Category Archives: Everyday Racism and the Life of Composition Studies

Congratulations Seattle Teachers!

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Teachers, students and parents in Seattle, Washington have drawn a great deal of public attention in the past few months for their campaign to reject standardized tests in reading and math. Despite threats of a 10-day suspension without pay, a January boycott led by teachers at Garfield High School quickly spread.  A week ago, the school district announced that the MAP test (Measures of Academic Progress) is now optional, allowing schools to design/create their own assessment cultures outside of for-profit, corporate-designed/controlled measurements systems.

Here is Jesse Hagopian, a high school history teacher at Garfield High School, interviewed by Democracy Now.

And here is Jesse Hagopian with Wayne Au, author of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality:

I am most impressed by the website and research that teachers themselves engaged as part of how they would imagine and create alternatives to a rampant testing culture.  Here are the important reminders they give us about standardized testing:

  • Narrows curriculum both within a subject and across the entire scholastic curriculum by de-emphasizing untested subjects
  • Decreases rigor by emphasizing memory recall and test-taking skills over critical and creative thinking
  • Exacerbates inequities for students of color/poverty
  • Is often used for the purpose of implementing policies such as holding back elementary students and tracking students, which are shown to be detrimental
  • Negatively affects students’ self-perception as competent learners
  • Narrows debate on what’s considered important in education– ignores larger issues such as poverty, class size, funding equity

I think their three recommendations are also stunningly clear and provocative:

Assessments should incorporate a variety of measures, possibly gathered into a body of evidence that demonstrates abilities. These measures, taken together, should:

  • Include classroom work
  • Allow teacher and student choice
  • Integrate with curriculum
  • Demonstrate student growth as well as standards achievement
  • Be free of gender, class, and racial bias

Valid assessments:

  • Reflect actual knowledge and learning, not test taking skills
  • Are educational in and of themselves
  • Are differentiated to meet students’ needs
  • Allow opportunity to go back and improve
  • Have tasks that reflect real world thinking and abilities

The creation and review of assessments should:

  • Include community input
  • Undergo regular evaluation and revision by educators
  • Be graded by teachers collaboratively

SeattleTeacherProtest-1As I read these teachers’ collaborative research, watched their protests, and followed their blog, I couldn’t help but think of a Latino high school teacher who I met at 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication) a few years back, himself an educational activist and researcher.  He had come to 4Cs to learn new radical literacy approaches for high school work with his predominantly Latin@ students but instead was dismayed by how irrelevant almost everything he heard was to any critical awareness of race and the experiences of students of color in schools today.  It was the BEST conversation I have ever had at 4Cs and, perhaps, the most engaging.  When I think of him and these teachers at Garfield, I think about how far, far behind we are, as compositionists, in terms of educational activism for communities of color.  I am often surprised by how many compositionists think they are doing something so much more advanced than what happens in high schools with their traditionalist notions of discourse and college curricular content.  I have never met a person who moves towards this self-congratulatory gesture who I thought actually deserved the praise they were bestowing on themselves.  I am grateful for the high school teachers like the ones being chronicled here.  They remind me of what is possible beyond the social limits of composition studies.

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Semester Begins to End…

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Ida B. Wells "The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press."

Ida B. Wells
“The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.”

Tired, Tired, Tired…It’s the end of the semester and I am just wiped out.  The tank was inching towards empty a long time ago but now, it’s just fumes.  Part of my fatigue, I believe, comes from the amount of work and time it took to try and make my rhetoric class a richer multimedia experience.  I was doing that at the same time that I was reading an extensive amount of my students’ writing.  I assign writing for each reading, which means I assign writing for every class.  I don’t give quizzes and exams because I am collecting the equivalent of 4-5 pages, at minimum, a week per student (a combination of blogs, vlogs, and print).  I do not grade these weekly writings as finished, polished essays; it’s just for ideas and articulation (there are final writing projects where I do that more traditional thing).  In weekly writing, I am not looking at format, organization, coherence, or even logic… just ideas.  With 30 students, that’s at least 150 pages of student writing per week for one class.  And, yes, I still read and comment to each page, and not with that bland, white liberalist discourse that constitutes most of what gets called response theory in the still-white-dominant composition studies.

Rosa Parks "I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear."

Rosa Parks
“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”

I don’t believe students will actually do the writing unless I comment to it and I don’t think peer critique is enough.  Peer dialogue is a vital part of my class but for the most part, the content here is all new for students so the person who DESIGNED that content has to be present in a student’s progression of ideas and feelings (I can always rest assured that students have not learned much about or read much of anything by black women at my college).  If you don’t have time to read what your students write, I say stop assigning so much of it or, in the least, we have to stop being disappointed when students don’t give us what we are looking for because we haven’t built in enough of a feedback system to articulate our curriculum.  I get that students need to write a lot and do it on their own, but, really, that jus ain’t gonna happen.  I had graduate teachers who followed this liberalist philosophy and assigned us writing that they didn’t collect. Guess how much of that writing I did?  NONE OF IT.  Had NO time for that.  That kind of thing only works for avid journalers; I am not one of them.  The only substantive writing that I do now (I am not talking about texting, etc… I said SUBSTANTIVE) is for public: this blog or print publications.

