Category Archives: Teaching/Thinking about Education and Literacy in African America

“Publicly Speak the Truth:” DeShaun’s Literacies

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writing-notesTonight we will look at a student essay, using the models of African American literacies and rhetoric that Elaine Richardson provided for us last week, alongside the critique of schooled-literacy-as-white-property in Rebecca Powell’s introduction. We will ask ourselves how DeShaun defines himself as a writer and how/if he subverts the requirements of white-schooled-literacy in his essay.  We will use a worksheet that I designed for freshmen classes in 2005 alongside a copy of DeShaun’s essay (this essay actually took up 3 blue books, unfortunately not reproduced here, masking all of his arrows, erasings, cross-outs, etc): Worksheet w DeShaun’s Essay

Let me introduce DeShaun’s essay.  DeShaun was a freshman in one of my first year writing classes many years ago, on the eve of our entry into our war on Iraq.  In that teaching context, students were required to take a departmental midterm where they were given two essays to read two weeks in advance. At the exam, they were given an exam question that they had to answer in two hours.  For this particular exam, students were assigned: 1) George Orwell’s canonical essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” where he launches the polemic that the colonizer is also dehumanized given what he represents/does to the colonized, and; 2) an essay by Amitav Ghosh where Ghosh connects the impossibility of imposing our will on Iraq to Britain’s failed attempts to do so in colonizing India.   Here are the exam questions (students must choose one)… please read them VERY carefully:

In his essay, George Orwell states that at the time of the events he describes, he “could get nothing into perspective”. Summarize how the experience of shooting the elephant changes the narrator’s perspective about imperial power. Apply this understanding to Amitav Ghosh’s discussion of current events. Be sure to summarize enough of Ghosh’s essay to give the necessary context for your discussion. Drawing on your own knowledge or experience, evaluate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the authors’ views of imperial power.                                                      OR….
 Summarize Amitav Ghosh’s argument about the “new American empire”. Make a connection between Ghosh’s ideas about the current situation and the view of empire presented in Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant”. Be sure to summarize enough of Orwell’s essay to give the necessary context for your discussion. Draw on your knowledge of these and other readings and your views of imperialism to make an argument about the American presence in Iraq and its potential effects on Iraqis and Americans alike.

DeShaun failed the exam with the lowest score in the class but with, ironically, the longest and most developed essay.  The full story and DeShaun’s essay are here along with the results of what happened with him (in an essay called “Writing While Black”); an example of a (5-paragraph) essay that was scored highest is also included.

The most important point here is to imagine a strategy for dealing with this situation.  This ain’t a practice exercise.  It ain’t hypothetical.  It ain’t theoretical. It is all the way liiive.  Everyone in this graduate class is tutoring in some capacity, working in K-12 schools or with youth, or teaching college reading and writing classes.    So here is where all that talk we talk counts.  What’s your response to this situation (as in what will you DO)?

Stay tuned for a letter I wrote to writing center tutors who stunningly failed to imagine DeShaun as their equal…

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Tricking New Literacies

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In class this week, we are discussing Toward a Literacy of a Promise: Joining the African American Struggle.  We’ll pause and (re)look at pages 6-10—  two subsections called: 1) “School Literacy and the Discourses of Power”; 2) “Schooled Literacy and Traditional Forms of Literacy Instruction.”  Powell has taken theories of New Literacies Studies (NLS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and really made that her own, in her own words/frames of reference, and politics of location.  We need to do the same… here is my version…

In simplest terms, in CDA and NLS, we think of schools as expecting and maintaining certain styles of speaking, writing, and being and thereby recycling power.  There are “prescriptive norms and values” for how you must write, speak, respond, ask questions, look, sit, think, act, walk, feel, question— how loud you do it, when, where, and how.  (We call these norms and values Discourses— with a capital “D”!) What researchers related to NLS and CDA are suggesting is that Anglo, upper middle class students represent Discourses that schools match (see Shirley Brice Heath’s 1983 canonical Ways with Words for a linguistic ethnography of just how much school matched white kids’ homes and ran counter to the philosophies and goals of black homes).  What happens then is that the language and ways of being that have real currency, impact, and effect in the home communities of students of color have no visible value or place in school.  What is important about Powell’s work is that she is NOT suggesting that we teach whitened-school practices to non-white students more effectively or efficiently (which is essentially what most teaching models consciously or unconsciously do).  She is suggesting a rupture of those whitened school-practices that get communicated through textbooks, standardized tests, prepackaged learning objectives, curriculum kits, classroom techniques, etc.  Literacy gets packaged as a set of neutral, static objectives that can be measured and “scientifically” managed and then students must conform to the materials, an altogether different thing than becoming conscious or literate, so that they can be (using Gee’s words):  “apprenticed in the right place, at the right time, with the right people.”

