writingatthecrossroads

[writingatthecrossroads]

A year ago today I finally finished writing my dissertation, edits and all. Looking back all I can feel is pure joy for staying the course and getting my Ph. D!!!!!!!!!

WHEN YOU REALIZE THAT YOU NEVER HAVE TO WORK ON YOUR DISS AGAIN:

#agooddissertationisafinisheddissertation

[writingatthecrossroads]

Should Educators Expect Real Voices from their Students?

Student’s rights, teachers expectations, and vocalizations.

I have written this entire dissertation under idea that there is really no such thing as student voice.  The Student is a role an individual plays.  It is not a permanent role or even a semi-permanent role a person plays, like playing the role of a mother, brother, husband, friend, employee or daughter are.  It is a role that is bound by time and, in our current social context, enforced by institutions that a large number of individuals do not trust.  When individuals come in contact with a role, that role can be played cagily, or with sincerity, depending on what the individual determines will be the most appropriate for the situation.  Much like a performer in a Greek drama, the individual wears the role like a mask.  The mask itself does not have a voice.  The individual speaks through the mask.  And although the performance calls for preset lines (which is a restriction in autonomy), the voice that comes through the mask is still the voice of the individual.  It was my goal in this dissertation was to examine how individuals coped with saying their lines through the mask, not focusing on the mask itself.  

When thinking about how individuals use their voices in the academic context I believe it’s time we  as educators ask ourselves if we have the right to expect or even desire students project their authentic voices in their work. There are  psycho-social and emotional ramifications  to the voice. The voice isn’t closest to the brain.  It is nestled in a cradle north  of the heart making it the heart’s highest communicator.  When we ask diverse students for their true voice, we are asking them to speak from the heart.  

While that request sounds wonderful in a touchy-feely way, it is ultimately a dangerous request.  When educators ask diverse students to use their authentic voice we are asking a vulnerable population of students to be even more vulnerable in an institution that does not value, and sometimes punishes, vulnerability.    Moreover, we live in a society where duplicity is often rewarded and vocalizing one's truth can have serious long term repercussions on one’s career and social standing.   

As a result of these truths, I don’t believe educators have the right to expect students of any background to project their diamond voices in their writing. It’s not really our place to ask students to put themselves on the line, especially if they secretly harbor ideas that could be seen as radical or repugnant. Desiring to hear the voices of individuals in the student role can also backfire on a teacher, causing a contentious atmosphere between students and educators when students vocalize ideas that the teachers perceived to be offensive.  A prime example of this is backlash the Sacramento Area Youth speaks program got from Caucasian teachers when educators felt students’ poems were anti-white (Watson, 2012).  Thus delving into the realm of the voice can be a minefield for everyone who is involved.  

While I wrote this draft, more than once other researchers  asked me, “If students are using so many voices, how can they know which one really represents them?” When analyzing that question, I feel the same could be asked of seasoned scholars, teachers and administrators.  In our own careers as educators and scholars we frequently use languages and voices that are not our own to navigate our journeys through academia. How do we know which voice really represents the core of who we are? With that question in mind, when we know we play different roles to make it in this society, why do we ask for, hope for, and sometimes, expect and grade students on using their real voices in their work when we don’t do that same thing all of the time in our own work? How can we demand students to be brave in a space that sometimes intimidates us into silence?   Are we talking to ourselves when we ask students for their real voices?  Are we giving out the advice we give ourselves but somehow can’t act on?  Before we can ask the adults who come to us as students to project their real voices, we need to the more difficult work of modeling that behavior by practicing what we preach in our work.

These questions make it clear before we can ask individuals in the student role to project their real voices, we need to examine our own motives for that request to ensure the projection of voice is for students’ benefit in and outside of the classroom. Self-reflection can lead to some hard truths about what our real voices would say if vocalized out loud. Maybe the truth is we are working on a campus initiative that needs more brown people to give the appearance of a more diverse campus.  We might find that we have been intellectually “slumming it”  by asking students from backgrounds that are different from ours to share their real voices so we can peer into their lives and exoticize them. And  maybe we are just feeding our teacher-savior complexes. We have to do that difficult, complicated inner work and know who we are inside so when students are going through their inner work process in preparation to project their voices, we can relate to them as human beings who struggle with the same issues under the same institutional pressures. 

All cynicism aside, I think the majority of educators who aspire to hear their students’ voices do have loftier aspirations.  Those educators, like myself, see the projection of authentic voice in the classroom as practice for projecting truth in our larger tumultuous society. Speaking up and speaking out against our systematically oppressive monoculture is extraordinarily important, especially now with the resurgence of bigotry and violence as a result of the recent presidential election.  Xenophobic and homophobic groups will use all types of rhetoric at their disposal, like denying racism exists, online trolling, hate speech and fake news, to denigrate diverse people and to excuse violent behavior against diverse individuals. Diverse students will need more experience than ever to face down these volatile factions of the American populace.   When educators work with diverse students to voluntarily cultivate their voices as a means to empower individuals talk back to oppression and the status quo, that is when the real work of voice can begin to take place.  

[writingatthecrossroads]

Strategies for Supporting Diverse Writers in Diverse Contexts

Conclusion part 2

Strategy 1 : Build Trust Through Positionality and Allyship

Before any teaching can begin, it is crucial to lay the foundation for instruction by positioning oneself as an ally to diverse students.   It is important to position oneself as an ally to diverse students in order for those students to sense they can trust the educator with their more radical ideas.  Allyship does not mean an individual agrees with everything the student says or that the individual is a radical social activist.  It is more of an indication of a willingness to listen to diverse people while refraining from judgment. Allyship also indicates an individual is willing offer support and advice to help further the student’s goals. 

Indicating allyship can be a difficult process, especially for Caucasian allies. On the surface, indicating one is an ally might seem as simple as posting ally signs for different groups, like undocumented immigrants or LGBTQ students, or wearing a safety pin to indicate diverse students are safe in the presence of the individual wearing the pin.  The problem is in the current global climate of rising xenophobia, it is hard for diverse students to believe these indications of allyship are nothing more than public displays of the shallowest form of acceptance.  Most students begin to recognize faculty members as allies only after a consistent record of supporting diverse students through concrete actions.  That action does not need to be drastic. To become an ally, start with actions that are in your comfort zone.   Those actions could be as simple as establishing contact with diverse student groups you’d like to work with, talking to diverse students about issues that are impacting them to get their perspective, regularly attending talks that feature issues that are important to diverse students, offering to mentor diverse students, speaking against school policies that could hurt diverse students or pushing to make the faculty in one’s department more diverse.   In the classroom, allyship could take shape by inviting diverse speakers to give talks or presenting texts with a range of perspectives from diverse authors. 

No matter what actions an instructor decides to take, in my opinion, the most successful actions have compassion, humility and mutual human respect at the core of them.   The most successful allies I have observed never tout their role as an ally, especially since using the term “ally” as a badge of honor can come across as using diverse student issues to boost one’s career.  Usually students come to know professors are allies through word of mouth from other students who trust the professor. Thus, making respectful connections with students during actions of allyship is critical. 

Strategy 2: Create Safe Spaces for Discussion

There are a number of ways educators can designate their classroom or office as a safe discussion space. For example, at the beginning of a class, an instructor can designate their class as a safe space by indicating that designation in the syllabus.  Within the syllabus, the instructor can outline their ground rules for the safe space and ask students to provide input on those ground rules so each safe space classroom is unique to the students who are present. Here are three sample ground rules I present to students when establishing a safe space:

When discussing a topic, each person may speak for a maximum of 1 minute.

If an individual has already spoken on one topic, they must remain quiet until every student who wants to speak on the topic has the opportunity to say their piece. 

Derogatory, disrespectful comments towards individuals are not allowed.  If criticizing an idea, focus on presenting concrete reasons as to why that idea is problematic using constructive language. 

The professor can also verbalize the intent to make the class a safe space at the beginning of the class and ask students to democratically create ground rules for the space. No matter which way the educator decides to enter into the conversation of creating a safe space, student co-creation of that space is critical to the development and maintenance of safety in the space.   Student input on how to conduct a safe space is critical because when students are given the opportunity to co-create their learning environment they get to become comfortable with exercising their real voice in that professor’s presence and they get the opportunity to take ownership of what happens in the class.   

Once ground rules for the space are determined, it is the responsibility of the professor to ensure all students and the professor adhere to the rules throughout the semester or school year. In the safe space, the instructor may find themselves taking on more of a discussion facilitator role, unless the instructor turns that role over to a student and quietly observes the conversation.  As a discussion facilitator, it is critical the educator does not steer the conversation to a topic or ideological conclusion they prefer. Also it is important for educator/facilitators to model safe, neutral language that would further the conversation so students can learn how to replicate that language.  

When creating a safe space, expect heavy emotions and hard confrontations to arise. Despite the fact that safe spaces have been described as cushy, touchy-feely spaces for diverse students in popular rhetoric, in reality they are anything but. When students talk about different topics, especially political, economic or race based issues, they will get into heated debates. During those debates it is important not to marginalize unpopular student perspectives as they may have grains of wisdom embedded within them. While it may be difficult to hear some of the more controversial student ideas, it is still important to hear those ideas out if they are presented appropriately.  Hearing out unpopular student ideas give the students who air them the satisfaction of knowing they will be heard even if they disagree with the majority of the group. Also, hearing out students with unpopular ideas offers other students the opportunity to practice offering rebuttals to controversial notions. The trick to maintaining safe spaces during difficult conversations is ensuring students don’t simply use the discussion to complain about issues that bother them.  It is important the facilitator (whether it is the instructor or a designated student) pushes the group to discuss possible solutions to the issues so students feel empowered to take actions they deem appropriate once they leave the space. 

Finally, in the space it is important not to give too much attention to students who may be trolling other students in the space. Revisiting the ground rules may help curtail trolling.  If the ground rules don’t stop trolls it may be necessary ask the student point blank during the discussion if they are trolling the space or to call out their behavior.  Asking students to examine their own rhetoric and behavior is vital to maintaining the space because it gives them the opportunity to be self reflective about whether their ideas are furthering the conversation and leading to solutions or simply feeding their egos.       

Strategy 3: Invitations and Conversations  

While positioning oneself as an ally, it is important to connect with students through meaningful discussions.  Those discussions can take place during the classes or one on one during office hours.  Initiating conversations during classes may be less challenging than initiating one on one conversations. As instructors we are used to leading discussions by offering up topics, conundrums and questions for discussion.  Inviting one on one conversations may be more challenging.   To engage in one on one conversations, it is advisable to let the student initiate the conversation.  It might seem counter-intuitive to wait for students to initiate a difficult conversation, especially if the professor has already intuited discussing that topic with the student was already on the horizon. In order to get students comfortable with the idea of approaching a professor with a difficult conversation, that professor needs to signal they are available to be a sounding board, even for thorny topics. Signalling can be done through an announcement at the beginning of a course or a casual mention during a conversation are good ways to tell students you are available to talk about complicated issues. During those casual mentions, if the students seem interested, tell a story of how you listened to a student (anonymize your story) and what that student’s outcome was to demonstrate you have experience in listening to diverse students.  

