Introdcutory Bio
Nicholas Behm is an assistant professor at Elmhurst College in Illinois. He publishes work on composition pedagogy and theory, ancient rhetoric, postmodern rhetorical theory, whiteness studies, and critical race theory. His research examines how first-year composition textbooks may reinforce white privilege and maintain white hegemony. Currently, Behm is working on several projects simultaneously, including book chapters on racism and writing assessment, an edited collection on writing program administration, and articles discussing the personal essay and critical race consciousness.
Blog Entry
I concur with Vorris Nunley’s posting on April 16, 2009 that we need to clearly define and theorize what we mean by “diversity.” Too often, when political pundits, corporate spokespersons, and high-level academic administrators bandy diversity-speak, they are articulating what Nunley calls a “Neo-liberal diversity discourse.” Such discourse has been corporatized and codified in the academy and in the workplace as “diversity sessions” and “tolerance,” and often serves to hide racism, classicism, sexism, heterosexism, and ethnocentrism, effectively reifying what diversity discourse was originally meant to interrogate. Put simply, diversity discourse has been subsumed by hegemonies and then re-deployed as “Neo-liberal diversity discourse” to reinforce institutionalized racism. I commend the committee for attempting to construct a new discourse that will, as Joyce Irene Middleton notes in her May 21, 2009 posting, abandon “the false illusion of racial human difference (without abandoning the powerful history of racism).”
Although I think that a position statement on diversity is desperately important, I am skeptical about its potential impact on the discipline or on writing programs and institutions across the United States. I fear that the future position statement on diversity will be rendered as meaningless, as bereft of any transformative power, as prior position statements, such as the “CCCC Guideline on the National Language Policy,” “CCCC Statement on Ebonics,” or “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.”
I am skeptical because CCCC members have never adequately discussed the racialized history of the organization and of composition studies. If the discipline and the CCCC have been constructed and exist within a racialized social system, surely they bear the markings of that system. Racial inequality has been institutionalized and racism and its deleterious effects are systemic and pervasive not only in the legal, medical, political, and educational systems, but also in the CCCC and in composition studies. As Thomas West argues in the “The Racist Other,” the organization and the discipline facilely exteriorize racial critiques, condemning a class of people (poor white folks) or political organizations (Republicans) or legislation (No Child Left Behind) that are easily codified as racist (215). When we exteriorize our critiques, placing blame on an obvious scapegoat, we don’t examine our own positioning and how that positioning constitutes and is constituted by racial inequity. As West suggests, to adequately reflect on how composition studies and the CCCC may perpetuate racial inequity, we must start with ourselves: our positions, our pedagogies, engaging and investigating “how the internalization of hegemonic forces creates contradictions in us that need not lead to paralysis, silence, retrenchment, or guilt but to renewed efforts to counter oppressive behaviors, renewed efforts which nonetheless recognize tensions between self-interests and common commitments” (217). In other words, we are all racists in that we have been socialized within and conditioned by a racialized social system. This realization enables us to consider how race and racism permeates our work, our perceptions of reality, our discourses.
Gary Olson articulates a similar argument in “Working with Difference: Critical Race Studies and the Teaching of Composition,” which is a chapter in Lynn Bloom, Donald Daiker, and Ed White’s Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future. Olson suggests that composition studies lacks any serious study of how composition pedagogy and writing programs perpetuate and are constituted by inequitable relations of power that reinforce racial stratification. As a result, Olson argues that the discipline does not have the language to interrogate its processes of colonization, nor may it be capable of productively responding to the increase in diversity in the student population (208-209).
So, I suggest that we vigorously confront the CCCC’s and the discipline’s “colonial sensibility,” which Victor Villanueva persuasively outlines in “Maybe a Colony: And Still Another Critique of the Comp Community.” We need to make explicit, to challenge and to contest how whiteness pervades the discipline; how whiteness constitutes and is constructed and revised by valorized research methodologies, pedagogies, assessment practices, and curricula; how whiteness functions and circulates at our conferences and in our dialogues; how what we do, what we value, and what we know may reinforce whiteness. Of course, we need to build off of and extend the important work of scholars, such as Krista Ratcliffe, Victor Villanueva, Catherine Prendergast, Thomas West, and Gary Olson, who have already offered sagacious critiques of the discipline and articulated how whiteness functions and proliferates.
To extend their important contributions and to confront how the CCCC and composition studies may construct and may be constructed by a racialized social system, I suggest that we consider employing the critical frameworks offered by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. In Racism Without Racists, Bonilla-Silva argues that a new racial framework pervades the major social structures and arrangements of the U.S., consisting of inconspicuous mechanisms that construct, proliferate, and reinforce racial inequality. An essential component of the “new racism” is what Bonilla-Silva calls “color-blind racism.”
To articulate the construction and diffusion of “color-blind racism,” Bonilla-Silva extends Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus to race: Bonilla-Silva contends that white people ghettoize themselves into homogeneous communities in which they constitute and are constituted by a “white habitus” that “conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (104). One consequence of the white habitus is to reinforce what Bonilla-Silva calls “a white culture of solidarity” that naturalizes whiteness and white privilege and fashions a white lens that many whites use to interpret racial differences in ways that facilely ascribe their own privileges to anything but their race (104).
Considering the racial makeup of the CCCC, which Joyce Irene Middleton outlines in her May 21, 2009 posting, Bonilla-Silva’s conception of a “white habitus” is particularly important for CCCC members to consider. We need to ask how the CCCC and composition studies may constitute and may be constitutive of a “white habitus,” and how “color-blind racism” may be promulgated and reinforced by the discipline’s valorized discourses, pedagogies, assessment practices, journals, and conventions.
Bonilla-Silva argues that a “white habitus” enables the rationalization of racial inequality by constituting and diffusing four powerful frameworks: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism (28-47). Abstract liberalism, accounts for the tendency to embrace tenets of political liberalism (equal opportunity, meritocracy, equal rights, individual choice) and/or economic liberalism (free market, competition) in a “decontextualized manner” to justify and rationalize racial inequities (141). Abstract liberalism, according to Bonilla-Silva, is the most powerful framework because denizens of the U.S. thoroughly and routinely accept and valorize the fundamental tenets of liberalism, rendering those tenets so natural, normal, and moral that they seem irresistible and unassailable.
The second framework, naturalization, explains the process through which people rationalize racial inequity by suggesting that residential segregation, racial preferences in friends and partners, and school segregation are all perfectly normal and natural. Naturalization enables some to designate residential and school segregation as either a choice or as a biological tendency.
The third framework, cultural racism, explains racial inequities as resulting from supposed group characteristics. This framework is a facile revision of the framework of biological inferiority that segregationists used during the era of Jim Crow. It ascribes pejorative characteristics to particular groups and describes these characteristics as permanent, as biological (39-40). Before and during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Southern segregationists justified the inequalities suffered by African Americans by claiming that African Americans were less intelligent and biologically inferior. Today, however, systemic racism is justified by arguing that Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, and/or other minority groups are inferior as a result of culture, rather than biology.
Bonilla-Silva’s fourth framework, minimization of racism, accounts for the widespread view that racism and discrimination no longer figure in the United States. This framework promotes the assumption that racism only involves the aberrant acts of a small number of people that are easily codified as racist (29). All four frameworks protect white hegemony by deflecting attention away from how racism is institutionalized and systemic. They form an “impregnable yet elastic wall that barricades whites from [. . .] racial reality” in the U.S. (47).
The members of the CCCC need to critically consider how these frameworks circulate in our dialogues; in our scholarship; in our writing programs; in our evaluations of students’ work; in our assessment practices. We are experiencing a critical—if not kairotic—period in the history of the organization, the discipline, and the United States, during which difference and diversity have once again become prevalent topics on the news, in classrooms, and during legislative sessions. Let us seize this moment by deploying the critical tools that we possess to construct a critically reflective statement that relates how the CCCC and the discipline may function to reinforce systemic social and economic inequities; that articulates a language with which we can critique discourses and practices that serve to inure hegemonies; and that exhorts CCCC members of privileged groups to commit race, ethnic, gender, class, sexual orientation treason so that we can work purposefully and ingenuously to eradicate inequalities of all kinds.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
A Different Take on Diversity
Introductory Bio
Jenn Fishman is an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where she teaches rhetoric and composition as well as eighteenth-century studies. Her abiding interests in performance and pedagogy inform both her historical scholarship and her contemporary writing research, including her contributions to the Stanford Study of Writing, the Embodied Literacies Project, and the Research Exchange, an online database for writing researchers. Her published work appears in College Forum, College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, and Stories of Mentoring as well as the forthcoming collection Pragmatics and Possibilities: Reflections on Contemporary Writing Research. Her current monograph project, entitled Staging Education, examines the contribution public theater made to the formation of modern rhetoric during the British long eighteenth century.
Blog Entry
Take 1. I am a graduate student when the school paper reports a historic shift in undergraduate demographics. In the writing program, we talk about what it means to teach rhetoric and composition in the most ethnically diverse place we and our students have ever been. I think about college dorm copia exercises and imagine dozens of new terms for pop, cola, soda.
Take 2. I am still in graduate school when a visiting scholar, an assistant professor elsewhere, tells a cautionary tale about the time she spent as a campus pariah after a male student accused her of discriminating against him. Lesbians hate men, he argued for local media on a campus with inadequate antidiscrimination policies and no ombudsperson.
Take 3. I am a new assistant professor, and my students are sharing illiteracy narratives. A young woman tells about the time she tried to help a busload of deaf tourists who came to Graceland without an interpreter. Still new at the Southern vowel shift and the post-coronal glide, I miss most of her story, and the episode headlines in my own Illiteracy Times.
Take 4. It is my second year on faculty. Because my new state failed to desegregate the university system after Brown v. Board, I am on a committee authorized to search for an African American scholar in my discipline.
Take 5. My students tell me the Princeton Review includes our university on their lists of top twenty "jock schools," "party schools," and schools where "alternative lifestyles [are] not an alternative."
Take 6. I have just finished teaching a drama course in New York, where The Little Dog Laughed was our last play. The ticket agent described the basic plot: closeted Hollywood actor wants out of the closet; manager says nix; ribald comedy ensues. She didn't mention frank representations of same-sex sex or more full-frontal nudity than Hair. My department head asks how the course went, and I ask what he's heard. Nothing, he says. It went well then.
Take 7. It must be harder for you here. A colleague and I are talking about race, the ongoing underrepresentation of people of color on campus, and the consequences—as well as the irony—of treating "color" as if it were synonymous with "black." I grew up in the South, he twangs, a first-generation American of Syriac Christian Asian Indian descent.
Take 8. I am at Cs when a researcher asks to interview me about writing studies. He says I'll help round out his project demographics because I represent the South.
Take 9. At the same Cs I am talking about revisionist history and my work on theater's contribution to rhetorical education in the British eighteenth century. What about women's experiences and feminist scholarship, someone asks me. I draw from the logics of both, I respond: Examining performance disrupts histories that exclude or fail to take seriously physical acts and material bodies, and as a result my work contributes to the conditions of possibility for ongoing feminist research. Listening to my answer, I think about what we need to believe in order to agree.
Taking Stock
Every year for the past several years at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, I have taught a course called English 495: Introduction to Rhetoric and Writing in History, Theory, and Practice, and though I like to rearrange the readings annually, the general arc of the course remains the same. This spring, for example, Victor Villanueva's retelling of rhetoric history in Bootstraps led us to James A. Herrick's History and Theory of Rhetoric, Todd Taylor's Take 20, and several essays from Rhetorical Education in America, edited by Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer. Together, these texts ask students to consider how rhetorical education both cultivates and challenges social inequalities. While we might say that what I've been doing is "teaching diversity," like others on this site I am reluctant to make that claim. Instead, I believe I have been developing a pedagogy of difference that engages students in responding critically to the kinds of issues we raise when we talk about diversity, and the distinction has become important to me.
At its best, diversity signals attempts to redress systemic prejudice by implementing measures of fairness. However, through over- and misuse, "diversity" often seems like an empty set, a blank idiom overwritten by the flawed logics of exclusion and erasure, institutionalized oppression, and homogenization that Damián Baca, Eric Darnell Pritchard, Vorris Nunley and others discuss below. As a result, the idea of teaching diversity seems both abstract and prohibitive to me, while teaching difference—and teaching through difference—offers a great deal of critical and pedagogical possibility. At least that is what I hope every time I out myself as a Yankee in English 495. Thinking about Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and The Epistemology of the Closet, I call attention to this "imbecilically self-evident" fact about myself in order to open discussion about how regional identity "works" and what we think it means (22). In a similar spirit, I also perform religious difference deliberately. Sometimes I try almost subtle: "Happy Holidays" in response to "Merry Christmas." Other times I talk about Hanukah with cocktail hotdogs, stuffed Chicago-style pizza, and Frango mints as though it were nothing out of the ordinary.
In these instances, my goal is not to transform myself into our primary course text, nor is it to advance particular conclusions about any one identity category. Instead, with even the most facetious performance my aim is to bring attention to difference. In our briefest exchanges, this may be the most important thing we can do. Alternatively, when teaching, scholarship, and service afford us more time, individual performances can help us interrogate Sedgwick's first axiom, "People are different from one another," and examine when, where, how, and why it matters.
Taking It to the Limit
When we take pedagogies of difference out of the classroom, difference itself becomes one of the tools we can use "to broaden our organization’s thinking, talking, and writing about diversity in our profession," "to trace the histories of difference, to examine the narratives of individualism and progress, and to develop antiracist pedagogies," "to make Universities safe and productive spaces for all folks who have not traditionally been advantaged by American academies," and to meet other goals we organize under the heading "diversity." In these various contexts, difference is not an abacus for counting beans or heads, nor is it a universal remote that will let us control the gates to educational access. Instead, difference is a praxis that combines our reflections on diversity, our strategies for diversity, and the many situations we negotiate as students, mentors, teachers, colleagues, administrators, and members of various communities. A powerful tool, if we can figure out how to use it, difference may be instrumental to achieving the "paradigm shift in our scholarship, teaching, and service" that Joyce Irene Middleton and the CCCC Committee on Diversity hope to facilitate.
How so? To begin, difference can help us identify the envelope we are pushing when we engage in new discourse on diversity, and as such difference operates terministically. After Kenneth Burke, we might say difference poses the question or set of questions that "selects a field of battle" for our new endeavors, and through the process of selection difference "forms the nature of the answers" we discover through conflict and victory or defeat (67). Alternately, if we are not sure we want to work toward diversity by troping on war, we might say difference selects a dynamics or field of activity and through the process of selection promotes inquiries into what animates discrimination, what motivates fairness, and so on. From this point of view, we can try to understand the nexus of historical relationships among sender, receiver, and text by focusing on the lines of activity that connect (or disconnect) them, the social forces that animate those connections, and the circumstances that tether relationships to specific cultural material contexts. A distinctly irenic praxis, difference in this sense invites us to recognize the kinds of complexities that Byron Hawk elaborates in his Counter-History of Composition, and in doing so difference centers diversity (perhaps precariously) on différance or "the 'active,' moving discord of forces" and the "differences of forces" that Jacques Derrida defines.
Embracing the openendedness of meaning and relationships, the praxis of difference can also help us recognize how our work toward diversity is grounded in both bodies of text and corporeal bodies. In this respect, the praxis of difference can bring attention to the growing range of alphabetic, aural, and imagistic texts that we can use for diversity pursuits, and difference can help us understand the complementary resources in our repertoires. As Diana Taylor explains, contrasting archive and repertoire, the latter "enacts embodied memory" through "performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge." While these activities follow patterns (e.g., cultural or artistic scripts), "the actions that are the repertoire do not stay the same" (20). Instead, they change over time, and they also change—and can be changed—from situation to situation. Within a praxis of difference, then, the repertoire is an inventory of available means that we can invent and reinvent in order to address the issues of diversity with the greatest exigence.
Give and Take
Back in the classroom, when I perform—or strategically hyper-perform—Yankee and Jew, I also (necessarily) perform a much greater range of differences, which can be catalogued according to race, class, age, ability, gender, sexuality, and so on. I single out region and religion because of the ways those particular points of reference are accessible and have salience where I teach. Emphasizing not pretense but play, these choices lack cunning, and my performances lack the sly politics and sophistication of critical pedagogies like Karen Kopelson's edgy and admirable "performance of neutrality." Our actions are part of the same repertoire, however, and they move us toward similar ends. Not only do they stage "students' more open encounters with the new and unfamiliar" (136); they also do fundamental diversity work by moving us toward a greater self-reflective and critical understanding of the ever-evolving social dimensions of difference.
Such activities are quintessentially disciplinary, at least to the degree they help us invent new models for making knowledge about not only diversity but also rhetoric, composition, and communication. In some ways, then, we find ourselves at a familiar crossroads. CCCC has historically defined itself through the articulation of policies and practices that support organization members' efforts to implement fairness across the profession and within overlapping communities. In other ways, our current activities, including this blog conversation, signal we have already entered new territory. As part of the praxis of difference, then, we will click the links, perhaps add a comment, and then we can take it from the top, where there will always be something new to read.
Such activities are quintessentially disciplinary, at least to the degree they help us invent new models for making knowledge about not only diversity but also rhetoric, composition, and communication. In some ways, then, we find ourselves at a familiar crossroads. CCCC has historically defined itself through the articulation of policies and practices that support organization members' efforts to implement fairness across the profession and within overlapping communities. In other ways, our current activities, including this blog conversation, signal we have already entered new territory. As part of the praxis of difference, then, we will click the links, perhaps add a comment, and then we can take it from the top, where there will always be something new to read.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Diversity That Matters: A Commitment to Social Justice
Introductory Bio
Annette Harris Powell is an assistant professor of English at Bellarmine University where she teaches courses in writing, advanced rhetoric, and Caribbean literature. She is in the process of developing a community-based literacy project with La Casita Center, a community group working to create a bridge between the Latina community and the larger community. Prof. Powell’s research interests include identity, writing and place, discourses of cultural preservation and community-based conservation. She has published “Access(ing), Habits, Attitudes, and Engagements: Re-thinking Access as Practice" in Computers and Composition. “Roots and Routes to Agency: Space, Access and Standards of Participation” in Labor, Writing Technology and the Shaping of Composition in the Academy, and “Conflicting Voices in the Classroom: Students Developing Their Own Critical Consciousness” in Practice in Context: Situating the Work of Writing Teachers. Powell also writes about Caribbean rhetoric and gendered perspectives in literature. Her current project examines identity, memory, and place in relation to the lived life and culture of the Gullah-Geechee communities of the Sea Islands.
Blog Entry
I teach at a university with a mission grounded in the Catholic Intellectual tradition of faith and reason and focused on the examined life as a way to encourage students to be discerning. We also teach students to become critically engaged in social justice issues that support global sustainability as it embraces “cross-cultural and inter-faith awareness and diversity.” Yet, I frequently get the following student responses to readings:
“I really can’t relate to this experience; it’s very different.”
“These kinds of things don’t really happen here.” Or,
“I don’t really understand why they live like this.”
Commentary such as this is nothing new to me—majority students, in particular, have always been somewhat resistant when asked to reflect on the limits of their own experiences. They continue to be skeptical of, or indifferent to diversity and multiculturalism. This view is doubly complicated by the apparent shifting dynamics of race in this age of “change.” There is growing popular discourse about the imminence of a post-race era. Increasing numbers of both majority students and students of color are now more resistant to “diversity talk,” often asserting that they see no need in dredging up history—“it’s a different day.” The civil rights movement was successful—there is so much more access today. Both groups of students see themselves as cosmopolitans—that is, they have traveled outside their neighborhoods and have become “citizens of the world.” It’s curious, though, that the large majority of these would-be travelers have yet to venture outside of their own zip codes. Anthony Appiah, in his 2006 book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, rehabilitates the notion of cosmopolitanism as “connection not through identity but despite difference” (135). We are all, he says, “citizens of the world,” and as such “we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association” (my emphasis xix). I agree with Appiah, that we need to engage conversations across boundaries and that cosmopolitanism is about interest and engagement, but we must also be mindful that cosmopolitanism presupposes mobility. The student responses above are indicative of this mobility; they embrace the simplistic allure of choosing what is “real” to them. Additionally, it is not enough to engage difference; we must also interrogate the uneven distributions of power that reproduce difference.
Though it’s difficult to say with certainty what accounts for the above responses, economic and class demographics are, I suspect, one indicator. Recently, some scholars (See Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism and Catherine R. Squires’s Dispatches From the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America) have critiqued multiracialism and its attendant ambiguity as “bridges between the races.” Squires argues that “this ambiguity is about exoticism and intrigue, providing opportunities for consumers to fantasize and speculate about the Other with no expectations of critical consideration of power and racial categories.” This re-positioning of race by many Americans contributes to the conception of race as fluid and neutral. This view is acontextual and ahistorical—race and its underlying societal meaning can be manipulated so that “choice” (the decision to belong/not belong, to be fluid, to move in/out) will maintain the current paradigm of inequality. In the May 29, 2009 issue of The Chronicle Review, Rainier Spencer, a professor of anthropology argues that “what popular wisdom tells us is the supposed twilight of how Americans have thought about race is merely a minor tweaking of the same old racial hierarchy that has kept African-Americans at the bottom of our paradigm since its very inception. Multiracial ideology simply represents the latest means of facilitating and upholding that hierarchy—while claiming quite disingenuously to be doing the opposite” (B5). I would suggest that students and scholars in the field question this facile conception of race.
Such conceptions of race often transfer to discussions of various texts that are situated across and within national spaces, suggesting a tension between the global and the local. Although some majority students have a few opportunities to get first-hand experience in local communities with marked social, cultural, or material differences, many do not. Quite often this leads to students’ superficial engagement with texts that present different perspectives and encourages them to think about privilege in terms of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, class, sexuality. Most of my middleclass (and majority) students are often unable to recognize their privilege as distinct. While some acknowledge a few advantages, privilege continues to be invisible. I remind them that privilege is not always a dirty word. We all are privileged in some way, and that although we might not recognize all its variations, most of us possess some. My intention is not to neutralize the idea of privilege. Rather, I’m suggesting that because there is resistance to discussions of privilege, we need to think creatively about how we might bridge the gap and communicate this concept. Most college age students, especially those at private colleges, assume that there are no barriers, that everyone is included, and that everyone has the same degree of access and mobility. Thus, in an increasingly global culture, majority students see the problems (e.g., poverty in post-colonial Caribbean and African communities, the role America expects new immigrants to play, and assimilation) plaguing minority and immigrant communities from a distance. Although I remind students that these “texts” are connected to institutions and power, that they are never neutral, many otherwise critically perceptive students continue to read these cultural problems unreflectively, unable to apply what Wendy Hesford calls a “critical localism.”
In her 2006 PMLA article “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” Hesford argues that “the contradictory effects of globalization, its polarizing as well as democratizing functions, suggest the need for a critical localism … that recognize[s] the ongoing cultural work of ‘local’ spaces” (790). This is important in an increasingly geo-political world where students will need to be able to read, to contemplate, and inevitably, to cross unfamiliar borders in order to interpret and understand the multiplicity of cultural tropes and commonplaces they will encounter. But this abstract border-crossing is one that many students, already unengaged by the readings, find difficult to do, or simply unnecessary. On several occasions, majority students have noted that they have a roommate of another ethnicity or culture whom they describe as relatively assimilated. In this instance, like the cosmopolitan traveler, the student has decided what is “real” to him. The differences they encounter in the written texts we read or the films we watch, they suggest, don’t seem to apply in the context of their authentic encounters. So, while I believe global sustainability to be an important project, it often provides a cover for many majority students who have never had to question their privilege or the kind of mobility they are afforded. The focus on the global presumes that it is always about out there and the Other, and seldom about us, and so, we don’t have to contemplate the problems of, or work needed in local spaces.
My fear is that such relativistic approaches to global and local cultures (and emerging post-race discourses) encourage a lack of empathy and awareness of the material realities of certain communities, especially local ones. The 2007 movie Lions for Lambs highlights the tension between global and local engagement. In one of Lions three narratives, Robert Redford’s character professor Stephen Malley duels with one of his most promising students about why he thinks this student should get involved and why the student thinks he doesn’t need to. Professor Malley stresses that his students should try to make a real difference in society, to claim their stake in the future. In another narrative two of professor Malley’s students call attention to the concept of “engagement” that the US has been practicing successfully, globally, suggesting it might be a productive tool to use domestically where citizen engagement has been failing. This movie promotes the very same call to action or “civic engagement” with which service learning is concerned and offers a useful example of it.
What does the potential absence of empathy portend for diversity and multiculturalism? While multiculturalism, like diversity, is productive in some ways, it often reduces culture to lifestyle and difference or places emphasis on where one is born—identification. It becomes largely about cultural choice rather than about power, politics, and knowledge or epistemology. As we embrace change, we must also recast notions of diversity and multiculturalism. We need to reconsider the meaning of both: what does it mean now to teach and engage these terms as part of the official discourse of most universities and organizations?
Like guest bloggers before me, I share a strong commitment to diversity, but I also question how diversity often functions—as an empty signifier, or as Vorris Nunley suggests in his blog, what is popularly referred to as “body count diversity.” In both institutional and political contexts, we typically rate our success in achieving diversity by counting and then we celebrate it or check it off our list. While representation is certainly important, most would agree that we have to move beyond thinking about diversity primarily in terms of numbers in order to engender change that is meaningful—that is, change that enables us to make connections between stereotypes and behaviors, and systemic forms of injustice and oppression. I am committed to these goals, and I certainly see them as a necessary component of the movement toward social justice. But discussions in my writing and literature courses that explicitly engage the official discourse of the university indicate a strong need to re-consider what diversity and social justice mean, especially in the context of a small private university setting. Although institutional demands and expectations for students encourage social justice, diversity, and global sustainability, there is a noticeable gap between this discourse and students’ commitment, ability, and readiness to fully participate in this discourse. As I work to engage students in the university’s mission, I have had to acknowledge that the promise of the official discourse is often unrealized. Students’ (in)ability to participate in the institutional mission raises several questions: 1) What does it mean to apply social justice principles in the context of the classroom? 2) What should this look like? 3) How do we get students to engage more critically?
Official discourse that promotes diversity and multiculturalism must be concerned with social justice. Service learning, if done properly, is the most likely means of achieving social justice because it provides students not only with opportunities for writing but also with opportunites to work directly for and with communities (See Thomas Deans’ Writing Partnerships: Service Learning in Rhetoric and Composition). Students need realistic experiences in action—theoretical, often abstract, applications in the classroom are not enough. They need to study theories and systems along with people whose material lives are affected by those systems. While diversity is an important goal, social justice and action that promotes it as a knowledge-making project, and contributes to change must be the ultimate objective. Despite Nedra Reynolds critique of service learning as “assigned encounters with difference” (9) in Geographies of Writing, service learning offers productive and potentially transformative opportunities for learning and writing in the community (see, for example, Linda Adler-Kassner’s Writing in the Community). Writing about their service provides students with a space to work out their ideas and their experiences—what they do and learn in a particular community. This is indicative of writing as thinking, writing as a situated activity, and writing as a way of creating knowledge. For a provocative discussion of diversity and writing see Phillip P. Marzluf’s 2006 CCC article “Diversity Writing: Natural Languages, Authentic voices,” and Margaret Himley’s and Christine R. Farris’ 2007 response to Marzluf in the CCC Interchanges. For an example of a diversity writing program, consult Syracuse University’s Writing and Diversity in a Globalized World at (http://wrtdiversity.syr.edu/).
While some universities talk about social justice primarily in terms of curricular engagement others go beyond service and volunteerism, suggesting that it is a sustained commitment to getting students involved in the community, helping them make sense of what they are experiencing while encouraging them to reflect on these experiences critically. This is a space where diversity discourse can be very productive for students, teachers, and administrators. Social justice via service learning encourages students to ask certain questions of themselves: How do they define social justice? How does community collaboration change the face of social justice for community partners and students? How does this change the contours of the borders they cross? What do they see as their role as engaged citizens, based on what they learn in the classroom and in the community? These questions can feed into their writing assignments, into the way they think about composition, and the way they think about official discourse. Most importantly, students are given the opportunity to raise questions about how or why material realities exist as they do and to consider how they might respond productively. The latter model of social justice presents both opportunities and challenges; nonetheless, this is the kind of civic engagement students need in order to be able to enact social justice in real world contexts and to be able to participate in diversity that matters—that has lasting material impact, locally and globally.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Post-Civil-Rights Whiteness and Diversity: When Are We Going to Stop Talking about Race?
Joyce Irene Middleton, chair of the CCCC Committee on Diversity, has written this week's post on whiteness and diversity. In it, she links ideas and arguments that the committee will use to develop its position statement on diversity. During the next two weeks, members of the CCCC Committee on Diversity will respond to Joyce's post by adding their own comments, and we all invite our readers to join in the conversation. We also encourage folks to use the blog series in their graduate classes come fall semester and ask their grad students to respond. Our new regular schedule for invited Guest Bloggers in our "CCCC Conversation on Diversity blogging series will on 6/4/2009.
Blog Entry
The emergence of whiteness studies helps to shed new solutions in ways to think about diversity in the twenty-first century. Initially, some readers may ask the question: “what does whiteness have to do with diversity?” The answer is, quite emphatically, everything, especially if the intersectionality of identities is important (and too often it is not). The current and lingering oppositional thinking about race (not ethnicity), as either “white” or “non-white” has actually helped to sustain early US markers of identity and difference. This kind of racializing is rooted in fossilized markers of difference: whiteness, ethnicity, post-colonial identity, race, and gender. We continue to do this, even though late twentieth-century scholars both in the humanities and sciences agree—especially with the availability of DNA evidence—that the concept of race, including the white race, is a mythology—a powerful construction of ideology and human identity that perpetuates an illusion of human difference.
Importantly, any concept of diversity that is linked to race and whiteness furthers the illusion of racial purity. This committee wants to assert a new discourse on diversity that abandons the false illusion of racial human difference (without abandoning the powerful history of racism). We hope that this new discourse on diversity will support a paradigm shift in our scholarship, teaching, and service. Effectively, we will move from talking about whiteness and non-whiteness as a personal reality (the illusion) to focus solely on the persistence of historical and institutional whiteness and racism (the reality).
These scholars, and others, are examining and questioning the specific, interconnected, relationships between whiteness, race, ethnicity, and gender with our current practices of teaching and writing in the university. One question that arises from this kind of research is: How can we recognize the influences of whiteness not only in our personal language use, classrooms, and departmental business, which are important, but also in how discourses of white privilege and racism use us? In talking about race, I always talk about whiteness and race (and racism) together. Importantly then, what kinds of antiracist work – scholarly, pedagogical, and institutional – will we make visible in our practices in order to disrupt the persistence of white privilege?
Blog Entry
The emergence of whiteness studies helps to shed new solutions in ways to think about diversity in the twenty-first century. Initially, some readers may ask the question: “what does whiteness have to do with diversity?” The answer is, quite emphatically, everything, especially if the intersectionality of identities is important (and too often it is not). The current and lingering oppositional thinking about race (not ethnicity), as either “white” or “non-white” has actually helped to sustain early US markers of identity and difference. This kind of racializing is rooted in fossilized markers of difference: whiteness, ethnicity, post-colonial identity, race, and gender. We continue to do this, even though late twentieth-century scholars both in the humanities and sciences agree—especially with the availability of DNA evidence—that the concept of race, including the white race, is a mythology—a powerful construction of ideology and human identity that perpetuates an illusion of human difference.
Importantly, any concept of diversity that is linked to race and whiteness furthers the illusion of racial purity. This committee wants to assert a new discourse on diversity that abandons the false illusion of racial human difference (without abandoning the powerful history of racism). We hope that this new discourse on diversity will support a paradigm shift in our scholarship, teaching, and service. Effectively, we will move from talking about whiteness and non-whiteness as a personal reality (the illusion) to focus solely on the persistence of historical and institutional whiteness and racism (the reality).
In 2005, Valerie Babb, writing in Jackie Jones Royster's and Ann Marie Simpkins’ edition of Calling Cards Theory and Practice in the Study Of Race, Gender, and Culture, an award-winning anthology on constructions of race, gender, and culture, raises a question about why “whiteness continues to exert its unstated privilege” (28) in the United States in the twenty-first century, especially in the academy? The persistent invisibility of this social (and global) racial construct continues to influence the values of our academic writing, teaching relationships, and professional memberships. For example, here are the rough numbers that reflect the current CCCC membership profile:
- Asian, including Asian Indian or Pacific Islander 76
- Black/African American 146
- Prefer not to answer 130
- White--Non-Latino/Hispanic/Spanish 3,010
- American Indian or Alaska Native 18
- Two or more races 32
- Latino/Hispanic/Spanish 78
For most CCCC members in this profile, these numbers pale in comparison with the increasingly non-white student body in U.S. colleges and universities. Over the recent decades, many rhetoric, composition, and writing scholars have devoted their work to revising traditional histories of rhetoric and composition. Effectively, they have given us, not only re-gendered and re-raced readings of those histories, but they have also given us close examinations of the intersections of race, whiteness, gender, listening, silence, and other pedagogical topics (See, for example, Morrison, Booth, Allen, hooks, Giroux, Glenn, Trainor, Ratcliffe, Welch, Royster, Kennedy, Donawerth, Babb. Villaneuva, and Middleton).
These scholars, and others, are examining and questioning the specific, interconnected, relationships between whiteness, race, ethnicity, and gender with our current practices of teaching and writing in the university. One question that arises from this kind of research is: How can we recognize the influences of whiteness not only in our personal language use, classrooms, and departmental business, which are important, but also in how discourses of white privilege and racism use us? In talking about race, I always talk about whiteness and race (and racism) together. Importantly then, what kinds of antiracist work – scholarly, pedagogical, and institutional – will we make visible in our practices in order to disrupt the persistence of white privilege?
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The Responsibilities of Social Justice: Activist Literacy, Race, and California State University
Introductory Bio
Dr. Virginia Crisco is an assistant professor at California State University-Fresno where she teaches literacy and composition pedagogy and where she co-coordinates the first-year writing program. Her research interests focus on the intersections of literacy and rhetoric as it manifests in the practice and pedagogy of public writing and civic participation to inform the spaces of the classroom and the community. Crisco's recent publications include “Rethinking Language and Culture on the Institutional Borderlands” in The Journal of Basic Writing, “Graduate Education as Education: The Pedagogical Arts of Institutional Critique” in Pedagogy, and "Conflicting Expectations: The Politics of Developmental Education in California" in the edited collection Developmental Education: Policy and Practice.
Blog Entry
My current scholarship focuses on the literacy practices of activism. Out of qualitative research with the Green Party of the United States and my first-year writing class, I called what I was observing “activist literacy:” the rhetorical use of literacy for civic participation. Drawing on scholarship from Jacqueline Royster, James Berlin, Ellen Cushman, de Certeau, Bickford and Reynolds, and Barton and Hamilton, I argue that community members use activist literacy in response to institutional structures they want to change. Activist literacy focuses on critically understanding and challenging socio-political power structure; it emphasizes the deliberate use and interpretation of language to challenge and shape the reality of self and institution. Finally, activist literacy finds value in building coalitions and collaborating with other individuals or groups for the purpose of changing dominant attitudes, positions, policies, and laws. My work with the Green Party taught me that it is ok to NOT always compromise for the good of all, particularly when compromise means that the majority doesn’t understand the minority. The party taught me that sometimes activists have to make people who value the status quo uncomfortable, challenge them, and help them to recognize what they have rendered invisible, especially the associated consequences.
Though I do not argue that the issues the Green Party face are the same issues that people of color and whites face trying to create an antiracist society (though this is a goal of Greens as well), I do argue that some of the practices of activist literacy can be used toward that end. Critical Race Theorists such as Beverly Daniel-Tatum, Catherine Prendergast, Patricia J. Williams and Gloria Ladson-Billings argue for a version of reality that makes many whites uncomfortable, and they insist that the racial battles we have historically fought in this country have not really changed race relations (e.g., civil rights of the 1960s). Activists take responsibility to learn the histories of race relations. We read between the lines of dominant histories to see what is kept invisible. We resist claims that erase people of color or suggest that their histories are unimportant. As whites, we recognize and critique our history of domination and erasure. Activists’ deliberate use and interpretation of language position us to reflect on our own language-using practices, consider how they demonstrate what we know and what we are trying to learn, and allow us to make arguments that rewrite histories and make the invisible visible. When activists can build coalitions and collaborate with other individuals, we recognize our abilities to listen, to give up some of our own desires to balance power structures, and to be willing to work with others in momentary or long-term alignments.
Activist literacy needs to be applied to particular contexts in order to be useful in making change. For example, I currently work California State University, and, like other states, California is having a budget crisis. Their solution to this crisis – a hardwon solution – is to cut education. In fact, according to the California Teachers Association’s publication California Educator, education took the biggest hit in the most recent budget battle. California State University does not receive guaranteed funding like the K-14 education system, and it does not benefit from grants and gifts given to the University of California system. But the state university is still required to accept the top one-third of students graduating from California high schools and is called on to provide a 4-year, public education for Californians and others in the nation and abroad. The student population of the CSU, in general, is racially and ethnically diverse (In fact, systemwide, whites are the minority at 43.6% of the student body.), and these cuts, while affecting faculty workload and lecturer positions, also impact the students who seek higher education in California.
The California Faculty Association has started the “cuts have consequences” campaign that includes videos of activism and stories from faculty, lecturers, students, and staff about the effects of cuts on the CSUs website (http://www.youtube.com/cutshaveconsequences). Students’ stories in particular show how these cuts create even more challenges to get a higher education:
• Students explained that larger class sizes mean fewer opportunities to interact with faculty and to get individual attention.
• Students shared that finishing their degree might take longer because the numbers of required classes have been reduced.
• Students discussed deciding between taking a semester off or prolonging their education by taking classes that are available (but not getting a full load) because required classes are not being offered. This could mean for many of our students additional student loans and another semester out of the workforce.
• Students pointed to rising tuition costs – doubled in five years – which makes it difficult for them to afford books.
These are the stories of how White, Latino/a, Asian, Black, Filipino, American Indian, and Pacific Islander students have trouble getting a higher education – and these effects are not applied equally across the board. For example, system-wide about 30,000 students are non-citizen resident aliens. In the example of one of my students, Ivonne, her family moved from Mexico City to Fresno when she was young. She was able to attend her first year of college with the help of CAMP (college assistance migrant program) but needed to rely on scholarships for the remainder of her education – even though she grew up in California. Though students like Ivonne are able to pay resident tuition, which is significantly cheaper than nonresident tuition, they are not eligible for federal financial aid.
This budget crisis puts California State University workers, students, alumni and California residents, in general, in a place to consider how to move forward. As we saw with the last election, people can make a difference. President Obama and Vice President Biden’s “Renew America Together” initiative challenges us to recognize the power we have to help our communities. Californians need to educate the population about the importance of higher education to the economy and the future of the state and then we need to let our state representatives know that they have to invest in higher education.
This blog is my opportunity to voice my thinking and consider deeply and carefully how we might apply activist literacy practices to our profession in order to support diversity and social justice. I want to thank Asao Inoue and Joyce Middleton for allowing me to share my ideas, but I also want to call on folks in the discipline to help us consider how our professional ethics, pedagogical practices, research methods, and educational policy should reflect our values in relation to diversity. Below are some of my ideas; I encourage readers to add more:
• We need to find ways to translate the scholarly and classroom work we do into community conversations through blogs, letters to the editor, news columns, you tube videos, etc – in other words, through the literacy practices that our communities use to get information out and to educate citizens about the importance of their participation.
• We need to teach our students the importance of multiple kinds of writing, to recognize that student’s development as a writer, community member, and professional can benefit from learning multiple genres of writing (both academic and community oriented).
• We should resist goals that only see teaching as the development of workers and embrace goals for education that encourages community engagement and participation.
• As white professors/professionals, we need to recognize our privilege and white and people of color should listen to what our peers, colleagues, students, and staff have to say about what it means to be a person of color in the institution.
• We need to work to change our retention and promotion structures to recognize not only Dean’s notion of writing with the community as an important intellectual contribution, but also the value of consulting with our representatives in state and national governments particularly because this can allow us to educate decision makers on the value of our work.
To fight the budget battle, the Alliance for the CSU was created (http://www.allianceforthecsu.org/index.html). This activist organization is made up of students, citizens, faculty, staff, alumni, and others who care about the future of the CSU. This organization is a good model of activism, as they are working on multiple fronts to educate the community and state government about how budget cuts affect public higher education. Initially through the activism of the Alliance, we were able to win back about $66 million to the CSU budget from the Governor’s original May 2008 Budget Proposal, yet the CSU Chancellor gave back $31 million of it. And. when the state was looking at a $41 billion deficit, it was clear that the CSU was going to get cut again. Still, the Alliance continues to educate and fight for the CSUs – and the diverse student population it serves – as a crucial special election comes up in May 2009.
Dr. Virginia Crisco is an assistant professor at California State University-Fresno where she teaches literacy and composition pedagogy and where she co-coordinates the first-year writing program. Her research interests focus on the intersections of literacy and rhetoric as it manifests in the practice and pedagogy of public writing and civic participation to inform the spaces of the classroom and the community. Crisco's recent publications include “Rethinking Language and Culture on the Institutional Borderlands” in The Journal of Basic Writing, “Graduate Education as Education: The Pedagogical Arts of Institutional Critique” in Pedagogy, and "Conflicting Expectations: The Politics of Developmental Education in California" in the edited collection Developmental Education: Policy and Practice.
Blog Entry
My current scholarship focuses on the literacy practices of activism. Out of qualitative research with the Green Party of the United States and my first-year writing class, I called what I was observing “activist literacy:” the rhetorical use of literacy for civic participation. Drawing on scholarship from Jacqueline Royster, James Berlin, Ellen Cushman, de Certeau, Bickford and Reynolds, and Barton and Hamilton, I argue that community members use activist literacy in response to institutional structures they want to change. Activist literacy focuses on critically understanding and challenging socio-political power structure; it emphasizes the deliberate use and interpretation of language to challenge and shape the reality of self and institution. Finally, activist literacy finds value in building coalitions and collaborating with other individuals or groups for the purpose of changing dominant attitudes, positions, policies, and laws. My work with the Green Party taught me that it is ok to NOT always compromise for the good of all, particularly when compromise means that the majority doesn’t understand the minority. The party taught me that sometimes activists have to make people who value the status quo uncomfortable, challenge them, and help them to recognize what they have rendered invisible, especially the associated consequences.
Though I do not argue that the issues the Green Party face are the same issues that people of color and whites face trying to create an antiracist society (though this is a goal of Greens as well), I do argue that some of the practices of activist literacy can be used toward that end. Critical Race Theorists such as Beverly Daniel-Tatum, Catherine Prendergast, Patricia J. Williams and Gloria Ladson-Billings argue for a version of reality that makes many whites uncomfortable, and they insist that the racial battles we have historically fought in this country have not really changed race relations (e.g., civil rights of the 1960s). Activists take responsibility to learn the histories of race relations. We read between the lines of dominant histories to see what is kept invisible. We resist claims that erase people of color or suggest that their histories are unimportant. As whites, we recognize and critique our history of domination and erasure. Activists’ deliberate use and interpretation of language position us to reflect on our own language-using practices, consider how they demonstrate what we know and what we are trying to learn, and allow us to make arguments that rewrite histories and make the invisible visible. When activists can build coalitions and collaborate with other individuals, we recognize our abilities to listen, to give up some of our own desires to balance power structures, and to be willing to work with others in momentary or long-term alignments.
Activist literacy needs to be applied to particular contexts in order to be useful in making change. For example, I currently work California State University, and, like other states, California is having a budget crisis. Their solution to this crisis – a hardwon solution – is to cut education. In fact, according to the California Teachers Association’s publication California Educator, education took the biggest hit in the most recent budget battle. California State University does not receive guaranteed funding like the K-14 education system, and it does not benefit from grants and gifts given to the University of California system. But the state university is still required to accept the top one-third of students graduating from California high schools and is called on to provide a 4-year, public education for Californians and others in the nation and abroad. The student population of the CSU, in general, is racially and ethnically diverse (In fact, systemwide, whites are the minority at 43.6% of the student body.), and these cuts, while affecting faculty workload and lecturer positions, also impact the students who seek higher education in California.
The California Faculty Association has started the “cuts have consequences” campaign that includes videos of activism and stories from faculty, lecturers, students, and staff about the effects of cuts on the CSUs website (http://www.youtube.com/cutshaveconsequences). Students’ stories in particular show how these cuts create even more challenges to get a higher education:
• Students explained that larger class sizes mean fewer opportunities to interact with faculty and to get individual attention.
