Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College Classrooms and Communities

Juan C. Guerra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317935650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College Classrooms and Communities examines what takes place in writing classrooms beyond academic analytical and argumentative writing to include forms that engage students in navigating the civic, political, social and cultural spheres they inhabit. It presents a conceptual framework for imagining how writing instructors can institute campus-wide initiatives, such as Writing Across Communities, that attempt to connect the classroom and the campus to the students' various communities of belonging, especially students who have been historically underserved.

This framework reflects an emerging perspective—writing across difference—that challenges the argument that the best writing instructors can do is develop the skills and knowledge students need to make a successful transition from their home discourses to academic discourses. Instead, the value inherent in the full repertoire of linguistic, cultural and semiotic resources students use in their varied communities of belonging needs to be acknowledged and students need to be encouraged to call on these to the fullest extent possible in the course of learning what they are being taught in the writing classroom. Pedagogically, this book provides educators with the rhetorical, discursive and literacy tools needed to implement this approach.

1
Fixity and Fluidity

The year is 1961. I am lying alone in a bed that I typically share with two younger siblings early on a Sunday morning reading a book I checked out from my elementary school library. I am engaged in the new—for me—social practice of reading, a habit I developed a couple of years earlier that compels me to immerse myself in fictional worlds created by various authors to escape the social, cultural and political constraints that conspire to keep me fixed, tied to a particular chronotope where “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh” and “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84). If, at that moment, we could have zoomed up into the sky from the bedroom and looked down as we are now able to do using the perspective Google Maps provides, we would have located that bedroom in one of 34 buildings laid out in a neat barracks-like matrix that together made (and still make) up Los Vecinos,¹ the housing project where my eight siblings and I grew up. Except for an Appalachian family that lived in the building immediately behind ours, every family living in the 29 four- and six-unit apartment buildings was Mexican or Mexican American. The families living in the 5 two-unit apartment buildings carefully segregated from our own were African American. We all knew our place so well at the time that in all my years living there I never once befriended an African American child, nor one of them me, even though I walked past their homes every day on my way to an overwhelmingly Mexican public elementary school that we did not share with them, located immediately south of the housing project.

If we were to zoom farther out, we would notice that Los Vecinos is located in Harlingen, a small rural town in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas methodically divided in half by railroad tracks that run through its middle. Like me, everyone (or so it seemed at the time) who lived west of those tracks in the housing project or in one of the small, generally well-kept, but sometimes dilapidated working-class homes on the west side of town was of Mexican origin. Los bolillos—as housing project residents disparagingly referred to white people in our town when they felt the need to put them in their place—lived east of the railroad tracks in their comfortable middle-class homes with modestly manicured lawns. I am certain—although I do not remember being aware of it at the age of 11—that there must have been a few middle-class families of Mexican origin living on the east side among the Anglos. West side residents referred to them as los vendidos, a stinging rebuke used by adults in el barrio to describe those they saw as having turned their backs on our shared language, culture and way of life. Although I encountered both groups—bolillos and vendidos—on a regular basis in the public junior high and high schools I attended later, like everyone else in town, I pretty much hung out with my own kind. It was comfortable, and it felt like home. But it was also the only thing we were permitted to do. We had no other choice.

If we zoomed just a bit farther out, we would see precisely demarcated agricultural plots of land spreading out in all directions from my hometown on which an array of crops were and are still cultivated. Scattered among them you would see the cotton and tomato fields where many of us in Los Vecinos—those of us who did not head north late in the spring as part of the annual stream of migrant farmworkers—labored to help our families make ends meet, earning 3 to 6 dollars (depending on how much we were able to pick) for a 12-to-14-hour day of grueling work in the stifling heat and humidity of a south Texas summer. In many cases, it was a life made even more difficult by a condition too many of us had to deal with at home: alcoholism in the midst of poverty and all that it entails.

