Assignment for Wednesday and Friday, November 12 and 14

 

The Setup:

Several of the articles we’ve read about literacy suggest that the classroom is not always a place of uniform agreement: Louise Wetherbee Phelps writes, “While the cooperative model is vital to social development, there are other relations and motives woven into literacy experiences—tensions, hostilities, competition, cruelty, and unfairness. The teacher, being human will share and act out these attitudes in her own behavior—will disappoint, fail, oppress her students, be indifferent, careless, angry, and regretful” (121).

In "Revisiting Students' Rights," Valerie Kinloch describes the way her class approached issues of language. She writes that, “By the semester’s end, they all embraced Students’ right, witnessed how the resolution could indeed be implemented inside a classroom focused on student involvement and student voice…”(98). Throughout the vignettes, Kinloch presents a fairly “cooperative” narrative of the way that her class talked about language issues, often using “we” to suggest that the direction of the class was a mutually agreed upon endeavor, and that there was no resistance on the part of the students to the project at hand.

The Question:

How do we interpret Kinloch’s vignettes in light of statements like those made by Phelps? (Is the Phelps quote applicable to the classroom situation Kinloch describes?) Is Kinloch’s presentation of what happened in her class a fair one, and are the conclusions she draws based on the vignettes she gives incontestably valid? Would having more information about the class—what the original purpose of the class was, Kinloch’s goals going into the class, etc.—change our evaluation of the pedagogical strategies she suggests?

I am intrigued by Liz’s final questions, “How does multi-media composing fit into teaching/addressing SRTOL? Does it work towards allowing students to compose in their own ‘language’?,” and thought to propose a similar question given Kinloch’s argument at the top of page 108: “Encouraging students to use alternate forms of expression in the classroom can demonstrate the richness of languages in communication, engagement, participation, and understanding in literacy learning.” My complementary questions, then, are: what is the “language” of digital composing? Is it an “alternative” language in and of itself? There are many, myself included, who are willing to promote digital composing as integral to twenty-first century _literacy_ ; therefore, given Kinloch’s statement on page 91, “This reinterpretation [of Smitherman’s fundamental concept of ‘being on the margins’] involves increased public and professional understanding of literacy and language in the academic spaces of classrooms and the habitable spaces of people’s communities,” do we draw a line between “academic” and “non-academic” digital composing and digital literacy? If so, how so, and why? If not, why not, and should we [perhaps given D’Eloia’s arguments for the political and social necessity of teaching a “standard....English” (6)]?

In "Students' Right to their Own Language" the NCTE argues that we should evaluate student writing not on its use of standard English, but on its "exactness of content" in their own dialect (15).  Kinloch in her reevaluating of that resolution encourages us to allow our student to use their "mother tongue" in the classroom (107). The quotations are hers, which means that she is qualifying what she means by mother tongue. Presumably, she's not expecting Jose, the Spanish speaker, to blurt out his comments in Spanish. Since she keeps talking about diversity throughout her essay, I imagine she means that we should allow diverse voices to be heard in the classroom. However, I think she may go further than that. When talking about her Chinese student Minh, she quotes her as saying that she was forced to assimilate into "a language of otherness that doesn't acknowledge the history of my people" (98). While I feel that it is important for us to be welcoming of diverse ideas and backgrounds, I worry about that kind of statement and what it means for us as teachers. Minh's people are from China. As instructors, we can be expected to have a superficial understanding of China, but how likely is it that we'll be able to know about the history of all our students' backgrounds?

My own people are Venezuelan, but I've never expected any of my American professors to know much about my country because I understand that there isn't a lot of contact between us and the U.S. Am I expected to have an understanding of the cultures my students come from so that I can provide a space in which they can feel comfortable during my classes? What if they come from a country I've never even heard of? No matter how hard I try to understand the history of the world there are always dark spaces in my mental map. One could argue that Kinloch is not asking for what I'm describing here, that she just wants us to provide a space where they feel confortable speaking of their own experiences, but I think that in order to satisfy students like Minh, we need to do more than just that, and I'm not sure that Kinloch's essay provides a solution to that problem, to the limitations of our own understanding of the world around us no matter how hard we try to be educated and open-minded.  

