Response to Adrienne Rich "Teaching Language in Open Admissions"

"There seemed to be three ways in which the white middle class could live in New York: the paranoiac, the solipsistic, and a third, which I am more hesitant to define (15)."

This essay was so reflective of the current milieu that it felt like it could've been written today. It fits nicely with the current social movements that have manifested over the past two years like Occupy Wall Street. Currently, we see the battle between corporate forces in education that threaten to take over higher education, resulting in a growing tide of students that have been disenfranchised due to the rising costs of student loans. I think Adrienne Rich had her finger on the pulse of the times and this memoiristic piece gives a very personal and honest account of the reasons why a teacher would want to teach at City College during the Open Admission period of the late 1960s. Although Rich admits that her "white liberal guilt" compelled her to teach to "disadvantaged" children, I think she gives her motivations less credit than she should. Rich was fighting to provide an opportunity to learn and experience language in an environment where the only emotion given to students was skepticism. As she points out, these seemingly "ghetto" students would have been able to handle the demands of language and syntax because of their "growing capacity for political analysis" that showed them first-hand the urban blight of their communities; in a classroom setting, this kind of analysis is not granted to them so there is the feeling of powerlessness, yet when they channel that knowledge of their communities, that street knowledge, onto the academic page, they can become savvy rhetors. Adrienne Rich sums it up best: "they came to college with a greater insight into the actual workings of the city and of American racial oppression than most of their teachers or their elite contemporaries." This to me, seems so commonsensical and prompts me to ask "Why don't we find a way to harness that capability, or at least acknowledge students that they are more than capable of becoming capable citizens?" These students know the economic and political realities that we only theorize about in our Adult Education class. Our literacy narratives, I think, ultimately fall short in encapsulating these lives. I don't want to generalize and say all students are like this but we at least have to admit that students are more than capable of this.

Response to "Braiding and Rhetorical Power Players: Transforming Academic Writing through Rhetorical Dialectic

"What message are we sending, to students, to ourselves, and to the broader public, when we police linguistic legitimacy? Nobody comes out of her mama's womb hedging claims and citing precedents. It is trained into us. However, there is a pedagogical futility here. When an overly narrow academic discourse is prescribed, we end up creating parrots who excel in replication, not agents who can enter in, own, and alter the discourse at hand, academic and otherwise (69.)"

I think the above quote sums up the article quite nicely. It also captures the rhetorical strategy that Gunter employs to really bring together this idea of "braiding." Indeed, she uses it in her article and that is one of the elements that really was great to experience. I think she is really intent on giving students power and autonomy and that point really is expressed eloquently. I also appreciated the way that she informed me of the rivalry between the two modes of communication espoused by these two seemingly very different scholars. It piqued my curiosity because Gunter was able to draw upon the research that these two scholars made in a concise and succinct manner without dumbing down their arguments.

While reading the article, I was also able to make connections with another book that I had read for a book report: Basic Writing as a Political Act. I think the author of this article shares the same belief that the "personal is damn sure academic as well." The authors of Basic Writing...Act essentially say that students should be validated for expressing themselves on paper and that it should not be viewed as simply a stepping stone for more "serious" and "academic" types of writing hence the emphasis on the scrutiny of a syllabus and the ways in which these syllabi try to balance and maintain equilibrium between the right of expression and self-validation of students and the bureaucracies of the institution. Gunter also takes issue with this when she asks, "Is the value of personal writing only that it facilitates more proficient use of academic writing? Clearly, it is no. A personal paper written by a students should have the same kind of intellectual heft that an objective academic paper has.

Response to "Composition 2.0: Toward a Multilingual and Multimodal Framework

I can definitely agree for the need to redefine writing for the 21st century. Putting literacy in the global perspective where multilingual writers interact with each other creating a new hybrid style of writing, one that embraces diversity, is a welcome sentiment in the classroom. I feel like students would benefit from this kind of composition that is multi-modal and utilizes the multi-lingual skills of students who bring with them new ways of looking at the world and offer new paradigms for teachers so that they can create adaptable lesson plans. The article itself was very wordy and heavy on jargon, so I felt a little lost trying to keep up with the intellectual discussion that the author is so well versed in. But I like the idea of "code mashing" and think it is a provocative way to engage in a world that is so hyper connected and so readily switching from different forms of communication and social networking mediums like Facebook, Twitter and so on.