• Students shared that finishing their degree might take longer because the numbers of required classes have been reduced.
• Students discussed deciding between taking a semester off or prolonging their education by taking classes that are available (but not getting a full load) because required classes are not being offered. This could mean for many of our students additional student loans and another semester out of the workforce.
• Students pointed to rising tuition costs – doubled in five years – which makes it difficult for them to afford books.
These are the stories of how White, Latino/a, Asian, Black, Filipino, American Indian, and Pacific Islander students have trouble getting a higher education – and these effects are not applied equally across the board. For example, system-wide about 30,000 students are non-citizen resident aliens. In the example of one of my students, Ivonne, her family moved from Mexico City to Fresno when she was young. She was able to attend her first year of college with the help of CAMP (college assistance migrant program) but needed to rely on scholarships for the remainder of her education – even though she grew up in California. Though students like Ivonne are able to pay resident tuition, which is significantly cheaper than nonresident tuition, they are not eligible for federal financial aid.
This budget crisis puts California State University workers, students, alumni and California residents, in general, in a place to consider how to move forward. As we saw with the last election, people can make a difference. President Obama and Vice President Biden’s “Renew America Together” initiative challenges us to recognize the power we have to help our communities. Californians need to educate the population about the importance of higher education to the economy and the future of the state and then we need to let our state representatives know that they have to invest in higher education.
This blog is my opportunity to voice my thinking and consider deeply and carefully how we might apply activist literacy practices to our profession in order to support diversity and social justice. I want to thank Asao Inoue and Joyce Middleton for allowing me to share my ideas, but I also want to call on folks in the discipline to help us consider how our professional ethics, pedagogical practices, research methods, and educational policy should reflect our values in relation to diversity. Below are some of my ideas; I encourage readers to add more:
• We need to find ways to translate the scholarly and classroom work we do into community conversations through blogs, letters to the editor, news columns, you tube videos, etc – in other words, through the literacy practices that our communities use to get information out and to educate citizens about the importance of their participation.
• We need to teach our students the importance of multiple kinds of writing, to recognize that student’s development as a writer, community member, and professional can benefit from learning multiple genres of writing (both academic and community oriented).
• We should resist goals that only see teaching as the development of workers and embrace goals for education that encourages community engagement and participation.
• As white professors/professionals, we need to recognize our privilege and white and people of color should listen to what our peers, colleagues, students, and staff have to say about what it means to be a person of color in the institution.
• We need to work to change our retention and promotion structures to recognize not only Dean’s notion of writing with the community as an important intellectual contribution, but also the value of consulting with our representatives in state and national governments particularly because this can allow us to educate decision makers on the value of our work.
To fight the budget battle, the Alliance for the CSU was created (http://www.allianceforthecsu.org/index.html). This activist organization is made up of students, citizens, faculty, staff, alumni, and others who care about the future of the CSU. This organization is a good model of activism, as they are working on multiple fronts to educate the community and state government about how budget cuts affect public higher education. Initially through the activism of the Alliance, we were able to win back about $66 million to the CSU budget from the Governor’s original May 2008 Budget Proposal, yet the CSU Chancellor gave back $31 million of it. And. when the state was looking at a $41 billion deficit, it was clear that the CSU was going to get cut again. Still, the Alliance continues to educate and fight for the CSUs – and the diverse student population it serves – as a crucial special election comes up in May 2009.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Distorting the Hush: Diversity as Political Rationality and Public Pedagogy
Introductory Bio
Vorris Nunley is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Nunley is interested in Rhetorical and Critical theory, public pedagogies and composition, visual culture, neo-liberalism and African American expressive culture. His work addresses the intersections of rhetoric, space, and episteme (knowledge). Informed by work in literature, rhetoric (traditional/ethnic/gendered), cultural studies, and critical/feminist geography, Professor Nunley argues for the existence of a strand of African American rhetoric and knowledge he refers to as African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (AAHHR). Recently, his work engages neo-liberalism as a public pedagogy and how it commodifies, produces, and mediates the construction and reception of masculinity/femininity, Blackness, the communal, and excess. He is currently the Professor in Residence for the Honors Program. He works with vice-provost on epistemic diversity. He also lectures and does workshops on related epistemic diversity issues. His book Keepin’ It Hushed: African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric and Knowledge will be published by Wayne State University Press in 2010.
Blog Entry
Experts in the institutionalization of diversity in corporate America and on university campuses refer to the hegemonic version of diversity as compositional or body count diversity. Compositional diversity, or what I refer to as neo-liberal diversity, pivots around the inclusion of different bodies and various subjectivities. To wit: let’s add some icing to the normative institutional cake. A little chocolate. A smidgen of brown, yellow, gender, and class. Oh, did someone forget the red again? Can we queer all of this damned icing? And while we are at it, let’s disable the cake? While compositional diversity is a necessary first step, it falls short, if the end game—particularly for those of us interested in more transformative social practices, political rationalities, and public pedagogies—is intended to exceed mere inclusion. Neo-liberal diversity discourse, for the most part, is a status quo buttressing, political rationality that inadvertently smuggles in hegemonic institutional, social, and racial relations through the backdoor of tolerance and market logics. Neo-liberal diversity does not reconfigure or dismantle what constitutes legitimate political and social knowledge.
Instead, it jettisons rhetorics of gender, race, and sexual orientation from the epistemic and then explicitly or implicitly relegates them to the stagnant, theoretical backwaters of difference, the cultural, the resistant, the sociological, and my personal favorite, the alternative.
Wendy Brown in “American Nightmare: Neo-liberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” describes a political rationality as “a specific form of normative political reason organizing the political sphere, governance practices, and citizenship . . . [it] governs the sayable, the intelligible, and the truth criteria of these domains”(5). Neo-liberal diversity, as both an economic and political rationality, allows a euphoric discourse celebrating a range of marketable differences, for togetherness across those differences, and for colorblindness, tolerance, commonality, and ethnic unity—as long as they are flattened into a homogenized logic. A logic informed by what Slavoj Zizek (borrowing from Walter Benjamin) in Violence (2008) refers to as the “culturalisation of politics, depoliticizing diversity from unruly episteme and messy politics, and resituating it into difference, personal feelings, and a supermarket for ethnic choice" (140). In my view, what Brown argues about tolerance as a “depoliticizing trope” in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006) also applies to diversity: “One sure sign of a depoliticizing trope or discourse is the easy and politically crosscutting embrace of a political project bearing its name” (16). As a result, Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, President Obama, and most major corporations also support diversity.
At this point, I ask readers not to misread my critique: Compositional diversity is important. It carves out a space for marginalized folks to have a job in the academy and elsewhere. In the classroom, it allows previous, backstage student voices (to borrow Erving Goffman’s term) to occupy center stage. And if neo-liberal diversity is merely about center staging marginalized academic and student voices so that they can be slotted into the normative political rationality, then let’s celebrate the inclusive dance, but not the illusion of a transformative political rationality that seduced many of us to purchase admission tickets to the diversity ball in the first place.
In terms of American and African American rhetorical practices, President Obama’s March 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech offers a useful example. The speech was rhetorically savvy, and productively galvanizing in the fragmenting wake of the Bush years as it was an epideictic speech in praise of the common that advocated for inclusive America.
Unfortunately, “A More Perfect Union” re-inscribed the normative political rationality through the trivialization, then the omission of African American epistemes, knowledge’s, and subjectivities I refer to as African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (AAHHR). “A More Perfect Union” accomplished this through its disavowal of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s assertion that “racism is endemic to America.” Obama argued that his primary reason for distancing himself from Rev. Wright was that he had a “distorted” view of America (see "A More Perfect Union" speech at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobamaperfectunion.htm).
.
For good or ill, Rev. Wright’s claim is a commonplace in AAHHR. Hush harbors are African American Black publics, micropublics, or what Michael Hanchard in Party/Politics: Culture, Community, and Agency in Black Political Thought (2006) refers to as lifeworlds. Lifeworlds foster the taken-for-granted bundles of beliefs, subjectivities, standpoints, and the language use which ordinary people engage in to create meaning within African American civil society. A civil society where African American rhetors speak to and exchange knowledge and information with primarily African American audiences (6-8, 223-224).
In African American hush harbors, African American political rationalities and terministic screens are not alternative, not counter, nor merely cultural; they are normative. Rev. Wright was the fifth most popular preacher/speaker in the United States due in part to his immersion in the epistemic parreshia (dangerous or frank speech) of AAHHR. Indeed, most African Americans understand White racism/privilege to be endemic to the American nation-state. Further, scholars as disparate as David Theo Goldberg, Ruthie Gilmore, Cedric Robinson, and Elaine Richardson have all written directly or indirectly about the centrality of Whiteness and racism to American identity and how both are not only coterminous with the development of the nation-state but also with Enlightenment humanism and modernity. Even if most African Americans did not agree with Wright’s position, they certainly understood his position to be legitimate and rational, not distorted. But the normative political rationality required the President to distance himself from both Rev. Wright and from the political rationalities of AAHHR to rhetorically construct himself as invested in diversity and multiple identities yet, racially non-partisan, rational, civil, and therefore, electable.
Indeed, neo-liberal diversity not only embraces multiple identities, spheres, discourses, and identities; not only celebrates the choices, diversities and hybridities of post-racial ontologies; not only cheers pluralized border-occupying subjects and subjectivities; but also attempts to produce all of the aforementioned on the very terrain of the subject as citizen-consumer.
Citizen as consumer-subject privileges market logics of utility that gloss over the antagonisms between citizens as political-subjects in the quest for unity, commonality, and consumption. Flattening tensions in the hegemonic political rationality is one reason why in the state of California, voters could both support President Obama—a marketable Blackness or diversity object that did not disrupt the dominant political rationality around race—but then, simultaneously, vote against Proposition 8, the so-called Gay Marriage amendment that definitely transgresses the hegemonic political rationality around masculinity gender, and marriage expectations.
My primary concern in this posting is not with President Obama’s intentions; rather, my argument is that the “A More Perfect Union,” speech, together with and by extension, neo-liberal diversity, function in tandem with the very political rationality that requires the rendering of African American and other hush harbor rhetorics invisible or distorted. If we take seriously Henry Giroux’s notion of neo-liberalism as public pedagogy as he argues in his book, Against the Terror of Neo-Liberalism, then we must also understand pedagogy and learning occur across a spectrum of social practices and settings through the educational force of the entire culture. Neo-liberalism and Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech can be said to be public pedagogies that are marked by both the possibilities and limits around what is intelligible and sayable in the public sphere vis-à-vis diversity, race, and sexual orientation, flattening out a more unruly, but more vital democracy.
But such flattening makes for a more easily digestible, more consumable, diversity cake.
Vorris Nunley is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Nunley is interested in Rhetorical and Critical theory, public pedagogies and composition, visual culture, neo-liberalism and African American expressive culture. His work addresses the intersections of rhetoric, space, and episteme (knowledge). Informed by work in literature, rhetoric (traditional/ethnic/gendered), cultural studies, and critical/feminist geography, Professor Nunley argues for the existence of a strand of African American rhetoric and knowledge he refers to as African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (AAHHR). Recently, his work engages neo-liberalism as a public pedagogy and how it commodifies, produces, and mediates the construction and reception of masculinity/femininity, Blackness, the communal, and excess. He is currently the Professor in Residence for the Honors Program. He works with vice-provost on epistemic diversity. He also lectures and does workshops on related epistemic diversity issues. His book Keepin’ It Hushed: African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric and Knowledge will be published by Wayne State University Press in 2010.
Blog Entry
Experts in the institutionalization of diversity in corporate America and on university campuses refer to the hegemonic version of diversity as compositional or body count diversity. Compositional diversity, or what I refer to as neo-liberal diversity, pivots around the inclusion of different bodies and various subjectivities. To wit: let’s add some icing to the normative institutional cake. A little chocolate. A smidgen of brown, yellow, gender, and class. Oh, did someone forget the red again? Can we queer all of this damned icing? And while we are at it, let’s disable the cake? While compositional diversity is a necessary first step, it falls short, if the end game—particularly for those of us interested in more transformative social practices, political rationalities, and public pedagogies—is intended to exceed mere inclusion. Neo-liberal diversity discourse, for the most part, is a status quo buttressing, political rationality that inadvertently smuggles in hegemonic institutional, social, and racial relations through the backdoor of tolerance and market logics. Neo-liberal diversity does not reconfigure or dismantle what constitutes legitimate political and social knowledge.
Instead, it jettisons rhetorics of gender, race, and sexual orientation from the epistemic and then explicitly or implicitly relegates them to the stagnant, theoretical backwaters of difference, the cultural, the resistant, the sociological, and my personal favorite, the alternative.
Wendy Brown in “American Nightmare: Neo-liberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” describes a political rationality as “a specific form of normative political reason organizing the political sphere, governance practices, and citizenship . . . [it] governs the sayable, the intelligible, and the truth criteria of these domains”(5). Neo-liberal diversity, as both an economic and political rationality, allows a euphoric discourse celebrating a range of marketable differences, for togetherness across those differences, and for colorblindness, tolerance, commonality, and ethnic unity—as long as they are flattened into a homogenized logic. A logic informed by what Slavoj Zizek (borrowing from Walter Benjamin) in Violence (2008) refers to as the “culturalisation of politics, depoliticizing diversity from unruly episteme and messy politics, and resituating it into difference, personal feelings, and a supermarket for ethnic choice" (140). In my view, what Brown argues about tolerance as a “depoliticizing trope” in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006) also applies to diversity: “One sure sign of a depoliticizing trope or discourse is the easy and politically crosscutting embrace of a political project bearing its name” (16). As a result, Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, President Obama, and most major corporations also support diversity.
At this point, I ask readers not to misread my critique: Compositional diversity is important. It carves out a space for marginalized folks to have a job in the academy and elsewhere. In the classroom, it allows previous, backstage student voices (to borrow Erving Goffman’s term) to occupy center stage. And if neo-liberal diversity is merely about center staging marginalized academic and student voices so that they can be slotted into the normative political rationality, then let’s celebrate the inclusive dance, but not the illusion of a transformative political rationality that seduced many of us to purchase admission tickets to the diversity ball in the first place.
In terms of American and African American rhetorical practices, President Obama’s March 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech offers a useful example. The speech was rhetorically savvy, and productively galvanizing in the fragmenting wake of the Bush years as it was an epideictic speech in praise of the common that advocated for inclusive America.
Unfortunately, “A More Perfect Union” re-inscribed the normative political rationality through the trivialization, then the omission of African American epistemes, knowledge’s, and subjectivities I refer to as African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (AAHHR). “A More Perfect Union” accomplished this through its disavowal of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s assertion that “racism is endemic to America.” Obama argued that his primary reason for distancing himself from Rev. Wright was that he had a “distorted” view of America (see "A More Perfect Union" speech at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobamaperfectunion.htm).
.
For good or ill, Rev. Wright’s claim is a commonplace in AAHHR. Hush harbors are African American Black publics, micropublics, or what Michael Hanchard in Party/Politics: Culture, Community, and Agency in Black Political Thought (2006) refers to as lifeworlds. Lifeworlds foster the taken-for-granted bundles of beliefs, subjectivities, standpoints, and the language use which ordinary people engage in to create meaning within African American civil society. A civil society where African American rhetors speak to and exchange knowledge and information with primarily African American audiences (6-8, 223-224).
In African American hush harbors, African American political rationalities and terministic screens are not alternative, not counter, nor merely cultural; they are normative. Rev. Wright was the fifth most popular preacher/speaker in the United States due in part to his immersion in the epistemic parreshia (dangerous or frank speech) of AAHHR. Indeed, most African Americans understand White racism/privilege to be endemic to the American nation-state. Further, scholars as disparate as David Theo Goldberg, Ruthie Gilmore, Cedric Robinson, and Elaine Richardson have all written directly or indirectly about the centrality of Whiteness and racism to American identity and how both are not only coterminous with the development of the nation-state but also with Enlightenment humanism and modernity. Even if most African Americans did not agree with Wright’s position, they certainly understood his position to be legitimate and rational, not distorted. But the normative political rationality required the President to distance himself from both Rev. Wright and from the political rationalities of AAHHR to rhetorically construct himself as invested in diversity and multiple identities yet, racially non-partisan, rational, civil, and therefore, electable.
Indeed, neo-liberal diversity not only embraces multiple identities, spheres, discourses, and identities; not only celebrates the choices, diversities and hybridities of post-racial ontologies; not only cheers pluralized border-occupying subjects and subjectivities; but also attempts to produce all of the aforementioned on the very terrain of the subject as citizen-consumer.
Citizen as consumer-subject privileges market logics of utility that gloss over the antagonisms between citizens as political-subjects in the quest for unity, commonality, and consumption. Flattening tensions in the hegemonic political rationality is one reason why in the state of California, voters could both support President Obama—a marketable Blackness or diversity object that did not disrupt the dominant political rationality around race—but then, simultaneously, vote against Proposition 8, the so-called Gay Marriage amendment that definitely transgresses the hegemonic political rationality around masculinity gender, and marriage expectations.
My primary concern in this posting is not with President Obama’s intentions; rather, my argument is that the “A More Perfect Union,” speech, together with and by extension, neo-liberal diversity, function in tandem with the very political rationality that requires the rendering of African American and other hush harbor rhetorics invisible or distorted. If we take seriously Henry Giroux’s notion of neo-liberalism as public pedagogy as he argues in his book, Against the Terror of Neo-Liberalism, then we must also understand pedagogy and learning occur across a spectrum of social practices and settings through the educational force of the entire culture. Neo-liberalism and Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech can be said to be public pedagogies that are marked by both the possibilities and limits around what is intelligible and sayable in the public sphere vis-à-vis diversity, race, and sexual orientation, flattening out a more unruly, but more vital democracy.
But such flattening makes for a more easily digestible, more consumable, diversity cake.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Cross-Cultural Rhetoric: Diversity on a Global Scale
Introductory Bio
Dr. Alyssa J. O'Brien is a Lecturer at Stanford University, where she directs the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric program and publishes scholarship and textbooks on visual rhetoric, writing pedagogy, and intercultural competencies.
Since arriving at Stanford in 2001, Alyssa has co-authored nine textbooks and instructor manuals as well as many articles and conference papers. These include three editions of Instructor's Notes with Professor Andrea Lunsford (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005, 2007, 2009), and three books concerning visual rhetoric with her colleague and friend, Christine Alfano: Envision: Persuasive Writing in a Visual World; Envision: Researching and Writing Arguments; Envision In-Depth: a Reader (Pearson/Longman, 2006-2009), along with three instructor’s manuals for those books.
Alyssa has been an invited speaker in Asia and Europe on subjects such as global learning, communication for leadership, visual rhetoric, and “mapping a change in writing.” Over the past three years, she’s directed the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric project (or CCR), a research and teaching endeavor originally funded by the Wallenberg Global Learning Network. CCR now connects students across five continents and involves universities from ten countries through video-conference technology and blogs. Since Alyssa began as the Project Director for the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric project during its first pilot in the fall of 2005, she has turned her research focus to intercultural communication theory, diversity on a global scale, and technology-enhanced learning. She has developed courses in Cross-Cultural Rhetoric, Globalization, and Intercultural Communication for Leadership. In addition to teaching these courses through collaborative connections with faculty colleagues at the University of Örebro, the University of Uppsala, National University of Singapore, the American University of Cairo, the University of Sydney, and Khabarovsk State Academy in Russia, Alyssa's responsibilities include serving as the Project Director, the Grant and Proposal Writer, the Report Writer, and the Data Analysis and Project Evaluation Coordinator for this important work.
Alyssa won the Phi Beta Kappa Outstanding Teaching Award in 2006, and what she enjoys most is helping people discover their voices in writing of all kinds. She is honored to be invited to contribute to the CCCC blog. Contact Alyssa at aobrien@stanford.edu.
Blog Entry
Stanford University is an incredibly diverse campus. I feel privileged to teach there as part of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Stanford even has a web portal devoted to diversity, where you can explore student groups and research initiatives or read Jane Stanford’s founding commitment: to “resist the tendency of stratification of society [by] keeping open an avenue whereby the deserving and the exceptional may rise through their own efforts.”
But a striking phenomenon I’ve noticed is that soon after arrival, students are quickly inculcated into what we (and they) call the “Stanford Bubble.” Does this happen elsewhere? After one week of dorm bonding activities, school chant practices, scavenger hunts into San Francisco, and the noble address of Convocation, students morph into a new, unified identity: part of the Stanford family, a member of a distinctly Stanford culture, with its obligatory othering process (Beat Cal!). My students even joke about the fact that they all wear Stanford gear to class, as if someone might forget the name of the University.
Now while this academic enculturation process may be funny, necessary, and even helpful (We pride ourselves on not letting any student “slip through the cracks” or get into trouble, as the family cares deeply about each member.), it has its consequences, I think, for diversity.
To meet the challenge of preparing students to interface with, communicate with, and live/work with diverse people outside the Stanford Bubble after graduation, I’ve been fortunate to work with several colleagues on a grant-funded research and teaching initiative called the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric Project (CCR). As an emerging field within rhetoric and writing, cross-cultural rhetoric has, as its pedagogical goal, the transformation of students into global citizens, equipped with the communication and collaboration strategies they will need for active, ethical participation in a diverse world community. At its heart, the CCR Project believes that we need to connect students in our classes to real audiences—have them present their research, receive feedback on their writing and speeches, and learn about others through live class-to-class video conferences and dialogic blogging.
Since we started this work in 2006, the Stanford CCR project has connected students and teachers across five continents, and our strongest partnerships are with Sweden, Egypt, Australia, Singapore, and Russia. We are, however, always looking for new partners, especially from institutions in communities with cultures quite distinct from Palo Alto, California.
Perhaps paradoxically, our students love to have a “virtual class” with diverse populations just as much as they love being part of the “Stanford Bubble.”
I would like to thank Joyce Middleton for the opportunity to explain the project here and how it aims to support the mission of diversity at Stanford as well as in the academy at large.
CCR began as a research project in 2006. It was a collaboration between colleagues at Stanford–notably Andrea Lunsford, Christine Alfano, Marvin Diogenes, and myself–and colleagues in the Rhetoric Program at the University of Örebro, Sweden. Supported by a grant from the Wallenberg Global Learning Network, we developed a teaching methodology, global learning curriculum, set of pedagogical best practices, guidelines for dedicated-learning spaces, and technical parameters for digital learning in small globally-distributed teams. We connected our classes to other classes around the globe and found out the best ways that students could learn about the diverse views of those outside their own rhetorical situations.
An international version of Mary Louise Pratt’s theoretical conception of the Contact Zone, the intercultural encounter at the center of CCR, can be understood as a third space of learning. Elsewhere, I have theorized this as a space of negotiation—a new site of collaboration made possible by cross-cultural connections facilitated through digital pedagogy solutions (O’Brien & Eriksson, 2009). The goal is to produce deep learning about cultures, values, ways of communicating, and ways of perceiving the world.
In this site, global citizenship takes on active roles in constructing new knowledge, analyzing and defamiliarizing culture, and extending global learning beyond the sphere of individual or national boundaries. In this way, CCR helps foster intercultural competencies, what theorists Dixie Goswami and Carl Lovitt (1999) describe as the increasingly important skill of approaching others with consideration for and sensitivity towards diverse cultural contexts.
But isn’t such learning possible at campuses that emphasize diversity? To address this question, we set up a test-control condition to determine if students learned intercultural competencies from working with diverse students within the Stanford community as they did from collaborating with others abroad; our statistical analysis showed the force of academic enculturation and the need to connect students outside the campus in order to learn diverse viewpoints.
Thus, what we have learned in three years of research and teaching in CCR is that students experience a defamiliarization of their own cultures, coming to realize the rhetorical concepts of decorum and doxa. We defamiliarize ourselves from our own culture when we become aware of other people’s doxa, their hidden assumptions and things taken for granted. Theorist R. Brislin (2000) argues that intercultural communication competencies need to be transferrable from culture to culture. The benefit of a video-conference and collaborative-blog based methodology within a curriculum dedicated to global learning is that participants learn concrete skills and modes of communicating that are, in Brislin’s words, “practical when individuals or group members are about to go to many different countries” (p. 264).
I would add to Brislin’s formulation that intercultural competencies are increasingly necessary when individuals meet in virtual spaces of negotiation (video-conference or blogging), and these sites are more common modes of contact today with the economic and environmental challenges to actual travel.
Moreover, since rhetoric by its very disciplinary definition focuses on the art of discerning the best means of communicating in any situation, by applying a rhetorical approach to fostering intercultural competencies, the intercultural encounter made possible through video-conference teaching can avoid the dangers of immersion-based learning, namely, the pitfalls of selectivity and stereotype-reinscription noted by researchers Ronald and Suzanne Scollon (1995). By contrast, rhetoric enables what theorists Chen and Starosta (2000) call “an individual’s ability to develop a positive emotion towards understanding and appreciating cultural differences in order to promote appropriate and effective behavior in intercultural communication” (p. 408).
As one student wrote on an exit survey after a three-way connection between Stanford-Sweden-Egypt:
Overall, I thought it was great to have students from three different schools (and therefore three different countries). More schools/students meant more perspectives, and this enriched our discussion and overall experience tremendously. My group analyzed Nelson Mandela's speech, and it was amazing to see how the students in Sweden versus in Egypt versus in the US responded to the question "Would this speech work in other countries? Would it need to be changed?" Students from every country responded that the speech would have needed to be modified in their country of origin, but each country/school had different reasons. This experience broadened my understanding of how students from different countries look at the world, analyze rhetoric, and view their own culture in a larger globalized context.
While we’ve been thrilled and grateful to work on this project as an initiative dedicated to diversity on a global scale, we realize that for researchers and teachers working in this area—new challenges arise.
1. How might we foster intercultural competencies among students collaborating on writing projects in English only?
2. What is the role of translation at the site of intercultural exchange?
3. How can we avoid the limitations of contrastive rhetorics in which, as researchers Bennett and Salonen (2007) claim, “cultural knowledge does not equal intercultural competence”?
To address these concerns, my own teaching and research has recently been dedicated to developing a rhetorically-based writing pedagogy that allows for a diversity of languages and learning styles. My contention is that collaborative multimedia production as a rhetorical act enables deep learning of writing practices and cultures; a global learning curriculum therefore needs to include negotiated multimedia texts as alternative forms of academic writing. Perhaps in this way, the intercultural encounter can make possible what theorists Chen and Starosta (2000) call “an individual’s ability to develop a positive emotion towards understanding and appreciating cultural differences in order to promote appropriate and effective behavior in intercultural communication.”
If our own teaching and research practices help us break out of the “Bubble” we’ve been enculturated into, then we can better serve our students and our communities. I think we’ve only just begun this important work, and I welcome your comments, perspectives, and future collaboration in this effort.
Dr. Alyssa J. O'Brien is a Lecturer at Stanford University, where she directs the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric program and publishes scholarship and textbooks on visual rhetoric, writing pedagogy, and intercultural competencies.
Since arriving at Stanford in 2001, Alyssa has co-authored nine textbooks and instructor manuals as well as many articles and conference papers. These include three editions of Instructor's Notes with Professor Andrea Lunsford (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005, 2007, 2009), and three books concerning visual rhetoric with her colleague and friend, Christine Alfano: Envision: Persuasive Writing in a Visual World; Envision: Researching and Writing Arguments; Envision In-Depth: a Reader (Pearson/Longman, 2006-2009), along with three instructor’s manuals for those books.
Alyssa has been an invited speaker in Asia and Europe on subjects such as global learning, communication for leadership, visual rhetoric, and “mapping a change in writing.” Over the past three years, she’s directed the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric project (or CCR), a research and teaching endeavor originally funded by the Wallenberg Global Learning Network. CCR now connects students across five continents and involves universities from ten countries through video-conference technology and blogs. Since Alyssa began as the Project Director for the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric project during its first pilot in the fall of 2005, she has turned her research focus to intercultural communication theory, diversity on a global scale, and technology-enhanced learning. She has developed courses in Cross-Cultural Rhetoric, Globalization, and Intercultural Communication for Leadership. In addition to teaching these courses through collaborative connections with faculty colleagues at the University of Örebro, the University of Uppsala, National University of Singapore, the American University of Cairo, the University of Sydney, and Khabarovsk State Academy in Russia, Alyssa's responsibilities include serving as the Project Director, the Grant and Proposal Writer, the Report Writer, and the Data Analysis and Project Evaluation Coordinator for this important work.
Alyssa won the Phi Beta Kappa Outstanding Teaching Award in 2006, and what she enjoys most is helping people discover their voices in writing of all kinds. She is honored to be invited to contribute to the CCCC blog. Contact Alyssa at aobrien@stanford.edu.
Blog Entry
Stanford University is an incredibly diverse campus. I feel privileged to teach there as part of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Stanford even has a web portal devoted to diversity, where you can explore student groups and research initiatives or read Jane Stanford’s founding commitment: to “resist the tendency of stratification of society [by] keeping open an avenue whereby the deserving and the exceptional may rise through their own efforts.”
But a striking phenomenon I’ve noticed is that soon after arrival, students are quickly inculcated into what we (and they) call the “Stanford Bubble.” Does this happen elsewhere? After one week of dorm bonding activities, school chant practices, scavenger hunts into San Francisco, and the noble address of Convocation, students morph into a new, unified identity: part of the Stanford family, a member of a distinctly Stanford culture, with its obligatory othering process (Beat Cal!). My students even joke about the fact that they all wear Stanford gear to class, as if someone might forget the name of the University.
Now while this academic enculturation process may be funny, necessary, and even helpful (We pride ourselves on not letting any student “slip through the cracks” or get into trouble, as the family cares deeply about each member.), it has its consequences, I think, for diversity.
To meet the challenge of preparing students to interface with, communicate with, and live/work with diverse people outside the Stanford Bubble after graduation, I’ve been fortunate to work with several colleagues on a grant-funded research and teaching initiative called the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric Project (CCR). As an emerging field within rhetoric and writing, cross-cultural rhetoric has, as its pedagogical goal, the transformation of students into global citizens, equipped with the communication and collaboration strategies they will need for active, ethical participation in a diverse world community. At its heart, the CCR Project believes that we need to connect students in our classes to real audiences—have them present their research, receive feedback on their writing and speeches, and learn about others through live class-to-class video conferences and dialogic blogging.
Since we started this work in 2006, the Stanford CCR project has connected students and teachers across five continents, and our strongest partnerships are with Sweden, Egypt, Australia, Singapore, and Russia. We are, however, always looking for new partners, especially from institutions in communities with cultures quite distinct from Palo Alto, California.
Perhaps paradoxically, our students love to have a “virtual class” with diverse populations just as much as they love being part of the “Stanford Bubble.”
I would like to thank Joyce Middleton for the opportunity to explain the project here and how it aims to support the mission of diversity at Stanford as well as in the academy at large.
CCR began as a research project in 2006. It was a collaboration between colleagues at Stanford–notably Andrea Lunsford, Christine Alfano, Marvin Diogenes, and myself–and colleagues in the Rhetoric Program at the University of Örebro, Sweden. Supported by a grant from the Wallenberg Global Learning Network, we developed a teaching methodology, global learning curriculum, set of pedagogical best practices, guidelines for dedicated-learning spaces, and technical parameters for digital learning in small globally-distributed teams. We connected our classes to other classes around the globe and found out the best ways that students could learn about the diverse views of those outside their own rhetorical situations.
An international version of Mary Louise Pratt’s theoretical conception of the Contact Zone, the intercultural encounter at the center of CCR, can be understood as a third space of learning. Elsewhere, I have theorized this as a space of negotiation—a new site of collaboration made possible by cross-cultural connections facilitated through digital pedagogy solutions (O’Brien & Eriksson, 2009). The goal is to produce deep learning about cultures, values, ways of communicating, and ways of perceiving the world.
In this site, global citizenship takes on active roles in constructing new knowledge, analyzing and defamiliarizing culture, and extending global learning beyond the sphere of individual or national boundaries. In this way, CCR helps foster intercultural competencies, what theorists Dixie Goswami and Carl Lovitt (1999) describe as the increasingly important skill of approaching others with consideration for and sensitivity towards diverse cultural contexts.
But isn’t such learning possible at campuses that emphasize diversity? To address this question, we set up a test-control condition to determine if students learned intercultural competencies from working with diverse students within the Stanford community as they did from collaborating with others abroad; our statistical analysis showed the force of academic enculturation and the need to connect students outside the campus in order to learn diverse viewpoints.
Thus, what we have learned in three years of research and teaching in CCR is that students experience a defamiliarization of their own cultures, coming to realize the rhetorical concepts of decorum and doxa. We defamiliarize ourselves from our own culture when we become aware of other people’s doxa, their hidden assumptions and things taken for granted. Theorist R. Brislin (2000) argues that intercultural communication competencies need to be transferrable from culture to culture. The benefit of a video-conference and collaborative-blog based methodology within a curriculum dedicated to global learning is that participants learn concrete skills and modes of communicating that are, in Brislin’s words, “practical when individuals or group members are about to go to many different countries” (p. 264).
I would add to Brislin’s formulation that intercultural competencies are increasingly necessary when individuals meet in virtual spaces of negotiation (video-conference or blogging), and these sites are more common modes of contact today with the economic and environmental challenges to actual travel.
Moreover, since rhetoric by its very disciplinary definition focuses on the art of discerning the best means of communicating in any situation, by applying a rhetorical approach to fostering intercultural competencies, the intercultural encounter made possible through video-conference teaching can avoid the dangers of immersion-based learning, namely, the pitfalls of selectivity and stereotype-reinscription noted by researchers Ronald and Suzanne Scollon (1995). By contrast, rhetoric enables what theorists Chen and Starosta (2000) call “an individual’s ability to develop a positive emotion towards understanding and appreciating cultural differences in order to promote appropriate and effective behavior in intercultural communication” (p. 408).
As one student wrote on an exit survey after a three-way connection between Stanford-Sweden-Egypt:
Overall, I thought it was great to have students from three different schools (and therefore three different countries). More schools/students meant more perspectives, and this enriched our discussion and overall experience tremendously. My group analyzed Nelson Mandela's speech, and it was amazing to see how the students in Sweden versus in Egypt versus in the US responded to the question "Would this speech work in other countries? Would it need to be changed?" Students from every country responded that the speech would have needed to be modified in their country of origin, but each country/school had different reasons. This experience broadened my understanding of how students from different countries look at the world, analyze rhetoric, and view their own culture in a larger globalized context.
While we’ve been thrilled and grateful to work on this project as an initiative dedicated to diversity on a global scale, we realize that for researchers and teachers working in this area—new challenges arise.
1. How might we foster intercultural competencies among students collaborating on writing projects in English only?
2. What is the role of translation at the site of intercultural exchange?
3. How can we avoid the limitations of contrastive rhetorics in which, as researchers Bennett and Salonen (2007) claim, “cultural knowledge does not equal intercultural competence”?
To address these concerns, my own teaching and research has recently been dedicated to developing a rhetorically-based writing pedagogy that allows for a diversity of languages and learning styles. My contention is that collaborative multimedia production as a rhetorical act enables deep learning of writing practices and cultures; a global learning curriculum therefore needs to include negotiated multimedia texts as alternative forms of academic writing. Perhaps in this way, the intercultural encounter can make possible what theorists Chen and Starosta (2000) call “an individual’s ability to develop a positive emotion towards understanding and appreciating cultural differences in order to promote appropriate and effective behavior in intercultural communication.”
If our own teaching and research practices help us break out of the “Bubble” we’ve been enculturated into, then we can better serve our students and our communities. I think we’ve only just begun this important work, and I welcome your comments, perspectives, and future collaboration in this effort.
Friday, March 06, 2009
Looking forward to Our Convention, March 11-14, 2009
The CCCC Conversations on Diversity will break for the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco, CA, March 11-14. We will post a new Guest blog entry on March 19.
We hope to see you in San Francisco, and we look forward continuing this service to our readers after the conference.
We hope to see you in San Francisco, and we look forward continuing this service to our readers after the conference.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
A Shared Address
Introductory Bio
Meta G. Carstarphen, Ph.D., is a Gaylord Family Professor and Associate Professor of Journalism in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. She served as Associate Dean, Academic Affairs, for the College from 2006 to 2008. In 1993, she received a CCCC “Scholar For The Dream Award” for Outstanding Research by an Emerging Scholar of Color. An experienced book critic, Carstarphen is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters, including, “News-Surfing the Race Question: Of Bell Curves, Words, and Rhetorical Metaphors,” in Race, Rhetoric, and Composition (Gilyard, ed, 1998). Carstarphen has edited two books, including, Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender and Identity (Greenwood P, 1999) and is the lead author of Writing PR: A Multimedia Approach (Allyn & Bacon P, 2003). Currently, she teaches courses in public relations writing and campaigns; race, gender and the media, and research and cultural studies within the media.
Blog Entry
Diversity is the street where I live, and I would argue, the neighborhood that all of us inhabit. Like Victor Villaneuva, though, I find the word itself problematic, at least in terms of how we most often encounter it. One definition I found online equates diversity with “variety” and “multiformity.” When diversity is poised as an organizational or institutional goal at our various colleges and universities, we are often left with the strangely disembodied target. How much diversity is enough? And who gets to decide?
Diversity in some ways is too placid a term, connoting just the right mix of different elements, operating in a perfect balance with all of its parts. But I think the experience of diversity involves a sometimes raucous, sometimes contentious and sometimes blissful set of interactions. Mary Louise Pratt’s essay, “Arts of the Contact Zones,” captures the spirit of this social context as the author describes the “joys of the contact zone” incorporating a host of experiences from “rage” to “revelation” and beyond.
And yet the notion of multiple varieties existing in one temporal space is as commonplace to our everyday sensibilities as our everyday lives attest. I encountered one recent reminder of this as I trekked along the I-35 highway corridor between Texas and Oklahoma. Right inside the southern border between the two states, a large billboard loomed along the roadside, proudly trumpeting the specialties of a local eatery: “Catfish, BBQ and Mexican food.” Imagine the cultural cornucopia in place to make such a space possible—American Indian, African American, European American and Mexican American. Ironically, this restaurant resides in the state that, in 2007, passed the harshest anti-immigration law in the country at that time, with a not-so-concealed agenda to hasten the exodus of Mexican and other Latino residents.
So as I consider diversity as a state of dynamic flux, I find my research interests intensely concerned with historical constructions of diversity. A major project now centers on my work to give close readings of some of the nineteenth century Native American and African American newspapers published in Oklahoma pre-statehood. These periodicals, a tiny part of massive archives held at the Oklahoma History Center, are texts that offer multiple possibilities for new readings of the cultural histories of this state, region and country. What would happen if knowledge of these periodicals jostled along with knowledge of larger newspapers? In a dynamic environment of diversity, would we see—as the Law of Requisite Variety posits—a wider, more flexible view of knowing?
Such an idealized goal looms more concretely in the classroom as students attempt to move beyond sometimes deeply held biases for or against diversity by talking to real people in their acquaintance. A course I developed for the Gaylord College of Journalism called “Race, Gender & the Media” attempts to provide an academic space where students can examine, in a critical fashion, their assumptions about how the media represent race and gender. Over the semester, students are invited to combine their personal experiences with scholarly perspectives, all with the goal of encouraging them to locate themselves in the media professions to which they aspire.
One project involves a long-term research assignment where students work in small teams to
investigate and analyze historical and contemporary race/gender topics. The teams examine the ways in which the topic has been presented in the media and they critique those representations based upon the information they have garnered from a wide array of other sources. Their goals are:
· to determine if the coverage they found was accurate and fair,
· to ascertain the relevance of the topic to contemporary readers and viewers, and
· to suggest better ways in which the information could be communicated to mass audiences.
In previous semesters, I have required students to present their research projects in poster-style fashion in the lobby of our building, inviting written questions and comments from other students and faculty members.
One student group researched the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, and included archival newspaper reports of this event as well as contemporary coverage of hearings considering reparations for survivors.
As new media have figured more heavily into our curricula, poster boards have given way to class blogs. Colleagues who also teach critical and cultural topics have championed the use of wikis in place of the traditional research paper.
home are different from the ones you have experienced here?
· How do you describe yourself physically?
· When do you think about race? What makes that happen?
· Would your life be different if you were another gender? A different race? Why or why not?
If so, in what ways would those differences be evident?
When the discussion begins, I (and the students) become fascinated by the complexity of these identity answers. Diversity is in flux, illuminated by the voices of real people who do not fit into one-dimensional categories or experiences.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
Meta G. Carstarphen, Ph.D., is a Gaylord Family Professor and Associate Professor of Journalism in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. She served as Associate Dean, Academic Affairs, for the College from 2006 to 2008. In 1993, she received a CCCC “Scholar For The Dream Award” for Outstanding Research by an Emerging Scholar of Color. An experienced book critic, Carstarphen is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters, including, “News-Surfing the Race Question: Of Bell Curves, Words, and Rhetorical Metaphors,” in Race, Rhetoric, and Composition (Gilyard, ed, 1998). Carstarphen has edited two books, including, Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender and Identity (Greenwood P, 1999) and is the lead author of Writing PR: A Multimedia Approach (Allyn & Bacon P, 2003). Currently, she teaches courses in public relations writing and campaigns; race, gender and the media, and research and cultural studies within the media.
Blog Entry
Diversity is the street where I live, and I would argue, the neighborhood that all of us inhabit. Like Victor Villaneuva, though, I find the word itself problematic, at least in terms of how we most often encounter it. One definition I found online equates diversity with “variety” and “multiformity.” When diversity is poised as an organizational or institutional goal at our various colleges and universities, we are often left with the strangely disembodied target. How much diversity is enough? And who gets to decide?
Diversity in some ways is too placid a term, connoting just the right mix of different elements, operating in a perfect balance with all of its parts. But I think the experience of diversity involves a sometimes raucous, sometimes contentious and sometimes blissful set of interactions. Mary Louise Pratt’s essay, “Arts of the Contact Zones,” captures the spirit of this social context as the author describes the “joys of the contact zone” incorporating a host of experiences from “rage” to “revelation” and beyond.
And yet the notion of multiple varieties existing in one temporal space is as commonplace to our everyday sensibilities as our everyday lives attest. I encountered one recent reminder of this as I trekked along the I-35 highway corridor between Texas and Oklahoma. Right inside the southern border between the two states, a large billboard loomed along the roadside, proudly trumpeting the specialties of a local eatery: “Catfish, BBQ and Mexican food.” Imagine the cultural cornucopia in place to make such a space possible—American Indian, African American, European American and Mexican American. Ironically, this restaurant resides in the state that, in 2007, passed the harshest anti-immigration law in the country at that time, with a not-so-concealed agenda to hasten the exodus of Mexican and other Latino residents.
So as I consider diversity as a state of dynamic flux, I find my research interests intensely concerned with historical constructions of diversity. A major project now centers on my work to give close readings of some of the nineteenth century Native American and African American newspapers published in Oklahoma pre-statehood. These periodicals, a tiny part of massive archives held at the Oklahoma History Center, are texts that offer multiple possibilities for new readings of the cultural histories of this state, region and country. What would happen if knowledge of these periodicals jostled along with knowledge of larger newspapers? In a dynamic environment of diversity, would we see—as the Law of Requisite Variety posits—a wider, more flexible view of knowing?
Such an idealized goal looms more concretely in the classroom as students attempt to move beyond sometimes deeply held biases for or against diversity by talking to real people in their acquaintance. A course I developed for the Gaylord College of Journalism called “Race, Gender & the Media” attempts to provide an academic space where students can examine, in a critical fashion, their assumptions about how the media represent race and gender. Over the semester, students are invited to combine their personal experiences with scholarly perspectives, all with the goal of encouraging them to locate themselves in the media professions to which they aspire.
One project involves a long-term research assignment where students work in small teams to
investigate and analyze historical and contemporary race/gender topics. The teams examine the ways in which the topic has been presented in the media and they critique those representations based upon the information they have garnered from a wide array of other sources. Their goals are:
· to determine if the coverage they found was accurate and fair,
· to ascertain the relevance of the topic to contemporary readers and viewers, and
· to suggest better ways in which the information could be communicated to mass audiences.
In previous semesters, I have required students to present their research projects in poster-style fashion in the lobby of our building, inviting written questions and comments from other students and faculty members.
One student group researched the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, and included archival newspaper reports of this event as well as contemporary coverage of hearings considering reparations for survivors.As new media have figured more heavily into our curricula, poster boards have given way to class blogs. Colleagues who also teach critical and cultural topics have championed the use of wikis in place of the traditional research paper.
