I'm a sucker for maps. Especially "academic" maps that involve three points. So it follows that I would like how Flynn maps out the major approaches to multiculturalism.
First is the liberal approach that emphasizes equity and inclusion; its impulse is largely assimilationist. Cultural approaches, such as women's studies programs and Native American literature, focus on difference, its impulse, separatist (114). A third approach she labels as post-structuralist, and its impulse is transculturalism. This approach offers viable alternatives to victim narratives, focusing instead on "deconstructing master narratives of race, gender, and class" (116).
Notice that the first two approaches generally entail or imply a certain content or at least curricular focus or theme: multiculturalism. Starke-Meyerring, however, would clearly fall in the third categorical approach, "[arguing] for a change from content-oriented 'information' multicultural education—which ultimately cannot invite or explain outbursts—to a more process-oriented multicultural literacy, which might make constructive use of them" (136). She sees literacy as "social involvement and a literacy class as a space where students are active and conscious creators and re-creators of the cultural dynamics … not only as they exist outside the campus and the classroom, but also as they exist in such a classroom itself" (146).
I would add that this third approach doesn't focus on WHAT we read so much as it focuses on HOW we read texts. And because every text is heteroglossic and/or can be heterogeneously received (to recall Pratt's article and my first blog), we can't help but talk about how race, class, gender, able-ness, sexuality—whatever— inform (or don't inform as the case may be)– and make meaning and try to pass that meaning off as natural and universal. As someone said (I forget who at the moment), as human beings we are always making sense. Or at least trying to. In Dilke's words (paraphrasing Ralph Williams), culture is a noun of process (162). Or put another way, culture is a verb.
Besides curriculum, our readings this week also hold important pedagogical implications, not just curricular ones. Lyons and Bizzell call for mixedblood rhetorics, and Lyons calls for mixedblood liberatory pedagogy and critical literacy to promote "movement both ways," not just from students of color but also white students. Energies that usually either erupt into outbursts or manifest as silence and other forms of resistance can be productively channeled to enact a classroom cultural dynamic where (to recall Starke-Meyerring's words) "students are active and conscious creators and re-creators" of culture. In such a classroom, no one would think that s/he doesn't have a culture, as some respondents in Starke-Meyerring's survey did.
I'll close with a map of my own: a map of pedagogical approaches, each with its own assumptions about students and first-year comp objectives. Each approach trended in this more or less chronological order, following too the trajectory of our readings for this seminar. The first is the cultural deficit model, which holds that some students are "behind" and need to "catch up," as we saw in some of our early contrastive rhetoric readings. This model aims to remediate students curing them of their ills as writers. The second is the cultural difference model that holds that students of color and working-class students need to become bicultural in order to succeed in college; they need to "invent the university," learning the secret handshake of academic discourse. Some of the contrastive rhetoric readings fall in this camp, although the major exponents of this position (e.g.,Bartholomae; Rose) we didn't read in this course but I suspect you've read or heard about in other courses.
The camp I will name the cultural production model maintains that we need to re-invent the university, encouraging mixed discursive practices that will revitalize driza-bone academic discourses. This approach relies on a more dynamic understanding of culture as something that's always under construction, contesting and complementing meaning. The major exponents of this approach: Bizzell, Lyons, Starke-Meyerring, and all the authors in AltDis that we'll be reading next week.
I would count myself in that number—the cultural production camp—but I also have a foot in another camp. I'll write about that camp in next week's blog.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
You are what you do
"You are what you have experienced," Gee writes about the sub-text of Blue's Clues. Amen.
To that I would add, you learn what you do or what you can simulate doing or imagine doing. This is more than a learning preference for many working class/poor students. It's also a rhetorical preference which in turn embodies a worldview, one that values experience-based knowledge—embodied experience—over abstraction and "objectivity."
I do love Gee for his insights into learning from a cognitive psych perspective, and for that he is justly famous. But he often gets ding-ed if not denigrated for his lack of attention to culture and class issues. This chapter would seem to exonerate him on that charge. While I can see how some of the things he says here might be taken out of context (things like gender and ethnicity don't matter under the new capitalist order), I see another problem here with how he talks about class issues: his point of emphasis is so disproportionately focused on "well-off teens" (105), with the issue of the poor taken up and tacked on at the end as if an afterthought, left unpondered or at least underpondered. The second and more insidious problem: he acts as if the experiences of the poor don't matter in this millennium, failing to recognize much less explore possible connections between their experiences and their futures. Ironically, the childrearing practices as well as the socialized learning styles of many students of poverty ALSO (not just the well-off shape-shifters, as required by the new capitalism) favor experience-based knowledge and knowledge-making, with apprenticeships drawing on learning-by-doing models. I would argue that these preferences COULD serve them well... if we as teachers would take fuller advantage of that fact and stop treating "underprepared" students as if they are coming to school and college without linguistic and learning resources. This week we're going to focus on just that: how to make those connections.
