By Dr. Anderson P. Smith

In an era when generative AI can produce polished prose, writing educators face an important question: How do we create writing experiences that help students recognize and value their own voices? This article explores spoken-word poetry and identity-centered writing as pathways to reflection, agency, and self-efficacy. Beginning with the stories carried by our names, I consider how scaffolded writing can move students from memory to meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship about writing self-efficacy, student voice, and identity-centered pedagogy, I argue that authentic writing begins by creating space for students to write themselves back into the learning experience.

“Names carry stories. What three words describe what your name carries?”

I recently posed this question to a group of educators during an interactive workshop on spoken-word poetry and identity-centered writing. Slowly, words appeared across the screen: identity, grandson, compassion, and a label. We had not begun talking about writing. 

We started with our names.

My own name has always carried stories. Growing up, people teased me about Anderson Smith, insisting that I had two last names. Andy belongs largely to family and childhood friends. Dash carries my college years and twenties. Anderson is the name I grew into and now prefer.

Today, those names function almost like timestamps. Andy belongs largely to family and childhood friends. Dash carries my college years and twenties. Anderson is the name I grew into and now prefer. Depending on what someone calls me, I can often identify when they entered my life and how closely they knew me.

Perhaps that is why this workshop question affected me differently than I expected. My name does not carry one story. It carries versions of me.

Before Students Can Value Their Voices

In a recent WACademic contribution, Josef Vice (2026) explores the writing anxiety and fatalism students can carry into first-year composition. One student’s reflection captures that transformation in four words: “My voice has value.”

I keep returning to that sentence.

Mitchell et al. (2023) found important relationships among writing self-efficacy, writing performance, and writing apprehension while also highlighting the role of instructional context in how students perceive themselves as writers.

But what must happen before a student can confidently say “My voice has value”?

Perhaps students need opportunities to hear themselves first.

I started writing poetry at 11. I wanted to draw, but every time my pencil touched paper, words came instead. I still tell people that I cannot draw; I paint pictures with words. Long before I knew the word metacognition, writing gave me a way to examine my thoughts and experiences while growing up in the South Bronx.

Writing taught me how to hear myself. Spoken Word taught me how to name myself.

On stages such as the Bowery Poetry Club and the Nuyorican, something intensely personal could suddenly become communal through a stranger’s clap, snap, stomp, or shout. My story could become our story.

What Happens When School Asks Us to Leave Ourselves Outside?

Christopher Emdin’s (2021) Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success challenges educational models that require students to suppress pieces of themselves in pursuit of what institutions recognize as academic knowledge. His “ratchetdemic” framework instead makes room for knowledge of self, alongside academic knowledge. 

Our students do not arrive as blank pages waiting for us to give them voices. They arrive with voices already shaped by families, communities, languages, histories, inside jokes, and experiences.

The question is whether our writing spaces recognize those voices.

Franny Choi’s “Choi Jeong Min” (Button Poetry, 2016) explores a name as a site of culture, assimilation, family history, and reclamation, while Idris Goodwin’s (2019) “Say My Name” traces a name repeatedly mispronounced, questioned, shortened, and even replaced with “Eddie.” 

Together, the poems raise a deceptively simple question: Who gets to name us?

Giving Students the Pen Back

Felicia Rose Chavez’s (2021) The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop challenges instructor-centered writing spaces and asks educators to create conditions in which writers exercise greater ownership over their language, stories, and writing processes. That idea is especially useful here because the naming activity deliberately shifts interpretive authority.

I do not tell participants what their names mean. They do.

Participants first place their names in the center of a bubble map and consider the various names they carry. After encountering Choi and Goodwin, they reflect on how names shape perception, power, and belonging before responding to prompts such as:

What version of yourself lives inside this name?

One of the names I wrote was Professa, or at least that is what it sounds like when some of my students call out to me. That name makes me think about my great-grandmother.

When she came to the United States, she could not read or write and signed her name with an “X.” My mother and grandmother would read to her, and at age 65, my great-grandmother wrote her own name for the first time. Three generations later, her great-grandson became the first person in our family to earn a doctorate.

I never shared that story during the workshop. I may have curated the experience, but I was experiencing it too.

When a student calls me Professa, I hear more than a title. I hear the distance between an “X” and a Ph.D. I hear my great-grandmother learning to write her name at 65, and my mother and grandmother reading to her.

Whose Voice Is on the Page?

All of this feels increasingly important in an era of generative AI.

Coetzer and van Aardt (2024) identify the possible loss of student voice and academic opinion as a concern when AI-generated text substitutes for students’ own writing. AI can certainly generate a poem about a name. It can imitate voice and produce polished sentences within seconds.

But producing the poem was never really the point.

The learning happens in recognizing why one nickname feels like home while another makes you uncomfortable. It happens when memory becomes language and language helps us understand something about ourselves that we had not articulated before.

The pedagogical value lies in the inquiry, not the artifact.

I worry that when students use AI before discovering their own writing voices, they risk missing an important part of the experience: authentic human connection. When we write authentically and share that writing, someone else may recognize themselves in our experience. Suddenly, what felt intensely personal becomes shared.

I learned that long before generative AI, standing on spoken-word stages and hearing strangers snap, clap, stomp, or shout because something I had written about my life somehow spoke to theirs.

Writing Ourselves Back In

Perhaps one response to generative AI is not to create assignments that machines cannot complete. That increasingly feels like the wrong contest. Instead, we can create writing experiences that students have a reason to complete themselves.

We can begin with something they already carry:

A memory. 

A community. 

A contradiction. 

A story. 

A name.

When students encounter writing as inquiry rather than simply production, the page can become more than a place to demonstrate what they know. It can become a place to discover who they are, what they carry, and what they want to say.

So perhaps alongside our familiar questions about thesis, evidence, organization, audience, and correctness, we might occasionally ask one more:

Can you find yourself in what you wrote?

Because before students can confidently say, my voice has value, we may need to create classrooms that give them the opportunity to hear it.

And sometimes that work can begin with something as simple as asking, “What does your name carry?”

References

Button Poetry. (2016, April 8). Franny Choi – Choi Jeong Min [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRFyWLM6k_o

Chavez, F. R. (2021). The anti-racist writing workshop: How to decolonize the creative classroom. Haymarket Books.

Coetzer, Z., & van Aardt, P. (2024). Unsilencing the student voice: Detecting and addressing ChatGPT-generated texts presented as student-authored texts at a university writing centre. International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.6.2.00151

Emdin, C. (2021). Ratchetdemic: Reimagining academic success. Beacon Press.

Goodwin, I. (2019, October 29). Say my name: How Idris became Eddie, and why it matters [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnlFjlI0854

Mitchell, K. M., Zumbrunn, S., Berry, D. N., & Demczuk, L. (2023). Writing self-efficacy in postsecondary students: A scoping review. Educational Psychology Review, 35(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09798-2

Vice, J. (2026, July 13). Building connection and confidence: The power of “teamship” in the first-year college composition classroom. The WACademic. https://thewacademic.blog/2026/07/13/building-connection-and-confidence-the-power-of-teamship-in-the-first-year-college-composition-classroom/

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About the Author

Anderson P. Smith, Ph.D., is an educator, writing instructor, and spoken-word artist whose work explores identity, voice, metacognition, and authentic writing. He is particularly interested in creating learning experiences that help students see themselves as writers and recognize their lived experiences as meaningful sources of inquiry.