Writing Pedagogy
“Resonant Writing”: Creating Knowledge Collaboratively

“I have written stories about us,” I write on the classroom whiteboard. Then I hesitate. Was this the right thing to do? It’s true that over the past few weeks, I have written stories about situations in class and beyond – situations that touched me, situations of “resonance”. (Important key concepts are highlighted and explained in the glossary at the end of the article.)

In 2016, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa stated that resonance can occur in the body, in feelings and in thoughts, both in our relationship with ourselves and with the world. This is why I started writing stories: about moments with the various people in my course, about unexpected situations, about situations that transformed me.

I called these stories “miniatures”. They are short but dense, containing a lot of meaning in a small textual space. They sum up in condensed form what has happened from my perspective. But that is exactly the point: it’s my perspective. It is not complete. In research, this is described as situated. My perspective is influenced by my position in society, at work and in the classroom.

Let me give you an example: I grew up in the eastern part of Germany’s capital city. My mother comes from Eastern Europe, my father from East Germany. My mother’s first language was not German, and my parents did not initially speak German with each other either. In an academic context, naming aspects of one’s own social situation, such as origin or language, is called “positionality”.

Unlike the German language learners in my classroom, my parents are not refugees. My mother migrated, my father relocated within East Germany. Although both of them, together with me as a child, experienced the collapse of a political system, neither they nor I know what it means to be forced to flee a country because of danger, war or a life far below the poverty line. Since we all have a German passport, we are not at risk of deportation – nor do we live in fear of it. This is an example of privilege. It influences how safe a person feels in the world, how they view the world and how they write. The more privileges a person has within a society, the more power that person has. To use power responsibly, we can name our own positionality, share our inherently limited perspective and question our own knowledge.

Teachers share their miniatures with the learners

Sharing as “co-participation” is part of building world relations (Bismarck/Beisbart 2020). When I open up, others can relate to me. I decide to carry out an experiment: to share my miniatures – short texts written from the teacher’s perspective about situations of resonance – with the learners. I see sharing these miniatures as a risk. By sharing them, I am saying: this is how I think, feel and experience. That makes me vulnerable. Yet it is this vulnerability that makes resonance possible.

To improve comprehensibility, I rewrite the miniatures before I share them. I replace words that are too difficult for A2-level German learners. I shorten sentences. I remove feelings and physical reactions when they are mentioned too often, but I do not delete them entirely. Because if I show my feelings and physical reactions, I am there as a whole person. Then the learners see me not just as a teacher, and therefore not just as an authority. Trust can develop. Perhaps they will tell me how they experienced the situations in the miniatures, whether they can remember them at all or whether they find completely different situations important.

The moment has come. I read aloud the text from the whiteboard. Then I hand out the simplified versions of the miniatures, in which the learners play a role. “You wrote all of that down?” they ask. “You remembered all of that?” “Thank you!” they say. “Whoa!” After I finish reading, I ask a few questions. Some of the learners want me to write positive endings for situations that later turned out well. Others want me to emphasise their agency where they were able to act. Some want to read the texts aloud or retell them. Some already start sharing them with the person next to them.

I am overwhelmed by the resonance. Or is all of this happening only because I’m the teacher? Are the learners afraid of getting a bad grade if they don’t participate? Are they worried they will have problems with their final exam? These questions are not easy to answer. But it is important to ask them.

Learners choose topics and write their own texts

What do the learners know themselves? Which situations do they talk about when I only name the subjects of the miniatures and leave the choice to them? What knowledge do they have that I have not yet acknowledged? Questions like these are important for epistemic justice. It is about listening to marginalised people and taking their experiences seriously instead of ignoring them (Hänel 2024). That is a just way of engaging with existing experiential knowledge.

I think about how this could be possible and draw up a plan. Two weeks later, I bring the miniatures back into the classroom. This time I’ve prepared a worksheet listing all the topics from the miniatures. “Language(s)” is one of them, for example. And “family”, “training” and “Everything’s gonna be alright”. But also: “bomb”, “sickness” and “patience”. Below the list is the question: “Have you ever experienced anything like this?” – followed by the prompt: “Tell your story, if this is okay with you.” It’s important that talking about personal experiences remains voluntary.

I hand out the worksheets. On my desk are copies of ten miniatures. Several learners choose the topic “Speaking German”. The corresponding miniature begins with a student who says: “I want to speak only German in class.” In the text, I write that at that point, I start to tremble. I have learned from migration pedagogy that allowing learners to use their first languages in the classroom is important (Mecheril 2016), that insistence on monolingualism reflects an outdated norm and that multilingualism is normal in most countries – and that in Germany this is still rarely understood, represented and practised.

“What does tremble mean?” asks the student who played a particularly important role in the “Speaking German” miniature. I explain it to him. He looks at me. I ask him whether he remembers the situation. “It was like that,” he replies. Then he draws a picture of a school – with a smiling sun above it. But the story he then writes himself is on the subject of “bomb”.

I understand this situation as a break in resonance. Such breaks occur because the availability of resonance is not stable. It is dependent on biographical, emotional and social factors. The student has had experiences that Hartmut Rosa (2016) and Rahel Jaeggi (2016) refer to as alienation. This is why the word “bomb” resonates for him.
Experiences of alienation can make learning more difficult. These experiences need space. This is why my writing prompt has an additional option: “You are also allowed to write ‘uncomfortable’ stories.”

Many other learners describe their first experiences of learning German. They write: “At first, the language was difficult” and “I often felt I had no language”. But they also describe language learning as a process and say that they now feel less afraid than before, and that everyone makes an effort to practise reading – even if they progress at a different pace. So they write about both: alienation and resonance. Alienation is the opposite of resonance. It separates us from other people and makes learning more difficult. We need to change the conditions of our teaching in order to deal with this.

Conditions for collaborative learning in a diverse learning environment

Resonant writing shows that learners do more than simply extend the miniatures. They set their own topics and create from their experiences: experiences of “arriving” in the German language, of learning in the classroom community and at home, but also experiences of alienation brought about by war, violence and monolingualism, as well as experiences of grief over the loss of friends and family. And they write about the right to education. It is only through the interaction between the themes that matter to the learners and the teachers’ contributions that resonant knowledge emerges. This is a form of knowledge that does not begin with textbook content but with the learners themselves. It is a knowledge that affects us as teachers when we look inwards. Through respect, appreciation and pedagogical love (hooks 2024), we can create conditions for resonant writing and overcome alienation.

Resonant writing can be an especially helpful approach for learners who have had painful experiences in their (learning) biographies. A prerequisite for this is that they have acquired basic writing skills such as the writing system and sentence structure. They must also be willing to gradually open up about their own vulnerability – and develop an awareness of their own agency. Often, first reactions to the teachers’ miniatures show whether learners are open to using the method.

Resonant writing helps to create resonant knowledge in a diverse learning space – but it cannot replace necessary processes of teaching basic writing skills or working through biographical ruptures outside the classroom.