Abstracts for Biotechnosocial Identities

Haraway, Donna J.  “Cyborgs to Companion Species:  Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience,” The Haraway Reader,  New York:  Routledge, 2004. 295-320.

In this essay, Haraway expands upon her Cyborg Manifesto to consider the broader interactions of humans and technologies with the animal kingdom.  Addressing issues of identity and difference, and our relationship to ourselves and others, she thoroughly blends what are normally seen as “distinct” categories between humans, animals, nature, and technology.  Haraway argues that we are constantly (re)creating ourselves based upon our social interactions with others (be they animal, human, plant, or machine).  It is both the recognition of the Other as not-us, and yet still somehow part of us through the process of interacting, that is essential to the creation of meaning, and how that meaning is the basis of what we call culture.  Since meanings can never be “fixed,” self and Other are constantly changing, and thus changing culture.  Haraway briefly traces an evolutionary theory about how certain genetic traits in wolves actually "encouraged" the development of the domesticated dog alongside humans.  

Haraway, Donna J.  When Species Meet.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press.  2008.

When Species Meet is a further exploration of Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto (which grew out of the Cyborg Manifesto).  Haraway analyzes various meetings of humans and animals, from the relationship of a zookeeper with his/her animals, to cloning animals for scientific purposes, to her personal interactions with her dogs in the agility ring, to the raising of livestock for food.  Perhaps most important for understanding Haraway's theories, however, is section II:  it illuminates how Haraway grew into the cyborg and companion species manifestos, by discussing her relationship with her father.  Here we find out that her father had been paralyzed from tuberculosis as a child, and so grew up using crutches as an extension of his body; the family never saw the crutches as external devices; they were a part of him, of who he was.  She explores how these webbed interactions, these kinships, make new categories and unmake others; citing Mary Pratt, she calls these interactions contact zones and situates them both historically, socially, and politically.  For Haraway, there is never an individual; it is always an individual-in-context, a context that includes the entire web of life and the constantly shifting relations of all species in a dance of co-creation.

Brooke, Robert.  "Ethnographic Practice as a Means of Invention," Voices and Visions:  Refiguring Ethnography in Composition.  Kirklighter, Vincent, Moxley, eds.  Portsmouth: Boyton/Cook, 1997. 11-23.

Brooke argues that ethnography is politically and historically situated, and therefore no ethnographer's findings can ever be "objective."  He addresses issues of representation and power -- who is representing whom and for whom?  He asks us to consider where the categories we study come from and how they change as we write.  What are the possibilities of seeing something as meaningful when we must consider how we locate ourselves when we write?  Brooke states that, "because science cannot be neutral, the politics of the researcher must be explicit."  After analyzing some of his classroom observations and what he wrote, he then discusses the significant changes a publisher required of his work, and asks us to consider what we surrender in order to meet the needs of our audience(s).  Most significantly, Brooke notes how, as a young researcher, he saw what he had been trained to see.  Now being aware of that training, he asks that we consider how we approach our subjects and our classrooms, if we see them one way and not another. 

Rhetoric of the Mind

The blogging cat is back on my lap, so I guess it's time to blog. 

Jess pretty much summed up my reaction to this week's readings/viewings.  They also nicely fit in with a session I attended at Cs talking about multimodal learning in FYC.  Alexander's article does echo much of Gee's work and I think  reintroduces the concept of play in the classroom.  No one takes issue with children playing; in fact, most primary school classes are designed around daily activities that are "fun" for the students.  They can "play" at being different people, taking on different roles in the classroom.  I learned all about good and evil and racism and questions about race/identity issues through my model horse battles with my childhood best friend.  The elaborate back stories and ongoing duals we "wrote" -- albeit verbally and in our minds -- were very similar to what players experience in WOW or other MMORPGs. 

One interesting question Alexander brought up is one I can answer:  he asks, "whether the game designers are consciously inculcating particular values in their game designs, or if their narratives (such as storylines involving race conflicts) arise out of a political unconscious" (52).  At least in the professional world of game design, the answer is absolutely a "yes" -- on both accounts.  My cousin designed the number one selling PS3 game last year.  While he admits that his focus on values became much more of a conscious effort once his children were born (they're 2 and 4 now), he said many times he'd be partway through a design and suddenly realize a political point he had unintentionally built into it. 

Alexander also brings up (and fails to answer) two other key questions about online gaming and the Internet in general:  "What, exactly, is extended from one 'world' to the next, and is the 'real world' perhaps its own extension of the 'virtual world'?  More specifically, and critically, whose 'worlds' are we talking about, in terms of both the 'real' and the 'virtual'" (58)?  Since this nicely ties into my Cs presentation, I have to ask, is there really any way to separate our experiences in these worlds?  Are experiences any less "authentic" in a virtual realm?  Certainly I don't believe so.  Vivian Sobchack states that since the Internet is “[a]ll surface, electronic space cannot be inhabited by any body that is not also an electronic body” (Carnal Thoughts 159), so in order to participate in online worlds, we have to create an electronic self.  But in keeping with phenomenology (and paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty), we can't think of a space without existing in it -- without some part of our selves being in that space.