One of the best ways to indicate a willingness to discuss complicated topics in relation to the field is presenting alternative pedagogies and theoretical approaches in the classroom. Again, presenting those approaches does not have to indicate agreement with those positions.  It does indicate, however, the professor is in conversation with those approaches. Presenting a range of theoretical approaches gives students academic options they can use to broach complicated topics. I have found this approach works for students who want to talk about topics that hit close to home but who want to maintain a high level of privacy. 

Strategy 4: Model Codeswitching

Before skill transfer through codeswitching can happen, language, whether discipline specific or culture based, must be translated. Up until this point, there has been an unspoken assumption that diverse students can intuitively learn how to codeswitch as long as they have the vocabulary in each register to describe something. ��Elizabeth’s example demonstrates we cannot assume students will automatically be able to translate language if they have the vocabulary to describe something.  To help students who face issues with codeswitching, educators need to conscientiously supply vernacular approximations of our discipline specific language.  Once we have given students an example of a vernacular definition of discipline specific words, it is important to model codeswitching between the vernacular and the discipline specific language.  Providing vocabulary and demonstrating how to use those terms helps students learn how to connect what they are learning to the language they already possess.  Modeling codeswitching and practicing it with students during discussions teaches students how to adeptly communicate within the discipline and how to communicate what they have learned with audiences outside of the field. 

Strategy 5: Use Trans-textualism  for Genre Transfer

As mentioned earlier, the teaching methods I employed while working with students were trans-textual writing pedagogies. I have had teachers ask me,  “What does that mean on the ground?”  What that means to me is explicitly describing the components of writing that transfer between genres and which rhetorical components each genre shares with other genres. While we are aware as compositionists that making all of nuances of genres is almost impossible, from the teaching experiences I describe here I have learned it is possible to describe those nuances to the best of our abilities. For example, to help some students transition from writing literary styled pieces to more scientific work, we discussed the parallel behaviors writers employ in both poetry and scientific work, namely observation and recording what is observed. Then we would discuss how those characteristics manifest differently in those two genres- in poetry the observer uses literary devices to convey an image of what has happened, the scientist records bare bone facts to convey what has occurred. Breaking down genres in this way helped students see how the writing and study skills they used in one genre could be used on another if those skills were manifested in rhetoric that was appropriate to the genre.

Moreover, using Freire’s dialogic approach and the Socratic method opens up space for students to articulate their subconscious understandings of genre to during classroom discussions. Each individual comes to the classroom with subconscious understanding of genre based on their encounters of genre in everyday life. Having students discuss the components of a genre without initial input from an instructor opens up space for instructors to ask students how they came to learn those components, if they recognize those components in other genres, how components change from genre to genre and it gives students the opportunity to practice creating transferable components and behaviors in their own writing.  

Strategy 6: Make Instruction and Expectations Explicit

There is a lot of debate among compositionists as to how much instruction should be explicit in the writing classroom. I used explicit instruction in all of the previously described contexts.  I was explicit about what assignments were given, and my reasons for giving those assignments. While I was also explicit in my description of genres, I was also extremely clear about the fact that genres are ever changing and malleable in the hands of the writer, and I explicitly encouraged experimentation.  When students did experiment, I was explicit about the strategies students could go about to make their experiments successful written pieces.  For example, one student wanted to write a research paper about their performances and the feminist theories their performances were based on.   That student and I worked to make their research paper a genre hybrid that incorporated elements of a research literature review and an artist statement.  The key to making that hybrid paper successful was explicitly discussing the components of each genre and talking with the student about which components of the academic research paper and the artist statement overlapped with one another. Once we were able to determine points of overlap, the student worked within those points to create a draft.  That draft would have not been created if I had given vague directives to be “creative.” 

Explicitness also means not using code words or expecting students to ‘read between the lines” of what you are expressing during instruction.  For example, if you say, “be more scientific” when really you mean, “be less emotional,” you are conveying an imprecise and inauthentic message because science and emotion are not mutually exclusive.   If we want to encourage students to be their real selves in their rhetoric, we have to model that behavior with real, direct talk that does not sugar coat or dance around the message that is projected.   

Strategy 7: Maintain then Augment Student Digital Skills

As we saw with Jimmy Recino’s example, sometimes when the academy integrates digital technology with instruction, deskilling of students can occur. That deskilling can come about as a result of using paper based writing prompts for an online environment, rigid formatting requirements, antiquated digital platforms or not allowing students to experiment with their writing. When students are digitally deskilled in the academic environment, they may see little connection between the work that is done in school and the writing they do elsewhere because the online writing they are doing in school is artificial.  That artificiality stunts the transfer of rhetorical skills between contexts.

To maintain student skills, first pinpoint, acknowledge and integrate the skills students bring to the classroom into writing instruction.  Allow space for students to teach their classmates and you what they know about digital writing.  It is especially important for students to be able to demonstrate their skills because each student will have a different level of digital knowledge that others could learn from. Knowing  what skills each student brings to the table will also allow the instructor to take those skills into consideration when developing digital based assignments.  

To augment students’ digital skills experimentation, authentic audience and student ownership of projects is critical.    When instructors allow students to experiment with their messages with an authentic audience, students have a tendency to be more invested in an assignment because responses from online audiences are immediate.  Student experimentation could come about on a group level through creating digital assignments collaboratively in a democratic classroom  or individually when a student experiments with storytelling through memes.  

When students experiment, we have to give them the space to make mistakes, especially when using an authentic online audience.  Once in a while an instructor might be faced with a written piece that makes them think, “I can’t allow so-and-so to publish this!  They’ll get a bad reaction from their readers.” What we need to remember is the reader’s reaction is a critical part of the writing process.  A writer cannot figure out how to tailor their messages to their readers without having authentic responses they can use to inform their future writing, so making authentic mistakes is a learning process we have to allow our students to go through when they are making their work public. 

Strategy 8: Learn the Rules To Break Them 

I’ve seen moments on campus where like there’s a proclaimed openness for creativity, but when those moments come, it’s like no, bureaucratically we’re gonna do this way.

- Justin Phan

Often educators claim to want students to be creative with their work but, as Justin points, out often when it comes to making creativity happen, the status quo stands in the way.  Educators need to be crafty when finding new ways to integrate creativity while circumventing bureaucracy. To do this an educator needs to learn the rules in their institution that are related to student communication them devise work-arounds they and students can use to project creative messages.  

My favorite work around for projecting student voice is the disclaimer. Well written disclaimers are excellent tools for teachers who want to give students the space to vocalize their opinions on public platforms with authentic audiences.  For example, in order for KDVS DJs to have controversial talk shows, the studio had public affairs DJs read the station disclaimer that absolved the station and the school from being responsible for student views.   Using a disclaimer removes the need for an instructor to censor or even “subtly guide” the messages in their students’ work because the instructor has put the responsibility where it belongs- with the writer. Typically, when students are faced with taking responsibility for what they will publish in the public sphere, they will apply more care when creating a draft.

[writingatthecrossroads]

Voice 2.0: When Acquiescence Becomes Resistance

Conclusion Part 1

All of the students who have been showcased here agree they have used different voices, authentic and inauthentic to their true selves, to navigate the paths of their academic careers.  These students defined the differences between their “real” voices and their CZ voices in terms of whether they were speaking their own truths in light of their cultural paradigms as an act of resistance to monoculture or whether they acquiesced to institutional conventions and ideas in their rhetoric.  What is interesting about these findings is the fact that using standardized American English was not the defining factor for an inauthentic voice- the ideas behind what was articulated by students using standardized English was how students defined a voice as inauthentic. 

This finding builds on previous findings in composition literature about the projection of diverse student voices in that it demonstrates the current generation of students may not have the same anxieties or difficulties about acquiring academic English the previous generation of diverse scholars had.   For example, Mellix (1998) and Gilyard (1991) both struggled with the tensions between gaining skills in academic English while maintaining African American English as the main connection to their culture.  Rodriguez (1982) lamented the loss of his mother tongue, Spanish, and his cultural identity as a result of acquiring academic English.  All of these authors, like Villanueva when he suggests jaiberia, discuss voice was in terms of the degree or ways in which a diverse individual acquiesces and assimilates to the mono-culturally based institution through the use of a particular language or dialect. Othering was involved in the experiences of these authors; each one of these authors saw standardized English as the language of others, white Americans, not one of the dialects of their homeland.   

In the current generation, there is a shift in paradigm.  Like the previous generation, the current generation of diverse youth understands standardized English is the currency that will pay the tolls on their journey.  These youth recognize the populace they will encounter in urban, digital and global markets are extremely diverse, with languages and cultures as unique as their own.  Moreover, many of the people they encounter will speak some form of standardized English as well.  Like Lu’s daughter (1998) who moved seamlessly between the language of home and school, the current generation of students code-switch with ease to fit different contexts, with no inner turmoil about demonstrating alliances to specific cultures through speech acts.  This lack of turmoil may be because multiculturalism and multilinguism are valued more than they were when the previous generation scholars came into their own because of the changes that came about in response to civil rights activism.  As a result, the current generation does not feel pressured to relinquish their ethnic, gender or sexual identities.  Instead of feeling ashamed of not fitting the monocultural norm, these students cherish their unique backgrounds and work to respect the backgrounds of others.  

The current generation of diverse students seems to be moving towards a culture of hybridity that does not view standardized English as a language of a normalized other that, in turn, casts their language and ways of being as abnormal.  Instead, the youth view standard English as just another way to communicate their ideas.  Removing the pressure of conforming to white and often male based heteronormative identities frees up student energy to focus less on getting the mechanics of standardized English down pat to ensuring their messages are crafted well in standard English and any dialect or language they choose to use.  When those messages are crafted well they generally demonstrate students’ desires and demands for institutions to assimilate some of their culturally based ways of being and knowing on some level.  

Students’ push for hybridity in academia is a step further than what the previous generation of compositionists wrote about as they progressed on their journies as scholars. However, the current generation’s approach is reflective of the practices and examples put forth by “radical,” social justice activist scholars of the previous generation, like Gloria Anzaldua and Angela Davis. I put radical in quotes here because at the time these and other activist scholars’ ideas were put forth they were considered radical, but since then those ideas have been normalized. We in academia like to joke that no one reads our work but the reality is, at least among diverse students who are focused on social justice, the current generation is reading the literature and utilizing what they have learned from it in their day to day behaviors and in their scholarly research.    

This shift has occurred among youth due to the realization that surrendering to the institution or working within the bounds of it’s so called power, even on a small, subversive level, is a relinquishment of personal power. The fact of the matter is institutions need our acquiescence, our silence and our insincere messages to perpetuate its oppressive practices.  In changing our vocalized messages we have already surrendered to oppression. 