One of the fundamental activities of journalists and media professionals is the interview, and another assignment I assign my students is the diversity interview. The assignment has a few key requirements. One, students must select someone, an acquaintance, who belongs to a visibly different racial or ethnic group from themselves AND gendered differently from themselves. As a corollary to this requirement, students cannot pick anyone currently taking the class or anyone with whom they have an intimate relationship! Two, students have to conduct this interview in a public place, like a restaurant or campus space. Three, students are required to comment on the experience of interviewing their subject, in addition to reporting on the facts and responses they receive, providing them with an informal experience in ethnography. They all ask a core of common questions that I provide, including:
· Tell me about where you were born and grew up. Do you think the racial attitudes at yourhome are different from the ones you have experienced here?
· How do you describe yourself physically?
· When do you think about race? What makes that happen?
· Would your life be different if you were another gender? A different race? Why or why not?
If so, in what ways would those differences be evident?
When the discussion begins, I (and the students) become fascinated by the complexity of these identity answers. Diversity is in flux, illuminated by the voices of real people who do not fit into one-dimensional categories or experiences.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Composition, Colonialism, and Hemispheric Pluralities
Introductory Bio
Damián Baca, Assistant Professor of English, earned a Ph.D. in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric from Syracuse University in 2006. He is core faculty in the University of Arizona’s “Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English” Ph.D. program and affiliate faculty in Mexican American Studies. Baca's most recent publication is Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (New Concepts in Latino American Cultures Series) with Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. In addition to co-editing a manuscript, A Brief History of Rhetoric in the Americas: 3114BCE to 2012CE, Baca is co-editing a forthcoming special edition of College English on “Writing, Rhetoric, and Latinidad” with Victor Villanueva. Baca serves on the NCTE Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English, the NCTE College Section Steering Committee, the CCCC Progressive Special Interest Group and Caucus Coalition, and is a member of the CCCC/NCTE Latino Caucus. As a recipient of NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color Research Foundation as well as the federally funded Ronald E. McNair post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, Baca is committed to mentoring students of underrepresented populations as they prepare to enter the professoriate.
Blog Entry
I’d like to thank Joyce Middleton and the CCCC Committee on Diversity, NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color Research Foundation, the CCCC/NCTE Latino Caucus, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation, and the Ronald E. McNair post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program.
Although some Composition specialists theoretically embrace “diversity,” they often do not reflect on the origins of Western Composition that are the fruit of a Eurocentric interregional system before which they are profoundly uncritical, and, because of this, they struggle to contribute valid alternatives for exploited populations of the Americas. Thus, “diversity” is a semantic landmine that I generally avoid when describing my teaching, research, and service. I instead think in terms of hemispheric (and global) pluralities. Let me explain.
Raised in a multilingual, matrifocal family that endured shifting national identities, I became sensitive to the politics and geopolitics of culture at an early age. Rhetorical mediations between Mexican Spanish, Spanglish and English formed a web through which I made sense of the circumstances into which I was born. But the intellectual location of U.S. writing specialists prevented their well-intentioned pedagogies from accounting for the practices of such creative processes. The inherited patterns of thinking that emerged in Western Europe under capitalism and their philosophical extensions (that celebrated corpus from Phenomenology to Postmodernism) remain systematically narrow and inadequate. It wasn’t until confronting articulations such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza consciousness” that I began to understand explicitly the traces of colonial power present at all scenes of writing instruction in the “New World,” as well as the innovative rhetorics emerging and persisting from the peripheries of North Atlantic imperialism.
Today, Rhetoric and Composition scholars too often retreat from confronting the enterprise of Western writing instruction as a consequence of colonial power, in particular, the transnational transfer of European systems, technologies and theories of writing to the Western Hemisphere, and the subsequent covering of pre-existing writing practices and tools of literacy of subjugated civilizations.
Operating directly against the humanities’ Western logic of exclusion and erasure, Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness revises our field’s imperial imaginary by “inventing between” AngloAmerican, Iberian, and Mesoamerican cosmologies. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa de-naturalizes standardized English literacy as the normative tool of communication by entwining various Castilian varieties—both the standard vernacular of an ex-colonial power and some of its subalternized counter-cultural admixtures, admixtures that are so common today. Anzaldúa furthermore introduces the potential to displace the supremacy of the art of letters by continually evoking pre-Columbian record keeping practices, which re-inscribe the Mesoamerican concept of Tlacuilolitzli—the earliest expression for writing in the Americas—translated as “the spreading of color on hard surfaces.” Ancient Mexican writing, influenced by the preceding 10,000 years of development in Mesoamerica, supported a fully socialized “higher education” network which fostered the realization of an organized and consistent legal system, an exact science of time-astronomy-and mathematics, complex faith systems, advanced knowledge of herbal medicine, elaborate architecture and sculptural art—all of this without Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum and without the invention of the alphabet.
By merging Mexican and Western technologies of writing, we are no longer obliged to accept the Western philosophy of a grammar, of linguistic control or taming the tongue and mind, as universal components of writing instruction. Possibilities for accessing theoretical and pedagogical potentials, no longer constrained by an elite class of practitioners, become available. If, in place of theorizing Composition based on a vanguard Western mythology, we accept new mestiza consciousness as a point of origin, we might be encouraged to think about, practice, and teach rhetoric in such a way that is directly responsive to comparative developments of writing, both past and present, from Olmec glyphs to the Inca Quipu, from Maya hieroglyphs to Aztec pictographs to Chicano codices and Zapatista internet communiqués. The earliest writing systems in the “New World” develop from the abstract to the pictorial—precisely the reverse of what many might teach us to believe. Fifteenth century Aztec writing is almost entirely pictorial, while earlier Maya hieroglyphs of the fourth century are far more abstract. The history of writing and writing instruction, therefore, is not a triumphant progression toward the alphabet, but rather a series of co-evolutionary processes in which different systems follow their own transformations. No longer limited by parochial assumptions about “true writing” as the representation of speech through alphabetic systems, the field could study and learn from the construction of knowledge through various technologies of information storage and transmission, whether one writes with letters or with colors or with a system of knotted cords. New translations of rhetoric that “emerge from” the American colonial periphery would provide thorough knowledge of what the field has yet to generate: a materialist, historically-grounded theory of writing that accounts for those civilizations that maintain the longest cumulative histories of writing and writing instruction in the Western Hemisphere. Such subalternized knowledge is also responsive to current trends in digital rhetorics and digital literacies—trends that belatedly call for increased awareness of so-called visual, multi-genre, and multi-media writing practices.
New mestiza consciousness as a rhetorical practice creates a locus of enunciation not where Iberian and Mesoamerican legacies are mere alternatives to Composition Studies. Anzaldúa’s rhetorics suggest, quite to the contrary, that Composition is not necessarily a suitable or superior alternative to the immense hemispheric plurality that remains obscured. As a teacher and researcher of writing, my largest obstacle is not the last eight years of “Cowboy Conservatism” in the Oval Office, but an enduring John Wayne pedagogy of the study of written language. It is the field’s compassionate colonialism that systematically deforms the history and theory of writing under divisive periodizations and spacializations that declare the Western cosmology as the genesis and center of all critical thought.
As a way out, I suggest a shift from merely “talking about” writing and “diversity” from the harmfully narrow perspective of those in the imperial center, to “writing and teaching from” Anzaldúa’s conceptual borderlands. We might also look to the forgotten Fernando Ortiz and his misappropriated “transculturation,” W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” Emma Pérez’ “decolonial imaginary,” Caribbean essayist Edouard Glissant’s “Créolization,” Malea Powell’s “trickster rhetoric,” and Guaman Poma’s “arts of the contact zone”—these distinct enunciations, grounded in the lived experiences of the peripheral colonial world, express new potentials that surpass the limits of post-Enlightenment rationality. In place of the uni-linear, developmental, racially coded framework “from Ancient Greece to Modern America,” the idea of temporal simultaneity is invoked in which it becomes possible to see multiple histories and memories coexisting, without political rankings or assumptions that all cultures and rhetorical practices progress along the same imperial path.
In this light, an education in Composition and Rhetoric would interrogate the overhanging colonial determinant of the study of written language—not for what it declares, but for what it conceals: the epistemic limits of an enduring Eurocentric telos, too often passed off as universal and disembodied, without cultural roots or limitations. By provincializing and possibly even abandoning the field’s imperial horizon, perhaps we might prevent Composition Studies from becoming the humanities’ final attempt to keep John Wayne alive for one last Western.
Damián Baca, Assistant Professor of English, earned a Ph.D. in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric from Syracuse University in 2006. He is core faculty in the University of Arizona’s “Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English” Ph.D. program and affiliate faculty in Mexican American Studies. Baca's most recent publication is Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (New Concepts in Latino American Cultures Series) with Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. In addition to co-editing a manuscript, A Brief History of Rhetoric in the Americas: 3114BCE to 2012CE, Baca is co-editing a forthcoming special edition of College English on “Writing, Rhetoric, and Latinidad” with Victor Villanueva. Baca serves on the NCTE Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English, the NCTE College Section Steering Committee, the CCCC Progressive Special Interest Group and Caucus Coalition, and is a member of the CCCC/NCTE Latino Caucus. As a recipient of NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color Research Foundation as well as the federally funded Ronald E. McNair post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, Baca is committed to mentoring students of underrepresented populations as they prepare to enter the professoriate.
Blog Entry
I’d like to thank Joyce Middleton and the CCCC Committee on Diversity, NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color Research Foundation, the CCCC/NCTE Latino Caucus, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation, and the Ronald E. McNair post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program.
Although some Composition specialists theoretically embrace “diversity,” they often do not reflect on the origins of Western Composition that are the fruit of a Eurocentric interregional system before which they are profoundly uncritical, and, because of this, they struggle to contribute valid alternatives for exploited populations of the Americas. Thus, “diversity” is a semantic landmine that I generally avoid when describing my teaching, research, and service. I instead think in terms of hemispheric (and global) pluralities. Let me explain.
Raised in a multilingual, matrifocal family that endured shifting national identities, I became sensitive to the politics and geopolitics of culture at an early age. Rhetorical mediations between Mexican Spanish, Spanglish and English formed a web through which I made sense of the circumstances into which I was born. But the intellectual location of U.S. writing specialists prevented their well-intentioned pedagogies from accounting for the practices of such creative processes. The inherited patterns of thinking that emerged in Western Europe under capitalism and their philosophical extensions (that celebrated corpus from Phenomenology to Postmodernism) remain systematically narrow and inadequate. It wasn’t until confronting articulations such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza consciousness” that I began to understand explicitly the traces of colonial power present at all scenes of writing instruction in the “New World,” as well as the innovative rhetorics emerging and persisting from the peripheries of North Atlantic imperialism.
Today, Rhetoric and Composition scholars too often retreat from confronting the enterprise of Western writing instruction as a consequence of colonial power, in particular, the transnational transfer of European systems, technologies and theories of writing to the Western Hemisphere, and the subsequent covering of pre-existing writing practices and tools of literacy of subjugated civilizations.
Operating directly against the humanities’ Western logic of exclusion and erasure, Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness revises our field’s imperial imaginary by “inventing between” AngloAmerican, Iberian, and Mesoamerican cosmologies. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa de-naturalizes standardized English literacy as the normative tool of communication by entwining various Castilian varieties—both the standard vernacular of an ex-colonial power and some of its subalternized counter-cultural admixtures, admixtures that are so common today. Anzaldúa furthermore introduces the potential to displace the supremacy of the art of letters by continually evoking pre-Columbian record keeping practices, which re-inscribe the Mesoamerican concept of Tlacuilolitzli—the earliest expression for writing in the Americas—translated as “the spreading of color on hard surfaces.” Ancient Mexican writing, influenced by the preceding 10,000 years of development in Mesoamerica, supported a fully socialized “higher education” network which fostered the realization of an organized and consistent legal system, an exact science of time-astronomy-and mathematics, complex faith systems, advanced knowledge of herbal medicine, elaborate architecture and sculptural art—all of this without Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum and without the invention of the alphabet.
By merging Mexican and Western technologies of writing, we are no longer obliged to accept the Western philosophy of a grammar, of linguistic control or taming the tongue and mind, as universal components of writing instruction. Possibilities for accessing theoretical and pedagogical potentials, no longer constrained by an elite class of practitioners, become available. If, in place of theorizing Composition based on a vanguard Western mythology, we accept new mestiza consciousness as a point of origin, we might be encouraged to think about, practice, and teach rhetoric in such a way that is directly responsive to comparative developments of writing, both past and present, from Olmec glyphs to the Inca Quipu, from Maya hieroglyphs to Aztec pictographs to Chicano codices and Zapatista internet communiqués. The earliest writing systems in the “New World” develop from the abstract to the pictorial—precisely the reverse of what many might teach us to believe. Fifteenth century Aztec writing is almost entirely pictorial, while earlier Maya hieroglyphs of the fourth century are far more abstract. The history of writing and writing instruction, therefore, is not a triumphant progression toward the alphabet, but rather a series of co-evolutionary processes in which different systems follow their own transformations. No longer limited by parochial assumptions about “true writing” as the representation of speech through alphabetic systems, the field could study and learn from the construction of knowledge through various technologies of information storage and transmission, whether one writes with letters or with colors or with a system of knotted cords. New translations of rhetoric that “emerge from” the American colonial periphery would provide thorough knowledge of what the field has yet to generate: a materialist, historically-grounded theory of writing that accounts for those civilizations that maintain the longest cumulative histories of writing and writing instruction in the Western Hemisphere. Such subalternized knowledge is also responsive to current trends in digital rhetorics and digital literacies—trends that belatedly call for increased awareness of so-called visual, multi-genre, and multi-media writing practices.
New mestiza consciousness as a rhetorical practice creates a locus of enunciation not where Iberian and Mesoamerican legacies are mere alternatives to Composition Studies. Anzaldúa’s rhetorics suggest, quite to the contrary, that Composition is not necessarily a suitable or superior alternative to the immense hemispheric plurality that remains obscured. As a teacher and researcher of writing, my largest obstacle is not the last eight years of “Cowboy Conservatism” in the Oval Office, but an enduring John Wayne pedagogy of the study of written language. It is the field’s compassionate colonialism that systematically deforms the history and theory of writing under divisive periodizations and spacializations that declare the Western cosmology as the genesis and center of all critical thought.
As a way out, I suggest a shift from merely “talking about” writing and “diversity” from the harmfully narrow perspective of those in the imperial center, to “writing and teaching from” Anzaldúa’s conceptual borderlands. We might also look to the forgotten Fernando Ortiz and his misappropriated “transculturation,” W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” Emma Pérez’ “decolonial imaginary,” Caribbean essayist Edouard Glissant’s “Créolization,” Malea Powell’s “trickster rhetoric,” and Guaman Poma’s “arts of the contact zone”—these distinct enunciations, grounded in the lived experiences of the peripheral colonial world, express new potentials that surpass the limits of post-Enlightenment rationality. In place of the uni-linear, developmental, racially coded framework “from Ancient Greece to Modern America,” the idea of temporal simultaneity is invoked in which it becomes possible to see multiple histories and memories coexisting, without political rankings or assumptions that all cultures and rhetorical practices progress along the same imperial path.
In this light, an education in Composition and Rhetoric would interrogate the overhanging colonial determinant of the study of written language—not for what it declares, but for what it conceals: the epistemic limits of an enduring Eurocentric telos, too often passed off as universal and disembodied, without cultural roots or limitations. By provincializing and possibly even abandoning the field’s imperial horizon, perhaps we might prevent Composition Studies from becoming the humanities’ final attempt to keep John Wayne alive for one last Western.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Challenges from the Margin: Diverse Feminist Theories for Diverse Women
Introductory Bio
Dr. Hui Wu is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Her scholarship encompasses history of rhetoric, comparative studies of rhetoric, global feminist rhetorics, and archival research in rhetoric and composition. Currently, she continues to study post-Mao Chinese literary women’s feminist rhetoric and has begun writing about and translating China’s first book on persuasion, Guiguzi (Master of the Ghost Valley, 400-300 BCE). Her Chinese translation (Jiangxi Education Press, 2004) of C. Jan Swearingen’s Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies offers Chinese academics an alternative perspective of the history of Western literacy. Her critical anthology in translation, Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women, is forthcoming from Lexington Books.
Editor's note: find Hui Wu's Works Cited page at
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEfiles/Groups/CCCC/huiwuworkscited.pdf
Blog Entry
Time is ripe for CCCC to address diversity in terms of what we do as scholars and teachers. Today, each of us is part of the diversity we live and work in. Personally and professionally, diversity is what I am, what I live, what I “do” in everything I do. Yet diversity remains an issue with the whole baggage of problems, problems that permeate our research, teaching, and service. Feminist theory and research methodology can serve as a prime example. For years, until recently, “Privileged feminists have largely been unable to speak to, with, and for diverse groups of women because they either do not understand fully the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression or refuse to take this interrelatedness seriously. Feminist analyses of women’s lot tend to focus exclusively on gender and do not provide a solid foundation on which to construct feminist theory (bell hooks 15).
Since 2001, my publications on post-Mao Chinese women writers’ rhetoric have been addressing methodological problems caused by the dominant interpretive feminist framework that has evolved from white middle-class women’s perspectives (Wu 2001, 2002, 2005). Such perspectives, I have been arguing, disable us to explain the lot of women of other cultures, ethnicities, and classes. The dominant feminist theory focusing on individualism and women’s sexuality hardly provides a valid critical lens for the understanding of non-white, non-middle-class women’s lives. It does not respond to post-Mao Chinese women’s rhetoric nor explain their lived experiences. First, individualism is a concept inherited from the Western white male tradition for the independent pursuit of the self, so it is still patriarchal. Second, sexuality as a critical concept is developed from white women’s gender perspectives against white men and for the sexual emancipation from white men. To other women, for example, African-American women, the fight for women’s sexuality is a family quarrel between white women and white men (Morrison 21). Other women want “something real: women talking about human rights rather than sexual rights” (Morrison 30).
To the question, “how do you address diversity in your research, teaching, and service?” I am providing this answer--what I have been doing is addressing problems to shape and reshape feminist theory by making Chinese women’s feminist rhetorics visible and their voices heard, because of the challenges these women pose to the feminist mainstream theoretical framework.
Since the late 1980s, particularly the most recent years, Western feminists' interest in Chinese women’s life, history, and writing has exploded. Yet, for more than three decades, post-Mao literary women, who came of age in the late 1970s, have been baffling their Western sisters with their vehement repudiation of Western feminism. For so many years, this breach has been barely patched. And for so many years, the disassociation and repudiation have undergone intensive examinations in the West but with little satisfaction to either side.
My reading of their writings shows that post-Mao women writers’ experiences under Mao and their observations of women’s lives during economic reforms have largely shaped their feminist standpoint, a standpoint that distinguishes them from white middle-class women and Chinese women before and after their generation. This standpoint encourages women to develop themselves into strong world leaders who embody both the Confucian value of the exemplary human and the modern feminist values of the independent equal woman. The ostensibly conflicting values have possibly engendered their disassociation with many Western feminist critics, whose reading of their works is often dominated by individualism and sexuality.
Such an interpretive framework fails to appreciate post-Mao women writers’ collective activism for a women’s literature, which distinguishes itself not only from mainstream male literature, but also from two types of women’s writing for commercial purposes--one that encourages women to shape their bodies and minds for male approval and the other that focuses on sexual encounters with graphic details mostly read by Western critics as free expressions of women’s self and sexuality. The post-Mao female writers want to continue developing a literature of women, by women, and for women, a literature that centers on women’s past and present, including women with/without choices, working women, impoverished women, married/unmarried women, and young women. They hope this literature will educate men (not fight against men for sexual rights) and emancipate women to develop China into a society respectful of human rights and free of gender discrimination.
It’s no coincidence or surprise that I am frequently quoting African-American women in this blog. Actually, my research draws upon their womanism more than mainstream feminism, because of some interrelatedness between post-Mao Chinese women and black women in the U.S. These two groups of women in different socio-cultural contexts have both been deprived of human rights by the state political machine, a regime that has also oppressed their men. Theirs is not only gender oppression but also socio-political oppression.
This cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, cross-class feminist standpoint is what we should continue to advocate and develop in order to read diverse women’s writings, rhetorics, and histories on their own terms. This is because “it has become so commonplace for individuals doing feminist work to evoke gender, race, and class, it is often forgotten that initially most feminist thinkers, most of whom were white and from privileged class backgrounds, were hostile to adopting this perspective” (bell hooks xii). Until recently, few feminist critics of white middle-class backgrounds have transcended their own race, culture, or class to use theories of non-white, non-middle class women to reflect upon their practices or theories. It is quite often to see feminist critics of other cultures and ethnicities being trained with the dominant feminist theory, but it is rare to see their theories being part of the training unless the course title has some distinguishing “Other” words—“African-American” or “third world.” Isn’t it odd that other women should master the dominant feminist theory consequently to deprive their own voices and find no valid methodology to explain their own lives or interpret their own writing?
I feel it compelling to take this opportunity to promote diverse feminist approaches and show how cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, and cross-class approaches can bring us “together in difference” (Mao). A successful example is Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening, where she braves the ideology of white supremacy openly. Her confession about her refusal to include Alice Walker in her previous book, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions is like a fresh breeze into a room covered by layers of heavy dust from years of feminist talk that has never personally transcended the dominant discourse. Ratcliffe’s approach is encouraging and aspiring. It is encouraging, for it shows that it the margin is pushing the frontline of feminist research, taking its footing in the mainstream framework. It is aspiring for it testifies that marginalized feminist theory is indeed useful to the analysis of mainstream identity and discourse, making us better critics, theorists, and teachers with diverse perspectives. Evidently, the feminist theoretical landscape demands culture matters, “race matters” (Middleton), and class matters.
Dr. Hui Wu is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Her scholarship encompasses history of rhetoric, comparative studies of rhetoric, global feminist rhetorics, and archival research in rhetoric and composition. Currently, she continues to study post-Mao Chinese literary women’s feminist rhetoric and has begun writing about and translating China’s first book on persuasion, Guiguzi (Master of the Ghost Valley, 400-300 BCE). Her Chinese translation (Jiangxi Education Press, 2004) of C. Jan Swearingen’s Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies offers Chinese academics an alternative perspective of the history of Western literacy. Her critical anthology in translation, Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women, is forthcoming from Lexington Books.
Editor's note: find Hui Wu's Works Cited page at
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEfiles/Groups/CCCC/huiwuworkscited.pdf
Blog Entry
Time is ripe for CCCC to address diversity in terms of what we do as scholars and teachers. Today, each of us is part of the diversity we live and work in. Personally and professionally, diversity is what I am, what I live, what I “do” in everything I do. Yet diversity remains an issue with the whole baggage of problems, problems that permeate our research, teaching, and service. Feminist theory and research methodology can serve as a prime example. For years, until recently, “Privileged feminists have largely been unable to speak to, with, and for diverse groups of women because they either do not understand fully the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression or refuse to take this interrelatedness seriously. Feminist analyses of women’s lot tend to focus exclusively on gender and do not provide a solid foundation on which to construct feminist theory (bell hooks 15).
Since 2001, my publications on post-Mao Chinese women writers’ rhetoric have been addressing methodological problems caused by the dominant interpretive feminist framework that has evolved from white middle-class women’s perspectives (Wu 2001, 2002, 2005). Such perspectives, I have been arguing, disable us to explain the lot of women of other cultures, ethnicities, and classes. The dominant feminist theory focusing on individualism and women’s sexuality hardly provides a valid critical lens for the understanding of non-white, non-middle-class women’s lives. It does not respond to post-Mao Chinese women’s rhetoric nor explain their lived experiences. First, individualism is a concept inherited from the Western white male tradition for the independent pursuit of the self, so it is still patriarchal. Second, sexuality as a critical concept is developed from white women’s gender perspectives against white men and for the sexual emancipation from white men. To other women, for example, African-American women, the fight for women’s sexuality is a family quarrel between white women and white men (Morrison 21). Other women want “something real: women talking about human rights rather than sexual rights” (Morrison 30).
To the question, “how do you address diversity in your research, teaching, and service?” I am providing this answer--what I have been doing is addressing problems to shape and reshape feminist theory by making Chinese women’s feminist rhetorics visible and their voices heard, because of the challenges these women pose to the feminist mainstream theoretical framework.
Since the late 1980s, particularly the most recent years, Western feminists' interest in Chinese women’s life, history, and writing has exploded. Yet, for more than three decades, post-Mao literary women, who came of age in the late 1970s, have been baffling their Western sisters with their vehement repudiation of Western feminism. For so many years, this breach has been barely patched. And for so many years, the disassociation and repudiation have undergone intensive examinations in the West but with little satisfaction to either side.
My reading of their writings shows that post-Mao women writers’ experiences under Mao and their observations of women’s lives during economic reforms have largely shaped their feminist standpoint, a standpoint that distinguishes them from white middle-class women and Chinese women before and after their generation. This standpoint encourages women to develop themselves into strong world leaders who embody both the Confucian value of the exemplary human and the modern feminist values of the independent equal woman. The ostensibly conflicting values have possibly engendered their disassociation with many Western feminist critics, whose reading of their works is often dominated by individualism and sexuality.
Such an interpretive framework fails to appreciate post-Mao women writers’ collective activism for a women’s literature, which distinguishes itself not only from mainstream male literature, but also from two types of women’s writing for commercial purposes--one that encourages women to shape their bodies and minds for male approval and the other that focuses on sexual encounters with graphic details mostly read by Western critics as free expressions of women’s self and sexuality. The post-Mao female writers want to continue developing a literature of women, by women, and for women, a literature that centers on women’s past and present, including women with/without choices, working women, impoverished women, married/unmarried women, and young women. They hope this literature will educate men (not fight against men for sexual rights) and emancipate women to develop China into a society respectful of human rights and free of gender discrimination.
It’s no coincidence or surprise that I am frequently quoting African-American women in this blog. Actually, my research draws upon their womanism more than mainstream feminism, because of some interrelatedness between post-Mao Chinese women and black women in the U.S. These two groups of women in different socio-cultural contexts have both been deprived of human rights by the state political machine, a regime that has also oppressed their men. Theirs is not only gender oppression but also socio-political oppression.
This cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, cross-class feminist standpoint is what we should continue to advocate and develop in order to read diverse women’s writings, rhetorics, and histories on their own terms. This is because “it has become so commonplace for individuals doing feminist work to evoke gender, race, and class, it is often forgotten that initially most feminist thinkers, most of whom were white and from privileged class backgrounds, were hostile to adopting this perspective” (bell hooks xii). Until recently, few feminist critics of white middle-class backgrounds have transcended their own race, culture, or class to use theories of non-white, non-middle class women to reflect upon their practices or theories. It is quite often to see feminist critics of other cultures and ethnicities being trained with the dominant feminist theory, but it is rare to see their theories being part of the training unless the course title has some distinguishing “Other” words—“African-American” or “third world.” Isn’t it odd that other women should master the dominant feminist theory consequently to deprive their own voices and find no valid methodology to explain their own lives or interpret their own writing?
I feel it compelling to take this opportunity to promote diverse feminist approaches and show how cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, and cross-class approaches can bring us “together in difference” (Mao). A successful example is Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening, where she braves the ideology of white supremacy openly. Her confession about her refusal to include Alice Walker in her previous book, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions is like a fresh breeze into a room covered by layers of heavy dust from years of feminist talk that has never personally transcended the dominant discourse. Ratcliffe’s approach is encouraging and aspiring. It is encouraging, for it shows that it the margin is pushing the frontline of feminist research, taking its footing in the mainstream framework. It is aspiring for it testifies that marginalized feminist theory is indeed useful to the analysis of mainstream identity and discourse, making us better critics, theorists, and teachers with diverse perspectives. Evidently, the feminist theoretical landscape demands culture matters, “race matters” (Middleton), and class matters.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
"A CCCC Diversity Statement--in Four Voices"
Editor's Note: Happy New Year, and welcome to our new CCCC blog posts on diversity
and writing for the 2009 spring semester. As always, your comments and
responses to our guest writers are welcome.
Guest Writers: Annis N. Brown, Cathleen Clara, Ellen Cushman, and Alma Villanueva
Introductory Bio
Annis N. Brown is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy program at Michigan State University. Her research interests lie in the historical and contemporary implementation of urban educational policy and critical literacy studies. She works with pre-service teachers, student teachers and veteran teachers in various capacities. She is an active member of the Graduate Student Council for the American Educational Research Association, and currently serves as the community leader. She was also the Training and Support Coordinator for The New York City Teaching Fellows and previously taught middle school English Language Arts and Social Studies in the South Bronx.
Blog Entry
So, what do we really mean by diversity? My mind consistently veers toward this question every time I hear the infamous four syllables. I teach pre-service teachers who are overwhelmingly white and predominately middle-class. In my learning as a doctoral student, I am professed to by mostly white faculty. Does inserting my African American self into either of these equations automatically equal diversity? Am I creating diverse learning environments by sharing my experiences as a teacher in the South Bronx, and inserting the requisite Brice-Heath, Delpit, Banks, and Nieto into my syllabi? When thinking about diversity I have more questions than answers. However, there is no place where I make better sense of these questions than in the classroom.
In my collegiate teaching, my pedagogical leaning is toward a womanist conceptualization of care. The strength of the women in Jackie Jones Royster’s Traces of A Stream, the historical memory of the educators in Michelle Foster’s, Black Teachers on Teaching and the framework construction of Nell Noddings in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education all inform my instructional stance. This pragmatic application of Black feminist ideals, high expectations and social justice transcends place–it is applicable across both homogenous and heterogeneous groups. Caring about whether both the margins and the center are represented, in texts assigned and activities taught, creates a vibrant learning environment where ideas can be stretched. Expecting and requiring intellectual rigor that translates into practical application and genuine learning, while leaving my students with the charge to “do something about it” is my instructional legacy. I am teaching English teachers who will radiate across this nation to choose the books that children read, create the assignments that frame adolescent understanding, and engineer curricula for towns, districts and states. These causal relationships further complicate the true meaning of diversity.
This lovingly pragmatic approach that I espouse is also borne out of my experiences as a student. I grew up in schools that were poor and racially segregated. The caring that emanated from the predominately Black and female teachers in my classrooms prepared me to begin to comprehend a world where I am seen as a minority. These intersections have caused me to explore the realities of urban Black girls, their teachers, and their rhetorical practices. How can their cultural understandings diversify our perceptions of teacher and learner? How do popular and public stereotypes about “that loud Black lady” interact with domestic and private home expectations of docility and femininity? What can the latent texts and silences that lie beneath speech tell us about the marginalized spaces of “double minorities”? This research agenda will continue to inform my teaching, and my identity as a constantly evolving pedagogue. What I really mean by diversity is shifting consciousness, shaping outlook, and sustaining change.
Introductory Bio
Cathleen Clara is a third-year teacher education doctoral student in Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy at Michigan State University. She is studying adolescent literacy, young adult literature and urban/alternative education. A former alternative high school teacher, she has taught language arts and social studies, content area literacy and children’s literature. She has also written curriculum for a local school district and is support staff for freshman study abroad experiences.
Blog Entry
In working with pre-service teachers, I create a learning environment that encompasses ideas of pedagogy that critically engage popular notions of diversity and multiculturalism. As a former alternative high school teacher, I longed to be able to name the practices I used in my classroom, so this course is heavily weighted in critical pedagogy and critical literacy. I teach a course in secondary content area literacy where the majority of my students are White, middle-class, female, Christian and were ‘good students’ in high school. As part of this course, they spend time working in an urban alternative high school, where many of them encounter students who are not only different from them in race and class, but also in their experiences and perceptions of the purposes of schooling.
I feel that part of my job is to widen their perspectives on diversity and to help them be able to work with all of the students in their future classrooms, especially those who have had different life and school experiences from their own.
I begin this course by asking my students to write about and discuss what they already know about teaching and learning based on their own experiences as students and pre-service teachers. We then build on those experiences through their field placement and activities that challenge their traditional notions of what education is and can be. I use varied texts (by writers such as Lisa Delpit, Linda Christensen, Bill Bigelow, Peter McLaren, bell hooks, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Greg Michie and Mica Pollack--to name a few) that push my own and my students’ current knowledge and perceptions of literacy and schooling. This helps us redefine not only who students are and the challenges they face in a school system that panders to one type of student, but also to redefine our notions of literacy in content and context.
My biggest challenge is getting my students to engage ideas of incorporating material that is outside the traditional (white/middle class) curriculum. They struggle with issues they find controversial (GLBTQ, language diversity, oppression, etc) and how they can really teach and work with students around subjects and experiences that speak to their own and their students’ lived experiences. In order to help my students think about these lived experiences, we read three diverse novels; PUSH by Sapphire, Ironman by Chris Crutcher and The Other Side of the Sky by Farah Ahmedi. These texts inevitably lead to heated discussions about what can and cannot be taught in schools and how involved teachers can and should become in students’ lives. Ultimately, I believe that my job is to help my pre-service teachers learn to really love kids for who they are, not how they perform in our overly structured and standardized school system. As teachers we work primarily with human beings and secondarily with our content areas.
Soon, I will begin research on the possible influences diverse texts might have on pre-service teachers’ beliefs, perspectives and assumptions about students and adolescents. Eventually, I plan to look specifically at student and teacher relationships in alternative education and how those might better inform our preparation of pre-service teachers.
Introductory Bio
Ellen Cushman is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. She has published two books: The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community and Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook with co-editors Eugene Kintgen, Barry Kroll, and Mike Rose, as well as numerous essays. Initial findings from her qualitative study of Cherokee language and identity will appear in College Composition and Communication, The Public Work of Rhetoric (eds David Coogan and John Ackerman), and in a new book underway: The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing Linguistic, Historical, and Cultural Perseverance.
Blog Entry
For me, diversity has best been understood in terms of the tools people use in their everyday struggles and acts of making meaning. Be it a fifty-year old African American woman completing a welfare application with her sisters; a Korean freshman grappling with the English translation of a complex idea so eloquently written in Korean; a Cherokee language teacher trying to structure a language lesson for his English L1 students; a professional writing student creating a digital video to represent the history the effect of allotment on Cherokee families; or three graduate students tackling the idea of diversity with me—as we strive to represent ourselves, we put media together to show who we are; where we stand; what we need, think, and believe; and hopefully, to reach our students and readers. These tools of representation have grammars and conventions for their use; these are:
the rules that write us as we write with them,
the structures that shape and limit the reach of our voices, and
the cultural values that imbue our meaning making.
To understand the ways in which tools come to hold value for the people who use them, this work draws upon two areas of scholarship that have remained, unfortunately, relatively unconnected. On the one hand, I draw upon the scholarship that explores the rhetorical and literate strategies of African Americans (Richardson, Smitherman, Pough, Royster, Moss, Gilyard, and Middleton), Asian Americans (Lu, Okawa, Young, Guinsatao Monberg), Native Americans (Crane-Bizzarro, Powell, Lyons), Latino/as (Villanueva, Moreno, Baca, Perez), and Whites (Ratcliffe, Kirsch and Ritchie, Prendergast, Trainor). Taken together, these works have had noteworthy impact on unmasking the power and privilege of particular linguistic tools and the cultural rules that govern their use. On the other hand, this work draws upon the scholarship that explores composing with various tools (Anderson, Wysoki, DeVoss and Webb, Ball, Trimbur, George, Halrbitter) and the effects of mediation on the people who use them (Hawisher and Selfe, Haas, Charney, Holdstein). This too-brief list of colleagues working in the area of composing with various media points to the ways in which these tools cannot be seen as instruments alone, that they structure us as we use them, and that tools of representation have cultural values and status related to the practices of their use.
Ultimately, though, any understanding of mediation as a cultural practice that may be drawn from this line of inquiry will be useful only insofar as it’s helpful to communities and cultures this work serves. Understanding diversity for me must weave tightly with teaching, writing, and public engagement activities. Many of the classes I teach ask students to learn to work at the intersections of culture, community, and technology, what Ernest Morrell and I have called a praxis of new media. For example, students enrolled in multimedia writing created educational installations for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to facilitate the Nation’s efforts to write histories of the formation of the state of Oklahoma from the perspective of Indian Territory. These histories are one small effort in a constellation of rhetorical practices the Nation has developed to persevere as a sovereign entity. This perseverance will be illustrated in a book-length study of the evolution of the Cherokee writing system. Diversity, then, can be understood through a combination of research, teaching, and service.
Introductory Bio
Alma Villanueva is an MA candidate in the Rhetoric and Writing program at Michigan State University, and a first-time teacher of college composition. Her scholarship focuses on imperial rhetorics in their local and global manifestations, currently with a particular interest in composition pedagogy that at once provides students access to institutions of power and works against the ideological ramifications of contemporary neocolonial discourse.
Blog Entry
I teach “Preparation for College Writing,” where white Americans of the middle class are a minority. I have first generation immigrant students, international students from China, Japan, and Turkey, and I have first generation working class white American and African American students. There is one middle class white student, and there is me, a white-looking middle class woman. Diversity?
As I stand in front of my twenty-three students from different social locations within and without the States, I have to push to hear a diversity of voices. Everyone knows the American way: to assimilate and try to get it “right.” Discussions on language variations and linguistic prejudice become silencing moments in which confused students try to understand the “right” answers and the “right” histories whereby ethnic and national discriminations perished sometime after a Black preacher had some dream. They strive for me to tell them how to do “correct” American English in writing and talking, meaning, of course, Edited American English and Standard(ized) American English. Where is the diversity, even as I look out into a room full of people that are supposed to epitomize “diversity”?
Diversity is a way of seeing and being in the world; and as educators, students, and colleagues within this field, we need to embrace a diversity that speaks from the citizens of this earth and about the structural conditions that harm too many of us. We need to encourage and promote a diversity of voices, a diversity of ways of thinking. In order to work towards a diversity as it ought to be promoted and exist in education and other institutions, much of my recent scholarship aims at Ernest Morrell’s (2008) vision of critical literacy, which is not only to create “aware[ness] of the various social, ideological, cultural, and political contexts in which the languages and literacies of power operate,” but also to work towards the production of “counter-language and counter-texts” for a “redefining of the self and the [eventual] transformation of oppressive social structures.”
In other words, teaching composition with diversity means teaching ourselves, one another, and our students. It means learning from our students. It moves from the small scale, the individual, and radiates outward, affecting greater social structures. It is not only reformative or reactive, and it is not only responsive; but it acts on its own accord, towards liberatory ends. Not just critical pedagogy, but a pedagogy of liberation. Diversity ought not be about having a multitude of ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and other such identities; rather it is about a diversity in discussions about structured discriminations against persons of color, gays and lesbians, non-American nationalities, women, non-Christians, the working class, and the impoverished of the U.S. and the world.
and writing for the 2009 spring semester. As always, your comments and
responses to our guest writers are welcome.
Guest Writers: Annis N. Brown, Cathleen Clara, Ellen Cushman, and Alma Villanueva
Introductory Bio
Annis N. Brown is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy program at Michigan State University. Her research interests lie in the historical and contemporary implementation of urban educational policy and critical literacy studies. She works with pre-service teachers, student teachers and veteran teachers in various capacities. She is an active member of the Graduate Student Council for the American Educational Research Association, and currently serves as the community leader. She was also the Training and Support Coordinator for The New York City Teaching Fellows and previously taught middle school English Language Arts and Social Studies in the South Bronx.
Blog Entry
So, what do we really mean by diversity? My mind consistently veers toward this question every time I hear the infamous four syllables. I teach pre-service teachers who are overwhelmingly white and predominately middle-class. In my learning as a doctoral student, I am professed to by mostly white faculty. Does inserting my African American self into either of these equations automatically equal diversity? Am I creating diverse learning environments by sharing my experiences as a teacher in the South Bronx, and inserting the requisite Brice-Heath, Delpit, Banks, and Nieto into my syllabi? When thinking about diversity I have more questions than answers. However, there is no place where I make better sense of these questions than in the classroom.
In my collegiate teaching, my pedagogical leaning is toward a womanist conceptualization of care. The strength of the women in Jackie Jones Royster’s Traces of A Stream, the historical memory of the educators in Michelle Foster’s, Black Teachers on Teaching and the framework construction of Nell Noddings in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education all inform my instructional stance. This pragmatic application of Black feminist ideals, high expectations and social justice transcends place–it is applicable across both homogenous and heterogeneous groups. Caring about whether both the margins and the center are represented, in texts assigned and activities taught, creates a vibrant learning environment where ideas can be stretched. Expecting and requiring intellectual rigor that translates into practical application and genuine learning, while leaving my students with the charge to “do something about it” is my instructional legacy. I am teaching English teachers who will radiate across this nation to choose the books that children read, create the assignments that frame adolescent understanding, and engineer curricula for towns, districts and states. These causal relationships further complicate the true meaning of diversity.
This lovingly pragmatic approach that I espouse is also borne out of my experiences as a student. I grew up in schools that were poor and racially segregated. The caring that emanated from the predominately Black and female teachers in my classrooms prepared me to begin to comprehend a world where I am seen as a minority. These intersections have caused me to explore the realities of urban Black girls, their teachers, and their rhetorical practices. How can their cultural understandings diversify our perceptions of teacher and learner? How do popular and public stereotypes about “that loud Black lady” interact with domestic and private home expectations of docility and femininity? What can the latent texts and silences that lie beneath speech tell us about the marginalized spaces of “double minorities”? This research agenda will continue to inform my teaching, and my identity as a constantly evolving pedagogue. What I really mean by diversity is shifting consciousness, shaping outlook, and sustaining change.
Introductory Bio
Cathleen Clara is a third-year teacher education doctoral student in Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy at Michigan State University. She is studying adolescent literacy, young adult literature and urban/alternative education. A former alternative high school teacher, she has taught language arts and social studies, content area literacy and children’s literature. She has also written curriculum for a local school district and is support staff for freshman study abroad experiences.
Blog Entry
In working with pre-service teachers, I create a learning environment that encompasses ideas of pedagogy that critically engage popular notions of diversity and multiculturalism. As a former alternative high school teacher, I longed to be able to name the practices I used in my classroom, so this course is heavily weighted in critical pedagogy and critical literacy. I teach a course in secondary content area literacy where the majority of my students are White, middle-class, female, Christian and were ‘good students’ in high school. As part of this course, they spend time working in an urban alternative high school, where many of them encounter students who are not only different from them in race and class, but also in their experiences and perceptions of the purposes of schooling.
I feel that part of my job is to widen their perspectives on diversity and to help them be able to work with all of the students in their future classrooms, especially those who have had different life and school experiences from their own.
I begin this course by asking my students to write about and discuss what they already know about teaching and learning based on their own experiences as students and pre-service teachers. We then build on those experiences through their field placement and activities that challenge their traditional notions of what education is and can be. I use varied texts (by writers such as Lisa Delpit, Linda Christensen, Bill Bigelow, Peter McLaren, bell hooks, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Greg Michie and Mica Pollack--to name a few) that push my own and my students’ current knowledge and perceptions of literacy and schooling. This helps us redefine not only who students are and the challenges they face in a school system that panders to one type of student, but also to redefine our notions of literacy in content and context.
My biggest challenge is getting my students to engage ideas of incorporating material that is outside the traditional (white/middle class) curriculum. They struggle with issues they find controversial (GLBTQ, language diversity, oppression, etc) and how they can really teach and work with students around subjects and experiences that speak to their own and their students’ lived experiences. In order to help my students think about these lived experiences, we read three diverse novels; PUSH by Sapphire, Ironman by Chris Crutcher and The Other Side of the Sky by Farah Ahmedi. These texts inevitably lead to heated discussions about what can and cannot be taught in schools and how involved teachers can and should become in students’ lives. Ultimately, I believe that my job is to help my pre-service teachers learn to really love kids for who they are, not how they perform in our overly structured and standardized school system. As teachers we work primarily with human beings and secondarily with our content areas.
Soon, I will begin research on the possible influences diverse texts might have on pre-service teachers’ beliefs, perspectives and assumptions about students and adolescents. Eventually, I plan to look specifically at student and teacher relationships in alternative education and how those might better inform our preparation of pre-service teachers.
Introductory Bio
Ellen Cushman is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. She has published two books: The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community and Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook with co-editors Eugene Kintgen, Barry Kroll, and Mike Rose, as well as numerous essays. Initial findings from her qualitative study of Cherokee language and identity will appear in College Composition and Communication, The Public Work of Rhetoric (eds David Coogan and John Ackerman), and in a new book underway: The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing Linguistic, Historical, and Cultural Perseverance.