 

Selfe's literacy narratives project also reminded me of the multimodal learning in FYC session at Cs.  One lady presented on the videos she has her FYC students do for their final project -- in place of a final paper.  These videos are 2-5 minutes long and can be about anything.  She stated that her students had a lot of fun and became much more aware of visual rhetoric; in fact, the project had received so much attention that now, at the end of each semester, they hold a public viewing and the entire school administration shows up.  However, I didn't see a lot of the reflective literacy in her examples that Selfe highlights.  One of these videos was just the camera following a guy running sideways and flapping his arms about; he ran across campus, into a dorm, into the elevator, got out of the elevator and ran past other students, then it cut to a shot of the dorm exterior where you could see the guy through the windows and he ran out of side, and then through 3 stories of windows, he falls, head over feet, to the first floor, then we see him run out the door, still flapping arms and running sideways, out of the shot.  What is the purpose of such a video?  The instructor was particularly proud of it and how the students used a dummy for the fall, but she seemed more impressed by the videography than any meaning the piece may have had.  I think I would consider such a project, but if it was going to be the final work of the semester, I would have the students include a written rhetorical analysis of the piece

.

So, do I side with Hesse or with Selfe?  Selfe, for the most part, but since I am teaching Technical and Professional Writing (I inform the students on the first day that it is Technical and Professional Communication, and that there's going to be much more than just writing involved), the need to focus on certain forms of writing is essential.  Interestingly, Julie Meloni does not teach her 402 students anything about web design, because she feels like they'll mostly be writing memos, lab reports, etc., and web design and visual design will be taken care of by experts in those fields.  If the students end up working for large corporations, that's pretty much how it will be.  However, my first permanent job out of college was for a small office design firm, and I quickly went from executive secretary to Novell network manager, and then to migrating their ancient accounting system into a integrated software package that began with the proposal, through design, electrical, delivery, setup, and the accounting.  And so far, my students have agreed that learning basic web design (if it's only google sites) is beneficial, because that's one more skill they have that might help them get a job or move up the ladder. 

I really liked Selfe's emphasis on writing being one rhetorical tool and that "'writing is not simply one way of knowing' but rather 'the way'" (609).  In 402 we deal with the CRAP principles throughout the semester (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity), because corporate newsletters and write-ups from science experiments or even building plans always have photos and/or graphs imbedded in the text, so we consider how to best present text and graphics to "sell" the project or findings.  Students quickly see the differences in resumes with borders versus those without -- anything that brings a visual element to the text is more likely to be memorable.   And I then have them extend those principles beyond tech writing to other visuals, such as this photo of my cousin taken by her husband:

The students can immediately see the CRAP principles at work, and how important they are to all visual design. 

I think incorporating other media into rhet/comp classrooms is essential.  In my 101 classes, I use the adbusters website to show students how powerful rhetoric can be -- a simple picture can say far more about our society and our values than a 1,000 word essay.

  

The Interdependent Self

This week I'm writing my post in Blogger, instead of Word, just out of curiosity -- I want to see my comfort level with the different environments. And I'll warn you -- I'm going to be all over the place in this post, because the articles brought up a number of different issues for me.

"It is a miracle that curiosity survived a formal education."
 -- Einstein

First, I'm going to start with rebuttals to two arguments Ong made.  On page 52, he states that "[w]e know that formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing, and so made a permanent part of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible."  This is the Western notion that ancient Greece is where it all began.  The Phoenecian and Semetic alphabets preceded the Greek alphabet by several centuries, and arguments can be made that the first alphabet was created in Egypt as far back as 1800 BCE (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/521235.stm).  Since we can't fully translate these other alphabets, we have no way of knowing that they didn't have "formal logic."  But if Ong's statement that the culture "interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing," we have no reason to think that these older cultures didn't have logic.

Second, on page 54, he discusses how the "illiterates" in Lurias's study struggled with self-analysis.  "Self-analysis requires a certain demolition of situational thinking.  It calls for isolation of the self, around which the entire lived world swirls for each individual person, removal of the center of every situation from that situation enough to allow the center, the self, to be examined and described."  This is, once again, looking at definitions through a Western lens.  I would argue that "the center, the self" can certainly be analyzed and described within the context of the situation (especially since we can never be out of a context), but it is a different form of analysis and is expressed in different ways from traditional Western expectations.  If you ask an indigenous person a Western-centered question, of course the person is not going to provide a Western answer.  But if you were to rephrase it into that person's cultural traditions, you would get a "valid" answer.  Case in point: in my non-western rhetorics course I took, my professor had spent years studying Chinese rhetoric.  When I asked her if the I Ching could be considered rhetoric, she said no way.  But with some research, I was able to prove that this "book of mysticism" had actually been the most powerful rhetorical tool for the Chinese for thousands of years.  As I mentioned in class, Chinese leaders would actually consult the I Ching before making major political decisions such as going to war or marrying a daughter off to another clan to avoid future battles.  So the book was absolutely a rhetorical tool, but it was used in a manner foreign to Western tradition.  

