ENGL 680M: Minority Rhetorics

Smitherman’s text brought up a number of issues that I have been discussing in classes since I was an undergraduate in San Antonio. Given that I have taken several linguistics courses, one of which was taught by Southerner Guy Bailey, I was familiar with many of the speech patterns and discourse styles that Smitherman describes. Still, I can see how her book was likely much more powerful for a reader in 1977 that it was for me at Purdue in 2009.

I first read an excerpt from Talkin and Testifyin for my Intro to Comp Theory class here at Purdue.  I had found many of the readings in that class engaging and enlightening but Talkin went beyond that, I couldn’t put it down.  I had always suspected that Black English had specific rules but I’d never run across anyone who explained where the language came from so thoroughly.  I’ve always had African American friends while I’ve lived in the U.S., but I didn’t really come to think seriously about the issue of Black English till I was an adjunct fr

In keeping with Smitherman’s chapter seven and following the style of the black preacher, I’d like to take for my text James Cone’s theology of “black liberation”:

Throughout Smitherman’s text, I kept thinking about one main thing: hip hop. Specifically, I kept thinking that the rise of hip hop, both the music and the culture surrounding the music, has really galvanized America in ways that we don’t seem to want to acknowledge.

As with Ehren, I was interesting in looking at how David Schaafsma’s presentation of the responses of instructors and students illustrates the role of emotions in the classroom. As a former substitute teacher, this is something I frequently saw but never spent much time thinking about, let alone actually discussing with other instructors. More often than not, the discussions in the teachers’ lounge centered on the events in the classroom instead of the reasons behind teachers’ responses to events.

I very much enjoyed David Schaafsma’s emphasis on storytelling on Eating on the Street.  I think it is an aspect of writing that we may want to emphasize more in composition.  I understand that Creative Writing has “academic dominion” over this aspect of writing, but we might still benefit from welcoming some more creative nonfiction into our classrooms.  Arguing the above in this class is, of course, preaching to the choir, since most of what we’ve read this semester have been accounts of scholars’ lives and how that relates to teaching, writing

Now, where have we seen and heard the rhetoric of the middle class directed towards the poor, black working class before? Hmmm…

One thing that we haven’t been discussing in this class too much, and something that David Shaafsma and Mike Rose have spent a little more time on, is the issue of emotions between students and teachers. We, or at least I, don’t often think about how my emotions play a role in teaching and in the goals I have for my courses. Shaafsma’s final chapter about Dora, however, really managed to make a strong point about how our emotional states and our understandings of our emotions can affect our relationships with students.

On the Mother Tongue

http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/12/

Clarification: This is not my usual approach to writing, but I think my choice of approach may be understood in the context of my concluding paragraph.