Blog Entry
For me, diversity has best been understood in terms of the tools people use in their everyday struggles and acts of making meaning. Be it a fifty-year old African American woman completing a welfare application with her sisters; a Korean freshman grappling with the English translation of a complex idea so eloquently written in Korean; a Cherokee language teacher trying to structure a language lesson for his English L1 students; a professional writing student creating a digital video to represent the history the effect of allotment on Cherokee families; or three graduate students tackling the idea of diversity with me—as we strive to represent ourselves, we put media together to show who we are; where we stand; what we need, think, and believe; and hopefully, to reach our students and readers. These tools of representation have grammars and conventions for their use; these are:
the rules that write us as we write with them,
the structures that shape and limit the reach of our voices, and
the cultural values that imbue our meaning making.
To understand the ways in which tools come to hold value for the people who use them, this work draws upon two areas of scholarship that have remained, unfortunately, relatively unconnected. On the one hand, I draw upon the scholarship that explores the rhetorical and literate strategies of African Americans (Richardson, Smitherman, Pough, Royster, Moss, Gilyard, and Middleton), Asian Americans (Lu, Okawa, Young, Guinsatao Monberg), Native Americans (Crane-Bizzarro, Powell, Lyons), Latino/as (Villanueva, Moreno, Baca, Perez), and Whites (Ratcliffe, Kirsch and Ritchie, Prendergast, Trainor). Taken together, these works have had noteworthy impact on unmasking the power and privilege of particular linguistic tools and the cultural rules that govern their use. On the other hand, this work draws upon the scholarship that explores composing with various tools (Anderson, Wysoki, DeVoss and Webb, Ball, Trimbur, George, Halrbitter) and the effects of mediation on the people who use them (Hawisher and Selfe, Haas, Charney, Holdstein). This too-brief list of colleagues working in the area of composing with various media points to the ways in which these tools cannot be seen as instruments alone, that they structure us as we use them, and that tools of representation have cultural values and status related to the practices of their use.
Ultimately, though, any understanding of mediation as a cultural practice that may be drawn from this line of inquiry will be useful only insofar as it’s helpful to communities and cultures this work serves. Understanding diversity for me must weave tightly with teaching, writing, and public engagement activities. Many of the classes I teach ask students to learn to work at the intersections of culture, community, and technology, what Ernest Morrell and I have called a praxis of new media. For example, students enrolled in multimedia writing created educational installations for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to facilitate the Nation’s efforts to write histories of the formation of the state of Oklahoma from the perspective of Indian Territory. These histories are one small effort in a constellation of rhetorical practices the Nation has developed to persevere as a sovereign entity. This perseverance will be illustrated in a book-length study of the evolution of the Cherokee writing system. Diversity, then, can be understood through a combination of research, teaching, and service.
Introductory Bio
Alma Villanueva is an MA candidate in the Rhetoric and Writing program at Michigan State University, and a first-time teacher of college composition. Her scholarship focuses on imperial rhetorics in their local and global manifestations, currently with a particular interest in composition pedagogy that at once provides students access to institutions of power and works against the ideological ramifications of contemporary neocolonial discourse.
Blog Entry
I teach “Preparation for College Writing,” where white Americans of the middle class are a minority. I have first generation immigrant students, international students from China, Japan, and Turkey, and I have first generation working class white American and African American students. There is one middle class white student, and there is me, a white-looking middle class woman. Diversity?
As I stand in front of my twenty-three students from different social locations within and without the States, I have to push to hear a diversity of voices. Everyone knows the American way: to assimilate and try to get it “right.” Discussions on language variations and linguistic prejudice become silencing moments in which confused students try to understand the “right” answers and the “right” histories whereby ethnic and national discriminations perished sometime after a Black preacher had some dream. They strive for me to tell them how to do “correct” American English in writing and talking, meaning, of course, Edited American English and Standard(ized) American English. Where is the diversity, even as I look out into a room full of people that are supposed to epitomize “diversity”?
Diversity is a way of seeing and being in the world; and as educators, students, and colleagues within this field, we need to embrace a diversity that speaks from the citizens of this earth and about the structural conditions that harm too many of us. We need to encourage and promote a diversity of voices, a diversity of ways of thinking. In order to work towards a diversity as it ought to be promoted and exist in education and other institutions, much of my recent scholarship aims at Ernest Morrell’s (2008) vision of critical literacy, which is not only to create “aware[ness] of the various social, ideological, cultural, and political contexts in which the languages and literacies of power operate,” but also to work towards the production of “counter-language and counter-texts” for a “redefining of the self and the [eventual] transformation of oppressive social structures.”
In other words, teaching composition with diversity means teaching ourselves, one another, and our students. It means learning from our students. It moves from the small scale, the individual, and radiates outward, affecting greater social structures. It is not only reformative or reactive, and it is not only responsive; but it acts on its own accord, towards liberatory ends. Not just critical pedagogy, but a pedagogy of liberation. Diversity ought not be about having a multitude of ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and other such identities; rather it is about a diversity in discussions about structured discriminations against persons of color, gays and lesbians, non-American nationalities, women, non-Christians, the working class, and the impoverished of the U.S. and the world.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Small Failures and Compromises: The Institutional Life of Diversity
Introductory Bio
Phillip P. Marzluf, Assistant Professor and the Director of the Expository Writing Program at Kansas State University, arrived to composition and rhetoric after experiences as an ESL/EFL teacher in Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and other journals. Especially noteworthy for CCCC readers is his article on diversity in rhetoric and composition studies, "Diversity Writing: Natural Languages, Authentic Voices" in CCC 57.3 (February 2006) which generated a good debate with Margaret Himley and Christine Farris in CCC 58.3 (February 2007). Currently, his research centers on several qualitative studies that examine how white students from highly conservative and religious backgrounds experience and respond to the public and secular discourses of academic life.
At K-State, Marzluf is connected with the Tilford Group, the organization that makes visible the university’s mission to enhance diversity and that mediates much of the campus conversation about diversity. Marzluf is also one of the primary contributors to Writing Communities and Identities, the local antiracist textbook used by first-year students in the writing program.
Blog Entry
At institutions like Kansas State University—public, land grant universities that still remain predominantly white spaces—diversity plays an important role in administrative policy (e.g., retention and recruitment of historically marginalized students) and as a peculiarly American middle-class academic discourse, one that resembles the politeness that marks the “Principles of Community”—statements of civility that once graced the walls of all K-State classrooms (though, they have now been largely replaced by statements detailing emergency procedures for suspicious packages, bomb threats, active shooters, and other such threats). It is easy enough to mock this middle-class discourse of diversity, for indeed it is all too polite, too ineffectual, too corporate (two of K-State’s largest diversity donors are Dow Chemical and Cargill), and too evangelical (I have now held hands at two diversity events). And yet, despite all of these significant weaknesses, including those that the other excellent CCCC bloggers have already identified, the discourse of diversity continues to play an important role in my administrative life, as well as in my teaching and research. I rarely feel, it must be said, that my efforts are completely successful, and I admit that my confrontations and interruptions of diversity discourse quickly become (again, all so polite) compromises.
As the director of the Expository Writing Program, I contend with the “work” of diversity on a daily basis. For example, I have recently presented the diversity efforts of the English department to an alumni group, judged a batch of university proposals for diversity funding, and experimented with a rubric to assess how well students’ writing portfolios demonstrate their ability to analyze identity and to interpret how texts represent difference. I also train novice graduate teaching assistants for and teach an introductory writing course that asks students to analyze, research, and make sense of the issues intersecting human difference on U.S. campuses and beyond. Students, for example, analyze advertisements in order to identify and explain what gender expectations are being represented, compose a research memo on the roles social class plays in campus life, and analyze a personal narrative that they have constructed through the various lenses of gender, race, class, and other factors. Every year, together with my writing program colleagues, I tackle the stock genres that proliferate from these assignments and continue to revise the course materials, assess the objectives, and rethink our teacher training. At the same time, I have to reflect upon the many compromises that the curriculum and the program have made: Why haven’t I instituted that unit on language diversity yet? Why do students keep on writing about their expensive cars as a way to demonstrate their identity? Why doesn’t our curriculum ask students to confront heteronormativity?
Even though the first-year students—as well as some of the graduate teaching assistants—may grumble at times that the curriculum smacks of “political correctness,” they are particularly adept at exploiting the middle-class code of politeness that celebrates individual liberalism, in which students have the opportunity to voice their opinions and beliefs, providing that they agree to listen and to not contest other students’ opinions and beliefs. This is what “diversity” comes to mean for many students—classrooms that become markets of the free exchange of ideas. Yet, although I attempt to disrupt this logic of politeness, I usually fail: numerous, nagging, small failures, which rarely manifest themselves as student resistance, yet that haunt me, these failed teachable moments during which I shrink, cowardly, under the dominant discourses of individualism, white privilege, and commonsense notions of progress.
One example: I use texts about American sports and athletics in order to talk about how popular media construct images of African American males and about how sports afford rare opportunities for people to discuss the conflicts between cultural groups, even though these conversations may be highly coded. This semester, I discussed an article by David Zirin, “Proud ‘Black Quarterback,’” in order to begin talking about whiteness, systemic racism, and myths of “even playing fields.” My little, nagging failure begins when Zirin, who demonstrates how the media use the prevalence of NFL African American quarterbacks to promote a narrative of contemporary equality, juxtaposes these positive images of successful quarterbacks alongside statistics that reflect an oppositional narrative of systemic racism, including dramatically higher unemployment and incarceration rates for young African American males. Yet, at the very moment when I asked students what Zirin hoped to accomplish with using such statistics, I grew nervous. The middle of the classroom shifted. Voices emerged, articulating the passions of the tropes of individualism, the capitulation of the past, and the skepticism over the use of statistics. These are the voices of the Midwest Commonsense that I feel at times unable to interrupt. Why compare the efforts of black quarterbacks to criminals who have made bad life decisions? What does unemployment and crime have to do with his main point?—aren’t you the one always going on about focus and keeping to your thesis? Or, aren’t such comparisons a form of racism in themselves? Or, even, K-State has its own black quarterback: what’s the big deal, anyway? (And he’s not as good as everyone thinks!)
These awkward compromises and nagging defeats come at a cost. The institutional discourse of diversity cannot align itself with the more robust discourses of diversity, those that, according to Eric Pritchard, Rebecca Dingo, Morris Young, and other CCCC diversity bloggers, refuse to become an object or topic to be classified or a “problem” to be solved. This critical diversity becomes deeply intertwined with the histories of language and literacy, revealing our way of talking about conflicts between social groups struggling to reproduce—or rearticulate—values, definitions, and beliefs as part of the struggle to secure resources and access to political, economic, and cultural power. The myths of literacy as well as those of writing and writing instruction originate as ways to naturalize human difference and justify hierarchies of language standards and authority. In turn, this rhetorical authority, invested in certain privileged speakers and writers, manifests itself in terms of access to literacy instruction, higher education, audiences, institutional titles, sponsors, and such material resources as libraries, books, paper, and other literacy technologies. This access becomes naturalized, within the commonsense of how we talk about our students and the metaphors we choose to describe rhetorical and literacy instruction. Linda Brodkey, Susan Miller, Sharon Crowley, and others have traced these commonsensical, naturalized notions interlinking students to their texts in the middle-class universities that first sponsored composition in the United States. I fear, therefore, that these small, nagging failures—in which I feel unable to interrupt the dominant middle-class discourse of diversity—may indicate my own indebtedness to the institutional logic and history of the university and my inability to envision something beyond the notions and metaphors that I have been socialized to recognize and perform.
Is this dominant, yet weak, un-critical, and middle-class discourse of diversity, then, what remains of our desires to trace the histories of difference, to examine the narratives of individualism and progress, and to develop antiracist pedagogies that ask students to consider the ethics of their own writing? Well, I certainly hope not. Yet, we will continue to accept compromises; we will feel uneasy; we will be silenced; we will become enraged; and, we will continue to write and work and try to interrupt.
Phillip P. Marzluf, Assistant Professor and the Director of the Expository Writing Program at Kansas State University, arrived to composition and rhetoric after experiences as an ESL/EFL teacher in Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and other journals. Especially noteworthy for CCCC readers is his article on diversity in rhetoric and composition studies, "Diversity Writing: Natural Languages, Authentic Voices" in CCC 57.3 (February 2006) which generated a good debate with Margaret Himley and Christine Farris in CCC 58.3 (February 2007). Currently, his research centers on several qualitative studies that examine how white students from highly conservative and religious backgrounds experience and respond to the public and secular discourses of academic life.
At K-State, Marzluf is connected with the Tilford Group, the organization that makes visible the university’s mission to enhance diversity and that mediates much of the campus conversation about diversity. Marzluf is also one of the primary contributors to Writing Communities and Identities, the local antiracist textbook used by first-year students in the writing program.
Blog Entry
At institutions like Kansas State University—public, land grant universities that still remain predominantly white spaces—diversity plays an important role in administrative policy (e.g., retention and recruitment of historically marginalized students) and as a peculiarly American middle-class academic discourse, one that resembles the politeness that marks the “Principles of Community”—statements of civility that once graced the walls of all K-State classrooms (though, they have now been largely replaced by statements detailing emergency procedures for suspicious packages, bomb threats, active shooters, and other such threats). It is easy enough to mock this middle-class discourse of diversity, for indeed it is all too polite, too ineffectual, too corporate (two of K-State’s largest diversity donors are Dow Chemical and Cargill), and too evangelical (I have now held hands at two diversity events). And yet, despite all of these significant weaknesses, including those that the other excellent CCCC bloggers have already identified, the discourse of diversity continues to play an important role in my administrative life, as well as in my teaching and research. I rarely feel, it must be said, that my efforts are completely successful, and I admit that my confrontations and interruptions of diversity discourse quickly become (again, all so polite) compromises.
As the director of the Expository Writing Program, I contend with the “work” of diversity on a daily basis. For example, I have recently presented the diversity efforts of the English department to an alumni group, judged a batch of university proposals for diversity funding, and experimented with a rubric to assess how well students’ writing portfolios demonstrate their ability to analyze identity and to interpret how texts represent difference. I also train novice graduate teaching assistants for and teach an introductory writing course that asks students to analyze, research, and make sense of the issues intersecting human difference on U.S. campuses and beyond. Students, for example, analyze advertisements in order to identify and explain what gender expectations are being represented, compose a research memo on the roles social class plays in campus life, and analyze a personal narrative that they have constructed through the various lenses of gender, race, class, and other factors. Every year, together with my writing program colleagues, I tackle the stock genres that proliferate from these assignments and continue to revise the course materials, assess the objectives, and rethink our teacher training. At the same time, I have to reflect upon the many compromises that the curriculum and the program have made: Why haven’t I instituted that unit on language diversity yet? Why do students keep on writing about their expensive cars as a way to demonstrate their identity? Why doesn’t our curriculum ask students to confront heteronormativity?
Even though the first-year students—as well as some of the graduate teaching assistants—may grumble at times that the curriculum smacks of “political correctness,” they are particularly adept at exploiting the middle-class code of politeness that celebrates individual liberalism, in which students have the opportunity to voice their opinions and beliefs, providing that they agree to listen and to not contest other students’ opinions and beliefs. This is what “diversity” comes to mean for many students—classrooms that become markets of the free exchange of ideas. Yet, although I attempt to disrupt this logic of politeness, I usually fail: numerous, nagging, small failures, which rarely manifest themselves as student resistance, yet that haunt me, these failed teachable moments during which I shrink, cowardly, under the dominant discourses of individualism, white privilege, and commonsense notions of progress.
One example: I use texts about American sports and athletics in order to talk about how popular media construct images of African American males and about how sports afford rare opportunities for people to discuss the conflicts between cultural groups, even though these conversations may be highly coded. This semester, I discussed an article by David Zirin, “Proud ‘Black Quarterback,’” in order to begin talking about whiteness, systemic racism, and myths of “even playing fields.” My little, nagging failure begins when Zirin, who demonstrates how the media use the prevalence of NFL African American quarterbacks to promote a narrative of contemporary equality, juxtaposes these positive images of successful quarterbacks alongside statistics that reflect an oppositional narrative of systemic racism, including dramatically higher unemployment and incarceration rates for young African American males. Yet, at the very moment when I asked students what Zirin hoped to accomplish with using such statistics, I grew nervous. The middle of the classroom shifted. Voices emerged, articulating the passions of the tropes of individualism, the capitulation of the past, and the skepticism over the use of statistics. These are the voices of the Midwest Commonsense that I feel at times unable to interrupt. Why compare the efforts of black quarterbacks to criminals who have made bad life decisions? What does unemployment and crime have to do with his main point?—aren’t you the one always going on about focus and keeping to your thesis? Or, aren’t such comparisons a form of racism in themselves? Or, even, K-State has its own black quarterback: what’s the big deal, anyway? (And he’s not as good as everyone thinks!)
These awkward compromises and nagging defeats come at a cost. The institutional discourse of diversity cannot align itself with the more robust discourses of diversity, those that, according to Eric Pritchard, Rebecca Dingo, Morris Young, and other CCCC diversity bloggers, refuse to become an object or topic to be classified or a “problem” to be solved. This critical diversity becomes deeply intertwined with the histories of language and literacy, revealing our way of talking about conflicts between social groups struggling to reproduce—or rearticulate—values, definitions, and beliefs as part of the struggle to secure resources and access to political, economic, and cultural power. The myths of literacy as well as those of writing and writing instruction originate as ways to naturalize human difference and justify hierarchies of language standards and authority. In turn, this rhetorical authority, invested in certain privileged speakers and writers, manifests itself in terms of access to literacy instruction, higher education, audiences, institutional titles, sponsors, and such material resources as libraries, books, paper, and other literacy technologies. This access becomes naturalized, within the commonsense of how we talk about our students and the metaphors we choose to describe rhetorical and literacy instruction. Linda Brodkey, Susan Miller, Sharon Crowley, and others have traced these commonsensical, naturalized notions interlinking students to their texts in the middle-class universities that first sponsored composition in the United States. I fear, therefore, that these small, nagging failures—in which I feel unable to interrupt the dominant middle-class discourse of diversity—may indicate my own indebtedness to the institutional logic and history of the university and my inability to envision something beyond the notions and metaphors that I have been socialized to recognize and perform.
Is this dominant, yet weak, un-critical, and middle-class discourse of diversity, then, what remains of our desires to trace the histories of difference, to examine the narratives of individualism and progress, and to develop antiracist pedagogies that ask students to consider the ethics of their own writing? Well, I certainly hope not. Yet, we will continue to accept compromises; we will feel uneasy; we will be silenced; we will become enraged; and, we will continue to write and work and try to interrupt.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
"Pathways to Diversity: Social Justice and the Multiplicity of Identities"
Introductory Bio
Eric Darnell Pritchard is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a faculty affiliate in the department of English, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies. He studied English-Liberal Arts at Lincoln University and literacy, rhetoric, critical theory and African-American gender and sexuality studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Pritchard's research and teaching interests include literacy, African-American and Queer Rhetoric, community-based writing, critical pedagogy queer theory, black feminist theory, masculinity studies and hip hop studies. His current focus is on the intersections of race, (queer) sexuality, gender and class with historical and contemporary literacy research.
Pursuant to those interests he is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, Black Queer Literacies. The study draws on the life story accounts of 60 black LGBTQ people who he interviewed about the relationships among their everyday literacy practices and identity formation across their lifetimes. The study focuses on the fluidity of literacy and identity and its interplay with black queer cultural productions (literary, visual, performance) in activism, spirituality, education, and in digital realms.
For his scholarship and community work he has received numerous honors, including the "Scholars for the Dream Award" from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the A. Philip Randolph Award for Community Activism from the Wisconsin Black Student Union.
Blog Entry
I want to thank the members of the CCCC Committee on Diversity for the creation of this space for a very important conversation. As a young scholar in rhetoric and composition I especially appreciate the invitation to be in the conversation with people who, in their work, have blazed so many trails for me to ‘tell it my way.’
My response to the question “How do you address the topic of "diversity" in your scholarship, teaching, and service?” reflects the sentiments of Victor Villanueva, Malea Powell and other guest contributors to the blog. Each has professed their commitment to diversity, while acknowledging their specific contentions with the term as it’s sometimes invoked. In my case, I have long emphasized and used the phrase ‘social justice’ rather than diversity. I prefer social justice because I hear in it the recognition of institutionalized social inequalities and the necessity of intervention into institutionalized oppression in pursuit of social justice. Diversity is one result of anti-oppression work. Social justice then is a pathway to diversity, a pathway that I think we continue to struggle with everyday. I often wonder: how effective is it to emphasize the importance of having ‘everyone at the table’ — to use a phrase often employed to illustrate diversity —if discussions don’t center the inequities each encounters en route to the proverbial table? What effect does this structure of the conversation have on the sustainability of coalitions for social justice? This question seems especially necessary given past and on-going discourses in society that ignore the specificity and continuance of oppression. The result of this discourse is an emphasis on equality and diversity that leads (prematurely) toward post-race, post-gender or in sum, post-oppression, without a necessary uptake of the impact of oppression. Here I briefly explore the centrality of these issues to my own work and more broadly to our research, teaching and professional service as members of the rhetoric and composition community.
In my research I respond to these challenges through a call to reconsider the usefulness of the phrase ‘multiplicity of identities’ as an alternative to lists of discrete characteristics as a category of analysis. This analysis can be of socio-political and cultural issues, and by extension, histories and theories of rhetoric and literacy traditions and pedagogical models. A recognition of identity as multiple is central to highlighting the problematic of pointing toward actions like inclusion or tolerance as representative of diversity or resorting to simplistic understandings of institutionalized oppression and identity. This is important because, in quests for social justice, how can we confront the social inequalities that threaten diversity without completely grasping the complexity of identities, oppression and communities as multiple, fluid, linked and/or simultaneous?
For example, my work on the literacy traditions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people showed me the consequences of the field under – theorizing the multiplicity of identities. By under-theorizing I refer to theorizing identities as narrow or monolithic or through an oversimplified interpretation of intersectionality. For many of my research participants, resisting this predisposition has allowed them to assert their identities as Black and LGBTQ (amongst many other identities). Through this the black LGBTQ person destabilizes the heteronormativity by which blackness is often read and also resists the erasure of difference in LGBTQ/sexuality studies research across disciplines, insisting on paradigms that center the “heterogeneity of sexuality” whereby sexuality “is constitutive of and constituted by racialized gender and class formations” (see Roderick Ferguson’s “Of Our Normative Strivings: African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality”). As such through their life story accounts my research participants intervene into composition and rhetoric research that depicts black and LGBTQ identities, movements and concerns in ways that fail to synthesize race, class, gender, sexuality and other identities. I should also say that this oversimplification of identities is endemic of work outside the realm of African-American and LGBTQ related research too. To move beyond this issue, I contend that we must return to the full definitions of women of color feminist writers and activists who first theorized and applied “intersectionality” — particularly the women of the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization. In their position paper “A Black Feminist Statement” Combahee described identities and oppressions as being on different paths that sometimes intersect and overlap, and at other times are synthesized or blended. The latter part of this definition — the synthesis — has often been ignored while the former — the criss-crossing of identities — has been used to define intersectionality. “Multiplicity” (see Michael Hames-Garcia’s “Who Are Our Own People?: Challenges for a Theory of Social Identity.” ) of identities references the entirety of this definition of intersectionality. Through it we can explore multiple oppressions and identities in ways that do not elide the specificity of difference, but acknowledges the intertwining of these oppressions and identities. Thus, for all of us for whom social justice is a goal in our scholarship, teaching and professional service we must always be attentive to the multiplicity of identities and by extension the simultaneity of oppressions and the unevenness of power and privilege. This includes provisional privileges as well (see Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”).
Viewing identity through multiplicity does indeed make things fluid in ways that we are not socialized to be comfortable with or accept. However, I argue that the material circumstances of our students and our lives warrant that we embrace the complexity of people’s lives. If we do so, we will be able to access, document and analyze situated rhetorical and literacy traditions that are easily overlooked when we see identity too narrowly. Also, in terms of quests for social justice and embracing difference, multiplicity is a powerful lens because the specificity of the effects of oppression and differentials of power/privilege occurring in one body and/or across communities is better illuminated. This is important to any movements toward “diversity” because it forces us to take into account as full a rendering as the stories of everyone at “the table” as possible. Multiplicity reminds us, as put so eloquently by poet and essayist June Jordan, that “freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all… and either we [emphasis mine] are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self interests and I am working for mine” (409). We must all recognize that our freedom is bound up in the oppression of other people. Further, multiplicity engenders a conception of diversity that recognizes difference as not a problem to be overcome but as a source of power. And perhaps most significantly, multiplicity supports the politics of coalition building across communities as necessary and sustainable. It suggests such coalitions are possible through the hard work struggling with one another for collective social justice and not against one another for individual advancement. A deeper understanding of identity and oppression is crucial to doing this hard work together.
Multiplicity of identities can also be useful to mediating professional development /institutional support structures. For instance, at the CCCC convention each year, there is a given time slot for caucuses and some of the special interest groups (SIGS) to meet. Generally this time is allotted for Friday evening of the convention when it comes to the ethnic/racial caucuses, queer caucus and many other caucuses and SIGS. Many of these caucuses meet at the same time, and though I doubt this is the intended effect, it forces people to choose one identity or commitment at the expense of others.
In my own experience, I remember having to literally run up and down the stairs of the conference hotel at a past CCCC, going from the Black Caucus to the Queer Caucus that met at the same time. In this sense, I am forced to either stretch myself to be in all the spaces with which I identify, get support and work to support others in these communities or, I am forced to decide which of my identities is most salient. Another example is those persons who identify as multi-racial/ethnic. If all the ethnic/racial caucuses meet at the same time, a person of multiple races/ethnicities will be unable to participate in the different spaces relevant to their personal and professional development. A restructuring of this schedule would also be very useful to building ally and coalition relationships between the various constituencies attending caucuses as it would allow space for members to be in other spaces as allies if that was desired by a given caucus or member. I could go on and on with the ways in which other persons from any number of identity groups are put in this situation. Our inattention to multiplicity of identities not only impacts our scholarship and teaching, but clearly, has limited our potential to provide the most comprehensive support to our colleagues at the institutional level as well. As Catherine Fox says, in English Studies, we operate under an “ironic display of desire to construct a collective identity for English Departments … occluding genuine reflection, dialogue, and struggle about what might constitute safety for marginalized peoples” (in “From Transaction to Transformation: (En)Countering White Heteronormativity in ‘Safe Spaces’,” in College English, May 2007) and consequently, how one arrives at a true coalition or collective identity.
We must resist the impulse to do violence to one another through oversimplifying the oppressions and identities we each encounter if we are to ever achieve the transgressive research, teaching and service we all imagine as our contribution to meaningful social change.
Eric Darnell Pritchard is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a faculty affiliate in the department of English, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies. He studied English-Liberal Arts at Lincoln University and literacy, rhetoric, critical theory and African-American gender and sexuality studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Pritchard's research and teaching interests include literacy, African-American and Queer Rhetoric, community-based writing, critical pedagogy queer theory, black feminist theory, masculinity studies and hip hop studies. His current focus is on the intersections of race, (queer) sexuality, gender and class with historical and contemporary literacy research.
Pursuant to those interests he is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, Black Queer Literacies. The study draws on the life story accounts of 60 black LGBTQ people who he interviewed about the relationships among their everyday literacy practices and identity formation across their lifetimes. The study focuses on the fluidity of literacy and identity and its interplay with black queer cultural productions (literary, visual, performance) in activism, spirituality, education, and in digital realms.
For his scholarship and community work he has received numerous honors, including the "Scholars for the Dream Award" from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the A. Philip Randolph Award for Community Activism from the Wisconsin Black Student Union.
Blog Entry
I want to thank the members of the CCCC Committee on Diversity for the creation of this space for a very important conversation. As a young scholar in rhetoric and composition I especially appreciate the invitation to be in the conversation with people who, in their work, have blazed so many trails for me to ‘tell it my way.’
My response to the question “How do you address the topic of "diversity" in your scholarship, teaching, and service?” reflects the sentiments of Victor Villanueva, Malea Powell and other guest contributors to the blog. Each has professed their commitment to diversity, while acknowledging their specific contentions with the term as it’s sometimes invoked. In my case, I have long emphasized and used the phrase ‘social justice’ rather than diversity. I prefer social justice because I hear in it the recognition of institutionalized social inequalities and the necessity of intervention into institutionalized oppression in pursuit of social justice. Diversity is one result of anti-oppression work. Social justice then is a pathway to diversity, a pathway that I think we continue to struggle with everyday. I often wonder: how effective is it to emphasize the importance of having ‘everyone at the table’ — to use a phrase often employed to illustrate diversity —if discussions don’t center the inequities each encounters en route to the proverbial table? What effect does this structure of the conversation have on the sustainability of coalitions for social justice? This question seems especially necessary given past and on-going discourses in society that ignore the specificity and continuance of oppression. The result of this discourse is an emphasis on equality and diversity that leads (prematurely) toward post-race, post-gender or in sum, post-oppression, without a necessary uptake of the impact of oppression. Here I briefly explore the centrality of these issues to my own work and more broadly to our research, teaching and professional service as members of the rhetoric and composition community.
In my research I respond to these challenges through a call to reconsider the usefulness of the phrase ‘multiplicity of identities’ as an alternative to lists of discrete characteristics as a category of analysis. This analysis can be of socio-political and cultural issues, and by extension, histories and theories of rhetoric and literacy traditions and pedagogical models. A recognition of identity as multiple is central to highlighting the problematic of pointing toward actions like inclusion or tolerance as representative of diversity or resorting to simplistic understandings of institutionalized oppression and identity. This is important because, in quests for social justice, how can we confront the social inequalities that threaten diversity without completely grasping the complexity of identities, oppression and communities as multiple, fluid, linked and/or simultaneous?
For example, my work on the literacy traditions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people showed me the consequences of the field under – theorizing the multiplicity of identities. By under-theorizing I refer to theorizing identities as narrow or monolithic or through an oversimplified interpretation of intersectionality. For many of my research participants, resisting this predisposition has allowed them to assert their identities as Black and LGBTQ (amongst many other identities). Through this the black LGBTQ person destabilizes the heteronormativity by which blackness is often read and also resists the erasure of difference in LGBTQ/sexuality studies research across disciplines, insisting on paradigms that center the “heterogeneity of sexuality” whereby sexuality “is constitutive of and constituted by racialized gender and class formations” (see Roderick Ferguson’s “Of Our Normative Strivings: African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality”). As such through their life story accounts my research participants intervene into composition and rhetoric research that depicts black and LGBTQ identities, movements and concerns in ways that fail to synthesize race, class, gender, sexuality and other identities. I should also say that this oversimplification of identities is endemic of work outside the realm of African-American and LGBTQ related research too. To move beyond this issue, I contend that we must return to the full definitions of women of color feminist writers and activists who first theorized and applied “intersectionality” — particularly the women of the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization. In their position paper “A Black Feminist Statement” Combahee described identities and oppressions as being on different paths that sometimes intersect and overlap, and at other times are synthesized or blended. The latter part of this definition — the synthesis — has often been ignored while the former — the criss-crossing of identities — has been used to define intersectionality. “Multiplicity” (see Michael Hames-Garcia’s “Who Are Our Own People?: Challenges for a Theory of Social Identity.” ) of identities references the entirety of this definition of intersectionality. Through it we can explore multiple oppressions and identities in ways that do not elide the specificity of difference, but acknowledges the intertwining of these oppressions and identities. Thus, for all of us for whom social justice is a goal in our scholarship, teaching and professional service we must always be attentive to the multiplicity of identities and by extension the simultaneity of oppressions and the unevenness of power and privilege. This includes provisional privileges as well (see Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”).
Viewing identity through multiplicity does indeed make things fluid in ways that we are not socialized to be comfortable with or accept. However, I argue that the material circumstances of our students and our lives warrant that we embrace the complexity of people’s lives. If we do so, we will be able to access, document and analyze situated rhetorical and literacy traditions that are easily overlooked when we see identity too narrowly. Also, in terms of quests for social justice and embracing difference, multiplicity is a powerful lens because the specificity of the effects of oppression and differentials of power/privilege occurring in one body and/or across communities is better illuminated. This is important to any movements toward “diversity” because it forces us to take into account as full a rendering as the stories of everyone at “the table” as possible. Multiplicity reminds us, as put so eloquently by poet and essayist June Jordan, that “freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all… and either we [emphasis mine] are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self interests and I am working for mine” (409). We must all recognize that our freedom is bound up in the oppression of other people. Further, multiplicity engenders a conception of diversity that recognizes difference as not a problem to be overcome but as a source of power. And perhaps most significantly, multiplicity supports the politics of coalition building across communities as necessary and sustainable. It suggests such coalitions are possible through the hard work struggling with one another for collective social justice and not against one another for individual advancement. A deeper understanding of identity and oppression is crucial to doing this hard work together.
Multiplicity of identities can also be useful to mediating professional development /institutional support structures. For instance, at the CCCC convention each year, there is a given time slot for caucuses and some of the special interest groups (SIGS) to meet. Generally this time is allotted for Friday evening of the convention when it comes to the ethnic/racial caucuses, queer caucus and many other caucuses and SIGS. Many of these caucuses meet at the same time, and though I doubt this is the intended effect, it forces people to choose one identity or commitment at the expense of others.
In my own experience, I remember having to literally run up and down the stairs of the conference hotel at a past CCCC, going from the Black Caucus to the Queer Caucus that met at the same time. In this sense, I am forced to either stretch myself to be in all the spaces with which I identify, get support and work to support others in these communities or, I am forced to decide which of my identities is most salient. Another example is those persons who identify as multi-racial/ethnic. If all the ethnic/racial caucuses meet at the same time, a person of multiple races/ethnicities will be unable to participate in the different spaces relevant to their personal and professional development. A restructuring of this schedule would also be very useful to building ally and coalition relationships between the various constituencies attending caucuses as it would allow space for members to be in other spaces as allies if that was desired by a given caucus or member. I could go on and on with the ways in which other persons from any number of identity groups are put in this situation. Our inattention to multiplicity of identities not only impacts our scholarship and teaching, but clearly, has limited our potential to provide the most comprehensive support to our colleagues at the institutional level as well. As Catherine Fox says, in English Studies, we operate under an “ironic display of desire to construct a collective identity for English Departments … occluding genuine reflection, dialogue, and struggle about what might constitute safety for marginalized peoples” (in “From Transaction to Transformation: (En)Countering White Heteronormativity in ‘Safe Spaces’,” in College English, May 2007) and consequently, how one arrives at a true coalition or collective identity.
We must resist the impulse to do violence to one another through oversimplifying the oppressions and identities we each encounter if we are to ever achieve the transgressive research, teaching and service we all imagine as our contribution to meaningful social change.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Diversity -- A Transnational Matrix of Relationships
Introductory Bio
Rebecca Dingo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri. She holds a joint appointment in Women’s and Gender Studies and English. Rebecca's research intersects feminist rhetorical theory with transnational, public policy, disability, and visual culture studies. She is interested in how public policy-making at the local, national, and global levels are created not only to persuade policy-makers but also every day citizens. In her scholarship Rebecca demonstrates how the rhetorical dynamics of the policy-making process structure--through public, legal, political, and administrative institutions--audiences' collective and individual identities, cultural memories, value systems, senses of place, and material circumstances.
Rebecca Dingo’s monograph book project, "Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing," examines the formation of transnational publics by exploring the vocabularies of transnational policy initiatives. The book aims to develop a broader practice of rhetorical criticism that accounts for the transnational paths along which arguments travel, the interarticulated points at which local and global logics meet, and the historical contexts that enable these logics. Her latest essay, “Linking Transnational Logics” (College English, May 2008) examines the networked arguments in World Bank and U.S. gender-mainstreaming policies. Rebecca’s work has also appeared in Concerns: Journal of the Women’s Caucus of the MLA, The Journal of Women’s History, and Wagadu: Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies.
Blog Entry
Diversity?… hmmmm…. Do I really “do” diversity? That is what I thought when I was invited to blog about how I address diversity in my teaching, scholarship, and service. Ok yes, I hold a joint appointment in English (rhet/comp) and Women’s and Gender Studies; I actively participate in recruiting and hiring minority job candidates; I publish essays that focus on third world women, post- and neo-colonialism, disability, and sexuality; I teach “Feminist Rhetorical Theories” (a course I designed to explore an expanded diverse canon); and I do also frequently teach that large lecture course titled “Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies” which is, in a lot of ways, teaching students to notice and respect the diverse experiences, needs, desires, and geopolitical situation of women. But oddly, I have never considered myself to be a diversity scholar or teacher per se. Unlike Victor Villanueva and Melea Powell, both of whom mentioned on pervious guest blogs, that they resist the use of the term diversity and unlike Asao Inoue who finds that teaching “diversity” usefully provides a way to teach students about power and identity, I do not think about diversity quite in the same ways.
Rather, in my teaching and scholarship I strive to untangle the happenings that connect us while showing how indeed, these connections are often uneven or unfair. I fear that if I simply teach about diversity or even sameness then my students will not be able to get past the simplistic idea that all “difference is good.” While difference and diversity can be good, people such as David Horowitz (who is known for creating a nation-wide movement to make university teachers teach and “respect” intellectual diversity), have made me question the usefulness of the term or even the concept. (And in fact, his movement demonstrates exactly what Krista Radcliffe mentions in her guest blog: words function as tropes and in his argument diversity has become a new trope.) While this sounds all good and well, intellectual diversity has become a way for universities to police their faculty thereby creating a hostile and suspicious work environment. My university recently adopted an intellectual diversity statement and while we are lucky that few of us have felt that we are being watched, this movement has affected my teaching (and scholarship)—but surprisingly, in some positive ways.
In an attempt to avoid being too much of what the Horowitz folks describe as a “liberal” teacher and scholar I invite my students (and my scholarly audience) to think about the various ways they are connected with other parts of their local communities, nation, and world. I have found that the emerging sub-field of women’s studies, transnational feminism, to be particularly useful for moving my students away from thinking only about their own privilege and how they are different from others to making connections to each other and the ostensible “other” (thereby making the other not so unfamiliar or exotic). I use the term transnationalism to refer to how globalization has influenced the movement of people and the production texts, culture, and knowledge across borders. A transnational feminist lens asks that we consider how social, political, and economic forces are dynamic, unbounded, and uneven; these forces function in a supra-national, trans-regional, and trans-local network making it necessary to reconsider how we understand identity, sovereignty, citizenship, and textual production. Transnational movements have had uneven material consequences throughout and within different regions of the world. These consequences require rhetoricians find new ways to examine how texts are written and dispersed, how they persuade, and how they might impact audiences who reside in different geopolitical locations. Indeed, I think that these consequences also necessitate that we expand our understanding of diversity.
This is not an easy task because we tend to want to exoticize people and places that are unfamiliar to us; we have already been taught through images, reports, preconceived notions, etc. that there are distinct differences between the so-called first and third worlds, the city dweller vs. the country dweller, Poles vs. Chinese, Americans vs. Africans, to name only a few examples. And yet, due to an increasingly transnational market, economy, and community, these assumptions are simply that: assumptions. Take for example the supposition that the U.S. is significantly different from India. Despite the fact that the U.S. is considered a high- income nation and India a lower-income nation, poor citizens and immigrants from both countries are being helped financially through micro-loans from the Grameen Bank (the bank that won the Nobel Peace prize, along with its founder, Professor Muhammad Yunus in 2006) . The Grameen Bank is best known for providing Indian women with microloans to begin independent businesses; recently, the New York Times reported that the Grameen Bank has begun to provide microloans to communities in Queens, N.Y. This simple example demonstrates how third world poverty very much resides in the so-called first world and that differences become muddied in a transnational economy.
I find a transnational studies methodology to be a useful way to think through the concept of diversity because a transnational analysis does not ask who suffers more, who has more power, or how two (or more) groups are similar or different but instead sets up a matrix of relationships and examines connectivities. A transnational perspective that examines how economic globalization has influenced the flow of people, labor, capital, culture, and knowledge across borders allows rhet/comp scholars and teachers to analyze more precisely how diversity is enmeshed with larger global exchanges (money, goods, power, representations, knowledges, etc.) that affect the changing nature of identity. In addition to rhet/comp scholars recognizing how race, class, ability, sexuality, gender, etc, impact one’s identity and rhetorical situation, a transnational studies lens asks us to examine identity alongside the global circulation of and interarticulation in texts and situations.
I use a simple exercise in my classes to illustrate this circulation of goods and situations. I ask my students to look at their clothing tags to see where the item was made. For the most part, the students’ clothing comes from parts of Central and South America, Asia, and sometimes Africa. We then think about how these items connect us to people we might not know by considering the various hands that might have touched the fabric before the students purchased the item. I then ask them to think about the other non-tangible ways they might be connected to those people who made the clothing. For example, I invite them to consider how women who work in the maquilladoras along the U.S. and Mexico borders have an unacknowledged relationship with former female factory workers who might now work in U.S. megastores. The women working in the megastore might have worked in a factory that produced the same goods as the Mexican factory but due to transnational trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that factory might have moved to Mexico leaving these women without a stable income. Both sets of women, then, are linked by the very products produced at the maquilladora—one woman makes the items the other sells them—yet, in many cases both sets of women cannot afford to purchase the very products they produce and sell. In this way, U.S. and Mexican workers are linked within a complex network of economic, geopolitical, and labor forces even though they reside in different geopolitical locations and may have very different lives. Ultimately, these women are unevenly connected to each other due to increased global financial, cultural, and gendered networks.
So do I “do” diversity? Well, yes and no. I suppose that for me, the concept of diversity has productively shifted in my research and teaching so that I am less interested in how diversity or difference is expressed and more interested in climate and situation that creates a matrix of sometimes uneven connections. In my teaching and research, I thus show how the circulation of texts (and the climate in which they are produced) often creates this matrix making it necessary for rhet/comp scholars to turn a critical eye on diverse public texts we might otherwise disregard.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Literacies and Identities: Shifting the Discourse of Diversity
Introductory Bio
Morris Young is Director of English 100, associate professor of English, and faculty affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was formerly a faculty member at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research and teaching focus on composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, and Asian American literature and culture. His essays and reviews have appeared in College English, Journal of Basic Writing, Amerasia, Composition Forum, and he has contributed chapters to many edited collections including The Literacy Connection (1999), Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing (2001), East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (2005), Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century (2007), and The Sage Handbook of Rhetoric (forthcoming). His book, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (2004) received the 2004 W. Ross Winterowd Award and the 2006 Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. With LuMing Mao, he has edited Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, forthcoming from Utah State University Press.
Editor's Note: Morris Young's new blog entry gives readers some great arguments to think about in the context of the election on 11/4/2008, when Barack Obama finally won a long, hard-fought, presidential election, anti-gay marriage bans passed in California and Florida, and one of the five planned anti-affirmative action bans, happily, failed in the state of Colorado.
Blog Entry
As I write this blog entry, I have just finished rereading Rural Literacies by Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen Schell for my graduate seminar on “Literacies and Identities.” Over the last several weeks we have read work by bell hooks, Elaine Richardson, Vershawn Ashanti Young, Daphne Desser, and selections from the collection, Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century, edited by Beth Daniell and Peter Mortensen. We’ll be finishing with Jonathan Alexander’s Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies and essays selected by seminar members to address some issue in the context of the course that they would like to explore further, including questions of social class, postcoloniality, English language learning, gender, multimodality, and indigeneity.
I list this work and have constructed the seminar not to suggest some representative sampling of what constitutes the relationship between literacy and identity, nor to suggest that literacy practices are fixed entirely and exclusively by identity, nor to view identity as indelibly shaped by some promise or premise of what literacy can or cannot deliver. Rather, we muddle our way through theoretical discussions about literacy and identity, read narrative, autoethnographic, and ethnographic accounts about the intersections of ostensible identity categories and literacy practices, and discuss the materiality of these experiences. We read these “little narratives” that provide multidimensional descriptions within and against the “grand narratives” of identity: race, gender, sexuality, social class, region, and literacy. And I hope that we have “troubled” what are often viewed uncritically as fixed or organic relationships between a perceived/performed sense of identity and the perceived/performed practice of literacy. That is, I hope that we have begun to shift toward a more nuanced and complex understanding of how lived experiences may shape literacy practices and how literacy may shape lived experiences. And in unpacking these experiences and expressions I hope that we have also begun to shift the discourse of diversity.