One quote I really like in Ong's article was that "[o]ral folk assess intelligence not as extrapolated from contrived textbook quizzes but at situated in operational contexts" (55).  This is very much the American Indian belief that you cannot separate yourself from the land; once you do that, you are headed on a path of destruction. Or as Monroe mentioned in "Plateau Indian Ways with Words," "the Plateau Indian self is also a relational, interdependent self, a construct that also manifests in many ways, often simultaneously with the independent self" (w324).  There is an "independent" self but it is always connected to the social; it is interdependent.  What I took from Monroe's article was a clear definition of my philosophy of self, and I'm definitely a holistic thinker.  But what also intrigues me is that my brother is not; we are definitely yin and yang.  His life, as a Naval commander, prosecuting attorney, and a police officer, is all about right and wrong; there is no in-between.  For me, there is only in-between.  We both have the same blood quantum, yet I identify AI and he identifies white.  And our self-identities showed in school as well:  I always listened to the teacher and didn't speak out-of-turn (although I was taught to look at the teacher so that she or he would know I was paying attention); my brother was argumentative, and while he would take his disagreements with what another student said "outside," it was an absolute "I'm right and you're wrong" attitude that several times resulted in physical violence.

Both articles also answered a question I posted on FB yesterday: how could a student produce such a beautiful resume and have such an incredibly wordy cover letter?  Re-reading her letter in light of oral culture, I can see that she was writing exactly how she would speak, and she did repeat herself several times and included information that wasn't pertinent to a cover letter, but information that would come up in conversation.  So now, my job is to explain "the values [a cover letter] embodies" (w340) without engaging in "rhetorical imperialism."  Any suggestions?




P. S. In case you were wondering, I prefer Word because it checks grammar.  This editor didn't catch when I typed "rhetoric" instead of "rhetorical."

Mixed (I)dentities

Walled In or Walled Out?

There were a number of things I really liked in both readings this week.  Both articles deal with the concept of points of view and that we can see different things in the same situation simply by shifting our perspective.  I was immediately reminded of a couple of readings from a course in ethnography I took a few years ago.  Robert Brooke, in an article about an ethnographic study he did, asked, "who would I become, as teacher and writer and member of the classroom community I had been in, if I explained what I had seen one way rather than another?"  Similarly, in her essay, Ethnography and the Problem of the "Other," Patricia Sullivan asks, "how can we conceive and reflect the "other," the not-us, in the process of inquiry such that we convey otherness in its own terms?"  We have to learn about these other cultures in order to start to see from their perspectives.  I think Swearingen's and Mao's article nicely summed up traditional Western issues with Chinese (and Asian) rhetoric, although I'm not sure if they really stated flat-out (pun intended) that all the allusions made in Chinese rhetoric are the writers displaying their knowledge of the subject, and since there is no private ownership of material, there is no plagiarism, so using direct quotes without citations is standard practice.  Imagine how difficult it must be for Chinese American students to have to learn our academic English, when their culture talks "around" a subject rather than addressing it directly. 

What I really liked about the interview with Gloria Anzaldua was her focus on identity and that there are many different traditions within each of us.  "I cannot disown the white tradition, the Euro-American  tradition, any more than I can disown the Mexican, the Latino or the Native, because they are all in me" (52).  Perhaps this comment resonates with me because in a mere two generations, my family went from being American Indian to being white; of course, as the colonized people, assimilation was far more likely to guarantee survival than trying to retain the old traditions.  And the desire to fit in is certainly seductive (I love her use of that term), but I really like that she emphasizes that we can't ever disown parts of our cultures because they are a part of ourselves. 

I think Anzaldua's focus on changing and shaping our identities is a key point to discuss with our students.  The realization that, oh, this isn't the only way to write and the person I've always been can change, that "if you see that shed and that sky and that sea and all that happens in it from this other angle, then you will see something else.  You can recreate reality" (67) is a very powerful one for students (and everyone else).  It is also why I love Ursula LeGuin's work so much, because it is always dealing with issues of identity and seeing the same situation from different perspectives.  Since I read it in a science fiction literature class my freshman year of college, The Dispossessed has changed my perspective on so many issues.  It opens with this description of a wall around a landing platform for space ships:

Like all walls, it was ambiguous, two-faced.  What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on…[t]he wall shut in… the rest of the universe.  It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres:  the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

Prior to reading that novel, there were a lot of cultural walls in my life that I had never recognized and therefore never questioned.  Now I'm constantly seeing them and (usually) jumping on top of them to see what it looks like from the other side, and doing my best to rewrite the culture surrounding the walls.

