Torrington: (Re)defining writing and access in the multilingual classroom

All of the authors from this week's readings provide practical suggestions that help to language and writing instructors account for and lay bare multilingual issues in their classrooms. Toward the end of Delpit's article, however, she argues that: "Unlike unplanned oral language or public reading, writing lends itself to editing. Although conversational talk is spontaneous and must be responsive to an immediate context, writing is a mediated process that may be written and rewritten any number of times before being introduced to public scrutiny. Consequently, writing is more amenable ·to rule application. One may first write freely to get one's thoughts down, and then edit to hone the message and apply specific spelling, syntactical, or punctuation rules" (99-100). What I find problematic about this statement is Delpit's implication that writing is a monolithic act--that is, writing equals big "W" writing. In other words, this line of thinking assumes that writing is writing is writing across the board--and that consequently, teaching someone to write (even a multilingual speaker) is as simple as teaching them the rules.

The problem with this assumption (and I was surprised to see that Deplit's article is fairly recent) is that "writing" as a mediated process is complex--and that writing or composing print, visual, digital, or audio texts necessitates understanding that a range of material conditions are implicated in the process: the author’s laminated experiences in space and time (Prior and Shipka) as well as their densely woven networks of cultural, history, and activity (Prior et al.); the ways that literacies travel, are transformed, and destabilized across contexts (Brandt and Clinton); the many ways writers repurpose activities across the boundaries of genre, space, and time, forming networked trajectories of literate activities (Roozen); how literate individuals and communities are shaped by the practices of access (Powell); and the economic, political, cultural, and locational contexts framing any given literate practice (Pandy).

Ultimately, then, while Delpit's overall suggestions are important, instructors who remain committed to respecting students' own languages and working with multilingual speakers must remember and account for complexity of robustness of the act of writing--and must not imply that writing is somehow "less complicated" than speaking because writing is more revisable.

Torrington: Beyond Binary Conceptions of Literacy

In the second half of her text, Heath writes, "When Trackton and Roadville children go to school, they meet very different notions of truth, style, and language appropriate to a 'story' from those they have known at home"  (294). In her powerful epilogue, she elaborates: "Academic success beyond the basis of readiness depends on becoming a contextualist who can predict and maneuver the scenes and situations by understanding the relatedness of parts to the outcome or the identity of the whole" (352).

These quotes jump out to me as significant because in this half of the book, Heath's characterization of the disconnect between Trackton and Roadville home and school literacies demonstrate that literacy cannot be conceived as a binary (oral/written, literate/illiterate, etc.) Adopting a notion of sets of complex social practices accounting for plural literacies rather than believing in a monolithic idea of literacy tied to dichotomies of educated and uneducated or, further back in time, civilized and primitive (Gee) meets suspicion in many realms, both within and outside of the academy. Why can’t they read and write? As such, questions of what it means to be literate, particularly in a contemporary moment of rapid technological globalization (Barry, Hawisher, and Selfe), impose a particular exigency on literacy and language scholars. With educational policies making mainstream US schools good places to practice mainstream literacy and language skills—but not good places to obtain them (as Heath’s study shows),  we need more teachers and policy makers who define literacy more broadly—as an ability to communicate in a given semiotic system and to comprehend communications by other entities working with in that system. We need individuals willing to become apprentices to students with multiple, situated, material cultural ecologies (Hawisher et al.). We need educational stakeholders that understand that a range of material conditions are implicated in the process of becoming literate in any practice: the individual’s laminated experiences in space and time (Prior and Shipka) as well as his/her densely woven networks of cultural, history, and activity (Prior et al.); the ways that literacies travel, are transformed, and destabilized across contexts (Brandt and Clinton); the many ways writers repurpose activities across the boundaries of genre, space, and time, forming networked trajectories of literate activities (Roozen); how literate individuals and communities are shaped by the practices of access (Powell); and the economic, political, cultural, and locational contexts framing any given literate practice (Pandy).

