Assignment for Monday, November 24

 

Ohmann and O’Dair are coming from very different places.  Ohmann is arguing for a Marxist perspective on the issues of social inequality.  He’s asking for a pedagogy that will allow students to assume responsibility over their education and to learn language that will achieve social and political aims for them.  In this way he’s not far from Villanueva and Blackmon’s call for a pedagogy that will allow students to develop critical thinking skills and awareness of social, ethnic and political differences among others.

O’Dair is coming from a perspective that mirrors Hairston.  She’s concerned that if we turn our writing classrooms into places where ideology is foregrounded, we’ll be hurting our students.  In her case the concern is different.  She fears that we’ll isolate working-class students from their family and community and still be unable to teach them critical thinking skills or help them earn high salaries upon graduation.  Her conclusion is much more extreme than Hairston’s, however, since she suggests that we stop trying to teach working-class students at the college level and instead learn to value their culture as a society.  This view is much more polemical than anything we’ve read before and rather frightening. 

 

Although Ohmann and O’Dair are essentially arguing for two different things, they each urge for a pedagogy that would allow the working class to be valued and to use language effectively for its purposes (although a chief difference affecting the import of the articles comes from what each author believes those purposes to be).

First, each pedagogy acknowledges that there are classes, and that we shouldn’t ignore these. Each proposes a pedagogy that puts issues of class at the forefront.

Both also find fault with a model that privileges the values of the middle class. As O’Dair puts it, we need to “[accept] that middle class culture is not superior to that of the working class” (603). Both also see the classroom as a place of enabling activism, O’Dair in her call to see the working class as worth something, and Ohmann in his view of instruction as enabling the working class to organize into unions, consumer movements, etc.

Re: Smitherman, Villanueva, and Blackmon

2) Villanueva suggests a curriculum that has a goal to expose students "to differences and similarities within the literacy conventions they have to contend with, to know the traditional norms while also appraising them, looking at the norms critically" (100). Blackmon proposes a course that asks students "to think and write about different facets of their identities before . . . [focusing on] their identities holistically" (94). Berlin suggests that social-epistemic rhetoric approach to teaching composition involves “the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence” (48). Both Villanueva and Blackmon ask their students to engage in their discourse communities, but use different words for the term: Villanueva uses “traditional norms” and Blackmon uses “identities.” Both authors’ curriculum/courses, though, enact social-epistemic rhetoric by asking students to challenge and question these discourse communities so they can approach them from a critical stance.

Re: Ohmann and O'Dair:

1) I agree with Caitlan in that both Ohmann and O'Dair question class's role in the university and in pedagogy. Both find "fault" with the middle class and advocate for a re-vision of the importance of the working class and its role in the university. Ohmann calls for teachers to "[r]espect the linguistic resources students have" and to "make language a vehicle for achievement od real political and personal aims" (17). O'Dair has a similar sense of activism in her essay by proposing that "the college composition classroom become a site for 'class activism' by promoting the value and worth of working-class people and working-class culture" (603). Both these article seem to have undertones of the statement on Students' Right to Their Own Language. Using these article, this statement title could be revised to read, "Students' Right to Their Own Class."

2. To what extent are the composition course curricula Villanueva and Blackmon describe developing consistent with the curricula advocated by Berlin in “Rhetoric and Ideology”?

Villanueva may well be invoking Berlin in the following quotation: “Confining discussions to matters of culture without considerations of class paints an ideological picture of a pluralism or a multiculturalism which does not yet exist in our society—and cannot exist without acknowledging the struggles inherent in the class system” (114). Villanueva, like Berlin, is interested in exposing and fore fronting ideological assumptions; students must question what beliefs have long remained the invisible privilege: “Students look at fairy tales and children’s stories, and, in looking, begin to question the obvious and the natural, begin to question ideology” (98). Blackmon, too, is interested in students’ investigating ideological assumptions for the greater good and asserts that all students will benefit: “While students in this diverse classroom learned about Hindu customs and Kwanzaa ceremonies from their classmates, they also learned new things about themselves, their communities, and their own beliefs. For this reason, I argue that this course could be equally valuable for an apparently “homogenous” [“just white”] student population” (99). All three authors are interested in empowering students through “critical” awareness and action.