The use of an Israeli start-up company was useful because it gave me a good visualization of these different practices and terms that the author uses in a more straightforward way. I can understand the need for start-up companies that are young and more fluid in the discourse and rhetoric of our digitally adept generation. Multi-modal composing seems like a pretty conducive approach for these young start-up tech companies.

While reading this, I was reminded of a friend that lived in South Korea who did part-time work translating animation storyboards for a very well known animated T.V. show, "Family Guy." The animation companies that produce these shows are actually pretty fascinating to observe and is quite germane to the topic that this article addresses. Oftentimes, these companies have a team of animators, storyboard artists, translators and assistants that work in different countries, mostly in Asia where the animation is usually done, and they have to work with and facilitate in two or more languages communicating with each other and making sure the animated show gets produced. This is a very complex process and it was interesting watching my friend translate storyboards in English into Korean so that the Korean animators would be able to work on the storyboards further and finally finish a sketch so that it could get inked and colored. Remembering this exchange of information take place resonated with this article. I feel like this will be the future of many kinds of jobs: multilingual environments.

Links to resources for basic writing teachers and professionals in the field

 Some links to websites that offer insightful articles and scholarly work in the field of education and basic writing


www.edutopia.org

http://www.cael.org/home

http://www.voiceofliteracy.org

 http://daln.osu.edu/ Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives

http://www.tycanortheast.org/

Final reflections on ENGL B8104

I think one of the biggest strengths of this class is that it provides a broad historical and social perspective that really puts the basic writing institution in a more clear light. I felt confident enough to understand what the policy makers would do and how they would justify certain actions taken that affected higher education institutions. I think it's great to be able to get information from that vantage point and talk about these different statistics and percentages in the classroom. It's easy to get lost in the quagmire of data about adult education institutions, and I am impressed by the people that handle that data.

My conception of who a basic writer is and how a basic writer is defined has not changed. It remains a very complex picture with students coming from all walks of life. It was an illuminating experience having Reggie Blackwell speak in our class. He had an incredible story and it's important to acknowledge the power that education can have to move people closer to their dreams. However, I think it's also important to not treat Reggie's story as exemplary of every basic writing student. It's also important to acknowledge what Reggie said when he states "It wasn't a lack of education but a lack of formal education" that stopped him. That statement stuck with me and I don't ever want to underestimate my students or walk into a classroom feeling like they are already ill-equipped to handle academic work.

One of the most rewarding aspects of this semester was revisiting my experience in South Korea through a literacy narrative assignment. My literacy narrative was a challenging experience for me. At first I was intent on doing an interview with my mother about her reading and writing experience. I thought it would be easy to do, frankly, because I had heard her tell her story many times; in many ways, it was ingrained in my being. In other words, the story was told to me that I felt it was part of a larger mythology that didn't seem to have a point in time but was timeless. So for these reasons, I thought the interview would be easy to translate onto paper. What I discovered when doing it was how time-consuming the process was. It was also difficult because I felt there was no story to tell really. My mother's answers were brief and I had to keep asking her to expand upon her answers more...The result of this however was a positive one. I switched to the literacy narrative instead and because of my conversation with Barbara before I did the draft, I was able to come up with a narrative that was suitable for the assignment and that was also creatively very stimulating for me. Talking about my story really helped me develop and latch onto the literacy narrative that I could write. I also felt confident that I could write an adequate literacy narrative because Barbara was there listening and guiding me with her questions.

Speaking and telling your story can be an extremely helpful way for students to articulate their literacy narratives in the same way that I had done. The power of oral storytelling is very important and I feel like there is less of that in our day and age where communication tends to favor brevity. If I were a teacher, I would employ this more often because I think it's such an effective tool to engage students with. It allows students to revisit past events and reflect on them in such a way that it creates a meaningful cornerstone from which to draw further experiences from. Combined with a long-term focus and adequate scaffolding, literacy narratives can be a powerful way for students to understand the connection between writing and experience. But this experience can only be understood if one knows that it was important; it seems self-evident but that is not always the case.

I was able to draw on my experiences as an ESL teacher in South Korea and connect it to bodies of knowledge that I was learning from at the time. Had I not talked about my experience teaching ESL in the context of literacy and transformative learning, I don't think I would've been able to understand how important those 3 years of my life were.

I think this was the most important thing take-away from this semester. Looking forward to another semester at City College!

