What's the difference?

“May I borrow a pen?”

“A what?”

“A pen.”

“You mean a pen.”

“Yes, a pen. To write with.”

“You mean, with which to write?”

“Yes, or a pencil.”

“It’s not a pin. It’s a pen. P-E-N.”

“What?”

“You don’t say P-E-N, pin.”

“Well, you know what I mean, right?”

“I don’t have a pin.”

“… that’s just how I say it.”

It was the first time someone tried to standardize my language. It was the first time someone tried to make me feel stupid for my colloquial dialect. It was the first time that my Cumberland-Appalachian/SouthernRegionalized English was pointed out as being different from Standard American English as if this were a significant, bad, or intellectually inferior thing.

I was confused. This had never been a problem before. I was smart. I had won spelling bees. I read voraciously (like… for fun… on the bus on the way home up my little back-woodsy mountain… when I finished my homework… over summers and holidays). And my vocabulary was so precociously developed that I had trouble maintaining normal adolescent relationships, damn it! So, as a freshman in my English Composition class at my moderately progressive Tennessee high school, I truly believed that this classroom, like others, was the land of my Mother Tongue. It isn’t cool to use the word “voraciously” as a fifteen year-old hanging out with your friends—it’s supposed to be very cool to do that in an English class!

Insert my hick accent, y’all. Let the judgments fly.

Grammar Rules Behind 3 Commonly Disparaged Dialects:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/51741/grammar-rules-behind-3-commonly-disparaged-dialects

See, what I did not know (oh, but what I have learned!) is that Southern=Stupid to the “educated ear.” And my teacher (little did I know) was hearing something in my voice that masked any intellectual potential I may have had. She was from “the North,” the land where they don’t fry things and they don’t “talk funny like us” (the same land where I knew Good Witches came from, too, I might add, but was "No Place Like Home"). What I did not realize at the time was that her “correction” was a genuine attempt to help me remove what would be a very stigmatizing identifier from my pronunciation. She was not an unkind person, and I believe she ultimately knew that institutions—institutions that have been the bedrock of my career—are not particularly kind to an incursive ‘r’ or a rolling drawl. But did I resent the unnecessary correction? Yep. It liketa killt me.

It wasn't until much later when I left the land of colloquial homogeneity and found myself surrounded by difference of many kinds--this time, diversity--that I realized what my attempted re-education had been all about. As an adult student, traveler, professional, and educator, I have more frequently found myself being different in the presence of difference. Diversity is a tricky concept, right? Cultural, sexual, political, neurobiological, economical, situational, experiental, emotional, racial, linguistic, age-relational, spiritual, ideological, intangible... diversity is not something easily encapsulated in an institutional statement. Representing and identifying our "selves" amid the masses (perhaps particularly within an institutionalized mass) can present a challenge to the lone, wavering voice, even if that voice finds itself reified by a specific demographic grouping. Diversity by its very definition should resist reductivism and stereotyping at the expense of the personal--but that is a lot to ask of an educational system for many reasons, not all of them easy to locate. What we do see so frequently represented in American educational institutions, though (even democratic ones with "diversity missions") is tension--the tension between the individual and the group, difference and the ideated norm. Perhaps nowhere is this battle more hard fought than on paper and on the tongue. My little story of colloquial standardization reflects what is, of course, a much larger debate in language and composition pedagogy--do we standardize them or do we diversify?

To explore this question a bit further, I would like to briefly consider Christopher Schroeder's Diverse by Design: Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions (2011). Schroeder's ethnographic exploration of Northeastern Illinois University's (NEIU) ecology as "the ostensibly most (ethnically) diverse university in the Midwest" (p. 2) presents us with refreshingly few closed-ended answers, and rewardingly several fractured and uncertain views of authentic and often contradictory findings. Schroeder's focus is primarily on NEIU's identity as a Hispanic-Serving Institution and the programatic and individual-level challenges, successes, and questions this framework of diversity-as-identity poses for teachers, students, and university. More specifically, Schroeder looks at the way in which language acts as a point of negotiation, resistance, acceptance, transmission, unification... and, perhaps in some small way, standardization, of identity.

At the heart of Schroeder's discussion, however, exists a core thesis: "Diversity, despite what we say, disturbs us" (p. 3). Schroeder, like many others, spends the following chapters parsing possible definitions for "diversity," "we/us," and, maybe most importantly, "disturbs." For it is our disturbance that seems to drive us to push for institutional change, to invest in paradigms of standardization, to privilege SAE as more normal than Emerging-Hispanic-English or AAVE, or to deny 9th Grade girls who "talk with a twang" pens. 

