IWAC 2014: Where did the currents take me?

I just returned from the 2014 IWAC (International Writing Across the Curriculum) Conference at the University of Minnesota, and I have to say it was one of my best conference experiences yet. The presentations were engaging, the people were open and friendly, and Minneapolis was a great city.

During my brief two days there, I managed to sit in on 5 panels, one in which I presented, a keynote, and an incredible plenary session. In truth, it made me a little sad that I'm not a WAC WPA because I would have loved the opportunity to implement some of the ideas that were discussed at the universities where I am involved in writing pedagogy.

The Panels

Here is a brief overview of the titles of the panels that I attended:

• Role Reversal: When Students Teach Faculty in WAC Programs - Deanna Daniels & Brandy Grabow, Kate Ronald & Lucy Manley, and Greg Skutches
• Writing Beyond the Curriculum - Nicole Papaioannou, Dan Reis & Caroline Klidonas, and KaaVonia Hinton & Yonghee Suh
• Interrogating Disciplinarity in WAC/WID: An Institutional Ethnography - Anne Ruggles Gere, Naomi Silver, & Melody Pugh
• Teaching Meaningful Writing: What Faculty Say About Writing Assignments in Their Disciplines - Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, & Neal Lerner
• Multimodal Literacy: Writing, Reading, & Transfer - Andrea Glover, Maggie Christensen, and G. Travis Adams

I will take some time to address the larger issues in each of these panels in separate posts, but I wanted to recap some of the big questions that I've started to ask as a result of these panels and some of the discussion that followed. I picked one large question that was sparked by each.

• Does the campus culture empower students?
• How can on-campus organizations make use of student writers and also enhance student writing?
• How do we frame disciplines? Should we moving toward a theory of centers rather than a theory of boundaries?
• What makes a writing assignment meaningful?
• Should we shift to a WRAC model (writing and reading across the curriculum)?

These questions may be brief in text, but responses are complex, and the ways in which those responses shape student learning experiences and faculty development are important.

The Plenary

The plenary session focused on creating sustainable WAC programs and was led by an A-team of scholars-- Chris Anson, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Chris Thaiss, Linda Adler-Kassner, and Bob McMaster-- who role-played how they would deal with a failing, under-resourced WAC program (a very cool divergence from the traditional plenary talk). Anson would propose scenarios, building the complexities facing the school bit by bit, and the 5 others would respond on the fly. They did not know what they would be asked beforehand.

 As some who hopes to be a WPA one day, I was really intrigued by how the scholars embodied the different thought processes, concerns, and strengths of each individual involved in a WAC initiative, ranging from department chairs to WAC directors to provosts to students. I thought, aside from having a bit of fun, they were incredibly in-tune with those that they served and incredibly empathetic. It helped me see what I might come up against should I someday be invited to try to enhance or save a WAC program.

The speakers reminded the audience that sustainability went beyond a current context and a current moment and planned for the future. The solution also had to be built within the framework of the local context with input from all stakeholders (as much as possible, that is). Top-down initiatives would feel imposing and oppressive and often fail to effectively use the strengths of the parties involved. Collaboration, where possible, is a wonderful thing.

The most important things I took away were:

1. Understand the campus climate and be prepared to work within it, even if the aim is to change it. No model is one-size-fits-all when it comes to campus writing initiatives.
2. Be sensitive to people's fears and frustrations. See challenges as moments for reflection, negotiation, or collaborative education.
3. Bring joy into the work. Focus on the pleasures of learning from one another and the pleasure of writing.

What seems evident from these talks and discussions is that the people here really care about their students and their colleagues. While many people were doing serious research, it was easy to see how much of it could be put into practice and was largely aimed at contributing to a positive learning environment for everyone involved. IWAC really made me excited about the work I'm doing, the field that I intend to contribute to, and continued interactions with the people who I am privileged to call my colleagues. I'm looking forward to (fingers crossed) attending again in 2016.

I would love to hear from IWAC-attendees about their experiences at the conference and from those interested in campus writing initiatives what to make of some of these big questions and themes.

Snark/asm and Second (3rd, 4th,...) Language Learning

For the past few months, I've been trying to learn Portuguese. It is definitely one of the hardest things I have done in a long time. I use interactive websites. I write in elementary grammar books. I listen to podcasts. I even try reading the news and books in Portuguese. Acquiring even the most basic conversational skill has been a painfully slow process. Despite keeping at it everyday, I can make only a few full sentences-- nothing in past tense or conditional or the million other tenses Portuguese has. As someone who is almost a doctor in the English language, it feels so odd to me not to be able to craft complex sentences or find the right vocabulary for the ideas I want to express. I haven't given up yet, though.

The reason I continue to fight it out is partially because I want to be able to converse with my boyfriend's friends and family, but even more so because I've had positive encouragement. My significant other will let me ask him one million questions about the language. He'll sit there and help me try to pronounce words. If I message him in Portuguese, he'll answer me back and show me the correct way to say what I was trying to say. He does this all with patience and kindness, and he reminds me how far I've come. At a birthday party, his family friends made me feel proud of how much I was catching on. One of my best friends is also learning Portuguese, though she is much more advanced than I am, and she also consistently reminds me that I've learned a lot and celebrates my small victories. Even online, when I chat on Babbel.com with native speakers, they never put down my poor grammar or the length of time it takes me to construct a thought. They are all supportive. This has made it easy to learn.

