Week 15: Balancing Ethical and Institutional Imperatives

How do writing instructors deal on one hand with an institutional imperative that calls for them to make students ready to write in the rest of the university, and on the other hand with a personal, ethical imperative that says that molding students’ language use can be harmful to the students’ well-being? 

That is the million dollar question that in one way or another most composition articles dealing with language diversity work to address. Of course, it is not an easy question (if it was, it would have been answered in the 70s or 80s or 90s). However, as Lovejoy notes in her article, it remains a vital question because as teachers we must “think about what we communicate to students about language use through our teaching and curricula” (90). We must be self-reflexive.

The ways in which Lovejoy and Delpit try to escape the double-imperative bind is, I think, quite similar.  For Lovejoy, the answer hinges on the difference between language appropriateness and language correctness (100).  She says in her conclusion:  “I want my students to learn to make thoughtful decisions in their writing, decisions that are based on purpose and audience and context.  I want them to see how some pieces can be written appropriately in the students’ own language while other pieces are more appropriate in EAE” (106). She also encourages students to use their own languages in drafts of more academic assignments (104).  Lovejoy believes that as long as students can see the different kinds of audiences and contexts, and that they can see that their home languages are appropriate in certain situations, that she is both holding up her ethical and institutional imperatives. 

Delpit first focuses in her article on the importance of “access,” which is part of the institutional imperative that asks writing teachers to help students get ready to gain access to the world of the academy and eventually to the world of professional workers. She notes that while having access to the standard doesn’t necessarily guarantee success, “not having access will almost certainly guarantee failure” (94).  She also illustrates her attention to the ethical imperative, pointing out how important it is to not call students’ home languages wrong:  “the linguistic form a student brings to school is intimately connected with loved ones, community, and personal identity.  To suggest that this form is wrong or, even worse, ignorant, is to suggest that something is wrong with the students and his or her family” (95).  Similar to what we saw in Lovejoy’s article, she too finds her way out of the bind through a focus on context, and situational writing.  She says that a focus on the importance of context in the classroom will show that “certain contexts suggest particular kinds of linguistic performances” (95).

While I think both Delpit and Lovejoy are well-meaning in their attempts to leave behind the double bind of conflicting imperatives, I don’t believe that either succeeds in their efforts. 

I wonder if it really means anything different than “incorrect” when students are told that while they can draft in their home languages, they must adapt to more Standard English patterns that are “more appropriate” for academic contexts when they complete their final drafts? 

How does it feel to be told that your home language is not “appropriate” for serious, university writing or final drafts? Is this not also harmful to your group and individual identity?

The Johns’s article asks that teachers be explicit about their grading criteria and by what they mean by critical thinking.  She calls for “transparency” (141) and wants teachers to interrogate their own assumptions and practices.  I would argue that it is just as important to be explicit about the games that we ask students to play. It is not that “their” languages are any less “appropriate” inherently for any writing situation, or that as a result of being without them they have no chance at “access,” they cannot function in society and are doomed to failure.  

Instead, I would focus on being transparent about the racism inherent in these policies and expectations. I say, show them that it is an unfair game. Don’t cover the injustice with a nice layer of “context-is-key” frosting.    

Week 14: Language as Access: Fiction?

My blog post this week is focused on the issue of language as access and power. 

It was clear throughout Way with Words that students, parents, as well as teachers believed that helping students acquire the standard dialect required for most school settings would amount to power, to the potential for higher paying jobs, and to a general moving up in life that many of them wanted for themselves, their children, or their students.  In talking about the parents’ hope for their children’s education, Heath writes,

“Intuitively, they [Roadville and Trackton children] and their parents feel language is power, and though they may not articulate precisely their reasons for needing to learn to read, write, and speak in the ways the school teaches, they believe that such learning has something to do with moving them up and out of Trackton and Roadville” (265).  

In other words, citizens believed that using “town language” would give students access to “town things”—better jobs, better education, easier lives.  While this belief doesn’t encourage the residents to help their children with their homework, and they see language as primarily a thing that school should teach their children, there might still be some value in this interest.  Certainly this feeling makes those in the Roadville households read books to their children to prep them for school.  Health herself seems to at least implicitly agree with their understanding of the importance of proficiency in the standard for the students’ futures—after all, to a degree, this has spurred her research, though her understanding of the issues associated with language and language change are of course much more complex.    