Diversity IS disturbing. So is standardization. I don't think it all has to be bad--we can learn from each positionality. But I think as educators, in particular, we must take responsibility for the disturbances we enact when we impose/require standardized language practices and expectations upon large groups. This is bound to disturb our students as much as we have been disturbed by their increasing need for new ways of teaching. Institutionally, the move toward "diversity" (however we define it) has been hard for us--it was hard for my well-intended teacher, and it is hard for so many institutions who are faced with unprecedentedly unique student groups now. By the same token, standardization of thought and performance is hard for students--why should that shift toward something not like them be easy, and why should we expect it to be? (And is it best or good? This MUST be asked.) Change is always hard. With patience, though, I think we can find solutions: accents have a tendency to become less different over time as imperfection gives way to intent... we might just need to start listening differently.

To learn more about Hispanic-Serving Institutions:
http://www.hacu.net/assnfe/companydirectory.asp?STYLE=2&COMPANY_TYPE=1,5

To learn some Southern Appalachian English:
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/dictionary.html

We're all in this together,

Rachael

"I don't know what you take me as..."

“And I know my rights so you goin' need a warrant for that

‘Aren't you sharp as a tack? You some type of lawyer or something?

Somebody important or something?’

‘Child, I ain't passed the bar, but I know a little bit…’”—JayZ, 99 Problems

“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”—Michel Foucault (1991) by Didier Eribon, Trans. by Betsy Wind, Harvard UP, p. 282.

What qualifies as knowledge? Intellect? A smart idea? A powerful idea?

When I listen to the many struggles and judgments that infuse education discourse, these questions (always these questions) return to me.

It surprises me how uncomfortable the words “I don’t know” can make us. Considering the current rate of expansion and mutability of our knowledge, I am not sure how any epistemological certainty is absolutely privileged above another: I’m even more perplexed by our lack of embrasure of uncertainty as a condition that frames our judgments. I think on some level, we all like to feel safe with what we know. Emotionally and cognitively, it is hard to acknowledge the absolute boundaries of our way of knowing without feeling kind of “out there.” Perhaps, when we begin to take on the mantle of “intellectual” (as seems to be required part and parcel to acquiring academic credibility), and when that identity is reified by social expectations that we use our way of knowing to uphold a persona of “intellectuality,” we find ourselves clinging so tightly to our knowledge-base for fear of losing our small stake in an otherwise cold and unpredictable world. We don’t want to let anyone down, ourselves included. And in our fear and fervor, we begin to assert our own way of thinking—sometimes without thinking or knowing—into the lives of others, the ways of others. We stop seeing their knowings as knowings at all. In our smallness, we see their knowledges as unsafe, invalid, and unlike us. Because how can there be space for our intellectuality and theirs as well? Maybe we would like to know them, and maybe they would like to know us, but the risk of saying, “I don’t know. I don’t really know what you know,” is too high and too burdensome.

Time to lay some burdens down.

This week I read James Traub’s City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College. I don’t know what to think about it, precisely. What to feel about it. Traub’s heart seems like it is in the right place [meaning, he, by his own admission, “wanted City College to work,” (p. 18)], but his own analytical and philanthropic goals seem to get in the way of his ability to see how the curation of knowledge can lead to the blind exclusion of entire epistemic and cultural value systems (most notably those least historically like his, though he seems unaware of this exclusive tendency). On the one hand, I feel the desire to be compassionate toward Traub’s attempt to discuss the intersecting lives of others as they exist within the institutional framework that is City College. I believe his goal was most likely to champion the value of education, itself, so I am inclined to see his best intentions. But best intentions or not… It is not easy, if even possible, to represent “the other” with any completeness, so Traub’s analysis—institutional or not—was bound to be fraught with misrepresentations by its very sociopolitical nature. Still, is there empathy, that component so necessary in exploring other knowledges with any hope of learning anything at all?