I contrast this with my attempts to learn Greek as an adult. My father is a Greek immigrant and several of my family members and close family friends speak Greek. I've been to Greece twice. I thought it was important to learn the language. The problem is that whenever I tried to speak Greek, I was met with sarcasm or playful mocking. The first time I went to Greece, my cousin would poke fun at me every time I spoke, whether my accent was incorrect or not, simply because I was an American struggling to speak the language. The second time I went to Greece, my grandmother was the only one who encouraged others to speak Greek to me in an attempt to help me learn the language, but she didn't help much with the spoken aspects. At home, my dad made no effort to encourage my Greek learning, even after I dished out a large fee for Rosetta Stone. After a while, I just didn't want to try anymore. No one would engage me. The learning process felt solitary. There was no one to practice with, and as I already felt self-conscious, the playful jests made me not want to try, even when there was.  

Sass doesn't belong in feedback to student writing. 

I spent the first five years of my life in Brooklyn, NY, grew up in Jersey, relocated to Queens, and then returned to Jersey again. I was raised by a native Staten Islander and a Greek transplanted in Brooklyn. Needless to say, I am fluent in sarcasm and teasing. I admit that I will often tease my students when they ask seemingly obvious questions, but now more than ever, I see that there is a time and place for it, and I am trying to train myself to act accordingly.

Learning a new language outside a formal educational settings has really helped me empathize with the plight of students who are learning English or even just learning to craft better Standard American Written English/Academic English/whatever fancy term you want to use to describe the English of the socioeconomic elite. It's become obvious to me that if we want students to learn, we have to tone down the sarcasm and the playful mocking.

The worst case I ever saw was on a student's paper from a law professor. A student was proposing a thesis statement for a research paper, and the professor had written things like "REALLY?????????!?!?????? Are you even trying? Can you think? Oh, so X, Y, Z happened? Really?" in a paragraph long email of harsh sarcasm that addressed his vague, overly general thesis statement. While I guessed that this professor was just offering a bit of tough love, her comments made the student feel incapable of performing the assigned task. They completely alienated him and made him feel far beneath the average student. He didn't want to ask her questions. He didn't feel playfully challenged. He felt defeated and didn't want to write anymore.

I also saw a professor who demanded that his student attend the writing center because he had a slew of grammar issues, which the professor guessed were a result of learning English as a second language. The professor thought he was being encouraging by writing snarky comments, then sending the student for extra help instead of failing him. However, the student's native language was English, and the professor's list of things to work on (which, again, he thought was encouraging) only served to make this student feel stupid and incapable of correcting what were really just small surface-level grammatical errors. He could have learned so much more if the professor just took the time to explain and perhaps actually let him play around with language.

Like I said, language learners definitely need play and playfulness. We need to make learning fun and encourage mistake-making in a nurturing environment. It clearly needs to be interactive. But fun doesn't have to be at the expense of our students, a reminder that we are superior to this, which is what snark and sarcasm both do. These students already know we have mastered something that they are struggling with. Sarcasm should be reserved for those who have already established skill and confidence, who know that they can do better. Those who are already questioning their abilities will only find further doubt in those seemingly harmless teasing remarks. In the process of building confidence, play has to be about discovery and socialization, making new connections.

Boa sorte!

The Expert as Novice: Reliving the Freshman Year

image from techwhirl.com

For the past few weeks, I've been working part-time at an IT consulting & network integration firm in downtown Manhattan as part of the technical writing team (which is really just me & the existing technical writer). The thing is, even though I’m (somewhat) proficient at writing for academic purposes, technical writing is a whole new ball game. While my writing is clean and easy to read, I don’t always have the knowledge to write what needs to be written. It’s a bit confidence-shaking. I’m feeling like an intern rather than someone whose specialty is writing.

Feeling like a beginner isn't easy, especially when you've devoted your entire adult life thus far to studying English and Communications, and even more so when as a writing instructor and writing consultant, I’m supposed to be an expert writer. It’s true that I can write for many contexts. Heck, I can even teach writing in the disciplines! But writing in the professional domain about information technology has proven challenging, and my lack of content knowledge is extremely frustrating. I know if I knew more, I could write better.

This brings me back to some of the literature that I have been reading for my dissertation. Sommers & Saltz’s study “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year,” for instance, talks about the struggle that freshman face as they are placed in a new writing environment, where they are expected to perform as experts without already having expertise. While it it is the process of writing that these freshman struggle with, it is also the writing that helps them to make sense of complex concepts and gain expertise. Furthermore, they find that students who embrace their novice status are the ones most likely to make the greatest strides in writing development and learning in general. Continued writing is helping me to gain an understanding of the IT field, but embracing my novice is still a challenge.

Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers by Lee Ann Carroll also speak into my situation. Carroll thinks writing assignments need to be redefined as literacy tasks because they require much more than just a handle on writing skills, such as grammar and organization. Writing tasks require some knowledge about the content area, an ability to negotiate the needs of the audience with the needs of the writer, to understand form, and perhaps to navigate information. Many literacies are involved in the composition of a single piece of writing. And with new roles come new literacy needs. In this case, my inability to perform as I would on, say, an essay for a Writing Studies course is directly related to being asked to perform a new role and a lack of information technology literacy. I am missing the necessary vocabulary and am fairly unaware of the conventions of the field. No matter how cleanly I can write, I will not be able to produce the quality of writing that someone who has in-depth knowledge of the field will be able to produce. My performance as a technical writer is affected by this lack of knowledge. Again, this is extremely frustrating to someone who supposedly has “mastered” reading and writing, with nearly 10 years of higher education devoted to it.

To cope with my lack of knowledge, I have been reading, taking notes on style, and asking questions-- and I am learning a lot-- but the process of learning to be an effective technical writer at an IT firm is still a much slower process than I’m comfortable with. Even when I feel that I’ve said something as precisely as possible, I am often told “that’s great, but here’s an even better way.” The person I am working under is great in that he tries to encourage me, but still, sometimes, I feel like my work is more of a burden to correct than a lightening of his workload. It can be totally disheartening.

It really makes me empathize with my students. It makes me see that they probably are giving me their best efforts and that my feedback to them may come as a surprise. It shows me that while they may understand my feedback in theory, they may not know how to put it into practice. Furthermore, encouragement is nice and may be genuine, but without specifics or if always followed by “but here’s what you need to fix,” it may wind up being meaningless. On the other hand, this experience also shows me that with time, effort, a willingness to research concepts and revise their writing, and a careful eye for rhetorical analysis, students will be able to make significant progress. Finally, this progress likely will not come in rapid epiphanies, but as a slow, non-linear coming into awareness.    

Little Kids and Language Learning

Even though I spent my early years in a bilingual household-- my grandparents, aunt, father and their friends all spoke Greek and English-- I lost my connection to the Greek language when we moved from the duplex my family shared with my grandparents to our own single-family home in New Jersey just before my 5th birthday. While I may still know a few words here and there, I am by no means fluent. I don't know what it's like to know two languages, let alone use them interchangeably.

Which is why I'm fascinated by my boyfriend's 3-year-old sister (aside from being one of the coolest little kids I know). My boyfriend and his family are Brazilian-- not of Brazilian descent, but actually from Brazil. His sister, though, was born and raised in America. Dear BF is completely fluent in English (even more so than some English-speaking people I know I'd say), and his mother speaks enough to get by, though she is more comfortable with and prefers to speak in Portuguese. His little sister can easily switch between English and Portuguese. 

What amazes me about the little peanut is that she knows when to use which language. She can say something in Portuguese to her mom, and then turn her head and speak to me in English. She'll speak in whichever she feels like to my BF, sometimes jumping between languages from sentence to sentence. Clearly, she is able not just to speak both languages, but to think in both, as well. Dear BF can do this too, and I think he's awesome. His ability to switch spoken and thought languages instantly absolutely amazes me. On the other hand, I somewhat expect an adult to know in what context a particular language is appropriate. Most adults can identify others as able to speak to English or another language. However, I thought that would be beyond the comprehension of a 3 year old.

It leaves me with many questions for those who grew up multilingual or have taught their children to be multilingual: 

• How do you learn two languages at once?

• At what point do you start to think in another language?

• How do you learn to differentiate between multiple languages as you learn them, knowing that you've learned a word in one language versus another?

I'm interested in learning other languages, and I'm wondering what I can learn from little kids about acquiring new vocabularies and their cultural contexts. I bet it would also be useful to building better ways to help first-year writers, who often struggle to acquire disciplinary vocabulary and "general writing skills"/academic language simultaneously.

The Prospectus: Lessons from a Struggling Writer

My longtime readers already know that when I began my doctoral program, my intention was today study Victorian literature, specifically Children's literature of the Victorian age. A little less than a semester in, however, I decided to flip to the dark side of Comp/Rhet, and I've loved every minute of it. The problem is that I began my doctoral program with a background in British literature and Children's literature, and because I already had a M.A., I was fast-tracked in my residency requirements. This meant that while I normally would have had three years of full-time classes, I was cut down to one-- nice for my wallet, not so nice for my brain.

Now that I'm at the dissertation phase, I'm struggling. I picked three areas of interest for my comprehensive exams that were somewhat useful, but not directly applicable to my dissertation. So at the moment, I'm forced to play catch up with all of the readings that I missed over two years of lost residency and to figure out how comp/rhet researchers write. I don't blame anyone, and I certainly wouldn't say "I wish I never switched fields." I'm quite happy with what I've chosen, but it has been a challenge.