Further reading:

Brooke, Robert. “Ethnographic practice as a means of invention” in Voices and

Visions: Refiguring Ethnography in Composition, Cristina Kirklighter, Cloe Vincent, &

Joseph Moxley, Eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997.

Sullivan, Patricia.  "Ethnography and the Problem of the 'Other'," Ethics & Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy, Mortensen, P and Kirsch, G Eds.  IL: NCTE, 1996. 

Are there really any clear boundaries?

"Understanding is always relative to the whole grid or map" (Gee 32).

Both articles this week really focused on Discourses and the intersection of various Discourses in the classroom.  While Gee's article defined Discourses (and discourses), and explained how we use them to define ourselves, Monroe's article really brought to light the values of various discourse communities and how easily those values can be misinterpreted in the classroom. While I had been aware of the various "dialogues" many African American students have in class conversations, no one had actually spelled out for me why these students acted in specific ways, and Monroe's explanation of putting oneself on Front Street really outlined it.  The same Black student poet I mentioned last week used every one of the behaviors Monroe outlined, including all the joking going on in his "personal" (it wasn't) narrative.  I just wish I knew then what I know now, because I definitely would have been able to respond to his actions much better.  The UM/Detroit study showed that the students (on both sides) were conversing with a group identity rather than their personal identities, which makes sense since they didn't know one another.  Monroe states that, "interactants work most consistently from their group identities, defined by both race and gender" in email conversations (43).  I immediately thought of the people I've met through Twitter and how they convey themselves online.  Last spring I did a discourse analysis of one specific Tweeter (@academicdave) and found that nearly all of his tweets fell into one (or more) of three categories:  academia, social commentary, and personal.  However, unlike the approach of the college tutors in Monroe's study, and (unfortunately) unlike so many social networking users, @academicdave always treated his tweets as public conversation; it was very apparent that he knew that anyone could be reading his tweets, so even the personal ones tended to be about a good run, or watching Top Chef.  But what really interested me about the Detroit students is that they treated email as public, even though it was only being sent to one specific person.  From that aspect, I think their home Discourses may have actually better prepared them for online writing than the college students who viewed the communications as private.  Any thoughts on that?

Two points in Gee's article really struck me, one of which is the quote at the top of this posting, about contextualizing understanding.  I mentioned in class that I was born extremely nearsighted, and that wasn't discovered until I was five.  But unless there is something about blood quantum and the way one relates to the world, I would have to say that those first five years shaped my view of the world very much as Gee describes Discourses placed on a map always being relative to all the other countries on the map (32).  Because I was so nearsighted, there were no distinct boundaries between objects (including people); I take off my glasses now and I see vague fuzzy grey lines on the screen, the monitor's black border blends into the white desk, which blends into the carpet, which blends into the sleeping cat.  They are all components in one continuous whole; there are no individual items.  The second point, which marries with the first, is "which comes first, recognition work or Discourses?  Neither.  They are reflexively related, such that each creates the other" (29).  This concept of Discourses creating each other is very similar to Donna Haraway’s concept of cyborgs: she stresses that we cannot separate ourselves from the technologies and machines that we create.  Because we make them, they are a part of us, and we are a part of them.  She furthers this idea with her concept of companion species, of which she says cyborgs are a part (Haraway 299).  “Companion species take shape in interaction.  They more than change each other; they co-constitute each other, at least partly” (307).  I think these are important points to discuss with students, so that they can start to see how we change through the process of relating both in and out of the classroom, and also to start to see that they have the power to change me as much as I have the power to change them.

Additional reading:

Haraway, Donna J.  The Haraway Reader.  New York:  Routledge.  2004.

What Versus Why, Said the Cat

(I'm going to play a bit today, mostly because I'm trying to write this blog with one cat insisting he sit on my lap and lick my fingers.)

I will vote with Pearce and argue that Gee is wrong when he states that technology is neutral.  Since we cannot separate our minds from our bodies and the "logical" portions of our mind from the emotional, the concept of "objectivity" is a fiction.  Technologies are therefore created by subjective people, with a specific use in mind.  The result may be adapted to unforeseen uses (like satellites now being used for cell phones in the public sphere, instead of remaining strictly under government control), but the technology was created for a specific, subjective purpose.  Gee's notion of neutrality is based on the concept of, "it is how we use them that matters."  What he overlooks, though, is that technologies have very specific limitations, so we can't necessarily adapt any given technology to any given use.  I can't print out this blog from my microwave.  Just as no pedagogy can be neutral, no technology can be neutral.  However, what I do really like about Gee's essay is his analysis of the types of learning and cognitive thinking that occur in the technologies of video games. 