In addition to talking back to institutionalized oppression, the student work that comes about as a result of using “radical” discourse offers the possibility for student originality that goes far beyond what could be considered “abnormal discourse” (Bruffee, 1992). Bruffee argues “abnormal discourse sniffs out the stale unproductive knowledge and challenges its authority (p.31)” by undermining our reliance on “normal discourse” or what I call “institutionally derived” discourse because to call such discourse normal makes all other discourses pathological. When students merge their academic acumen with novel ideas that stem from their unique backgrounds, original, progressive knowledge is created. Because of the synergistic relationship between academic investigations and unique paradigms,  students may project messages that go against everything we’ve learned to be “truth” during our own journeys of institutionalized education.  In the following sections, I will overview all the strategies described in this dissertation that came about as a result of the research I did so more teachers can welcome voices of resistance into their teaching practices.

[writingatthecrossroads]

Diverse Voices in The Disciplines

Part 2: Justin Phan Challenges the Academic Status Quo through Alternative Ethnic and Gender Rhetoric

(Photo source: UC Riverside Ethnic Studies Department)  

Justin Phan exudes a grounded seriousness that draws a teacher in whether they are in front of the class or meeting with him one on one.  The attention in Justin’s eyes never wavers, even when talking about topics most students perceive as boring. When teaching, I always felt certain Justin was working to absorb as much of the information that was being co-created during the learning process in each moment during class.  That said, I deeply respected Justin because he is not the type of student to take the information that is presented at face value. Justin always critically analyzes the rhetoric around whatever is being discussed so he can have the ability to critically respond to the mindsets and concepts that underlie that rhetoric with his own ideas. Justin’s willingness to articulate his findings on the eurocentric rhetoric that surrounds diverse peoples, gender, and the concept of race gives Justin a number of opportunities to practice translating his culturally based ideas into academic rhetoric through codeswitching in safe spaces.  

As the son of Vietnamese immigrants, Justin seeks to understand how the confluence of militarism and post-colonialism impact gender, race and nationalism in the Vietnamese diaspora.    In terms of the current composition literature on students of immigrant descent, Justin Phan would be labeled an Asian ESL student, despite the fact that Justin has an extraordinarily high English competency in everyday conversation and in his writing. However, when Justin began college as a biological sciences major he did not feel confident as a writer. For Justin, writing seemed to focus on grammatical rules and formulaic approaches to composing a message. Justin claimed he would spend hours working on the mechanics of a page trying to get it “just right” while missing the opportunity to focus on honing his message. Justin admitted:

“I felt like I wasn’t good at writing. I felt like for me for a while I didn’t really, like, do any reading or writing. It was something I was kind of worried about, and I was kind of taught it as a formula, usually with the five paragraph thing and try to do your topic sentences and stuff. And so I tried to write that for a while. I always saw writing as just like plugging in and following that formula that they taught us, not really thinking about what kind of lessons or what kind of message I'm trying to convey. So I think really early on, maybe that’s just the way that writing was taught at high school.”

Justin also had trouble with striking a balance between being conversational or being formal in his work because of his perceptions of the constraints of academic writing. Justin perceived the genre to be more clinical and emotionally detached, so he had more difficulty with academic writing.  Much like the other students featured in this research, Justin’s identity informs the topics of his papers. Despite that fact, Justin definitely felt a split between his academic and personal voice.

So now I’m having trouble, well how do I know if it’s like academic enough and how do I know if it’s too personal?...

I think it’s still all part of me, because I feel like, I believe that people function differently in different circumstances. And so when I need to write for an anthro paper, I might take on more of this objective voice, while also trying to intervene... while at the same time I’m writing for one of my feminist study classes, those things are, in a sense, given, the idea that subjectivity shapes how you talk about things. So I feel a little more at ease reflecting on personal experience[in a feminist class], than I would have said about a sociology class, where a professor might say, like, anecdotal evidence is not evidence.

In this quote we can see when Justin determines a particular discipline does not value the same evidence he does, in this case valuing storytelling as evidence, the split between his academic and scholarly voice occurs.  While Justin admits he understands people communicate differently in different circumstances, he also still has issues switching between the rhetorical stances of each discipline.  

Justin went on to describe how all that changed. When Justin got to college two things happened to him concurrently.  First, Justin gained awareness of the academic dialoguing process that occurs perpetually across theories, theorists, and texts through his first university classes.  

“...over the years I started seeing reading and writing as more of like a dialoguing process. So I started imagining the books as people that I’m just talking to, or like they’re talking to me, and eventually I started thinking about, like, citations as like, well, if you’re in this room with all these people, you are just trying to make a point and have this person, well this x person said this and let them speak for a while, and, well, ‘this’ is what I'm trying to get at by having them speak. So it seemed, eventually I think I saw writing as more of a performative process, where it was kind of like there’s a production side to it, where you’re producing a piece of work to convey a particular message, and it’s also how you are trying to frame it as you’re going along with different points and putting yourself in dialogue.”

In understanding the dialoguing process, Justin realized the way to interject himself into that dialogue was through writing.  While this seems like a no-brainer for most of us academics, the fact that Justin came to this realization independently is huge given the fact that most diverse students see the ideas and approaches that are a part of the academy as set in stone with no entry point for new, alternative ideas. 

The second thing that happened to Justin was during his first years at UC Davis was much more personal. Justin completed what he describes as a “racialization process,” meaning he was designated “Asian” by the school which is problematic because that term was developed through a Eurocentric paradigm and doesn’t reflect the uniqueness of each cultural group that originated from the continent of Asia. Being lumped in this way led Justin to question and talk back to the stereotypes that were foisted upon him and others who would be designated “Asian” by white monoculture. Justin reported:

“prior to coming to Davis, I didn’t really closely identify as being an American... You know I came into the world with my family, right? They didn’t call themselves Asian Americans; they called themselves Vietnamese, because we’re Vietnamese immigrants—folks from Vietnam, but here in the US. So there’s a family culture that was there, and there were ways that school tries to categorize me in particular way based on the historical legacy of racism. So you know that I’d be, I think part of the reason I was in honors classes was because I was a quiet Asian student who did homework. You know, like, I think that’s part of it...the ways that I interacted with being Asian American was different I think, before coming to Davis.” 

The racialization process Justin began to undergo in high school reached a critical point when he started attending Davis. Justin argues the academic institution racialized him and other diverse students by lumping them into groups according to monoculture based “assumptions of positionality.” Assumptions of positionality presumes an individual has insider knowledge of a particular group or represents a particular group because they identify with that group or have characteristics of that group. The assumption of group representation may occur despite the fact that the individual may not identify themselves in the same way, or there may be a body of group foundational knowledge that individual may not have access to.  

Justin went on to describe the different types of Asian students that get lumped into identities that are pre-constructed by monoculture based rhetoric based on assumptions of positionality:

“There’s international students, students who face things differently, folks that are breaking down model minority stuff, and saying that not all Asians are wealthy, hardworking, super good at math and science. And I think that coming from the Bay area, I was able to play into that [stereotype] in many different ways...”

What made different Justin’s college racialization experience different from his high school experience of being racialized were the student-run community centers on the UC Davis campus. Becoming involved with UC Davis’ student activist community raised Justin’s awareness about talking back to and resisting the legacies of racist monoculture.  That resistance includes rejecting the model minority stereotype that has been projected onto Asians by whites because that stereotype was created to denigrate other ethnic groups.  

 When describing being described as “Asian” by an institution  and responding to institutions through activists networks, Justin says:

“it’s a new racialization process coming to Davis, and being part of networks that would try to challenge those logics institutionally, that try to categorize that all Asian folks are similar, or saying that ‘This is what Asians are like,’ based on the funding grants, or stuff like that. I know that people are working on a grant right now, so if you are at school [that is] twenty-five percent Asian serving, then you can apply for this grant. So like I think for me, it was coming here and seeing activists being like, ‘Wait we’re not all Asian in this particular way that you’re trying to construct us.’” 

The type of critical response to academic schemas and systems diverse, radical scholars construct as Justin describes here brings to light the amount, or lack thereof, of nuance researchers and administrators bring to the table when describing and working to serve diverse students. Justin questions the assumptions embedded in these types of identities because they have been pre-constructed by a racist system. Superimposing assumptions of positionality on groups of people can lead to faulty decision making based on limited data and activist acts in response to, or in accordance with, the negative outcomes of those decisions, whether they be administrative or pedagogical outcomes. 

Coming to Davis, there is system networks of student centers, academic departments that really try to politicize these Asian ideas of race and try to really kind of combat racism or combat other forms of oppression on campus. And so being part of those networks of people, who consider themselves radicals or anti-oppression activists like stuff like that, really shifted and made me think about the world completely differently, cause ‘politics,’ ‘radicals,’ and ‘Asian-American’ I would never use in a sentence prior to coming to Davis.”

Justin learned to talk back to and reach beyond the limitations of monoculturally constructed identities when he joined student groups that presented alternative pedagogies that integrated ethnocentric and gender-based ways to construct knowledge. The alternative pedagogies of the student groups introduced Justin to active facilitation between diverse groups of people and differing theoretical frameworks. Justin ended up combining his awareness of the ongoing academic conversation with the theories and approaches he learned in activist spaces. Justin then transferred the practices of facilitation from those activist spaces to his reading and analysis of texts when he became a humanities major. 

Justin went on to describe how he came to see writing as a “performative process” that put himself “in dialogue” with the authors he read, which is a critical, well-documented skill advanced writers possess.  Justin also came to see the differences between facilitating dialogues among real people and acting out imaginary dialogues between authors and their theories. 

“I started seeing facilitation as an important part to writing, so if you were to, it’s kind of like facilitating a conversation of different theoretical frameworks or different people who have different opinions, and trying to get at some kind of consensus with it. Rventually I started realizing that consensus isn’t necessarily what I’m trying to do...”

Justin’s reading practices revealed to him that the theories and ideas he works with do not have to concur with one another, leading him to get comfortable with ideological conflict and ambiguity. When ideas talk back to one another to create ideological conflict, that conflict opens up space for new ideas to challenge old concepts and bring more nuanced approaches to an issue.    

In Loco Parentis: Parenting Other People’s Adult Children

One of the main on-campus issues Justin wanted to talk back to was what Justin described as a parental tone and approach the university takes to its students. Justin calls UC Davis’ approach to managing its students “In Loco Parentis”, or the institution acting as a stand in for the student’s parents and family.  To support his claim, Justin examined the rhetoric in a number of UC Davis publications using anthropological approaches.   One of the textual data sources Justin used to demonstrate the patronizing parental voice the school uses to speak with students was, coincidentally and ironically, Aggie Voices.  I did not discover that fact until I read Justin’s first completed draft, so I did not influence his analysis of the blog in any way. 

