Maps

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.

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.

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.