2. How do the authors’ purposes differ and what are the differences in the exigences of their essays?

Ohmann, writing in 1982, seeks to show that the (then) recent attention placed on Bernstein and Mueller’s understanding of the relationship of “code” and “class” is misplaced; their correlation is “damagingly static” (13). Ohmann draws on Volosinov to show that the relationship between the terms has ideological implications; parties from different classes may have used “the same sign in both sentences, but [it was] used in ideologically contrasting ways” (13). Ohmann’s exigency comes in wanting to amend the popular pedagogical strategy (drawn from Bernstein’s and Mueller’s work) of teaching working-class students the “elaborated code” supposedly inherently connected with the middle-class; rather, all students should be taught the “dynamic and changeable power relations” inherent in the relationship between “class” and “code” (17). O’Dair, writing in 2003, is reacting against the (then, and perhaps still now) popular pedagogical strategy of exclusive attention to ideological matters in the Composition classroom (593). O’Dair’s exigency comes in wanting to remove the goals of “therapy” and “activism” from this classroom to initiate veritable, palpable help for the working class, which involves initiating them into academic discourse rather than a strategy of (what she sees as) attending to their emotional needs (594) and valuing their home language and the “knowledge they already know” (598); the working-class students who choose to go to college (and, O’Dair believes not all working-class students need to, 594) are there because they desire to be initiated into this middles class, and anyone who believes the university is anything but middle class is (according to O’Dair) a bit naive (601).

3. Bizzell included Villanueva’s and Smitherman’s work as examples of “hybrid academic discourse,” claiming that these hybrid discourses “enable scholarship to take account of new variables, to explore new methods, and to communicate findings in new venues, including broader reading publics than the academic.” Judging from the small sampling you have from today’s readings, would you say Bizzell’s claim is defensible? Why or why not?

 

I would say that in the pieces mentioned above, there is some difference from the standard academic discourse, but not a large amount, at least in the ways mentioned above.  Villanueva’s piece wanders away from the standard in that it relies heavily on autobiography, a method of presenting information that does not normally appear in the academic: the personal does not have the weight of argument, but instead the reasoned argument with corroborating sources.  While different in this way, the piece does not seem to be moving for new venues, or broader reading publics, since it relies on a systematic breaking down of speech, borrowing from linguistic analysis. 

 

My initial impression of Smitherman’s work is that while there is no small amount of dialect used, a voice different by far than what is normally seen in academia, the information presented seems to be the same as would be found in a traditional academic essay, and there does not seem to be on a first read anything that would explore new methods, or use new venues to broaden reading.  It seems to be in a different voice, but that is it. 

 

 

Geneva Smitherman’s book (Talkin’ and Testifyin’) was published the same year as Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations: 1977. (We read “Diving In,” published in 1976). What similarities and differences between the two seem most significant to you?

 

The similiarity that strikes me as most obvious is the appeal to the reader in each to look at the problem of “basic writers” in the view of linguistic difference.  Each author talks about breaking down problems with writing on the linguistic level.  There is a perceived need in each piece to move to the linguistic level, to look at patterns in language in order to make sense of what might on the surface seem to be a random mistake.

The main difference that I notice between the two is the way these differences are spoken of.  The feeling from the piece by Smitherman is much more positive.  The language is celebrated for its difference, and there are periods where disappearing differences are lamented (such as the example of the islands).  In Shaughnessy’s piece, there is more of a feeling of a problem to be fixed, not celebrated.  While both pieces, to be fair, are respectful of the students, the Smitherman piece does not have the same “error to be fixed” feeling that Shaughnessy’s piece does. 

