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.