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.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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CCCC Annual Convention
March 11-14, 2009
San Francisco, CA
