur the significance of all the rest. Another teacher recalls, “And so there would be times where a student would—I could see it, they would have that epiphany, they would get it because of the question that I asked or an exchange that we had. And they got it” (Participant 5). Through movement into the open space, free students respond to questions they might never have asked themselves to grow in ways they might never have foreseen. Because the teacher envisions the student for what he or she could be and not as the image projected or believed in the student’s mind, transformation is possible once the student faces cognitive dissonance with patience. Cranton and Wright (2008) note the following:

An individual who begins to see himself or herself as being capable of learning and exchanging knowledge with others is calling into question his or her previous habits of mind. This questioning or critical reflection can then lead to a revision of a value, belief, assumption, or even a broader perspective. If this happens, transformative learning has taken place. (p. 34)

The myth made conscious could be that a student’s value is measured incorrectly by his or her past inability to answer prerehearsed pedantic questions. Some mature learners grow while facing “high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity,” by practicing exploration through a “continual questioning of life’s direction” (Kovan & Dirkx, 2003, p. 106). Likewise, Participant 5 reveals his method of allowing for the birth of living questions:

I don’t want to at the end of reading something immediately jump to the discussion question that you’d see at the end of a chapter. It might be a personal comment like I’ll say, “Boy, I’m just really struck by that line there. Can you feel that?”

The “that” of the question sets up a potential discussion of the other, which by its very mention requires more questions. The writing teacher open to questions instead of closed to predestined answers produces questioning learners.

Hearing

To respond to the movement of questions during soul work, participants also discuss hearing as important action. Participant 5 elaborates, “I would re-read a line again and again and again. I wouldn’t tell them why I was doing what I was doing. But just to keep hearing it and hearing it, for me that was the experience of the soul.” Eliciting response requires movement into the mysterious or ambiguous. Hanlin-Rowney et al. (2006) suggest this type of hearing is like listening to the soul without making meaning. While there seems ample time to make meaning of information, perhaps through the movement of hearing, students’ patient quiet allows for the mind, emotion, body, and spirit in a holistic experience. Careful to distinguish between hearing and listening, one of the participants believes a vital element separates the two actions, so she teaches her students how to tell the difference. She contends, “And then we went to sound, and we talked about how sound is different than listening. First of all, that if you’re listening, you’re listening and remembering. If you’re just hearing it, sound can be shut off” (Participant 2). One could theorize then that remembering is the opening to an ongoing communication. In this way, deep hearing is listening and remembering the communication of the various myths, metaphors, and images of the past, like those of the student writer and the roadside sculpture that introduced this article. A text or communication can lead one back again and again “in explicable ways, held captive by them for varying lengths of time, seemingly spellbound by their messages—our inner worlds refracted through the lens of image and metaphor and story” (Dirkx, Mezirow, & Cranton, 2006, p. 127). Hearing, as described by these participants, takes time, a sense of personal space, a reflective teacher, and a willingness to allow the ongoing communication to take us where it may.

Awakening

The movement of awakening, like dialoguing, questioning, and hearing thrives through authentic, trusting relationships in the classroom. One of the participants describes a lowering into the depths of human experience: “When I say I take them down, I do mean that in their own writing. But I mean it in a broader sense than that. I mean awaken them to human suffering, to the gravity of the human condition” (Participant 1). To awaken is to go down and to be aware of what really matters. This awakening to broader experiences removed from the students’ affective domain likely causes dissonance in learners. Scott (2003) expresses, “social action disrupts, bothers, and interferes with the established internal structures of the psyche as well as external structures in the world, and it is this constant state of disequilibrium that supports transformation” (p. 280). In a sense, the awakening allows for the conscious exploration of human pleasure and pain. The result may be a spiritual reflection leading to a weighty realization of pleasure and pain as ubiquitous. Education is the experience of whole people, so when one teaches, one’s mind, spirit, and body are “aligned” in the act (Shahjahan, 2004, p. 299). While participants did not use the words “spiritual awakening” at any point, some used the language and imagery of spiritual truth. For example, one teacher uses the metaphor of a small seed: “Something has to be awakened and there’s got to be a little—I mean, there may be like a thousand dead little seedlings in there, but there’s like one little sprout that’s waiting” (Participant 3). The image of student as a seedling for new life seems a powerful motivation to encourage awakening. What is education if not this?