And how to make those connections within our own local context: Intro Comp, WSU, 2007. Going local is one of the major points that Bizzell makes in her "Hybrid Discourses" article, but ironically she doesn't follow her own advice. She recommends that basic writing courses be designed around a single teacher-selected issue of "cultural crux" and then giving students choices about how to respond. Bizzell also argues intro courses need to require lots of reading—and not just the writing of other students—so they can see what academic discourse is like and then imitate it. What bugs me the most is how she talks about basic writing, especially when she talks about personal narrative as not really being appropriately scholarship, for example, when she keeps telling us Victor's work isn't a personal memoir; it's scholarship. We're going to focus exclusively on curriculum and pedagogy over the next couple of weeks and beyond so no need to elaborate here, except to say that I seriously disagree with Bizzell's advice. Back to the theme of this blog: once again, there's the negative valuation of experience-based knowledge.
Something else I want to point out about the Bizzell pieces: the controversy over the NAME of this sub-field. We've gone from "contrastive rhetoric" to "hybrid discourses" to "mixed or blended discourses"... and we're about to get the term "alternative discourses," the next book we're going to be reading—and a term that has already been hunted down and hounded out of existence (in the very same book no less!) Although Bizzell very thoroughly critiques her own coinage "hybrid discourses" (her own, in that she adapt postcolonial theory to comp studies), the term "hybrid" persists and at least at the moment prevails... as I notice as I flip through the Cs program coming up in New York this week. Weird, but just last year I couldn't find any session on the topic of mixed, hybrid, contrastive, or alternative discourses... and this year: POW. It's all over the place.
Ahhh yes: the ways of academe. Who wouldn't want to be one of our number???
One last thought: Gee on the three TV shows ... parallels different views of culture we've talked about this semester.
Sesame Street celebrated cultural difference.
Barney focused on cultural commonality.
Blue's Clues assumes that culture is produced, and identity constructed to a certain degree, the show focusing on problem-solving through mediation with an adult. That's also the model of teaching/learning to which we'll now turn in the next segment of the course.
To that I would add, you learn what you do or what you can simulate doing or imagine doing. This is more than a learning preference for many working class/poor students. It's also a rhetorical preference which in turn embodies a worldview, one that values experience-based knowledge—embodied experience—over abstraction and "objectivity."
I do love Gee for his insights into learning from a cognitive psych perspective, and for that he is justly famous. But he often gets ding-ed if not denigrated for his lack of attention to culture and class issues. This chapter would seem to exonerate him on that charge. While I can see how some of the things he says here might be taken out of context (things like gender and ethnicity don't matter under the new capitalist order), I see another problem here with how he talks about class issues: his point of emphasis is so disproportionately focused on "well-off teens" (105), with the issue of the poor taken up and tacked on at the end as if an afterthought, left unpondered or at least underpondered. The second and more insidious problem: he acts as if the experiences of the poor don't matter in this millennium, failing to recognize much less explore possible connections between their experiences and their futures. Ironically, the childrearing practices as well as the socialized learning styles of many students of poverty ALSO (not just the well-off shape-shifters, as required by the new capitalism) favor experience-based knowledge and knowledge-making, with apprenticeships drawing on learning-by-doing models. I would argue that these preferences COULD serve them well... if we as teachers would take fuller advantage of that fact and stop treating "underprepared" students as if they are coming to school and college without linguistic and learning resources. This week we're going to focus on just that: how to make those connections.
And how to make those connections within our own local context: Intro Comp, WSU, 2007. Going local is one of the major points that Bizzell makes in her "Hybrid Discourses" article, but ironically she doesn't follow her own advice. She recommends that basic writing courses be designed around a single teacher-selected issue of "cultural crux" and then giving students choices about how to respond. Bizzell also argues intro courses need to require lots of reading—and not just the writing of other students—so they can see what academic discourse is like and then imitate it. What bugs me the most is how she talks about basic writing, especially when she talks about personal narrative as not really being appropriately scholarship, for example, when she keeps telling us Victor's work isn't a personal memoir; it's scholarship. We're going to focus exclusively on curriculum and pedagogy over the next couple of weeks and beyond so no need to elaborate here, except to say that I seriously disagree with Bizzell's advice. Back to the theme of this blog: once again, there's the negative valuation of experience-based knowledge.
Something else I want to point out about the Bizzell pieces: the controversy over the NAME of this sub-field. We've gone from "contrastive rhetoric" to "hybrid discourses" to "mixed or blended discourses"... and we're about to get the term "alternative discourses," the next book we're going to be reading—and a term that has already been hunted down and hounded out of existence (in the very same book no less!) Although Bizzell very thoroughly critiques her own coinage "hybrid discourses" (her own, in that she adapt postcolonial theory to comp studies), the term "hybrid" persists and at least at the moment prevails... as I notice as I flip through the Cs program coming up in New York this week. Weird, but just last year I couldn't find any session on the topic of mixed, hybrid, contrastive, or alternative discourses... and this year: POW. It's all over the place.
Ahhh yes: the ways of academe. Who wouldn't want to be one of our number???
One last thought: Gee on the three TV shows ... parallels different views of culture we've talked about this semester.
Sesame Street celebrated cultural difference.
Barney focused on cultural commonality.