(Successfully booted the cat onto the return, thanks to the birds outside.) 

This point  came up in Chris Ritter's and Shawn Lamebull's colloquium last week.  One literature professor in the audience could not understand how the learning principles and issues of sex, race, and gender in video games could be compared -- in nearly any way -- to the literacy involved in reading a book.  As Monroe noted, "[g]enres from the entertainment domain employ different rhetorics of information that require complex literate behavior" (103) and Gee demonstrated with the example about Brian playing Pikmin:  the boy "was aware that the changes signaled that he needed to rethink some of his strategies, as well as his relationship with the game" (27).  How many six year old kids rethink their strategies of reading and relationship to a narrative in a book?  I'm bringing this up because most of our students have grown up playing video games, and analyzing the learning strategies and the rules of the games can, I believe, help us find a "way in" to academic discourse for those children whose home discourses are at odds with what is expected of them in school. 

In my "remedial" ( I hate that word) writing course that I taught in California, I had a young black man that had a terrific sense of humor, he could tell stories to the class, he was great at interjecting some satirical comment while I or anyone else was speaking (and then we'd all be laughing), but he really struggled to write.  Following the structure for that course, the students read from a text that was composed of personal narratives written by students from other cultures who were struggling with American society and the American school system.  One of the first big assignments was a personal narrative, and while this student had a great story to tell, his sentence structure and punctuation were, in the "traditional" academic sense, atrocious.  I had him work with a tutor in the writing lab each week, in addition to the one class our the entire class spent working with tutors every week.  His writing improved a bit, but his persuasive and expository essays were still poorly structured.  He tried very hard, but having grown up in a very oral culture, as with some of the examples we reviewed in class last week, structuring what he was saying was very difficult.  But as an extra-credit assignment, he had co-written (with another "poor" writer) a poem that was beautifully done.  Since it just had line breaks and no punctuation, there were only minor spelling errors, and he was able to communicate exactly what he wanted.  He turned in another poem that was again, beautifully written, and I knew that I had a very talented poet on my hands.  When I submitted his portfolio for review, I had him include the two poems because I knew the panel of teachers would immediately fail him if it wasn't made obvious that he was an excellent writer, just not a "standard" writer.

(The cat is back and now his front paws and his head are on my left forearm.)

In the same course I had a Chinese girl who wrote beautiful essays, but in the traditional Chinese way:  her points were never stated outright and the essay would sort of spiral it's way around what we wanted to say.  Being familiar with that style allowed me to appreciate her writing and compliment her on it, while also showing her how the Academy would want her to structure her essays.  The textbook also helped with these issues, because the authors complained about the same things: not understanding how they could write well enough to earn A's in their country, and then not even get into FYC here. 

(Just booted the cat.  Again.)

What I really liked about Monroe's article was the discussion of what-questions versus why-questions, and the parallels she draws between the why-questions and different cultures, as well as the individual computer usage versus family computer usage.  My personal experience with students and a Mexican boyfriend completely align with her generalizations (always aware of there being exceptions)

(the cat came back)

about different cultural literacies at home, but I'd never broken it down into "what" versus "why."   I used to frustrate my mother with why-questions because I always had to find another why (as a result, I was frequently sent outside to play, or off to read a book, so that she could have some time free of a pestering child).  But so many of my friends from other cultures did not question; they simply accepted, and so for them, not only did many of them struggle with written academic English, they also never saw the ideologies at work in their lives, which meant they simply accepted the cards they were dealt without realizing they could discard some and hope for a better hand. 

("But WHY do you have to boot me to type?" asked the cat.  "WHY can't you take a hint and let me get my work done?" I replied.  "Because," the cat said, "you're the one that's always singing, 'But the cat came back, the very next day. They thought he was a goner, but the cat came back. He just couldn't stay awayyyyyyy'")

Culture Clash: Literacy and Identity

While the reading this week focused on academic discourses, I want to focus on what I consider a key issue underlying those discourses:  identity.  Bizzell states that "minority [students tend] to see the academy's formal language as 'more logical' or 'purer' than their home dialects -- 'dialect misconceptions' that lead to 'linguistic shame" (3).   Similarly, Royster mentions the need to resist "a tendency to view discourse (language in a particular use) as a disembodied force within which we are inevitably, inescapably, innocently swept along" (25).  Becoming part of a new discourse community does entail learning the language, and certainly at times we do feel "swept along" and that certain discourses are "better" than others.  Janet Eldred and Peter Mortensen  wrote an article titled, "Reading Literacy Narratives" that was published in College English back in 1992.  In it, they used Shaw's Pygmalion as an example of how learning a new discourse can alienate us from our home discourses. 