As many of the contributors to this blog have noted, the use of “diversity” as a term is at the very least vexed and at worst meaningless or even damaging since for many it has become an empty signifier often employed to suggest progress on one hand or to invoke anxiety or outrage on the other. While many of us would recognize the “progress” that has been made through the Civil Rights movement, or different eras of Women’s rights (from suffrage through the historic political campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton), or the recognition of same-sex marriage in some states, we also recognize that such events can be used as wedge issues to reinforce divisions (for example, ballot initiatives banning Affirmative Action or same-sex marriage) or may just as likely foster indifference or complacency. A woman can be a candidate for President of the United States and be expected to win the nomination. An African American can be the presidential nominee of a major political party and be elected. Domestic partner benefits make good business sense. Why are we still talking about diversity concerns when there is growing evidence that we are making “progress” and that anyone can fulfill the promise of the American Dream?
In this sense the discourse of diversity has been strategic, to draw on the work of Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life and Paula Mathieu’s application in Tactics of Hope. Within a system of power, the identification and deployment of diversity has seemingly created stable social relations that allow for its relatively benign expression: a celebration of culture or an acknowledgement of suffering. Even in acknowledging suffering or social injustice, however, there is a risk in reducing an understanding of diversity to fixed categories that mask more complex experiences. For example, in the recent special issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (26 September 2008) focusing on “Diversity in Academe,” the clear focus was in thinking about diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, or in its terms, “minorities.” Examining several diversity initiatives begun in the 1990s at a variety of institutions, The Chronicle updates the results of hiring plans for faculty and student recruitment, especially in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action in 2003, looks at globalization as the latest expression of diversity, and discusses the various ways diversity has been institutionalized on campus, from the creation of Chief Diversity Officer positions to rethinking the various categories of diversity and what impact this has on counting diversity. While this special issue does important work in continuing to cast attention on the numbers of minority students and faculty in higher education compared to whites, its focus on this one measure of diversity does not capture how our higher education institutions reflect diversity in several other dimensions or even within the categories of race and ethnicity that are inflected by generation, region, national origin, and other factors. As an Asian American born and raised in Hawai‘i who is trained in the humanities (not the sciences) and whose field of research and teaching is rhetoric and composition, I certainly do not fit the stereotype of the Asian American in the academy.
While my own work has focused on race and ethnicity more broadly and Asian Americans more specifically, I have taught in a variety of classrooms that have required me to think about diversity in more nuanced ways in order to serve all of my students. Again, building on de Certeau and Mathieu, my identification and deployment of diversity has been tactical and rhetorical, to understand and take advantage of the opportunities that arise in the classroom and to use the available means of persuasion to create a productive site for engaging diversity. In this sense, I have had to work against the discourse of diversity since my students may expect specific constructions of diversity as manifested by race, gender, class, or sexuality. Being tactical challenges the stability of social relations and systems of power that have defined diversity only as certain fixed categories of identity. If the discourse of diversity is destabilized, then discussions and critical understanding about the materiality of experience and the injury that may be faced by people of color, women, the poor, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and others often placed at the margins of dominant culture become possible because we cannot simply rely on a cultural script that defines relationships.
To be tactical and rhetorical, I use the following questions as a way to frame my thinking and teaching and to create the possibility for spaces of conversation and engagement:
1) How are our ideas, meanings, and uses of “diversity” shifting?
This may seem obvious but I think it serves us well to remind ourselves that our students’ experiences are different from our own. While we may be tempted to characterize students in particular ways to reflect either our identification or disidentification with them, one way to create critical conversation about diversity is to develop our own vocabulary, meanings, and application with them. If we rely on the discourse of diversity and fail to interrogate institutionalized versions of it then we risk reproducing static meanings that maintain dominant relations of power.
2) How are our classroom communities shifting?
Depending on the communities where we teach, we may still see limited improvement in the number of students of diverse racial backgrounds despite institutional efforts to recruit more racially and ethnically diverse students. However, again depending on the communities where we teach, we may see more awareness of students with disabilities, students comfortable with expressing their GLBT identities, non-traditional students, first-generation college students, or students of a wide variety of backgrounds that contribute to a “critical mass” of experiences that again disrupt the discourse of diversity by understanding these experiences within systems of power.
3) As we shift our locations, how are our ideas about and meanings of diversity also shifting?
This question has perhaps had the most resonance for me. I’ve moved from Honolulu, Hawai‘i to Ann Arbor, Michigan to Oxford, Ohio to Madison, Wisconsin. In each case I’ve been faced with recalibrating my sense of what constitutes diversity, moving from a predominantly Asian and Pacific Islander community to places where I was more likely to encounter African American or Latino/a or GLBT communities as the face of diversity. But perception and position also are critical in this shift. While my new institutional home, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has just a 12% “minority” student population there is also a sense of cosmopolitanism and engagement that creates opportunities for discussions (sometimes difficult and painful) that interrogate systems of power. While my former institution, Miami University, has a reputation for conservative and privileged students (to progressives) or for liberal professors (to conservatives), in my ten years of teaching there I never felt I could so easily define my students or colleagues. And in living away from Hawai‘i for 17 years now, I have become more aware of the complicated relationships between Native Hawaiians and the non-Native Hawaiian population, as well as among Hawai‘i’s various ethnic communities. These shifts in locations have required engagement with the local to understand how social relations are organized and what interventions may be made to facilitate conversation.
While my comments above have centered on understanding and engaging the array of experiences rather than focusing on certain classes or categories of experience, my primary intent is to interrogate systems of power that construct diversity and identity in specific ways that often disadvantage people of certain experiences. If we rely on a discourse of diversity that fixes identity rather than challenges systems of power all we do is reinforce those stereotypes that are deployed to create divisions. There are certainly still reasons for creating interventions and remedies to address a history and legacy of discrimination. But by shifting the discourse of diversity in order to create a more complex and nuanced concept and understanding of diversity, we have the opportunity to understand more fully how those identified as different have been subject to injury, have lived full and complex lives, and have contributed to our community and conversation.
Morris Young is Director of English 100, associate professor of English, and faculty affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was formerly a faculty member at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research and teaching focus on composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, and Asian American literature and culture. His essays and reviews have appeared in College English, Journal of Basic Writing, Amerasia, Composition Forum, and he has contributed chapters to many edited collections including The Literacy Connection (1999), Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing (2001), East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (2005), Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century (2007), and The Sage Handbook of Rhetoric (forthcoming). His book, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (2004) received the 2004 W. Ross Winterowd Award and the 2006 Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. With LuMing Mao, he has edited Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, forthcoming from Utah State University Press.
Editor's Note: Morris Young's new blog entry gives readers some great arguments to think about in the context of the election on 11/4/2008, when Barack Obama finally won a long, hard-fought, presidential election, anti-gay marriage bans passed in California and Florida, and one of the five planned anti-affirmative action bans, happily, failed in the state of Colorado.
Blog Entry
As I write this blog entry, I have just finished rereading Rural Literacies by Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen Schell for my graduate seminar on “Literacies and Identities.” Over the last several weeks we have read work by bell hooks, Elaine Richardson, Vershawn Ashanti Young, Daphne Desser, and selections from the collection, Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century, edited by Beth Daniell and Peter Mortensen. We’ll be finishing with Jonathan Alexander’s Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies and essays selected by seminar members to address some issue in the context of the course that they would like to explore further, including questions of social class, postcoloniality, English language learning, gender, multimodality, and indigeneity.
I list this work and have constructed the seminar not to suggest some representative sampling of what constitutes the relationship between literacy and identity, nor to suggest that literacy practices are fixed entirely and exclusively by identity, nor to view identity as indelibly shaped by some promise or premise of what literacy can or cannot deliver. Rather, we muddle our way through theoretical discussions about literacy and identity, read narrative, autoethnographic, and ethnographic accounts about the intersections of ostensible identity categories and literacy practices, and discuss the materiality of these experiences. We read these “little narratives” that provide multidimensional descriptions within and against the “grand narratives” of identity: race, gender, sexuality, social class, region, and literacy. And I hope that we have “troubled” what are often viewed uncritically as fixed or organic relationships between a perceived/performed sense of identity and the perceived/performed practice of literacy. That is, I hope that we have begun to shift toward a more nuanced and complex understanding of how lived experiences may shape literacy practices and how literacy may shape lived experiences. And in unpacking these experiences and expressions I hope that we have also begun to shift the discourse of diversity.
As many of the contributors to this blog have noted, the use of “diversity” as a term is at the very least vexed and at worst meaningless or even damaging since for many it has become an empty signifier often employed to suggest progress on one hand or to invoke anxiety or outrage on the other. While many of us would recognize the “progress” that has been made through the Civil Rights movement, or different eras of Women’s rights (from suffrage through the historic political campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton), or the recognition of same-sex marriage in some states, we also recognize that such events can be used as wedge issues to reinforce divisions (for example, ballot initiatives banning Affirmative Action or same-sex marriage) or may just as likely foster indifference or complacency. A woman can be a candidate for President of the United States and be expected to win the nomination. An African American can be the presidential nominee of a major political party and be elected. Domestic partner benefits make good business sense. Why are we still talking about diversity concerns when there is growing evidence that we are making “progress” and that anyone can fulfill the promise of the American Dream?
In this sense the discourse of diversity has been strategic, to draw on the work of Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life and Paula Mathieu’s application in Tactics of Hope. Within a system of power, the identification and deployment of diversity has seemingly created stable social relations that allow for its relatively benign expression: a celebration of culture or an acknowledgement of suffering. Even in acknowledging suffering or social injustice, however, there is a risk in reducing an understanding of diversity to fixed categories that mask more complex experiences. For example, in the recent special issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (26 September 2008) focusing on “Diversity in Academe,” the clear focus was in thinking about diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, or in its terms, “minorities.” Examining several diversity initiatives begun in the 1990s at a variety of institutions, The Chronicle updates the results of hiring plans for faculty and student recruitment, especially in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action in 2003, looks at globalization as the latest expression of diversity, and discusses the various ways diversity has been institutionalized on campus, from the creation of Chief Diversity Officer positions to rethinking the various categories of diversity and what impact this has on counting diversity. While this special issue does important work in continuing to cast attention on the numbers of minority students and faculty in higher education compared to whites, its focus on this one measure of diversity does not capture how our higher education institutions reflect diversity in several other dimensions or even within the categories of race and ethnicity that are inflected by generation, region, national origin, and other factors. As an Asian American born and raised in Hawai‘i who is trained in the humanities (not the sciences) and whose field of research and teaching is rhetoric and composition, I certainly do not fit the stereotype of the Asian American in the academy.
While my own work has focused on race and ethnicity more broadly and Asian Americans more specifically, I have taught in a variety of classrooms that have required me to think about diversity in more nuanced ways in order to serve all of my students. Again, building on de Certeau and Mathieu, my identification and deployment of diversity has been tactical and rhetorical, to understand and take advantage of the opportunities that arise in the classroom and to use the available means of persuasion to create a productive site for engaging diversity. In this sense, I have had to work against the discourse of diversity since my students may expect specific constructions of diversity as manifested by race, gender, class, or sexuality. Being tactical challenges the stability of social relations and systems of power that have defined diversity only as certain fixed categories of identity. If the discourse of diversity is destabilized, then discussions and critical understanding about the materiality of experience and the injury that may be faced by people of color, women, the poor, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and others often placed at the margins of dominant culture become possible because we cannot simply rely on a cultural script that defines relationships.
To be tactical and rhetorical, I use the following questions as a way to frame my thinking and teaching and to create the possibility for spaces of conversation and engagement:
1) How are our ideas, meanings, and uses of “diversity” shifting?
This may seem obvious but I think it serves us well to remind ourselves that our students’ experiences are different from our own. While we may be tempted to characterize students in particular ways to reflect either our identification or disidentification with them, one way to create critical conversation about diversity is to develop our own vocabulary, meanings, and application with them. If we rely on the discourse of diversity and fail to interrogate institutionalized versions of it then we risk reproducing static meanings that maintain dominant relations of power.
2) How are our classroom communities shifting?
Depending on the communities where we teach, we may still see limited improvement in the number of students of diverse racial backgrounds despite institutional efforts to recruit more racially and ethnically diverse students. However, again depending on the communities where we teach, we may see more awareness of students with disabilities, students comfortable with expressing their GLBT identities, non-traditional students, first-generation college students, or students of a wide variety of backgrounds that contribute to a “critical mass” of experiences that again disrupt the discourse of diversity by understanding these experiences within systems of power.
3) As we shift our locations, how are our ideas about and meanings of diversity also shifting?
This question has perhaps had the most resonance for me. I’ve moved from Honolulu, Hawai‘i to Ann Arbor, Michigan to Oxford, Ohio to Madison, Wisconsin. In each case I’ve been faced with recalibrating my sense of what constitutes diversity, moving from a predominantly Asian and Pacific Islander community to places where I was more likely to encounter African American or Latino/a or GLBT communities as the face of diversity. But perception and position also are critical in this shift. While my new institutional home, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has just a 12% “minority” student population there is also a sense of cosmopolitanism and engagement that creates opportunities for discussions (sometimes difficult and painful) that interrogate systems of power. While my former institution, Miami University, has a reputation for conservative and privileged students (to progressives) or for liberal professors (to conservatives), in my ten years of teaching there I never felt I could so easily define my students or colleagues. And in living away from Hawai‘i for 17 years now, I have become more aware of the complicated relationships between Native Hawaiians and the non-Native Hawaiian population, as well as among Hawai‘i’s various ethnic communities. These shifts in locations have required engagement with the local to understand how social relations are organized and what interventions may be made to facilitate conversation.
While my comments above have centered on understanding and engaging the array of experiences rather than focusing on certain classes or categories of experience, my primary intent is to interrogate systems of power that construct diversity and identity in specific ways that often disadvantage people of certain experiences. If we rely on a discourse of diversity that fixes identity rather than challenges systems of power all we do is reinforce those stereotypes that are deployed to create divisions. There are certainly still reasons for creating interventions and remedies to address a history and legacy of discrimination. But by shifting the discourse of diversity in order to create a more complex and nuanced concept and understanding of diversity, we have the opportunity to understand more fully how those identified as different have been subject to injury, have lived full and complex lives, and have contributed to our community and conversation.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
"Talking Back to Contemporary Multicultural and Whiteness Pedagogies"
Introductory Bio
Jennifer Seibel Trainor is associate professor of English at San Francisco State University, where she teaches in the Graduate Program in Composition Studies. Her research focuses on critical literacy, antiracist education, and theories of rhetoric and persuasion. She teaches graduate courses in research methods, composition theory and pedagogy, and literacy theory, as well as undergraduate courses in writing. She is a recipient of NCTE’s Promising Research Award and a member of the National Writing Project. She served on the executive committee of NCTE's Assembly for Research. Trainor's articles have appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, and The Journal of Advanced Composition. Her book, Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in a few weeks.
Blog Entry
For the past several years, my efforts to address diversity have been centered on efforts to address racism and on creating effective antiracist pedagogies. I guess you could say I’ve been focused less on diversity than on impediments to it, particularly as those impediments manifest in the classroom, in white students’ sometimes racially-charged assertions, their defensiveness, and the difficulty they sometimes have in exploring issues of racial justice. This has led me to several research projects that investigate how white students respond to matters of race, the most recent a year-long ethnographic project at a suburban high school – 97% white -- located outside a mid-sized city in the Northeast. Of the insights about the workings of racism and the potential for antiracist pedagogies gleaned from this work, I’d like to share three:
Insight #1
We need a more complex understanding of the origins and sources of racism. Our current diagnoses – that racism arises from a need or desire to protect white privilege, ignorance of oppression, or lack of exposure to difference – don’t really capture the complexity of the processes by which students become convinced of particular ideas about race. These diagnoses are rooted in assumptions about reason and rationality: white students don’t know about oppression and so they dismiss it when confronted with it in a text, or white students are threatened by texts that protest racism because they understand on some level that they benefit from racism and hence resist out of a desire to maintain their racial privilege. Instead, we need to think of racism in terms of irrationality and emotion, and to see that students’ responses to matters of race are affective, more than logical or rational, rooted not so much in abstract political or identity-based calculations, but in local experiences and feelings that are to a surprising extent given force in school, a point that leads to Insight #2:
Insight #2
We don’t teach students about race only in those moments when we assign a multicultural text or include a unit that critiques whiteness or privilege. As Amanda Lewis writes, schools may not teach racial identity in the way that they teach multiplication or punctuation, but schools are settings where students acquire some version of the “rules of racial classification,” and of their own racial identity. We haven’t fully grappled with how students learn about race in the context of everyday interactions in school, but in my research I began to see how tacit, unexamined lessons, rituals and practices in school exerted a powerful influence on students’ responses to matters of race. To take a quick example: the high school where I did my research pervasively valued “positive thinking.” Students were exhorted constantly by teachers and administrators to “look on the bright side,” “focus on the positive,” and “keep up a good attitude.” There were bright yellow beanbags with smiley faces sitting along one wall of the classroom. The student aid who recited the pledge of allegiance each day over the PA system always added “Have a great day!” at the end of her recitation. This focus on positive thinking emotionally predisposed students to look negatively upon fictional characters, real individuals or groups of people who did not appear to present a positive outlook on life, which in turn fueled sometimes hostile or racist responses to critiques of racism, which were perceived as whining or complaining.
We often think that if we find the right argument, the right assignment or reading, we can convince students to give up problematic racial beliefs. But my research suggests a different persuasive process at work, one articulated by Kenneth Burke, who writes that persuasion takes place not through “one particular address, but [through] a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement.” We need to examine these seemingly trivial practices, taken-for-granted values, and daily-reinforced routines of schooling, in order to understand how they scaffold students’ learning about race.
Insight #3
The tropes and metaphors we rely on in our pedagogies – particularly economic metaphors for white privilege that liken whiteness to a wage or property that whites own and that can be used to secure other commodities and privileges – don’t address students’ lived experiences of race and privilege, and thus fuel white student resistance and confusion. We need better metaphors for whiteness and racism, metaphors that speak to the local, affective experiences of race that students bring to the classroom.
How do these insights translate into the classroom and into service? In the classroom, I have experimented with different approaches to antiracist education for several years now. Most recently, I have focused on an approach that privileges students’ emotioned responses to readings and ideas and that makes room for the emotional labor of unlearning racism, and I’ve worked with students to discover metaphors and descriptions of racial identity and privilege that actually do speak to their lived experiences. I’ve also worked to disrupt the routines of schooling that either get in the way of antiracism or that promote values, attitudes, and habits that actually scaffold and enable racism. I do this by employing some of the tricks of critical pedagogy – asking students to generate topics and themes, and to analyze the assumptions behind taken-for-granted school practices, as well as the values behind the discourses privileged in school. Finally, I’ve created assignments that ask students to talk back to contemporary multicultural and whiteness pedagogies by writing about their own affective experiences with and memories of race, and theorizing from there about what racism is and how to end it. A recent assignment asked upper-division pre-service teachers to critique, add to, or complicate Alice McIntyre’s Making Meaning of Whiteness by comparing her descriptions of race with their own experiences and memories of it. Beyond the classroom, I imagine building collaborative partnerships with high schools that focus on changing the practices and values that inadvertently support racism. I imagine pedagogical projects where teachers work to create new metaphors and models of racism and whiteness in our curricula. There are many other possibilities, of course, but I hope my entry here will provide one place to start for the CCCC committee as they begin the task of creating a statement on diversity for our field, one that addresses both its promise, and the myriad impediments we still face in our efforts to enact it.
Jennifer Seibel Trainor is associate professor of English at San Francisco State University, where she teaches in the Graduate Program in Composition Studies. Her research focuses on critical literacy, antiracist education, and theories of rhetoric and persuasion. She teaches graduate courses in research methods, composition theory and pedagogy, and literacy theory, as well as undergraduate courses in writing. She is a recipient of NCTE’s Promising Research Award and a member of the National Writing Project. She served on the executive committee of NCTE's Assembly for Research. Trainor's articles have appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, and The Journal of Advanced Composition. Her book, Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in a few weeks.
Blog Entry
For the past several years, my efforts to address diversity have been centered on efforts to address racism and on creating effective antiracist pedagogies. I guess you could say I’ve been focused less on diversity than on impediments to it, particularly as those impediments manifest in the classroom, in white students’ sometimes racially-charged assertions, their defensiveness, and the difficulty they sometimes have in exploring issues of racial justice. This has led me to several research projects that investigate how white students respond to matters of race, the most recent a year-long ethnographic project at a suburban high school – 97% white -- located outside a mid-sized city in the Northeast. Of the insights about the workings of racism and the potential for antiracist pedagogies gleaned from this work, I’d like to share three:
Insight #1
We need a more complex understanding of the origins and sources of racism. Our current diagnoses – that racism arises from a need or desire to protect white privilege, ignorance of oppression, or lack of exposure to difference – don’t really capture the complexity of the processes by which students become convinced of particular ideas about race. These diagnoses are rooted in assumptions about reason and rationality: white students don’t know about oppression and so they dismiss it when confronted with it in a text, or white students are threatened by texts that protest racism because they understand on some level that they benefit from racism and hence resist out of a desire to maintain their racial privilege. Instead, we need to think of racism in terms of irrationality and emotion, and to see that students’ responses to matters of race are affective, more than logical or rational, rooted not so much in abstract political or identity-based calculations, but in local experiences and feelings that are to a surprising extent given force in school, a point that leads to Insight #2:
Insight #2
We don’t teach students about race only in those moments when we assign a multicultural text or include a unit that critiques whiteness or privilege. As Amanda Lewis writes, schools may not teach racial identity in the way that they teach multiplication or punctuation, but schools are settings where students acquire some version of the “rules of racial classification,” and of their own racial identity. We haven’t fully grappled with how students learn about race in the context of everyday interactions in school, but in my research I began to see how tacit, unexamined lessons, rituals and practices in school exerted a powerful influence on students’ responses to matters of race. To take a quick example: the high school where I did my research pervasively valued “positive thinking.” Students were exhorted constantly by teachers and administrators to “look on the bright side,” “focus on the positive,” and “keep up a good attitude.” There were bright yellow beanbags with smiley faces sitting along one wall of the classroom. The student aid who recited the pledge of allegiance each day over the PA system always added “Have a great day!” at the end of her recitation. This focus on positive thinking emotionally predisposed students to look negatively upon fictional characters, real individuals or groups of people who did not appear to present a positive outlook on life, which in turn fueled sometimes hostile or racist responses to critiques of racism, which were perceived as whining or complaining.
We often think that if we find the right argument, the right assignment or reading, we can convince students to give up problematic racial beliefs. But my research suggests a different persuasive process at work, one articulated by Kenneth Burke, who writes that persuasion takes place not through “one particular address, but [through] a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement.” We need to examine these seemingly trivial practices, taken-for-granted values, and daily-reinforced routines of schooling, in order to understand how they scaffold students’ learning about race.
Insight #3
The tropes and metaphors we rely on in our pedagogies – particularly economic metaphors for white privilege that liken whiteness to a wage or property that whites own and that can be used to secure other commodities and privileges – don’t address students’ lived experiences of race and privilege, and thus fuel white student resistance and confusion. We need better metaphors for whiteness and racism, metaphors that speak to the local, affective experiences of race that students bring to the classroom.
How do these insights translate into the classroom and into service? In the classroom, I have experimented with different approaches to antiracist education for several years now. Most recently, I have focused on an approach that privileges students’ emotioned responses to readings and ideas and that makes room for the emotional labor of unlearning racism, and I’ve worked with students to discover metaphors and descriptions of racial identity and privilege that actually do speak to their lived experiences. I’ve also worked to disrupt the routines of schooling that either get in the way of antiracism or that promote values, attitudes, and habits that actually scaffold and enable racism. I do this by employing some of the tricks of critical pedagogy – asking students to generate topics and themes, and to analyze the assumptions behind taken-for-granted school practices, as well as the values behind the discourses privileged in school. Finally, I’ve created assignments that ask students to talk back to contemporary multicultural and whiteness pedagogies by writing about their own affective experiences with and memories of race, and theorizing from there about what racism is and how to end it. A recent assignment asked upper-division pre-service teachers to critique, add to, or complicate Alice McIntyre’s Making Meaning of Whiteness by comparing her descriptions of race with their own experiences and memories of it. Beyond the classroom, I imagine building collaborative partnerships with high schools that focus on changing the practices and values that inadvertently support racism. I imagine pedagogical projects where teachers work to create new metaphors and models of racism and whiteness in our curricula. There are many other possibilities, of course, but I hope my entry here will provide one place to start for the CCCC committee as they begin the task of creating a statement on diversity for our field, one that addresses both its promise, and the myriad impediments we still face in our efforts to enact it.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
"Yes We Can" Both Acknowledge and Act on Difference
Asao Inoue, one of our committee members, has written this week's post on diversity. In it, he links ideas and arguments that look back on part one of our series, and he also provides a segue for us as we look forward to part two. Asao's post is interested in the pedagogical uses of our discussions on diversity as well as the arguments that our committee will use to develop its position statement on diversity. During the week, each member of the CCCC Committee on Diversity will respond to Asao's post by adding our own comments, and we invite our readers to join in the conversation. Our schedule for invited Guest Bloggers will begin next week.
Asao's Blog Entry
In the conversations on diversity so far, most of the writers for part one of our blogging series have expressed a resistance to the term “diversity,” the first being Victor Villanueva, our first contributor and the writer whom I’ll use to draw out one pedagogical lesson that I believe fits our committee’s charge and may allow for productive, rhetorical classroom discussions with students. Villanueva says:
I don’t really work with “diversity,” that all-inclusive and non-inclusive institutional term . . .
Diversity just tries to be all-inclusive—the entire range of differences. That’s what the word means, after all—a range of differences. So—if you’re not part of the “same,” you’re among the range of differences. The French distinguished the Same from the Other. Diversity is the American version of l’autre. But who are the Same?
Villanueva’s question, who are “the Same,” asks us to consider more than a simple answer, such as: the “Same” is a White, middle-class, masculine, heteronormative, Protestant subjectivity. The shadowy referent of “the Same” that Villanueva points out in the uses of the term “diversity” simultaneously has and does not have a material correspondence in our world; nonetheless, our institutional and private rhetorics often function as if we do not need to care about actual correspondences. If we just say we “respect and honor diversity,” not considering what “diversity” really means or how it functions in any instance, then not only is the statement not racist, but life for all is better, forgiving, welcoming – as if differing values, ideas, histories, perspectives, priorities, experiences can always coexist or never clash. Villaneuva also points out, importantly, that: "Acknowledging difference is not the same as acting on those differences--substantively."
So then, how might we act on real differences as teachers? We can ask students, directly, to locate tacit referents to the rhetoric of diversity and envision alternatives on a real landscape on which people exist and work, which is similar to the fascinating activity that Krista Ratcliffe’s blog entry from part one offers. I, for example, might take Will. i. am’s “Yes We Can” video that uses Barack Obama’s January 8 speech (in New Hampshire) to create a rhetoric of diversity, and I would explore this rhetoric together with students in my classes. The goal for the class would be to find correspondences of "the Same" and "the Other" that we can observe, reconstruct, and then recreate in order to understand the strength of the rhetoric’s appeal to particular audiences. We might ask the following questions:
Asao's Blog Entry
In the conversations on diversity so far, most of the writers for part one of our blogging series have expressed a resistance to the term “diversity,” the first being Victor Villanueva, our first contributor and the writer whom I’ll use to draw out one pedagogical lesson that I believe fits our committee’s charge and may allow for productive, rhetorical classroom discussions with students. Villanueva says:
I don’t really work with “diversity,” that all-inclusive and non-inclusive institutional term . . .
Diversity just tries to be all-inclusive—the entire range of differences. That’s what the word means, after all—a range of differences. So—if you’re not part of the “same,” you’re among the range of differences. The French distinguished the Same from the Other. Diversity is the American version of l’autre. But who are the Same?
Villanueva’s question, who are “the Same,” asks us to consider more than a simple answer, such as: the “Same” is a White, middle-class, masculine, heteronormative, Protestant subjectivity. The shadowy referent of “the Same” that Villanueva points out in the uses of the term “diversity” simultaneously has and does not have a material correspondence in our world; nonetheless, our institutional and private rhetorics often function as if we do not need to care about actual correspondences. If we just say we “respect and honor diversity,” not considering what “diversity” really means or how it functions in any instance, then not only is the statement not racist, but life for all is better, forgiving, welcoming – as if differing values, ideas, histories, perspectives, priorities, experiences can always coexist or never clash. Villaneuva also points out, importantly, that: "Acknowledging difference is not the same as acting on those differences--substantively."
So then, how might we act on real differences as teachers? We can ask students, directly, to locate tacit referents to the rhetoric of diversity and envision alternatives on a real landscape on which people exist and work, which is similar to the fascinating activity that Krista Ratcliffe’s blog entry from part one offers. I, for example, might take Will. i. am’s “Yes We Can” video that uses Barack Obama’s January 8 speech (in New Hampshire) to create a rhetoric of diversity, and I would explore this rhetoric together with students in my classes. The goal for the class would be to find correspondences of "the Same" and "the Other" that we can observe, reconstruct, and then recreate in order to understand the strength of the rhetoric’s appeal to particular audiences. We might ask the following questions:
- Who literally is “the Same” (the center) that speaks in the video “Yes We Can”? What features of sameness and difference are most noticeable? How well does this representation of the Same match our classroom’s?
- Who is constructed as the Same in the excerpted language of the Obama speech in the video? What features of sameness and difference are most noticeable?
- Where do each of these sets of referents (the people, issues, places) exist on the landscape that the rhetoric of “diversity” in the video creates? How well does it match our own experiences?
- If our purpose was to “accurately” provide a representation of our classroom’s “diversity” in a speech or a video, without smoothing out our differences and conflicts, what would it look/sound like?
Certainly there are more questions to ask about rhetorical purpose and context and more ways to frame these questions in our classes. But I hope this brief statement offers a generative start for all of our work around the complicated set of issues that we call “diversity.”
Thursday, October 02, 2008
"CCCC Conversations on Diversity," Part Two
Blog Entry
Welcome to the “CCCC Conversations on Diversity,” Part Two. We want to express our sincere appreciation to all of our readers. We also want to express our sincere thanks to Shirley Logan who, as Chair of CCCC in 2003, worked with the Executive Committee to issue the charge for the work that we do. Our committee, in part, responds to the call of her CCCC Chair’s address in March 2003. Subscribers may find her article, “Changing Missions, Shifting Positions, and Breaking Silences,” in CCC 55:2/December 2003 (you may also find her article in the JSTOR database).
The CCCC Committee on Diversity is pleased to announce the second part of its new blogging series. For the next several months, we will host a forum for CCCC members to broaden our organization’s thinking, talking, and writing about diversity in our profession. The CCCC Committee on Diversity includes the following members: Joyce Irene Middleton (Chair), Beth Godbee, Asao Inoue, Jay Jordan, Gwendolyn Pough, Mya Poe, Annette Powell, and John Stovall.
This week's new entry is a blog entry for open comments for CCCC/NCTE members to blog along with us over the next two weeks.
Starting on October 16, 2008, we will feature blog posts by Guest writers from across the discipline of rhetoric and composition studies in higher education. Please see the archive of part one of our series at http://cccc-blog.blogspot.com/, and pass the word. Part one includes Guest blog entries by Victor Villaneuva, Krista Ratcliffe, Malea Powell, Paul Kei Matsuda, Michelle Hall Kells, Frankie Condon, Haivan V. Hoang, Jonathan Alexander, and Mike Rose. All Guest postings (including the archive) will be open to anyone with internet access who wants to read them. In addition, CCCC/NCTE members will be able to post comments, and we really want to hear from you. Everyone can find a new Guest writer’s blog entry bi-weekly (2 times per month), until Thursday, May 14, 2009.
We’d like to ask for your continued attention over the next six months at a computer screen near you. You can help to continue our sustained conversation about the role of diversity in the work that we do (last month we reached over 700 new readers). Of course, the work of rhetoric and composition has addressed issues of diversity for decades, and each year brings new scholars and perspectives to CCCC. Ultimately, we’d like to think about our Guest writers’ statements, your responses, and the archived blog posts, when our Committee generates a CCCC Position Statement on Diversity this year. We believe that this statement should reflect the contributions of as broad a cross-section of members as possible.
See our committee’s charge at: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/gov/committees/all/115435.htm).
Thanks for reading our first blog post for part two on the CCCC Conversations on Diversity series.
Enjoy your 2008-09 school year!
Thursday, September 18, 2008
"Cognition and Diversity"
Introductory Bio
Perhaps best known for his award-winning book, Lives on the Boundary, Mike Rose has taught, researched, and written about the challenges facing diverse non-traditional, often underprepared and disadvantaged students in higher education. He has taught students at almost all levels from kindergarden to university and in almost all places from the intercity to the traditional college campus. Rose, currently Professor of Social Research Methodology in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is also the author of numerous articles on teaching non-traditional writers and underprepared students and literacy. Additionally, he has authored ten books, including Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America; An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity; and most recently, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. Among his many awards are a Distinguished Lectureship from the American Educational Research Association, Guggenheim Fellowship, Distinguished Teaching Award from UCLA, Grawemeyer Award in Education in 1997, and the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English from the National Council of Teachers of English.
As Rose states in his own blog (http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/): “If I had to sum up the philosophical thread that runs through my work, it would be this: A deep belief in the ability of the common person, a commitment to educational, occupational, and cultural opportunity to develop that ability, and an affirmation of public institutions and the public sphere as vehicles for nurturing and expressing that ability.” Mike invites CCCC members and their students to subscribe and participate.
Blog Entry
First, let me thank Joyce Middleton and the CCCC Committee on Diversity for inviting me to join this series. Like Victor Villanueva, I come late to the blogosphere, and was nudged, grumbling into it about six months ago. Let me also say that I’m honored to be in the company of the other bloggers and hope my entry adds fruitfully to theirs.
The issue I want to discuss – and I think it’s why Joyce and the committee invited me – is intelligence and the broader construct of cognition: attention and perception, conceptualizing, thinking, problem-solving, etc. We tend not to think about this cluster of topics when discussing diversity – unless we’re discussing exceptional children – but beliefs about intelligence are woven throughout beliefs about race, gender, social class, and ability.
I’ll begin with a little personal history.
I’ve been interested in the way we think for a long time. When I was an English major, I found myself drawn to accounts of a writer’s creative process: What was the inspiration for a story or a key defining moment or image that was the germ of the thing? Or what happened to a poem through various revisions; what did we know about why changes were made? Or I was fascinated by those bursts of creativity that seemed to come out nowhere: for example, how you couldn’t have predicted the intricacies of Moby Dick from Melville’s earlier novels.
Then came psychology and reading in perception and cognition, in child development, in cross-cultural studies. All this got me on the road, provided bodies of knowledge and ways to understand and study.
But not without complication.
The history of psychological and social science – and the humanities as well – is laden with research and writing that reflects the biases of the larger culture from which in emerges. So, as in the larger culture, you have claims about the intellectual inferiority of non-white races, or immigrants, or rural folk, or women. You have claims about linguistic inferiority. You have all sorts of claims about the working-class and the work they do.
I won’t weigh the present essay down with the details of how I found my way through all this and simply begin by using the cognitive perspective toward what I hope are egalitarian ends. (Anyone interested in more of that detail can find it in An Open Language, a complimentary copy of which, I’m pretty sure, CCCC members can get from Bedford Books.) But I do want to zero in on two things that I think are central to my own development, and are pertinent to the ongoing discussion.
One is my own background as the child of immigrant working-class parents growing up in a poor neighborhood. I know intimately many of the kinds of people who are the focus of claims about intellectual and linguistic inferiority. And what I heard and read didn’t always match up.
The second is that I started tutoring and teaching at a relatively young age in schools and programs that served poor and working-class people from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds – and the settings spanned kindergarten to college. So, again, I saw first-hand the processes of teaching and learning, and I saw what people can do with their minds.
Both of these elements of my personal history certainly contributed to the way I saw myself, my values and dreams, and they contributed as well to an empirical and skeptical bent, useful both to question the ugliness of the discourse that I’d hear on the streets, on the radio, in my own neighborhood and extended family as well as the claims made in some of the academic material I was encountering.
This empirical skepticism, this need to test what I was studying against my own personal and professional experience, enabled me to use cognitively-oriented research to both critique work within the cognitive tradition that diminished human ability as well as critique the many and ongoing claims that rise like crabgrass in our society about the intellectual capabilities of underprepared students, poor folks, people of color, women, manual workers, you name it.
So let me fast-forward now to a few quick summaries of this work.
My study of cognition combined with other areas of study in the humanities and social science led to a series of articles that, collectively, tried to do the following: I wanted to explore the way flawed assumptions about cognition and language have influenced remedial writing curricula; the limiting institutional definitions of remediation and of writing instruction; overgeneralizing explanations as to why some students have difficulty with writing; and the classroom processes by which some students get defined as intellectually and linguistically deficient.
In addition to critique, I advocated a richer, more multifaceted model of cognition and writing and a way to think about curriculum and instruction that honored that richness.
All of this work played itself out in a series of articles that you’ll find in that Open Language collection and, in more narrative form, in Lives on the Boundary.
I can give you a flavor for this writing by doing a pretty unblogospheric thing here and quoting the closing paragraph from one of the articles, “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism”:
If I could compress this essay’s investigation down to a single conceptual touchstone, it would be this: Human cognition – even at its most stymied, bungled moments – is rich and varied. It is against this assumption that we should test our theories and research methods and classroom assessments. Do our practices work against classification that encourages single, monolithic explanations of cognitive activity? Do they honor the complexity of interpretive efforts even when those efforts fall short of some desired goal? Do they foster investigation of interaction and protean manifestation rather than investigation of absence? Do they urge reflection on the cultural biases that might be shaping them? We must be vigilant that the systems of intellect we develop or adapt do not ground our students’ difficulties in sweeping, essentially one-dimensional perceptual, neurophysiological, psychological, or linguistic processes, systems that drive broad cognitive wedges between those who do well in our schools and those who don’t.
Though some of this work is of its time (it was written in the 1980s), it unfortunately is pertinent today. Consider the number of basic/remedial/preparatory writing courses that are still built on problematic notions of cognition and language, leading to deadening skills and drills curricula. Or an article that appeared in the June 2008, Atlantic Monthly (that I’m sure is familiar to many readers of this blog) in which a disgruntled community college professor depicts his students as academically dense and marginally literate. Or that old bad penny Charles Murray of The Bell Curve fame peddling again in his latest book, "Real" Education, methodologically flawed notions about intelligence and the social order.
O.K., one more fast-forward, this one to The Mind at Work, a recent project in which I continue exploring questions of cognition, intelligence, and achievement. I blend case histories of blue collar and service workers with cognitive and social analysis to challenge longstanding Western distinctions between mental and physical activity, offering, I hope, a more psychologically and educationally productive way to consider what we do with hand and brain.
From Classical Greece on down, we have tended to make sharp and value-laden separations between the mental and physical, between the philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual versus the practical, applied, and concrete – and, more recently, between the academic and the vocational. These distinctions have affected the way we define intelligence, create curriculum, and organize work. But this kind of binary thinking is inadequate to describe what actually occurs as waitresses or welders (or, for that matter, as teachers or surgeons) apply knowledge, solve problems, arrive at decisions, and make aesthetic judgments.
This set of issues seems especially important for those of us who teach students from working-class families and/or who work in programs aimed at providing occupational training.
I think these issues are also important for all of us, for with our educations can come a predisposition to elevate the intellectual content and value of one kind of work over another and make cognitive judgments about people based on the work they do.
Having said that, I feel the need to explain further, and, if you’ll indulge me one more time, I’m going to do the boorish thing of quoting myself again, this time from The Mind at Work:
This is not a call for a simplified egalitarianism. I am not denying the obvious fact that people come to any pursuit with different interests, talents, knacks for things, motivations, capabilities. Nor am I claiming that all bodies of knowledge and expressions of mind are of the same level of cognitive complexity and social importance. All the cultures I’m familiar with make judgments about competence in the domains that matter to them. (Though ours is more obsessed than any I know with developing measures of the mind and schemes to rank them.) No, the distressing thing is that both in our institutional systems and in our informal talk we tend to label entire categories of work and the people associated with them in ways that generalize, erase cognitive variability, and diminish whole traditions of human activity. Attributions of merit and worth flow throughout the process. We order, we rank, we place at steps upon a ladder rather than appreciating an abundant and varied cognitive terrain.
In closing, let me offer a cautionary tale that illustrates how easily overgeneralized and ungenerous judgments about other people’s thinking can come to us.
For the last dozen or so years I’ve been working a lot with graduate students. A while back, one came to see me with a sketch of a dissertation proposal. It had taken this person a fairly long time to get to this place, having begun then abandoned a previous research topic. And the sketch I was looking at was also the result of many months of deliberation. Along the way another faculty member had commented to me that this person was a “weak” student.
I read the new sketch, and it wasn’t good at all. It was general in some places. In others, one claim didn’t line up with the next. Some sentences were difficult to understand. It was hard to know exactly what the research project was. The comment from my colleague flipped into my mind like a pop-up ad. And so did a sense that’s hard to describe, but was kind of a half-thought/half-feeling that this student might not have the ability to complete a dissertation.
We met and caught up a little, stuff about family and work. Then we turned to the proposal. I decided to avoid its problems and asked the student to talk to me about the project, not in dissertation lingo, but in everyday speech.
What followed was clear, elaborated, interesting. A solid, engaging project. We talked a while longer, getting some notes down on paper. I then turned to the piece I’d read and pointed out a few places where I had had trouble. And the student explained – frustration seeping out – that what I read was an attempt to reconcile conflicting advice from another faculty member, several peers, and an activist in the community to be studied.
This student’s dilemma is familiar to all of us, I’m sure – the way conceptual (and interpersonal) conflicts can negatively affect our writing. But look at what went on in my head when I first read the proposal sketch. Without realizing it, I had absorbed the informal norms of graduate study: that, for example, time-to-degree is a measure of ability or that flawed writing equaled flawed thinking. Mr. Lives-on-the-Boundary had drunk the cognitive Kool Aid.
As I write in that paragraph from The Mind at Work, I’m not trying to ignore the fact that we, all of us, do have different talents, interests, etc. It is possible that the student was, for all sorts of reasons, not ready or equipped to write a dissertation. And, after all, as educators we’re obliged to make judgments about performance and respond accordingly. What is troubling in the anecdote, however, is the ease with which a one-dimensional judgment about intellectual ability came to me.
But the anecdote also points to some ways out of this mess. (And what I’m going to say, I think, resonates with the other blogs.) It reminds us that we live tangled in systems of bias, and that we will always blunder, and, therefore, we need in our teaching some methods to keep us aware, some tools of mindfulness: asking different questions, shifting languages, listening closely. We need certain habits of mind, for example, a testing of our own judgments, a willingness to have them disconfirmed. We need to be alert to the social contexts we inhabit – this was the root of my error – and the norms and beliefs we absorb in them. We need to publicly question the vocabulary and assumptions that constitute these settings. (This blog is a tiny gesture in that direction.) We also need to be creative in fashioning other kinds of spaces within those worlds we inhabit.
These are the kinds of issues and questions we – I – need to keep raising. They keep in sight the ease with which we reduce each other. They contribute to a richer pedagogical imagination. Ant they can help fashion a more humane institutional and civic life.
Perhaps best known for his award-winning book, Lives on the Boundary, Mike Rose has taught, researched, and written about the challenges facing diverse non-traditional, often underprepared and disadvantaged students in higher education. He has taught students at almost all levels from kindergarden to university and in almost all places from the intercity to the traditional college campus. Rose, currently Professor of Social Research Methodology in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is also the author of numerous articles on teaching non-traditional writers and underprepared students and literacy. Additionally, he has authored ten books, including Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America; An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity; and most recently, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. Among his many awards are a Distinguished Lectureship from the American Educational Research Association, Guggenheim Fellowship, Distinguished Teaching Award from UCLA, Grawemeyer Award in Education in 1997, and the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English from the National Council of Teachers of English.
As Rose states in his own blog (http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/): “If I had to sum up the philosophical thread that runs through my work, it would be this: A deep belief in the ability of the common person, a commitment to educational, occupational, and cultural opportunity to develop that ability, and an affirmation of public institutions and the public sphere as vehicles for nurturing and expressing that ability.” Mike invites CCCC members and their students to subscribe and participate.
Blog Entry
First, let me thank Joyce Middleton and the CCCC Committee on Diversity for inviting me to join this series. Like Victor Villanueva, I come late to the blogosphere, and was nudged, grumbling into it about six months ago. Let me also say that I’m honored to be in the company of the other bloggers and hope my entry adds fruitfully to theirs.
The issue I want to discuss – and I think it’s why Joyce and the committee invited me – is intelligence and the broader construct of cognition: attention and perception, conceptualizing, thinking, problem-solving, etc. We tend not to think about this cluster of topics when discussing diversity – unless we’re discussing exceptional children – but beliefs about intelligence are woven throughout beliefs about race, gender, social class, and ability.