Such complex factors demonstrate the importance of Heath’s study for literacy education. If we fail to become “contextualists”—and help our students become contextualists, we remain stuck in binary literacy ideologies. Or, as Heath says, any case, unless the boundaries between classrooms and communities can be broken, and the flow of cultural patterns between them encouraged, the schools will continue to legitimate and reproduce communities of townspeople who control and limit the potential progress of other communities and who themselves remain untouched by other values and ways of life." (p. 369)

Torrington: Ethnography in Action

Though Heath's seminal comparative study provides literacy researchers with practical insights regarding the relationship between home and school literacies, what I find most useful and interesting about the first part of Heath's book is her methods and methodology, as it provides an example of ethnography in action. During her 9 year ethnographic study, Heath collaborated with teachers and graduate students as she collected and analyzed data from two communities in Carolinas: one town made primarily up of black rising working class families  (Trackton) and one that was mostly long time working-class white folks (Roadville). Because Heath was interested in the ways these populations communicated both in and out of school, Heath recorded communication  at school, at home, or at the textile mills. After cross-comparing the trends of communication in Trackton and Roadville  (for both the children themselves and the ways they were instructed), Heath asks the question: “For each of these groups, what were the effects of the preschool home and community environment on the learning of those language structures and uses which were needed in classrooms and job settings” (4)?

What strikes me most about Heath's study is that, as a self-declared anthropologist, she entered the community naturally, through acquaintances and acted as a participant-observer by getting to know and respecting the communities under study. In describing her study, Heath is clear in her agenda, and she defends her narrative methodology by contending that quantitative data approaches fail to account for the social-cultural contexts of literacy practices (8). She notes her responsibility to represent the varying dialects of her participants by working to capture their speech as it occur, as the participants “are the products of their history and current situation” (10). Finally, she acknowledges her own affect as the researcher on the study, noting that the stories she tells are incomplete (13), and that “From ethnographer learning, or coming to ‘know,’ I have become ethnographer doing" (13), and thus, affected the social realities of her sites.

Given this responsible and thorough study design, Heath's suggestion that “educators should not look here [in the book] for experiments, controlled conditions, and systematic score-keeping on the academic gains and losses of specific children. Nor should psycholinguisitics look here for data taped at periodic intervals under similar conditions over a predesignated period of time” (8-9) strikes a chord with me as a literacy researcher Yet I wonder about the conflict that researchers (like me and Heath) come up against when such narrative methods and ethnographic designs clash with policymakers that want hard numbers. How do we resist the pressure to produce numbers for numbers' sake?

Torrington: Ethnographic Methods, Literacies, and Writing Development

This week I want to take up Hammersley’s discussion of some of the key critical debates surround ethnographic research practices by focusing on the issue of the observer or researcher. Hammerseley writes that one problem “concerns whether the researcher must locate what is being studied in the context of the wider society, or whether instead he or she should concentrate on studying in great detail what people do in particular local contexts” (6). He continues: “First, how are we to determine what is the appropriate wider context in which to situate what we are studying? Second, how are we to gain the knowledge we need about that context? Neither of these issues is straightforward. As regards the first, we perhaps ought to ask whether context is discovered or constructed; and, if it is constructed, whether it is constructed by the participants or by the analyst. One approach to context is to argue that it is generated by the people being studied, so that the analyst must discover and document context as this is constituted in and through particular processes of social interaction. In other words, it is suggested that participants in social activities effectively ‘context’ those activities in the course of carrying them out, by indicating to one another what is and is not relevant. This is an argument developed by conversation analysts, but now also employed by many discourse analysts and some ethnographers. From this point of view, any attempt by an analyst to place actors and their activities in a different, ‘external’, context can only be an imposition, a matter of analytic act, perhaps even an act of symbolic violence” (6-7) Hammerseley ultimately discounts this model, arguing that it fails to account for the wider social forces at play in ethnographic situations. Though Canagarjah particularly counters this argument, noting the need to “take a closer look at the day-to-day functioning of the classroom and the lived culture of the students” in order “to interrogate the range of behaviors students display in the face of domination-the awareness of which should precede and inform any development of such pedagogies” (603), the problem of how the researcher or observer’s own positionality shapes the both the research and the documentation of that research must be addressed if language and literacies scholars aim to adopt ethnographic methods in ethical ways.