I've been trying to perfect my prospectus for two semesters now, and it's been a painfully slow process. At one point, I scrapped an entire semester's worth of work and started from scratch. With that said, I am learning some things along the way about how to prepare a prospectus:

1. A dissertation prospectus is not the same thing as the prospectus for a Master's thesis: This was my first wrong assumption. I figured because I did one well, I would be good at doing the other. Not so. A dissertation prospectus is a much more intensive task. 
2. Writing more is not necessarily writing well: When I heard "this is not ready for approval," I automatically thought that meant I had to add more texts and explanation. That wasn't the case. What I needed to do (and still need to do) was think more deeply about the issues and focus in on the key points.
3. How you frame your review of the literature is just as important, if not more important, than the works that you choose to include: As an English major, I know that the nuances of language can change the meaning of a phrase dramatically. I had a hard time seeing the difference between presenting ideas and presenting my ideas about others' work, which was often directly related to the way I wrote about the texts. I also couldn't see that I was supposed to be filtering in the works that directly applied to my work and wanted to talk about everything ever written about my subtopics. Having models is a good start, but learning to make the switch is not automatic. I'm still working on it.
4. Read other prospectuses and ask questions: I wish I knew more about writing the prospectus itself when I started and more closely analyzed others' prospectuses and literature reviews. I'm not sure I understood the function of the prospectus, other than to tell what research you thought you were doing, but it's more than that. It's about the importance of your contribution, the relevance of your ideas, the rationale behind your methodologies, the subfields that you want to connect with, and how you're speaking into what's already been. Asking questions and reading for models earlier on would have saved me time and energy. 
5. Own it: I'm still working on this one too. It's hard to remember that the dissertation is about YOUR contribution to the field and about your entrance into the scholarly conversation. 

Now, I'm not saying I've got these things down. Far from it. In fact, my chair had to remind me about just about all of them yesterday. And for all I know, I might still be missing the mark. However, if I realized these 5 things earlier, I probably would have been much further ahead than I am now. Wiuth that said, this whole process has been a learning process, though, and I'm looking forward to working through my ideas more productively and effectively now and taking these strategies to future research.

Take the Plunge: Mina Shaughnessy's "Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing"

Last week, I had to read Mina Shaughnessy's 1976 essay "Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing" for our professional development session at the writing center where I work. I've read her book Errors and Expectations (1977), but this was the first time that I had a chance to read any of her shorter works. Though the article is nearly 40 years old, the problems and solutions described by Shaughnessy are still applicable today.

Shaughnessy's main argument in the piece is that educators need to stop considering basic writing "a writing course for young men and women who have many things wrong with them" (291). Instead, she argues that writing instructors need to begin to examine their own teaching and learning processes and the complex and contextual needs of their students. To show how these issues manifest themselves in the university, Shaughnessy outlines a "developmental scale for teachers," complete with four stages. They are:

Guarding the Tower: gate-keeping and denying access to those who seemingly do not belong, a tactic of self-preservation.
Converting the Natives: assuming outsiders can be "tamed" and fashioned after the elite class, though they can never truly be part of the elite.
Sounding the Depths: realizing there is complexity and that students of all kinds have something to contribute.
Diving In: meeting basic writing students head-on, dealing with their complex needs, and breaking the tradition of thinking "what's wrong with them" 

Though the terminology is controversial, as it is steeped in racial and colonialist overtones, the message is clear. It's not "them" who needs to be fixed; it's "us," the educators, who need to reevaluate our methods. We need to be aware of our own practices, be willing to assess the needs of our students, and quit using one-size-fits-all pedagogies. We need to stop thinking these students are broken and realize that they simply need someone to guide them through the things they have not been privileged yet to know. We also need to stop privileging antiquated ideas of "the typical college student," the ones who come from high performing high schools with a middle class enthusiasm for formal education. These are ideas that are still practical and useful in our current educational climate.

Here are some things we can do to help students, especially basic writers, based on Shaughnessy's ideas:

1. See students as people with real problems, passions, and pursuits.
2. Do not think of students as empty vessels or know-nothings who need to be filled with your greater knowledge.
3. Accept that students bring their own knowledge and literacies to the classroom, even if they aren't the "standard."
4. Be willing to learn from students.
5. Remember that at one point, you didn't know either.
6. And... you didn't know what you didn't know until someone made you aware.
7. Don't use "it's not my job" or "they should have learned that in [insert course or grade level here]" as an excuse not to help a student with a task that you have the ability to help them with.
8. Recognize patterns of error and needs rather than worrying about "correctness" (what's correct anyway? whose version of correct?). 
9. Don't just mark errors. Explain your thought process.
10. Offer models of academic inquiry and inquiry processes. Students often need to learn how to ask questions more than they need to learn answers.
11. Do not underestimate your students. 
12. Challenge students to complete meaningful tasks, but also be willing to help them along the way.

Shaughessy ends these essay with these words: "DIVING IN is simply deciding that teaching them [basic writers] to write well is not only suitable but challenging work for those who would be teachers and scholars in a democracy" (297). If we want democracy, we can't have a fixed notion of who can and cannot be educated. We can't say, "oh they'll never make it" or "they're not 'college material,'" or only a small, likely homogeneous, group of students will ever have the opportunity to succeed. If we want to encourage diversity and all of the wonderful things that come from the intersection of different ideas, then we need to take the plunge and dive in.

-------------------------------------

Shaughnessy, Mina. "Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing." College Composition and Communication 27.3 (1976): 234-39. Rpt. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 3rd ed. Eds., Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2011. Print.