To return to my opening quote from "Students' Rights" I wonder how qualified I am to grade an essay written in Black English or even in Nuyorikan.  I am fluent in both English and Spanish but when living in New York and riding the subway into Manhattan with my fellow Brooklyners from Puerto Rico, I could not always understand what they were saying.  If I, who speak both the root languages of their dialect, could not entirely follow their conversations, what would those who speak only English do when confronted with a paper written in the nuyorikan dialect?  How do we grade something that we can't understand?  How do we tell a student that we respect their dialect but can't decipher it?

In “Revising the Promise of Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” Valerie Kinloch shares her experience with engaging students in an investigation of language use in the classroom. Her discussion centers on a semester at a Houston university where her students examined the Students’ Right resolution and provided examples of authors using nonstandard English for academic purposes. In her investigation, the students were linguistic minorities who were able to clearly articulate the challenges of using their own language in an academic setting. Still, one of the issues her students pondered was the role of language and class, which for her students is often linked to ethnicity. Considering that we at Purdue often teach in an ethnically homogenous environment but still must moderate linguistic challenges based on class and culture, how might we apply Kinloch’s means of complicating and moderating the way we do language in the classroom? Might there be problems in discussing dialects with students who are convinced that their mastery of an academic dialect is simply a matter of improving grammar or having a larger vocabulary?

A comment:

First I would like to discuss MacDonald’s description of teacher education as well as demographics in regards to SRTOL. I believe that there is a sort of adaptation, a molding if you will, when it comes to overall learning in general. In regards to the teacher, it’s the experiences that they were subjected to growing up in their schools and then taking those lessons and conforming and adapting them to their own pedagogies that form them as a teacher, and in regards to the student, namely the foreign student, although their linguistic background differs greatly from that of say, the American student, they still are able to adapt their language over time to adhere to the English language. It may sound a bit vigorous to make such a statement, but the fact that when new immigrants have conversations with native speakers of English they are being subjected to positive opportunities in learning that language. Although it may not be apparent at first, the evolving of speech and mental comprehension will come in time, allowing immigrants to the English language to deliver comparable speech as a native speaker would. (605-607)

My question:

In regards to MacDonald’s discussion of “Joanie”, she states, “If Joanie’s schooling ignores the verb system until the college years, for instance, then suddenly asks Joanie to study it for teacher credentialing…” (605) In other words, would Joanie be qualified to go on to give instruction to her students having only been subjected to the correct verb system during her college years as compared to someone who had had the correct verb system for every year up until and including their college years?

I found Kinloch’s validation of student’s rights to their own language inspiring and thought-provoking, and yet throughout I was plagued by the concern that I would struggle to successfully implement this approach in my own classroom. At Purdue, I have never had more than two bilingual students in a single classroom, and have seldom had more than a couple of American students whose native dialect was something other than “Hoosier.” While the fact that my classroom is reasonably linguistically homogenous does not negate the importance of challenging students’ perceptions of the connections between language, status, and power, I think that it does limit the potential for the type of active, impassioned response Kinloch was able to elicit from her class. I worry that, were I to use a similar approach, it would simply end up highlighting and perhaps unfairly targeting the couple of non-native English speakers in the room. “You do know that language rights are always tied into race, right?” (95) Even as I read back over what I’ve just written, I am nervous about whether this question makes me sound ignorant or not-quite-P.C., but I do not think that ignoring this issue is an appropriate response. I do not know if the composition of my classrooms is representative of an “average” 106 class, but if it is, should we perceive the lack of diversity as a simple geographical coincidence, or a disconcerting sign of the continuation of maintaining a linguistically stratified status quo in higher education?