One negotiation of the issue of the researcher/observer’s positionality comes from activity theories, which see context as a way to abstract the outside—that is, not as a location but as an act. Bruno Latour especially attends to this issue with ethnographic data, objecting to the kind of theorists whose research interests or frameworks dictate their research results vis-à-vis the mapping of a priori theories onto their research subjects, then confirming the validity of that mapping to the extent that the subjects disagree. For example, a researcher wants to study a writing classroom at ISU to see what kind of power relations exist in it. The researcher has an a priori Marxist lens, and discovers that the students, who own the means of production in terms of their compositions’ content, genre, and evaluation (they do peer grading) of their texts in this particular classroom, have the most power because they’re operating under a Marxist system; the students’ objections (“We’re not Marxist! We’re just trying to get good grades by figuring out what the teacher wants”) would reinforce for the researcher that his or her conclusions are correct, because subjects are always-already constructed as such and can’t see outside their own ideology. This researcher would not, then, take into consideration the course policies, day-to-day interactions between students and teacher, interactions between teacher and WPA, etc. In neglecting to do so, he or she might also be missing information that would lead to a different kind of reading of the situation – say, one in which the power struggle is actually between traditional notions of composition classes/their outcomes and students/teachers/administrators, etc. For Latour, these observer impositions are harmful because the research site caught in a kind of a feedback loop, where the researcher has an idea of what they’re going to see, they see it, and the subjects’ objections confirm that they saw it. 

Latour confronts this issue directly in Reassembling the Social; in terms of the possibility of an “objective” researcher, he writes “A good text is never an unmediated portrait of what it describes – nor for that matter is a portrait….There is nothing less natural than to go into fieldwork and remain a fly on the wall, pass out questionnaires, draw maps, dig up archives, record interviews, play the roles of a participant-observer, compile statistics, and ‘Google’ ones’ way around the Internet” (136). So, while it’s clear that he isn’t suggesting that researchers be unbiased, ideology-free, “flies on the wall,” it’s not exactly clear how the mediated subjectivity of the observer factors into the study.

Latour’s failure to fully account for this mediation is further evident when he notes that “ANT is simply the social theory that has made the decision to follow the natives, no matter which metaphysical imbroglios they lead us into” (62) but insists that “to treat a report of social science as a textual account is not a weakening of its claims to reality, but an extension of the number of precautions that have to be taken onboard and of the skills requested from the enquirers” (127). The crux of my uncertainty about the perspective of the researcher lies in between these statements. If I, as an activity-theory researcher, am given the task to “follow the natives,” and I want to make clear that the report I will produce from this tracing has some claim to reality, then how do I take “onboard” the extended “number of precautions” that factor into my basic choice in even deeming a subject in a given situation “native”?  In other words, the observer’s subjectivity leaves its mark not only on the “textual account” of the situation but also on their fundamental observations of the situation – on whom or what they call “actors.” As Humberto Maturana says in the introduction to his and Francisco Vaerla’s “Autopoiesis and Cognition” essay, “Everything said is said by an observer.”

            This oversight on Latour’s part constructs for the activity theory researcher a kind of tension between disinterest and engagement. As Latour puts it, “We wish to be more disinterested than was possible with the social engineering project of traditional…But we also wish to be much more engaged than what was possible with the scientistic dream of a disinterested gaze. And yet, something like disinterestedness is offered by the deployment of the four sources of uncertainty…while engagement comes from … the fifth uncertainty” (256). So, Latour’s researcher is a “more objective” one than the contemporary sociologist—not overly engaged, but not entirely disinterested (because such an ideal isn’t humanly possible). Even while shifting the degree of objectivity, however, Latour doesn’t quite fully recognize the fact that there is always contingency—someplace else from which the observer can make his observations—and recognizing these alternative possibilities that stem from a researcher’s own perspective might make ANT even more useful in its methodologies.

            What Latour and Hammerseley remind me in terms of ethnographic methods for language and literacy research, then, is the necessity of considering this contingency—where else I could make the “cut” as to what I’m actually seeing (or not seeing) in that situation, based on how my own subjectivities might shape who/what I define as an actor, etc.

Torrington: What Counts as Literacy in Context?

