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.