Dialoguing across Cultures, Identities, and Learning

Crosscurrents and Complexities in Literacy Classrooms

Bob Fecho, Jennifer Clifton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317331605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Drawing on Dialogical Self Theory, this book presents a new framework for social and cultural identity construction in the literacy classroom, offering possibilities for how teachers might adjust their pedagogy to better support the range of cultural stances present in all classrooms.

In the complex multicultural/multiethnic/multilingual contexts of learning in and out of school spaces today, students and teachers are constantly dialoguing across cultures, both internally and externally, and these cultures are in dialogue with each other. The authors unpack some of the complexity of culture and identity, what people do with culture and identity, and how people navigate multiple cultures and identities. Readers are invited to re-examine how they view different cultures and the roles these play in their lives, and to dialogue with the authors about cultures, learning, literacy, identity, and agency.

1
Cultures and the Dialogical Self

“Well, it’s all a bit complicated.”

Bob was sitting in a coffee shop with a colleague—we’ll call her Connie—trying to convince her to co-facilitate a summer writing institute with him. Connie continued, “I really want to do the institute—I mean, it’s a great opportunity—but we’re a one-car family and I live on the eastside. If I drive to the institute, I basically confine my husband and son to the house all day, or I’ll have to get them up way early and make them drive me and pick me up later, which doesn’t seem fair.”

Connie took a breath, “Plus I’m working on a book project with this great co-author I met online—we finish each other’s sentences—and I need to carve out time to work on that.” She paused and stared out the window, as if imagining other possibilities. “But it’s been so long since I wrote poetry and the institute would let me feed that side of myself.”

In looking back at this conversation, we believe Connie’s situation is a vivid illustration of how the various I-positions that contribute to our ongoing identity construction engage in dialogue that is simultaneously internal and external. We have been tossing this term I-positions around but want to begin unpacking our orientation to its meaning here, an orientation we will continue to deepen and nuance throughout the book.

According to Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010), “collective voices speak through the mouth of the individual person” (p. 6). In a given moment, individuals echo, construct, and transform the many cultures they carry with them in that interaction, speaking with one voice and yet shaping and being shaped by many. In this way, all of us on this planet participate in and come in contact with a range of cultures throughout our daily experience. The various positions we construct in relation to those cultures reside and continue to fluctuate within each of us.

As multicultural beings living in multicultural contexts, our cultural dialogues are not just external or just internal and external, but internally external and externally internal. Put another and less paradoxical way, as cultures outside you engage in dialogue and cultures within you engage in dialogue, those cultures within us and outside us engage in dialogue in a blurred space, sometimes more external and other times more internal. As Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010) phrase it, “the other is not outside the self, but rather an intrinsic part of it” (p. 7).

Returning to Connie, one stance she takes is that of a literacy educator who would enjoy working with teachers in an intensive 18-day summer institute devoted to writing and writing instruction. Then there’s Connie the mother and Connie the wife, neither of whom wants to put husband and son to too much inconvenience. Her husband and son are not only outside her self and part of her external life but also deeply internalized within Connie’s imagination as part of who she is. Another I-position—Connie as co-author—feels responsible to honor a commitment to collaborate on a project with someone whose work and ways of working resonate with hers. Yet that more academic voice is tempered by Connie the poet who would enjoy having the broad expanse of the summer institute to indulge herself in the insightful verse she writes so well.

There are less obvious, but equally compelling dialogues occurring here concurrently. How Connie views herself as an independent woman who is self-employed and primary income producer for her family teeters against patriarchal vestiges of what constitutes good mothering and female spousal support. Perhaps beliefs about productivity—the 60-hour work ethic so prominent in the US—voice concerns about her wanting to indulge in an art form. She considers herself someone who is a good collaborator and sensitive to the needs of others—husband, son, co-author—but also wants to, perhaps even needs to develop an emotional, aesthetic facet in her life. And these are only the dialogues that became most evident in the short discussion about the teaching gig. Who knows what other I-positions may have entered the internal discussion, but never made it to the external dialogue.

Sketching the Dialogue of Cultures

We can say that people live in a clash of cultures. Or we could say people live in a mesh of cultures. Others might call it a hybridity of cultures. Still others, a dovetailing of cultures, or a crush of cultures, or a diversity of cultures. In this book, we suggest that all of us exist and constantly transact in a dialogue of cultures.

To start, what do we mean when we type the word dialogue? Although both of us have read extensively in and believe passionately about the liberatory literacy work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970), we are not referencing his vision of dialogue, at least not as key and center to our discussions in this text. Freirean dialogue occurs only under certain conditions and at the volition of those involved in the dialogical situation. Conditions must be met, among them being that those who oppress and those who are oppressed need to help each other create new ways of transacting, to not merely trade places.

Instead, much of our conception of dialogue springs from the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. To embrace Bakhtinian (1981, 1986) dialogical theory is to embrace the inevitability of tension being present in our lives. He argued that language is continuously beset by centripetal tensions—unifying, but eventually reifying—and centrifugal tensions—individualizing, but eventually disuniting. As the prior sentence implies, we need language to be both unified and individual. It’s not a question of one force or the other; rather, the tensions should create a humming, mutually energizing buzz that is only possible where more than one force is present and in productive, dynamic resistance with the others.