Researchers, educators, and scholars invested in literacy studies taken on the difficult labor of breaking down discriminatory ideologies of literacy that evoke strict binaries between "literate" (i.e., standard English readers and writers) and "illiterate" (i.e., anyone else) individuals--ideologies that stem back to decades-ago debates about the differences between oral cultures and "literate" ones (i.e., those that communicate through writing). These stakeholders recognize, as Street does, the New Orders understanding that "[w]hat counts as ‘effective’ [literacy practices] cannot, then, be prejudged . . . [because] there are multiple literacies in communities and . . . literacy practices are socially embedded" (2). As such, I want to take seriously Street's argument--which he frames as the argument for the larger edited collection this piece introduces--that "ethnographic approaches to literacy in development can offer such an accommodation of theory and practice and address the larger issues raised in the New Orders, while maintaining a focus upon the local meanings through which we all experience such processes" (6).

If, as Street notes, "[l]iteracy . . . is always contested, both its meanings and its practices, hence particular versions of it are always ‘ideological’, they are always rooted in a particular world-view and a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and to marginalise others," it is imperative that ethnographers of literate practices focus on the location of meaning in communicative exchanges that count as literate acts, particularly in pedagogical contexts. The location of meaning--the point at which meaning arises--in a communicative act necessarily affects what counts as literacy. Where an individual believes meaning is located in a situated act of communication—either in the speaker/writer or in the linguistic or composed text—underscores both how that individual takes up the act and the trajectories of the act in terms of what the listener/audience does with it. For example, if I (as a writing teacher) believe that meaning resides solely in a composed product, I am unable to account for the historical-cultural factors bound up within that product and thus begin to see students as “good” or “bad” writers, “literate” or “illiterate” beings, etc.; conversely, if I (as a writing teacher) believe that meaning resides solely in verbal communications, my notion of what it means to assign a grade to a student becomes shaped by the kinds of oral contributions I observe that student making, thus also excluding the historical-cultural mediating factors that may be at work when a student utters something like “It ain’t no thang.”

The above consequences lead me to reflect more on how assigning a particular location to meaning in a communicative act (and to think there are only two choices—either/or!) inherently shapes the ways that student writers are perceived as literate or illiterate by their teacher-audiences. The problem of the location of meaning is further complicated by the inherited locations--or, as Gee puts it, "[o]ne always and only learns to interpret texts of a certain type in certain ways through having access to, and ample experience in, social settings where texts of that type are read in those ways. One is socialized or enculturated into a certain social practice" (45). Unexamined, these formative assumptions can accomplish a great deal of pedagogic violence in the classroom. As such, I wonder how we as teachers might benefit from an understanding of meaning predicated on neither relativism (i.e., meaning depends on the situation) nor indiscriminate notions of writing for writing’s sake (i.e., it all means something, and speech acts and composing acts carry equal forces of meaning) but a consideration of the full range of mediating elements, including meaning, in a given communication system. Such a consideration may lend us, as teachers invested in multiliterate learning situations, a means to take seriously literacies across contexts.

Torrington: Method, Methodology, and Context (oh my!)

I find Gee's discussion of the relations among discourse, meaning, and culture--what he describes as "the social and cultural nature of meaning and communication . . . with due deference to individual human agency and responsibility" (87)--particularly useful in considering the frames with which we approach our research. For my own research on learning and the uptake of literate activities, his distinction between "acquisition" and "learning" (in Chapter 9, which we weren't assigned) in light of this network of relations is especially compelling. He writes,

Acquisition is a process of acquiring something (usually subconsciously) by exposure to models, a process of trial and error, and practice in social groups, without a process of formal teaching. It happens in natural settings that are meaningful and functional in the sense that acquirers know that they need to acquire the thing they are exposed to in order to function and they in fact want to so function.  This is how people come to control their first language.

Learning is a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching (through not necessarily from someone officially designated a teacher) or through certain life-experiences that trigger conscious reflection.  This teaching or reflection involves explanation and analysis, that is, breaking down the thing to be learned into its analytic parts.  It inherently involves attaining, along with the matter being taught, some degree of meta-knowledge about the matter. (167)

Differentiating between "acquisition by meaningful and functional exposure" and "attaining knowledge that triggers conscious reflection" while accounting for individual agency, responsibility, and the social/culturally mediated nature of meaning, however, becomes fairly complex for the researcher- or teacher-in-practice--that is, it is difficult to identify, code, and quantify (in the case of the researcher) or assess (in the case of the teacher) moments of learning when those moments are ever-contingent on the learner's agency coupled with the socially/culturally constituted nature of what it means to learn in a given situation. As such, my question in light of this week's readings is: as researchers, how can we use theory, methodology, and method to investigate a research question embedded in such complicated systems? In other words, how can we use our own theoretical attachments to help mitigate the complexity of doing research?

