Pedagogical Directions on Language Difference

Delpit's article brought up a teaching problem that I've been thinking about a lot this semester as I approach assessing student writing: the way that I "correct." As background, I've always been in favor of the red pen sort of approach, adding in editing marks on students' papers, correcting spelling and punctuation, crossing out awkward wording and writing in my my own suggestions. My theories as to why I do this (in order of least problematic to most problematic) are: a) because I like to edit and have done a lot of editing work; b) because it was done to/for me as a student; or c) because it feels like I've accomplished something when I grade this way. For me, this feels like I've made my "argument" in response to their writing.

As I mentioned, I know this is problematic. But I think Delpit gets at the heart of why it is when she writes that this correction can actually mar the teacher/student relationship and can impede student's reading and writing, rather than making it more fluent. I notice this more in my online teaching, where the performance of my students in Standard English is much less proficient than at ISU and where all my feedback is necessarily in writing, on the page. When I correct them, they don't just make a change in their habits. Instead, they seem to get defensive about their language. Often, they e-mail me to express frustration at how much they're getting wrong, saying that writing is not their thing or that they've always struggled in English classes. What I've realized is that what is more beneficial (but yes, takes longer) is to summarize tendencies that I notice in their writing and to use those to create lectures for the entire class about why we use certain types of punctuation or what possibilities lie in spellings words different ways. Referring these students to these optional lectures then allows them, hopefully, to feel like they're investigating language on their own and making choices about what mode to employ. At least, I'm hoping that it's more of a choice. This is just one workaround to solve the "correction" problem that I've found, but I'm sure that there are better out there. I find it particularly challenging in an online class, where the curriculum is fairly rigid and it's more difficult to have one-on-one conversations with students.

Ways with Words: Heath's Limitations

I found the second half of Heath's book to be more satisfying in how it discussed applying these ethnographic techniques to the classroom in both teacher and student activity. It seemed to me that it was in those last two chapters where the actual "project" of this work was situated; in other words, how do we go from observation of language patterns to productive use of that knowledge?

I want to focus most of my attention on the article "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography," which we also read for today. What I responded to here most was that, rather than stridently defending her own work, Heath acknowledges her own opacity to the "stylistic features" and "literary tropes" that are present in her work (258). She later addresses the ways in which her identity intruded on her research in ways that she did not thoroughly acknowledges in the text. She calls her competing goals at the time of the writing (e.g. as a mother, a teacher, a researcher, a community member) her "schizophrenic existence" (259). I think Heath is right to point out the fact that these conflicts exist and should be examined, but that this is merely one account by one researcher. So although last time in class we marveled at how extensive the study is and how difficult to reproduce, it's still, by its very nature, only a fraction of what was actually occurring at that time, in those communities.

To that end, the other interesting argument of the article is the way in which she reminds the reader that we are reading this with the benefit of theoretical knowledge that she did not have when writing it. She says "we impose our ideals of equity and access on the past" (262). It is not that she did not consider issues of gender, but her methods were a product of their time. It reminds us that we all write within the boundaries of our moment, that social and historical context that we cannot escape, no matter how enlightened, thorough, or scholarly we may be.

Heath and the Enormous Ethnography

Heath acknowledges in her prologue to Ways with Words that the study it contains is unlikely to be repeatable and in fact was conducted under what we might consider to be ideal conditions, given that "no deadlines, plans, or demands from an outside funding agency set limits on the time or direction of the cooperative arrangements between teachers and anthropologist" (7). This lack of constraint ended up producing an incredibly detailed ethnography with what seems to be a reasonable ambition (i.e. to track and compare how language development occurs among two different populations) but an enormous scale.

I thought it was an effective rhetorical choice to begin with the acknowledged limitations of the study (e.g. the lack of quantifiable data it produced). Yet she defends her research by saying that more quantitative results wouldn't necessarily have acknowledged the social and cultural contexts of the study. She also refers to the book as an unfinished story -- placing the importance on the narrative nature of the book, again moving it away from expectations of empiricism. This narrative tendency is demonstrated even in the first sentence. Rather than beginning with her claim, the theoretical framework for the study, a description of her method or her participants, Heath begins by setting the scene: "A quiet early morning fog shrouds rolling hills blanketed by pine-green stands of timber, patched with fields of red clay" (19). She is orienting the reader to the fact that this is a story of a place and its people. It's something different than we might expect when we think of a "study."