Race, Language, and Identity in Students' Academic Lives: Lessons from NCTE12

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending my very first National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention (#NCTE12) at the MGM Grand Conference Center in beautiful Las Vegas, NV. There were many interesting and exciting panels to choose from. My program is about an inch and half thick. My favorite panel, however, was "Connecting Lived Experiences and Literacies with Urban High Schools: Lessons for Pedagogy." Here is the program entry:

B.41 CONNECTING LIVED EXPERIENCES AND LITERACIES WITH URBAN HIGH SCHOOLS: LESSONS FOR PEDAGOGY (S)Room 107, Level One
Teachers experience pedagogical struggles while students
interact in academic spaces that challenge their multiple
lived experiences through the narrowing of curricula. In
this session, presenters will critically analyze their educational research contexts,
which often miss rich opportunities to consider students’
multiple identities, positionings, and languages.
Chair: Timothy San Pedro, Arizona State University,
Tempe
Presenters: Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Teachers College,
Columbia University, New York, New York, “Dear Miss:
Building Black and Latino Adolescents’ Racial Literacy
through Letter Writing”
Danny Martinez, University of California, Los Angeles
Limarys Caraballo, Teachers College, Columbia University,
New York, New York, “‘I Don’t Feel Like We Get to
Express Ourselves in There’: Students’ Narratives of
Resistance in a Middle School Classroom”
Discussant: Ramon Martinez, The University of Texas,
Austin

I was excited to attend this panel because I'm interested in bridging lived experiences and academic ones. Despite being suggested for a secondary education audience, the ideas shared by the panelists were important for all educators to hear. At first glance, I thought this panel would address a broad spectrum of traumas or issues students faced and how they were incorporated into the classroom. Instead, the panel focused on issues of race in interesting ways.

A Brief Recap of the Presentations

Danny Martinez was first up. He talked about the ways that Standard English still dominates the classroom and how, despite NCTE's "Students' Right to Their Own Language," evidence shows that students have not yet received a true right to their own language. Martinez did this by observing and recording classroom discussions and interviews with students. He noted that the teachers often subtly corrected students' uses of Black English during conversation by revoicing their ideas into Standard English. He also referred to the term repair, which suggests that the use of Black English is using "broken" language.

In her presentation, Limarys Caraballo discussed problematic privileging of "neutral" space in ELA, which actually translates into making white middle class language the norm in the classroom. Caraballo demonstrated ways in which students of color attempted to carve out sites of resistance through writing. Through ethnographic study and interviews, she showed that students of color often feel that their voices are not valued in the classroom, an idea that carried through the following presentations. My favorite part of this presentation was when Caraballo displayed an excerpt from a students' piece of writing that displayed resistance to an assignment. The assignment called for use of vocabulary words in a freewrite, and the student wrote something to the effect of: "It's not really a freewrite if you tell us what words to use." I saw that as an astute observation.

Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz presented the findings of a project she works on with non-traditional high school students. At the beginning of the session, she spoke about letters from students and said that we must have the strength not only to receive letters of praise but letters that admonish us if we are to be good educators. Her presentation focused on a "Dear Teacher" letter assignment that asked the young men in her nontraditional high school to address their experiences with race. I quite literally teared up as she read excerpts from the works. The young men had so much to say and quite articulately, and it was evident that they had not had many places, if any, to articulate those thoughts before within the academy. Their letters made it clear that students of color experience racism in education. In the letters, one learns that these students are marked as problem students, which has the potential to mark them as hypervisible or invisible in a classroom space; held to a lower standard, which lowers their motivation; and that they want a space to talk about these issues. How would things change if we opened up these spaces, if we considered these questions and criticisms?

The last presenter was Tim San Pedro. San Pedro spoke about his ethnographic study of a high school that stands 2 miles from a Native American reservation in Arizona. In keeping with the conference theme of "Dream.Connect.Ignite.," San Pedro started the session by asking "Whose dreams are being recognized? Whose connections are being made?" Throughout his talk, San Pedro traced the experiences of two students in particular, a white student and a Native American student. These students were both in a Native American Literature class (the only course of its kind in Arizona, due to recent legislation banning ethnic studies) and an American History course. It was particularly relevant for this conference because NCTE moved the 2012 conference from Arizona to Nevada in protest of that legislation. What San Pedro found is that both students were influenced directly by the juxtaposition of the two courses. The Native American student felt that she found her voice and that her experiences were validated by the Native American Literature course. They even gave her a way to respond to the American History course that she believed was unnecessary, being that it told history from a corrupt perspective. The Caucasian student, who was the only Caucasian student in the Native American Literature class, felt that her views were challenged by the class. She began to see American History as complex and perhaps not completely true. What San Pedro also noted was the neither student felt comfortable speaking in the course that did not validate their views. They felt silenced. It was important for these students feel some sort of authority or mastery before they felt able to speak, even when they had ideas. He referred to these places of felt-authority as environmental safety zones and internal safety zones, building off Bahktin's zone of contact theories and noted that typical education offers more safety zones for Caucasian students than students of color.

To close out the panel, the discussant, Ramon Martinez, ended by asking the big question: "What if?" He challenged us to think about the possibility of living in a world where we allowed students to speak in their own language, where we allowed students to express their struggles with race, and where we didn't view students of color in the classroom as "problems to be fixed." For many, I have a feeling it was a future not easily imagined.