Justin’s results demonstrated UC Davis’ publications frequently evoked the image of family by referring to the campus community as a family in multiple publications.  After constructing the university’s familial ideal,  the institution worked within that family framework to hand down rules and discipline, much like a parent would, to students.  Justin argued UC Davis’ approach to communicating with students and the community at large negated the students’ autonomy and rights as unique individuals with their own families and cultures.  Moreover, in invoking a parental stance the university refused to see students as adults who are, more often than not, paying for their own education in one way or another.    Positioning the students as adults would confer more power to students since they would be seen as they are - consumers paying large sums of money for the university’s product, not children who need discipline and management. 

Justin found the conversations we had where we triangulated ideas and delved into the political in a private safe space was most helpful for his papers.  I never interjected my own personal politics but I did present different sides from different theoretical approaches (I used ideas from linguistics, sociology, discourse analysis, feminist theory and decolonizing pedagogy) and in regards to each on-campus political issue to help Justin sort out his ideas. However, I was the second person Justin sound boarded his ideas with. First, Justin engaged in these and other topics with his mentor, Professor Mama. Professor Mama, who Justin described as having extensive experience with activism, encouraged Justin in his quest to merge his activism-informed ideas with his academic analysis.  Professor Mama encouraged Justin to complete his research using a research journal so he could chart the development of his thoughts and findings.  In both his conversations with Professor Mama and myself, Justin got to practice code-switching between the language of the academy and the world of activism effectively while analyzing complicated, political topics related to diverse people in the academy.   

Engaging thorny topics, like criticizing the rhetoric of the institution where one works or studies,  a tricky strategy because talking about politics or other complicated ideas can be explosive for an instructor’s career. That said, these conversations have to happen so students can see how a more seasoned academic code-switches between the languages of different spaces, so they can see how an academic positions their ideas and so students have the opportunity to practice code-switching and positioning in a safe space. Conversations like these have to be done in such a way that the educator doesn’t come off as partial to any particular idea or cause. The conversation also has to be initiated by the student and co-navigated by the student and educator.  The initiation of a political conversation by the student indicates the student feels the educator is trustworthy enough to approach about with the topic in addition to being knowledgeable about it. It might seem counterintuitive to wait for students to initiate a difficult conversation, especially if the professor has already intuited discussing that topic with the student was already on the horizon.  Professors hold high levels of power over students, whether we like to admit it or not. If a professor initiates a difficult conversation, that initiation could lead to the student feeling manipulated or led in their academic pursuits.  

Again we see how trust between the educator and the student, particularly when it comes to the student trusting the educator with their deepest ideas, impacts how the student crafts their message.  It is important to remember the student is being initiated into a discipline by the instructor, so the instructor is the “face” of the discipline, so to speak. Student encounters with the faces of a discipline will determine how the student characterizes the discipline itself and whether the student believes their ideas will be engaged, validated or even accepted by a discipline.  Justin’s example provides a sharp contrast to Elizabeth’s example.  Justin’s non-academic rhetoric was welcomed and engaged by his mentor, so he felt he had a point of entry into his discipline.  In contrast, Elizabeth’s mentor rebuffed her language and ideas, so Elizabeth did not feel welcomed into her discipline, despite the fact that other individuals in the discipline would be interested in her ideas. In these students’ examples, we can see how much power we educators have as individuals when it comes to ushering in more diverse students into our disciplines.  The fact of the matter is we have a lot of power on the individual level, more power than we typically give ourselves credit for. Seemingly monolithic disciplines are made up of individuals, namely us scholars.  When we criticize our disciplines for not being more diverse, we’re criticizing ourselves.  We have to take into consideration the fact that our disciplines may not be more diverse because we as individuals have not welcomed diverse ideas and peoples.  Perhaps we have inadvertently upheld the status quo by teaching and doing things the way they have always been done because it is safe or because it is all we know. Justin’s relationship with Professor Mama demonstrates disciplines grow and evolve when the participants of that discipline are willing to grow and evolve.  Professor Mama saw Justin had something to teach, something she and her discipline.  In inviting a student to become a teacher, Professor Mama fueled Justin’s passion for research while opening space for the discipline of Anthropology to evolve.  

[writingatthecrossroads]

Diverse Students in the Disciplines

Part 1 : Can Westernized Science Learn From The Native Paradigm?  Elizabeth Moreno’s Experience

There has been much discussion about the importance of ensuring diverse students learn the ins and outs of discipline-specific language (Bazerman, 2003; cited by Bawarshi and Reif, 2010) and the political and linguistic complications surrounding that learning process (Villanueva, 2011) in the field of composition. In those discussions, there have been lingering questions as to whether the acquisition of discipline-specific languages and genres are tools that usher students into assimilating the prevailing monoculture or whether using that language is a necessary skill diverse students must acquire to initiate themselves into the knowledge generating society.  

The UC Davis McNair scholars grapple with the tensions between those two polarities every day in their research and personal lives. They walk the fine line between becoming scholars who investigate their topics rigorously while maintaining their culture based paradigms.  I took a two-pronged approach when responding to these students’ needs.  I taught the basic components of academic journal article writing with a Hallidean approach by sticking closely to the standard characteristics of the genre and showcased how the sections shifted according to discipline as best as I could.  I balanced that prescriptive approach by putting student knowledge and collaboration at the forefront, especially when I did not know the discipline well, like in the case of mathematics proofs. Before any lecture on the genre, I had students define what the genre meant to them or what rhetorical components they noticed in the genre.  Starting with student knowledge building bolstered students’ agency because they were given the opportunity to access, display and validate the knowledge they had in their collective consciousness about genres.  Activating that part of students’ consciousness also made students metacognitively aware of the psychological level genres spring from and work upon. 

While the students and I collaboratively built knowledge on how academic writing manifests in their disciplines, I also encouraged the students to experiment in their work with genre-mashing and by playing with vocabulary. I gave the students who were brave enough to experiment with genre-mashing semi-explicit information on how to execute their work by describing how the different components from each genre could compliment one another, how they could negate one another and how to move between the rhetorical moves in each genre on the sentence and section level as they combined components. For example, I guided one student to create a journal article that integrated components of the artist’s statement to describe the theoretical foundations of the performances they produced for their research project.  

Using the experiences of the McNair scholars students, this final results portion works to adds to the discussion surrounding diverse students and discipline-specific language by challenging both sides of the divide. The experiences of Elizabeth Moreno and Justin Phan demonstrate the acquisition of discipline-specific language does not necessarily lead to assimilation. Moreover, their examples demonstrate how diverse students move beyond simply acquiring discipline specific rhetoric to reconfigure genres by integrating their culture based paradigms with discipline-specific language.  Integrating their own rhetoric into their discipline-specific research allows these students to talk back to their disciplines and the assimilationist rhetoric that is embedded in it.

However, I found students could only accomplish that goal when they are adequately supported by the educators they work with. Below I will describe how Elizabeth and Justin integrated their culture based rhetoric with their research, some challenges they faced and which teaching strategies were best suited for these students.   I will also examine the circumstances that lend themselves to assimilationist practices of voice suppression in the disciplines by focusing on the experiences of  Elizabeth, a veterinary student of Native descent who felt excluded from the language of her discipline.

(Photo Source: Elizabeth Moreno’s Facebook Page)

There is one in every class.  The student that flies under the radar, who almost doesn’t get as much attention as they should until towards the end of the semester when the teacher finally realizes, “Hey, this student is freaking brilliant.”  The instructor kicks themselves a little bit for fawning over the smarty pants or being overly annoyed (and attentive) to the trouble makers.  But they don’t waste too much time because they want to use every remaining moment of class enjoying that quietly brilliant student.

That student is Elizabeth Moreno. Initially, it was hard to see how smart Elizabeth was because I’m not sure she realizes how smart she really is, so she doesn’t project an air of extreme confidence in her intelligence like most gifted students will do. Elizabeth was kinda quiet at first during the summer writing intensive I held my first year with McNair. As time wore on she gained confidence, testing out more vocabulary words, offering up fun jokes and basically keeping the mood light by putting on Spongebob Square Pants during lunch breaks after we had been writing all morning.

Elizabeth impressed me with her willingness to experiment with vocabulary and phrasing in her writing. During the course of our class, Elizabeth diligently tried out each strategy in the 10 Step method, which led to more comprehensive discussions on how the shades of meaning each word can shift the meaning of a sentence (or simply not fit) even if a synonym of that word could be used appropriately.  I appreciated Elizabeth sparking off those conversations because many of the other students were not willing to take the time to investigate the meanings of words then experiment with those words in their work. Elizabeth’s conversation sparked the curiosity of her peers and led them to consider how word precision can make a difference when it comes to clarifying one’s messages.

The speed and ease with which Elizabeth wrote also blew me and her classmates away.  No one expected Elizabeth to be the second person to complete the McNair Journal Article in the cohort. Elizabeth’s article on increasing mare prolactin levels using artificial lights was sophisticated and Elizabeth seemed to really enjoy completing writing overall. So when Elizabeth volunteered to participate in this research foray, I was really excited to learn more about her writing process.  I didn’t realize going into the interview I was in for a lot more surprises.

Going into the interview Elizabeth expressed a paradoxical situation.  She had a fair amount of confidence in her writing but she felt she didn’t communicate her ideas well, which surprised me because I always found Elizabeth to be a clear communicator in her writing. Elizabeth felt her verbal communication was impeded by stuttering because her mind was typically a few steps ahead of what she was saying and she was always searching for the most erudite to say things, which she described as “nerve-wracking.”

Elizabeth’s constant search for the right words is definitely affected by her ESL status.  Although she is highly fluent in English,as a woman of Yaqui descent Elizabeth reported she has trouble translating ideas from Yaqui to English.  That trouble is not because of a lack of vocabulary on Elizabeth’s part as a woman who speaks English as a second language.  The issue lies in the fact that Yaqui paradigm is completely different from Eurocentric ways of seeing and being in the world.  For example, according to the Yaqui, the world is composed of five worlds, the flower world, the dream world, the night world, the desert world and the mystical world.  The goal of Yaqui religious practices is perfecting these worlds and mitigating the harm that has been inflicted on these worlds by human beings.   The Yaqui ways of seeing the world is reflected in the ways Elizabeth would like to approach veterinary science:

I get the feeling that most people, and just humans in general, like to think of themselves as being above animalistic tendencies, and we have to change certain aspects of the environment around us, so that we can have a better life sort of thing… things like changing, physically altering ourselves, our bodies, even though what you know how inter-created everything is. Essentially it’s the way it’s supposed to be, it has a reason, and it might not be the most attractive design, but it works. Yup, some humans just want to think that, like they want to distinguish themselves above animals and the environment and just nature in general. Whereas the Yaqui and just other Native Americans, it’s not just the Yaqui, it’s like a partnership with the mother Earth. And going with the flow of how the nature systems are working, kind of like take it as it comes kind of thing, like things happen for a reason. Didn’t rain because well it didn’t rain, and we have to figure out, we have to change ourselves to, you know, not to try and change the Earth, just so we’re happy, without thinking about what the heck, what implications it can have on the ecosystem and things like that. But that’s kind of what I feel when it comes to the mindset of the world between Western thinking versus Native American thinking…

Elizabeth reported that she is aware her Yaqui mindset affects how she communicates with people.  She finds she has an easier time communicating with people who can see the world from this alternative perspective, but not so well with people who are firmly entrenched in the western mindset.