Blue's Clues assumes that culture is produced, and identity constructed to a certain degree, the show focusing on problem-solving through mediation with an adult. That's also the model of teaching/learning to which we'll now turn in the next segment of the course.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Gee Whiz
When I was in graduate school at UT-Austin, I took sociolinguistics from Ian Hancock, a famed linguist and polyglot. As a Roma child, he traveled all over eastern Europe and then western Europe with his clan; at age 17 he walked into the U of London and plopped down the first English/Roma dictionary. On the basis of that work alone, he was awarded a doctorate degree.
Dr. Hancock was a kind of Professor Higginson, you know the character in My Fair Lady, who could discern where someone was from just from hearing that person speak a line or two. Dr. Hancock could go Prof Higginson one better: he could tell everywhere you were from—the migrations of your life—from just having you read one sentence. (I don't remember the sentence but it's one that commonly used by phonologists—it's chock full of vowel sounds and other telltale phonemes that are pronounced distinctly different in regional varieties of English, here and abroad. As our final exam, we had to listen and read different speakers and identify where they were from.)
The first day of class Dr. Hancock showed us that his reputation was well deserved. Going around the table, he had each of us read the sentence and then he told us where we had lived from birth to adulthood (in adulthood, our accents become less malleable, so he only claimed accuracy up to about age 20). I sat there smugly, just knowing that my migratory life would throw him off.
My turn came. I read the sentence. And without even a pause, Dr. Hancock correctly identified that I had spent early childhood up until about age 5 about 50 miles south of Boston, with a bit of Maryland/DC area throw in there somewhere, then moved to the northeast corner of Arkansas for about 3 – 4 yrs, (about ages 5-8) moved back to Massachusetts, and then finally down to the Houston area when I was about 12, where I came of age.
He was off in just one detail: I moved to Houston when I was 11, not 12. All other details were stunningly accurate.
I thought of Dr. Hancock as I read Gee and his analysis of the two students: Jennie (who did the pretend story) and Leona (who told the "rambling" story about her grandmother eating cakes). Their discursive practices—as do ours—tell the stories of their lives, or at least their own distinctive "ways with words." Gee's examples highlight how these two girls' family lives initiated them and socialized them differently in certain patterns of language use. What Gee doesn't emphasize (but would also agree with) is that these two girls can continue to expand their discursive practices if and when they are exposed to other "ways with words." But notice how the teacher misunderstood and devalued Leona's story as "rambling," failing to recognize the rich expressive tradition from which her storytelling principles draw.
While I do agree with Gee that one's ways with words reflect and constitute the values of one's identity group (the reason, in fact, these distinctive expressive traditions survive and even flourish), he goes too far in his analysis of what the cake story meant (bottom, p. 33), which is a curious little structuralist reading we used to do in 1970s. Just had to get that in.
A couple of things Gee leaves unexplained or under elaborated on. One is his point about using "popular culture" (which he puts in quotes). And the other re: making schools less alienating by making learning more like simulation video games. In both regards, he doesn't specify HOW. I went to a Gee panel at NCTE a couple of years back that was focused on that glaring omission. Gee spoke first, showed us his avatar (a half-female/half-asexual priestess—yes, he said high "priestess"), and said he intentionally did not specify how schools could apply these principles, in part because there are countless possibilities and in part because he trusted the imagination and intelligence of individual teachers to create these new possibilities in their classroom. The next two speakers—one a ninth-grade English teacher and the other an 8th grade science teacher—did just that. The science teacher explained how the hurricane seasons lead to an absolutely amazing extended unit based initially on tracking these storms but leading to all kinds of other questions that students generated and investigated. The English teacher was less successful in teaching Great Expectations in what she thought was a new way: pairing it with a young adult lit title (I forget what it was)... after which she still had students slogged through GE the same old way. Several teachers in the audience (quite rudely) called her out on that... and when it turned into a pile-on, Gee intervened and graciously and generously praised the profession for bringing these issues to the forefront (something like that). That quelled the mob who then put down their torches and nooses.
So how do we at college level create less alienating classrooms? That's the issue we'll be focusing on over the next 3 weeks.
Dr. Hancock was a kind of Professor Higginson, you know the character in My Fair Lady, who could discern where someone was from just from hearing that person speak a line or two. Dr. Hancock could go Prof Higginson one better: he could tell everywhere you were from—the migrations of your life—from just having you read one sentence. (I don't remember the sentence but it's one that commonly used by phonologists—it's chock full of vowel sounds and other telltale phonemes that are pronounced distinctly different in regional varieties of English, here and abroad. As our final exam, we had to listen and read different speakers and identify where they were from.)
The first day of class Dr. Hancock showed us that his reputation was well deserved. Going around the table, he had each of us read the sentence and then he told us where we had lived from birth to adulthood (in adulthood, our accents become less malleable, so he only claimed accuracy up to about age 20). I sat there smugly, just knowing that my migratory life would throw him off.
My turn came. I read the sentence. And without even a pause, Dr. Hancock correctly identified that I had spent early childhood up until about age 5 about 50 miles south of Boston, with a bit of Maryland/DC area throw in there somewhere, then moved to the northeast corner of Arkansas for about 3 – 4 yrs, (about ages 5-8) moved back to Massachusetts, and then finally down to the Houston area when I was about 12, where I came of age.
