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.
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