In Pygmalion the main character, Eliza, is a young woman from a poor, lower class section of England.  When she meets Henry, who represents the upper class and the “best” of everything the world has to offer, he informs her that her language is “gutter-talk” and that he can teach her how to “talk like a lady,” thereby escaping poverty and becoming an upper-class citizen.  Eliza accepts the offer.  Through the course of the story she does learn to speak like an upper class woman; she learns to dress and walk and act the part.  But since the language she used growing up was demeaned by upper class society, Henry does not allow her to speak it.  By denying her “the speech patterns that are common and familiar, that embody the unique and distinctive aspect of our self,”(Kutz 112) she finds herself not only alienated from the people around her but also alienated from herself, as she can never go back to being who and what she was (Eldred and Mortensen 519).  Henry’s literacy has taken away her culture and her people and left her searching for an identity in a foreign world. 

While Pygmalion is a fictional work, it highlights the importance that language plays in our sense of identity and how learning a new language creates an identity crisis.  With each new subject in school, students expand their vocabulary in the language of school-speak, but frequently that new language is at odds with their home language. 

[A]s is too often the case, they may enter a world in which their home ways of using language are denied or condemned, where what is taught in the name of language instruction is a set of attitudes that leads them to dismiss the ways of others as well, and where learning new communicative styles associated with schooling and literacy calls for a contraction rather than an expansion of their own linguistic and communicative repertoire. (Kutz 165)

In her case study, “Virginia:  Not Her Kind of Game,” Christine Casanave relates the story of Virginia, a student who came from a Puerto Rican family in New York.  Upon entering a PhD program in sociology, Virginia struggled with the language used in core theory courses.  The terms were so specialized and the means of analysis so scientific that they conveyed no emotion, making it a language foreign to her.  One of her issues with the vernacular was that she had no way to translate what she was learning back into a language that her mother would understand; as she told Casanave, the only thing she could tell her mother about the two weeks she spent at the computer working on a paper was that she was “working at the computer.”  “By using ‘Dr. Bernstein’s language’ she was aligning herself with scientists, not with the populations she wished to communicate with at home and in future work:  women, ethnic minorities, educators in racially and culturally mixed neighborhoods” (Casanave 161).  This inability to integrate the scientific methodologies and vernacular with her values and beliefs seemed at cross-purposes with her goals, so she dropped out of the program.  As Casanave noted, by forcing Virginia to stick strictly to the scientific language, the university missed an opportunity to expand sociological principles to a broader community through her. 

In “Pygmalion,” Eliza decides to become a teacher herself, thereby combining her old and new identities.  Virginia, on the other hand, failed to reconcile her two very different identities and chose to reject the new one.  But literacy also has the power to allow individuals to escape their primary discourse communities and create entirely new lives for themselves.

My father was born on a small farm in Hinton, Oklahoma, in the thirties.  His father, half Cherokee and part Choctaw, never completed the eighth grade.  His mother came from a poor white family and never completed high school.  Both parents not only supported school literacy, but emphasized how it could help my father be something better than just a farmer.  Both parents also maintained close ties to their primary discourse community:  the large, extended family in the area.  During World War II, they moved to Oregon, where my father completed high school and went on to college.  He married.  He then went on to receive his Master’s in abstract mathematics.  The additional degree provided him a job in the aerospace industry, so he and my mother moved to Pomona, California.  By this time his literacy had made him question not just his religion, but also the values of the extended family in Oklahoma.  As with Virginia, he felt he couldn’t explain to family members what it was he did in a language they would understand.  He also felt as if he’d grown beyond their base values and had entered a new social class that was “above” them.  While he maintained contact with his parents and a cousin that also went to college, he dropped all other ties to the extended family.  Literacy allowed him to escape the lower class lifestyle that his parents had endured, but it also alienated him from his primary discourse community. 

Issues of Privacy

Royster's comments on privacy really struck me, especially in light of my anti-Twitter student's boyfriend.  She states that we need to discuss with students "the importance of assessing, not just using, personal knowledge and experience in making good decisions about what is private, what is social, what is public, what should be written or said, while recognizing in explicit ways that classrooms are not private spaces" (27)(italics mine).  The boyfriend clearly thought that classrooms were private spaces -- private as in only addressing topics directly related to the course.  I took the opportunity this past Friday to explore these issues with my 402 students and directly addressed the two "unprofessional" tweets that I had put out there.  First, I asked them what they thought about the tweet about flossing my dog's teeth, which promptly got comments such as "unprofessional," "totally unimportant," and "who cares?"  That last question really allowed me to focus on audience.  I mentioned that several other professors use Facebook as a class communication tool, just like Twitter, and the students agreed that yes, they read things about other people in those professors' lives that had nothing to do with their courses.  I asked again about the flossing and the fact that I mentioned the name of the kennel I had gotten Glacier from, and someone finally said, "oh, yeah, other dog breeders would be interested in that."  The tweet about the cost of the course packet drew comments like, "it's nice to see a professor who remembers what we go through" and "it could get you in trouble if someone higher up read it."  We then discussed the ethics of yes, what if it was a complaint about the company I worked for and my boss read it.  When I relayed a true story about one of my students getting a job over another, equally-qualified candidate because her MySpace page was "clean" and the other person had pictures of drinking with friends, one student said that MySpace and Facebook should be totally personal and employers shouldn't consider that information at all.  Another student promptly argued that it led to character, and that everything we put out in the public forum is indeed public.  We ended the conversation talking about the different discourses in our lives and how they overlap and intersect, and the need to always consider both our known audience, as well as the unknown audiences our words might find their way to. 