He was off in just one detail: I moved to Houston when I was 11, not 12. All other details were stunningly accurate.
I thought of Dr. Hancock as I read Gee and his analysis of the two students: Jennie (who did the pretend story) and Leona (who told the "rambling" story about her grandmother eating cakes). Their discursive practices—as do ours—tell the stories of their lives, or at least their own distinctive "ways with words." Gee's examples highlight how these two girls' family lives initiated them and socialized them differently in certain patterns of language use. What Gee doesn't emphasize (but would also agree with) is that these two girls can continue to expand their discursive practices if and when they are exposed to other "ways with words." But notice how the teacher misunderstood and devalued Leona's story as "rambling," failing to recognize the rich expressive tradition from which her storytelling principles draw.
While I do agree with Gee that one's ways with words reflect and constitute the values of one's identity group (the reason, in fact, these distinctive expressive traditions survive and even flourish), he goes too far in his analysis of what the cake story meant (bottom, p. 33), which is a curious little structuralist reading we used to do in 1970s. Just had to get that in.
A couple of things Gee leaves unexplained or under elaborated on. One is his point about using "popular culture" (which he puts in quotes). And the other re: making schools less alienating by making learning more like simulation video games. In both regards, he doesn't specify HOW. I went to a Gee panel at NCTE a couple of years back that was focused on that glaring omission. Gee spoke first, showed us his avatar (a half-female/half-asexual priestess—yes, he said high "priestess"), and said he intentionally did not specify how schools could apply these principles, in part because there are countless possibilities and in part because he trusted the imagination and intelligence of individual teachers to create these new possibilities in their classroom. The next two speakers—one a ninth-grade English teacher and the other an 8th grade science teacher—did just that. The science teacher explained how the hurricane seasons lead to an absolutely amazing extended unit based initially on tracking these storms but leading to all kinds of other questions that students generated and investigated. The English teacher was less successful in teaching Great Expectations in what she thought was a new way: pairing it with a young adult lit title (I forget what it was)... after which she still had students slogged through GE the same old way. Several teachers in the audience (quite rudely) called her out on that... and when it turned into a pile-on, Gee intervened and graciously and generously praised the profession for bringing these issues to the forefront (something like that). That quelled the mob who then put down their torches and nooses.
So how do we at college level create less alienating classrooms? That's the issue we'll be focusing on over the next 3 weeks.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Shootout at the OK Corral
I've read this piece many, many times before, and each time I read, I mark. The underlinings, notations, stars, ink colors, and lead types bear witness to pieces and parts and phrases that struck me as important from reading to reading. So imagine my surprise this go-round when I realized that I had missed the main point in my previous readings. Lyons isn't advocating rhetorical sovereignty for individual students, on a parallel of the Cs' "Students' Rights to their Own Language." Rather, he's arguing for rhetorical sovereignty of a peoples... and by extension other peoples, like African Americans, disabled, etc. (I can't find that one line where he extends this call to other groups... but he did mention these groups specifically.). He uses the term rhetorics of sovereignty, specifying these rhetorics have a commitment to place, or land. These rhetorics too should be "more relevant to and reflective of actual populations of this land."
In other words, he seems to be arguing for institutionalizing comparative rhetorics (he uses this term once in the article—can't find it now, tho')-- at least at the graduate level. As for Indian rhetorics, Lyons calls for going beyond the "accounts of the wars and more of the statecraft, legends, languages, oratory, and philosophical concepts." He also points out that previous scholarship has dealt mainly with the oral Indian—as if writing Indians didn't exist in the 19th century. Lyons also recommends that universities look around and see what people are being removed or were removed from the land on which the university sits.
These recommendations bring to mind our own institutional situation and the comparative lack of knowledge about the Plateau Peoples, on whose ancestral land this university sits. Just this past week, the Washington State Magazine did an article on the Plateau Center Conference—and the main spread was about . . . food. I'll scan the article with its images for discussion this week...
All of Lyons' recommendations are curricular and at the graduate level. In another piece we'll read by Lyons later in the semester he'll offer us more about teaching undergraduates and using popular culture—based on one of his own very negative teaching experience: a class of predominately Native American students basically turned on him when he tried to get them to take action on an Indian mascot debate. I see now that I should have paired that reading with this one. The other piece really problematizes much of what he says here.
One more thing: just as we noticed that Mao used some features of Chinese-American rhetoric in his piece (along with academic discourse), so does Lyons. I love his gentle humor especially: "Rhetorial sovereignty at the C & R Ranch." Nice parodic echo of "Shootout at the OK Corral"—and parody, as we know from Pratt's essay way back in Week 2, is one of those rhetorical arts of the contact zone.
In other words, he seems to be arguing for institutionalizing comparative rhetorics (he uses this term once in the article—can't find it now, tho')-- at least at the graduate level. As for Indian rhetorics, Lyons calls for going beyond the "accounts of the wars and more of the statecraft, legends, languages, oratory, and philosophical concepts." He also points out that previous scholarship has dealt mainly with the oral Indian—as if writing Indians didn't exist in the 19th century. Lyons also recommends that universities look around and see what people are being removed or were removed from the land on which the university sits.
