Week 6: Culture and Pedagogical Assimilation

Culture is : “a set of rules and patterns shared by a given community” (Connor 101)

"with regard to culture, whereas the genre approach and critical literacy view it as a site of struggle implicated in relations of power, traditional contrastive rhetoric assumes the existence of a set of fixed cultural conventions as the norm that is preferred in specific settings yet that differs from culture to culture" 

(Kubota Lehner 15) 

Before I get into the meat of what might end up sounding like a more critical post than I mean it to be, I want to first say that I really enjoyed the Kubota and Lehner article—I think that it did a great job of highlighting a very long list of major concerns about the ideological implications of contrastive rhetoric and the effects of contrastive rhetoric on students in ESL classrooms. Kubota and Lehner productively incorporate poststructuralist, postcolonialist, and postmodern approaches to the major issues in their field. And, in no short degree, their pedagogy is more ethical, more responsible, more caring. I applaud them for this outcome.

However, they argue at the end of their article that they want to install “counter-assimilationist practices within and across classrooms” (22). Perhaps this sounds lovely on the surface, but it makes me concerned.

On some level isn’t any approach taken by an instructor assimilationist to at least some degree? What I mean is, let’s say we are prescribing to the “culture” as multiple, converging, in flux model.  Through our pedagogical practices, our in-class exercises, our assignments, we are always going to be working to in some way to influence our students to that same thinking.

Despite what the authors promise about CCR, I don’t think that ascribing to poststructuralist, postcolonialist, and postmodern notions magically gets teachers out of assimilationist practices, nor does it take away their agency in the classroom. CCR influences students to see cultures and personal identities as shifting and multiple, it highlights the “othering” tendencies of the American classroom on non-American students and cultures, it illustrates unfair power dynamics in relation to language.  I see these as good things, but I’m not willing to pretend that this is not enculturation of a different kind.