In “Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading and Material Racism,” Barbara Schneider starts out by first relating an experience she had teaching a summer composition class to a group of underprepared, inner-city, new college students. Immediately, she noticed that the students segregated themselves into groups with which they most identified.
The topic for discussion was racism and segregation. Schneider produced two essays, bell hooks’s “Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education,” in which she describes her experience moving from one community to another vastly different one. Schneider also chose for discussion Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average,” in which he describes his experience with vocational school.
Schneider then asked that her students write a literacy narrative, chronicling their own journeys. What they produced were shallow texts in which they tried to form and even force connections with hooks.
This led Schneider to realize that in order for our teaching to be transformational, we need to consider changing our instructional model. We need to teach students rhetorical listening. For that to happen, she proposes that students are asked to answer questions about texts that force them to be analytical.
This model for instruction is appropriate for not only race discussions but for all and any controversial topic. The types of questions that Schneider proposes instructors ask of their students put students in the place of the essayists (or even characters in a story). These questions also encourage students to understand the institutional forces against the essayist or character thereby understanding his or her (essayist or character) struggles. And if the essayist or character represents an idea contrary to the beliefs of the students, such as a student last semester that came to the learning center where I work distraught because she did not want to do an assignment on a book relating to homosexuality (Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin) because this topic goes against her beliefs, having students put themselves in different contexts and questioning how we as a society come to believe what we believe can potential foster change in the minds of students. This is what transformational learning is.
Though I am for this approach, I do not believe taking any one instructional perspective will eradicate bigotry in the hearts and minds of all students, particularly after one semester. There are those students who are adamant and set in their beliefs and would rebel against being asked to question them, such as the anti-homosexual student in the learning center. What this approach can accomplish is it can cause students (those willing to actually complete the assignment) to face their own prejudices and this might eventually lead to change. This perspective is like planting seeds.
As for Joseph Harris’s “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing,” I like that he talks about theories that challenge the idea of community in the classrooms, theories that suggest that writing communities can cause students to suppress their individualities for politeness sake.
He also argues that how we write is a result of the community or communities to which we belong. In other words, our identities are linked to our communities and against that we cannot write.
When students enter college, they are then in a new community and they have to now understand their identities in this new communities.
Students often struggle with writing because they are expected to perform in a set way (meaning write according to certain standards) and they have not yet had the time to understand the community that is college and who they are within it.
I struggled with this article, not because it was difficult but because time forced me to rush through it. I am not sure if my understanding of it is correct so please, help me understand.
ReplyDeleteThomas Peele INSTRUCTOR MANAGER
Hi Rhode-Elise,
You do a good job of capturing Schnieder’s point, but I’m curious to know what you think about rhetorical listening. She writes that it begins with “an attitude of receptiveness and humility, a listening while our own wants, needs, and egos are held at bay so that we may receive both the gifts and challenges others’ texts offer us” (927). That seems like a lot to ask of students—the anti-gay student in your learning center, for example. I do think there’s some room for asking students to set aside, for a moment, their own ideas so that they can at least finish the task at hand (reading a book, in her case), but I wouldn’t go so far as to request receptiveness and humility. How would it be measured?
As for Harris, he argues against the idea of entering into a community. Instead, he suggests that “it might be more useful (and accurate) to view our task as adding to our complicating their uses of language” and not that “students should . . . be working towards the mastery of some particular, well-defined sort of discourse” (754). He’s arguing against both Bruffee and Bartholomae.
Raquel Coy
What this approach can accomplish is it can cause students (those willing to actually complete the assignment) to face their own prejudices and this might eventually lead to change. This perspective is like planting seeds.
Well said, Rhode-Ellis, I agree with the idea of providing students with little nudges that they can choose to follow or not. Yes, it runs the risk of having some persist in believing in ideologies, but I would rather not indoctrinate students either.