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