Basic Writing as a Political Act Book review

Review: Basic Writing as a Political Act. Hampton Press, 2002. New Jersey. Print

            Basic Writing as a Political Act by Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington focuses on the bigger issues of basic writing. Specifically, it shows how literacy practices are not neutral in the classroom setting, and argues that in order to make basic writing a “political act” one has to understand the ideological forces at play perpetuating views of literacy that are stripped of social context. The authors of the book challenge the place of autonomous literacy in the classroom and champion social literacy practices that incorporate a student’s social context into the academic setting. One of the strongest analyses of the book is that it provides a new paradigm on how to see basic writing as a truly political act.  

            Making basic writing political may seem synonymous with grassroots activism, and with the recent noteworthy attempts of people like Elizabeth Warren who has railed against the corporate takeover of higher education, educators may mistakenly see this book as a kind of blueprint for political activism. However, the book stays clear with engaging in any kind of heated debate of that nature and instead focuses on what teachers can do in the classroom, and more importantly how students in the basic writing community can incorporate their literacy practices into the classroom and make it valued, steering it away from the practices of autonomous literacy with its emphasis on quantifiable date and aggregate skill building.

            The authors argue that the autonomous model of literacy emphasizes skills-based learning and de-emphasizes the context of how that learning takes place; it doesn’t allow basic writing students to ask questions about how they became “basic writing” students and what led them there to begin with. This fundamental challenge is what gives Basic Writing as a Political Act its whole purpose. However, there is a spectrum of thoughts and ideas that animate the conversation about basic writing. Educators like Ira Shor argued that basic writing classrooms are suspect to begin with, and that any meaningful change cannot be reached in the classroom unless the basic writing institution is itself abolished.

            Kassner and Harrington first lay out their argument and contrast it with the position of Ira Shor. They do not want to abolish basic writing because they agree that in doing so the inherent framing of basic writing students as problems will not be addressed. The framing of how basic writing students are defined is what drives the crux of this book and Kassner and Harrington look at the models that institutions use to effectively transition basic writing students into the mainstream.

            The question of mainstreaming students, the authors assert, is actually laden with assumptions about what students can and cannot do. In its systemic critique, the question is placed front and center and made point blank: what are the forces that mainstream basic writing students, and how do those powers affect what is being taught in the classroom? To more narrowly understand and exploit these issues, there are key features of a basic writing classroom that the authors look at. One involves the students’ literacy practices, their actual voices that educators must work to use authentically in the classroom, and the other is the syllabus used in the classroom.

            The authors interviewed 38 students about their literacy contexts outside of school; the main concerns of the authors was to try to understand how basic writers thought of themselves in terms of writing. It was revealed that they actually cared deeply about their writing and used it to connect meaningful events in their lives. However, if students shared a common concept of being a writer as developing ideas from mind to paper, their conceptions of writing well, or school writing differed dramatically.

            For the students, learning to write well was associated with purely discrete components of writing such as grammar, sentence structure, syntax, subject-object agreement and spelling. This focus on the discrete components of writing, the authors argue, ends up alienating the students from the classroom. This model of learning is not a new revelation, and authors such as Mike Rose in his work Back to School, paint a picture of the writing correction guidelines established by early 20^th century educators that treated common writing errors more as symptoms of some overall deficiency, hence the character of “remedial education” became synonymous with treating writing difficulties that students had with that of mental deficiency.

            In order to counteract this, the authors argue that professors have a lot of leeway when it comes to controlling the tone of a basic writing class through how they choose to highlight students’ skills.  Although there is an acknowledgment that instructors of basic writing courses try to implement creative ways that allow students to express themselves and show themselves capable of connecting their literacies to the classroom, there is still a constraint placed upon academic institutions that limit the potential of students. This constraint places students’ skills as simply a means to an end: the end result is writing an academic paper successfully, but this doesn’t value their literacies for what they are. In order to rectify this, the authors suggest incorporating a more social-oriented model of literacy into the syllabus.

            The authors posit that syllabi are important markers in determining the way that basic writing is conceived. A syllabus is a document that is written in the moment and that can shape students’ literacy practices.  These practices are established within the students’ social contexts, but if a syllabus simply treats skill building as a way to transition into the academic world without explaining the context to students then it perpetuates an autonomous form of literacy.

            Indeed, skills that we deem useful in the academic world are explicitly laid out in the syllabi and therefore the authors argue, our syllabi is a public document that sets the cornerstone of what kind of classroom we want to teach, including how we would like to frame the issue of basic writing, and whether or not those students that we teach to are allowed to validate their own experiences without feeling like their literacy practices are simply meant to be transferred to an academic setting.

