This week I would like to look at the other side of the controversy of teaching ELL or NSE speakers in the classroom. Truth be told, I used Stanley Fish in the last post to be provocative; no one stirs it up more than Fish, well, perhaps E.D. Hirsch, but that is another post. This week, I would like to approach the controversy through the lens of critical pedagogy. Norton and Toohey state in the intro of their book "Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning" that "language is not simply a means of expression or communication; rather, it is a practice that constructs, and is constructed by, the ways language learners understand themselves, their social surroundings, their histories, and their possibilities for the future" (1). With this in mind, how can we carefully consider students' home/private/intimate language in the writing classroom? Too often, testing, especially high stakes testing, eradicates the possibility of pedagogy that sees language as identity. Students must find a way to become fluent in the dominant discourse, at times at the expense of their primary discourse. Of course, these are the times when the relationship between power and discourse become most prominent.
I think about my students who come to the writing classroom with alternative discourses or epistemologies. I also think about my position within an institution that perpetuates power structures through pedagogy. How can I resist the power structures as a teacher; how can I help my students see the power structures and hope that they will resist? At times like these, Anzaldua's works always come to mind. Linguistic domination is all too real, especially in education. My goal with these marginalized students is not to further their marginalization, but then what am I doing?
So this week's driving question is:
At what point does acculturation/assimilation into the dominant/academic discourse become violent oppression?
About Me
- Erica
- I am a second year PhD student in the Rhetoric, Composition, and teaching of English program at the University of Arizona. This blog is a Controversia project for my Comparative Pedagogy class with Dr. Anne Marie Hall.
4 comments:
Hi Erica!
I have always been concerned with co-opting students home lives into the classroom. God knows that I believe in a separation between school and my personal life. In my students' critiques of academic discourse however, they all champion their 'unique' voices and how they want those voices to have a place in academic discourse. Maybe our fears are unfounded? Maybe my students are only saying that because they are mostly people who are used to having their voices privileged?
Interesting comments and questions, Erica!
As we've discussed in class a few times, I'm always torn as a writing teacher between wanting to value my students' unique and personal voices, while still feeling accountable to the students (not necessarily the institution) to teach them the ways (or what I often see as secrets) of academic discourse. I want to equip my students with the skills they need to succeed, but the skills of a personal voice are rarely valued and rewarded in academic disciplines - especially those outside of the humanities. Am I doing my students an injustice by assigning personal writing? I don't think so. But I do feel the need to follow up a personal writing assignment with a more traditionally academic assignment. I try to do both, but sometimes it becomes messy. Take for example my first writing assignment for English 101 this semester. I wanted to have students write literacy narratives. But then I felt pressure to better meet the writing program's expectations of textual analysis. So, I ended up assigning a weird hybrid assignment where students were analyzing literacy narratives (by Tan, Baca, Tapahonso, etc.), but they could also bring in personal experiences to enhance their analysis. Some students successfully achieved the balance of personal and academic, while others struggled. I don't think I'll frame the assignment that way again. However, I think it's highlights my inner tensions between valuing student voice and personal writing, while still maintaining academic and programmatic objectives.
Re: Faith's comment, I do not believe in separations between home and work. I know that, legally, the basis for that is preventing discrimination - against mothers, for instance, which has been in the news lately - but I think that it also contributes to the invisibility of people's familial and social needs. It's a faux-pas to mention that you need to do something with or for your children at work - it can hurt your career - especially when so few others do it. But then employers can go on pretending that lack of flexible hours and on-site child care and breast-feeding/pumping/milk storage facilities and such do not impact their workers, because that impact would have to go unspoken. And I think that it's artificial to suppose that people compartmentalize their minds/souls/selves/lives that way. I am not just a student at school, a mother/wife at home, a teacher in front of class, etc. I am all of those things all of the time.
I agree that the writing classroom needs to be a space where students feel like their home literacies are valued. Before you even mentioned Anzaldua in your piece, I was already thinking about how her use of code-switching between Chicano Spanish and English is itself an illustration of her concept of mestiza consciousness, since speaking in both languages challenges the rigid dualisms (separation of languages) that she speaks of in Borderlands/La Frontera.
To answer the question you pose at the end of your blog, I think that to an extent this is a subjective answer--what one student might see as assimilation/oppression, another might welcome. Yet I think we as writing teachers find ourselves attempting a difficult balance: We want to give students the knowledge they'll need to be able to communicate effectively in dominant circles (for how else can power be reappropriated?), but we also want to ensure that their ways of knowing and making meaning
are supported and strengthened.
But how to do this? This is a question I've been thinking about for some time, and I feel strongly that teaching only essayist literacy in FYC undermines our attempts to show students we value their ways of knowing. As Marcia Farr and Gloria Nardini have noted, essayist literacy and its close (dubious) association with academic discourse unfairly disadvantages minority groups whose own literacy practices may be incongruous with this way of making meaning. Am I saying that we shouldn't teach students how to write essays? No, absolutely not. I do think, however, that FYC would much better serve students--and the academy at large--if we open it up beyond just essayist literacy. Writing new media, visual and spatial rhetorics, and cross-genre projects signify some of the ways that we can do so. We can and should give students opportunities to bring their home literacies and technologies into the writing classroom while also helping them to understand the ways in which these literacy practices work with and against more dominant epistemologies.
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