Tricking-VideoLet me bring it home, quite literally.  In my first semester at my current college, I had a first-year writing course that I taught with the theme of NLS.  My idea was that young people of color themselves could chime in on these very conversations and (re)claim how they are literate in ways over and beyond “schooled literacy” in politically necessary ways.  I was not disappointed.  Before midterms even fell down on my first semester at my new campus, Jason taught me about a set of literate practices that I had never heard of before… tricking.  Jason was a trickster!  Now as an oldhead, this was new to me and so this is how I described it upon first seeing it: super-high energy, multiracial youth across the world blending acrobatics with martial arts and a dose of some kind of new crack cuz this stuff was just CRAZZZY!   So how was this NLS for Jason?  Well, to get to tricking, there was a lot of textual sharing that happened first (this was 2008— tricking is more prevalent and popular now.)  What I knew was that Jason spent hours of his time uploading his own videos of his tricking and looking at videos from other tricksters across the world who would comment back to one another with suggestions; when there was no common language, they would use their bodies for the form of their commentary.  In fact, Jason’s video collage and research project for the class examined how tricking embodied what Maisha Fisher calls a “participatory literacy community” where literacy is shaped solely through high levels of participation.

Since Jason’s lesson, I have been following Brandon McCuien (I am still not very knowledgeable about this world though), who I see young people on the internet calling a Black Superhero and/or the Real Neo.

Here is his short, gone-viral collage:

Here he is in public spaces:

Now I don’t mean to sensationalize here but this couldn’t capture more brilliantly something that seems so totally opposite in form, purpose, and dynamic from what school feels like and does:

  • a reinvention of gymnastics (and maybe martial arts too)
  • moving your learning directly into embodied action
  • maintaining connections with other youth across the globe
  • inventing global communication networks where the viewers/youth design a sophisticated “assessment” vocabulary for who’s good and who’s not
  • taking over public spaces— literally flipping them
  • and, if all that ain’t enough: deciding who the hell your own black hero is!

I can dig it.  The point of a theory and practice of African American Literacies, NLS, or CDA would be to see the energy, audience awareness, and skill that someone like McCuien so obviously has and see to it that schooling recognizes it also.  Now many might say: but yeah, they need to learn how to write essays.  I won’t argue for or against that but what I say is this: if we can’t engage all this brilliance with our essay-based teaching requirements, then it is not the students who are lacking, it is us.

 

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Internalizing Richardson’s African American Literacies

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This week we read Elaine Richardson’s African American Literacies.  I have asked the class, amongst many other things, to come today with an “anchor” from Richardson’s text that works as a grounding definition of African American Literacies.  We will do some multimodal, visual work in the classroom with this anchor and the other writing assignments for the week before we get into more discussion about the book.

I want students to walk away having internalized their positions about this text.  I am not expecting agreement in the classroom but I do expect internalization.  I am more impressed with a student who can articulate a disagreement and stay with it than I am with a student who presents an affinity to Richardson’s work but simply co-opts that work more than lives it out.  What I mean by this is simple: if you agree with African American Literacies, then you have to follow it through. There’s some stuff that just shouldn’t sound or look or feel right to you.   There are some ways of talking about students that should contort your mouth so bad that it can’t even escape your lips.  And, there are some things that you should notice and really question about the educational institutions in which you work and live out your thinking.

In sum, I am suggesting that consciousness cannot live in contradiction to your daily awareness.  As one simple example, I am talking about  holding one’s self accountable to the wide variety of racial, code words that stamp African American students and other students of color as “other” to the processes of schooling and culturally/mentally deficient: a pantheon of codes that frame students within constructs like motivation, achievement gap, at-risk, basic writers, transitional, impoverished, colorblindness, and more.  To frame black students this way would be the antithesis of Richardson’s project.

Think back on what we read last week in Gloria Ladson-Billings’s “Landing on the Wrong Note: The Price We Paid for Brown” and now see below how she particularly interrogates the use of the code “at-risk” (a term I have heard at this institution more than I have ever heard anywhere else):

(This is a 10-minute clip from a larger talk that is available in viewing resources)

If you want to claim Richardson’s ideas as part of your own internalized system of beliefs, then you need to be willing to deconstruct the images and ideas in front of you, not simply roll out Richardson’s name.  Don’t just read African American Literacies… internalize it!