Struggling

Perhaps, of all the movements discovered, the one most inherent in transformative learning is struggling. One participant discusses the connections between soul work and struggling to find meaning through writing. He says, “Let the writing take you where it wants to go. But there’s that struggle between the conscious, the planned versus the unplanned. So for the assignments that I create, start with free writing” (Participant 5). His inclusion of free writing seems logical since soul work includes the release of the controlling consciousness to discover meaning through the reflection on unconscious myths, metaphors, and images. Transformative learning occurs when one gets out of his or her way to know the subject as it is fully (Lawrence & Cranton, 2009). The writer’s plan most often only considers other pathways to knowledge when personal pain enters the equation and one cannot take the well-worn path in comfort.

The struggle of the writing student involves not only surface concerns but the plugging into a stream of ideas to find unconscious knowing. Not knowing can lead to listening to hidden ideas and is “anchored within a continual openness to learning” (Kovan & Dirkx, 2003, p. 106). It seems the less one controls past conscious knowledge, the more likely one is to hear from hidden places. Teachers struggle to be free from patterns of control, which lead to less creativity and, perhaps, less contact with the unconscious. Students already have the restrictive voices in mind. A teacher suggests, “Dialogue with them, talk to them, particularly ones who are struggling with where to go with it. I’ve gotten more in trouble I would say in the last four or five years [because] I became more and more prescriptive, managing, managerial of their learning” (Participant 5). The managerial self, perhaps, the “I” of the conscious person, leads some teachers and students toward a narrowed structure of control, away from the open creative space of discovery.

The struggle for student and teacher involves giving up a measure of control in order to allow creation for the student and the teacher. This is no different than working in a team to accomplish a particular project, but for soul work to occur, the effort to loosen control runs far deeper. It would necessitate personal vulnerability. Perhaps, this is what Participant 2 had in mind when she warned future English teachers of the coming struggle to come to awareness of the task of teaching. She questions, “Didn’t you know it would call on every aspect of your being to try to get a hold of somebody and change what’s going on in their head?” (Participant 2). Certainly her passion for learners rings out clearly as does her awareness of the likelihood of dissonance in education. Disorientation about social roles sparks the reflection necessary for transformation (Brock, 2010). The struggle for students who want to reach down through the conscious barriers poses a disorienting dilemma for learners; much in the same way, the teacher of English struggles to allow freedom for the writer to experience a range of emotions related to his or her own personal story without blanketing creation with prescription.

Change

Describing the experience of revision of thought, experience, and writing product, one teacher elaborates: “It’s like sculpture. Shape it. Change it” (Participant 1). Thankfully, the plasticity of the human brain supports worldview transformation. The concern for many writing teachers extends beyond past grammatical or syntactic habits into the psychological reasons for communication issues. Another teacher says, “I wonder if something would have been different in their background. If they would have—if today they were better readers and writers, let’s say. Would they be in the same path in life? Would that have changed anything?” (Participant 3). A step further, perhaps, is the acknowledgment of writing revision as wide-ranging life change, which according to one teacher, leads to validation when connected to the learner’s psychological past: “So they start to identify more with I can be successful. I take these steps towards effort. I start to be more confident. It’s not a case of I suck at writing, or I’m always going to suck at writing. There’s a way to change it” (Participant 3). Being stuck in writing could be a case of being stuck in life. Cranton and Wright (2008) explain, “People whose lives are marginalized by their literacy skills need to be able to imagine another kind of life altogether to be able to enter into the learning” (p. 45). Participant 4 connects this within the teaching mission: “I think we’re the ones that maybe have the best chance to really change people and maybe not change people, help them find themselves. And that really should be what education is about anyway.” Once a learner extends the meaning of revision beyond the paper product or final essay, the student seems to be able to revise the myth of being a personal failure because of past attempts at writing.

Change on a final draft does not belie psychological transformation. Transformation is more than change, it is a remodeling of one’s “behaviors, competencies, beliefs, identity, and mission” (Poutiatine, 2009, p. 198). One teacher encourages the students to focus on change through writing “a story about a transformative experience, an experience that changed you from this to that. How did the change occur?” (Participant 5). This student’s volitional efficacy serves as proof of change: “My life has changed so much since the beginning of this project. I’m no longer afraid to be vulnerable with those who are close to me and stand up to those who mock me” (Participant 5). Another teacher had his own experience of transformation when a caring teacher would not allow him to stay attached to his old myths and images. He recollects, “It chokes me up to even talk about it today because she helped change my life too. As I said, I went in after school that time and asked why do you care about me so much?” (Participant 6). Care leads to movement and response through trust within the English classroom: “When the literacy learner feels respected, he moves into a trusting relationship” (Cranton & Wright, 2008, p. 39). A response to the “Call” and “Movement” within soul work is change to the written product and change in the writer’s self.