            That academic setting in principle, the authors argue, excludes basic writers. What the authors recommend is that the syllabus reflect a core principal that basic writers need in order to frame basic writing as a political act. In order to do this then there has to be an emphasis on making students be responsible for their writing so that they understand that literacy practices are meaningful in a social setting where everyone is contributing. The questions that must be asked when creating a syllabus are to ask self-consciously, “What does it mean to be a basic writer at this local institution at this time?”

            While the battlefield where political writing is fought takes place center-stage on the national level, the authors understand that in order to make basic writing a political act one has to understand what the forces are at the local levels that converge to create basic writing programs in each state. To understand what these forces are means to acknowledge the historical factors that have created “basic writing” and it gives students autonomy and understanding of their place in the institution.

            It is fraught with ideas of what basic writing is and what steps should be taken to fix a system that is seemingly perpetually broken. The question remains though about how students can talk about basic writing as a political act without somehow regarding the broader institutional forces that give funding, take funding away and generally set the tone of how these adult education centers are framed. On this count, the authors make a very cogent point about the implicit judgment that newspapers and media sources carry when they talk about community colleges and the “school-success narrative.”

            This narrative basically champions the basic writing student that often comes from a poor economic background. This success narrative is used as a way to reinforce the value of education as a means to access traditional middle-class standing. Students in basic writing classes are seen as falling from the traditional path of education but are on their way to trying to make it again. In this narrative, middle class values are valued and the objectives of literacy as a means to achieve success is faithfully left untouched. It validates the importance of education in attaining middle-class status without questioning the forces that made the conditions that basic writing students have to live with.

            The challenge of educators is to now try to make basic writing a political act but the book’s solutions leave something to be desired. How do we face the institutional forces that dictate how much money basic writing students should get? The book raises more questions than answers and perhaps it wasn’t the authors’ intentions to create a blueprint for any kind of structural change. Normally, one would think of grassroots activism led by students as being political, but the authors don’t raise that possibility or perhaps see that kind of activism as premature without asking about the political potentials of a classroom.

            I believe that this book is a good way for teachers to measure something that can be quite divisive and rancorous. We as educators obviously want to help our basic writing students move freely into the academic writing community. At the same time, we don’t intend on alienating them from their literacy practices at home that are varied, complex and give so much self-understanding to these students. This is the heart of the dilemma that we as educators face today.

Reflections on writing the literacy narrative

                                                My literacy narrative reflection      

            Writing this literacy narrative made me reflect on my experiential learning in South Korea and how important it was to my development as not only a teacher but as a person as well. Teaching requires a lot of maintenance, hard work and dedication. My first year as an ESL teacher was a defining moment for me. Even though I didn’t have any of the tools and expertise to fully immerse myself in my job, I was given an extraordinary chance to witness a culture that was very different from mine. It wasn’t just South Korean culture that was new to me. The entire practice of hiring native English speakers as English instructors was a very peculiar phenomenon in South Korea. I didn’t make the connection at first, but I realized that learning English for South Koreans was pushed so aggressively that it alienated many of my students.

            From this experience I became aware of the political context that students learn under. Obviously this not only applies to an ESL classroom but to every classroom. At any given moment there are institutional forces that shape what you do and don’t do in the classroom. This is why it is so important to understand the context of the students that you teach. Questions like “what are the economic or political forces that shape how English is learned?” and “what kind of English learning is being valued more?” are important questions that only now come to mind.

            I realized that teaching English in South Korea was not a neutral act. I also realized that teaching there implicated me in that system.

This wasn’t made apparent right away and only through uncovering the layers of experience that I felt there made me more aware of it. Perhaps I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Jung who was a central part of my literacy narrative. I can honestly say that without him I wouldn’t have made the same kind of assessment of South Korea’s education politics.

            Mr. Jung was very aware of what was going on around him and he was curious to know more about Western culture and values. It was truly a pleasure to talk to him and exchange information about our lives. I don’t think I would’ve known so much about the history of South Korea if it weren’t for him. From him, I was also keenly aware of the value placed on English education in the country because he was so wholly against it.

            Mr. Jung believed there needs to be mutual respect and understanding between people if any kind of learning will ever happen. I extend this further; through my learning and understanding of basic writing contexts, I realize that a learning environment that doesn’t take into account students experiences and values is doomed to fail. Hopefully, as a teacher I can remember this important caveat and not walk into a basic writing classroom filled with doubt and mistrust.