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.