Additional Reading:

Casanave, Christine Pearson.  Writing Games:  Multicultural Case Studies of Academic Literacy Practices in Higher Education.  NJ:  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2002.

Eldred, Janet Carey and Mortensen, Peter.  “Reading Literacy Narratives,” College English, 54, No. 5, September 1992:  512-539.

Kutz, Eleanor.  Language and Literacy:  Studying Discourse in Communities and Classrooms, NH:  

Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1997.

The American Crucible: Hybridity

Last Tuesday in class we discussed our positions as authority figures in the classroom and what we've done when that authority has been challenged.  Wednesday I checked my WSU email and found a very long, very adamant email from the boyfriend of one of my students, arguing against my use of Twitter in the classroom. He attacked Twitter as non-academic since it is a social networking site, and he cited two of my posts which had "nothing to do with the course."  He also copied the English department chair and two academic advisors.  I spent some time composing my reply, which further explained why I use Twitter, account settings he could change so that he didn't have to worry about viruses or receiving tweets after ten p.m., and that the two "unprofessional" tweets were going to be used in class as examples of audience and subject appropriateness when messages are in the public venue.  He replied back (again, a very detailed message) still arguing against Twitter as a non-academic tool, that I hadn't used those tweets in the class (we haven't addressed audience yet), and again copied the same people.

In an environment where we're being asked to use technology in the classroom (and I fervently believe in it; the courses I've taught and taken that didn't involve technology tended to have more "sleepers" in them than those that activity used computers or other technologies), this student seemed to be arguing against it.  In his second reply, however, he mentioned that he is a network engineer.  That is when I realized he wasn't arguing against technology in general, but at what he perceived to be a blurring between the academic  and social worlds.  For him, my hybridizing my technical and professional writing course with a "social networking tool" (it's so much more than that) challenged his definition of school and professionalism.  For him, school is indeed what Bizzell called "a 'tidy house' within the academy" (45), a place where boundaries are not crossed or questioned. 

Bizzell quotes Bahri that while hybridity is "useful in undoing binaries and approaching the complexities of transnationalism... I would warn that it also tends to avoid the question of location because it suggests a zone of nowhere-ness, and a people afloat in a weightless ether of ahistoricity" (46).  "Suggest" I think is the key word, because it doesn't necessarily create that zone.  In fact, Stuart Hall, in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, stated:

My own sense of identity has always depended on the fact of being a migrant... (now) I find myself centred at last.  Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centred:  what I've thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience... welcome to migranthood! (15)

I have to agree with Hall, and Bizzell also mentions that "what is crucially left out of my 'Hybrid Academic Discourses' analysis is the profound cultural mixing that has already occurred in the United States" (54).  I live in a contact zone; I am a hybrid of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Scottish; my sister-in-law is Chinese American.  As a child, I had best friends that were Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, Jewish, Black, White, Korean, Mexican.  Being exposed to so many different religions, races, and cultures really helped enforce in me that there is no one way of doing things, and thus, even in Freshman Composition, no one way of writing.  In fact, my writing has been criticized for using the majority of the traits Bizzell lists as marking hybrid academic discourses (61).  But writing, at least for me, is no longer about the traditional academic essay; that is writing for one very specific discourse community, and my goal is communication.  I want to welcome students into writing, not force it on them; I want them to explore their culture and American culture (and the places where they intersect), and grapple with identities and values that are always in negotiation with the environment. 

As far as my anti-Twitter student and her boyfriend, well, they don't have to like using Twitter and they don't have to use it a lot.  I don't enjoy spending hours and hours revising to turn my writing into a traditional academic paper, but I know how to do it and I understand why it's useful.  I hope that these two students will learn how to use Twitter, and understand that there are situations in which tools like Twitter can be useful -- even in professional and technical writing. 

The one thing that did amuse me about Bizzell is at the end of "Hybrid Academic Discourses" she states that she encourages her "students to cannibalize earlier papers for parts to use in later papers" (65) and then proceeds to close the essay with a significant block quote she used in her essay on basic writing.