Elizabeth’s writing trajectory may have been affected by the complications of having to navigate translating between two mindsets. Elizabeth described her writing learning trajectory as being praised early on in elementary school for being extremely detailed with the images, but having that praise turn to criticism in high school when her AP English teachers characterized the descriptions as “fluff.”  Elizabeth reported she had a hard time adapting to that change, saying:

Probably this is probably where my stubbornness came in, cause I was always the good writer, so I was like, “What the fuck,” you know, “What are you talking about? How do you not understand what I’m trying to say?” …apparently the rules of communication had changed since elementary school.

Elizabeth went on to describe struggling with communication overall during and after high school, but paradoxes still lingered.  For example, she reported going to her high school AP English teachers to clarify their understandings of the arguments in her papers.  Elizabeth’s teachers initially docked her paper grades down for not being clear, but upon review with Elizabeth, her arguments came across.  When Elizabeth completed first year writing in community college, she received yet another contradictory message about writing. That instructor criticized her for not being detailed enough and for not focusing on her writing.  Elizabeth conceded she was not focused at that time, that she had basically stopped caring about her writing and went through the motions to get credit at that point. Elizabeth claimed by the time she completed the writing courses that were required for her degree, she felt writing probably was not that important for her as a person in the sciences.  Elizabeth’s lost interest in writing during that time could be attributed to the conflicting feedback she got from writing teachers as she shifted across each stage of learning.   A coherent message about all of the components that constitute good writing, which could have included advice on how details can contribute to building a powerful argument, probably could have helped Elizabeth feel more confident about using her strengths in image making to communicate her arguments more effectively.

The theme of ineffective communication leading to going through the motions arose again in Elizabeth’s interview when we discussed her McNair Research Project on artificial light and mare prolactin levels. Elizabeth revealed that she had problems getting her mentor to hear her ideas about animal behavior and that their conversations led to Elizabeth having anxiety about communicating her ideas with that professor throughout the course of the program. Elizabeth’s anxiety was especially pronounced because she struggles with depression and PTSD as a result of previous traumas.  In the following example, Elizabeth recounts when her mentor insulted her using academic language when Elizabeth tried to put forth an idea on pregnant mare behavior:

Elizabeth: Um, let’s see. Although I, for instance, I can understand how people say, “you can’t talk to animals,” it’s just, we don’t communicate the same way they do, but there’s still ways of kind of at least limiting down what they are trying to tell us. So in this case when we were trying to find a project for me to work on, we were talking about how no one has really figured out how the mare or the female horse knows that it’s pregnant. We know how it happens chemically, but we don’t know how they know. And I think I mentioned something like, “Why don’t we just ask them?” I was kinda leading to that. And she’s just looks back at me with this, kind of like, you’re so stupid face. It’s like,  “but they can’t tell us.” And I’m like, “duh they can’t freaking tell us, but we can at least find a freaking way.”

Kenya: Right. And they can tell us by the way they act, and there’s horse whisperers, right?

Elizabeth: Yea, you know? And she finishes that topic with, “Yeah, we’re gonna have to work on your critical thinking skills.”

In this example, Elizabeth’s mentor hinted Elizabeth lacked the intelligence to create research on animal behavior, an insinuation that effectively shut down Elizabeth’s desire to elaborate on what she meant by “asking” a horse how it knows it is pregnant. During the interview, Elizabeth’s rhetoric displayed she did have the aptitude to describe how a researcher  could “ask” an animal questions.  Without much prompting on my part, Elizabeth elaborated on the idea of communicating with animals saying:

“… there are certain plants that animals kind of gravitate towards, cause it’s kind of alleviates the symptoms. So we know something about a plant and what it does, what effects it seems to have on the animals, then we can, it’s like listening, it’s like hearing animals say, like this is what’s wrong with me, I have a freaking upset stomach, that is why I’m eating a bunch of grass, so I can just puke it out. Like that’s what I need, and at least they get to tell you, instead of you just, at least they have the chance to kind of tell the veterinarian, like, “This is what’s wrong with me.” Cause that’s what I’ve always heard growing up. Like, “it’s hard being a veterinarian versus a doctor cause you can’t talk to an animal.” And so there was that idea, and then another idea I had, it’s not quite veterinarian medicine, but it’s just like how animals and humans can kind of work together better, how they can kind of communicate better.”

Elizabeth’s method of communicating with animals by backtracking the cause of their behaviors, like in the example Elizabeth presented of analyzing the foods they eat, is scientifically testable. If the research questions and methods were formulated with precision by building on the knowledge that is already in the veterinary field and expanding upon it with ideas that are based on Elizabeth’s Yaqui knowledge, Elizabeth could get answers to her questions. Unfortunately, Elizabeth was stymied from developing research around her ideas simply because her mentor was not prepared to hear Elizabeth out  by asking Elizabeth to elaborate on what she meant by “asking the animals.” “Asking” could have taken the shape of presenting a mare with a range of herbs to determine if the mare knew it was pregnant based on the herbs they ate as a research project Elizabeth did not feel sure if her mentor’s response felt aggressive because her mentor was actually aggressive or whether she was overreacting due to her PTSD.  Regardless of her mentor’s intent, they never continued that line of conversation again.  More troubling, Elizabeth felt anxiety in relation to every communication she had with that professor, even simple emails.  

After reviewing the entirety of the interview, it is my opinion that there is a strong possibility Elizabeth’s mentor was in the habit of not listening to Elizabeth at all because of disinterest on her mentor’s part. That lack of attentiveness could have led to the cutting remark Elizabeth reported.  I glean that possibility from Elizabeth’s description of her professor’s attitude towards Elizabeth’s research topic and the McNair Scholar’s program itself.  Elizabeth reported her mentor was not really interested in animal behavior, which was Elizabeth’s focus, so they were, in Elizabeth’s words, “already at a loss there.”  Elizabeth also claimed her mentor didn’t see the McNair Scholars as a fellowship program because her mentor always referred to it as a scholarship, despite Elizabeth’s protests to the contrary:

“…that one I can’t say I freaking miscommunicated, ‘cause I told her. I was like, “No we have, we get paid during the summer, we have to basically act like researchers, and you teach us how to do it,” you know?”

Elizabeth claimed her mentor saw the work Elizabeth did for the program as juvenile, which led to tension between them when it came time for Elizabeth to complete her research conference presentations and the final journal article. During the creation of Elizabeth’s research conference poster, for example, Elizabeth’s mentor criticized her images, the colors she used and other graphic details. Elizabeth’s mentor also criticized her for being “overly analytical” and having a “one track mind” in her research.  Tensions between the two even continued after the completion of Elizabeth’s paper.  For example, The McNair scholars director and I had to step in and contact Elizabeth’s mentor to get her paper approved as the professor did not readily communicate with Elizabeth. As a result of that tension, Elizabeth stopped engaging with the questioning phase of the research process and simply piggybacked off her mentor’s work to complete her McNair project.

Elizabeth did concede her mentor taught her how to write the introduction and hypothesis portion of a research paper for their discipline, which she did find beneficial. When I asked Elizabeth if her authentic self wrote her paper, she plainly responded, “No… That was someone else.” Elizabeth went on to reveal her real self had not shown up in any of her writing in school.  She agreed with my assertion that if a student was passionate about their work, their real selves would appear.  However, the opportunity for Elizabeth’s real self to compose had not arisen because the real Elizabeth was too unconventional for the academy.   

Elizabeth’s case was a difficult one for me because after the interview I came away with the idea that Elizabeth had needed more instruction on how to couch her ideas in rhetoric individuals working from a western paradigm could hear them. In other words, she needed more practice with codeswitching and she needed to execute that practice in a safe space before testing it on professors. During the interview, I asked Elizabeth:

Do you think if you had said something like “well maybe if we observe their behaviors to get some cues we can see how they understand they’re pregnant”, do you think she would have accepted something like that?

Elizabeth: Um she probably would have…

Unfortunately, I came to this realization too late.  Elizabeth was in the first cohort of students I worked with at McNair, and I only taught those students over the summer, so I didn’t have the opportunity to work with her on codeswitching like I did with the following two cohorts.  When Elizabeth seized on practicing vocabulary using the ten step method I presented, I took it as Elizabeth wanting to improve her vocabulary when in actuality it was a sign Elizabeth wanted to improve the way she communicated her messages in academic English.  What she needed was the ability to structure her sentences in the moment, not more words that could potentially muddy her message.

Looking back on Elizabeth’s example I have also come to realize how much new information is lost when diverse students are not able to pre-package their ideas into rhetoric that is easily digested by higher ups in their disciplines. Elizabeth’s ideas were sound but the halting way she presented them, partially due to confidence issues, partially because of difficulty in translating between the Yaqui and western paradigms, obscured the value in those ideas.  Elizabeth could have submitted her findings in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association if she had been encouraged to pursue her research. For Elizabeth, encouragement could have taken the shape of more listening or asking follow-up questions like, “what do you mean by ‘ask’” questions that could have pushed Elizabeth to flesh her ideas out.

That said, even if Elizabeth presented her ideas in a better way, would they have been heard?  In Elizabeth’s case, we can see how miscommunication between diverse students and professors can happen due to issues on both sides.  Yes, diverse students may need more practice in codeswitching to academic speech.  However, professors from Eurocentric backgrounds may need more practice with mindful listening and conversation engagement to build student trust and confidence. Conversation engagement is not just asking questions or asking students to elaborate on their ideas.  It also includes putting one’s own ideas about the world on hold to allow students to present their own ideas without the fear of being judged. Judgment and feedback are two completely different things.  Judgment is the projection of value on an idea.  Feedback, on the other hand, gives students something to work with based on what is known in the field and generates ideas on how to go about discovering new knowledge based on the research interest of the student. The student trust that arises from conversation engagement and feedback leads to more opportunities for students to build their code-switching abilities. Having multiple opportunities to engage in the feedback process brings students to the point where they can synthesize their culture based ideas with academic rhetoric, thus adding to their respective discipline while circumventing total assimilation.  What Elizabeth got from her mentor was judgment, not feedback, which led to the shutdown of her authentic voice because she didn’t perceive her mentor to be a safe person to entrust her ideas.

In Elizabeth’s case, we can the perpetuation of the status quo and assimilation into standard genres is not simply the result of teaching formulaic approaches to the academic journal article genre, nor is it the result of fitting ideas into academic rhetoric.  It is the result of enculturating diverse students into the normalization of idea and voice suppression through microaggressions and the outright dismissal of novel, culture-based approaches that have not been couched in academic language.

