Re-Vising Language, Re-Vising Ideas

By Annabel Barry, English

Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026  

Teaching an R1A on “Feminism and Language,” I discovered that students struggled to engage with feminist texts from the past in ways that went beyond rejecting them as outmoded or pedestalizing them. Student responses to the texts we read and analyzed in the classroom tended to fall into one of two binary positions. A student would either notice that a text was missing something that we today “know” about gender and sexuality and deem it unsalvageable or be dazzled by the text’s canonical status and conclude that a mere undergraduate could not possibly find anything in it worthy of critique. To overcome this obstacle, I designed a sequence of readings and classroom activities and a scaffolded assignment dedicated to teaching my own interpretation of what feminist poet Adrienne Rich calls, in the title of a 1972 essay, “Writing as Re-Vision.” 

Revision is the task of returning to one’s own writing, but Rich’s hyphen reminds us that revision is also the political act of re-seeing social configurations embedded in literary form. In keeping with Rich’s spirit, I did not take her concept at face value. In one class session, students read her essay and discussed its central claim: that feminist writers must learn to transform old literary forms to liberate themselves from a patriarchal literary tradition. They then divided into small groups to close read Rich’s 1973 poem “Diving into the Wreck.” In the next class session, they came back together in their groups to close read “There’s No Trace of the Word ‘Transgender’ in Adrienne Rich’s Biography,” a 2024 poem by trans feminist poet Torrin A. Greathouse. Finally, we reconvened as a class to talk about how Greathouse’s poem borrows the motifs and rhythms of Rich’s while critiquing Rich’s exclusion of trans women from her definition of “woman.” 

Next, I asked students to draft a three-page imitation of one of the texts we had read.  Like Greathouse did with Rich, I asked them to reconstruct the formal elements of their chosen text (structure, genre, diction, syntax, literary devices) while taking up an issue the text overlooks, extending a topic the text mentions briefly, or offering an alternative to a position taken in the text. I also asked them to write a one-page reflection on what they found easy or difficult to say in the style they adopted and whether they would consider borrowing any features of this style for their own future writing. After students turned in their initial drafts and reflections, I administered an in-class peer review during which each student wrote feedback on two other students’ drafts. Finally, I instructed students to revise their initial draft based upon feedback from their peers and myself and to craft a one-page memo explaining their revision process.

I evaluated the effectiveness of this sequence based upon students’ self-reported learning as described in their reflections and revision memos and the success of their final assignments. Surprisingly, while copying someone else’s style, students reported newfound confidence in their own voices. This was also reflected in the creativity of their imitations. Consider the work of two students who imitated Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a classic Chicano feminist essay blending English and Spanish, as well as poetry and prose. One student, who identified as both Jewish and Latina, extended Anzaldúa’s brief citations of Jewish thinkers to uncover an affinity between Jewish and Latinx feminisms on the basis of their shared opposition to the erasure of marginalized languages, whether Yiddish or Spanglish. Another used English and Tagalog to highlight Filipino constructions of masculinity. He reflected that he never thought he would be able to use his native language in an academic setting. Modeling how scholars resituate each other’s ideas without rendering them void authorized students to critique constructively influential texts and to form their own opinions. Inhabiting the style of another author allowed students to comprehend the interrelationship between textual mechanics, conceptual claims, and larger social values and to apply this to their own development as thinkers and writers.