Judith Jamison "Learn the craft of knowing how to open your heart and to turn on your creativity. There's a light inside of you."

Judith Jamison
“Learn the craft of knowing how to open your heart and to turn on your creativity. There’s a light inside of you.”

For those students who are like me when it comes to journaling, I KNOW that if I don’t collect their writing, they will not do it; and if I don’t respond to their writing, they will not do it earnestly and they certainly will not fully learn the content.  Most importantly, it is really in the responding to students’ individual writing that an individual and consistent relationship with each of my students forms.  Those kinds of individual relationships don’t happen deep enough in class lectures and office hours alone.  This is all pretty simple.  After all, I’m a compositionist and writing teacher and this is how most of us teach;  however, even those that write and present about pedagogy seem clueless—most folk in the field who I see and hear are some of the worst and most boring teachers around.

Assata Shakur "Freedom in the right to grow, it's the right to blossom, Freedom is the right to be yourself."

Assata Shakur
“Freedom in the right to grow, it’s the right to blossom, Freedom is the right to be yourself.”

Here’s the caveat with all this responding to student writing: by the time the semester ends, you will be wiiiiiiped out.  This particular rhetoric class that I have right now really just OD’ed on this writing stuff.  In the last reflective assignment, what I called Neo-Soul Ruminations, I asked students to stop and pause and piece together the second half of the semester’s learning.  Knowing THESE students, I gave them a five page MAXIMUM!  Yes, no more than five pages!  I just can’t read more than that right now.  But don’t you know some of them hustled that?  Figured, well, she didn’t say double-spaced or size 12 font so they went and gave me tiny-print, single-spaced writing that, yes, met the five page maximum.  Again, that’s one day of class.  Imagine that for 30 students, for one class.  They killllllllin me!  K.I.L.L.I.N. me! Sometimes I wonder about these college teachers who say things like: my students will just agree with what I say or say what they think I want to hear; my students won’t write much or won’t veer from traditional formats, 5-paragraph essays, or standardized Englishes.  Could somebody send some of them squares my way, please?  Cuz I don’t see nuthin like that in front of me this semester and I could really use a break!

Audre Lorde "It is not our difference that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."

Audre Lorde
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

The other issue that I am reluctantly admitting is that I live in a severely delusional state by nature of spending so much of my time around 18-22 years old.  It makes me forget that I am old and can’t do the things they do.  All that staying up late at night to write and read and work on problem sets?  Puhlease!  Ain’t no way I can do that anymore. The other week I was in our main student building where my classroom is housed and at 9am, I saw two, little, itty-bitty skinny ol’ things, all of 19 years old, eating an extra-large pizza all to themselves with supersized Mountain Dews, talkin about schoolwork.  At 9am!  I didn’t even know you could buy pizza at 9am in the morning.  By the time I passed them on my way after class, that whole box of pizza was gone and they were talking about potato chips, M&Ms, and French Fries.  I think I gained five pounds, increased my blood pressure, and raised my bad cholesterol levels just listening to their conversation.  You can easily get caught up in a delusional reality in these settings because this is just NOT what you can do when you are my age.  Just because your 20 year old students have energy at the end of a semester, do NOT assume you can hang with that!  Last night I was part of a panel for the sociology honor society.  The students were of course, amazing, and I suddenly realized I was the “deadbeat” that I had always called my aunts, uncles, and parents.  Here we’d be at the family reunion dining hall (it’s a large family so we need a hall when we come together) and all they ever did was sit around and talk, just sittin there, and talkin.  That’s it.  Buncha deadbeats.  Well, last night, after the event, the students were running around, cleaning up, making plans.  Nope, not me. By the time 8:30pm came around (my commute to work starts at 8am), guess what I was doin?  Sittin… and talkin… and THAT’S IT.  Now it’s official: I am a deadbeat.

Eunique Jones All photos here are by Eunique Jones and part of her project at: becauseofthemwecan.com.

Eunique Jones
All photos here are by Eunique Jones and part of her project at: http://becauseofthemwecan.com.