I’ll begin with a little personal history.
I’ve been interested in the way we think for a long time. When I was an English major, I found myself drawn to accounts of a writer’s creative process: What was the inspiration for a story or a key defining moment or image that was the germ of the thing? Or what happened to a poem through various revisions; what did we know about why changes were made? Or I was fascinated by those bursts of creativity that seemed to come out nowhere: for example, how you couldn’t have predicted the intricacies of Moby Dick from Melville’s earlier novels.
Then came psychology and reading in perception and cognition, in child development, in cross-cultural studies. All this got me on the road, provided bodies of knowledge and ways to understand and study.
But not without complication.
The history of psychological and social science – and the humanities as well – is laden with research and writing that reflects the biases of the larger culture from which in emerges. So, as in the larger culture, you have claims about the intellectual inferiority of non-white races, or immigrants, or rural folk, or women. You have claims about linguistic inferiority. You have all sorts of claims about the working-class and the work they do.
I won’t weigh the present essay down with the details of how I found my way through all this and simply begin by using the cognitive perspective toward what I hope are egalitarian ends. (Anyone interested in more of that detail can find it in An Open Language, a complimentary copy of which, I’m pretty sure, CCCC members can get from Bedford Books.) But I do want to zero in on two things that I think are central to my own development, and are pertinent to the ongoing discussion.
One is my own background as the child of immigrant working-class parents growing up in a poor neighborhood. I know intimately many of the kinds of people who are the focus of claims about intellectual and linguistic inferiority. And what I heard and read didn’t always match up.
The second is that I started tutoring and teaching at a relatively young age in schools and programs that served poor and working-class people from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds – and the settings spanned kindergarten to college. So, again, I saw first-hand the processes of teaching and learning, and I saw what people can do with their minds.
Both of these elements of my personal history certainly contributed to the way I saw myself, my values and dreams, and they contributed as well to an empirical and skeptical bent, useful both to question the ugliness of the discourse that I’d hear on the streets, on the radio, in my own neighborhood and extended family as well as the claims made in some of the academic material I was encountering.
This empirical skepticism, this need to test what I was studying against my own personal and professional experience, enabled me to use cognitively-oriented research to both critique work within the cognitive tradition that diminished human ability as well as critique the many and ongoing claims that rise like crabgrass in our society about the intellectual capabilities of underprepared students, poor folks, people of color, women, manual workers, you name it.
So let me fast-forward now to a few quick summaries of this work.
My study of cognition combined with other areas of study in the humanities and social science led to a series of articles that, collectively, tried to do the following: I wanted to explore the way flawed assumptions about cognition and language have influenced remedial writing curricula; the limiting institutional definitions of remediation and of writing instruction; overgeneralizing explanations as to why some students have difficulty with writing; and the classroom processes by which some students get defined as intellectually and linguistically deficient.
In addition to critique, I advocated a richer, more multifaceted model of cognition and writing and a way to think about curriculum and instruction that honored that richness.
All of this work played itself out in a series of articles that you’ll find in that Open Language collection and, in more narrative form, in Lives on the Boundary.
I can give you a flavor for this writing by doing a pretty unblogospheric thing here and quoting the closing paragraph from one of the articles, “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism”:
If I could compress this essay’s investigation down to a single conceptual touchstone, it would be this: Human cognition – even at its most stymied, bungled moments – is rich and varied. It is against this assumption that we should test our theories and research methods and classroom assessments. Do our practices work against classification that encourages single, monolithic explanations of cognitive activity? Do they honor the complexity of interpretive efforts even when those efforts fall short of some desired goal? Do they foster investigation of interaction and protean manifestation rather than investigation of absence? Do they urge reflection on the cultural biases that might be shaping them? We must be vigilant that the systems of intellect we develop or adapt do not ground our students’ difficulties in sweeping, essentially one-dimensional perceptual, neurophysiological, psychological, or linguistic processes, systems that drive broad cognitive wedges between those who do well in our schools and those who don’t.
Though some of this work is of its time (it was written in the 1980s), it unfortunately is pertinent today. Consider the number of basic/remedial/preparatory writing courses that are still built on problematic notions of cognition and language, leading to deadening skills and drills curricula. Or an article that appeared in the June 2008, Atlantic Monthly (that I’m sure is familiar to many readers of this blog) in which a disgruntled community college professor depicts his students as academically dense and marginally literate. Or that old bad penny Charles Murray of The Bell Curve fame peddling again in his latest book, "Real" Education, methodologically flawed notions about intelligence and the social order.
O.K., one more fast-forward, this one to The Mind at Work, a recent project in which I continue exploring questions of cognition, intelligence, and achievement. I blend case histories of blue collar and service workers with cognitive and social analysis to challenge longstanding Western distinctions between mental and physical activity, offering, I hope, a more psychologically and educationally productive way to consider what we do with hand and brain.
From Classical Greece on down, we have tended to make sharp and value-laden separations between the mental and physical, between the philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual versus the practical, applied, and concrete – and, more recently, between the academic and the vocational. These distinctions have affected the way we define intelligence, create curriculum, and organize work. But this kind of binary thinking is inadequate to describe what actually occurs as waitresses or welders (or, for that matter, as teachers or surgeons) apply knowledge, solve problems, arrive at decisions, and make aesthetic judgments.
This set of issues seems especially important for those of us who teach students from working-class families and/or who work in programs aimed at providing occupational training.
I think these issues are also important for all of us, for with our educations can come a predisposition to elevate the intellectual content and value of one kind of work over another and make cognitive judgments about people based on the work they do.
Having said that, I feel the need to explain further, and, if you’ll indulge me one more time, I’m going to do the boorish thing of quoting myself again, this time from The Mind at Work:
This is not a call for a simplified egalitarianism. I am not denying the obvious fact that people come to any pursuit with different interests, talents, knacks for things, motivations, capabilities. Nor am I claiming that all bodies of knowledge and expressions of mind are of the same level of cognitive complexity and social importance. All the cultures I’m familiar with make judgments about competence in the domains that matter to them. (Though ours is more obsessed than any I know with developing measures of the mind and schemes to rank them.) No, the distressing thing is that both in our institutional systems and in our informal talk we tend to label entire categories of work and the people associated with them in ways that generalize, erase cognitive variability, and diminish whole traditions of human activity. Attributions of merit and worth flow throughout the process. We order, we rank, we place at steps upon a ladder rather than appreciating an abundant and varied cognitive terrain.
In closing, let me offer a cautionary tale that illustrates how easily overgeneralized and ungenerous judgments about other people’s thinking can come to us.
For the last dozen or so years I’ve been working a lot with graduate students. A while back, one came to see me with a sketch of a dissertation proposal. It had taken this person a fairly long time to get to this place, having begun then abandoned a previous research topic. And the sketch I was looking at was also the result of many months of deliberation. Along the way another faculty member had commented to me that this person was a “weak” student.
I read the new sketch, and it wasn’t good at all. It was general in some places. In others, one claim didn’t line up with the next. Some sentences were difficult to understand. It was hard to know exactly what the research project was. The comment from my colleague flipped into my mind like a pop-up ad. And so did a sense that’s hard to describe, but was kind of a half-thought/half-feeling that this student might not have the ability to complete a dissertation.
We met and caught up a little, stuff about family and work. Then we turned to the proposal. I decided to avoid its problems and asked the student to talk to me about the project, not in dissertation lingo, but in everyday speech.
What followed was clear, elaborated, interesting. A solid, engaging project. We talked a while longer, getting some notes down on paper. I then turned to the piece I’d read and pointed out a few places where I had had trouble. And the student explained – frustration seeping out – that what I read was an attempt to reconcile conflicting advice from another faculty member, several peers, and an activist in the community to be studied.
This student’s dilemma is familiar to all of us, I’m sure – the way conceptual (and interpersonal) conflicts can negatively affect our writing. But look at what went on in my head when I first read the proposal sketch. Without realizing it, I had absorbed the informal norms of graduate study: that, for example, time-to-degree is a measure of ability or that flawed writing equaled flawed thinking. Mr. Lives-on-the-Boundary had drunk the cognitive Kool Aid.
As I write in that paragraph from The Mind at Work, I’m not trying to ignore the fact that we, all of us, do have different talents, interests, etc. It is possible that the student was, for all sorts of reasons, not ready or equipped to write a dissertation. And, after all, as educators we’re obliged to make judgments about performance and respond accordingly. What is troubling in the anecdote, however, is the ease with which a one-dimensional judgment about intellectual ability came to me.
But the anecdote also points to some ways out of this mess. (And what I’m going to say, I think, resonates with the other blogs.) It reminds us that we live tangled in systems of bias, and that we will always blunder, and, therefore, we need in our teaching some methods to keep us aware, some tools of mindfulness: asking different questions, shifting languages, listening closely. We need certain habits of mind, for example, a testing of our own judgments, a willingness to have them disconfirmed. We need to be alert to the social contexts we inhabit – this was the root of my error – and the norms and beliefs we absorb in them. We need to publicly question the vocabulary and assumptions that constitute these settings. (This blog is a tiny gesture in that direction.) We also need to be creative in fashioning other kinds of spaces within those worlds we inhabit.
These are the kinds of issues and questions we – I – need to keep raising. They keep in sight the ease with which we reduce each other. They contribute to a richer pedagogical imagination. Ant they can help fashion a more humane institutional and civic life.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Queer Pedagogy: Critical Multiculturalism Must Avoid "The Flattening Effect"
Introductory Bio
Jonathan Alexander, PhD, is an author, performance poet, teacher, scholar, queer theorist, sex futurist, and activist. He also studies web design, graphic novels, what used to be called cyberculture, and piano performance.
As a scholar, Jonathan is primarily interested in how people compose with digital technologies, as well as what these compositions mean for their many and varied senses of self, individually and collectively. He also works at the intersection of writing studies and sexuality studies, exploring what it means to "compose queerly," as well as what theories of sexuality, particularly queer theory, have to teach us about literacy in pluralistic democracies.
Jonathan has authored, co-authored, or edited six books: Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies; Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web; Argument Now, a Brief Rhetoric (with Margaret Barber); Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing (edited with Marcia Dickson); Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others (edited with Karen Yescavage); and Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies (with Deborah T. Meem and Michelle Gibson). He also edits the Journal of Bisexuality.
Jonathan has served on the CCCC Multiple Uses of Writing Task Force and helped to write the CCCC Position Statement on the Multiple Uses of Writing which was adopted by the CCCC Executive Committee on November 19, 2007.
Professionally, Jonathan is Associate Professor of English and Campus Writing Coordinator at the University of California, Irvine. He blogs at diligentpleasure and many of his digital projects are housed at meatjournal, for which he serves as co-editor.
His webpage is: https://webfiles.uci.edu/jfalexan/pubweb/index.html
Blog Entry
(Editor's Note: Today's blog entry has been edited from a much longer text, as indicated by the ellipses within the posted text. The longer entry is available at: http://www.ncte.org/library/files/cccc/1-alexander.pdf
As someone long interested in issues of diversity in the teaching of writing in particular and in higher education in general, let me begin by saying that we're already going in the wrong direction if we strive to think about how to “include” diversity in the classroom, in our institutions, and in our profession. Don't get me wrong: we have a LONG way to go before our faculties, our institutions, and our profession are truly representative of the public, much less of our student bodies. And composition as a profession seems, in many ways, to be doing its part. Much composition practice since the “social turn” of the 1980s has attempted to honor the diversity of our students’ experiences and recognize the many identities that students bring into the classroom. Certainly, such attempts should be lauded, particularly as they have created pedagogical spaces in which individuals from a variety of backgrounds can speak their truths, tell their stories, and enrich conversations about identity, culture, and citizenship.
As a queer person, however, I have been simultaneously appreciative and skeptical of such moves. Let me explain. In my writing courses, I have like my colleagues included readings that challenge normative constructions of identity and culture. Frequently, readings about LGBT people or issues interweave with narratives, essays, and manifestoes about race, ethnicity, gender, class, and citizenship. When teaching recently Judd Winick’s Pedro and Me, a graphic novel about the author’s friendship with the openly gay Pedro Zamora, who dies of AIDS in his 20s, I became concerned about what my students were taking away from their encounter with the text and our discussions about it. While students appreciated the friendship that is depicted in the book between a straight and a gay man, they also spoke of that friendship—the subject of Winick’s book—in terms that erased the critical differences between the two: Judd and Pedro loved one another as friends because they realized they were more like one another than not; Pedro’s homosexuality didn’t matter to Judd and wasn’t relevant to their friendship; our commonalities are more important than our differences.
These were the ways in which students talked and wrote about the book. I began to realize that much of my experience in teaching about difference, particularly texts that grapple with queer differences had resulted in much the same lesson: difference doesn’t matter. Curiously, the subtitle of Winick’s book, “Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned,” seem to evoke the “moral of the story,” gesturing towards the seeming necessity of coming up with an “answer,” a “lesson” about the encounter with difference. For my students, what’s important about queers—and what we can learn to tolerate—is that they are, after all, deep down, just like the rest of us. We’re all just basically human. As I thought more about this “flattening effect”—the erasure of queer difference as an important dimension of experience—I began to realize that I was seeing such not just in my students’ response to difference; the invitation to flatten differences seemed built into the structural apparatus that many of us use in approaching and teaching texts that grapple with difference. . . .
In a now classic essay, “Towards a Postmodern Pedagogy,” Henry A. Giroux articulates what I think of as the “double-bind” in the development of a critical pedagogy that relies on narratives to promote multicultural awareness and understanding. . . . Giroux calls us simultaneously to recognize critical differences in multiple narratives while working toward a language of reconstruction, “offering students a language to reconstruct their moral and political energies” in the pursuit of justice (691, 695-6). . . .
When I turn to queer colleagues and their work on including lesbian and gay voices in the classroom, I note a similar tension. Malinowitz, for instance, toward the end of Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities, argues for a pedagogy that “entail[s] thinking about the ways margins produce not only abject outsiderhood but also profoundly unique ways of self-defining, knowing, and acting; and about how, though people usually want to leave the margins, they do want to be able to bring with them the sharp vision that comes from living with friction and contradiction” (252). . . . Gay and lesbian students often do have “outsider” knowledge, “sharp vision,” and the “experience of crafting and performing multiple identities”—knowledges that are useful for all students to cultivate as they narrate the stories of their lives and critically examine the intertwining of the personal and the political. At the same time, I worry over how such knowledges, insights, and visions move into the classroom and then become co-opted, or lost, or flattened as they are “reconstructed” into the dominant narratives of collective experience. . . .
As such, a significant part of my concern with relying on narration of difference has to do with what I call the “flattening effect,” or the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) erasures of difference that occur when narrating stories of the “other.” Such a “flattening effect” arises out of the unexamined assumption that “understanding” and then “tolerance” or even “respect” are predicated on “identity.” By “identity,” I mean not just the acknowledgement that other identities exist, but that those identities are, in essence, somehow identical to your own. Whether you’re black, gay, Latino, disabled, or whatnot, you are still fundamentally human, concerned with similar core issues and very likely sharing core values, if not specific beliefs. Attaining “respect,” then, means that many of us have our differences essentially elided by an overriding narrative of shared humanity. Naturally, I am delighted to be acknowledged as human, particularly since many queers throughout history have been denied their humanity and treated as little better than animals, often deserving of slaughter. Those sent to Nazi concentration camps because of suspected or demonstrated homosexuality and those treated to electric shock and other forms of “therapy” at the hands of various members of the American psychiatric establishment are just some of those whose basic humanity has been denied.
But, if I may push a personal point in the service of my argument, my difference in my humanity is what is important, particularly in addressing some systemic violences against queers. If I am in danger of being assaulted, it is because I am not straight. I am a queer man. This is not to say that all queer people share a common sense of identity and common understanding of the world. Far from it. But it is to say that my queerness positions me as fundamentally different from the majority of straights. As a queer man, I have experienced discrimination within my family, on the job, and in the public sphere because of the intimacies that I desire to share with other men. I do not ask you, if you are straight, to understand how that discrimination has hurt me, angered me, and shaped my view of the world. Part of me hopes you cannot understand it, even as I insist that it must be acknowledged as a significant dimension of my experience of the world.
What narratives, and what writing assignments, work to uncover these dimensions—the dimensions of profound difference that complicate and problematize rather flattened narratives of a common, shared humanity—much less a common, shared sense of citizenship?
To answer such questions, I’ve been looking to the work of philosophers and theorists who have considered issues of diversity, alterity, and writing. For instance, in Outside the Subject, Levinas asks, “Isn’t there a type of experience in which something is given to me, indeed thrusts itself upon me, that can never be translated as a meaning for me?” For Levinas, what is so given is the uniqueness of the other, a uniqueness that our “knowledge” of the other, our attempts to know, to categorize, to order the other, violates. Levinas argues that a “person cannot be represented or given to knowledge in his or her uniqueness, because there is no science but of generality” (114). . . . In our ordering of the real, most often expressed in our determining of the normative, we tell stories about one another that reduce our experiences to bland commonalities. Judith Butler, in Giving an Account of Oneself, offers cogent analyses of how we “author” ourselves, of how we tell the stories of our lives and, in the process, open up spaces for understanding how our life narratives are imbricated in larger social forces and norms (17). . . .
What kinds of writing assignments might emerge out of this redirection from “understanding” difference to acknowledging radical alterity? How might we revise and rewrite some standard assignments that attempt to produce in students a multicultural sensibility? A simple way to begin might be by having students not write about what they believe they “know” about one another, but what they suspect they do not know. In Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, Robert McRuer asks important questions that query composition’s call to have students produce “products” about what they know, what they can argue about, and how they might persuade others (147). . . .
For McRuer, both queerness and disability offer challenges to the normative—challenges that are frequently glossed over as students seek to reiterate narratives of cultural tolerance and human commonality. Acknowledging the messiness, the unruly disorder of bodies and desires that don’t quite fit into the norm, that refuse simply to be tolerated and accepted as the “same,” means that we may have to question some of our fundamental compositional practices—such as training students to write the “composed” essay that neatly presents points, weighs various positions, and argues through to a rational conclusion. Instead, we may have to acknowledge the points where our knowledge of one another fails to be coherent—where we don’t know. We can take a clue from Butler and point students in the direction of analyzing how the drive to “narrative coherence” forecloses on some possibilities for acknowledging radical differences—differences that are crucial to acknowledge when facing the other, challenging totalizing visions of the world, and learning to live a bit more generously with one another.
One way to approach an analysis of the violence of “narrative coherence” may lie in having students respond to difficult texts that directly challenge readers’ ability to make radical alterity coherent and tame. I’m thinking of Gloria Anzaldua’s La Frontera/Borderlands, written partly in Spanish and describing through a variety of genres the author’s experiences of being between cultures, between different totalizing realities. The use of a different language in Anzaldua’s text is designed to be both inclusive and alienating, to honor Anzaldua’s multiple heritages and challenge a reader’s expectations that a text will easily make sense, or that a text is only worth knowing if it’s accessible. Such a rhetorical move gestures also to Anzaldua’s unknowability as a mestiza in a white dominant culture. As Anzaldua herself says, reflecting on her simultaneous visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, “I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t, we haven’t. The dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance” (108). The dominant culture assumes it knows her as part of its “melting pot” of cultures, but Anzaldua knows that such “knowledge” is itself an unfortunate “blind spot,” particularly as it leads to lethal ignorances. . . .
Indeed, as we work with students on developing an appreciation for and understanding of how writing moves in the world, we should not eschew texts that are difficult and challenging in favor of texts that replicate “safe” norms or tolerable differences. Doing so robs students of developing a strong critical sense of the power of writing to challenge, to unsettle, to change us. . . . To create opportunities to understand one another . . . may require that we risk substantive discomfort. And I would argue that such discomfort itself may be the proper subject of student compositions as they grapple with the queer other. Certainly, some will argue that it is perhaps impossible to construct writing assignments based on what is impossible to know—on incommensurability, or unknowability. But I maintain that that unknowability is the proper subject of writing itself.
Others will argue, of course, that all people are fundamentally different from one another. Yes, we are. But before the story of shared fundamental difference becomes yet another common narrative of our shared humanity, we should recognize the interlocking systems of oppression that serve as the ontological bases for discrimination. Indeed, any acknowledgement of radical alterity should lead to a movement from trying to understand an individual to attempting to understand structures that enable, even induce discrimination. Such an approach could comprise our radical, critical pedagogy. Naturally, I am in many ways just another privileged white person (and a white male at that) who is offering alternatives to our current brands of multiculturalism. It will be up to all of us “from the margins” to consider more powerful and productive ways in which we can acknowledge and write about the “other” in each of us.
Jonathan Alexander, PhD, is an author, performance poet, teacher, scholar, queer theorist, sex futurist, and activist. He also studies web design, graphic novels, what used to be called cyberculture, and piano performance.
As a scholar, Jonathan is primarily interested in how people compose with digital technologies, as well as what these compositions mean for their many and varied senses of self, individually and collectively. He also works at the intersection of writing studies and sexuality studies, exploring what it means to "compose queerly," as well as what theories of sexuality, particularly queer theory, have to teach us about literacy in pluralistic democracies.
Jonathan has authored, co-authored, or edited six books: Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies; Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web; Argument Now, a Brief Rhetoric (with Margaret Barber); Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing (edited with Marcia Dickson); Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others (edited with Karen Yescavage); and Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies (with Deborah T. Meem and Michelle Gibson). He also edits the Journal of Bisexuality.
Jonathan has served on the CCCC Multiple Uses of Writing Task Force and helped to write the CCCC Position Statement on the Multiple Uses of Writing which was adopted by the CCCC Executive Committee on November 19, 2007.
Professionally, Jonathan is Associate Professor of English and Campus Writing Coordinator at the University of California, Irvine. He blogs at diligentpleasure and many of his digital projects are housed at meatjournal, for which he serves as co-editor.
His webpage is: https://webfiles.uci.edu/jfalexan/pubweb/index.html
Blog Entry
(Editor's Note: Today's blog entry has been edited from a much longer text, as indicated by the ellipses within the posted text. The longer entry is available at: http://www.ncte.org/library/files/cccc/1-alexander.pdf
As someone long interested in issues of diversity in the teaching of writing in particular and in higher education in general, let me begin by saying that we're already going in the wrong direction if we strive to think about how to “include” diversity in the classroom, in our institutions, and in our profession. Don't get me wrong: we have a LONG way to go before our faculties, our institutions, and our profession are truly representative of the public, much less of our student bodies. And composition as a profession seems, in many ways, to be doing its part. Much composition practice since the “social turn” of the 1980s has attempted to honor the diversity of our students’ experiences and recognize the many identities that students bring into the classroom. Certainly, such attempts should be lauded, particularly as they have created pedagogical spaces in which individuals from a variety of backgrounds can speak their truths, tell their stories, and enrich conversations about identity, culture, and citizenship.
As a queer person, however, I have been simultaneously appreciative and skeptical of such moves. Let me explain. In my writing courses, I have like my colleagues included readings that challenge normative constructions of identity and culture. Frequently, readings about LGBT people or issues interweave with narratives, essays, and manifestoes about race, ethnicity, gender, class, and citizenship. When teaching recently Judd Winick’s Pedro and Me, a graphic novel about the author’s friendship with the openly gay Pedro Zamora, who dies of AIDS in his 20s, I became concerned about what my students were taking away from their encounter with the text and our discussions about it. While students appreciated the friendship that is depicted in the book between a straight and a gay man, they also spoke of that friendship—the subject of Winick’s book—in terms that erased the critical differences between the two: Judd and Pedro loved one another as friends because they realized they were more like one another than not; Pedro’s homosexuality didn’t matter to Judd and wasn’t relevant to their friendship; our commonalities are more important than our differences.
These were the ways in which students talked and wrote about the book. I began to realize that much of my experience in teaching about difference, particularly texts that grapple with queer differences had resulted in much the same lesson: difference doesn’t matter. Curiously, the subtitle of Winick’s book, “Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned,” seem to evoke the “moral of the story,” gesturing towards the seeming necessity of coming up with an “answer,” a “lesson” about the encounter with difference. For my students, what’s important about queers—and what we can learn to tolerate—is that they are, after all, deep down, just like the rest of us. We’re all just basically human. As I thought more about this “flattening effect”—the erasure of queer difference as an important dimension of experience—I began to realize that I was seeing such not just in my students’ response to difference; the invitation to flatten differences seemed built into the structural apparatus that many of us use in approaching and teaching texts that grapple with difference. . . .
In a now classic essay, “Towards a Postmodern Pedagogy,” Henry A. Giroux articulates what I think of as the “double-bind” in the development of a critical pedagogy that relies on narratives to promote multicultural awareness and understanding. . . . Giroux calls us simultaneously to recognize critical differences in multiple narratives while working toward a language of reconstruction, “offering students a language to reconstruct their moral and political energies” in the pursuit of justice (691, 695-6). . . .
When I turn to queer colleagues and their work on including lesbian and gay voices in the classroom, I note a similar tension. Malinowitz, for instance, toward the end of Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities, argues for a pedagogy that “entail[s] thinking about the ways margins produce not only abject outsiderhood but also profoundly unique ways of self-defining, knowing, and acting; and about how, though people usually want to leave the margins, they do want to be able to bring with them the sharp vision that comes from living with friction and contradiction” (252). . . . Gay and lesbian students often do have “outsider” knowledge, “sharp vision,” and the “experience of crafting and performing multiple identities”—knowledges that are useful for all students to cultivate as they narrate the stories of their lives and critically examine the intertwining of the personal and the political. At the same time, I worry over how such knowledges, insights, and visions move into the classroom and then become co-opted, or lost, or flattened as they are “reconstructed” into the dominant narratives of collective experience. . . .
As such, a significant part of my concern with relying on narration of difference has to do with what I call the “flattening effect,” or the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) erasures of difference that occur when narrating stories of the “other.” Such a “flattening effect” arises out of the unexamined assumption that “understanding” and then “tolerance” or even “respect” are predicated on “identity.” By “identity,” I mean not just the acknowledgement that other identities exist, but that those identities are, in essence, somehow identical to your own. Whether you’re black, gay, Latino, disabled, or whatnot, you are still fundamentally human, concerned with similar core issues and very likely sharing core values, if not specific beliefs. Attaining “respect,” then, means that many of us have our differences essentially elided by an overriding narrative of shared humanity. Naturally, I am delighted to be acknowledged as human, particularly since many queers throughout history have been denied their humanity and treated as little better than animals, often deserving of slaughter. Those sent to Nazi concentration camps because of suspected or demonstrated homosexuality and those treated to electric shock and other forms of “therapy” at the hands of various members of the American psychiatric establishment are just some of those whose basic humanity has been denied.
But, if I may push a personal point in the service of my argument, my difference in my humanity is what is important, particularly in addressing some systemic violences against queers. If I am in danger of being assaulted, it is because I am not straight. I am a queer man. This is not to say that all queer people share a common sense of identity and common understanding of the world. Far from it. But it is to say that my queerness positions me as fundamentally different from the majority of straights. As a queer man, I have experienced discrimination within my family, on the job, and in the public sphere because of the intimacies that I desire to share with other men. I do not ask you, if you are straight, to understand how that discrimination has hurt me, angered me, and shaped my view of the world. Part of me hopes you cannot understand it, even as I insist that it must be acknowledged as a significant dimension of my experience of the world.
What narratives, and what writing assignments, work to uncover these dimensions—the dimensions of profound difference that complicate and problematize rather flattened narratives of a common, shared humanity—much less a common, shared sense of citizenship?
To answer such questions, I’ve been looking to the work of philosophers and theorists who have considered issues of diversity, alterity, and writing. For instance, in Outside the Subject, Levinas asks, “Isn’t there a type of experience in which something is given to me, indeed thrusts itself upon me, that can never be translated as a meaning for me?” For Levinas, what is so given is the uniqueness of the other, a uniqueness that our “knowledge” of the other, our attempts to know, to categorize, to order the other, violates. Levinas argues that a “person cannot be represented or given to knowledge in his or her uniqueness, because there is no science but of generality” (114). . . . In our ordering of the real, most often expressed in our determining of the normative, we tell stories about one another that reduce our experiences to bland commonalities. Judith Butler, in Giving an Account of Oneself, offers cogent analyses of how we “author” ourselves, of how we tell the stories of our lives and, in the process, open up spaces for understanding how our life narratives are imbricated in larger social forces and norms (17). . . .
What kinds of writing assignments might emerge out of this redirection from “understanding” difference to acknowledging radical alterity? How might we revise and rewrite some standard assignments that attempt to produce in students a multicultural sensibility? A simple way to begin might be by having students not write about what they believe they “know” about one another, but what they suspect they do not know. In Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, Robert McRuer asks important questions that query composition’s call to have students produce “products” about what they know, what they can argue about, and how they might persuade others (147). . . .
For McRuer, both queerness and disability offer challenges to the normative—challenges that are frequently glossed over as students seek to reiterate narratives of cultural tolerance and human commonality. Acknowledging the messiness, the unruly disorder of bodies and desires that don’t quite fit into the norm, that refuse simply to be tolerated and accepted as the “same,” means that we may have to question some of our fundamental compositional practices—such as training students to write the “composed” essay that neatly presents points, weighs various positions, and argues through to a rational conclusion. Instead, we may have to acknowledge the points where our knowledge of one another fails to be coherent—where we don’t know. We can take a clue from Butler and point students in the direction of analyzing how the drive to “narrative coherence” forecloses on some possibilities for acknowledging radical differences—differences that are crucial to acknowledge when facing the other, challenging totalizing visions of the world, and learning to live a bit more generously with one another.
One way to approach an analysis of the violence of “narrative coherence” may lie in having students respond to difficult texts that directly challenge readers’ ability to make radical alterity coherent and tame. I’m thinking of Gloria Anzaldua’s La Frontera/Borderlands, written partly in Spanish and describing through a variety of genres the author’s experiences of being between cultures, between different totalizing realities. The use of a different language in Anzaldua’s text is designed to be both inclusive and alienating, to honor Anzaldua’s multiple heritages and challenge a reader’s expectations that a text will easily make sense, or that a text is only worth knowing if it’s accessible. Such a rhetorical move gestures also to Anzaldua’s unknowability as a mestiza in a white dominant culture. As Anzaldua herself says, reflecting on her simultaneous visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, “I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t, we haven’t. The dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance” (108). The dominant culture assumes it knows her as part of its “melting pot” of cultures, but Anzaldua knows that such “knowledge” is itself an unfortunate “blind spot,” particularly as it leads to lethal ignorances. . . .
Indeed, as we work with students on developing an appreciation for and understanding of how writing moves in the world, we should not eschew texts that are difficult and challenging in favor of texts that replicate “safe” norms or tolerable differences. Doing so robs students of developing a strong critical sense of the power of writing to challenge, to unsettle, to change us. . . . To create opportunities to understand one another . . . may require that we risk substantive discomfort. And I would argue that such discomfort itself may be the proper subject of student compositions as they grapple with the queer other. Certainly, some will argue that it is perhaps impossible to construct writing assignments based on what is impossible to know—on incommensurability, or unknowability. But I maintain that that unknowability is the proper subject of writing itself.
Others will argue, of course, that all people are fundamentally different from one another. Yes, we are. But before the story of shared fundamental difference becomes yet another common narrative of our shared humanity, we should recognize the interlocking systems of oppression that serve as the ontological bases for discrimination. Indeed, any acknowledgement of radical alterity should lead to a movement from trying to understand an individual to attempting to understand structures that enable, even induce discrimination. Such an approach could comprise our radical, critical pedagogy. Naturally, I am in many ways just another privileged white person (and a white male at that) who is offering alternatives to our current brands of multiculturalism. It will be up to all of us “from the margins” to consider more powerful and productive ways in which we can acknowledge and write about the “other” in each of us.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Learning about Racial “Diversity” & College Composition
Introductory Bio
Haivan V. Hoang is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her ethnographic work on Vietnamese-American rhetorical identities has been widely recognized for its insight into Asian American identity and literacy. Her presentations and publications have addressed important contemporary issues related to Asian American identity, including cultural memory in rhetorical performances and language politics. Her dissertation, "To Come Together and Create a Movement: Solidarity Rhetoric in the Vietnamese American Coalition (VAC)," won the James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2005.
Her current book project, Rewriting Injury: Asian American Rhetoric and Campus Racial Politics, explores the ways Asian American students in post-1960s California have used extracurricular rhetorical spaces to intervene in school racial politics centered on a "rhetoric of injury." The study counterposes two historical moments in Asian American
education: the early 1970's identification of injury and claim to language, whether to a bilingual-bicultural education in Lau v. Nichols or alternative student newspapers among Asian American student activists, and the early 2000's adaptation of the rhetoric of injury in the context of what one compositionist has called "diversity fatigue." In addition to her scholarship, Hoang's undergraduate and graduate teaching focuses on rhetoric, race, and politics. She has been an active member of many departmental and university committees at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Ohio State University. She is a former member of the CCCC Committee on Diversity and has been the co-chair of the Asian/Asian American Caucus since 2005.
Blog Entry
It was with a little apprehension that, over two years ago, I decided to teach a graduate course called Writing and Race. The course was an effort on my part to address the meaning of racial “diversity” in my research and teaching.
Why I Proposed to Teach Writing and Race
The impetus for the course was, in fact, my research. I hoped that teaching a course on Writing and Race would help me get past a snag in my writing. At the time, I was beginning the introduction to my book on Asian American college students and their activist rhetoric; the manuscript tentatively titled, Rewriting Injury: Asian American Rhetoric and Campus Racial Politics, is still in the works. The book, through historiography and ethnography, explores political texts produced by Asian American students: alternative news publications, student club’ constitutions, conversations in club meetings, and other activist rhetoric. In short, my purpose is to call attention to Asian American students’ activist rhetoric in extracurricular spaces and to mine these texts for broader lessons about rhetoric, campus racial politics, and higher education.
But then there was this snag: How could I introduce the project in a compelling way to composition faculty, especially those who neither self-identify as Asian/Asian American nor teach students who themselves are identified as such? I worried that readers would ask me a dreaded though fair question, What does this have to do with college composition? or Quite frankly, why do Asian American students’ activist rhetorics matter to my understanding of writing or writing pedagogy?
I soon realized that, in order to explain what compositionists can gain from my book on Asian American students’ activist rhetoric, I needed to step back and address an even bigger question. How have racial politics and college composition informed one another since the 1960s, and why should compositionists be asking this question?
Teaching a graduate seminar on Writing and Race was a way to explore this question in more depth, but I had a few concerns. To what extent could I account for the complex and contradictory history of race in America? How could I maintain intellectual vigor when trying to teach race scholarship from several disciplines? How would I facilitate class discussions if they were to get heated—or even worse, grow silent? How willing would I be to negotiate viewpoints that I hold dear? I decided to take the plunge because I wanted to further understand how racial politics and composition studies have been intertwined and believe that this is important for graduate students entering the field. Even with the good work that composition scholars have contributed on race as a concept or on racialized writers, we still need to do much more to clarify the ways race figures into our teaching, scholarship, and service.
I believe that’s partly why Joyce Middleton and her colleagues on the CCCC Committee on Diversity kindly invited us all to reflect on everyday strategies for responding to campus diversity. So, I share here a bit about the Writing and Race course in the hope that readers can draw on these ideas when addressing “diversity” in your respective teaching and research efforts.
Composing the Writing and Race Syllabus
I began preparing by defining my terms. Writing is a social art, the practice of crafting language in order to engage with one another; writing is informed by and informs how we understand reality. Race, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain in Racial Formation in the United States, “is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (55). Our understanding of race shifts as a result of “racial projects,” which are “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (56). In the class, this would be our starting point.
Then, I generated a list of “racial projects” since the 1960s that also involved conceptualizations of writing, student writers, composition pedagogy, and disciplinary histories of college composition. The list was wide and varied, and so were the participants within these “projects.” Consider how the following “projects” evidence the complex ways our discipline intersects with racial politics:
Surely, there must be more, but this was a start. I composed the syllabus, ordering the required readings (listed below--see hyperlink) under the following headings:
Haivan V. Hoang is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her ethnographic work on Vietnamese-American rhetorical identities has been widely recognized for its insight into Asian American identity and literacy. Her presentations and publications have addressed important contemporary issues related to Asian American identity, including cultural memory in rhetorical performances and language politics. Her dissertation, "To Come Together and Create a Movement: Solidarity Rhetoric in the Vietnamese American Coalition (VAC)," won the James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2005.
Her current book project, Rewriting Injury: Asian American Rhetoric and Campus Racial Politics, explores the ways Asian American students in post-1960s California have used extracurricular rhetorical spaces to intervene in school racial politics centered on a "rhetoric of injury." The study counterposes two historical moments in Asian American
education: the early 1970's identification of injury and claim to language, whether to a bilingual-bicultural education in Lau v. Nichols or alternative student newspapers among Asian American student activists, and the early 2000's adaptation of the rhetoric of injury in the context of what one compositionist has called "diversity fatigue." In addition to her scholarship, Hoang's undergraduate and graduate teaching focuses on rhetoric, race, and politics. She has been an active member of many departmental and university committees at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Ohio State University. She is a former member of the CCCC Committee on Diversity and has been the co-chair of the Asian/Asian American Caucus since 2005.
Blog Entry
It was with a little apprehension that, over two years ago, I decided to teach a graduate course called Writing and Race. The course was an effort on my part to address the meaning of racial “diversity” in my research and teaching.
Why I Proposed to Teach Writing and Race
The impetus for the course was, in fact, my research. I hoped that teaching a course on Writing and Race would help me get past a snag in my writing. At the time, I was beginning the introduction to my book on Asian American college students and their activist rhetoric; the manuscript tentatively titled, Rewriting Injury: Asian American Rhetoric and Campus Racial Politics, is still in the works. The book, through historiography and ethnography, explores political texts produced by Asian American students: alternative news publications, student club’ constitutions, conversations in club meetings, and other activist rhetoric. In short, my purpose is to call attention to Asian American students’ activist rhetoric in extracurricular spaces and to mine these texts for broader lessons about rhetoric, campus racial politics, and higher education.
But then there was this snag: How could I introduce the project in a compelling way to composition faculty, especially those who neither self-identify as Asian/Asian American nor teach students who themselves are identified as such? I worried that readers would ask me a dreaded though fair question, What does this have to do with college composition? or Quite frankly, why do Asian American students’ activist rhetorics matter to my understanding of writing or writing pedagogy?
I soon realized that, in order to explain what compositionists can gain from my book on Asian American students’ activist rhetoric, I needed to step back and address an even bigger question. How have racial politics and college composition informed one another since the 1960s, and why should compositionists be asking this question?
Teaching a graduate seminar on Writing and Race was a way to explore this question in more depth, but I had a few concerns. To what extent could I account for the complex and contradictory history of race in America? How could I maintain intellectual vigor when trying to teach race scholarship from several disciplines? How would I facilitate class discussions if they were to get heated—or even worse, grow silent? How willing would I be to negotiate viewpoints that I hold dear? I decided to take the plunge because I wanted to further understand how racial politics and composition studies have been intertwined and believe that this is important for graduate students entering the field. Even with the good work that composition scholars have contributed on race as a concept or on racialized writers, we still need to do much more to clarify the ways race figures into our teaching, scholarship, and service.
I believe that’s partly why Joyce Middleton and her colleagues on the CCCC Committee on Diversity kindly invited us all to reflect on everyday strategies for responding to campus diversity. So, I share here a bit about the Writing and Race course in the hope that readers can draw on these ideas when addressing “diversity” in your respective teaching and research efforts.
Composing the Writing and Race Syllabus
I began preparing by defining my terms. Writing is a social art, the practice of crafting language in order to engage with one another; writing is informed by and informs how we understand reality. Race, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain in Racial Formation in the United States, “is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (55). Our understanding of race shifts as a result of “racial projects,” which are “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (56). In the class, this would be our starting point.
Then, I generated a list of “racial projects” since the 1960s that also involved conceptualizations of writing, student writers, composition pedagogy, and disciplinary histories of college composition. The list was wide and varied, and so were the participants within these “projects.” Consider how the following “projects” evidence the complex ways our discipline intersects with racial politics:
- the selection of English as the language of early college composition requirements and university courses in general;
- school segregation for racial minority children;
- writing education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs);
- extracurricular literacy practices in African American women’s literary clubs;
- the legitimation of Black English through 1960s and 70s sociolinguistic research;
- debates over Chinese American, linguistic minority students’ civil rights in the 1974 case Lau v. Nichols;
- prejudice against speakers and writers of Black English, particularly in the Ann Arbor Black English case and in the mid-1990s Ebonics controversy in Oakland;
- the introduction of “basic writing,” specifically following CUNY’s 1970 adoption of an open admissions policy, and a subsequent racializing of basic writers;
- CCCC statements, including Students’ Right to Their Own Language and the National Language Policy;
- the argument to validate codeswitching among speakers and writers of, for example, Black English, Hawai‘i Pidgin, Spanish, and more;
- critiques of multicultural pedagogy and related assumptions about authenticity;
- debates over the ways race has or has not been addressed in the context of process approaches to teaching writing;
- historical recovery of racial minority writers and writing teachers;
- recognition of the absence of linguistic diversity from composition studies and exploring the complicated relationship between ethnicity and race;
- arguments for and refutations against movements to make English the official national language;
- burgeoning research on World Englishes;
- inquiry into whiteness and the implications of whiteness studies on composition pedagogy; and
- the inclusion of racial minority writers and writing teachers in histories of college composition.
Surely, there must be more, but this was a start. I composed the syllabus, ordering the required readings (listed below--see hyperlink) under the following headings:
- Introduction to Racial Formation & College Composition
- From the Late-1960s and Early-1970s “Social Turn” to the Post-Civil Rights Movement
“Retreat from Race” - Ethnicity, Language Difference, and Language Politics
- Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, and a Critique of Rights Rhetoric
- Reflections & Looking Forward…
Students in the class would write weekly questions and comments on our discussion board; contribute to discussion; and propose, draft, and revise a final essay. In the end, I was appreciative of the students, who were smart, collaborative, and questioning. Their talk and their writing about the readings yielded important insights and fresh points of departure.
What I Learned about Racial “Diversity” and College Writing
Racial “diversity” is surely complex; it is the accumulation of past and present racial projects, including those I glimpsed above. So I present just a few of the thoughts-in-progress that emerged from our class in response to the question, How have racial politics and college composition informed one another since the 1960s, and why should compositionists be asking this question?
Racial minority students prior to the 1950s and 60s were scarcely visible in histories of college composition and, for that matter, mainstream American universities. Not until the Third World Liberation Front strikes for ethnic studies and “self-determination” and universities’ subsequent adoptions of “multiculturalism” and “diversity” did racial minority students become systematically visible in higher education (through admissions data, new courses, new student support services, and so on). In spite of the critiques against university commitments to diversity—even valid ones—I am encouraged that the institutionalization of “diversity” provides an opening to name and discuss issues concerning racial minorities on college campuses.
The climate of civil rights activism, as disciplinary narratives tell us, was a turning point for college composition. It is common knowledge among compositionists that, in 1974, CCCC issued the position statement Students’ Right to Their Own Language. The statement was a response to the ways criticism of dialect difference could mask racist approaches (even if inadvertent) to language education.
But this historical moment of the 1960s and 70s also hummed with related racial projects in language education that need to be understood in concert. We might read the Third World Liberation Front strikes for ethnic studies alongside the introduction of “basic writing” at CUNY. We might read Lau v. Nichols and its impact on Chinese American students alongside discourse about Black English. And then, shifting to the late 1970s onward, we might read interest in process approaches to pedagogy alongside historical recovery projects that attend to ethnic/cultural heritages that inform writing practices in the present. We might read calls to recognize world Englishes and linguistic diversity (like those by fellow blogger Paul Kei Matsuda) alongside critical race theorists’ play with genre.
Knitting these racial projects together, we are faced with abundant evidence that indeed race matters in the teaching of college writing. How does it matter? SRTOL begins to answer this question by revealing how disregard for dialect difference can mask uneasiness with racial difference. As a result, compositionists and other researchers of language have attempted to validate linguistic difference by documenting different dialect/language systems and historicizing (and thus valuing) the ethnic/cultural heritages that inform writing practices in the present. Indeed, we require further study into the relationship between ethnic heritage and racial politics, which becomes especially important in light of the changing nature of Englishes across nations.
And there is still more work to do. We need a deeper understanding of the ways racial “diversity” takes shape on college campuses and thus produces students rhetorical imperatives. For me, it is important to study Asian American students’ activist rhetoric because their performances and the conditions that call for their performances cue the dynamic relationship between racial politics and composing practices (even if extracurricular).