These recommendations bring to mind our own institutional situation and the comparative lack of knowledge about the Plateau Peoples, on whose ancestral land this university sits. Just this past week, the Washington State Magazine did an article on the Plateau Center Conference—and the main spread was about . . . food. I'll scan the article with its images for discussion this week...
All of Lyons' recommendations are curricular and at the graduate level. In another piece we'll read by Lyons later in the semester he'll offer us more about teaching undergraduates and using popular culture—based on one of his own very negative teaching experience: a class of predominately Native American students basically turned on him when he tried to get them to take action on an Indian mascot debate. I see now that I should have paired that reading with this one. The other piece really problematizes much of what he says here.
One more thing: just as we noticed that Mao used some features of Chinese-American rhetoric in his piece (along with academic discourse), so does Lyons. I love his gentle humor especially: "Rhetorial sovereignty at the C & R Ranch." Nice parodic echo of "Shootout at the OK Corral"—and parody, as we know from Pratt's essay way back in Week 2, is one of those rhetorical arts of the contact zone.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Fish with feet
In yesterday's paper, the teaser (<--Amy, what is the journalistic term for these things?!) above the masthead proclaimed "Evolution of Faith" with the subheading "Christian movement aims to help Scripture, science coexist." The image that accompanied the teasers were a couple of those stylized Christian fish you see on the back of cars. One of them had little legs and feet on it, as Darwin visualized the evolution of fish to frog and other land creatures.
[I'm going to try to post the masthead here... but if it doesn't take, I'll show you in class.]..
I couldn't help but think of Bizzell's Barcelona Disputation... as well as our talk last week about spirituality, a taboo topic in academe because it's not "rational." I thought of this connection, too, as I meditated this morning on how Zen Buddhism also confounds intellectualization, verbalization, reason for some other way of knowing, beyond naming.
Mao always confounds and frustrates me. I get his idea of the fortune cookie, and I get his notion of yin-yang. But I seem to be getting further away from understanding his notion of Chinese face, as lian and mianzi, every time I read it. Hope someone can explain it to us tomorrow in class. Also, I did see perhaps for the first time that Mao's own writing style aims to enact the Chinese American rhetorical practices he describes: ”indirectness" insinuating "richly vague significances" evolving and involving readers to make meaning together. Ironic that because he is the professor, his ways of knowing and being become the norm that students have to adapt to. That move reminds me of something Alma said in her first blog about having international grad students as TAs in class and students' complaints about having instructors whom they can't understand; as Alma points out, the role reversal is itself a good lesson in power, language, and cultural mediation.
Bizzell, Romano, and Mao together actually raised my hopes for academe, if not American education more generally. Working from a cultural production—rather than a cultural reproduction—model, all show how nondominant groups co-opt dominant discursive practices and, at least in specific historical moments, confound and upend the power structures that would subjugate them. "You can't dismantle the Master's house using the Master's tools" I think Audre Lorde said. Oh yes you can. Witness the Jewish rhetor using reason to out-reason the Christians. Witness the indios—labeled as monkeys and magpies—taking over those translation projects, reversing the usual teacher/student relationship. And here's Mao, getting published in Cs, basically enacting a Chinese-American rhetoric in the most important journal in our field (and driving me and Paul absolutely wild). I'm reminded too of the history of Plateau Indians. As the saying goes, "yesterday's warriors are today's lawyers." English forced on them as a colonizing force, Plateau Indians have mastered legal discourse and over several decades have won and are continuing win huge legal battles, asserting their treaty rights—treaties that were in fact supposed to assimilate Indians to American ways and dismantle tribalism. As Amy pointed out in her blog, social justice is incremental.
'Course, such 'victories' are often pyrrhic (ex. American Indians) or short-lived. Bizzell's Jewish rhetor wound up getting run off to Israel, leaving behind his family; a hundred years later Jews were massacred in Spain and ultimately outlawed (in 1492) altogether. Romano's Tlaltelolco was axed by the Inquisition, and the Franciscans realigned their educational practices to reinforce power hierarchy and forestall future racial and linquistic cross-dressing. But over time, those increments add up.
Still, I come back to that Christian-Darwinian, amphibian fish, comfortable in water and on land. Discourses—the word itself means "back and forth," no?—do morph upon contact. And spirituality and science can co-exist and copulate without contradiction—except in a (hyper)rationalist universe.
Friday, February 2, 2007
Pink Sweet Peas
Anzaldua mentions going to a women's retreat in 1979 where she "was made (once again) to feel she was being labeled—tokenized as a 'third-world woman' and as an outsider, an exoticized other to the white feminists there" (p. 44).
Which reminded of the point I started to make last week (and then forgot what I was going to say) about my own experience with a women's "consciousness-raising" group around 1975. While the focus of that particular group was body awareness, what we soon discovered was that we were different in more ways than one. The first difference that arose was sexuality. Followed closely by socioeconomic class. And then race/ethnicity. In that order. By the end of the month (about 4 meetings) we weren't even speaking to one another, and the group broke up.