I could be said that Elizabeth’s mentor discouraged her line of questioning to protect her from making a research misstep. Indeed, sometimes instructor dismissal of student ideas is done under the premise of protecting students from making mistakes in their work or in their careers.  We instructors may think we are saving students time and effort if we discourage them from an idea. Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t. Maybe the idea of “protecting” students is just a patronizing way of saying a diverse student isn’t capable of facing challenges in the field. Maybe that protection is just a continuation of the “protection” others projected on us when we wanted to do ambitious research but were told to tone it down for the sake of our careers. Maybe that protection stems from the fear of having a student venture into territory that is filled with knowledge that we, as “experts,” cannot comment on.

Whatever the case may be, the bottom line is as educators it’s not our job to protect students.  It doesn’t matter if we agree with their ideas or not or whether we think their ideas are foolish or not.  History has proven time and time again some of the best scientific discoveries have come from “foolish” ideas, so it is completely plausible our students may be touching on new discoveries.  All that matters is if we tell them in a concrete way why their ideas may or may not be doable. The trick is to present students both sides of an issue and to let them decide on their own whether to move forward.  We can also plainly present them with the possibility of challenges they may face so they can develop their own solutions if they decide to move forward with their ideas. We can also help them work through the solutions to those challenges to the best of our ability.  As we can see in Elizabeth’s case, kibbitzing a seemingly stupid idea is an injustice to the student and the field.  Giving judgment, even supposed well-meaning judgment, instead of constructive feedback silences a student’s voice and stops the creation of new knowledge in the discipline.

Silencing oneself to fit into a culture is the cause of assimilation, whether it is through rhetoric or through behavior. The written generic format has little to do with that assimilative process and code-switching doesn’t do it either. The written genre-based work is just the final product that documents the silencing that had already taken place during the rhetorical and behavioral exchanges between the discipline’s inductors and inductees.

However, when a diverse student is enculturated into their discipline by a mentor who encourages culture based vocalization in conjunction with critical analysis, the genre documents that as well. The following student, Justin Phan, is a prime example of how diverse students are currently gaining mastery over written academic rhetoric while also infusing their own culture based mindsets into their disciplines.  Justin’s example will demonstrate this cross-pollination can only happen when diverse students are adequately supported by their instructors and academic communities.  

[writingatthecrossroads]

Context and Audience’s Impact on Voice

Analysis of Student Interviews

When I originally developed this research,  I wanted to do a textual analysis of all the student volunteers’ writing to determine whether their voices shifted according to discipline and context.  That desire evolved as I conducted interviews with the students, which led to the development of one central textual analysis and my development of understanding voice by listening to the students’ feedback.  I found as I analyzed their interviews the things students had to say about the contexts in which they composed their writing and rhetoric and how their personal histories influenced their voices was much more interesting than the texts themselves.  I also found there were interesting parallels between two pairs of female students in each of the remaining contexts I will examine, The Diversity Forum and the McNair Scholars program. 

In the following section, I’ll describe in detail what students revealed about how their personal histories, cultures, their self-knowledge and their level of discipline-specific knowledge influenced the manifestation of their authentic voices in their academic work.  Here I will focus on the students I worked with on the Diversity Forum before moving on to the analysis of the McNair Scholars’ feedback.

Listening as Rhetorical Instruction Tool

As the host and instructor of the Diversity Forum, my teaching task was to develop workarounds to curtail the impact the immediate, authentic audience had on students so they could maximize their voices and get their complete messages to that very same audience. While I listened to students, though, I did come realize I had to prep them with some (sneaky? subconscious?) rhetorical instruction before the interviews. When I began the Diversity Forum, I was naive in thinking simply providing a platform for students to express the multiple facets of their voices would be enough. That naivete was fueled by having stellar undergraduate speakers on air early in the show’s run.   

In addition to Jimmy, one of the students I sought after for the show’s first episodes was Star Bacon, who was the 2013-2014 Student Assistant to the Chancellor. She was also a former ASUCD senator and an undergraduate leader for the African-American student community.   

Star is, well, a star.  Here she is giving a speech during the 2015 Black Graduation:

                        (Image Source, Star Bacon’s Facebook Page)

Star Bacon is a natural, born orator whose love of rhetoric has led her to refine her rhetorical craft in preparation for the day she would become a leader.  Star revealed in our one on one interview (the original file was corrupted so I am writing based on my field notes) her focus on rhetoric began as a child when she noticed the difference between how people spoke in real life and how they spoke on television. Star studied infomercials to learn how to be a persuasive speaker who moves people to action. Star claims she took note of the different buzzwords the infomercial writers used to move people to action.  Star also noted how infomercials used repetition and case studies to reiterate their messages then used time pressure to push people to make a decision based on what was said. That led Star to be interested in the other ways rhetors persuade people to act. Once Star understood the persuasive speech of marketing she then worked to develop her own speeches on issues she was interested in. 

Star transferred the skills she developed independently to the college context which propelled her into being an African American student community leader.  Star revealed to me she took copious notes when she came arrived at the UC Davis campus to capture everything people told her and also to write her responses to what different individuals said.   

Star’s independent rhetorical work prepared her to use every rhetorical opportunity to the maximum.  During my time as a the Cross Cultural Center’s Graduate Student Retention Coordinator and as the co-chair for the Black Graduate and Professional Student Association I noticed Star used the town-hall style meetings we had with administrators and leaders for other student groups to bring up issues and initiatives she thought UC Davis leaders should take immediate action on. For example, she spearheaded the development of the new Center for African Diaspora Student success on campus by using her rhetoric to convince administrators and student leaders like myself (I helped Star refine the proposal draft for the center) to assist her in holding the administration accountable for African American student attrition. Star accomplished that goal by taking every in-person meeting as an opportunity to use persuasive rhetoric that was conscientious of each faction’s needs and goals. 

Star’s appearance on the Diversity Forum was no different. In Star’s interview, she came with an agenda to talk about the initiatives she was creating as the Student Assistant to the Chancellor to garner community buy-in for those projects.  Star also based her responses on the questions I had supplied her in advance. Star came alive when the studio mic was trained on her. Looking over Star’s interview transcript the sheer bulk of her responses makes it clear she has rhetorical force.   Star’s responses were, on average, twice as long as the other on-air interviewees’ responses.  Star came across as more at ease on air than the other students.  Star’s ease with listeners was demonstrated by her immediately addressing her intended audience, students with,  “Hey my fellow aggies, how you doing?” in the first two minutes of the interview. Star consciously made the decision to pinpoint her intended audience within the general audience of KDVS listeners based on the common knowledge that UC Davis students and far-flung community members (the station’s antenna allows the station to broadcast throughout the Sacramento region) listen to the station. 

The next rhetorical move Star took was describing her projects by highlighting the gains they would give students. Star made sure she clearly conveyed the details of her complex proposals to gain the student community buy-in she was seeking.  Here’s an example of Star outlining her plans for a student discount project:

“One of the things that Patrick and I, my fellow student assistant of chancellor, are working on is establishing a student-friendly housing and student discount program. Basically it would allow for students with student discount programs would be like... Currently you can get, like, discounted at places like around campus, you know, around the downtown area and other parts of Davis. But you don't necessarily have a system through which those discounts could, you know, people could reap the benefits of, right? So creating a system, where you would pull in all of the businesses that are already basically participating in giving students some sort of discounts, helping them with the purchase of commodities and expenses and things like that. But what we would do is then like provide them with the seal that students would then be able to identify and also on our end, promote it to the thirty thousand students that we have here. So, you know, the businesses are getting the promotion here and like basically a cosign by UC Davis, while students are able to get cheaper food. So some of those places that we’re really trying to get is Target, Safeway, Savemart.”

In this portion of the interview and other sections where Star describes her plans she reveals herself to not just be someone who talks about community change that benefits students. Star projects the message that she is an individual who backs up her rhetoric with concrete action and planning, but she also demonstrates she is able to do that by being in conversation with individuals who hold institutional power at the school. Star also demonstrates she has been able to strike a balance between what she wants to say and saying it in ways her intended audience can hear based on the context.

Modulating voice to conform to audience needs and expectation is something Star learned by experimenting with her voice with different audiences on campus.  Star pointed out issues of conformity in rhetoric on more than one occasion during our private discussion. Star claimed she tries to speak from her diamond voice in conversations but she “get[s] a lot of flack for it” from community members. She claims being told to “tone things down” in her rhetoric and she has done that in response to context and audience.  Star says her strategy is to begin speaking “diplomatically” so her audience can hear her, then building her audience up to hearing her diamond voice, which is an innovative, unique rhetorical strategy.   

When it came to translating her speech to writing in the classroom, conformity comes up again. Star reported most of the UC Davis writing instructors she encountered typically taught the same way.  Star dovetailed her observance with the memory of a UC Davis business writing instructor confirmed her belief all teachers taught the same. That instructor told Star’s class he could predict what they would write because they had all learned the same way to write.  Over time, Star says, that professor pushed her to write using fresh rhetoric.   Star described teacher conformity as something that occurred for “folks to get where they are.” Start characterized student rhetorical conformity as a result of being “taught to think the same” through the schooling process. In her writing, Star reported filtering herself even more as she wrote in some cases. While Star reported using writing as a cathartic communicative tool in certain contexts, she also reported tempering her emotions with standardized formats and language that reflects objectivity.  Despite tempering her emotions with “objective” language and expected formats Star still claims not being afraid to push buttons to bring certain emotions or thoughts to “disrupt the system” and bring about equity.  Star acknowledges some of the emotional response she elicits through her diamond voice from her audiences is raw and sometimes she has to back off from her most authentic messages to keep audiences listening. 

Basically, what Star described in our private talk is a rhetorical dance she does with audiences.  In some points of the dance, Star makes her voice the lead  of the audience to make certain “moves” work. At other points in the dance, the audience takes the lead. Star notes their cues to modulate her voice and make other moves work.  Despite the back and forth motion of the dance, Star still anticipates choreographing the dance by incrementally changing the moves with her most authentic messages and thus avoiding conformity.    

To Lan Phin: The Impact of Reticence on High Content Knowledge

After working with Star and Jimmy, the show took a turn as students with more varied levels of rhetorical experience came on air.  As I progressed through the quarter I found student message projection on air varied according to the perception students’had of the audience who would receive their messages (like in the case of Jimmy, who intended his voice to be received by students like himself and the public at large), their own levels of personal confidence and the mastery each student had over their discipline specific knowledge.   Jimmy and Star were students who demonstrated high levels of proficiency in all of those variables.  In contrast, there were more students who demonstrated varying levels of proficiency in each variable, which in turn affected how forcefully those students projected their messages in their authentic voices.  