Because of our current fascination in composition and literacy studies with the role that fluidity plays in our day-to-day lives, we sometimes forget that the rigid, stratified existence I just described is not a thing of the past, something experienced only by those of us old enough to have lived in a pre-civil rights era when every social, cultural, educational and political institution in this country conspired to keep us segregated from one another on the basis of our language, culture, identity and citizenship status. At the same time that it acknowledges and provides a sense of the possibilities available to our students in a volatile world where difference has replaced sameness and is now the new norm (Lu & Horner, 2013), this book makes every effort to remind us that fixity continues to be an inescapable element of our lives. But the book also fiercely argues that we, as educators in composition and literacy studies, must delve into the intricacies of what it means to live in social spaces² where nothing—not our languages, cultures, identities, or citizenship status—ever stands still despite the best efforts of institutional and ideological forces operating to hold us all—especially the disenfranchised among us—in rigidly defined and stratified categories. In so doing, I call on my own lived experience, first because the theoretical arguments I plan to make will become too ethereal if they are not grounded in blood, flesh and bone, but also because anyone who is going to ask students to use their lived experience³ to write themselves into being in college classrooms and other communities of belonging⁴ must be willing to do the same.

A Deleuzian Dreamscape of Desire

Wherever we turn nowadays, we are practically overwhelmed by a Deleuzian dreamscape of desire informed by a rhizomatic interpretation of reality full of centers, but no beginnings or endings (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In ways that we may not have realized before, a Deleuzian orientation has infected our thinking in the field of composition and literacy studies and in an array of related disciplines. As a consequence, we are repeatedly reminded that everything around us in the physical, social, linguistic, cultural, political and virtual spaces we inhabit is in continuous motion despite the best efforts of conservative elements in our society to stop everything in its tracks, to contain the irreverent nature of life out of a deep-felt sense that centrifugal forces are tearing apart centripetal systems (Bakhtin, 1981) that have seemingly been in place forever. Motion and its cousin mobility (Urry, 2005, 2007) have always been terrifying, but in an era of unprecedented change reflected in transnational travel, multimedia overload and global marketplaces that influence our lifestyle choices and our work-related options, space and time seem to be picking up more speed with the announcement of each new technological innovation (Fairclough, 1999, p. 75). As a result, many among us often feel as if we are at the precipice, teetering on the edge of oblivion, lost in the muck of a new kind of space and time that more than ever refuses to stand still. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words,

We live today in an age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to turn up so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull grey outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off the edges. We believe in totalities that are peripheral.

1983, p. 42

As researchers, theorists and educators in composition and literacy studies, we are obligated to develop and provide our students with the strategic and tactical tools they need to navigate and negotiate the unprecedented levels of change they encounter in their lives as readers, writers and rhetoricians in college classrooms and other communities of belonging. It is also our responsibility to continuously remind them that they need to work on acquiring a “full quiver of semiotic modes,” a rich repertoire of linguistic and cultural practices they can call on whenever they need to address the “wickedly complex communicative tasks” that we all face in an increasingly “challenging and difficult world” (Selfe, 2009, p. 645). In our collective effort to identify the various elements that inform the use of these modes and practices, we must work together with our students to help them develop the linguistic, cultural and semiotic tools they will need to employ to be more dexterous and agile, if only because every social space in which they will be putting these tools to use will be in a state of flux. It should come as no surprise that, through that lens, everything will seem as if it has become unhinged, and the center—the one thing everyone was counting on—has not held.

In more ways than ever, many of us are wildly romanticizing, even fetishizing, fluidity to counter the fixity that standardization has imposed on us (Lorimer Leonard, 2013) in much the same way that proponents of the New Literacy Studies fetishized the local over the global a few years back. At least until Brandt and Clinton (2002) pointed out that focusing exclusively on the local created methodological biases and conceptual impasses “by exaggerating the power of local contexts to define the meaning and forms that literacy takes and by under-theorizing the potentials of the technology of literacy” (p. 337). As was true back then, a question that immediately comes to mind is whether we have let the pendulum swing too far in a single direction and are finding ourselves unfairly criticizing valid representations of the challenging circumstances we all face instead of recognizing the degrees of difference that should inform any position we take. In working to become more precise in our description of what the world looks like now, we must be careful not to void historically important voices that have contributed to our understanding of the multiple forces that impinge on our curricular and pedagogical practices. The fact that they did not get everything right does not diminish the measure of their contributions to our understanding of how language and culture play themselves out in our lives as we perform our multiple identities in practice (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain, 1998; Caraballo, 2011) in the process of becoming citizens in the making.