Connection

Once writers and teachers view interactions as transformative learning opportunities, teachers and learners collaborate through connection. The connection to the other is a learned behavior that imbues a love of learning: “If I could connect with that person, then I could learn everything that person could teach me. But if I couldn’t connect with that person, there was nothing that I could sit still for” (Participant 2). Deep connection between learner and teacher may lead to the mentor–mentee relationship. The connection typically involves more than a relationship of two minds. Bringing one’s authentic whole self to teaching and learning leads to an attraction and connection with learning material (Shahjahan, 2004). Then, the journey to discovery and transformation can occur with attention to the unconscious. One teacher agrees that connection to the teacher leads to connection to the learning material, through which transformation may occur. She proclaims: “soul work and achievement are definitely connected” (Participant 3). Sharing life stories in groups expands social and self-knowledge and releases people to become leaders in public space (Scott, 2003). Students who connect to teachers in an authentic relationship are freed to share life stories. When the stories are met with immediate interest instead of immediate measurement by the writing teacher and even honored for a time as part of one’s unique and important journey, the likelihood that a student will connect to whatever that teacher is teaching is higher. Human respect leads to content connection.

Self

Teachers see a strengthening or distinguishing of the self in students. The journey from the connecting response to the generation of a new self is striking:

Okay, yeah, because it’s an emotional connection. It touches something at the heart of them. And it’s happened to me as a writer. I mean it’s happened to me and I know how you just get so excited and it sends you off in a new direction of thinking. (Participant 4)

This is likely Mezirow’s (2000) epochal transformation. Suddenly, the center of a person is touched and the self spreads itself to learn. The long-term effect of this spreading is a “lived stance toward a sense of call” (Kovan & Dirkx, 2003, p. 114). Here again, the idea of a “Call” seems a likely metaphor for a point in the soul work process. Participant 1 characterizes the relationship between the writer’s conscious ideas and the flow of the unconscious with a powerful distinction: “But the story that their deeper self wants told is a different one” (Participant 1). His notion of the deeper self is likely the deeper selves of Jungian thought, the unconscious. Critical reflection and emotional and spiritual awareness are necessary to soul work. One teacher laments the loss of self: “But most of the time, people with poor self esteem never felt like they had anything important to say” (Participant 2). Participant 3 agrees. She finds that she wants her students to reflect on important issues, of which the skill of writing is just a small part: “Who am I and what can I do to be, to better—who am I? What are my skills? And how can I use these skills to make a better life for myself? Give back to my community?” (Participant 3). Participant 5 encourages a fantastical approach to drafting to reveal the current and future selves. His method is the following:

They find that using the third-person and objectifying, seeing the self as an objective self as an object, it helps to actually see it as a character. The self becomes a character that they can not only watch their past life play out, but then to invent the future life and let the character go and do. (Participant 5)

Through fantasy, the student writer envisages a new self and move towards empowerment. Others agree: “Journaling, role-playing, and group discussion” can produce transformation (Brock, 2010, p. 124). Ironically, a result of a role-playing self is authenticity. Participant 5 continues, “I just gave her space. As she went, as writing is a process and the discovery of the self, the authentic self, it moved her along” (Participant 5). According to Kreber, Klampfleitner, McCune, Bayne, and Knottenbelt (2007), authenticity can be understood as “being somehow associated with a sense of empowerment, self-actualization, and individuation, and as such, linked to larger questions of human existence and agency in the world” (p. 25). Consequently, the writer who engages earnestly in the invention of a newly imagined self may experience transformative learning as the old images and stories are exchanged for new interpretations and a more unified self.

Wholeness

When a student engages in writing, especially writing to discover the soul in engaged with the unconscious selves, a sense of wholeness results. This wholeness is integrity of parts:

Well, the word soul to me, it’s not a word I use very often. But if I did, it would mean integrity, and integrity in the sense of moral and ethical character and wholeness. But also integrity in the sense of putting everything together into one thing, into one whole. (Participant 1)

Integrity is inherent in the writing process. The unifying effect through truth telling from experience could be the moral and ethical integrity of which he speaks. Poutiatine (2009) discussed this very process: “Transformation is always a movement towards a greater integrity of identity—a movement toward wholeness” (p. 193). Soul work, then, should be viewed as the transformative process leading to a more cohesive being. The more cohesive student may view the college English experience as part of the rest of life, not a separated compartment. There is no class; the school/life boundaries fade. Participant 3 elaborated in the following passage:

Without looking at how does this [class connect], how does this English classroom pertain to your life when you walk out that door. Without that then I think, then it’s just, like I think belittling the student, belittling the whole college experience because it’s not just [about the] surface level. (Participant 3)

Without the connection of whole students to the whole of experience, the college students of English may lack the materials required for transformative learning experiences. The college experience, then, results in narrow thinking, part by separated part, rule by separated rule, person by separated person.