On a more serious note, no one cares about my fatigue, nothing in my life is about to slow down, none of this stuff ever really lets up— not the bills, not the work that still has to be done, and not the dealings with the “unsafe”/self-proclaimed-radical white racists at the job.  The best thing about being a teacher though is the energy of undergraduate students.  On Wednesday, Christina sent me the link to Eunique Jones’s photography project that E.M. Monroe introduced to me during Black History Month. Christina’s email to me featured a collage of these children’s photos who represented all of the women we have talked about in my course (the photos on this post are some of the photos in the email Christina sent me).  Christina’s email gave me a new realization about Eunique Jones’s project: only a black woman could capture the beauty and deep aesthetic diversity of black children, guide black children in positioning themselves—both literally (i.e., the photo shoot) and figuratively (i.e. the racial memory)— as inheritors/heir of black traditions, and give that back to black people with texts that reach the masses. Yup, I said it: ONLY A BLACK WOMAN.  Now essentialize THAT! The next morning, Christina brought a spoken word poet, Parlay, to class who attends a neighboring university to introduce the day.  Afterwards, by the time the late afternoon rolled around, Karina came to my office with the best damn, homemade empanadas I have ever had.  To riff off of Eunique Johnson’s campaign: because of my students, I can… tired and all… with an avalanche of students’ writing to respond to.

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Academic Culture vs. Educational Change

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Popular meme created by college students

Popular meme created by college students

In my first academic job, I arrived after a 2-3 year commission of faculty who evaluated that university’s core/ liberal arts curriculum.  That commission wrote a report detailing what the challenges were.  The administration reflected on that report for another year. I was later assigned to a new committee that would discuss the commission’s report.  That took another two years.  When I left that committee and university, a new committee was designed to come up with a report that outlined a plan on what to do next.  5 years of students graduated and nothing changed; it looked like the next five years would promise more of the same.

I noticed some strange stuff in my first year of department meetings when I was an assistant professor.  I once had a question about students’ progress in the program (which was a certification program) so I saw my question as vital and requiring an answer… as in, ASAP.  It was a two-hour meeting with lots of discussion but I was confused by the end and said as much.  I had class the next day and needed to tell my students something and needed to ACT on a decision.  So at the end of the meeting, I asked: what did we decide here?  The answer was this: that we need to keep talking about this.  In the three years that I was there, I never got any answer to that question; we just kept talking. I stopped asking and got annoyed with even listening since the circuitous, nit-picky-do-nothing-and-go-nowhere dialogues just gave me pounding headaches.  I designed my own process with my students in my classes, processes that the department could have learned from and adopted had folk not spent their time trying to standardize a curriculum that couldn’t work. When I realized there was no way to do real or important work in that space with infrastructural support– whether it was from colleagues, the chair, or upper levels of academic administration/management— I left.  It was a good call on my part too; with no sense of urgency or political vision, the department has all but folded now.

Popular meme created by college students

Popular meme created by college students

I still remain stunned by the unwillingness of faculty to fight, to see education as a way to critically intervene in the world, to think politically about what literacy and learning mean in the 21st century, or to actually engage polemics and research on higher education and learning.  It’s frightening, especially since the current educational system we are in is one predicated on our demise as teachers.

This kind of culture in the academy was just not something I could get used to:

  • The kind of culture that says everything is okay and, if not, we can just ignore everything, make gradual changes, or just talk for a decade (I mean this literally) about what we will do.  There’s a kind of white bourgeois privilege here that does not imagine there is an urgency or danger to other people’s livelihood and progress when all you do is talk and stall.  I am reminded of that infamous text that seems to populate all composition textbooks: Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”  Bourgeois “progressives” are still all about waiting while other people suffer.
  • The kind of culture that says let’s just find a way to co-exist with the existing social forces, even if we do not want to.  I hear this kind of selling-out from many white liberals in relation to assessment and standardization in schools today.  I find it utterly irresponsible…and stupid.  What exactly do we think black communities have been doing all along since Brown v. Board of Education?  We have been making our peace with a system that promised improvement but gave very little, if any, for a longlong time now.  Making peace with the way things are could only be a perspective that comes from white privilege; that’s the only perspective that could see ACCOMMODATION as something new… or viable.
Popular meme circulated amongst college students

Popular meme circulated amongst college students

What gets clearer and clearer to me is that the majority of the white liberal bourgeoisie, the PMC, who makes up the professoriate has not had and will not have the tools to challenge or even understand the most corporatized university structure we have ever had.  I suppose if you take the arguments about the PMC to their logical conclusion though, the PMC was never interested in waging a challenge anyway.  However, the PMC is no longer invited to the table; holding on to the delusion of privilege seems a high price to pay.