That experience mirrors Anzaldua's own…which in turn reflects the larger trend in "The Movement," aka the feminist movement, whose beginning in the US is generally marked by the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique and whose "face" in the 1970s was Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. magazine. Notice: both Gloria and Betty were middle-class white women… a point not lost on all kinds of women, but first by lesbians, then working-class women, then etc. etc. (notice, the same order?) By the early 80s we were talking about "feminisms" plural, as women began to recognize that we can't all be lumped together, that maybe the "female experience" alone wasn't universal and uniform enough to create solidarity.
And so it goes with identity studies more generally, it seems to me. I was impressed to see that Anzaldua talked about "the multiplicity of her 'self' and her 'voice'", assuming as her avatar Shiva with different feet in different places (p.44). She maintains that a "mesitza rhetoric" allows her to "find all others in one's self; one's self in all others" (p. 44). The "new mestiza" has "a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity" (pp. 44-45).
For sure, I agree with the idea that identity is multiple. But I would add that the same is true, to different degrees of course, of every one.(Does my memory fail me or doesn't Harraway also talk in these terms about "cyborgs"?)
I'm also uncomfortable with the mestiza metaphor for at least two reasons:
1. it suggests that identity is still a function of "blood quantum." (Remember talking about sweet peas to learn genetics in high school? What do you get when you cross a white sweet pea with a red one?.... pink sweet pea, a hybrid, a mestiza, a mixed blood…) Identity isn't genetic or "natural"; it's cultural and historical.
2. it draws from Hegelian logic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Ironically, this kind of logic does NOT tolerate contradiction and ambiguity…
(I'll talk more about different logical systems, and how those differences will sometimes affect argument structure and interaction and decision-making in upcoming weeks.)
One more thing about the Anzaldua piece: I was blown away with the discursive features of this text: child-like graphics, work play (Nos/Otros how cool was that!!), metaphors, code-switching, etc … each and all implicitly "[denouncing] linguistic terrorism" (p. 45)
The Holliday IC resource book this week makes a similar point about identity—but points out that white people have culture too. Left unsaid or unrecognized, that fact leaves the impression that white ways are normative. At the same time, we don't want to fall into the contrastive trap, setting up a binary of white/black, us/them, insider/outsider, etc. (Anzaldua also mentions that she tries to verbalize and understand herself as a "non-binary identity").
Unfortunately that's what seems to be happening in my chapter on Detroit when I use Kochman to set up my theoretical framework for understanding differences governing personal disclosure. Funny, I knew this at the time but I just didn't know how to do it otherwise. While I tried to complicate that easy understanding later in the chapter (drawing from other disciplines) I should have done that upfront. There was just too much material, it seemed at the time. A similar problem comes up for the Storytime on the Reservation chapter: essentializing culture, or so it would seem. I wrote the Detroit chapter in 2000-2001 and the Storytime chapter in 2002 and the last I saw the manuscript was in 2003, when it started through the production process—and I haven't read it since, until last night. Now I'm able to read it as if it was someone else's—which is to say,with a much clearer eye.
Our readings over the next couple of weeks will focus on case studies—all of which have come out in the last few years—paying close attention to methodology and theoretical framings, though no one doing much with interdisciplinary approaches.
Which reminded of the point I started to make last week (and then forgot what I was going to say) about my own experience with a women's "consciousness-raising" group around 1975. While the focus of that particular group was body awareness, what we soon discovered was that we were different in more ways than one. The first difference that arose was sexuality. Followed closely by socioeconomic class. And then race/ethnicity. In that order. By the end of the month (about 4 meetings) we weren't even speaking to one another, and the group broke up.
That experience mirrors Anzaldua's own…which in turn reflects the larger trend in "The Movement," aka the feminist movement, whose beginning in the US is generally marked by the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique and whose "face" in the 1970s was Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. magazine. Notice: both Gloria and Betty were middle-class white women… a point not lost on all kinds of women, but first by lesbians, then working-class women, then etc. etc. (notice, the same order?) By the early 80s we were talking about "feminisms" plural, as women began to recognize that we can't all be lumped together, that maybe the "female experience" alone wasn't universal and uniform enough to create solidarity.
And so it goes with identity studies more generally, it seems to me. I was impressed to see that Anzaldua talked about "the multiplicity of her 'self' and her 'voice'", assuming as her avatar Shiva with different feet in different places (p.44). She maintains that a "mesitza rhetoric" allows her to "find all others in one's self; one's self in all others" (p. 44). The "new mestiza" has "a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity" (pp. 44-45).
For sure, I agree with the idea that identity is multiple. But I would add that the same is true, to different degrees of course, of every one.(Does my memory fail me or doesn't Harraway also talk in these terms about "cyborgs"?)
I'm also uncomfortable with the mestiza metaphor for at least two reasons:
1. it suggests that identity is still a function of "blood quantum." (Remember talking about sweet peas to learn genetics in high school? What do you get when you cross a white sweet pea with a red one?.... pink sweet pea, a hybrid, a mestiza, a mixed blood…) Identity isn't genetic or "natural"; it's cultural and historical.