Take Leander and Boldt’s critique of the New London Group’s “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” (1996), an essay they describe as a “disciplined rationalization of youth engagement in literacies” (2012, p. 22). They meticulously dismantle the basic arguments that the New London Group’s groundbreaking essay introduced to the field of composition and literacy studies and whose effects continue to reverberate 20 years after its publication. In their analysis, they contend that the “vision of practice” promulgated by the essay involves “a domestication that subtracts movement, indeterminacy, and emergent potential” from the picture (p. 23). To the field’s general detriment, they contend, the identities and futures that the New London Group (NLG) proposed “were understood as essentially the same as texts, all susceptible to being designed and redesigned as projects under the rational control of students and teachers” (p. 24). There is more than a hint of judgment here; there is also a purposeful reduction in the vitality that the NLG essay provided theorists, researchers and educators interested in understanding the role of reading, writing and rhetoric in the lives of students caught in the web of the social and cultural changes taking place at the time. Although there is certainly some truth in their critique—the NLG did indulge in the idea that text, reason and control would be our saving grace—I interpret Leander and Boldt’s reading of the NLG’s efforts to expand and smooth out grammars in the service of comprehending “the plurality of texts that circulate” in “increasingly globalized societies” (New London Group, 1996, p. 61; cited in Leander & Boldt, 2012, p. 24) as a purposefully designed effort to elevate the alternative model they offer above the NLG’s.

In expanding and improving on the NLG’s analytical frame of reference, Leander and Boldt (2012) call on the work of Massumi (2002), as well as Deleuze and Guattari (1987; see also Deleuze, 1994), to challenge what they see as the “overcoding structures” of “representationalism” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12; cited in Leander & Boldt, 2012, p. 25) inherent in the NLG project. To counter what they see as the NLG’s relentless preoccupation with mechanical and static conceptions of text production, Leander and Bolt (2012) focus on the outside-the-classroom experiences of Lee, a 10-year-old boy who has been labeled a failing reader in school but has been described as an enthusiastic reader at home (p. 42). To test their alternative hypothesis, they follow Lee over the course of a day as he engages in reading and playing with text from manga, a Japanese comic book art form (p. 22). In the course of following him through his day, they focus their attention on Lee’s profound immersion in a variety of social practices, including reading and writing, that are created and fed “by an ongoing series of affective intensities that are different from what the [NLG] describe[s] as the rational control of meanings and forms” (p. 26). In an effort to get away from what Lankshear and Knobel (2006) call “text-centricity” or “bookspace” (p. 52), Leander and Boldt (2012) conceive of Lee-as-body rather than Lee-as-text (p. 29), a critical strategy that in their minds produces more authentic data.

By locating Lee in an assemblage, a collection of things that are present in any given context and “have no necessary relation to one another” yet come together to produce “any number of possible effects” (p. 25), Leander and Boldt (2012) discover that what emerges is “the production of desire in which Lee does not aim to produce texts but to use them, to move with and through them, in the production of intensity” (p. 26). What they conclude from this “act of experimentation” (p. 25) is that the kind of activity Lee engages in “is saturated with affect and emotion; it creates and is fed by an ongoing series of affective intensities that are different from the [NLG’s] rational control of meanings and forms” (p. 26). As difficult as it would be to transfer this kind of experience to the classroom, a c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Fixity and Fluidity
• PART I Building Theory through Lived Experience
• PART II Putting Theory into Play
• Index