I am thinking about these things because I was recently on another committee to evaluate the core.  As one assignment, we had to write about what we think students should be doing/learning in Core/Liberal Arts in the 21st century.  I liked the homework assignment and plan to move forward on my ideas in my next classes:

  1. Take on current information about new global markets and the connections to 21st century imperialism
  2. Fully immerse ourselves in a digital empire in ways that (re)center self-determination and community-control (see the National Conference for Media Reform)
  3. Speak to and locate racial oppression in a Post-Katrina nation-state
  4. Speak to and locate male dominance in new Benevolent Patriarchy (women are outnumbering male college students more and more, but this is not bringing us any closer to gender equality in higher education… can we talk about this?)
  5. Craft new rhetorical mobility and design competence in a multi-media and digital universe
  6. Develop new worker consciousness in current modes of capitalist production (are we going to keep ignoring our students’ increasing debt, students’  increasing inability to find a job or one that can pay off those debts, and the corporatization of professions that makes professional jobs today look more like factory assembly lines?)
  7. Reframe the standardized education students have received (this is the most tested and standardized group of students in the world and ever in history) and work toward counter-standardization as an educational and human right
  8. Internalize and apply real tools for cross-racial dialogue and alliance in a multiracial/multilingual world
  9. Make daily decisions about the planet with an eco-consciousness that will not destroy the environment we take for granted (it’s not an option to just ignore this)
Popular meme circulated amongst college students

Popular meme circulated amongst college students

Of course, right-leaning white liberals will accuse me of indoctrination but this will be what my curriculum for first year writing does and interrogates in the future anyway. I am not looking for student agreement here, just engagement, something I think I am pretty good at.  I suspect that, once again, the curriculum and strategies that I devise will be ignored while faculty sit on more commissions and committees, talking about and doing nothing.  I’ve seen how it goes down.

Obviously, I think these nine points are the role of a liberal arts curriculum, work that I think traditional disciplinary structures do not even come close to.  We keep talking about the theories of Freud, classical literature, Greek empires, blahblahblah that students need to know and the students keep asking us about their debt, about the world in which they live, about their livelihood and living wage, about the realities of digital design in their lives.  My definition of a liberal arts/core curriculum has nothing to do with the disciplines and their canonical texts/ideas at all.   A liberal arts/core curriculum is the framework for the intellectual culture of a college… it is a deep, meaningful, intellectual engagement with ideas and contemporary social issues, not a set of isolated skills to measure.

What I am left with now is not so much about student identities or ideas about what students need to do. I am thinking more about faculty identities and what faculty need to do.  As faculty, we need to ask ourselves: What should Core/Liberal Arts FACULTY be doing in the 21st century?   We will need to fight for exactly the kind of intellectual and political culture that I am describing here … an intellectual and political culture diametrically opposed to our current corporate models of higher education.  At best, we faculty of the PMC have been D students in achieving this.

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“Because of Whiteness as Property”

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MJCongratulations to Dr. Mary Caruso who defended her dissertation this week!  After losing her beloved mother/best friend just weeks before the final defense, she has now crossed the first major threshold in her life without her mother by her side… but her mother has certainly been looking over her!

Dr. Caruso’s dissertation asks us to think deeply about race when we imagine higher education today.  Using a private college that is 66% minority/underrepresented group and 44% white, she highlights the obvious path of an ever browner college student population and how those students understand and live race today.

The very language we use now does not seem to apply.  “Minority” has no meaning here: white students are still the largest population in Dr. Caruso’s study but students of color carry the majority.  The OCR (Office for Civil Rights) and U.S. Department of Education currently has a category, Minority Institution, for colleges like this that serve a majority of students of color via multiple groups (as opposed to one minority group) in its classifications of the many colleges enrolling significant numbers of “minority” students:

These designations have been important in the past because universities become eligible for grants, contracts, or benefit programs; however, even the OCR concedes that its listings are never complete or total.

Given the number of colleges already officially registered in these categories, it becomes baffling as to how and why scholars in composition and writing studies so steadily imagine its college student today as one who is white, middle class, and Christian.  The default position for many white researchers in the field is what Bonilla-Silva has taught us is color-blind racism: this means you simply do not mention students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds in your study at all, which ends up being just another whitening tactic.  When I asked Dr. Caruso why these white practices were still so dominant in the field, she brilliantly referenced Cheryl Harris’s work on whiteness as property and argued that as field/discipline, whiteness is its property.  This means that who the college student is imagined as, which professors get to write/publish about “today’s college students” and their learning and how, and what we offer to college students does not look that much different from white neighborhoods and banks who make sure people of color are not moving in or white professionals who have fled to suburbia’s zoned schools that keep students of color out.

As someone who has only taught a majority of college students of color by CHOICE and DESIGN, most of what I read in the field feels, at best, irrelevant.  It is an honor to get to work with people like Dr. Caruso who do more than chronicle the writings and teaching of students of color (as white researchers often do in voyeuristic, parasitic fashion like the spectacle Holloway describes).  Dr. Caruso knows to interrogate structural racism and institutional racism.   These supra-organizing structures are more than just the theme of first-year courses, as many in the field so stunningly and stupidly proclaim.  Structural racism and institutional racism are the stories that all of us in higher education live in, some of us just choose not to promote those stories. 

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