2. it draws from Hegelian logic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Ironically, this kind of logic does NOT tolerate contradiction and ambiguity…
(I'll talk more about different logical systems, and how those differences will sometimes affect argument structure and interaction and decision-making in upcoming weeks.)
One more thing about the Anzaldua piece: I was blown away with the discursive features of this text: child-like graphics, work play (Nos/Otros how cool was that!!), metaphors, code-switching, etc … each and all implicitly "[denouncing] linguistic terrorism" (p. 45)
The Holliday IC resource book this week makes a similar point about identity—but points out that white people have culture too. Left unsaid or unrecognized, that fact leaves the impression that white ways are normative. At the same time, we don't want to fall into the contrastive trap, setting up a binary of white/black, us/them, insider/outsider, etc. (Anzaldua also mentions that she tries to verbalize and understand herself as a "non-binary identity").
Unfortunately that's what seems to be happening in my chapter on Detroit when I use Kochman to set up my theoretical framework for understanding differences governing personal disclosure. Funny, I knew this at the time but I just didn't know how to do it otherwise. While I tried to complicate that easy understanding later in the chapter (drawing from other disciplines) I should have done that upfront. There was just too much material, it seemed at the time. A similar problem comes up for the Storytime on the Reservation chapter: essentializing culture, or so it would seem. I wrote the Detroit chapter in 2000-2001 and the Storytime chapter in 2002 and the last I saw the manuscript was in 2003, when it started through the production process—and I haven't read it since, until last night. Now I'm able to read it as if it was someone else's—which is to say,with a much clearer eye.
Our readings over the next couple of weeks will focus on case studies—all of which have come out in the last few years—paying close attention to methodology and theoretical framings, though no one doing much with interdisciplinary approaches.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Logic & California Closets
Martin & Nakayama in “History of the Study of IC” rightly point to the importance of thinking dialectically when we think about culture—which requires us to hold two or more ideas at the same time, no matter how contradictory or ambiguous. For example, how can one’s behavior be both cultural and idiosyncratic (or “individual”—characteristic of that one person) at the same time? Easy—if we’re not tied to our own sense of rationality and linear logic, if we recognize that in fact that the EuroAmerican logical system ain’t the only one in town.
My beef with so many CR conversations is that logic gets tied up with nationality—ex. Asian, Indian, Latino, EuroAmerican—and then biologicize (if I may coin a word), as if all human beings aren’t capable of thinking any which way they need to. Kinda like the ol’ days of feminism, you’d hear (and still do) that women are just wired differently, they just think differently...naturally. A couple of our readings (Holliday et al and I think Martin & Nakayama) mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, an early linguistic study that made much too much of the language-and-logic linkage. They claimed that language both reflects and constitutes and limits our ability to think in certain ways and therefore affects our value systems. So, for example, Vietnamese don’t think about the past and future because their language doesn’t have those tenses in the way ours does. (Actually, English doesn’t have a true future tense either—but I digress.) Holliday et al actually cites this example—and rightly skewers it as long discredited.
Still, Victor Villanueva often talks about how his papers in community college would come back with just one word marked on them: “LOGIC???” . He admits that he likes to circle around his subject – i.e., “ramble”—before stating his main point. He also argues that that rhetorical logic is inherently Puerta Rican ... which he maintains has a biological/historical dimension to it, dating from the migration of the Greek Sophists to Istanbul and then the Iberian pennisula and ultimately to the New World. Maintaining that people’s brains are wired differently—that worries me, just as the talk about black athletes having extra (different?) muscles in their legs, a biological difference that explains why the NBA is predominately black.
So I wasn’t happy with Bliss’s take about teaching students to think “logically.” But this is often what CR is reduced to—and then instruction focuses on form-al features of the text, rather than the ideas and passion a writer is trying to convey. It was Robert Kaplan who first raised this issue of organization following distinct cultural logics in his “doodles article” back in 1968. Here’s the illustration of the culture-logic linkage that won him fame and fortune:
[well, remind me to show you the image in class--if this doesn't come up here.]
[from Harris, Muriel, Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference, Urbana: NCTE, 1986, p. 91.]
The schools have really run with this notion that some groups can’t “organize” their thinking. Here’s a quote from an outfit that goes around the country giving workshops for teachers about why children of poverty can’t/don’t think straight—and the dire consequences of this crooked thinking:
These professional developers also explain generational poverty in terms of... plastic bins?!!! As if California closets could save their world...
Which brings us to another key theme for this week: the link of socioeconomic class in language use. Notice that Lareau talks about poor children quite differently from Payne and her crowd. And notice too that it’s TALK between parents and children—not necessarily reading or being read to at an early age—that seems determinant of successful school literacy...which of course mirrors white, middle-class ways of knowing. The child-rearing model of “concerted cultivation” also engenders a sense of entitlement in middle-class kids, who then know how to work the system (i.e., needle their teachers into giving them better grades ;-) In other words, they are way more bratty than working-class kids.
