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"?