However, some of the more recent studies that we have read (I’m thinking specifically Pennycook here) seem to indicate that the need for acquiring a “standard dialect” in order to prosper in the future is a fallacy.  That really, if it most important to concern ourselves with the languages that our students do have, that they are already proficient in.  These scholars bring up the ethical implications of teaching students that their “home dialects” are for home (and therefore not good enough for “outside” the home).  They ask questions about what it means for students and their identity formations when they are told that the languages that they are most comfortable with are best left to creative assignments and rough drafts—not to final academic work. 

I guess I am left wondering if it is still worthwhile to speak of language as access—langauge as a mode of gaining power? If not, what motivates students to learn a standard dialect? This question remains important because most institutions and programs that we might teach in in the future are going to insist that we teach the standard and that we ask our students to use a standard dialect in their academic writing.  So how do we convince students to do this? I wonder if any of the teachers in Heath’s study, or their ethnographic methods, might be of some use here? 

Week 13: Ways With Words, Objectivity, and Embodiment

I had really mixed feelings this week reading the first half of Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways With Words. 

I know from what others have said that it is often called a “classic” in child development, ethnography, and literacy studies.  And, I was really impressed with the wide scope of the study of both “Trackton” and “Roadville” communities over such a long (10 year!) period. Her general argument, that home life and upbringing greatly effect how we come to see the world, participate in it, and perform later in life seem to me to be vital contributions to various fields.

I also couldn’t help but see some of my own background occasionally in the Roadville community. I belong to the second generation removed from the northern, Midwest equivalent of the mills—factories. Both my grandfathers were Midwest factory workers (machinists) who barely finished high school; one of my grandmother’s dropped out to have my mother at sixteen and never finished.  My mother only finished high school.  That is a long way of saying that from a personal standpoint, I’m often nodding in agreement with her.

However, from a more academic perspective, I struggled with this text on several levels.  

 First, I would have liked to see more evidence of the empirical data that she collects throughout her ethnography.  At various points, she stops and provides charts (ie topics of hand-clapping songs, uses of reading, uses of writing).  It is at these points that her qualitative analysis seems strongest, seems most viable to me. 

Perhaps this lack of quantitative data is acceptable because of the scope and breath of her study? Or, perhaps it is a convention of the linguistics/literacy discourse in which I am not a member? From the outside however, this feels so qualitative at times that I have a hard time seeing its relevance to anything larger.  It seems to be one outsider’s (no matter her background) perspective on the goings on of two communities.  Interesting, but not particularly objective, not particularly focused.

Secondly, while she tries to claim that she is unbiased/objective and goes so far as to say that she will not bring in anything into the environment which was not already commonly found in the communities to begin with (8), she does invariably introduce one major anomaly:  herself.  I don’t see how she can account for the influence that her embodied presence has on the environment that she is working to study, and, being around for almost ten years would surely have had an impact.  Let me give one short example to better illustrate my point. 

In chapter 3, Heath recounts the fact that Trackton adults typically never use baby talk when they speak to their infants (95).  However, Health and her children could not help but use such talk when they interacted with the Trackton babies:  “My children and I often slipped into baby talk with infants and young children in Trackton, and the adults made fun of us for doing so” (95).  This then exposes the babies in the community over the period of her study to the kind of baby talk that she argues Trackton children aren’t exposed to otherwise.  Further, while she notes that the adults in the community laugh at Heath and her children (more embodied presences!) for their antics, they are still noticing that the academic Health and her middle or upper-middle class children perform this baby talk.  Over time, this could influence the values of the community in terms of “best practice” with infants.

I look forward to finishing this text for next week. Perhaps the end will offer more of what I feel is missing/concerning in the first half.                   

Week 12: "Why Not Just Write Fiction" Or The Tension Between Objective Truth and Situated Knowledges in Ethnography Studies

In her landmark article “Situated Knowledges” published first in Feminist Studies in 1988, Donna Haraway outlines the issue facing those feminist scientists that had interrogated the great and powerful scientific pillar of patriarchy called “OBJECTIVITY” and found it wanting.  She narrates the difficult work of “what next” that some feminist social constructivists went through after this radical deconstruction work was completed (as Haraway says “too easily”).  They questioned how to, or in fact why to, perform scientific experiments then if any Objective Truth (with capitals) was simply a “god-trick.”  What’s the point—they asked—if there is no foundational “Truth,” if all truths are relative? 