Not authentically. At one point Traub points to City College’s motto, Respice, Adspice, Prospice: “Look back, look before you, look ahead” (p. 9). Traub, in his discussion, carries out this creed: what he fails to do is look inside. He fails to look with. Most of all, he fails to realize what he can’t see. Traub makes the mistake that so many like him make by assuming an insider’s view of knowledge even while exoticizing the very people and groups he refuses to self-identify with. Addressing the condescension of Traub’s historical-political account of City College is tricky because he does provide student testimony from individuals that seem to allow for representation of genuine experience, and often these experiences do contain authentic systemic themes of economic and political struggle. However, Traub’s oversight is in allowing the individual to represent the whole, and I’m afraid that his view of City College fell prey to the reductivist stereotyping that happens when one privileges their own scope and reach of knowledge without recognizing its limited capacity to see the comprehensive value of others’ social position.

 Consider the following:

People at City tended to think of the college as a supremely successful experiment in international living. Especially in New York, with its apparently insatiable appetite for tribal conflict, the City Cafeteria—where Hatians and Morroccans and Russians and Puerto Ricans and Sri Lankans and Peruvians and Khmers and African Americans talked to one another like civilized human beings—was an uplifting spectacle. And this was particularly true for many of City’s middle-class white Americans, who tended to be far more taken with issues of multiculturalism than were the multicultural immigrants themselves. At lunch one day I met an English major who had grown up in a small town outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. Cindy had gone to an all-white high school, and when she brought a black friend home one afternoon her father threatened to throw her both of them out of the house. Now she was living in a Hispanic neighborhood in Manhattan, taking Bible study class in Harlem, and dating a Korean guy. It was Cindy’s idea of heaven. She looked around at the sea of faces in the cafeteria and said, “What I like about this place is that the smallest minority is blondes. (p. 17)

Funny thing about privileging your own knowledge—it privileges so many other things implicitly, too. Culture, class, civilization, humanity. To the point that it blinds you to the possibility that perhaps the existence of others’ lives and intellects might not be there for your self-indulgent sense of “entry into” some kind of “tribal” buffet of experiences. (Quite frankly, I find this entire passage rather repulsive and naively written to the point of absurdity.) It never occurs to Traub that he, too, is a race and a knowledge among many, Harvard-educated, though he may be. It never occurs to him that at City College, a blonde/white English major perhaps shouldn’t be singled out as civilized among the tribes, in a privately white heaven: rather, she (like Traub) has not yet learned to see herself with/in the people around her, a reciprocal contributor. He never asks the most vital question—what could they teach me?

Perhaps it might feel safe to hold on to old knowledges, old mottoes, and old ideas—that “civility” looks and sounds like a girl from Nebraska or Traub, himself. But this is not the new, functional, or pragmatic. It is not empathetic or kind. It is not wise. And if an education should be good for anything at all, it should be learning to let go of old ideas that are no longer helpful and embracing new ones that move us forward, scary though they may be.

"I don't know what you take me as / or understand the intelligence that Jay-Z has..." Indeed! I'll just let him do the teaching on this one!


To find out more about City College: http://www.ccny.cuny.edu
 

Mentally Ill(iterate)

It began with “diagnostic.” The term sounded so clinical. Besides, what, precisely, was I supposed to be diagnosing? What panel of diseases was I looking to identify and cure? Or, worse, removing like a malignant tumor? No… “diagnostic” didn’t fit my practice at all. That much I knew. They were patient, but they weren’t my patients.

But it didn’t stop there. Prescriptive program, sample analysis, deficiency, crisis and outbreak. And institution. That one—institution.

I’d given them hugs and let them change my mind about video games. This was making me feel like their papers were a biohazard, or something. At the very least, I was fairly sure they had managed to infect me—I’d gotten so close to the “population.”

That’s it! Illness. More specifically: Mental Illness.

I never really liked the way I was asked to test students to see what was wrong with them (ok, their writing) on day one, and calling it a “diagnostic” made it worse. This was in a class they were required to take: where else were they supposed to go? Whomever and whatever they were as writers is what I had to teach, so the diagnostic felt like a horrible social mind-trick that was more about sending a very clear message—“You need to be here because you need help. Let me show you what is wrong with you.” That’s when it hit me. We are treating student writers who deviate from the norm (whatever that is) as if they represent a prevalent, yet abnormal psychology. And on a sociocultural scale, we treat un-assimilating groups and the very concept of “Basic Writing” like a chronic mental illness. We only drop the insanity if/when they normalize. They move up and out, and they stop having to take diagnostics. And in our frantic efforts to remind ourselves that we are not like “them”—that we must be better, more sanitary, than that, right?—we systematically institutionalize their treatment, provide a remedy. We remediate.