Afterthoughts

I admit that I often circumvent race issues in my classroom. As a white woman, I feel unable to speak back to them genuinely, as I am in a privileged position with little experience being subjected to racism. With the exception of some clips that talk about race for purposes of rhetorical analysis (Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," for example), I rarely bring race to the table as a topic of discussion. It's a conversation I am not comfortable having. I also have a fear of coming across as the "white savior" and belittling the experiences of others if I do. As a result, while I certainly would never squash a race conversation that my students wanted to have, I let these things happen organically, rather than creating a space for them. I constantly wonder if this is what I should be doing.

I have had students write about race on more than one occasion. For example, during my first year of teaching, one of my students wrote about his experiences as a young Black man for a Writing as Activism project. It was a privilege to be able to read it. He helped me to understand what it meant to be a target of racism without having others be overtly racist. The space is there for students to do work like this, but I do not push it on them. When they choose to take that space, however, I give students an outlet for doing something about the negative experiences that they have had with race rather than simply allowing them to express their frustration, which I believe is important.

Finally, Danny Martinez and Limarys Caraballo in particular got me wondering about my own language practices in the classroom. Do I revoice? Do I close of the space for students' right to their own language? Do I shut down sites of resistance? As a first year writing instructor, I know that I often teach SWE. On the other hand, I wonder if revoicing, at least in my case, is really a corrective device, or if it is my way of paraphrasing students, using my own language. It's complex. 

This panel, which I admit I might not have attended if it was marked with "race" in the title, has pushed me to think about these issues again.

Questions for Consideration

• Who gets heard in a classroom and in the larger context of education reform discussion?
• Should one/how should one make a space for discussions about race in a writing classroom?
• Is it possible to allow students to have the right to their own language in a college writing classroom, or any classroom really? If so, how?
• How do you feel about legislation that calls for the end of ethnic studies, naming it as anti-American and racist?
• Does the scholarship on racial minorities as underachievers because of socioeconomic factors lead to underachievement?
• Have you had experiences with racism in education? If so, how did you negotiate them?

Listening to the Lack: The Importance of Remembering How We Learned to Learn

I spent my early childhood years living in a two-family home in Brooklyn, NY that was owned by my Greek immigrant grandparents. For the first three years, I shared my grandparents' apartment, living in their finished basement. I had a bedroom. My parents slept on a pull-out sofa. Eventually, my parents and I and new baby sister moved into the upstairs unit. My family didn't have a lot of money at that time. Both of my parents worked, and I spent my days with my grandparents. Some days, we'd hang out with my elderly neighbors (two sisters and a brother who had all either never married or became widowed). Some days, one of those elderly neighbors, Josie, would bring her granddaughter and grandson over to play with me. Other days, we had visitors from around the neighborhood.

The point is that I grew up surrounded by people who enjoyed conversation, and most of them were adults. There was a constant stream of visitors in my house, between the extended Greek family that dropped by, close family friends, and my mother's four sisters and brother and their families. While we didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up, I was constantly encouraged to explore language and to be creative. I was spoken to, spoken with, given books, allowed to "use my imagination," and left to watch educational television programs, such as Sesame Street, the Muppet Babies, and Fraggle Rock. I only manged to go to preschool for one month because the waiting list for the public preschool was so long that there was no space available until May of my 4th year. It didn't matter much, though. In my household, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who were genuinely interested in helping me to express myself. This wealth of people perhaps made up for my lack of monetary wealth. I never felt poor as a kid. It was a rich experience, but one that I think many individuals fail to realize is not standard in all households.

Before I got to grad school, I rarely considered the impact my early childhood experiences had on my life or education. Prior to grad school, I think my perspective on the lives of others was narrow. I was truly ignorant to the ways that language and my own positionality had influenced me. My dad always said, "This is America. If you work hard, you can achieve success," and I believed it 100%. He seemed to be living proof. He came to America with no money, knowing no English at 11 years old, living in a poor, violence-stricken neighborhood in Brooklyn and wound up with a college education and his own IT company. But I was essentializing. I was making my dad's experiences the experience of every immigrant or underprivileged individual in America. It was my experience with literary theory and composition studies later in my masters program and then throughout my doctoral program that finally got me thinking about the biases under which I was operating. 

Today, I was reminded again of my own educational and professional advantages, as I read Gina Bellafante's blog post on NTY.com, "Before a Test,  a Poverty of Words." In the article, Bellafante cites research that states that infants and young children of working class families are exposed to 1500 less words in a day than their middle and upper class counterparts. They begin school with a "word deficit." Though the numbers and the study are disputed, the main claim is really the important part: those who have less access to words have less access to equal education. They were severely disadvantaged from the start, especially in regards to testing, because they have limited language. It's not just a matter of working hard; they have to play years of catch up while their peers are excelling even further.

This post is not a commentary on Bellafante's take on standardized testing (anyone who reads this blog knows I am not its biggest fan), but merely a reminder of just how much language impacts our ability to succeed in this nation. Immediately, the study cited in Bellafante's article makes me think back to Malcolm X's "Coming to an Awareness of Language." In that piece, which is a chapter of his longer autobiography, Malcolm X reflects on his experiences in prison. Without access to standard English (yes, a whole other bag of complexities), his ability to reach those in power was drastically reduced. He could not help himself or others without access to a larger vocabulary. In response, he used his time in prison to increase his vocabulary by learning the entire dictionary, copying and memorizing new words everyday. For Malcolm X, this was a liberating experience. It gave him access to power denied to him previously. 