 

Re Smitherman, Villanueva, and Blackmon, Question 2: Berlin emphasizes the importance of the discourse community and its ideological aspect as a social construct specific to a particular time and culture, which should be dealt with in the writing classroom. Blackmon also focuses on the issue of identity created by the interaction between the individual, the community, and related socioeconomic factors. She relies on reading materials in order to aid students to delve into ideologies and power relations imbedded in the process of their identity construction (one of the main purposes of her pedagogy is to incorporate technology into the classroom and think about the access to it in terms of socioeconomic factors as well). She wants her students to critically think about differences between different discourse communities such as race, gender, etc. and ways their identities (especially in terms of race) are constructed mainly focusing on cyberspace (sort of liberating their consciousness like Berlin said). Villanueva also values “the potential for social change” in education (p. 94). With critical literacy, he asks students to discuss “how different people, with different ways and living in different times, can see some of the same things differently” (p. 97) and “to question the obvious and the natural…[and] to question ideology” (p. 98) while dealing with issues of class, culture, and race. /////Re Ohmann and O’Dair, Question 1: Both of them delve into the issue of class, the working class vs. the middle class in relation to language. They propose to respect the differences shown in the two classes and admit that those differences are by no means superior or inferior to each other. Those differences are rather related to other situational or broader social relations (power relations in society). They both urge us to “respect the linguistic resources students have[,] make a language vehicle for achievement of real political and personal aims” (Ohmann 17) and “promot[e] the value and worth of working-class people and working-class culture” (O’Dair 603) to help students get what they want.

** Re Smitherman, Villanueva, and Blackmon, Question 2: Berlin emphasizes the importance of the discourse community and its ideological aspect as a social construct specific to a particular time and culture, which should be dealt with in the writing classroom. Blackmon also focuses on the issue of identity created by the interaction between the individual, the community, and related socioeconomic factors. She relies on reading materials in order to aid students to delve into ideologies and power relations imbedded in the process of their identity construction (one of the main purposes of her pedagogy is to incorporate technology into the classroom and think about the access to it in terms of socioeconomic factors as well). She wants her students to critically think about differences between different discourse communities such as race, gender, etc. and ways their identities (especially in terms of race) are constructed mainly focusing on cyberspace (sort of liberating their consciousness like Berlin said). Villanueva also values “the potential for social change” in education (p. 94). With critical literacy, he asks students to discuss “how different people, with different ways and living in different times, can see some of the same things differently” (p. 97) and “to question the obvious and the natural…[and] to question ideology” (p. 98) while dealing with issues of class, culture, and race. ** Re Ohmann and O’Dair, Question 1: Both of them delve into the issue of class, the working class vs. the middle class in relation to language. They propose to respect the differences shown in the two classes and admit that those differences are by no means superior or inferior to each other. Those differences are rather related to other situational or broader social relations (power relations in society). They both urge us to “respect the linguistic resources students have[,] make a language vehicle for achievement of real political and personal aims” (Ohmann 17) and “promot[e] the value and worth of working-class people and working-class culture” (O’Dair 603) to help students get what they want.

1.  Smitherman and Shaughnessy both recognize that the transition that students make toward writing and speaking “correctly” is more akin to learning a new language than merely learning an old language better. However, Shaughnessy’s focus seems more concerned with how students can transition to the new literacy required by academia rather than where students’ former literacy comes from. Conversely Smitherman seems more concerned with the genealogy of literacy (particularly for Black Americans) than how to make a certain group of students literate. Both Smitherman and Shaughnessy identify error as the nexus of literacy. The lack or presence of error in students’ writing or speaking determines whether or not those students may participate fully in academic conversation. Shaugnessy seems more focused on how to smooth the transition between “black” (and other non-white literacies) and academic literacy. Smitherman, on the other hand, seems more interested in studying where the disjuncture between “white” literacy and “black” literacy originates.

2.  Both Villanueva’s and Blackmon’s curricula begin with ideological perspectives. In this way they both reflect Berlin’s admonition that writing courses use rhetorical knowledge to teach students ideological perspectives that privilege the traditionally underprivileged. However, both Villanueva and Blackmon depart from Berlin’s particular stance: Villanueva is more revolution (in a sense) and Blackmon is more rhetorically (and thus less ideologically) focused. Villanueva advocates an educational environment that “is democracy in action, not the usual contradiction of an authoritarian structure preaching democracy” (Villanueva 91). Blackmon conversely advocates a rhetorical study of ideology as manifested in how ideological discourse communities (based in race, ethnicity, region, socioeconomics, and religion) “influence and are influenced by the other discourse communities that [students] belong to” (Blackmon 92). The difference is that Villanueva seeks to educate through empowerment (making education a literally democratic affair) while Blackmon seeks to empower through education (making students aware of the ideological frames that shape the ways the they and the rest of society see each other).