Mary Soliday’s The Politics of Remediation: Institutional and Student Needs in Higher Education explores the concept of “remediation” as it has evolved as a function of “institution” from its inception. She doesn’t draw the same parallels as I am here (institution=institutionalization), but Soliday’s analysis thoroughly explains how remediation—it’s definition and its institutional motives—is not a simple help function in academia. It isn’t like students don’t need literacy assistance or writing improvement: they do. But to what extent? That is a more difficult question. Because according to Soliday, the motives behind “remedial education” have never been firmly rooted in serving the student population. Rather, remedial education and it’s impetus the “literacy crisis” has been wielded much like the Munchausen Syndrome of academia. As Soliday writes: “One time-tested means of provoking debate about standards and values in education … is to foment a literacy crisis. Before the literacy crisis of the mid-1970’s, the most virulent outbreak occurred in the last decade of the nineteenth century….” (p. 120-121). The hysteria is not new. And neither is the victim-shaming. This cycle of crisis often results in systemic beliefs that the remedial student is somehow to blame for both the condition of their educational needs and the failure of the prescriptive remedial writing program. To me, this seems like planning for failure from the start: if “remedial education” knows it can always blame its students for any failure, what incentive does the institution really have to succeed in helping them? Furthermore, for many colleges and universities, it seems like they could potentially make more money by designing a remedial model that students paid for (perhaps multiple times through reenrollment), but which never cured students’ writing ills enough to garner academic and economic payoff. At this point, students who know they must pass compulsory composition courses and who wish to have a chance at a middle class lifestyle can’t afford to have the social stigma of being “un-remediated” or “in need of remediation” anywhere near their transcripts. So how many times will they take a course of this ever more expensive treatment? As many times as it takes to normalize….

According to Soliday, if remediation has been a “remedy” for anything at all, it has been used only as a tool by which educational institutions have socially managed their own appearances of exclusivity. To belabor the previous metaphor, I would argue that it is the tool by which America’s universities and colleges have made powerful statements about the intellectual health of their institution, with open admissions often signifying greater risk of contagion or “letting in the crazies.” If this seems like an unsavory comparison (and I hope it does), consider Soliday’s analysis when discussing how representations of remediation have been used to symptomatically classify student groups and writing behaviors:

When intellectuals assume that working class is synonymous with underclass, [this] category for analysis … tends to fuse the economic with the cultural and to highlight student need rather than the institutional need to manage the conflicting aims of access and excellence. […] This cultural analysis tends to portray social class as a set of academically dysfunctional behaviors that cannot really coexist with those habits of mind necessary to succeed in college. (p. 108-109)

As a teacher of designated “remedial” writing courses, what concerns me most is not the idea that our curriculum isn’t addressing a “basic writing” epidemic: I am afraid that once my students think of themselves as “remedial writers” inside the academic system, they are given little reason to believe they are valued as anything more. Despite often being clear-headed, rational, emotive, experientially rich, culturally aware and intellectually neurodiverse, we equate “basic writing” with “basic student,” assuming that this person has little to offer the institution. We may pretend we are doling out a remedy by offering remedial education, but at what cost? And I would press the question: what might the institution be losing by failing to see the intellectual potential lost when we assess basic writers as basic thinkers? It is crazy to think that we could be turning away bright minds (in physics, computer programming, psychology, linguistics, etc.) from the university because we are imposing an identity of “remedial student” upon a person who might simply structure grammar “abnormally.”

So often, I feel many of us reaching for answers, knowing change is needed—but what? And how? The “I don’t knows” can be maddening. No doubt, many of our students need our help, often in ways we do not anticipate or imagine. We aren’t physicians: we are teachers. Our job is… different, perhaps. But as we engage our students, personally and, yes, institutionally, I would offer the first few lines of the Hippocratic Oath as we continue to try:

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

We're all in this together,

Rachael

"I'm a Writing Teacher... Kind of... And I Don't Give a Smit!"

“I want to argue that if we take seriously the research and scholarship of these past forty years, we will have to acknowledge the limits to what we will ever be able to say with any confidence about how people write and how they ought to be taught….”