To Lan Phin is a student who epitomized how varying levels of personal confidence, discipline-specific knowledge, and audience awareness can impact voice timbre.  I invited To Lan on air to talk about the Mama Hope Collective Club she started on campus and her experience as a south Asian woman transitioning from New Orleans to California. When I interviewed To Lan Phin, I noticed a difference in the way she spoke to me during our meetings in my apartment and the way she spoke on air.  Our conversations at my place, which, unfortunately, I didn’t record, were more free flowing and animated.  (n private, To Lan really showed how perceptive she is about understanding human nature.  She also demonstrated a deep knowledge of Arabic and the histories of South Asian and Arab cultures.  On air in the studio, however, To Lan was much more quiet, reserved. More than once I felt as though I had to fill the space with conversation because her responses to my questions were more truncated than when we talked at home. During our interview, I realized To Lan held back because of the immediacy of the interaction with an authentic audience. As I watched To Lan in the studio she seemed to pull back from the microphone as if she were intimidated by the equipment.  The discomfort I noticed in the on-air was verified during the one one one interview when To Lan admitted that she only recently got comfortable hearing her own voice during presentations. Although To Lan warmed up as we moved past the half-way mark of the interview, she never really gained momentum in her rhetoric. 

To Lan’s hesitation is also evident in her writing process, it just manifests in a completely different way. When I worked with To Lan on the project proposal and talk for the Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies independent research project she presented at the Undergraduate Research Conference, she was extremely cautious about wording her drafts. That said, To Lan had high-level of command of the content, which lent personal authority to the voice she projected in her written work. Her pieces never read as timid.   Working with To Lan on her writing after the interview made me realize her strength was in working through multiple drafts of a piece of rhetorical work so she could convey a message that was accurate to her voice and her ideas. To Lan didn’t have the option to work through multiple iterations of her message when she was live and on air.  Not having a “do-over” clearly threw her voice off.

The difference in how confidence impacts To Lan’s voice is demonstrated in the one one one interview we had together.  The amount of talking To Lan does doubled and she was more direct about the things she wanted to share. I think To Lan’s difference in confidence across the radio, writing and private contexts relates to the first theme that arose in our interview- issues of silencing throughout To Lan’s schooling experience.  Silencing arose as a result of To Lan’s tendency to be quiet and was exacerbated by school.  To Lan described her schooling in New Orleans as chaotic.  To Lan’s school had metal detectors for safety and reported teachers had difficulty dealing with violent and deviant behavior from students, like students “throwing trash cans to security guards” or having sex in the bushes.  In response to coping with students’ bad behavior To Lan said:

...the teachers, I think it got to a point where like they just want you to be quiet, and those were the people that did well, they weren’t really measured by what they submitted and all. There was a time when the teacher was like, pretend you’re working in class, so I think I kind of went through all those years kind of that way until I moved to California, and then everything slapped me in the face.

The slap in the face To Lan describes was the realization her schooling in New Orleans had left her unprepared to tackle the challenges of rigorous schooling elsewhere. To Lan claims she never got feedback on her writing in her New Orleans middle school.  During high school in California, To Lan had to take it upon herself to learn all of the things she hadn’t learned before in regards to writing to graduate and move on to college. To Lan’s accomplished that through imitation.  Like Star, To Lan was able to improve her rhetoric by imitating individuals she thought had effective rhetoric.  In To Lan’s case, those individuals were her California classmates who got A’s on their papers.To Lan still had to complete remediated coursework (Workload 57) in writing when she arrived at UC Davis but she was able to get to a point where she could imitate genres and then make them her own by the time she switched to the Middle Eastern and South Asian studies major.  To Lan did that by talking back to the readings in her coursework. To Lan reported her professors noticed her high level of interaction with the articles she read in her writing because she “argued [her] own thing (one on one interview).”  The high level of engagement To Lan experienced in the MESA studies program gave rise to To Lan’s academic diamond voice in her writing.  That engagement was fueled by the connection the discipline had to her Vietnamese and Cambodian backgrounds.  

To Lan saw a marked distinction between the voice she projected in her major and the voice she used in her writing courses.  To Lan noticed there was a pre-set structure she needed to adhere to in order to pass the class, but that format wasn’t particularly engaging for her.  In reference to the UWP 101 class To Lan said:

I was like okay I’ll follow this format, and I kind of did that the whole quarter, and I kind of was like redundant, but it worked, and I think that I’ll just do it this way and get an A, but yea.

Despite learning how to navigate her way through school writing and rhetoric, the silencing To Lan experienced early on still affected the projection of her voice in her work. In some ways, To Lan is still working to catch up to her peers who can effectively present their written work in the oral sphere.  It’s also clear from her behavior in the UWP class that silencing impacted her decision to use the CZ voice in that environment.  Similar to the writing work she did in her New Orleans middle school where she would writing a journal to give the teacher what they wanted and get a “check” for completion, To Lan followed a redundant format to get an A, but she didn’t grow from those writing exercises.  While focusing on audience  and purpose works well for literary-minded students, using those words as directives did not inspire or resonate with To Lan because they were impersonal, which in turn made her work impersonal. In that instance To Lan reverted back to the self-silencing coping mechanism she learned previously to pass under the radar in that UWP context.  A more empowered student might have confronted the teacher with the observation To Lan made about the work being formulaic.  A more experienced student might have even gone to the professor to get more input to make the assignments her own. Being socialized into silence prevented To Lan from developing those types of academic vocalizing strategies. To Lan also needed to vocalize her academic interests in spaces that didn’t seem to be connected to her major, but subtly were, like the UWP courses that were supposed to prepare her to write in the academy.  Like some of the other students in this study, To Lan needed assignments that spoke directly to her cultural background, her experiences as a South Asian woman from a disadvantaged background, and her drive to work as an activist in disadvantaged communities. Knowing how to communicate her concerns to a professor in a diplomatic way could have opened up the opportunity for To Lan to meet the requirements of UWP assignments while meeting her own personal needs of making those assignments challenging and connected to her personal interests.   Had To Lan’s voice been sufficiently empowered,  she could have crossed that threshold by communicating with her instructor and extracted more immediate value out of her writing course than simply getting an A.

To Lan’s experience on the Diversity Forum is similar to Star’s in the regard that both students modulated their voices because the ante was raised by the radio station’s authentic audience in the public at large. What was different about these two women was their approaches to vocal modulation. Star used strategic vocalizing in response to the audience.  In contrast, To Lan self-silenced when she was given the opportunity to have her voice amplified.  For To Lan, the listening audience was not safe because they were faceless strangers. The opportunity appearing on the Diversity Forum provided to To Lan  was probably the first public media platform she had encountered to speak her truth.  While that is liberating, it’s also terrifying, particularly for individuals who have been silenced and have internalized silencing school strategies. Silencing isn’t something one can just throw off at will.  Once silencing is internalized it becomes a habit the speaker reverts back to in periods of uncertainty, stress or it serves as a default vocal stance because it is coded in the muscle memory of the body, in addition to being embedded in the mind.  The habits of silencing do not end at school either.  Whether learned at school, at the home or in another environment, once an individual learns that to be silent is to be safe, that coping mechanism becomes a way to respond in every aspect of an individual’s life.   A lot of unlearning has to happen to be able to shift practices of silencing and that unlearning has to be in a safe environment.  When vocalizing, a safe environment is one where the listeners feel safe to speak to. Students like To Lan want to take that leap, but they need extra assistance to do so. In To Lan’s case to became evident later on she needed a buffer between the immediate audience and herself when projecting her ideas as a South Asian activist to overcome the habits of self-silencing she learned in middle school. 

The working experience I had with To Lan demonstrates extra scaffolding is needed to support vulnerable students who employ maladaptive strategies as a result of their school experiences while giving them platforms to freely project their voices. The question that then arises is, “What does scaffolding in a media context look like?” 

I thought about that question and developed a strategy by the time I worked the final student I focused on in this context, Justen Deaton. 

Justen Deaton: A Reckoning Force in the Native Community

During the 2012-2013 and the 2013-2014 school years, Justen Deaton was a lightning rod in the UC Davis Native American community. Throughout both of those years, he was a lead organizer and volunteer for the Native American Culture days and the UC Davis Powwow.   Justen is a natural born speaker, but unlike Star, his confidence was patchy.  In the hood,on Facebook and in some academic venues, particularly those that were spaces where Native students and faculty typically asserted their rights and expressed their cultural ideas (like in meetings with Cross Cultural Center staff) he was more than comfortable with speaking his piece.  

However, when it came to projecting those clear messages through radio to a larger audience, Justen felt daunted and expressed nervousness leading up to the interview, much like To Lan had. Justen wanted to make sure he sounded as knowledgeable as he did in the research paper he completed for the Undergraduate Research Conference.  Justen just felt thrown off by the idea that unknown people would be listening to and analyzing his ideas as he spoke.  I think the idea that they could call and respond while he was on-air was frightening for Justen too.  Justen didn’t just need reassurance or access to the questions in advance.  He needed a real strategy to mitigate the pressure of the immediate audience so his voice could be as confident as it was when he talked to people he knew.  

I learned from To Lan’s experience and applied a new tactic when I interviewed Justen Deaton.   For Justen, I envisioned and implemented a simple buffer that scaffolded and even emboldened his voice. To prepare Justen, I coached him like I coached To Lan, reminding him to focus on the interview as being a conversation between himself and I, and that he should think of the conversation as like any other conversation we’ve had during our friendship.  I also prepared questions and provided them to Justen well in advance so he wouldn’t be caught off guard, even if I asked spontaneous follow-up questions because those questions would also be on the same topics. 

After Justen felt prepared to respond to those questions, I took a page from writing and gave Justen the opportunity to create a “rough draft”, so to speak, of his interview before putting it on air.  I did that by simply recording our interview.  Ivanic (1998) argues the difference between spoken and written language is “speaking usually takes place in a single physical context, whereas the writing takes place in a different physical context from the reading(p. 62).”  However, modern radio is more like Ivanic’s definition of writing.  In the old radio environment, interviews only happened in a single physical contextualized live moment, with dialogue between the radio personalities (or monologues) with an immediate response from listeners.  However in this digital age, a large number of people have access to inexpensive yet advanced recording equipment that allows them to record a moment, edit that moment by combining it with other in the moment utterances, then playing the final edited piece on air. So now with technology, there is more of an overlap, bridging the divide between speaking and writing for the average individual because speaking becomes more like writing since it can have an editing phase.

Removing  the immediacy of the authentic audience by prerecording the interview gave Justen the opportunity to have false starts if he needed them, to delete the interview or to tell me if he’d like the interview to be edited at certain points once we completed the conversation.  Turns out, we did not have to edit a thing.  Once Justen got going with the interview, he basically dominated the conversation (like he does in real life) and the audience (myself included) learned a lot from him, which was my ultimate goal.  Based on the calls I received when I aired the show and feedback I got from listeners in the community, Justen’s interview was the most popular show aired on The Diversity Forum. 