Haraway’s masterful response (which I will only touch on here) was that all knowledge is situated—inescapably situated, and that taking pains to interrogate the situated-ness of ourselves and our knowledges helped us out of that seemingly unending bind. 

Apparently, however, this bind is still strikingly alive and painful in ethnography studies.   

The issues in current ethnography studies, as outlined by both Martyn Hammersley in “Ethnography: problems and prospects” and by Steven Z. Athanases and Shirley Brice Heath in “Ethnography in the Study of Teaching and Learning of English” might be best read diffractively, with Haraway’s article in mind.  Both articles, written in “the Age of the Postmodern selves” seem at times at peace, and at times utterly uncomfortable with the idea of letting go of some objective/unbiased “Truth” as the objective of scientific study.  

For example, Athanases and Health admit that analysis is shaped by the reviewer:  “Different slices of the data, viewed through different analytic lenses, might yield quite varied portraits of cultural patterns” (276).  And yet, a single page later, the authors are illustrating that being better ethnographers (conducting larger studies with larger bodies of data) allowed the reviewer to make selections from that data that were accurate representations, that “made judgments of typicality and anomaly possible” (277).  In doing so, they forget that in making a judgment one is always inserting ones own subjectivities (e.g. one always has a conception of what might be normal/typical vs. anomalous). And yet, they admit further that “Ethnographic reporting is the construction of a reality, made possible by the researcher’s essential instrument, the self,” which is “a perpetual frame” (278). 

The conflict is better seen however in Hammersley’s work.  This is best illustrated in his conversation about “context” as either “discovered” or “constructed” (6-7).  After outlining various (important questions) that one must ask to interrogate any traditional sense of objective discovery of context, he paints a bleak relativist portrait of the only other option that he sees besides these difficult to answer questions: 

“A rather different point of view is that the choice of context by ethnographers is necessarily arbitrary, in the sense that a host of different stories could be told about any situation, each one placing it in a different temporal and spatial context.  From this perspective, ethnography is simply one means among others for telling stories about the social world, stories that need not be seen as competitive in epistemic terms.  Of course, given this orientation, there would be a puzzle as to why anyone would go to the trouble of engaging in ethnographic fieldwork.  Why not just write fiction in the manner of novelists and short story writers?” (7-8).  

(I’m going to set aside the somewhat nasty dismissal of “fiction writing” as a less than worthwhile enterprise.) I do though want to interrogate Hammersley in regards to this “dilemma” that he is setting up.  In this section, he calls back to traditional science—he asks what are we doing here if we are not finding out the Truths of things—what are we doing here if knowledge is really partial, situated.  What’s the point.  This, to me, is a really uncomfortable moment in Hammersley’s prose.  He ends the section following the quote above.  It seems that he doesn’t in fact have an answer that is satisfying. 

Some at least implicit residue of Hammersley’s traditionalist viewpoint can be also easily picked up on in his last major section, “Ethnography as Political.”  In it he argues that “the ethnographer must neither be in the service of some political establishment or profession nor an organic intellectual seeking to further the interests of marginalized, exploited, or dominated groups.  Both of these orientations greatly increase the danger of systematic bias” (11).  It is frankly hard not to laugh here.  Ethnographers should try to not have any political opinions or beliefs? It is a joke to believe that we can ever escape the ideological state apparatuses, the systems in which we function and simultaneously and often unknowingly replicate. I think deep down he knows this (some of the great questions that he asks elsewhere in his article would point to this), but he just can’t let go.     

Hammersley notes at the end of his article that “the very character of ethnography has come to be contested” (11).  It is threatened. The ideological underpinnings of what it means to “study” have been reveled.

What I would argue is that this is not a bad thing.  That those in ethnography perhaps need to just learn to be okay with partiality, with the idea that the apparatuses conducting any particular experiment are always going to control the results—always going to make the results. Those of us in the Humanities can do much to let them know that it’s going to be alright. 

That, as Haraway recently explained, “No longer able to sustain the fictions of being either subjects or object, all the partners in the potent conversations that constitute nature must find a new ground for making meanings together” (“Otherworldly Conversations” 158).