--David W. Smit, The End of Composition Studies, “Introduction” (p. 2)

“Writing is an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity” (Bartholomae, 2003, p. 629). When I read David Bartholomae’s definition of writing in Inventing the University as a young grad student preparing to teach my first college composition class in the early 2000s, I felt relief. I identified strongly with my students’ antagonistic relationship with a system of unclear grading and sometimes impersonal instruction, and I realized that writing could be a complex outlet for expressing frustration and disappointment, but often, too, wild ambition. I also knew the feeling of simply wanting to please my teacher—a teacher I liked very much who I knew cared for me but was bound by a system that often left him or her frustrated, disappointed, but often wildly ambitious, too. I was now that teacher. And I hoped that my students would be charitable, whatever that meant. But I also knew I didn’t I want fake, inauthentic, confused. As a result, I, like so many teachers, have spent my career a bit of a chimera, oscillating between student/teacher, aggression/charity, always hoping to find the stable identity of “charitable teacher” as a possible delivery system for writing instruction.   

(Thank you Detroit, for THIS Chimera!!!)

As a matter of legitimacy, I feel I must define “what I am” or risk letting it be defined for me, though precisely who is exerting this pressure, I’m not sure. I get the sense that “the university” asks the writing teacher to pick a persona: aggressive or charitable.  More often, though, we are asked to disguise ourselves as grading wolves in helper sheep’s clothing: aggression as charity. Are we really fooling anyone at this point?

In his book, The End of Composition Studies, David W. Smit says in his Chapter “What Does it Mean to Be a Writing Teacher?” “Writing teachers are sensitive to the needs of those people whose writing they want to improve. They are encouraging and helpful” (p. 166). What’s more, he later champions what seems to be my own position (yes, I felt a brief moment of “whew!”): “Good teachers expect students to do well, they are empathetic, and they believe that they can make a difference” (p. 177). I think I would be fine if that is all I had to be. But, there are the grades. The evaluations. The tests. The, the, the…. All of the aggressive stuff we talk about being “bad” but we never comprehensively change. Our system is quite kind to those who talk about being helpful while dutifully doling out assessment. You can’t just get rid of grades! They say. Why not? Do we even know what we are doing with them? I’m not sure I know.

The central concerns posed in The End of Composition Studies represent the central conflict I face every time I walk into the classroom: What is writing? What is the writing teacher? Ultimately, Smit admits that these are questions that might not have full answers, and I agree. However, I feel like I need to know what qualifies as “writing” in order to grade it and explain that grade. And if I don’t know what qualifies as writing, what the hell am I doing grading it and calling myself a writing teacher? How, exactly, am I supposed to explain that? To others in my discipline? To myself? And most importantly, to my students? At this point in the milieu of “the university,” my legitimacy as a writing teacher seems to depend on two very contradictory things: 1) my contractually bound willingness to say I know what “good writing” is and aggressively slap a grade on others’ writing, and 2) my willingness to tip my hand and admit to my students that, no, I don’t actually know everything about writing… none of us do. If they leave my class feeling like writing is more than a bit mysterious, it might not be because I’m an utter failure or because they are “stupid” (that word—I die a little when I hear it, don’t you?): it might be because, as Smit points out, “We make judgments about people’s writing abilities all the time based on very little information and a great many unstated assumptions about what we mean by writing ability” (pg. 32). Smit admits, “There may be no way to resolve the ambiguity at the heart of writing and writing ability” (pg. 39). While this might help me sleep at night if I am trying to forgive myself for that C that I gave the student who might have deserved a B, there is NO ambiguity on his or her transcript, now is there? So it doesn’t help the student much. There is also no ambiguity in the message that I have received time and time again that I shouldn’t contribute to “grade inflation” by being too lenient (charitable?) if I hand out too many A’s (besides, that might be perceived as an attempt to boost my own students reviews, and I wouldn’t want any ambiguity there—it wouldn’t look good, now would it?).

Yet… our students continue to let us read their writing. Knowing the system, knowing our struggles. Knowing… our students are charitable enough to continue to share their work with us, validating our position when all else fails. To me, more than being an act of aggression, this is an act of agreement. A willingness to help us find our way, even knowing we might not be able to help them find theirs. What kindness and empowerment! And bravery. Writing and letting someone else read your writing in any environment knowing critique is coming is an incredible act of courage, ever amplified by the self-knowledge that you are not a writer of the same experience-level as your audience. Maybe I can’t always be kind and brave with my students, as much as I want to be. Maybe I cannot teach them without grading, with transparent charity. But at the very least, I can recognize what they offer. And I can show them, above all, respect.

We're all in this together,

Rachael

(Sometimes we get lucky! Students share their work without our asking for it, and we don't HAVE to grade it! Check out the blog run by one of my wonderful students: Living Simple: Through My Eyes)