One idea related to the musings above is the notion of context that Lillis takes up. Lately, I've been considering the limiting ways that scholars not only bandy about this term, but also the narrow range of connotations implicated when a scholar invokes the context aspect of her research; what I find especially troubling about the term context in linguistics, literacy, and writing studies is that too often it stands as a black-boxed term (in the Latourian sense). Though Lillis addresses this issue, expressing frustration with methodologies and methods that lead to "truncated engagement[s] with 'context'" (355), and advocating "[e]mic perspectives, [which] are central to understanding what is relevant to participants and thus core to understanding what is significant from the very large and empirically unwieldy notion of 'context'" (360), I argue that her proposed alternative--a move to consider not the context of research but the contextualization of communicative acts, grounded in an understanding of text and context as enmeshed--may still fail to illuminate the ways that what is relevant to individual participants may obscure socially/culturally constituted meanings that emerge from the interactions of those individual participants with the tools of language and ecologies of communication at hand. 

Torrington: Considering translingual writing, or "what writers are doing with language and why"

To me, the implications for issues of translingual writing become most apparent when we consider the four levels (national, state, institutional/programmatic, and teacher) Tardy discusses in her article. As I am particularly interested in writing program and writing center administration, I take as foundational premise the understanding that writing is a negotiated, dynamic, complex, situated, culturally and historically conditioned activity. However, that notion, anchored in strong evidence from contemporary writing studies and activity theory research, often gets effaced at each of Tardy's aforementioned levels for a variety of reasons, including budget, student need, and perception of writing pedagogy. This effacement results in a fundamental disconnect between writing center and writing studies pedagogy—and such a disconnect ultimately does a disservice to students, as it reinforces a range of current-traditional writing ideologies.Yet as this week's readings demonstrate, this disconnect also enforces a range of hegemonic and exclusive language ideologies.

A potential response to these detrimental ideologies comes from a translingual approach to writing instructions, which I would argue is akin to a genre studies/CHAT based pedagogy as it "recognize[s] that
we are all language learners . . . that learning language is necessarily continuous precisely because language is subject to variation and change . . . that language learners are also language users and creators . . . [and that] mastery must be redefined to include the ability of users to revise the language that they must also continuously be learning—to work with and on, not just within, what seem its conventions and confines" (Horner et. al. 308). These core recognitions mirror a CHAT pedagogy's interest in helping writers understand that we are all writing researchers negotiating the same concerns listed above.

One important resource for disseminating an reinforcing these complex and contingent notions of language and writing across the university community lies in the space of the writing center. The CCCC second language writing statement makes particular mention of writing centers, noting:

"Writing centers offer crucial resources to second language students. These students often visit the writing center seeking support in understanding writing assignments, developing a piece of writing, and to gauge reader response to their writing. They may also seek input on interpreting teacher feedback or assessment and learning more about nuances of the English language.  Therefore, it is imperative that writing centers model and discuss effective approaches for working with second language writers in tutor training, make available reference materials specific to language learners such as dictionaries on idiomatic English, and hire tutors with specialized knowledge in second language writing.  Writing centers that hire multilingual tutors will have someone who can provide second language writing students with first-hand writing strategies as well as empathy." (CCCC Statement)

The above offers  good starting point, but I believe that in order to counter long-held monolingual ideologies, it is important for the writing center to do more than just hire multilingual tutors and make available second language writing resources. Rather, the writing center must shift its own pedagogy toward helping students develop an understanding of how their linguistic and writing knowledges have built up over time and what tools (artifacts, relationships, knowledge bases) of learning they may already have or need to develop in order to work within the fluent, dynamic contexts of communication. In short, then, the writing center must serve as an anchor space, from which students can become comfortable developing language and writing habits/ways of thinking critically that facilitate their "investigat[ion of] . . . differences in all features of written language, including syntax, punctuation, formatting, media, organization, and genre, [and the ability to address] these in terms of their interrelations" ( Horner et. al. 312).

