More History in the Spaces Left…

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We open this week using Jackie Royster’s and Jean Williams’s 1999 article for College Composition and Communication, “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies”, to bind together the 19th century (last week’s reading) with the 20th century (next week’s reading).  In particular, Royster and Williams remind us that to understand the contemporary presence of African American students and African American contributions to composition-rhetoric studies, we must begin with the 19th century.  In that spirit, they devote a significant part of their article to the work and history of HBCUs which have invented and maintained the record of educating African Americans in postsecondary institutions in the United States.  The masking of the work of HBCUs is, therefore, one of the (many) mechanisms that a broader understanding of the history of the field has been thwarted.

With Royster and Williams as inspiration, I would like to introduce the class to the HBCU Library Alliance Digital Collection.  Here is the introduction from the website:

A Digital Collection Celebrating the Founding of the Historically Black College and University is a collection of primary resources from HBCU libraries and archives. It includes several thousand scanned pages and represents HBCU libraries first collaborative effort to make a historic collection digitally available. Collections are contributed from member libraries of the Historically Black College and University Library Alliance.

The collection includes photographs, university correspondence, manuscripts, images of campus buildings, alumni letters, memorabilia, and programs from campus events.

These images present HBCUs as cultural, social, and political institutions from the early 1800s until today.

Here is Ira Revels (the first speaker) introducing the Digital Collection on a panel at Cornell University called “A Brief History of Black Education in America.”

This digital collection could very well support original research if you choose to incorporate this history in your final research project of the class, a history that is still not adequately represented in the field.

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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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Self-Taught! (Part II: In Memory of Spottswood Rice)

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Today, I fell in love …with the internet. I returned to a letter written by a soldier for the Union Army, Spottswood Rice, that I first read more than ten years ago in Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African American Kinship in the Civil War Era by Ira Berlin and Leslie Rowland.  In the letter, Rice (who learned to read and write as a slave by tricking his young “master”) leaves no stone unturned in letting a slave-mistress know what he has in mind if she continues to refuse to give him his child (who she believes is her property.)  By visiting Angela Walton-Raji’s blog, I participated in Walton-Raji’s archival research that witnesses the life of this man and his family. Her website allowed me to finally fill in the picture that Rice’s letter gave me when I first read it more than 10 years ago.

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Self-Taught! (Part I: African American Union Soldiers)

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In the second week of class, we will focus on Heather Andrea Williams’s book, Self-Taught, with the goal of framing African American Literacies in the 20th and 21st century in this crucial history.

We will begin class by discussing Williams’s work more fully.  But we will also spend part  of this class focusing on the role of African American Union Soldiers during the Civil War as a critical aspect of the history of African American Literacies.

There are, of course, so many intriguing literate characters, literacy events, and teaching moments that we could highlight from Williams’s book:

  • The role of black children themselves, many of whom were born into slavery but who experienced freedom AS the ability to learn to read and write OPENLY (children who would also “read” white paternalism alongside their books, given the ways they would trick northern, white missionaries who couldn’t tell them apart and, thus, report that their names were things like General Lee and Stonewall Jackson)
  • Teachers who crafted their literacy pedagogies and community teachings in hiding during slavery and showed up in full, visible force at emancipation
  •  Black women’s day-planning, all of whom were formerly enslaved, who became “stay-at-home moms” for the first time, solely for the purpose of learning to read and write and attending school with their children
  • the whole arsenal of skills-building underneath all of that financial literacy that let recently emancipated people who made less than $10 a month buy the materials to build their own schools and take care of the teachers (which included physical defense as much as monetary support)
  • the re-organization/re-scripting of menial work, work that looked no different from what black people had done in slavery, by taking every and any free moment or many turns with the plow to get in a quick lesson from the infamous blue-back speller (which became popular, no doubt, in part from emancipated slaves’  extensive use of this  text, a text with the central goal of replacing British English with an American English)
  • the imparting of the communal philosophy of “each one, teach one” to design the teaching of reading and writing (where even small children were considered masterful teachers and expected to share knowledge)

All of these and more could be a point of focus for Williams’s book.  Unfortunately, we can only focus in closely on one aspect.  So we will spend class time looking at one iteration of the literacies that the blue-back speller witnessed: letters and petitions written by black Union soldiers to various commanders and administration;  letters from wives and family members of soldiers to various commanders and administration; letters from soldiers to wives and family and vice versa. Williams compels us to see these African American Union soldiers in the Civil War as ushering in new definitions of literacy: both how one acquires literacy, why, and to what ends.

We will look at a few spaces, directed at teachers, where we can find the online writings of black Union soldiers.  Though these texts are invaluable, these texts have been heavily edited and altered.  While I understand scholars’ decision to do this because they don’t want audiences to assume these men’s ignorance, the editing obscures the histories of literacy that Williams lets us see.  When you begin to realize that for many of these soldiers, they had only been LEGALLY ALLOWED to read and write for less than a year, all of those editing “mistakes” are indications of heroism, not failures to learn mechanics. In class, we will instead use the documentary histories that Ira Berlin, et al have created so that we can see these black men’s actual words, spellings, etc.  From that, with Williams’s research as our guide, we will get a sense of who may have learned to read and write as former slaves and/or as soldiers.  Most crucial, however, is that we have a living testimony and voice of the men and families who pushed the United States much further than it ever intended to go when it enlisted black men and abolished slavery.

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