Being too skewed toward either uniformity or individualism is problematic; Instead, relatively equal forces pushing and tugging at each other can give direction, and redirection, to shared meanings needed to create a healthy language, society, or personality. In the rough ground and the taut pull of dynamic tensions, we seek—at least to an extent and perhaps temporarily—common agreement, or equilibrium, in our shared meanings so that communication can be facilitated. Yet we simultaneously imbue words with our own meanings—ones both nuanced and widely variant—pushing and pulling even upon those shared meanings as they, too, shift in response to the context in which meaning is being made.

As Bakhtin (1981) noted, language is something that is given to us—it comes with the touch of others—but, in our giving it back, we color it, shade it, shape it, spin it in ways that leave our fingerprints on it. Take a simple and common word like pitch and run it through its range of meanings: a tar-like substance, a thrown ball, a cricket field, a slope, a proposal, a measure of tone, a degree of alignment, a level of intensity. As a verb, we pitch a tent, a fit, a baseball, an idea, or an attack. As any word—in this case, pitch—undergoes centripetal and centrifugal tensions, its uses and meanings shift, with new meanings coming to play and other meanings losing sway, but not completely disappearing.

Furthermore, all these meanings are subject to context. We only understand pitch as a thrown ball if the context—perhaps a major league baseball game—suggests that meaning. The combination of the word and the context tug those in conversation toward a unified meaning. However, if one of those in conversation at the ballpark is an Australian and referred to the playing area as a pitch, much as he would a cricket field, his American baseball buddies might, at least at first, be confused. The Australian would have made an analogy based more on his individual experience—and on common experiences familiar to others in places of British influence—than an understanding common to this context. At that point, either he would have to explain his analogy or his listeners would have to bring in wider experience and context to compensate for the centrifugal tension.

Not only is meaning made in context, it is made through response. As we are writing this, we are responding to each other and Bakhtin overtly, even as we respond to other experiences more tacitly (Polanyi, 2009). As you are reading, you are responding as well—perhaps nodding in agreement, rolling your eyes, highlighting in turquoise, or wishing we’d get on with it already. Nevertheless, you are responding and, through your response, meaning—tentative, fragile, exploratory, formative—is being made. Bakhtin (1981) argued that you can’t help but respond, that people are always responding. At least to us, the implication of that constant response is that people remain, to some extent and purpose, in dialogue.

If such is the case, then all of us and the cultures we construct remain constantly in dialogue. Note that we didn’t write “perfect dialogue” or “complete dialogue.” Not all dialogue, perhaps not most dialogue, feels as dialogical as we would have it be, if we interpret dialogue as recognizing a range of perspectives, and proceeding toward mutually satisfying and forward looking, but not necessarily consensual or even arrived at ends. Meaning may be made that runs counter to our existing beliefs, may cause those belief systems to wobble or even shatter into shards that cannot not be reassembled, at least not as they were. Yet, even as a series of utterances skews more toward the monological end of the continuum, there remain traces of dialogue within.

It is from this dialogical stance that we argue that people in their lived experiences transact in an ongoing dialogue of cultures. This is a conception we will continue to expand and deepen as we wend our way through this and other chapters. As we discuss the plurality of cultures, we will also explore the idea that, to an extent, people have options regarding their cultural alignments, even those like gender and race that, to many people, might not seem to offer options. It is clear, then, that we are considering what is entailed in understanding cultures and selves as in flux and in dialogue. We are also testing the limits of romantic versions of self and cultures that prize essentialism and are testing the limits of nihilistic versions of self that see plurality as chaotic, fractured, and pointless.

In considering the plurality of cultures, we continue to unpack the idea of a multivoiced, dialogical self and consider the many ways we dialogue with cultures internally and externally. We begin by exploring ideas about positioning presented by Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking. We then use numerous examples to illustrate the complexity of dialoguing across multiple external and internal cultural positions in order to raise this complexity to the surface. Realizing that such a discussion can also raise feelings of apprehension and uncertainty, we next focus on the importance of dialoguing through these concerns. Our intent across the chapter is to create some interesting places to name and think about what we do with uncertainty and difference and how, through dialogue, we can gain direction in an increasingly pluralistic and connected, but complex world. Finally, as we will throughout the book, we prompt imaginings about the ways such ideas transact with the ways you continue to learn, live, and evolve.

Constructing a Self

Connie’s brief transaction reveals a dialogue within a multivoiced self and points to a dialogue among individuals, groups, institutions, and cultures. In an instance like that, when a person acts and interacts in a particular context, that person is recognized— by the self and by others—as acting and interacting as a certain “kind of person” (Hacking, 2007, p. 285) or even, as is illustrated in Connie’s case, several different “kinds” at once. In that same Bahktinian way that we create shared meanings of a given word—meanings that are at once unified and, therefore, recognizable, and also variant—we also construct shared meanings of particular ways of being in the world, ways of being certain “kinds” of people (Hacking, 2007, p. 285).