The inquiry into racial “diversity” should, I hope, continue for some time. With this reflection, I mean to suggest that I address diversity –whether in my scholarship or my teaching—by seeking deeper understanding of what racial difference means and how it impacts the teaching and learning of writing.
See the syllabus at http://www.ncte.org/library/files/CCCC/1-hoang-syllabus.pdf
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Why Do We Really Need the Word, "Diversity"?
Introductory Bio
A long-time anti-racism activist and educator, Frankie Condon is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of the Writing Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Prior to her arrival at UNL, Frankie directed writing centers at St. Cloud State University, Siena College, and, as a graduate student, at the State University of New York. Frankie has been involved in anti-racism through networks such as the Dismantling Racism Project in Albany, New York, and the Community Anti-Racism Education Initiative in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She has also led numerous anti-racism workshops for community members and college faculty across the Midwest and is co-facilitator of the International Writing Center Association (IWCA) Special Interest Group on Antiracist Activism. Frankie's recent publications include the co-authored book, The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice, which includes the chapter "Everyday Racism: Anti-Racism Work and Writing Center Practice" (2007) and "Beyond the Known: Writing Centers and the Work of Anti-Racism" in the Writing Center Journal (2007). Recently, Frankie has delivered several keynote addresses on anti-racism, which are part of a larger book project on identity, subjectivity, and the teaching of writing one-with-one.
Blog Entry
“I know, I know. We all hate the word diversity,” says the keynote speaker who is encouraging the group of us gathered for this regional conference to get and stay organized. I lean back. Maybe she’s feeling like the word harangues her, I think. Or maybe she’s just tired of hearing it. Or maybe she’s speaking to its inadequacies. My eyes are still on the podium, but now I’ve left the building. I’m wandering through past-times: my childhood as a white kid in a multi-racial family, all of us stuck in love and rage; my activism with the Dismantling Racism Project back in Albany during graduate school; the Community Anti-Racism Education Initiative I worked with in Minnesota; the years of mourning and fighting and celebrating like mad; all the talking and the writing; all the pointless commiseration and transformative communion of anti-racism work. The word doesn’t do my memory justice.
But no, I don’t hate the word “diversity.” Then again, I don’t try very often to “address diversity” in my teaching, scholarship, and service unless I’m writing something that people will have to vote on or agree to (like giving my writing center more money so we can do work that truly needs to be done).
Diversity is a fast-word. It’s a word that’s all about efficiency. Diversity stands in when saying what we really mean would take too long or when folks would like to feel good, but not be called upon to care too much or to care beyond the demands of professionalism or the bounds of civility. Diversity is the sign on the door of a room filled with boxes, stuffed with crates: lost and found objects, the detritus of institutional initiatives of all sorts: recruit more rural kids – no, wait, more city kids; retain more students of color; produce an articulation agreement with a school in Beijing or Budapest; be accommodating to fundamentalist Christian Republicans. Diversity is the entrance to a room stacked with books from Jossey-Bass that made the rounds of administrative and faculty offices and now, discarded, have found their final resting place; old student papers in response to well-intentioned assignments; “Teach Tolerance” stickers still on their sheets; “Safe Space” signs removed from office and dormitory doors as occupants depart.
Every institution has to have a Diversity Room with a door. It helps with sorting. Where does this idea go? Oh, just inside that door, in the Diversity Room. And you can walk past the door and feel good that it’s there. It’s good for all of us that we work in places with rooms like that, with doors that close. Diversity closes. Diversity encloses.
Okay, so I don’t hate the word. I need it sometimes, I admit. But it’s not a word that drives my teaching, writing or service. That work -- or what drives the work -- gathers at the threshold of the term, “diversity:” the history, the materiality, of lived conditions within, through, and under racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism – these drive the work. Irritatingly, perhaps, I want to change the terms of the question. I want to respond to the question, “How do you address the work of anti-oppression in your scholarship, teaching, and service?”
So much of my work, whether in the classroom, the writing center, my writing, or my services to department and institution seems to me now to have been and still to be wrestling with the social and rhetorical production of indifference and exploring the conditions for individual and collective care. How is it, I wonder, and in whose service is any one of us conscripted to do the labor of remembering and forgetting, contrasting, aligning, identifying, appropriating, lying, composing and belonging? I wonder these things because the cultivated performances and performance limits of comfort, generosity and hospitality among and between those who take on these forms of labor within particular communities of meaning-making and practice produces, I think, an expansive and cultivated everyday sort of indifference -- to oppression.
To teach, write, and serve with these questions and this belief at the heart of my praxis, more than demanding a particular set of practices or a particular content, requires of me a mindscape capable of evolving, of learning, of humility and of playing with care. If creating the conditions in which care rather than indifference is cultivated and valued, I cannot begin with the premise that my students or my colleagues are already or irremediably indifferent. Rather, I am challenged to remember, recognize, and acknowledge the difficult and contested terrain on which all of our subject positions and subjectivities are predicated. I am challenged to sustain a mindfulness of the mutability and partiality of theoretical knowledge in accounting for the lived conditions that produce experiential knowledge – my own and that of my students and colleagues. I have to be persistent in my search for the plentiful coordinating conjunction between us: the me-and, us-and, white-and, straight-and, middle class-and—and so on. I’m searching for the -ands not as an act of artifice and denial but as an active, ongoing acknowledgement of simultaneous materiality and fallaciousness of scripted or socially constructed identities and their associated performances. The -and in teaching, learning, writing, and serving is concomitantly an act of identification and dis-identification, an acknowledgment of the complex ways in which privilege and disenfranchisement, freedom and oppression are distributed, limited, enforced, conditionally offered and liberally withdrawn. The -and is not an attribute nor can it be possessed. The -and is about remembering without denying the memory of others, knowing and coming to know without foreclosing what others know or how others come to know. The -and is about seeing oneself reflected in the gaze of the other, listening to the ways one might be named by the other without believing or insisting that the other is or ought to be you and without pretending to be them. It’s a way of becoming I keep reaching for, missing, and reaching for again. The -and, for me, is an ongoing effort to acknowledge the transitive conditions of identity and to stretch toward transgression of what is given and received in and through identity formation.
I want and I hope I can teach writing in a classroom or a class located in the writing center, be a writer, be a colleague who resists absorbing or appropriating difference and who works and teaches for a “nonviolative relation to the Other” (see Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit, 1992). I want and I hope I can teach, write, be, and become in ways that “test the limits of vision and remembrance,” that “mind the aporia between seeing and knowing ‘everything’ or ‘nothing’” (Kyo Maclear, “The Limits of Vision: Hiroshima Mon Amour and the Subversion of Representation,” Routledge 2003). I want and I hope I can teach, write, and serve toward a just and ethical community in which hope coexists with and, indeed, depends upon questioning, reflection, the recognition of contradiction, the acknowledgement of complicity, mourning, celebration, and the embrace of wonderment. But to address any or all of these pedagogical goals (or life goals), I have to (and I’m always learning this the hard way) teach with a pressing recognition of the inherent impossibility of accomplishing them (at least in any measurable sense such that they could be checked off the individual or institutional to-do list). So really the goal is not finality, not winning by individually being the one who finally embodies and enacts a perfected anti-oppressive stance and successfully performs that finitude in any professional setting, but to teach, write, serve, or play such that the learning attending these goals continues and such that the work can also continue.
I really don’t hate the word, “diversity.” And I’m pragmatic enough, I guess, to think that institutions and organizations really do need the word. We – that’s the institutional “we” as opposed to the collective “we compositionists” or “we teachers” or we activists” – we need the word “diversity” and we need statements of principle about “diversity” because the word enables otherwise lumbering, somnambulant institutions to move, to shift even if just a little bit. We need the word because some significant number of our stakeholders are doing risky justice work in service of real need; we need the word to give them protection and legitimacy – to give them cover. We need the word because however facile we may find its typical deployment “diversity” continues to assert the importance of justice. The word whispers the names of those conditions it is so often now used to conceal or efface: racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism. And in that whisper “diversity” acknowledges the reality that they are with us, that we are with them, that we do them and that there is, therefore work to be done.
A long-time anti-racism activist and educator, Frankie Condon is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of the Writing Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Prior to her arrival at UNL, Frankie directed writing centers at St. Cloud State University, Siena College, and, as a graduate student, at the State University of New York. Frankie has been involved in anti-racism through networks such as the Dismantling Racism Project in Albany, New York, and the Community Anti-Racism Education Initiative in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She has also led numerous anti-racism workshops for community members and college faculty across the Midwest and is co-facilitator of the International Writing Center Association (IWCA) Special Interest Group on Antiracist Activism. Frankie's recent publications include the co-authored book, The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice, which includes the chapter "Everyday Racism: Anti-Racism Work and Writing Center Practice" (2007) and "Beyond the Known: Writing Centers and the Work of Anti-Racism" in the Writing Center Journal (2007). Recently, Frankie has delivered several keynote addresses on anti-racism, which are part of a larger book project on identity, subjectivity, and the teaching of writing one-with-one.
Blog Entry
“I know, I know. We all hate the word diversity,” says the keynote speaker who is encouraging the group of us gathered for this regional conference to get and stay organized. I lean back. Maybe she’s feeling like the word harangues her, I think. Or maybe she’s just tired of hearing it. Or maybe she’s speaking to its inadequacies. My eyes are still on the podium, but now I’ve left the building. I’m wandering through past-times: my childhood as a white kid in a multi-racial family, all of us stuck in love and rage; my activism with the Dismantling Racism Project back in Albany during graduate school; the Community Anti-Racism Education Initiative I worked with in Minnesota; the years of mourning and fighting and celebrating like mad; all the talking and the writing; all the pointless commiseration and transformative communion of anti-racism work. The word doesn’t do my memory justice.
But no, I don’t hate the word “diversity.” Then again, I don’t try very often to “address diversity” in my teaching, scholarship, and service unless I’m writing something that people will have to vote on or agree to (like giving my writing center more money so we can do work that truly needs to be done).
Diversity is a fast-word. It’s a word that’s all about efficiency. Diversity stands in when saying what we really mean would take too long or when folks would like to feel good, but not be called upon to care too much or to care beyond the demands of professionalism or the bounds of civility. Diversity is the sign on the door of a room filled with boxes, stuffed with crates: lost and found objects, the detritus of institutional initiatives of all sorts: recruit more rural kids – no, wait, more city kids; retain more students of color; produce an articulation agreement with a school in Beijing or Budapest; be accommodating to fundamentalist Christian Republicans. Diversity is the entrance to a room stacked with books from Jossey-Bass that made the rounds of administrative and faculty offices and now, discarded, have found their final resting place; old student papers in response to well-intentioned assignments; “Teach Tolerance” stickers still on their sheets; “Safe Space” signs removed from office and dormitory doors as occupants depart.
Every institution has to have a Diversity Room with a door. It helps with sorting. Where does this idea go? Oh, just inside that door, in the Diversity Room. And you can walk past the door and feel good that it’s there. It’s good for all of us that we work in places with rooms like that, with doors that close. Diversity closes. Diversity encloses.
Okay, so I don’t hate the word. I need it sometimes, I admit. But it’s not a word that drives my teaching, writing or service. That work -- or what drives the work -- gathers at the threshold of the term, “diversity:” the history, the materiality, of lived conditions within, through, and under racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism – these drive the work. Irritatingly, perhaps, I want to change the terms of the question. I want to respond to the question, “How do you address the work of anti-oppression in your scholarship, teaching, and service?”
So much of my work, whether in the classroom, the writing center, my writing, or my services to department and institution seems to me now to have been and still to be wrestling with the social and rhetorical production of indifference and exploring the conditions for individual and collective care. How is it, I wonder, and in whose service is any one of us conscripted to do the labor of remembering and forgetting, contrasting, aligning, identifying, appropriating, lying, composing and belonging? I wonder these things because the cultivated performances and performance limits of comfort, generosity and hospitality among and between those who take on these forms of labor within particular communities of meaning-making and practice produces, I think, an expansive and cultivated everyday sort of indifference -- to oppression.
To teach, write, and serve with these questions and this belief at the heart of my praxis, more than demanding a particular set of practices or a particular content, requires of me a mindscape capable of evolving, of learning, of humility and of playing with care. If creating the conditions in which care rather than indifference is cultivated and valued, I cannot begin with the premise that my students or my colleagues are already or irremediably indifferent. Rather, I am challenged to remember, recognize, and acknowledge the difficult and contested terrain on which all of our subject positions and subjectivities are predicated. I am challenged to sustain a mindfulness of the mutability and partiality of theoretical knowledge in accounting for the lived conditions that produce experiential knowledge – my own and that of my students and colleagues. I have to be persistent in my search for the plentiful coordinating conjunction between us: the me-and, us-and, white-and, straight-and, middle class-and—and so on. I’m searching for the -ands not as an act of artifice and denial but as an active, ongoing acknowledgement of simultaneous materiality and fallaciousness of scripted or socially constructed identities and their associated performances. The -and in teaching, learning, writing, and serving is concomitantly an act of identification and dis-identification, an acknowledgment of the complex ways in which privilege and disenfranchisement, freedom and oppression are distributed, limited, enforced, conditionally offered and liberally withdrawn. The -and is not an attribute nor can it be possessed. The -and is about remembering without denying the memory of others, knowing and coming to know without foreclosing what others know or how others come to know. The -and is about seeing oneself reflected in the gaze of the other, listening to the ways one might be named by the other without believing or insisting that the other is or ought to be you and without pretending to be them. It’s a way of becoming I keep reaching for, missing, and reaching for again. The -and, for me, is an ongoing effort to acknowledge the transitive conditions of identity and to stretch toward transgression of what is given and received in and through identity formation.
I want and I hope I can teach writing in a classroom or a class located in the writing center, be a writer, be a colleague who resists absorbing or appropriating difference and who works and teaches for a “nonviolative relation to the Other” (see Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit, 1992). I want and I hope I can teach, write, be, and become in ways that “test the limits of vision and remembrance,” that “mind the aporia between seeing and knowing ‘everything’ or ‘nothing’” (Kyo Maclear, “The Limits of Vision: Hiroshima Mon Amour and the Subversion of Representation,” Routledge 2003). I want and I hope I can teach, write, and serve toward a just and ethical community in which hope coexists with and, indeed, depends upon questioning, reflection, the recognition of contradiction, the acknowledgement of complicity, mourning, celebration, and the embrace of wonderment. But to address any or all of these pedagogical goals (or life goals), I have to (and I’m always learning this the hard way) teach with a pressing recognition of the inherent impossibility of accomplishing them (at least in any measurable sense such that they could be checked off the individual or institutional to-do list). So really the goal is not finality, not winning by individually being the one who finally embodies and enacts a perfected anti-oppressive stance and successfully performs that finitude in any professional setting, but to teach, write, serve, or play such that the learning attending these goals continues and such that the work can also continue.
I really don’t hate the word, “diversity.” And I’m pragmatic enough, I guess, to think that institutions and organizations really do need the word. We – that’s the institutional “we” as opposed to the collective “we compositionists” or “we teachers” or we activists” – we need the word “diversity” and we need statements of principle about “diversity” because the word enables otherwise lumbering, somnambulant institutions to move, to shift even if just a little bit. We need the word because some significant number of our stakeholders are doing risky justice work in service of real need; we need the word to give them protection and legitimacy – to give them cover. We need the word because however facile we may find its typical deployment “diversity” continues to assert the importance of justice. The word whispers the names of those conditions it is so often now used to conceal or efface: racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism. And in that whisper “diversity” acknowledges the reality that they are with us, that we are with them, that we do them and that there is, therefore work to be done.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Diversity, Metaphorical Constructions, and Enacting Deliberative Democracy in Teaching, Scholarship, and Service
Introductory Bio
Michelle Hall Kells is an associate professor and director of rhetoric and writing in the English department at the University of New Mexico. She teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in 20th Century Civil Rights Rhetoric; Contemporary and Classical Rhetoric; Writing and Cultural Studies, and Language Diversity. Dr. Kells’s research interests include civil rights rhetorics, sociolinguistics, and composition/literacy studies. She served as the Program Chair for the 2007 UNM Civil Rights Symposium, “40 years of Community Activism, 1967-2007: Civil Rights Reform Then and Now.” This symposium was a notable success and part of Kells’s vision for UNM and the discussion of civil rights and rhetoric in the Southwest and beyond. Dr. Kells is currently the Program Chair for the fall 2008 University of New Mexico Civil Rights Symposium: “Civic Literacy Across Communities: A Public Forum." The symposium seeks to generate cross-cultural dialogue that engages diverse voices and that promotes inclusion. Kells also developed a variation on the WAC model entitled Writing Across Communities. The WACommunities project, a visionary one, is designed to help University faculty, graduate teaching instructors, administrators, and staff understand the many contexts in which students need to read and write effectively, and to provide instruction to meet those needs. This program is unique both in the diverse student population it serves and in its focus on “educat[ing] students for global lives…in which the ability to communicate fluently across boundaries is essential.” Professor Kells is coeditor of Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines, and Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education (1999). She is author of Hector P. Garcia: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights (2006). Her current book project is Vicente Ximenes and LBJ’s “Great Society”: The Rhetoric of Mexican American Civil Rights Reform.
Editor's Note: Find information about the UNM Civil Rights Symposium on Michelle's webpage: http://www.unm.edu/~english/Faculty/Kells/Index.htm.
Blog Entry
The metaphorical construction of “diversity” has functioned as a first principal in my scholarship, teaching, and service since the beginning of my professional career. Conditioned by my own place and position, the notion of diversity has been prominent in the ways I have framed my research, shaped my teaching, and structured my service projects for over the past 10 years. My own migratory experience living, moving, and identifying with communities in the Southwest certainly has formed my conceptionalization of diversity. I cannot extricate myself from the people and place in which my own intellectual life has been cultivated. So I must begin with the ecology of my own experience. The inter-relatedness of space, landscape, living processes constitute change-over-time, the wellspring of diversity. Let me develop this concept further through metaphor.
I see bio-diversity as an enviro-physiological problem-solving response and process shaped by ever-shifting conditions. To extend the metaphor further, I see cultural (or ethno/sociolinguistic) diversity as an enviro-sociological problem-solving response and process shaped by ever-shifting conditions. Variation and innovation are intrinsic survival strategies. We, and this dynamic environment we inhabit, are works-in-progress. Like language itself we are a mixed collective, a constellation, an aggregate, un mestizaje. Purity is a myth. We are all mestizos. My own research again and again reveals that we are more successful negotiating this complex universe with a rich and varied communicative repertoire. If we are truly interested in helping our students thrive, we as educators will help them articulate their multiple spheres of belonging (constituted through the discourses they bring with them and those they acquire in the highly specialized discursive world of the university). Where and how do our students claim citizenship? How do we coordinate our changing lives, changing conditions?
These questions have challenged me to triangulate constructs of diversity with deliberative democracy (as context) and rhetoric (as practice). As a concept, “diversity” began for me as a recognition (and reconciliation) with notions of “difference” (racial, linguistic, class, cultural, sexual, generational, religious, regional, national, physiological, social, intellectual, perceptual, political etc.). Closely aligned, however, with this recognition of difference is the realization of disparity. Not all variations (linguistic, cultural, racial, sexual, etc.) have equal social value. Systems of hereditary privilege ascribe privilege to selected groups over others. That reality has always troubled me. As such, my preoccupation with constructions of diversity has fused with concerns about disparity (issues of social justice), and has evolved into a prevailing question about how diversity constitutes and is constituted within a nation of heterogeneous communities.
Diversity invigorates a deliberative democracy. Diversity perpetually complicates deliberative democratic institutions, including our colleges and universities. Difference challenges us to adapt, change, grow, respond. If we live in an exponentially diverse social world, how do we construct our relationships to one another? How do we distribute our cultural, political, and material resources equitably? Rhetoric then becomes the means by which we (as teachers, scholars, and citizens) constitute and protect the presence and participation of the diverse groups within a deliberative democracy. Reflecting on the practices of activists in civil rights, labor, human rights, women’s rights, indigenous sovereignty, I am impressed that all exercised a rhetoric of presence through discursive identification with a people, a place, a moment, and a vision of social justice. These should be our models as educators of an endangered generation.
When I joined the faculty at the University of New Mexico, the chair of the department asked me to launch a conversation about WAC. I aligned notions of social diversity and deliberative democratic practice with a model of WAC I call “Writing Across Communities.” This project has evolved over the past four years into growing conversations about literacy education, social justice, and cultural diversity. Programmatically, we have reconceptualized the First Year Writing program with these issues in mind. We have initiated interdepartmental and cross-community discussions on civil rights, civic literacy, place-based learning, ethnolinguistic identity, and academic access. I recently reflected on this project in an article for the Journal of Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy (see the Spring 2007 issue):
Michelle Hall Kells is an associate professor and director of rhetoric and writing in the English department at the University of New Mexico. She teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in 20th Century Civil Rights Rhetoric; Contemporary and Classical Rhetoric; Writing and Cultural Studies, and Language Diversity. Dr. Kells’s research interests include civil rights rhetorics, sociolinguistics, and composition/literacy studies. She served as the Program Chair for the 2007 UNM Civil Rights Symposium, “40 years of Community Activism, 1967-2007: Civil Rights Reform Then and Now.” This symposium was a notable success and part of Kells’s vision for UNM and the discussion of civil rights and rhetoric in the Southwest and beyond. Dr. Kells is currently the Program Chair for the fall 2008 University of New Mexico Civil Rights Symposium: “Civic Literacy Across Communities: A Public Forum." The symposium seeks to generate cross-cultural dialogue that engages diverse voices and that promotes inclusion. Kells also developed a variation on the WAC model entitled Writing Across Communities. The WACommunities project, a visionary one, is designed to help University faculty, graduate teaching instructors, administrators, and staff understand the many contexts in which students need to read and write effectively, and to provide instruction to meet those needs. This program is unique both in the diverse student population it serves and in its focus on “educat[ing] students for global lives…in which the ability to communicate fluently across boundaries is essential.” Professor Kells is coeditor of Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines, and Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education (1999). She is author of Hector P. Garcia: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights (2006). Her current book project is Vicente Ximenes and LBJ’s “Great Society”: The Rhetoric of Mexican American Civil Rights Reform.
Editor's Note: Find information about the UNM Civil Rights Symposium on Michelle's webpage: http://www.unm.edu/~english/Faculty/Kells/Index.htm.
Blog Entry
The metaphorical construction of “diversity” has functioned as a first principal in my scholarship, teaching, and service since the beginning of my professional career. Conditioned by my own place and position, the notion of diversity has been prominent in the ways I have framed my research, shaped my teaching, and structured my service projects for over the past 10 years. My own migratory experience living, moving, and identifying with communities in the Southwest certainly has formed my conceptionalization of diversity. I cannot extricate myself from the people and place in which my own intellectual life has been cultivated. So I must begin with the ecology of my own experience. The inter-relatedness of space, landscape, living processes constitute change-over-time, the wellspring of diversity. Let me develop this concept further through metaphor.
I see bio-diversity as an enviro-physiological problem-solving response and process shaped by ever-shifting conditions. To extend the metaphor further, I see cultural (or ethno/sociolinguistic) diversity as an enviro-sociological problem-solving response and process shaped by ever-shifting conditions. Variation and innovation are intrinsic survival strategies. We, and this dynamic environment we inhabit, are works-in-progress. Like language itself we are a mixed collective, a constellation, an aggregate, un mestizaje. Purity is a myth. We are all mestizos. My own research again and again reveals that we are more successful negotiating this complex universe with a rich and varied communicative repertoire. If we are truly interested in helping our students thrive, we as educators will help them articulate their multiple spheres of belonging (constituted through the discourses they bring with them and those they acquire in the highly specialized discursive world of the university). Where and how do our students claim citizenship? How do we coordinate our changing lives, changing conditions?
These questions have challenged me to triangulate constructs of diversity with deliberative democracy (as context) and rhetoric (as practice). As a concept, “diversity” began for me as a recognition (and reconciliation) with notions of “difference” (racial, linguistic, class, cultural, sexual, generational, religious, regional, national, physiological, social, intellectual, perceptual, political etc.). Closely aligned, however, with this recognition of difference is the realization of disparity. Not all variations (linguistic, cultural, racial, sexual, etc.) have equal social value. Systems of hereditary privilege ascribe privilege to selected groups over others. That reality has always troubled me. As such, my preoccupation with constructions of diversity has fused with concerns about disparity (issues of social justice), and has evolved into a prevailing question about how diversity constitutes and is constituted within a nation of heterogeneous communities.
Diversity invigorates a deliberative democracy. Diversity perpetually complicates deliberative democratic institutions, including our colleges and universities. Difference challenges us to adapt, change, grow, respond. If we live in an exponentially diverse social world, how do we construct our relationships to one another? How do we distribute our cultural, political, and material resources equitably? Rhetoric then becomes the means by which we (as teachers, scholars, and citizens) constitute and protect the presence and participation of the diverse groups within a deliberative democracy. Reflecting on the practices of activists in civil rights, labor, human rights, women’s rights, indigenous sovereignty, I am impressed that all exercised a rhetoric of presence through discursive identification with a people, a place, a moment, and a vision of social justice. These should be our models as educators of an endangered generation.
When I joined the faculty at the University of New Mexico, the chair of the department asked me to launch a conversation about WAC. I aligned notions of social diversity and deliberative democratic practice with a model of WAC I call “Writing Across Communities.” This project has evolved over the past four years into growing conversations about literacy education, social justice, and cultural diversity. Programmatically, we have reconceptualized the First Year Writing program with these issues in mind. We have initiated interdepartmental and cross-community discussions on civil rights, civic literacy, place-based learning, ethnolinguistic identity, and academic access. I recently reflected on this project in an article for the Journal of Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy (see the Spring 2007 issue):
Framing conversations on “diversity” and enacting advocacy initiatives within the institution is my primary role in the university. As a newly tenured professor and recently appointed director of Rhetoric and Writing, mediating communities and resources represents my principal duty. How do I address the topic of diversity in my scholarship, teaching, and service? I am creating new courses (e.g. Rhetorics of Place and Belonging, Language and Diversity, Writing and Cultural Studies, etc.), coordinating the Writing Across Communities Colloquia Series, chairing the Civil Rights Symposia, building liaisons and partnerships within and beyond the university, opening a community writing center, cultivating new research in civil rights rhetoric, establishing educational scholarships in Language and Literacy Studies, and mentoring students as new leaders. Diversity represents abundance—opportunity, vision, and generativity.The challenge for the Writing Across Communities initiative at UNM is enhancing
opportunities to build identification with the cultures of the academy as well
as cultivate appreciation across the university for the cultures and
epistemologies our students bring with them. By taking an advocacy role in
the university for ethnolinguistically-diverse students, WAC can help to mediate
and educate faculty and administrators about the constraints and concerns facing
college writers. Communicative competence depends upon complex strategies of
shuttling between ideas and audiences, a challenging, culturally-dependent
process. What might WAC look like if we open the conceptual umbrella to include
engagement with a broad range of cultural, civic, and professional
discourses? What would WAC look like if we concerned ourselves with not
only the discourses our students acquire in the classroom, but the rhetorical
resources they bring to the university? Under the rubric of Writing Across
Communities, the scope of WAC enlarges to engage not only ideas across the
disciplines, but the dissonance and dissent concomitant to the democratization
of academic discourse. Engaging dissonance is precisely the work of civic
and academic discourse, of taking on the role of citizen and scholar, of
belonging to a human community. Writing is the act of negotiating
difference through language.
While WAC and writing centers are
uniquely structured to serve the university community as cultural mediators,
there has been little guidance in WAC scholarship addressing the needs and
interests of ethnolinguistically-diverse student populations. The challenge for
writing program, writing center, and WAC administrators is finding productive
ways to foreground the social, cultural, and environmental dimensions of the
communicative context in the teaching of writing. (Kells)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Diversity and Language Differences
Introductory Bio
Paul Kei Matsuda is perhaps the most recognizable scholar addressing second language writing issues today. He is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he also serves as Director of Writing Programs. He is founding chair of the CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing and of the Symposium on Second Language Writing, which began as a biennial gathering of second language writing scholars, but which has grown into an annual international event. He is editor of the Parlor Press Series on Second Language Writing, and he has edited or co-edited numerous collections and special issues. A prolific and award-winning author as well, Paul's widely cited work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, English for Specific Purposes, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Basic Writing, Journal of Second Language Writing, and Written Communication. He is consistently invited to give talks, lead workshops, and teach courses in the US and abroad. In 2007, Paul was a visiting scholar at Nagoya University in Japan and at the University of Hong Kong.
Editor's note: Please check out Paul's list of publications on his beautiful webpage at: http://matsuda.jslw.org/research.html
Blog Entry
How do you address the topic of “diversity” in your scholarship, teaching, and service?
When people hear the word “diversity,” they may think of categories that are now highly conventionalized—race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, political views, etc. The term has been appropriated widely and its meaning has become somewhat diluted, but many of the original issues and concerns that prompted people to recognize, celebrate and covet diversity still remain relevant today. At the same time, many of the same issues that were invisible in the early discussion of diversity continue to be overshadowed by visible categories of diversity. I’m thinking particularly of language issues, of course.
Over the years, the effort to increase the visible diversity on campus has also intensified the issue of language diversity, although institutions for some reason don’t often recognize them as closely-related issues. For decades, U.S. institutions of higher education have been finding ways to compete for visible diversity by experimenting with admission procedures, by creating financial incentives, and by recruiting more aggressively in certain communities to increase visible diversity on campus. Many of these students come from diverse language backgrounds that are distinct from traditional students. At home, they may speak a variety of African American Vernacular English; a contact variety of English commonly referred to as Tex Mex or Spanglish; Appalachian English; or another language altogether—be it native American languages or languages, like English, that came from other continents as people migrated into this country.
U.S. colleges and universities have also been competing for international students who benefit institutions tremendously. Many of those students represent the best and brightest from all over the world. Many of them contribute to the visible diversity and enhance the international flavor of the campus. They would bring foreign capital—they are required to demonstrate that they have sufficient financial means to fund their entire course of study and cover the cost of living. They pay full tuition because they don’t qualify for many scholarships and financial aids. At state institutions, they usually pay the out-of-state rate because they are not considered residents even when they pay full taxes in the state. They also maintain full-time status because their visa status requires it. They also bring cheap (and legal) labor to campus because they are not allowed to work off campus due to visa regulations.
At school, these students may speak English with a distinct accent that is commonly (though sometimes erroneously) associated with their race and ethnicity. They may also speak their “own” varieties of English or languages among students from similar linguistic backgrounds. Or they may code-switch to a variety of spoken English that is familiar to the dominant language group in an effort to fit in, which can mask the level of linguistic diversity on campus as well as the struggle they go through as they try to write in the dominant variety of English they are not familiar with. Some of them—especially if they are Caucasian (a term some White students have never heard of)—may be able to pass as a native speaker of the dominant language; others may actually be native speakers of the dominant variety and people still perceive an accent—just because they look Asian.
How do I address these issues in my scholarship, teaching and service?
In my scholarship, I have been pointing out the lack of attention to language issues in U.S. higher education and particularly in rhetoric and composition studies, and suggesting ways to expand the field. To this end, I’ve written historical articles showing the ways in which the field has been responding to the presence of language differences in the contexts of first-year composition ( “Composition”; “Myth”; “Situating”), basic writing (“Basic”), and Writing across the curriculum (Matsuda and Jablonski, “Beyond”). I have also suggested specific ways in which the field as a whole and writing programs might think about and respond to the presence of language differences productively (“Alternative”; Matsuda and Silva, “Cross”). I’ve also edited books and special journal issues to provide resources and to further the conversation about language differences and their implications (Politics; Second Language Writing in the Composition Classroom; Second Language Writing Research).
Language issues also figure prominently in my teaching. In first-year writing courses, I try to raise the awareness of the positionality of the variety students are often expected to use and learn in U.S. higher education. I have also taught a theme-based first-year writing class where the focus was language issues of various kinds, such as different views on grammars, second language acquisition, language policy, and language teaching. In linguistics courses, I also invite students to think of not just the linguistic structures and changes but also of the historical and political aspects of language development and their symbolic functions.
At the graduate level, I have been incorporating language issues into core courses—such as composition theory, the history of composition, and research methods. I have regularly assigned readings on language issues, inviting students to try on a new theoretical lens and to reexamine the business as usual point of view. I have also been teaching a graduate course on second language writing on a regular basis to provide an opportunity to dig deeper into those issues.
In all of these cases, I try to avoid the in-your-face approach to diversity, which, in my opinion, only threatens students and puts them on the defensive; this does not lead to productive conversations or intellectual developments. Instead, I introduce those issues gradually—exposing students to new and intriguing issues, inviting them to explore the new territory, challenging them to think critically about their own assumptions, and providing additional resources to them for further exploration.
As teachers, we often recognize the need to be patient and to give students some space in order for them to grow. But we also know that, when it comes to issues that are near and dear to us, it’s difficult to be patient—to overlook a slight hint of apathy or resistance. I try to think of it this way: It’s all about treating students with the respect they deserve while facilitating their learning and personal growth. It’s easier said than done, I know. But the result is definitely worth the effort.
I also believe in service. (It’s a dangerous thing to admit, I know.) But in order to influence the field and to bring important issues to light, it’s not enough to be publishing or teaching.
I started by serving as a secretary for the CCCC SIG on Second Language Writing, which Tony Silva created in 1995. I took over the SIG and chaired it for a few years. In the late 1990s, I also started a series of workshops at CCCC, starting in 1998, and I continued to be involved in it until just a few years ago. But all of these efforts seemed rather temporary and uncoordinated; to remedy the situation, I spoke with Victor Villanueva, who was the CCCC chair at the time, about creating a committee on second language writing, which happened in 1998. The committee developed a Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers for CCCC, and coordinated various activities at CCCC, including workshops, SIG meetings, and an open meeting, where people discussed the status of second language writing at CCCC and developed plans for the following year.
At TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc.), I served as the chair of the Nonnative English Speakers in TESOL (NNEST) Caucus. Although people are increasingly uncomfortable with the dichotomy between native and nonnative English speakers (or users, as I would prefer to call them), the perception of the difference remains, and what some people call the native speaker myth—the undue privileging of the native speaker in language studies—still persists. In North American higher education, there are many English writing teachers who are themselves multilingual users of English; in the world, there probably are more English teachers who are nonative English users than those who are native English uses (though this is ultimately a false binary). It is important to raise the awareness, and sometimes the best way to do that is to create a movement rather than to talk about it in publications (although that also helps, too).
I am also active at the American Association for Applied Linguistics, where I have been engaging in conversations on writing, among other issues, to emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary understanding and cooperation. In this context, my job is to raise the awareness of the vast amount of knowledge that has been developed in rhetoric and composition, to enhance the study of writing in applied linguistics as well as to help applied linguists provide their insights more effectively to rhetoric and composition specialists.
My involvements are not limited to these national and international organizations. In the late 1990s, I felt the need to create a space for people who specialize in second language writing (because neither CCCC nor TESOL provided a space for highly specialized discussion of second language writing issues), and with Tony Silva, created the Symposium on Second Language Writing. The first meeting in 1998 was successful, and we decided to make it a biennial event. In 2007, we had our first symposium outside North America, and we also made it an annual event. This year, it is being held in June 2008 at Purdue University, and in November 2009, it will be taking place at Arizona State University.
I also edit a book series on second language writing, published by Parlor Press. This series also addresses the same issue I was trying to address when Tony and I created the Symposium—to create a space where second language writing specialists could speak to other specialists in the field.
My service efforts are not just limited to second language writing. Because I define myself broadly as a bona fide rhetoric and composition specialist as well as an applied linguistics and TESOL specialist, I get invited to work in many different capacities for various organizations and publishers—in evaluating manuscripts, serving on various committees, and participating in special initiatives like this blog. These activities are not as highly valued as research and teaching are, but I still take them seriously. As I have explained in one of the book chapters (“Coming”), I do what I do not because they count toward tenure and promotion but because I want to make a difference in the field—or in the world. Being involved also helps me better understand my fields as well as people in them; it also creates more opportunities to participate in meaningful conversations about issues that matter. I hope this piece will also generate a lot of interesting discussion and, more importantly, action.
Paul Kei Matsuda is perhaps the most recognizable scholar addressing second language writing issues today. He is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he also serves as Director of Writing Programs. He is founding chair of the CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing and of the Symposium on Second Language Writing, which began as a biennial gathering of second language writing scholars, but which has grown into an annual international event. He is editor of the Parlor Press Series on Second Language Writing, and he has edited or co-edited numerous collections and special issues. A prolific and award-winning author as well, Paul's widely cited work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, English for Specific Purposes, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Basic Writing, Journal of Second Language Writing, and Written Communication. He is consistently invited to give talks, lead workshops, and teach courses in the US and abroad. In 2007, Paul was a visiting scholar at Nagoya University in Japan and at the University of Hong Kong.
Editor's note: Please check out Paul's list of publications on his beautiful webpage at: http://matsuda.jslw.org/research.html
Blog Entry
How do you address the topic of “diversity” in your scholarship, teaching, and service?
When people hear the word “diversity,” they may think of categories that are now highly conventionalized—race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, political views, etc. The term has been appropriated widely and its meaning has become somewhat diluted, but many of the original issues and concerns that prompted people to recognize, celebrate and covet diversity still remain relevant today. At the same time, many of the same issues that were invisible in the early discussion of diversity continue to be overshadowed by visible categories of diversity. I’m thinking particularly of language issues, of course.
Over the years, the effort to increase the visible diversity on campus has also intensified the issue of language diversity, although institutions for some reason don’t often recognize them as closely-related issues. For decades, U.S. institutions of higher education have been finding ways to compete for visible diversity by experimenting with admission procedures, by creating financial incentives, and by recruiting more aggressively in certain communities to increase visible diversity on campus. Many of these students come from diverse language backgrounds that are distinct from traditional students. At home, they may speak a variety of African American Vernacular English; a contact variety of English commonly referred to as Tex Mex or Spanglish; Appalachian English; or another language altogether—be it native American languages or languages, like English, that came from other continents as people migrated into this country.
U.S. colleges and universities have also been competing for international students who benefit institutions tremendously. Many of those students represent the best and brightest from all over the world. Many of them contribute to the visible diversity and enhance the international flavor of the campus. They would bring foreign capital—they are required to demonstrate that they have sufficient financial means to fund their entire course of study and cover the cost of living. They pay full tuition because they don’t qualify for many scholarships and financial aids. At state institutions, they usually pay the out-of-state rate because they are not considered residents even when they pay full taxes in the state. They also maintain full-time status because their visa status requires it. They also bring cheap (and legal) labor to campus because they are not allowed to work off campus due to visa regulations.
At school, these students may speak English with a distinct accent that is commonly (though sometimes erroneously) associated with their race and ethnicity. They may also speak their “own” varieties of English or languages among students from similar linguistic backgrounds. Or they may code-switch to a variety of spoken English that is familiar to the dominant language group in an effort to fit in, which can mask the level of linguistic diversity on campus as well as the struggle they go through as they try to write in the dominant variety of English they are not familiar with. Some of them—especially if they are Caucasian (a term some White students have never heard of)—may be able to pass as a native speaker of the dominant language; others may actually be native speakers of the dominant variety and people still perceive an accent—just because they look Asian.
How do I address these issues in my scholarship, teaching and service?
In my scholarship, I have been pointing out the lack of attention to language issues in U.S. higher education and particularly in rhetoric and composition studies, and suggesting ways to expand the field. To this end, I’ve written historical articles showing the ways in which the field has been responding to the presence of language differences in the contexts of first-year composition ( “Composition”; “Myth”; “Situating”), basic writing (“Basic”), and Writing across the curriculum (Matsuda and Jablonski, “Beyond”). I have also suggested specific ways in which the field as a whole and writing programs might think about and respond to the presence of language differences productively (“Alternative”; Matsuda and Silva, “Cross”). I’ve also edited books and special journal issues to provide resources and to further the conversation about language differences and their implications (Politics; Second Language Writing in the Composition Classroom; Second Language Writing Research).
Language issues also figure prominently in my teaching. In first-year writing courses, I try to raise the awareness of the positionality of the variety students are often expected to use and learn in U.S. higher education. I have also taught a theme-based first-year writing class where the focus was language issues of various kinds, such as different views on grammars, second language acquisition, language policy, and language teaching. In linguistics courses, I also invite students to think of not just the linguistic structures and changes but also of the historical and political aspects of language development and their symbolic functions.
At the graduate level, I have been incorporating language issues into core courses—such as composition theory, the history of composition, and research methods. I have regularly assigned readings on language issues, inviting students to try on a new theoretical lens and to reexamine the business as usual point of view. I have also been teaching a graduate course on second language writing on a regular basis to provide an opportunity to dig deeper into those issues.
In all of these cases, I try to avoid the in-your-face approach to diversity, which, in my opinion, only threatens students and puts them on the defensive; this does not lead to productive conversations or intellectual developments. Instead, I introduce those issues gradually—exposing students to new and intriguing issues, inviting them to explore the new territory, challenging them to think critically about their own assumptions, and providing additional resources to them for further exploration.
As teachers, we often recognize the need to be patient and to give students some space in order for them to grow. But we also know that, when it comes to issues that are near and dear to us, it’s difficult to be patient—to overlook a slight hint of apathy or resistance. I try to think of it this way: It’s all about treating students with the respect they deserve while facilitating their learning and personal growth. It’s easier said than done, I know. But the result is definitely worth the effort.
I also believe in service. (It’s a dangerous thing to admit, I know.) But in order to influence the field and to bring important issues to light, it’s not enough to be publishing or teaching.
I started by serving as a secretary for the CCCC SIG on Second Language Writing, which Tony Silva created in 1995. I took over the SIG and chaired it for a few years. In the late 1990s, I also started a series of workshops at CCCC, starting in 1998, and I continued to be involved in it until just a few years ago. But all of these efforts seemed rather temporary and uncoordinated; to remedy the situation, I spoke with Victor Villanueva, who was the CCCC chair at the time, about creating a committee on second language writing, which happened in 1998. The committee developed a Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers for CCCC, and coordinated various activities at CCCC, including workshops, SIG meetings, and an open meeting, where people discussed the status of second language writing at CCCC and developed plans for the following year.
At TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc.), I served as the chair of the Nonnative English Speakers in TESOL (NNEST) Caucus. Although people are increasingly uncomfortable with the dichotomy between native and nonnative English speakers (or users, as I would prefer to call them), the perception of the difference remains, and what some people call the native speaker myth—the undue privileging of the native speaker in language studies—still persists. In North American higher education, there are many English writing teachers who are themselves multilingual users of English; in the world, there probably are more English teachers who are nonative English users than those who are native English uses (though this is ultimately a false binary). It is important to raise the awareness, and sometimes the best way to do that is to create a movement rather than to talk about it in publications (although that also helps, too).
I am also active at the American Association for Applied Linguistics, where I have been engaging in conversations on writing, among other issues, to emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary understanding and cooperation. In this context, my job is to raise the awareness of the vast amount of knowledge that has been developed in rhetoric and composition, to enhance the study of writing in applied linguistics as well as to help applied linguists provide their insights more effectively to rhetoric and composition specialists.
My involvements are not limited to these national and international organizations. In the late 1990s, I felt the need to create a space for people who specialize in second language writing (because neither CCCC nor TESOL provided a space for highly specialized discussion of second language writing issues), and with Tony Silva, created the Symposium on Second Language Writing. The first meeting in 1998 was successful, and we decided to make it a biennial event. In 2007, we had our first symposium outside North America, and we also made it an annual event. This year, it is being held in June 2008 at Purdue University, and in November 2009, it will be taking place at Arizona State University.
I also edit a book series on second language writing, published by Parlor Press. This series also addresses the same issue I was trying to address when Tony and I created the Symposium—to create a space where second language writing specialists could speak to other specialists in the field.