Torrington: Critical Contrastive Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogies

The notion of critical contrastive rhetoric, particularly as it's taken up Kubota, and, to an extent, Connor and Li (as intercultural rhetoric), strikes me as not only useful for the field of linguistics as a whole, but also crucial to questions of language and writing pedagogy--that is, a critical contrastive pedagogy seeks not to render disparate languages merely "separate but equal" but to explore how languages are constructed, taken up, passed on, and revised through ideological constructs largely based on embodied realities of power. As Kubota notes, this undertaking cannot be realized within current-traditional, explicit, or process based language and writing pedagogies (13-14). 

For me, such an undertaking directly relates to the problems with the commonplace of transfer in the field of rhetoric and composition. Most writing studies scholars assume that transfer of learning, if it happens at all, can only happen in context (and thus, cannot really "transfer" per se). The problem with the commonplace is that it reifies the field's sense of responsibility for "teaching students how to write" and thus works to reinscribe (re-prescribe?) more explicit pedagogies. Loosening this commonplace begins with an interrogation of its base assumptions and guiding questions. My particular interest in transfer and learning theories lies in how a writer learns to write—an interest that necessitates a consideration of literacy. Questions motivating this interest include: What is literacy? What counts as a literate act? How do we know someone has learned to write when we see it? Who gets to decide that someone has learned to write? Who decides what good writing looks like? When do we know writing activities have transferred, and what counts are transfer? Which activities are transferable? These questions reflect the fact that debates about literacy in the field of rhetoric and composition traditionally position the concept as invoking a set of binaries: literate vs. illiterate, reading and writing vs. orality,  informed vs. ignorant; consequently, the term literacy has come to connote a singular, acontextual cognitive understanding of printed English text.

Similarly, the notion of language learner invokes binaries that pit L1 against L2, native English speaker vs. nonnative speaker, etc. I argue that critical contrastive pedagogies can help negotiate the seemingly fixed boundaries delineating these binaries by giving students the language (and the "permission"/means) to explore the ways their own unique language ideologies can position them as communicators in the world. As Kubota notes, such a pedagogy demands that we ask the following questions WITH our students (as opposed to asking them TO our students): "How do languages become positioned in the world?, How do language users, in turn, become positioned by language?, Who benefits by particular positionings of languages?, etc. Ultimately, sorting out such understandings of what writing [and communication in general] entails, what it ‘‘looks’’ like (Who decides this?), and how it gets done (again, Who decides and why?) is a discursively constructed process and cannot be supplanted, manipulated, or controlled simply by a teacher’s belief that 'English writing is linear and yours is not'" (21). For me, these questions become crucial to both language and writing classrooms (and, by extension, spaces like the writing center that often serve L2 populations), as asking them becomes the catalyst for what writing studies scholar Kevin Roozen has called “instances of disruption and ontogenesis” (Invited Lecture, Illinois State University, Fall 2012), or moments in the activities of writing [or speaking] where discontinuities compel writers [or speakers] to shift or expand their  practices; these instances are often marked by remediation and repurposing, as writers [or speakers]  negotiate how their own diverse literate experiences work within the cultural and historical contexts of a particular composing practice or genre.

Torrington: Complicating Contrastive Rhetoric

Connor's and Kubota's texts push me to consider the ways that communication gets taken up across cultural, social, and historical context, as well as the ways these shifting communicative systems get studied and theorized across the disciplines. Even as Connor works to articulate a more fluid framework for contrastive rhetoric, she operates under particular notions of genre and writing that, if codified, could limit the domain of contrastive rhetorical studies in counterproductive ways. For example, she writes: "although contrastive rhetoric has often defined national cultures in the received mode, researchers in contrastive rhetoric have certainly not interpreted all differences in L2 writing as stemming from the L1 or interference from the national culture. Instead, these researchers have explained such differences in written communication as often stemming from multiple sources, including L1, national culture, L1 educational background, disciplinary culture, genre characteristics, and mismatched expectations between readers and writers" ("New Directions" 504). Given that new research paths in the fields of literacy and writing studies show how the trajectories of literate activity across a range of situations, I argue that merely pluralizing the sources of difference across cultures fails to account for the contingent, shifting relationships among a writer's or speaker's communicative resources. In other words, though it may be possible (and in some cases, even useful) to map out and contrast patterns of speech or writing across contexts, such an investigation must necessarily account for the dynamic and often tacit influences acting on a language learner or writer at any given moment in his or her development.