Vulnerability leads to unity: “It is time for us to stop living a divided life, and the time has to come for us to acknowledge that we cannot be perfect and that we need to bring our whole selves to the classroom” (Shahjahan, 2004, p. 303). Practicing precision is essential for practical communication, but allowing for risks and mistakes is necessary for change. The worker of the soul in English classes concerns him or herself with integrity. An assignment is life itself.

Voice

When students with stronger integrity of self sense a freedom to express, a new voice responds. One teacher remembers her first encounters with students: “I was getting a lot of unsatisfactory writing in Composition I, and I couldn’t understand why people of that age—or rather, I could understand why people of that age were unable to have a real voice” (Participant 2). She concluded that these students lacked the requisite outlook to have any idea about their knowledge and potential. The myths and images of themselves were stories and descriptions obscured and disempowered by parental or authoritative abuse. These early negative experiences impact communication: “We need to understand that language in itself can be disempowering and inaccessible to those who are marginalized, and having no access to such language can cause a spiritual scar in students” (Shahjahan, 2004, p. 303). A teacher may bring to light the myth working as the scar in a learner in the attempt to allow the whole person to connect to the writing. One teacher described the process of her own experience of finding a voice:

The teacher wrote some complimentary thing about how this was exactly how an English paper should be written because it was my soul. And I think that was the first time I found my real voice ever, in my life probably, that paper, because it seemed like later when I got into creative writing after that, it was always that voice I would find in me. (Participant 4)

The very acknowledgement of forces of oppression opens many learners’ voices to sing with authenticity. Cranton and Wright (2008) elaborate on the transformation of words as negative means to words as empowering forces:

Silenced learners often live with violence and in conditions where words are used as weapons rather than as a way to communicate ideas. In connected discussion, people listen deeply and respectfully in order to draw out others’ ideas, thereby giving voice to those who were not previously heard. (p. 45)

The sticks and stones of a learner’s past experience must be acknowledged to allow oppressive actions to birth redemptive words.

Hierarchical homogenizing structures oppress learners’ voices as well. Opposed to the stance that composition students should write only academic and objective papers, one teacher reasons, “I think authentic writing has the power of the human voice behind it” (Participant 5). His idea emphasizes the power of authenticity in the development of a human voice. Teachers who appear inauthentic have students who model inauthentic writing. According to Freire (1971), “The teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking” (as cited in Kreber, Klampfleitner, McCune, Bayne, & Knottenbelt, 2007, p. 29). The reasons why teachers of English find it best not to allow the prime conditions for authentic voices vary. Participant 5 questions one motivating force:

This could be an assumption, and maybe it’s unfair, that teachers that don’t respect narrative for students to seek out their authentic voices, their real lives, and move toward expository writing, research writing, the writing that presents itself as objective, analytical. I ask, “Are you doing that because you don’t want to know the other?” (Participant 5)

If one desires to know, opportunities exist to discover hidden assumptions presented in the myths of tradition, perfection, college preparation, and equality in education, and through images of standardized language, professorship, proximity to learners, and literacy. Nonetheless, students’ voices can rise through these monoliths too.

Awareness

The final relationship in this study within the major theme “Response” is awareness. One teacher concludes that awareness is not just alertness but connection with the soul in experience, those collected in the consciousness of time. He describes the awareness:

The soul, if that’s what it sounds like, [is] an awareness. What you get tuned into. It is, it’s just the—it’s the ultimate awareness. It’s a sense of maybe the transcendence of the experience, just being, boy, acutely aware of the other, whatever the other is. (Participant 5)

Just “being” in experience and becoming aware of the other is individuation. Cranton and Wright (2008) position individuation at the center of the transformative learning experience: Individuation is “central to the literacy learner’s transformative experience, as is the role of imagination” (p. 35). Tuning into the soul of the experience leads to individuation, the awareness of self and other. My students often express themselves with a tireless energy during this experience, like a detective nearing a solution.

Centering a learner for awareness and individuation occurs with identifiable processes. Leading a student toward the center requires “compassion, forgiveness, and lots of tolerance” (Shahjahan, 2004, p. 300). In short, college professors help students toward awareness by allowing them to risk becoming themselves and assisting them on the written journey with patience and empathy. Perhaps, as one teacher describes, the very mention of professorial support could be made more explicit in the English classroom as a way of centering for awareness. He recalls, “Fifteen, 16 years old, and I really wasn’t aware that anybody was really trying to help me except my coaches” (Participant 6). Coaches are aware that players must make mistakes as they risk and stretch. Writing coaches must allow room for risk and awareness by being explicit about their understanding of the writing student’s symbiotic journey through course and life.