(Re)defining Contact Zones

In the Spring of 2006, I taught my second section of freshman composition at California State University Stanislaus, in Turlock, California. Turlock is part of "The Valley" north of Fresno and south of Sacramento, and has a wide range of ethnicities. My class that semester had fourteen students, only two of whom were White. About midway through the semester, we read several articles on race and racism in the U.S. My two White students expressed their opinions and seemed fairly comfortable with the topic, while my Hispanic, Hmong, Arabic, and African students remained reticent. I recognized that my non-White students did not see themselves as belonging to our classroom community (or at least, not as full members of it). Kenneth Burke defines belonging as "the identifications whereby a specialized activity makes one a participant in some social or economic class. Belonging in this sense is rhetorical" (28). So I decided to use this definition of belonging and strategically played the "ace up my sleeve." I informed them that according to the "White Man's law" I was not White; I was Cherokee, which made me a minority. My two White students stiffened and sat up straighter in their chairs, and my twelve non-White students physically relaxed. In Pratt's terms, I became a heterogeneous text: I had just been "ready very differently [by] people in different positions in the contact zone." To my White students I had been White; I belonged to their culture, their community. But my announcement suddenly Othered me from them, and included me in the non-White community (which led to some great discussions and much more openness from the other minority students).

I start with this story because that classroom was a contact zone, and it was the first time that I saw how much racism and colonialism were still a part of those students' identities. That one day made me "reconsider the models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing" (Pratt). My "model" of community is much more of a Whiteheadan concresence than any sort of traditional static "Leave It to Beaver" type, but for my students, there were still very clear boundaries between races and cultures. In fact, the one day that I brought my dogs to class, my two Egyptian students didn't attend, because in their culture dogs are not pets and they would never socialize with them.

Pratt's article also resonated with me when she was discussing transculturation and stated that "subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, [but] they do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for." In my research last semester of American Indian enrollment, I discovered that the controversial issue of blood quantum was something originally imposed on Indians by the American government, but it was also something that many tribes incorporated into their definition of Indianness. Prior to being booted off their land, the Cherokee sense of culture was a social one; there was no concept of race or blood determining whether or not one was Cherokee. However, after being moved to Oklahoma and the General Allotment Act divvying up Indian Territory, it was the U.S. government that decided that "Indian" meant a person had to be at least half "Indian," live on the reservation in Oklahoma (not in a neighboring state), and be registered on the Dawes Roles to qualify for land. The Cherokee Nation, when it re-established itself several decades later, then absorbed the notion that to be Cherokee, one had to trace one's lineage back to someone on the Dawes Roles. So for me, while I have a greater blood quantum than many registered Cherokee, I can never be a member of the tribe because my ancestors were not included on the Dawes Roles.

My image of culture is a word-image, a recognition that there are no clear boundaries between individual and society, self and Other (Other including the non-human as well); it is of a mobile described in Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed:

[It was] a large piece made of wires pounded flat, so that edge-on they all but disappeared, making the ovals into which they were fashioned flicker at intervals, vanishing, as did, in certain lights, the two thin, clear bubbles of glass that moved with the oval wires in complexly interwoven ellipsoid orbits about the common center, never quite meeting, never entirely parting. (295)

As Donna Haraway states, our relationship with Others is a "contradictory story of relationships -- co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all" (300). To recognize identity and cultural identity as co-constitutive relationships means that the relationships are constantly building upon each other, that there is no fixing of identities because each is shaping the other, and thus "never quite meeting, never entirely parting." I think this is what Guaman Poma's point was in writing that text in both languages, and also why it is so long, because he was exploring how the Spanish and Incan cultures could shape each other, and that there was no end to the relating.

Both Pratt and Kaplan support the notion of culture being open-ended, not a "container for fixed values" (Monroe). Kaplan's notion of contrastive rhetoric could be seen to be limiting, had he not specifically stated near the end of the article that, "[i]t was never intended to be replacive; rather, it was always perceived as being additive -- contributing to the resources available for discourse building" (xvi). I find Kaplan's article very interesting because it doesn't occur to me not to use contrastive rhetoric in my classroom. I specifically challenge my students to look at controversial issues and to learn to see them from different perspectives, always aware that their beliefs are their own, but that by learning to see issues from different points of view, they can begin to understand others, and perhaps begin a dialogue with them. A philosophy and religion instructor I was lucky enough to study under, Dr. Jacob Needleman, once stated that he saw the various religions as "different paths up the same mountain," and that principle is what I try to instill in my students. Our interactions with Others shape us as much as we shape them, and since the interacting is ongoing, there can never be one clear winner.

Further Reading:

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives.

Haraway, Donna. "Cyborgs to Companion Species," The Haraway Reader.

Pratt, M. L. (1991). "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession 91: 33-40.

Kaplan, R. B. Forward: What in the World is Contrastive Rhetoric?: vii-xx.

English 597 Contact Zones