I take that interest in narrative to be part of the reason why she spends so much space orienting the reader to the material conditions of the participants' lives as well (particularly in  Chapter Two, where we learn everything from the layout of the towns and the decor of the homes to how money is typically spent). Yet I couldn't help but wonder if, for the sake of a coherent "story," there isn't a problem with some of the essentializing that Heath does. The gender and racial identities of these participants is often generalized (i.e. "the men do this" or "Trackton children do this"). It goes back to my post last week, where I asked about when we can/can't generalize as researchers. It occurred to me that a study like this almost requires generalization, because without it, how do you represent this (presumably) massive amount of data? Given that we're only halfway through the book, I'm reserving judgment about her conclusions, but I think it's an interesting quandry: Is there such a thing as too much data?

Critical Ethnography and Generalizability

I thought Hammersley's article was useful in the way that it unpacked what seems to be a very loaded term. He outlined the older, anthropological use of the term and contrasted it with modern interpretation, including:
-the ethnography may include qualitative and quantitative data (3)
-ethnography doesn't necessarily involve "living with" your subjects (4)
-ethnography is now more likely to take place over months than years, assisted by more advanced data collection technology like audio and video recorders (5)

He also brought up some of the risks inherent in ethnographic research, such as overgeneralizing results to assume they characterize "typical" activity (5). Later, he notes that critics of ethnography have charged it with "only documenting the surface of events in particular local settings, rather than seeking to understand the deeper social forces that shape the whole society, and that operate within those settings" (7). I was interested in the conflict between these two positions and how and when, whether in ethnography or other research methodologies, we can move from the specific to the general and vice versa.

This conflict is present in Canagarajah's article as well, in that he first acknowledges the risk of the teacher/researcher position and details why his particular subject position (including his status as a native Tamil, bilingual English/Tamil speaker, and progressive professor) might bear on his findings. After examining this a bit, he then moves to assert the relevance of his data by stating, "Although the uniqueness of each teacher/researcher-student interaction should not be slighted in favor of the generalizability of this study, we have to note that almost all Sri Lankan ESOL teachers are Westernized, middle-class, bilingual, native Lankans like me" (620-621). Thus even though he is cautious about generalizing, he wants the reader to know that this data might be common across the experience of many Sri Lankan teachers.

In approach the subject of critical ethnography, the questions then become: Can one design a study that is both "micro" in its execution (i.e. involving specific and close analysis), yet allow the researcher to make larger claims? Should "larger claims," as I've said clumsily here, ever be a researcher's goal? Does it do a disservice to your subjects to attempt to make larger claims or to shy away from them? In what ways is the subject able to assist in, contest, or question your focus and its "size"?

Education and "The Market"

As a lot of the other blogs are ably tackling the questions of literacy and ideology in this week's readings, I thought I would use mine to discuss something that came up in Gee's breakdown of the recent history of education. In particular, I wanted to talk about Gee's discussion of the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980's and the "market-driven approach" to education that resulted (27). He discussed how the purpose of education became churning out knowledge workers, technical workers, and service workers in order to satisfy a capitalistic economic system. He correlates this drive with the resultant emphasis on standardized testing and curricula and the stratification of school systems, with schools in privileged communities getting access to resources and an "elite" education and an emphasis in poorer communities on learning "the basics" (30).

For me, this called to mind how this market-driven approach manifests itself everywhere, even in practices within ISU and our department in specific. I've often heard that the way to justify particular elements of our curriculum is to tie them in some way to our students "professionalization" or to imply that the skills they are learning in our English classes will help them be more effective workers in other disciplines. While I don't think there's anything wrong with tying our educational practices to our students' future careers (as it would be nice for them to leave school and get jobs to ensure their survival), I always bristle a little at the notion that our job is to discipline students to participate more effectively in the capitalist system. I think the particular problem is that instead of talking about how to empower our students to challenge the status quo, how to make our students better critical thinkers, better problem-solvers in their interpersonal relationships, or even kinder, more altruistic human beings, there is an implicit institutional mandate to focus on how to make them better workers. It's not the kind of thinking that would be present in our university mission statement, but I hear it discussed all the time, even as a graduate student and I have to assume it is discussed even more often by faculty and the administration.