Contrastive rhetoric studies, then, must operate within frameworks that allow it, as Kubota notes, "to escape a binary logic of same versus different, diverse versus homogeneous, and unsystematic versus systematic" (15). Such frameworks will help scholars negotiate with language learners "critique[s] of cultural representations from the concepts of discourse and power/knowledge" (15). Another potential framework for navigating power structures in language comes from writing studies. In “Awareness Versus Production: Probing Students’ Antecedent Genre Knowledge,” Natasha Artemeva and Janna Fox ask “When instructors walk into an introductory . . . classroom on the first day of class, what should they assume about their students’ prior knowledge of disciplinary genres? How could they find out which past experiences may allow students to engage appropriately with communication tasks in a new discipline and which may hinder such engagement?” Writing instructors are interested in applying these kinds of questions to our understanding of our students’ experiences with writing and their knowledge of how writing works in specific settings, and I believe that studies of contrastive rhetoric could adopt a similar conceptual framework of antecedent knowledge--particularly as such a concept not only helps students and instructors gauge prior language knowledge, but also it compels students to be aware of the full complexities of their antecedent literate practices, which in turn helps them repurpose those practices in new contexts. 

Hip-hop doc

Sarah and I didn't have time to show it last week, but here's an interesting documentary on global hip-hop:

Global Hip-Hop Part 1

Global Hip-Hop Part 2

Torrington: On the Art of Deep Hanging Out; Or, Discourse Communities and Homebrewing

I'm interested this week in exploring Canagarajah's uptake of Lave and Wenger's seminal study on discourse communities, particularly in the ways that the former sees the notions of language and access mediating discourse community membership in complex ways. In "A somewhat legitimate and very peripheral participation," Canagarajah writes: “The problem is that certain degrees of legitimacy, peripherality, and participation are constructive, and certain others are not. Lave and Wenger do not fully appreciate the fact that constructs such as 'peripherality' and 'participation' are not absolute. They are relative and relational. To what degree should one enjoy peripherality in a community in order to be effectively inducted into its practices and become a legitimate participating member? What amount of participation qualifies as acceptance of one as a legitimate member of that community?” (198). The relativity and relationality of language/discourse community participation that Canagarajah identifies remain paramount for novice speakers attempting to gain access in any community governed by its own language rules, as these speakers on the periphery may be facing asymmetrical means to access, discordant antecedent genres and vernaculars, and tacit linguistic boundaries only apparent to a given community's insiders. While I think that in "The Place of World Englishes" Canagarajah models much of the pedagogical work needed to empower student to negotiate the above impediments in academic settings (and You furthers this ideology in his two pieces), I argue that much of this empowerment comes from both novice and expert speakers alike sharing the stories of their linguistic navigation journeys. Just as literacy narratives offer writing researchers a way to conceive of the many literacies writers bring to bear across a range of writing situations, language participation narratives (I think that'd be a good name) offer speakers to contextualize and reflect on the strategies they used as they entered into new discourse communities. Canagarajah offers on excellent exmaple of such a narrative in his "A somewhat..." piece. But I'd like to offer my own here.

 Yesterday, I began brewing beer.

While the community of those who enjoy tasting, brewing, and sharing good craft beer may not seem like a site ripe for linguistic study, I have already begun to see how far out on the periphery of this community I am, and I am already testing linguistic strategies for legitimizing my participation. For example, on my first trip to the Hop Shoppe in downtown Bloomington (the place where you purchase supplies for brewing), I simply said something along the lines of "This is my first home brew. Tell me what I need." The expert (owner) then embarked on a long monologue filled with a barrage of words and terms that sounded foreign to me--"chiller" (noun; a device that is able to quickly cool the beer), "malt extract" (noun; a powdered substance made from ground up barley), "rack" (verb; to fill a container, like the kind used for fermentation), "gravity" (noun; a measure of the density of a liquid compared to that of water). This was truly its own variety of English, with lots of functional shifts and in-group speech. My head swimming with these terms, I went home and immediately began to re-read all the beer brewing resources I own (several books) and scour homebrew forums and websites for more terms that I could appropriate (that is, use without fully understanding what they mean) for my next visit to the store. When I returned today, I was able to tell the owner that I had "pitched the yeast too hot"--to which he made a panicked face, as this basically means that I killed the yeast that would consume sugars and make alcohol, thus ruining my first ever batch of beer. In other words, though I had enough language to pass as someone on the inside, I have not yet acquired the means to pair this new variety of speech with the practices of the community.

