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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