My service efforts are not just limited to second language writing. Because I define myself broadly as a bona fide rhetoric and composition specialist as well as an applied linguistics and TESOL specialist, I get invited to work in many different capacities for various organizations and publishers—in evaluating manuscripts, serving on various committees, and participating in special initiatives like this blog. These activities are not as highly valued as research and teaching are, but I still take them seriously. As I have explained in one of the book chapters (“Coming”), I do what I do not because they count toward tenure and promotion but because I want to make a difference in the field—or in the world. Being involved also helps me better understand my fields as well as people in them; it also creates more opportunities to participate in meaningful conversations about issues that matter. I hope this piece will also generate a lot of interesting discussion and, more importantly, action.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Rhetorics of Survivance: "Recovery" Work for American Indian Writing
Introductory Bio
Malea Powell is a mixed-blood of Indiana Miami, Eastern Shawnee, and Euroamerican ancestry. She is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and American Culture at Michigan State University where she directs the Rhetoric & Writing program and serves as a faculty member in the American Indian Studies program. Her research on examining the rhetorics of survivance used by 19th century American Indian intellectuals has been published widely. Her current scholarly project focuses on American Indian material rhetorics and the degree to which such everyday arts tie tradition and innovation in the cultural practices of contemporary Native women. She is at work on a book manuscript, Rhetorical Powwows, that ties her historical and material scholarship together. Powell was, for seven years, editor of SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures (a quarterly journal devoted to the study of American Indian writing), for which she twice won the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers “Writer of the Year” award for scholarly editing, and she was just appointed the Associate National Director of the Wordcraft Circle. She is also the lead editor for a textbook, Of Color: Teaching Literatures of Color Rhetorically (Prentice Hall/Pearson). In her spare time, she serves on the Advisory Board of the National Center for Great Lakes Native American Cultures, Inc. in Portland, Indiana and writes romance novels.
Blog Entry
How do you address the topic of "diversity" in your scholarship, teaching, and service?
For me, diversity isn’t a “topic” at all. The behaviors that our discipline frequently categorizes as “attention to diversity” are part of every classroom already, are part of every scholarly audience already, are part of every university and every community we enter already. So the way I know to respond to questions like this is to say that my main goal as a scholar, teacher, mentor, and colleague is to change the way that knowledge by, about, and for American Indians is produced, distributed, taught, and received. In order to do that, I know that I have to make Universities safe and productive spaces for all folks who have not traditionally been advantaged by American academies – folks of color, women, queer folks, otherly-abled folks – because our scholarly fortunes are deeply connected.
While most of my scholarly work has been firmly centered in Rhetoric Studies, my commitment to American Indian intellectual production requires that I also substantially in the American Indian Studies community, both local and national. As editor of Studies in American Indian Literatures for 7 years (SAIL is the only journal in the United States that focuses specifically on writings produced by Native peoples, and as a well-known scholar in the discipline of Rhetoric & Composition), and now as the Associate National Director of the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, I have both the responsibility and the opportunity to mentor dozens of Native scholars (and non-Native scholars of Native writing) across a wide array of disciplinary and institutional arrangements. Both of these are positions that might be conventionally seen as “service” but that, done well, also require substantial intellectual investment and innovation. Deciding to take these positions wasn’t about elevating my own scholarly profile – it was about elevating the profile of entire fields of study and practice. It’s important to me that my work in academia always point to something larger than myself – to wider communities and practices who need to be noticed.
In terms of my own scholarship (and that phrase always seems awkward and more than a little selfish to me), much of my published work is rooted in a large, wide-ranging archival project called Rhetorical Powwows: American Indians Writing/Making Survivance. The project is focused on two things: first, a critical understanding of the way in which mainstream scholars have theorized “the Indian” for the past 150 years, and on the rhetorically sophisticated ways in which Native writers, intellectuals, activists and artists have responded to those constructions. This is the archival, textual piece of the project where I read the writings of the Native intellectuals rhetorically, listening for their use of popular nineteenth century notions about “the Indian,” and listening for the ways in which they reimagine what it means to be Native after centuries of colonization, genocide, and assimilation. It is that reimagining that I mark as “survivance,” and the tactics through which they enact that reimagining as “rhetorics of survivance.” This piece of the project is the most conventional in that it fits well with the current way that scholars in Rhetoric Studies have traditionally conceived of what it means to “do” rhetorical history. The second piece of the project radically challenges those traditional notions by investigating parallel rhetorical practices engaged in my Native “makers” – basketmakers, beadworkers, quillworkers, etc. – and understanding those practices as part of the same rhetorical and intellectual traditions begin enacted in print.
There are two significant things about this scholarly project in relation to the prompt for this blog:
First, it provides important “recovery” work for American Indian writing in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and important critical intellectual work to situate that writing. It also provides important new ways to think about American Indian material production as a rhetorical act. So it complies with scholarly traditions in the discipline then challenges those traditions and provides innovative interventions into conventional practices.
Second, while I have worked consistently on this critical project over the past decade, my decision to postpone the seemingly logical outcome of such research – a single-authored critical book – was purposeful, the result of a series of decisions I made to be a different kind of scholar, one who studied and participated in the project of American Indian survivance by creating a space where American Indian Studies and Rhetoric Studies can both grow.
I believe the accumulated result of my intellectual and “service” contributions to date has been, ultimately, larger than the contribution I might have made had I published even an important single-authored monograph in one of my chosen disciplines – Rhetoric Studies or American Indian Studies. In fact, I’d say that the kind of book I’m writing now wouldn’t have been possible without the past 10 years of working otherwise.
Additionally, I believe that a serious commitment to engaged and innovative teaching is an integral component of my responsibilities as a scholar of color. I’ve taught a wide range of courses – from first year writing to graduate courses in Rhetoric, American Studies & American Indian Studies. I take each course assignment seriously as a rhetorical and scholarly challenge. One of the ways in which I structure all of the courses that I teach is to focus on critical engagement with texts through historically informed and culturally situated rhetorical reading strategies. I think it’s deeply important that students in all of my classrooms understand that history and culture matter so I use a variety of strategies to gently insist that students attend to the connections between past and present, and that they extend their rhetorical investigations significantly beyond the edges of the text – to go beyond “what happened in this text and what does it mean?” to considerations of how the text makes meaning and what consequences that meaning has in the lives of people who live a multitude of realities. It’s true, I tend to have a lot of students of color enrolled in my classes, but I have a lot of “white” students as well. One thing I know from a long career of teaching is that the kinds of supports, strategies, and interventions that work especially well for students of color almost always work especially well for all students.
An extension of my commitment to classroom teaching is the amount of time I spend recruiting, supporting and mentoring graduate student. Because I already cast my role in the graduate classroom as that of a rhetorically experienced colleague, and because those classrooms are informed by my understanding that learning is a process of constant negotiation and resituating, my mentoring work necessarily extends that understanding to foster graduate student engagement with their discipline/field and their institution as cultural texts that can be situated, negotiated, revised and analyzed. And because I have high expectations for the level at which graduate students engage with these varied texts, I also take a good deal of time to simply know, support, and socialize with the students I work with. The academy can be a difficult place for many graduate students, especially for women and students of color. I ended up in the academy because of the support and encouragement of my family, my teachers, and my elders; I see it as my responsibility to them to extend the same level of support and encouragement to others.
In fact, if there’s one constant in that way I approach my scholarship, teaching and service, it’s the understanding that none of us gets “here” (no matter how that “here” is defined) by ourselves. Meritocracy is a myth – we all stand on the shoulders of others. The key is realizing where we’ve been helped, where we may have unfairly taken advantage, and how to be responsible for those who made our lives “here” possible. For me that means extending support (sometimes more support than I actually received) to the folks around me – both students and colleagues – in a generous way. It may sound corny, but I try to live as a scholar/teacher by treating folks in the way I’d like to be treated. I don’t always live up to that ideal but I do try, and I do judge my actions by it. And I do try to arrange my life as an intellectual in a way that both honors my elders and enables a better future for Native peoples.
So I guess my answer to the prompt is that there’s no “trick” for “adding” diversity to any part of our lives as scholars & teachers – honoring diversity is a way of life.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Definition Matters: Teaching the Materiality of the Trope Race, Using Barack Obama's, "A More Perfect Union" Speech
Introductory Bio
Professor and Department Chair of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Krista Ratcliffe contributes to the CCCC Conversations on Diversity her well-established and award-winning research on the cultural presence and/or absence of women’s voices and on the intersections of gender, race, and whiteness. In Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, which won the 2007 CCCC Outstanding Book Award, Ratcliffe troubles identifications of gender and whiteness to examine how whiteness functions as an “invisible” racial category. She examines the displacement and neglect of a literacy of listening and identifies the potential of rhetorical listening—a stance of openness—for inviting a more complicated notion of identification. In addition to her contributions through research and teaching, Ratcliffe serves as past president of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, as a current member of MLA’s Division on Teaching Writing, and of CCCC’s Task Force on Databases.
Blog Entry
I. Race as a Trope
In philosophical and rhetorical studies, Plato tells us that definition matters. Definition is, after all, a crucial step in his dialectic. In critical race studies, Cornel West tells us that race matters. Race Matters is, after all, the title of one of his books. Two key phrases from the previous sentences—definition matters and race matters—each signify in different ways. The slippage (between matters signifying as a noun and verb, between definition and race signifying as adjectives and subjects) demonstrates the communicative facility of language (in all senses of the word facility). Whatever the author’s intent, the possibilities for audience receptions are always multiple. This possibility and dilemma is at the heart of rhetorical studies. Given this multiplicity, it is fair to say that all words function as tropes, i.e., signifying differently to different people in different times and in different places even as cultural logics do offer possibilities for common interpretations.
By that logic, race is a trope.
But that claim sets some people’s teeth on edge.
Why?
There is a fear that, if race is discussed as a trope, then the discussion of race will focus only on language and discourse; by extension, there is a fear that bodies and cultures will be erased, both metaphorically and literally.
Is that fear legitimate?
Yes … sometimes.
But not always.
Does discussing race as the trope race always succeed? Of course not. No rhetorical tactic always succeeds, and success is always measured in terms of degree. Yet given this caveat, I want to relay how I used the tactic of discussing race as race in an undergraduate rhetorical theory course this past spring when we studied Senator Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union.”
My purpose here is to invite a discussion of the pro’s and con’s of discussing how the study of tropes, particularly the study of race as race, may be used as an antiracist pedagogical project.
II. The Class and In-Class Activity
First, a bit of context. Last semester in my undergraduate rhetorical theory course, composed mostly of juniors and seniors, the students and I began our study of rhetoric by reading excerpts from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the purpose being to identify definitions and tactics of rhetoric. Then we studied five different units: political rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, literary rhetorics, visual rhetorics, and pedagogical rhetorics.[1] On the last day of class, I asked students to practice listening rhetorically to an excerpt from Senator Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, which we first watched on the web and then read from a printed handout.
The in-class assignment was for students to get into pairs to discuss the first of the following questions:
(1) What are the assumed definitions of race in this speech?
(2) What importance is ascribed to race in this speech (for people/cultures)?
(3) How does whiteness function in this speech?
(4) How useful is this speech for spurring a conversation about race?
My plan was that we could then pull back together as a class to discuss the pairs’ findings on question one and then discuss the other three questions.
The excerpt from Senator Obama’s speech, which we watched and read, is as follows:
As sometimes happens in my teaching, my plan was scrapped because the students and I spent most of the time allotted to this activity discussing just one question: “What are the assumed definitions of race in this speech?” That fact got me to thinking again about the importance of definition.
III. The Class Discussion
Once the pairs had finished their work, I asked students, first, to share passages they had identified where definitions of race were stated or implied and, second, to share what they thought were the assumed definitions of those passages. Students were asked to avoid jumping to conclusions about whether or not they agreed with the definitions; they were simply to define and classify. Here are some of their—and my—responses.
In Senator Obama’s speech, definitions of race are either stated or implied in terms of:
(1) color (“black man,”“white woman” … family “of every race and hue”)
(2) geographic location (“Kenya,” “Kansas” … “three continents”)
(3) historical location (WWII … today)
(4) economic location (Depression, factory … fundraising presidential race)
(5) ancestry (African Americans descended from “slaves and slaveowners,” whites with
no acknowledged African ancestry …Americans of African and white ancestry)
(6) biology (“genetic makeup”)
(7) a story (“in no other country on Earth is my story even possible”)
(8) the only facet of identity (“too black” or “not black enough”)
(9) only one facet of identity (“Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a
purely racial lens”)
(10) inflections in national symbols (Confederate Flag)
(11) cultural tension (“the press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial
polarization” … “it has only been in the last couple of weeks the discussion of race in this
campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn”)
(12) more than a black/white binary opposition (“not just in terms of white and black,
but black and brown as well”)
(13) subordinate to idea-based coalitions (“we built a powerful coalition of African Americans
and white Americans”)
(14) hope (“I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve
them together”)
Once the students and I identified some of the above definitions, we discussed some implications. We concluded that if six paragraphs can generate so many different definitions of race, then that partly explained why it is so hard to talk about race in the U.S. For example, if Cornel West says “race matters,” assuming #13, and then reader person says, “yes,” assuming #11, then they have just honestly and unknowingly “agreed” on two different things. Disagreements can, likewise, cross definitions.
IV. Pedagogical Implications
This multiplicity of definitions evidences a U.S. racial discourse that (conveniently for the power structure of the status quo) obfuscates communication about race—about how it is inflected by history, economics, ancestry, biology, gender, etc.; about how it is a constructed category (a trope) originally perpetuated in the U.S. via myopic religion and false science to bolster a mostly non-white labor force as well as a mostly white ownership class; and about how it has subsequently had material consequences—both positive and negative—for the bodies and souls of real people, whether marked as “black,”“brown,”“yellow,”“red,”“white” or some combinations thereof. Throughout U.S. history, material bodies have been racially troped and, consequently, racial tropes have been embodied. In this way, tropes work not only so that they have material consequences for real people’s bodies but also so that, in the process of embodiment, they are made material (in common and different ways). And over time and place, this chicken-and-egg cycle continues.
So with this claim, I arrive back where I began. A discussion of race via the trope race begs a discussion not simply of language but of bodies and cultures as well as how all three are implicated in one another in particular ways in particular times and places. And extending this discussion of race to a discussion of whiteness-as-a-racial-category, then the trope of whiteness also begs a discussion not simply of language but of bodies and cultures as well as how all three are implicated in one another in particular ways in particular times and places. Whiteness is not the same thing as a body coded as white. Whiteness is a trope that signifies actions, attitudes, and (yes) certain bodies (that are coded as white). But bodies coded as white may or may not perpetuate actions and attitudes coded as white; likewise, bodies coded as non-white may or may not perpetuate actions and attitudes coded as white. Whiteness is a trope that may be performed by language, bodies, and cultures, either ignorantly or knowingly; and depending on the definitions associated with whiteness at a particular time or place, a performance of whiteness may be racist or anti-racist. The same is true of many other tropes.
Such discussions, I believe, serve pedagogical antiracist projects because they distance students from immediately jumping to personal claims/accusations of blame, guilt, denial, and/or defensiveness that often shut down discussions of race in the U.S. because we too often tend either to be silent or to argue past (not with) one another. Such distance, I believe, slows students down and asks them to listen to how race and whiteness signify structurally within the U.S. Once these structural significations are established as existing (the first level of stasis), then students can move to discussions of naming, valuing, and taking action (the second through fourth levels of stasis), only then coming (without the possibility of denial) to a reflection on race and whiteness in terms of how the structural affects the personal … and how the personal affects the structural.
[1] For a copy of my syllabus, cf. http://www.marquette.edu/english/faculty/ratcliffe.shtml.
Professor and Department Chair of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Krista Ratcliffe contributes to the CCCC Conversations on Diversity her well-established and award-winning research on the cultural presence and/or absence of women’s voices and on the intersections of gender, race, and whiteness. In Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, which won the 2007 CCCC Outstanding Book Award, Ratcliffe troubles identifications of gender and whiteness to examine how whiteness functions as an “invisible” racial category. She examines the displacement and neglect of a literacy of listening and identifies the potential of rhetorical listening—a stance of openness—for inviting a more complicated notion of identification. In addition to her contributions through research and teaching, Ratcliffe serves as past president of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, as a current member of MLA’s Division on Teaching Writing, and of CCCC’s Task Force on Databases.
Blog Entry
I. Race as a Trope
In philosophical and rhetorical studies, Plato tells us that definition matters. Definition is, after all, a crucial step in his dialectic. In critical race studies, Cornel West tells us that race matters. Race Matters is, after all, the title of one of his books. Two key phrases from the previous sentences—definition matters and race matters—each signify in different ways. The slippage (between matters signifying as a noun and verb, between definition and race signifying as adjectives and subjects) demonstrates the communicative facility of language (in all senses of the word facility). Whatever the author’s intent, the possibilities for audience receptions are always multiple. This possibility and dilemma is at the heart of rhetorical studies. Given this multiplicity, it is fair to say that all words function as tropes, i.e., signifying differently to different people in different times and in different places even as cultural logics do offer possibilities for common interpretations.
By that logic, race is a trope.
But that claim sets some people’s teeth on edge.
Why?
There is a fear that, if race is discussed as a trope, then the discussion of race will focus only on language and discourse; by extension, there is a fear that bodies and cultures will be erased, both metaphorically and literally.
Is that fear legitimate?
Yes … sometimes.
But not always.
Does discussing race as the trope race always succeed? Of course not. No rhetorical tactic always succeeds, and success is always measured in terms of degree. Yet given this caveat, I want to relay how I used the tactic of discussing race as race in an undergraduate rhetorical theory course this past spring when we studied Senator Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union.”
My purpose here is to invite a discussion of the pro’s and con’s of discussing how the study of tropes, particularly the study of race as race, may be used as an antiracist pedagogical project.
II. The Class and In-Class Activity
First, a bit of context. Last semester in my undergraduate rhetorical theory course, composed mostly of juniors and seniors, the students and I began our study of rhetoric by reading excerpts from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the purpose being to identify definitions and tactics of rhetoric. Then we studied five different units: political rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, literary rhetorics, visual rhetorics, and pedagogical rhetorics.[1] On the last day of class, I asked students to practice listening rhetorically to an excerpt from Senator Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, which we first watched on the web and then read from a printed handout.
The in-class assignment was for students to get into pairs to discuss the first of the following questions:
(1) What are the assumed definitions of race in this speech?
(2) What importance is ascribed to race in this speech (for people/cultures)?
(3) How does whiteness function in this speech?
(4) How useful is this speech for spurring a conversation about race?
My plan was that we could then pull back together as a class to discuss the pairs’ findings on question one and then discuss the other three questions.
The excerpt from Senator Obama’s speech, which we watched and read, is as follows:
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign--to
continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just,
more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to
run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that
we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together –unless
we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we
hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from
the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction—towards a better
future for of children and our grandchildren. This belief comes from my
unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But
it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black
man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a
white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during
World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at
Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in
America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black
American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners—an
inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers,
sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue,
scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never
forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even
possible.
It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional
candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea
that this nation is more than the sum of its parts-- that out of many, we are
truly one.
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all
predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this
message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a
purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the
whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the
Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans
and white Americans.
This is not to say that race has not been an
issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have
deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions
bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The
press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial
polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as
well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that
the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive
turn.
As sometimes happens in my teaching, my plan was scrapped because the students and I spent most of the time allotted to this activity discussing just one question: “What are the assumed definitions of race in this speech?” That fact got me to thinking again about the importance of definition.
III. The Class Discussion
Once the pairs had finished their work, I asked students, first, to share passages they had identified where definitions of race were stated or implied and, second, to share what they thought were the assumed definitions of those passages. Students were asked to avoid jumping to conclusions about whether or not they agreed with the definitions; they were simply to define and classify. Here are some of their—and my—responses.
In Senator Obama’s speech, definitions of race are either stated or implied in terms of:
(1) color (“black man,”“white woman” … family “of every race and hue”)
(2) geographic location (“Kenya,” “Kansas” … “three continents”)
(3) historical location (WWII … today)
(4) economic location (Depression, factory … fundraising presidential race)
(5) ancestry (African Americans descended from “slaves and slaveowners,” whites with
no acknowledged African ancestry …Americans of African and white ancestry)
(6) biology (“genetic makeup”)
(7) a story (“in no other country on Earth is my story even possible”)
(8) the only facet of identity (“too black” or “not black enough”)
(9) only one facet of identity (“Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a
purely racial lens”)
(10) inflections in national symbols (Confederate Flag)
(11) cultural tension (“the press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial
polarization” … “it has only been in the last couple of weeks the discussion of race in this
campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn”)
(12) more than a black/white binary opposition (“not just in terms of white and black,
but black and brown as well”)
(13) subordinate to idea-based coalitions (“we built a powerful coalition of African Americans
and white Americans”)
(14) hope (“I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve
them together”)
Once the students and I identified some of the above definitions, we discussed some implications. We concluded that if six paragraphs can generate so many different definitions of race, then that partly explained why it is so hard to talk about race in the U.S. For example, if Cornel West says “race matters,” assuming #13, and then reader person says, “yes,” assuming #11, then they have just honestly and unknowingly “agreed” on two different things. Disagreements can, likewise, cross definitions.
IV. Pedagogical Implications
This multiplicity of definitions evidences a U.S. racial discourse that (conveniently for the power structure of the status quo) obfuscates communication about race—about how it is inflected by history, economics, ancestry, biology, gender, etc.; about how it is a constructed category (a trope) originally perpetuated in the U.S. via myopic religion and false science to bolster a mostly non-white labor force as well as a mostly white ownership class; and about how it has subsequently had material consequences—both positive and negative—for the bodies and souls of real people, whether marked as “black,”“brown,”“yellow,”“red,”“white” or some combinations thereof. Throughout U.S. history, material bodies have been racially troped and, consequently, racial tropes have been embodied. In this way, tropes work not only so that they have material consequences for real people’s bodies but also so that, in the process of embodiment, they are made material (in common and different ways). And over time and place, this chicken-and-egg cycle continues.
So with this claim, I arrive back where I began. A discussion of race via the trope race begs a discussion not simply of language but of bodies and cultures as well as how all three are implicated in one another in particular ways in particular times and places. And extending this discussion of race to a discussion of whiteness-as-a-racial-category, then the trope of whiteness also begs a discussion not simply of language but of bodies and cultures as well as how all three are implicated in one another in particular ways in particular times and places. Whiteness is not the same thing as a body coded as white. Whiteness is a trope that signifies actions, attitudes, and (yes) certain bodies (that are coded as white). But bodies coded as white may or may not perpetuate actions and attitudes coded as white; likewise, bodies coded as non-white may or may not perpetuate actions and attitudes coded as white. Whiteness is a trope that may be performed by language, bodies, and cultures, either ignorantly or knowingly; and depending on the definitions associated with whiteness at a particular time or place, a performance of whiteness may be racist or anti-racist. The same is true of many other tropes.
Such discussions, I believe, serve pedagogical antiracist projects because they distance students from immediately jumping to personal claims/accusations of blame, guilt, denial, and/or defensiveness that often shut down discussions of race in the U.S. because we too often tend either to be silent or to argue past (not with) one another. Such distance, I believe, slows students down and asks them to listen to how race and whiteness signify structurally within the U.S. Once these structural significations are established as existing (the first level of stasis), then students can move to discussions of naming, valuing, and taking action (the second through fourth levels of stasis), only then coming (without the possibility of denial) to a reflection on race and whiteness in terms of how the structural affects the personal … and how the personal affects the structural.
[1] For a copy of my syllabus, cf. http://www.marquette.edu/english/faculty/ratcliffe.shtml.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Rhetorics of Racism
Introductory Bio
Victor Villaneuva, the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Washington State University, is our first Guest writer for the CCCC Conversations on Diversity series. Victor's reputation is well known among most of the readers of this blog entry, I'm sure--most notably his award-winning publication, Bootstraps: from an American Academic of Color. A popular writer, speaker, and recipient of numerous awards, he is the former chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. He has authored or edited five books and nearly forty articles or chapters in books, and he has delivered over ninety public speeches throughout the country. His concern is with the connections between language and racism. We look forward both to his stimulating and provocative conversation with us on the subject of diversity and, importantly, our CCCC/NCTE readers responses, comments, and posts.
Blog Entry
First time I heard of a blog, a weblog, was from the late John Lovas, former chair of CCCC. I figured I’d leave that to others, that I’d just claim to be “old school” (meaning the dog that isn’t going to learn the new tricks). But I was asked to contribute here, and I agreed. Still not doing a blog, though, really, just a short essay. I was told to make it short, between 1200 and 2000 words, and in those four or so pages, to answer the following prompt:
How do you address the topic of “diversity” in your scholarship, teaching, and service?
Freeze. I reckon I don’t address much else in a little over twenty years of published scholarship (or in the scholarship that led up to those pubs). I reckon I don’t address much else in my service or in my teaching either. Or maybe, I don’t.
I don’t really work with “diversity,” that all-inclusive and non-inclusive institutional term. I’m old school. I don’t care for that word diversity any more than I cared for its predecessor, multiculturalism. I’m glad those who make institutional decisions about bureaucratic titles realized that there are problems that extend beyond “culture” (replete with scare quotes, since “culture” really means racism, and multiculturalism was a term for non-hostile-anti-racism).
Diversity just tries to be all-inclusive—the entire range of differences. That’s what the word means, after all—a range of differences. So—if you’re not part of the “same,” you’re among the range of differences. The French distinguished the Same from the Other. Diversity is the American version of l’autre. But who are the Same?
What’s the norm here? The temptation is to say white men. But that isn’t fair. Most are different from that norm, I’d bet, though they have enough power not to notice, more often than not. The norm is predicated on power. And the words used to describe some of those different ones, the diverse ones, tells of power, an insight provided by Rosemary Hennessy in her references to heteronormativity, the function of which is to make homosexuality a deviance from the normed hetero. It may well be that wif-man, the root of “woman,” was not a derivative of the male as man, but that sure has become the connotation. Or what to make of “differently abled”? Or “minority”? Differential power relations are carried in the language.
Where I work, there is an Office of Equity and Diversity. That’s an interesting title—Fairness and Difference. I wish that the “and” were replaced with “despite” or “within.” But right now, the Office betrays the precise problem, diversity detached from equity, two different subjects: fairness (what we all want) and difference (with the different maybe or maybe not being treated fairly). Separate out the two and all there is the acknowledgement of power differences, of a sorting mechanism that decides who is most likely to get parceled out, separated, othered.
CCCC and its parent organization, for example, have any number of committees and resolutions and initiatives on diversity, yet in the case of CCCC there have been women who have headed the organization; there have been African Americans who have headed the organization; and there has been one Latino (one, male, Latino, in sixty years). In sixty years, with all its committees and resolutions and initiatives, like this one, there has been no disabled chair, no out gay chair (assuming some of those many chairs would have been gay—just not placing their sexuality on the forefront of their expressed identity), no Asian American, no Pacific Islander, no American Indian, Asian, South Asian, or Middle Eastern chair—labels I’ve chosen based on CCCC members I know who self-identify along these lines. Acknowledging difference is not the same as acting on those differences—substantively.
Diversity as something other than Equity.
Whatever the euphemism, the language betrays the ways that the othering remains. Yet we are clear that there has been progress: access ramps, signers, GLBT organizations, initiatives to attract students of color to schools and organizations like ours, classes that focus on racism or disabilities or queer theory or gender.
Students always tell me at the beginning of classes that have as their focus racism, the particular diversity subset that I am most concerned with, that they believe there still is racism; “of course,” they say, “but it isn’t what it used to be.” The same can be said for all of the Others.
But all that has really changed—and it is a significant change, all in all—is the social sanctions againstracism. The social sanction against gender discrimination has altered, not as significantly as it has of racism (if the prevalence of the word “bitch” has any significance). Yet the social sanction of heterosexism remains as strong as ever, as public debate takes place about whether or not gay couples should be treated fairly. And social safety nets for the poor have become threadbare. Beneath the sanctions, the affects of bigotry and exclusion remain.
“You can’t drive a knife into a man’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress." --Malcolm X
That bigotries are not what it used to be isn’t to say that everything is okay, that we can toss the word diversity into initiatives of various sorts and have those initiatives address the underlying, structural problems. These problems take effect in real, political economic terms, and they’re ideologically transmitted, maintained, and obscured through language—our business.
We are all of us rhetoricians. All of us—linguists, compositionists, literary critics, writers. We look at how language affects us aesthetically, socially, politically.
Recall Donald Bryant’s definition of rhetoric as “adjusting ideas to people and people to ideas” and Kenneth Burke’s “symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." Not all persuasion is argument. How we come to believe certain ideas also happens through language, is rhetorical. And what the rhetoric seems more intent on carrying is less how we should go about putting an end to racism and to other forms of hurtful discrimination than how to believe that things are better than they used to be, a Platonic notion, Yeats’s gyres. We’d do better to remember Burke.
Hey, Victor--
I know that sometimes you feel like you aren't reaching people, so I wanted to tell you about this great paper I read. It was talking about "subtle" racism—which is color-blind racism. The student argues that racism was believed to have disappeared after the Civil Rights Movement, but it didn't--instead the language changed. I left the topic open, so that students could write about anything dealing with the history of rhetoric--and so, she decided on her own to do this. The student is white, and she was one of your students.
--Rose
For me, what works pedagogically as well as philosophically, is looking at the tropes that are contained in the discourse of not-as-bad-as-it-was (why, we even have a VP for Equity and Diversity, a CDO). Burke makes much about the epistemological weight carried by what he terms four master tropes: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. But I’m more interested in—and having students think about—tropes more broadly, less about identifying some trope out of the rhetorical canon than recognizing how the language carries common ideas, how being colorblind is a trope and what it does to blind folks to the harm caused by continuing racism, how diversity, no less than multiculturalism, has us celebrating when it’s too soon to pat ourselves on the back.
I have students look at the tropes developed by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Students take issue with him—always. His rhetoric is strident, readily open to charges of “reverse discrimination,” of bad-faith empiricism. And I agree: he’s not good at winning over readers. But before we’re very far distant from his book, his four “frames” of “racetalk,” the discourse we use to hide or deny ongoing racism, and could easily be extended to embrace all those who are the targets of diversity, finds its way into our conversations and into the students’ papers. It doesn’t take long for them to recognize that what he terms “frames” are tropes.
Although Bonilla-Silva tweaks the labels to his frames from publication to publication, they amount to four: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism (or the biologization of culture), and the minimization of racism:
Victor Villaneuva, the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Washington State University, is our first Guest writer for the CCCC Conversations on Diversity series. Victor's reputation is well known among most of the readers of this blog entry, I'm sure--most notably his award-winning publication, Bootstraps: from an American Academic of Color. A popular writer, speaker, and recipient of numerous awards, he is the former chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. He has authored or edited five books and nearly forty articles or chapters in books, and he has delivered over ninety public speeches throughout the country. His concern is with the connections between language and racism. We look forward both to his stimulating and provocative conversation with us on the subject of diversity and, importantly, our CCCC/NCTE readers responses, comments, and posts.
Blog Entry
First time I heard of a blog, a weblog, was from the late John Lovas, former chair of CCCC. I figured I’d leave that to others, that I’d just claim to be “old school” (meaning the dog that isn’t going to learn the new tricks). But I was asked to contribute here, and I agreed. Still not doing a blog, though, really, just a short essay. I was told to make it short, between 1200 and 2000 words, and in those four or so pages, to answer the following prompt:
How do you address the topic of “diversity” in your scholarship, teaching, and service?
Freeze. I reckon I don’t address much else in a little over twenty years of published scholarship (or in the scholarship that led up to those pubs). I reckon I don’t address much else in my service or in my teaching either. Or maybe, I don’t.
I don’t really work with “diversity,” that all-inclusive and non-inclusive institutional term. I’m old school. I don’t care for that word diversity any more than I cared for its predecessor, multiculturalism. I’m glad those who make institutional decisions about bureaucratic titles realized that there are problems that extend beyond “culture” (replete with scare quotes, since “culture” really means racism, and multiculturalism was a term for non-hostile-anti-racism).
Diversity just tries to be all-inclusive—the entire range of differences. That’s what the word means, after all—a range of differences. So—if you’re not part of the “same,” you’re among the range of differences. The French distinguished the Same from the Other. Diversity is the American version of l’autre. But who are the Same?
What’s the norm here? The temptation is to say white men. But that isn’t fair. Most are different from that norm, I’d bet, though they have enough power not to notice, more often than not. The norm is predicated on power. And the words used to describe some of those different ones, the diverse ones, tells of power, an insight provided by Rosemary Hennessy in her references to heteronormativity, the function of which is to make homosexuality a deviance from the normed hetero. It may well be that wif-man, the root of “woman,” was not a derivative of the male as man, but that sure has become the connotation. Or what to make of “differently abled”? Or “minority”? Differential power relations are carried in the language.
Where I work, there is an Office of Equity and Diversity. That’s an interesting title—Fairness and Difference. I wish that the “and” were replaced with “despite” or “within.” But right now, the Office betrays the precise problem, diversity detached from equity, two different subjects: fairness (what we all want) and difference (with the different maybe or maybe not being treated fairly). Separate out the two and all there is the acknowledgement of power differences, of a sorting mechanism that decides who is most likely to get parceled out, separated, othered.
CCCC and its parent organization, for example, have any number of committees and resolutions and initiatives on diversity, yet in the case of CCCC there have been women who have headed the organization; there have been African Americans who have headed the organization; and there has been one Latino (one, male, Latino, in sixty years). In sixty years, with all its committees and resolutions and initiatives, like this one, there has been no disabled chair, no out gay chair (assuming some of those many chairs would have been gay—just not placing their sexuality on the forefront of their expressed identity), no Asian American, no Pacific Islander, no American Indian, Asian, South Asian, or Middle Eastern chair—labels I’ve chosen based on CCCC members I know who self-identify along these lines. Acknowledging difference is not the same as acting on those differences—substantively.
Diversity as something other than Equity.
Whatever the euphemism, the language betrays the ways that the othering remains. Yet we are clear that there has been progress: access ramps, signers, GLBT organizations, initiatives to attract students of color to schools and organizations like ours, classes that focus on racism or disabilities or queer theory or gender.
Students always tell me at the beginning of classes that have as their focus racism, the particular diversity subset that I am most concerned with, that they believe there still is racism; “of course,” they say, “but it isn’t what it used to be.” The same can be said for all of the Others.
But all that has really changed—and it is a significant change, all in all—is the social sanctions againstracism. The social sanction against gender discrimination has altered, not as significantly as it has of racism (if the prevalence of the word “bitch” has any significance). Yet the social sanction of heterosexism remains as strong as ever, as public debate takes place about whether or not gay couples should be treated fairly. And social safety nets for the poor have become threadbare. Beneath the sanctions, the affects of bigotry and exclusion remain.
“You can’t drive a knife into a man’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress." --Malcolm X
That bigotries are not what it used to be isn’t to say that everything is okay, that we can toss the word diversity into initiatives of various sorts and have those initiatives address the underlying, structural problems. These problems take effect in real, political economic terms, and they’re ideologically transmitted, maintained, and obscured through language—our business.
We are all of us rhetoricians. All of us—linguists, compositionists, literary critics, writers. We look at how language affects us aesthetically, socially, politically.
Recall Donald Bryant’s definition of rhetoric as “adjusting ideas to people and people to ideas” and Kenneth Burke’s “symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." Not all persuasion is argument. How we come to believe certain ideas also happens through language, is rhetorical. And what the rhetoric seems more intent on carrying is less how we should go about putting an end to racism and to other forms of hurtful discrimination than how to believe that things are better than they used to be, a Platonic notion, Yeats’s gyres. We’d do better to remember Burke.
Hey, Victor--
I know that sometimes you feel like you aren't reaching people, so I wanted to tell you about this great paper I read. It was talking about "subtle" racism—which is color-blind racism. The student argues that racism was believed to have disappeared after the Civil Rights Movement, but it didn't--instead the language changed. I left the topic open, so that students could write about anything dealing with the history of rhetoric--and so, she decided on her own to do this. The student is white, and she was one of your students.
--Rose
For me, what works pedagogically as well as philosophically, is looking at the tropes that are contained in the discourse of not-as-bad-as-it-was (why, we even have a VP for Equity and Diversity, a CDO). Burke makes much about the epistemological weight carried by what he terms four master tropes: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. But I’m more interested in—and having students think about—tropes more broadly, less about identifying some trope out of the rhetorical canon than recognizing how the language carries common ideas, how being colorblind is a trope and what it does to blind folks to the harm caused by continuing racism, how diversity, no less than multiculturalism, has us celebrating when it’s too soon to pat ourselves on the back.
I have students look at the tropes developed by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Students take issue with him—always. His rhetoric is strident, readily open to charges of “reverse discrimination,” of bad-faith empiricism. And I agree: he’s not good at winning over readers. But before we’re very far distant from his book, his four “frames” of “racetalk,” the discourse we use to hide or deny ongoing racism, and could easily be extended to embrace all those who are the targets of diversity, finds its way into our conversations and into the students’ papers. It doesn’t take long for them to recognize that what he terms “frames” are tropes.
Although Bonilla-Silva tweaks the labels to his frames from publication to publication, they amount to four: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism (or the biologization of culture), and the minimization of racism:
- abstract liberalism: every man for himself, and may the best man win; fair competition without regard (or mention) of race or ethnicity; lack of qualified candidates of color without regard to the causes for those lack of qualifications.
- naturalization: it’s only natural that they would hang out with their own kind; it’s only natural that students of color would not attend a rural university; it’s just the way things are.
- cultural racism/biologization of racism: they’re culturally predisposed to athletics; they’re culturally predisposed to partying rather than hard work (written about Puerto Ricans in a book titled Latinos); they’re culturally predisposed to having a lot of babies.
- minimization: of course there is still racism, but it isn’t as bad as it once was.
I never call the students on their own uses of these tropes. I always assure them the class isn’t about them; just like I have built a career with faith in readers’ good faith; it’s about us all; about the language we are presented with and use. And so I ask them to read newspapers, extend beyond CNN and the Discovery Channel, keep their ears open.
Posted at a bus stop outside the local high school:
(Larger versions of this image are available at: http://www.ncte.org/library/files/CCCC/Victor-Image.JPG
And then there are the current events in a world in which racism is different from what it once was. No room here to tell what students find, but here’s a simple list from one section of one class during fall semester 2007:
- Celebrity Racism: Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, Don Imus, Dog the Bounty Hunter;• Jena 6: nooses around the country, including Columbia Univ;
- Charleston, West Virginia: the rape and torture of a young black woman in by six white people;
- The Fence: anti-brown immigration hysteria;
- The Fence: College Republicans (a sanctioned student organization) on our campus erect a fence; two faculty engage the students; the faculty show up on You Tube and Fox News;
- Dr. James Watson: Nobel Prize Winner, co-discoverer of DNA—back to Black inferiority;
- Supreme Court decisions on school integration;• Resistance Records andRaHoWa (ie, Racial Holy War);
- Prussian Blue: thirteen year old girls performing neo-Nazi music, and receiving national broadcast attention;
- The Knights Party: the new face of the Ku Klux Klan (literally);
- Lewiston, Idaho, outside the Nez Percé Reservation, 45 miles from our campus: a thirteen year old American Indian girl is beaten for asking four or five young men “What about Native pride?”
- Islamo Fascism Week on our campus
Students not only record these events, but they record how the events are presented—or not presented by the news media—the ways in which reporters or the police or local politicians are quick to dismiss each event as an aberration. One student drawn to looking at Los Angeles after reading The Necessary Hunger, an assigned novel I would recommend to all for the classroom (Black, Asian American, young gay love, athletics, class differences) found “The Homicide Report,” which claims over a thousand homicides a year in LA. To the degree that any gets press, the discussions turn toward “gang violence,” yet she found only one of 773 killings could be traced to a gang member. Now, I can’t vouch for her figures.
But I can vouch that the student could read a rhetoric that tries to minimize violence as cultural (two of Bonilla-Silva’s tropes). Our attitudes about racial difference and about gender difference are different (with only minimal changes in attitudes about sexuality or class), but we must be attuned to the rhetorics that convey the message that greater acceptance of difference is the same as greater fairness despite difference.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
CCCC Conversations on Diversity
Welcome to the “CCCC Conversations on Diversity”
The CCCC Committee on Diversity is pleased to announce a new blogging series. For the next several months, we will host a forum for CCCC members to broaden our organization’s thinking, talking, and writing about diversity in our profession. Starting on Thursday, May 29, 2008 (in 2 weeks), we will feature blog posts by Guest writers from across the discipline of rhetoric and composition in higher education at http://cccc-blog.blogspot.com/.
We will begin the series with a Guest blog post by Victor Villaneuva, the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Washington State University. Guest postings will be open to anyone with internet access who wants to read it, and CCCC/NCTE members will be able to post comments. Everyone can find Victor Villaneuva’s blog post and each new Guest writer’s blog post on the CCCC blog site, bi-weekly (2 times per month), until Thursday, October 16, 2008.
At the risk of interrupting your summer plans, we’d like to ask for your attention over the next few months at a computer screen near you. We would like your help to generate a sustained conversation about the role of diversity in the work we do. Of course, the work of rhetoric and composition has addressed issues of diversity for decades, and each year brings new scholars and perspectives to CCCC. Ultimately, we’d like to think about our Guest writers’ statements, your responses, and the archived blog posts, when our Committee generates a CCCC Position Statement on Diversity this year. We believe that this statement should reflect the contributions of as broad a cross-section of members as possible (see our charge at: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/gov/committees/all/115435.htm).
Thanks for reading our first blog post on the CCCC Conversations on Diversity.
Enjoy your summer!
The CCCC Committee on Diversity is pleased to announce a new blogging series. For the next several months, we will host a forum for CCCC members to broaden our organization’s thinking, talking, and writing about diversity in our profession. Starting on Thursday, May 29, 2008 (in 2 weeks), we will feature blog posts by Guest writers from across the discipline of rhetoric and composition in higher education at http://cccc-blog.blogspot.com/.
We will begin the series with a Guest blog post by Victor Villaneuva, the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Washington State University. Guest postings will be open to anyone with internet access who wants to read it, and CCCC/NCTE members will be able to post comments. Everyone can find Victor Villaneuva’s blog post and each new Guest writer’s blog post on the CCCC blog site, bi-weekly (2 times per month), until Thursday, October 16, 2008.
At the risk of interrupting your summer plans, we’d like to ask for your attention over the next few months at a computer screen near you. We would like your help to generate a sustained conversation about the role of diversity in the work we do. Of course, the work of rhetoric and composition has addressed issues of diversity for decades, and each year brings new scholars and perspectives to CCCC. Ultimately, we’d like to think about our Guest writers’ statements, your responses, and the archived blog posts, when our Committee generates a CCCC Position Statement on Diversity this year. We believe that this statement should reflect the contributions of as broad a cross-section of members as possible (see our charge at: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/gov/committees/all/115435.htm).
Thanks for reading our first blog post on the CCCC Conversations on Diversity.
Enjoy your summer!
Friday, October 06, 2006
Become a Member of CCCC
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Friday, September 22, 2006
Announcing the 2006-2007 CCCC Research Initiative Projects
In late spring, the Conference on College Composition and Communication put out a call for projects for a research initiative to support syntheses and new investigations by providing up to $25,000 for at least three proposals and an opportunity for the researchers to gather to share ideas and receive advice. This program aims to create an opportunity for researchers to bring together what the profession has already learned, through a variety of methodologies, regarding the teaching and study of composition, rhetoric, and literacy. Syntheses will bring together what the profession has already learned (but perhaps not yet published), through a variety of methodologies, with regard to the teaching and study of composition, rhetoric, and literacy. The purposes of synthesis projects are (1) to articulate what is known about the teaching of composition at this time, and (2) to provide a foundation for future research, for large grant proposals, and for public policy discussions. New investigations will initiate research studies that have widespread value or strategic implications for teaching composition; such studies may be pilot in nature and preambles to larger grant proposals.
Four grants were awarded for 2006-2007. The recipients of these grants, who are listed below, will meet this fall at the NCTE Annual Convention in Nasville to collaborate and discuss their research projects. Funded researchers will also provide detailed reports for publication on the CCCC Web site and in other appropriate CCCC venues. Researchers will grant CCCC first consideration for publication of articles or monographs.
CCCC Research Initiative Projects and Researchers
"An Expanded Validity Inquiry into Minority Students' Experiences with a Large-Scale Writing Portfolio Assessment"
Diane Kelly-Riley, Washington State University, Pullman
"Survey of Writing Instructors at For-Profit Colleges and Universities"
Luana Uluave, University of Illinois at Chicago
Patricia Harkin, University of Illinois at Chicago
Kristine Hansen, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah
J. Quin Monson, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah
"The forms and functions of instant messaging as literate practice"
Christina Haas, Kent State University, Ohio
Pamela Takayoshi, Kent State University, Ohio
“'The Things They Carried': A Synthesis of Research on Transfer in College Composition”
Kathleen Blake Yancey, Florida State University, Tallahassee
Emily Dowd, Florida State University, Tallahassee
Tamara Francis, Florida State University, Tallahassee
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CCCC Annual Convention
March 11-14, 2009
San Francisco, CA