Applying a Translingual Approach

After this week's reading, it occurred to me that although changing attitudes toward language instruction in a composition classroom is a battle that has to be waged on multiple fronts (i.e. against those opposed in university administration, in other departments, within our department, within our writing program, our students, ourselves), the move toward a translingual classroom is a logical reflection of our increasingly translingual society. It's a small example, but I was thinking about how my nephew, son of monolingual English L1 parents, already knows several words in Spanish due to limited exposure to Dora the Explorer. Though he's not quite school age, he may find himself in classes later on that will either encourage him to capitalize on that kernel of knowledge or not. The language he's learned and more obviously, the language learned by those growing up in multilingual environments where code switching is the norm, should not be disregarded. Horner et al. see a pedagogical approach that can integrate this knowledge as useful for all students. They state, "This approach insists on viewing language differences and fluidities as resources to be preserved, developed, and utilized. Rather than respond to language differences only in terms of rights, it sees them as resources" (304). It makes perfect sense that I should want, as a teacher, to utilize every possible advantage that I can to get students to write interesting, dynamic work. So if employing a translingual approach will broaden my students' ability to communicate, why not try it?

My next thought was that enacting this kind of language policy on the classroom level might involve reconceptualizing some of our extant notions about what constitutes formal writing and what doesn't. Specifically, I was struck by how the chart on page 647 in the Tardy article demonstrates a decrease in the percentage of teachers willing to include practices that integrate other languages relative to the "seriousness" or finality of the assignment. So it seems to me that when we label an assignment as "final paper", "formal writing", or "graded work" it carries with it a hierarchy that demands, at least according to most teachers, a use of Standard English. I wonder if inverting that very structure might be what gets students to write more creative, expressive work. For instance, if students are encouraged to use the Standard (whatever that means to us or them) while drafting, but are then encouraged to make the writing match their own voice in revision, maybe the resultant work will be more engaging or will at least suit the individual writing it. I suppose I’m feeling that maybe it’s not just the language that we allow or encourage our students to use that matters, but the way that we frame the writing that we require them to do.

From Contrastive to Intercultural Rhetoric

I think one of the things that I took away from this week's reading is the value of dialogue in developing our theories. It's admirable that Connor was willing to adapt and rethink "contrastive rhetoric" (including an all-important name change) in response to specific criticism while simultaneously defending its value. She acknowledges that the original definitions of culture being exploited by contrastive rhetoric could be considered essentialist and that intercultural rhetoric needs to account for the dynamic, changing nature of culture (Beyond Texts, 292). In the same article, Connor proposes that the application of new research methodologies will allow for more specific, targeted study of how culture influences writing.

Speaking to the pedagogical implications of intercultural rhetoric research, I thought Li made an interesting point when he stated, "many of the flaws in our research stem less from the misconceived notion of culture, a notion that is both pervasive and elusive and probably all too broad as an analytical category, than from the misguided view of culture as an omniscient explanation and the assumption that there is one cultural prototype that students from the same cultural background would all pay homage to” (17-18). I think this applies to some of the discussions we’ve been having about how we regard non-standard English in student writing. The trouble occurs when we assume too much or are too eager to attribute differences in student writing to any one aspect of their identity.  These conclusions do not take into account a writer’s agency, as Kubota and Lehner point out in their article. Particularly at the college level, when students have presumably been writing in some form for many years of schooling, we can’t assume that students are entirely unaware of the standard. But is their deviation from that standard a product of culture alone? What about the interplay of questions that Kubota and Lehner suggest they might be considering: “How can I add English writing to my existing literacies?, Do I want to add English writing to these?, What do I intend to achieve with such an addition?” (21) I think a responsible teacher would also ask herself similar questions when evaluating student work: Are they writing according to how I expect them to write or according to their own definition of good writing, which may or may not have come from academic or standard English? Is the way they’re writing a reaction to some aspect of the assignment itself? Does their use of language follow the conventions of the genre I’ve assigned?, etc. “Critical” here, becomes the key word, particularly in how we assess our students’ needs and teach toward those needs.