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ePedagogy vs. eCommerce

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As I write this, I am looking at an ad from a major department store (I will leave the store unnamed so as to avoid giving it further advertisement).  I received this mini-catalogue in the mail, though I did not supply this store with my address.  In the catalogue, I am promised some kind of free gift if I pin them, follow them on tumblr, follow them on twitter, Facebook-friend them, use/view instagram, watch them on youtube, download their shopping app, and visit their blog; and these shopping suggestions are presented in a circle as if one thing cannot stand alone. All that AND a catalog mailed to my home too!  “This is just crazy” is what I first said aloud.

Needless to say, I am probably on the left end of the spectrum, always interrogating new modes of capitalism and the ways it structures thought and behavior.  Technology is never immune to the critique since new technologies make new modes of capitalism possible and vice versa. However, I am not necessarily inclined to reject all new technologies simply because they have been co-opted for hyper-consumerism. Obviously, we need to build radical community uses of digital media for our own purposes in a world that co-opts all technologies for consumerist purposes.  This seems to apply to college students especially since they are the target consumers for seemingly EVERYTHING. And that’s just my point here: we need to know when we are being co-opted.  When I meet other people of color who are suspicious of new technologies for its co-opting, I do not assume they are tech-phobes, too primitive to understand the advanced world, or merely indulging conspiracy theories.  I know that people’s histories with institutions (COINTELPRO did, after all, also use the new technologies of its time) can never be ignored. I like to hear these suspicions and analyses that keep my social observations sharp.

I think back to the first time I ever used blackboard (a learning management system bought by many colleges) in my classes circa 2000.  There were uses of it that I have always found invaluable (archiving 100s of assignments and digital texts, for example) but I never fell for the incessant, institutional dogma that insisted blackboard would save my teaching. There were two problems with this dogma for me. The first was that if we simply co-opted young people’s uses of and inclinations towards new technologies into our own curriculum and instruction (without the need to really change any of that), then we will capture their interests.  The second issue for me was this notion that students could be tricked into experiencing their classrooms as something other than impersonal, post-industrial, large lecture halls because they could post questions on blackboard (or, in today’s parlance, tweet their professor and 300 classmates).  This all seemed rather convenient to university’s budgets: there is no compelling need to rethink large lecture-based classes and, therefore, hire more tenure-track faculty, build new spaces, or create smaller learning communities.  You can just pack all the students in, make them feel like they are making real-time connections by co-opting their favorite means of social networking, and collect money from them in the process without really having to shell any out. Convenient, indeed.  This is all the more relevant when you consider Manny Marable’s argument (in Wells of Democracy) that universities (private universities, especially) often function today like Fortune 500 companies.   Convenient, indeed.

When I think of schooling’s uses of technologies, I think of scholars like Ngugi and Walter Rodney. They remind us that those students who were supposed to be the passive recipients of the empire’s models and modes came back to bite the empire in the behind with the very education that was supposed to domesticate them.  That’s all that keeps me going on those days when my college students and me are publicly asked to “brand” ourselves using new social networks. As a descendant of enslaved Africans, the legalized branding of my person and body stopped with the Emancipation Proclamation so I simply can’t see taking on this language or EVER using it with black students in a classroom.  This is when I think back to the black college students of the HBCUs who were the catalysts for a new sit-in movement (like the Greensboro Four from North Carolina AT&T on February 1, 1960 pictured at the top of this post) and a branch and method of Civil Rights protests that perhaps no one foresaw: black college students who questioned the ways their bodies and minds were socially patrolled as part and parcel of a new kind of educational curricula that they shaped and defined for themselves.  I find hope for the future looking at these patterns of the past.

I tend to get worried when I am simply expected to plug in information into an institution’s pre-determined templates where my needs, social-political purposes, linguistic designs, vernacular imaginations, and aesthetic philosophies are never consulted or regarded.  Even though I get worried, I always remember how domestication, co-opting, and colonizing never fully work, never really take with color-conscious people (the term I use to mark a politics distinct from color-blindness).  Capitalism tends to contradict itself and that’s where those little fissures of new possibility get magnified.  A blind allegiance to the kind of eCommerce awaiting me in my mailbox won’t ever be the full picture.  A radical ePedagogy for people of color will always be possible as long as we do what we have always done: question the how and why of what institutions do.

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