Language is powerful because it gives us access to new concepts, not just new words and discourse communities. I believe it was in Bahktin's "Discourse of the Novel" that I first learned about the link between language and existence. One theory I picked up from his essay is that if something does not exist in the language, it does not exist in the culture. Giving name to something, in essence, gives it life. If there are three shades of blue, for example, without a name, then they are simply "shades of blue," not existing on their own, nor able to be spoken about. "Robin's Egg Blue," however, exists on its own and can be spoken about and thought about. Can you imagine, then, how limited existence becomes, then, for those who have a limited vocabulary? Not to mention, someone with a limited vocabulary also has a limited range of expression. Simply having more words can give you more thoughts, or at least, more sophisticated ones. 

The debate that ensued in the comment section of Bellafante's post focused around fault, whether the children, the educators, or the parents were to be blamed for the lack of vocabulary-based education. Others argued that the findings of the earlier study were irrelevant because it was comprised of a small sample and the numbers did not necessarily add up. It seemed evident that many of these individuals were not considering their own positionality or were essentializing, as I had done. I think blame is counterproductive. I also think ignoring Bellafonte's observations and the study is foolish. Experience tells us that language is important and the more control over it we have, the more power we can potentially possess. 

I can't be in the homes of all of my students, clients, or peers. I can't change their childhoods. I cannot force them to do anything that they do want to do. But there are some things that I can do as a peer, a writing center consultant, and a writing instructor. I can make sure I encourage those who feel "dumb" to recognize that language acquisition is a process. I can encourage people to read, even if it's a gaming magazine or words off a cereal box. Perhaps, most importantly, I can encourage them to have conversations (see Bruffee's "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'"). For me, what Bellafonte's article reminds is that it is important that we develop a culture that emphasizes communicating and active listening rather than commanding.

The Writing on the (Bathroom) Wall

Today, for whatever reason, the writing on the bathroom stall in the library caught my eye. Usually, bathroom stalls are scribbled with nasty things. I've seen "so-and-so is a whore" or gang symbols and graffiti tags a million times. People's names or hearts with lovers are common too.

To my surprise, however, inspirational messages were written everywhere in this particular stall. Things like, "Be the change you wish to see in the world," and, "You are beautiful," were written in pen on the green doors. I would have taken a picture, but I thought that cameras in public bathrooms would be inappropriate. For a moment, it made me smile. While I don't condone vandalizing university property, I couldn't help but think how nice it was that someone had taken the opportunity to reach out to other women and share a moment of inspiration, one that they (most likely) could not avoid seeing.

I couldn't help but wonder how our world would be different if every ladies' room mirror had a sign that said, "you look great today," or in each stall, one that read, "you're brilliant!" instead of "wash your hands," "no smoking," or "don't forget to flush." Not that those things aren't important too, but I bet people would be more willing to keep a bathroom clean that made them feel good than one that made them feel like a child being scolded. I won't be writing on bathroom walls any time soon, but I might just start leaving some friendly notes in public places.

What is an adult?

from www.cartoonstock.com

For class this week, my students read Bonnie Morris's "When I Was a Teenage E.R.A. Activist." Morris's article talks about her experiences as an 18-year-old activist-intern, going door to door in a wealthy middle-class suburb in the South, campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment. The article is chock-full of thought-provoking narrative, including whether or not women's rights have been fully realized, how those campaigning adopted the very strategies of dominance they were rallying against, and how education seems to play little part in curing people of ignorance. The one question, however, that stirred up conversation in my classroom had little do with Feminism and much more to do with liminality.

Despite Morris's overt Feminist critique, her definition of womanhood was the one thing that caused blatant disagreement among my students. Morris writes, "At eighteen years old, I was old enough to vote, have sex, and get married-- three very significant and historically complex embodiments of American womanhood...." (169). In general, my students felt that this was not a sufficient definition of adulthood. Though it is clear that Morris was trying to do Feminist work here and was less concerned with the notion of adulthood than with the notion of womanhood, I thought it was interesting that my students were struggling with her definition in those terms.

As a result, I pushed them to think about how they defined "adult," and why Morris's definition of an adult woman was inaccurate. They listed off the usual: age, maturity, wisdom, independence, bills, responsibility, a consciousness for the ways actions affect others. One student pointed out that Morris's definition wasn't really a definition, but a list of rights.

Still, their definitions were somewhat run of the mill. What I found most interesting is that, when I asked my class, "Do you consider yourself an adult?" There was a generally confused silence. No one really said no, and no one really said yes. At best, I heard some incoherent mumbles. Stuck in the liminal space of being a college freshman and being either at the very beginning of adulthood at 18 or the very end of childhood at 17, most of my students didn't seem to embody either anymore.

image from cartoon-clipart.blogspot.com

As a graduate student, I couldn't help but empathize with their confusion (and perhaps this is where Morris is most correct in her assertions). Though I am well beyond 18 years of age, I struggle to define myself as an adult. Saying, "I am a woman," is a difficult thing for me. I still call myself "girl." Woman evokes an image of power and of inspiring females to whom I am not prepared to claim myself equal in rank, though I can't help but wonder why this is so.