Interactions and Transactions

In this sidebar, we unpack our differences around interactions and transactions. We hope that making visible our dialogue about these differences also reveals and operationalizes a theory of language underneath a commitment to dialogical selves. As you saw in the first sidebar, using the same word—the same set of alphabetic symbols on a page, the same set of audible sounds—does not guarantee shared meaning or experience. And yet, we must use symbols with each other to make sense of the world and to take action together. This is both beautiful and, at times, vexing, in part because the ways we understand, experience, value, and operationalize the same symbols—like working theory, democracy, home, immigrant, police, interaction—also creates a middling ground. However, when we act on the ideas, experiences, and perspectives—the realities and worlds—that arrive through language, we sometimes act in ways that treat our realities as the Reality—as something fixed, apparent, and universal. That is, as something that either is shared or should be shared.

But this view of language effectively shuts down dialogue within the self and with others; instead, this view of language either seeks to make what is obvious clear to others who should already see what is obvious, or it seeks to bring around those whose views and values are somehow inferior. In this book, we hope to rival this view of language and instead to show language to be semiotic, contextual, in flux; in these sidebars, we also hope to show that seeing language this way has profound implications for selves in dialogue and in flux and especially for possible stances toward the multiple worlds and selves created through discourse.

Framing the Dialogue (Bob)

So many of these discussions came about as we both were scouring through incomplete drafts searching on our end for a way to pick up the thread of the writing. This dialogue is no different as it begins with me writing a margin comment after wondering if I should keep changing all of Jen’s interacts to transacts.

Bob: Would prefer just using transacts à la Rosenblatt rather than interacts, which for me is too two-dimensional.

Jen: Oh, interesting. I have a hard time with transacts, but I come to Rosenblatt later than you do. My guess is you’ve internalized a sense of that word more than I have. In fact, until you tell me, it doesn’t even occur to me to use transacts. I also think I feel like transacts is implied in interacts. I do think this is where our tensions emerge – your lean toward dialogism and my lean toward pragmatism, even though we each value both. To me, interacts feels more internal, external, situated, inventive, and rhetorical …

Bob: OK, so maybe we need one of your beloved (smile) footnotes or maybe we create sidebars in this text where we unpack & share these discussions. We will have to, ultimately, go with one term or the other, but sharing our dialogue on that discussion might be interesting.

Jen: Actually, I like the idea of a sidebar as a convention to demonstrate dialogue with each other and with the text as we’re constructing it …

Bob’s Take

As I’ve thought about Jen’s stance on these terms, I’ve become less insistent on a need to use one term or the other, especially knowing that Rosenblatt’s use of the term transaction is less recognized by the public at large. Most people tend to equate the term transaction, not with mutual shaping and complexity of response, but with an exchange of money for goods or services. So, unless invoking a direct connection to the work of Rosenblatt, using either interaction or transaction may not matter to many readers.

In truth, however, I’ve so trained myself to separate the two terms that it’s very hard for me to use interaction except in the most predictable circumstances. A good friend of mine, Jenny Oliver, who unfortunately died two years ago, used to say in her distinctly southern way, “Bob Fecho, you’re about to remind us that we’re transacting, aren’t you?” At this point, I’m so hardwired to transact that if you see interaction anywhere in this text, it’s a safe assumption Jen wrote it.

Jen’s Take

As I’ve come to see the ways that Bob cares about Rosenblatt’s concept of transaction, I’ve tried to use it in places where I might otherwise use interaction. I also went back to Rosenblatt’s text to see which scholars she was drawing on, and I’ve begun reading John Dewey and Arthur Bentley’s book, The Knowing and the Known—the scholarship that largely informed her work on transactions.

As a rhetorician and a pragmatist, there are concepts and values that I try to hold for in writing this book with Bob. There is a lot of thinking between Bob and me that resonates, but occasionally we diverge, and when something in the text causes me to pause, I try to listen for what values are underneath what Bob is articulating and what histories inform his stance. I ask myself, “What’s he up to right here?” and with particular regard to ways our thinking diverges, “What’s the difference that makes a difference here?” In this case, our dialogue about transactions and interactions raised more questions and also reconnected me to John Dewey, a pragmatist. So, I find myself wanting to listen in on the dialogue among Dewey, Bentley, and Rosenblatt for the light that dialogue will shine on my next steps.

And perhaps as a side note to the sidebar, even these moves to be in dialogue with Bob in this way are born out of dialogue, an inquiry stance, and a practice of descriptive review that I learned through another text I often use with young people and with teachers: “Starting with what is: Exploring response and responsibility to student writing through collaborative inquiry” (Simon, 2013).

Being recognized as a certain “kind of person” in a given context is connected to identity, something we’ll discuss more in Chapter 4, and connected to cultures and the ways we come to share recognitions, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Cultures and the Dialogical Self
• 2 Learning, Cultures, and the Dialogical Self
• 3 Literacies, Learning, Cultures, and the Dialogical Self
• 4 Identities, Literacies, Learning, Cultures, and the Dialogical Self
• 5 Agency, Identities, Literacies, Learning, Cultures, and the Dialogical Self
• About the Authors
• Index