Now Corbet and parts of Weider&Pratt are more in keeping with the most recent developments in multiple rhetorics. Corbet rightly points to the connection between values and rhetoric—and the first part of Weider& Pratt about “the doing of the being and the becoming” Indian is theoretically sound (if jargony as hell) and is actually cited by James Gee extensively in one of his books. The second part is much more problematic, mainly because the authors overgeneralize to ALL Indian groups. But when we consider it was published around 1985, it’s an impressive piece.
I was also reminded me of Jeanette’s question raised in her blog last week: how do you get students to express their opinion? I didn’t realize she was speaking from her experience at Northwest Indian College. I think Weider&Pratt and Lareau go a long way in helping understand this extremely difficult issue in Indian education.
My beef with so many CR conversations is that logic gets tied up with nationality—ex. Asian, Indian, Latino, EuroAmerican—and then biologicize (if I may coin a word), as if all human beings aren’t capable of thinking any which way they need to. Kinda like the ol’ days of feminism, you’d hear (and still do) that women are just wired differently, they just think differently...naturally. A couple of our readings (Holliday et al and I think Martin & Nakayama) mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, an early linguistic study that made much too much of the language-and-logic linkage. They claimed that language both reflects and constitutes and limits our ability to think in certain ways and therefore affects our value systems. So, for example, Vietnamese don’t think about the past and future because their language doesn’t have those tenses in the way ours does. (Actually, English doesn’t have a true future tense either—but I digress.) Holliday et al actually cites this example—and rightly skewers it as long discredited.
Still, Victor Villanueva often talks about how his papers in community college would come back with just one word marked on them: “LOGIC???” . He admits that he likes to circle around his subject – i.e., “ramble”—before stating his main point. He also argues that that rhetorical logic is inherently Puerta Rican ... which he maintains has a biological/historical dimension to it, dating from the migration of the Greek Sophists to Istanbul and then the Iberian pennisula and ultimately to the New World. Maintaining that people’s brains are wired differently—that worries me, just as the talk about black athletes having extra (different?) muscles in their legs, a biological difference that explains why the NBA is predominately black.
So I wasn’t happy with Bliss’s take about teaching students to think “logically.” But this is often what CR is reduced to—and then instruction focuses on form-al features of the text, rather than the ideas and passion a writer is trying to convey. It was Robert Kaplan who first raised this issue of organization following distinct cultural logics in his “doodles article” back in 1968. Here’s the illustration of the culture-logic linkage that won him fame and fortune:
[well, remind me to show you the image in class--if this doesn't come up here.]
[from Harris, Muriel, Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference, Urbana: NCTE, 1986, p. 91.]
The schools have really run with this notion that some groups can’t “organize” their thinking. Here’s a quote from an outfit that goes around the country giving workshops for teachers about why children of poverty can’t/don’t think straight—and the dire consequences of this crooked thinking:
If an individual depends upon a random, episodic story structure for memory patterns, lives in an unpredictable environment, and has not developed the ability to plan, then
if an individual cannot plan, he/she cannot predict.
If an individual cannot predict, he/she cannot identify cause and effect.
If an individual cannot identify cause and effect, he/she cannot identify consequence.
If an individual cannot identify consequences, he/she cannot control impulsivity.
If an individual cannot control impulsivity, he/she has an inclination toward criminal behavior.”
These professional developers also explain generational poverty in terms of... plastic bins?!!! As if California closets could save their world...
"__ LACK OF ORDER/ORGANIZATION: Many of the homes/apartments of people in poverty are unkempt and cluttered. Devices for organization (files, planners, etc.) don't exist.
__LIVES IN THE MOMENT—DOES NOT CONSIDER FUTURE RAMIFICATIONS: Being proactive, setting goals, and planning ahead are not a part of generational poverty. Most of what occurs is reactive and in the moment. Future implications of present actions are seldom considered." (p. 70)
--(Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Third Revised Edition. Highlands, TX: Aha! Process, Inc., 2003.).
Which brings us to another key theme for this week: the link of socioeconomic class in language use. Notice that Lareau talks about poor children quite differently from Payne and her crowd. And notice too that it’s TALK between parents and children—not necessarily reading or being read to at an early age—that seems determinant of successful school literacy...which of course mirrors white, middle-class ways of knowing. The child-rearing model of “concerted cultivation” also engenders a sense of entitlement in middle-class kids, who then know how to work the system (i.e., needle their teachers into giving them better grades ;-) In other words, they are way more bratty than working-class kids.
Now Corbet and parts of Weider&Pratt are more in keeping with the most recent developments in multiple rhetorics. Corbet rightly points to the connection between values and rhetoric—and the first part of Weider& Pratt about “the doing of the being and the becoming” Indian is theoretically sound (if jargony as hell) and is actually cited by James Gee extensively in one of his books. The second part is much more problematic, mainly because the authors overgeneralize to ALL Indian groups. But when we consider it was published around 1985, it’s an impressive piece.
I was also reminded me of Jeanette’s question raised in her blog last week: how do you get students to express their opinion? I didn’t realize she was speaking from her experience at Northwest Indian College. I think Weider&Pratt and Lareau go a long way in helping understand this extremely difficult issue in Indian education.
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