I would say it's a Feminist issue, but I think men have it just as rough. Though they consciously avoid being defined in the feminized state of childhood by identifying themselves as "boys," they often get stuck in "guy," rarely accepting "man." Unless, of course, it is to jokingly declare, "I'm the man!"

What is it about our culture that makes adulthood so hard to define and so hard to identify with? 

Why Stephen Fry Thinks There Should Be More Anglophones... and Fewer Grammar Fanatics

From RogerCreations, the creator of this video:

Using the wonderful words of acclaimed writer, actor and allround know it all (I mean that in the best of ways) Stephen Fry I have created this kinetic typography animation. If you like what you hear you can download the rest of the audio file from Mr. Fry's website. stephenfry.com and then go to the audio and video section at the top of the page and look for the file entitled language. You can also find the file on iTunes by searching the name 'Stephen Fry's Podgrams'.

I loved this particular essay on language and I thought it would be the prefect opportunity to make my first kinetic typography. I hope you like it and even if you dont I would like to heard what you think in the comments section. Also I know that at point the audio does not match the text so you doesnt have to write that. It is because I copied the transcript off of Stephen's website and it was not 100% exactly what he said and i did not notice until I was well underway. However these cases are few and far between.

Just incase you were wondering the programs I used to make this were all by adobe. Mostly after effects but also flash and illustrator. Flash for the changing background colour transitions and illustrator for putting the words in to the shape of 'language' before loading it into after effects to animate.

Enjoy

A "Gooder" Look at Language in the Media

Watching late-night television, a certain ridiculous commercial caught my attention. The commercial itself was really mediocre advertising at best (I don't even remember the product it was promoting), but as someone interested in concepts of Englishes, grammars, signs and signifiers, and audiences, I couldn't help be struck by one simple word-- "gooder." Hearing that word, my head bobbed up from my laptop to catch the last 10 seconds of the clip.

In the commercial, a woman named Jane and a female friend are talking about (I think) a weight loss product, which her friend says is "gooder." Jane's initial reaction is to say, "gooder isn't a word."

Following shortly after Jane's remark, her friend notes enthusiastically, "Jane, you look gooder!" This time, Jane ignores the grammar trespass and agrees. Jane, of course, comes to accept "gooder" as a real word, when it conveniently describes her weight loss and makes it better than just plain "good" progress.

I think this commercial, as simple and silly as it is, acts as a metaphor for hierarchies of rhetoric. Jane, the current traditionalist grammar critic, is unable to accept "gooder" as a word, until it becomes a term that enhances her own authoritative position. It also makes clear that the thin woman (the social norm) is in a higher position of authority than her friend who has not yet tried the weight loss product. Thus, the silly, seemingly benign interaction between two gal pals evokes power structures and mainstream ideologies hidden in language.

Just one of the guys... err, pals.

When people say "ignorance is bliss," they aren't kidding. Learning about language has totally ruined my life! Ok, so maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but really, taking Literary Theory and Composition Theory has completely changed my way of looking at the world. I can't do so much as go on Facebook without thinking about language and ideology-- which is how I was inspired to write this post.

Today, I was struck by something I say all of the time. A friend wrote about girls who are "one of the guys" in her Facebook status, and I thought, "Well, hey, I'm 'one of the guys.'" For most of my life, at least up until my sophomore year of college, my closest friends were predominately male. When I was younger, I would climb trees with the boys, ride bikes with the boys, hike in the woods with the boys, and light things on fire with the boys. When I got older, I watched football with the guys, drank with the guys, watched action movies with the guys, and talked "locker room" talk with the guys. To this day, of my three closest friends from home, two are male. When I'm feeling bummed, I can call "my boys" for a bar night, possibly followed by a diner run and Guitar Hero at 3 A.M. It's great being "one of the guys." They talk openly around me and never treat me like I'm a delicate lady, whose ears must be protected from curses, dirty jokes, and belches.

So what's wrong with being "one of the guys?" Aside from the fact that it assigns gender roles and puts women down as the weaker sex, annoying and overly-conscious of societal norms? I don't think I've ever heard a guy say he's just "one of the girls" (at least not seriously). Any guy who admitted to being "one of the girls" would undoubtedly be mocked for it. Why is it ok for girls to be "one of the guys," but not vice versa? In truth, I don't know many men, especially not straight men, who have mostly female friends, though I know many females who empathize with my situation as "one of the guys." That seems rather ridiculous.

I think this is a good example of how seemingly harmless language can really be quite harmful. "One of the guys" reveals quite a bit about our culture and about the dominating ideologies that circulate here in America. It suggests that women want to be men and that female friendships are somehow lesser than male friendships. While we think the gender landscape is evening out, small phrases like "one of the guys" are evidence that there is still quite a way to go. If we become more conscious of our language, however, we can began to shift the male-dominated language to one that is more gender-neutral and thus change the ideologies that privilege white heterosexual upper class males.

Can anyone think of other examples, or does everyone think that I'm completely out on a limb here?