 The point of this brief and sad tale is that, as Canagarajah notes, “[S}peakers don’t have to be experts in another variety of English in order to speak to other communities. They simply need the metalinguistic, sociolinguistic, and attitudinal preparedness to negotiate differences even as they use their own dialects” (593). Such preparedness helped me negotiate the differences between what I was saying to the brew shop owner and how much I actually knew about the practices of the community--and though this is a small-scale example, I believe that we can find the same kinds of linguistic and discursive negotiations, ever-shaped by the relational and the relative factors working on a particular speaker's resources, in our students.

Torrington (and Hercula) Hiphopopotamus

Torrington: Language Ideologies Response

This week, I want to take seriously Gee's claim that "Theory and meaning are moral matters" (20)--that is, I want to consider how such an injunction serves to frame inquiries into language ideologies toward the goal of social justice. For me, the readings this week remain connected by the idea that the study of language must be an ethical endeavor, grounded in the notion that the many languaged beings we share our world with not only stand as equally "correct" in their semiotic systems, but also equally agented to communicate through them. Such an endeavor, as Matsuda and Matsuda note, is particularly complicated, as "[t]he dominance of codified varieties of English is constantly being reified by well-intended teachers and editors who try to help students and authors learn features of standardized written English" (371). In other words, in an effort to help students "compete" with native speakers on a global scale, teachers often end up reproducing deeply held beliefs that the English language is a great equalizer.

The problem with the fact that such a commonplace has not only become stuck in popular rhetorics but also in the institutional channels that comprise much of contemporary education around the globe is that this belief inherently does violence to others by failing to account for the agencies they posses--or, as Gee puts it, the discourses they posses, as    “Discourses are ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing . . . Discourses are ways of being ‘people like us.’ They are ‘ways of being in the world.’ They are ‘forms of life.’ They are socially situated identities. They are, thus, always and everywhere social products of social identities” (3). In some ways, then, failing to recognize the agency of another's language by valoring "standard" English equates to failing to recognize their personhood. Such a failure indicates, to paraphrase Bamgbose, a collective allowance of the opportunity offered by globalization "to denegrate into opportunism" (360). 

How, then, do we as teachers and scholars and researchers reclaim for both ourselves and our students the linguistically diverse resources offered us by globalization? As Matsuda and Matsuda argue, we can begin by  refusing "to overly valorize either the dominant discourses or alternative discourses. Furthermore, we as teachers and researchers need to play a greater role in challenging the undue privileging of the dominant discourses that have been institutionalized as the status quo" (373). Important to this refusal is Pennycook's "pluralization strategy," which demands that we "locate [world] . . . Englishes within a more complex vision of globalization . . . [one that] seeks to understand the role of English both critically--in terms of new forms of power, control, and destruction--and in its complexity--in terms of new forms of resistance, change, appropriation, and identity" (5). We can also, as a wise woman once told me (shout out to Sarah Hercula!) draw upon the rich linguistic resources our students carry with them in order to open up conversations about language, power, writing, and speaking. 

But I argue that it is also imperative for those of us interested in taking up Gee's call at the beginning of this post to reframe our thinking about/approach to teaching and researching language. Just as access to the English language has come to signify a level playing field (so to speak), so too has access to technology (the myth of the so-called digital divide). In her book Digital Dead End: Fighting For Social Justice in the Information Age, Virginia Eubanks talks about her work with a local YWCA. She details her efforts to provide the women of the YWCA access to technology, believing that access was the key to helping these people succeed in securing better jobs. Yet her assumptions proved to be wrong, as the majority of these women already held low-paying, long hours tech-support jobs where they accessed and used technology daily, and they also used technology extensively in their interactions with social services offices. Lack of interaction with technology was not the problem, then--the limiting and often exploitative nature of these interactions was. As such, Eubanks learned that in order to empower a group of people by giving them a tool/teaching them a particular skill, it is necessary to meet people where they're at. In terms of language use/English language instruction, I argue that the same theory applies--and I am confident that such a theory remains firmly rooted in a morality focused on social justice. 

A Bit of Fry (minus Laurie) on Language Use...