Context, Audience, and Voice Modulation

The experiences these students had on the Diversity Forum demonstrates there is a desire among undergraduate students of color to have their voices represented and their unique messages projected by unbiased, uncensored, on-campus media outlets that engage audiences outside of the academic community. Having access to school-based media outlets validates the messages of students in a way social media cannot do on its own.  While social media can garner immediate attention, particularly if the vocalizer has digital marketing acumen, it does not have the same prestige that comes with having a message projected by a media outlet that is affiliated with an established institution of higher education.  Wanting to gain that prestige while projecting a message that may not be in line with the image the establishment on campus wants to project is a delicate balancing act that must be executed with a little bit of eloquence and a whole lot of diplomacy, especially to engage the authentic, immediate audience.  The student speaker who wants to walk that fine line faces the heavy pressure to perform in the immediacy of the moment when they walk into the studio booth.  

These students acted in accordance with what has been previously theorized in the literature on voice’s interaction with audience and context in response to that pressure - they modulated their vocal projections based on their command of knowledge, their perception of the audience and the context itself. However that modulation was not based on students’ knowledge of language, the context, and the audience alone as has been previously argued.  The modulation that was observed here  was based on previous experiences with vocalizations and whether those vocalization strategies were rewarded or punished.  Thus, these students only projected what they perceived to be their authentic voices in spaces they perceived to be safe.  Star saw both our one on one interview and the in-studio interview as safe.  To Lan did not perceive our in-studio interview as completely safe, whereas our one-on-one interview was safe because it did not have an immediate audience.  Justen did not perceive the studio as a safe space, so we conducted his on-air interview in a one on one environment outside of the studio, which was safe for him.     What is interesting is in two cases, Justen and To Lan, students’ perception of the audience and the environment overrode their ability to articulate content knowledge they knew deeply.   These three students examples demonstrate that even if diverse students are given the opportunity to project their messages in a free, uncensored environment, they may hesitate if they perceive the environment to be unsafe.  

These students example and Jimmy’s example demonstrates the lack of trust and the perception of voice-generated danger in school-based  environments, like as described in the introduction of this dissertation, persists as diverse students progress through undergraduate school.  Telling students they are free and in a safe space isn’t enough to mitigate that perception.  To Lan and Justen’s example demonstrates educators have to develop simple, unintrusive strategies to build students’ trust and scaffold vocalizing while giving students opportunities to project their voices to authentic audiences. The prerecorded interview strategy was just one of many strategies an educator could develop in an instance like this to scaffold students’ voices.  That said, while that strategy removed the pressure of the authentic audience while maintaining the positive benefits of having a real audience, the authentic audience was always there and a vital point of the exercise because the students didn’t just vocalize their messages, they were heard outside of the school context, which was extremely important to all of the students who appeared on the show.  Having the ability to get their ideas broadly disseminated by connecting with people outside of their immediate communities and safe spaces gave these students the sense that their voices make a tangible impact on the progress of society at large because they introduced new narratives that combatted the narratives that are told about their cultures in the prevailing monoculture.

In the next section, I will review the cases of McNair Scholars who have the opposite objective when projecting their voices.  Instead of projecting their messages outside of academia, these students work to amplify their voices within the academy to enact social change.  In the following section, I will discuss how cullturally specific paradigms affect the magnification or minimization of diverse student voice within discipline specific contexts and rhetorics. 

#student voices

[writingatthecrossroads]

Jimmy Recinos

Student Textual Analysis

                                     (Image Source, The Plus Me Project)

When you first meet Los Angeles-based storyteller Jimmy Recinos, he comes off as quiet with an unassuming nature that is as grounded in his Chicano heritage as it is in his personality.  It is only through delving deep into a series of trust building, exploratory, philosophical conversations with Jimmy that one could learn his calm exterior is a grounded self-possession has been polished by an interpersonal finesse that only comes with deep knowledge of The Self, The Streets and The Game (for the sake of clarity,  I’m talking about the social game we all play as individuals who have consented, willingly or unwillingly, to social contracts and strive to find our place in society based on those contracts, not the internet spread mind worm, The Game). Jimmy constantly engages the concept of understanding one’s self within the context of The Game in his socially conscious online writing.  In his independent and online magazine posts, Jimmy parses out the webs of oppression that ensnare people from all walks of life. Constantly probing issues surrounding oppression through writing has led Jimmy to develop a prolific online presence that spans across the UC Davis campus and in the Los Angeles social justice community.     

I met Jimmy during my first year as the Aggie Voices editor.  Jimmy came on the team during the Winter quarter and we immediately hit it off. Over coffee or glasses of wine at Delta of Venus we debated social issues, parsed out the nuances of popular ideas that were floating around campus at the time and, on occasion, laughed it up. In essence, we kicked it.  Hard.    In our little bubble, Jimmy and I transcended the socially imposed limitations on literary writers of color to talk about the craft of writing, to indulge our imaginations and to talk about what impact, if any, the reality of our lived situations had on our different pieces of work. I can’t say I really mentored Jimmy like I did with other students.  We nourished each other with food for thought and still continue to do so through our mutual love of words, love of people, and love of ideas.   

Jimmy’s deep commitment to the written word and his prolific output led me to select him as the main student to conduct a textual analysis on for this dissertation. Jimmy’s compositions range across a multitude of genres including political essays, journalist opinion pieces, blog posts, fiction, and poetry, so there were many samples to choose from.  I selected samples of Jimmy’s independent writing to be used a baseline for his voice.  I compared those samples with the work we did together at Aggie Voices and the Diversity Forum and the discourse in our interviews to accurately gauge whether some facets of his voice came through when we collaborated.  I say “some” here because it would be impossible to measure all facets of his authentic voice without examining discourse and texts he shares with his family members and himself (like in the form of a private journal).   Even if we had all of those samples, however, we would still need to rely on the trustworthiness of interview data from Jimmy to ascertain if he considered each voice to be a “true” facet.   Thus, I concede there are limits to the analysis I will present below.

To understand how Jimmy’s rhetoric shifts from context to context, I analyzed and compared the messages, syntax, and lexicon of the following written and spoken samples:

Research Data Samples

How My Ruby Red Schwinn Made Me An Aggie, Published by Aggie Voices March 11, 2014

Why Seminars Can Change Your College Life, Published by Aggie Voices July 25, 2014

Episodes of The Diversity Forum that aired on 1/22/14 (begins at 2:20) and 2/05/14 (Begins at 1:34).

Baseline Data Samples

After Pike, Published by The Aggie November 15, 2012 {This is his best sample.  Pull from it a lot} 

Keep Reading, Published by The Aggie November 1, 2012

20 Years After The L.A. Riots, Published by The Jimbo Times July 15, 2015

Traumatized Bodies, Desensitized Minds, Published by Abernathy Magazine. 

In addition to using these sources, I also examined the one on one interview I had with Jimmy in addition to a written response Jimmy submitted that reflected on his time with Aggie Voices.   The interview transcripts from the Diversity Forum and one on one interviews can be viewed here. 

Originally the goal of this analysis was to examine whether Jimmy’s voice shifted based on the genre of writing, since the context of the medium, online writing, was so similar.  What was found, however, is Jimmy’s voice shifted according to the sub-genre and the socio-emotional environment in which he wrote or spoke. 

Vocal Positioning in Baseline Texts 

The texts that were used as baseline data revealed Jimmy’s rhetoric is a hybrid academic-conversational stance, the type of language moderately educated people might use when engaging in friendly philosophical debates.  In all of the baseline samples, Jimmy makes clear his positionality is grounded in self-knowledge and in social justice before supporting his positionality with additional outside evidence that bolsters his claims. 

Jimmy’s establishment of a positionality that is grounded in the self, not theory, is clear in following quotes from the piece After Pike: 

“I also speak with an opposition to political oppression and a suspicion of authority, as well as a passion for my individual findings of knowledge or information.” 

“Finally, I speak with consciousness that even when others share my biases, I still speak only for myself. I believe this last clarification is particularly important for supportive readers to consider, as in supporting the views of individuals it’s not uncommon to surrender our own voices in “being represented.”’”

“Correspondingly, I think demonizing any claimed figures of oppression falls under dogmatic and uneducated culture. To me, figures merely represent structures of oppression much larger than one person — structures including not only the aforementioned figures of one’s life, but also one’s self and much more.”

In these quotes, Jimmy firmly positions himself as a serious advocate against oppression who encourages the reader to not take his words as gospel, but only as his particular view in relation to society.  Jimmy is candid about his own quest for knowledge and his “suspicion” of knowledge or power that is handed down from those in authority.  Here, Jimmy makes clear his suspicion of authority springs from the knowledge he has gained about the systemic oppression institutions enact through individuals, including those of diverse backgrounds, to perpetuate an inequitable status quo.

Jimmy also positions himself as an advocate for self-education in these baseline texts. Consider the following quote from Keep Reading, an opinion piece that encourages students to  inform themselves about the issues they will encounter on the voting ballot.  

“But it is not my intention to tell you what to do with this information. Right now it is only my intention to ask that you go and seek the information for yourself and encourage others to do so as well.” 

Here Jimmy positions himself as someone who encourages readers (who he assumes to be his peers) to investigate political issues for themselves, not someone who gives hard and fast advice. He would rather encourage others to inform themselves so they can find their own truth and explore the collective “truths” in conversation with others’ individual truths. 

The firmness in which Jimmy speaks projects a voice that is serious, contemplative and conscientious of the impact a message can have.  What is clear here is Jimmy writes with the goal of inspiring action or to get the reader to contemplate issues from a new angle.  

What is also clear in Jimmy’s baseline texts is his control of high-level sentence construction and vocabulary. Jimmy clearly projects himself as an educated individual through the vocabulary he uses in the text above. The complex structure of Jimmy’s sentences also reflects a vocal cadence that uses strategic pauses and a bevy of clauses to emphasize particular points in his arguments. Jimmy’s cadence gradually unwinds, which makes for an organic formatting of the text that mirrors a vocalized argument or conversation. Organic formatting that mirrors vocalizations is typical for text written in the blog genre.  Jimmy demonstrates cadence control in Traumatized Bodies where he writes: 

“To name just one such instance: When police take you into custody, they attack you not just with their own imposing, uniformed bodies, but with the bodies of concrete walls that limit your eyesight, the bodies of voyeuristic police cameras watching your every move, and with the bodies of cold steel handcuffs that weigh down your wrists, as well as other instruments that enclose themselves upon your body.”  

In this passage, we see the deftness in which Jimmy infuses each phrase of this sentence with the physical senses of sight and feeling to give the reader the feeling of being thrust into panopticonic incarceration. Jimmy also uses repetition of the word “bodies” to emphasize the reduction of the individual, which encompasses the spiritual, the logical and the heart, to a nameless, faceless, physical entity that is violated in the incarceration system.  The passion behind Jimmy’s voice in this text carries places the reader in a situation they probably have never experienced, being arrested and jailed, to encourage them to consider the impact our so called justice system has on individuals and, by extension, our society.  

Putting the reader in the moment through detailed, hypothetical examples has a different impact than the academic standard of quantifiable or even some qualitative data.  It produces a visceral emotion because the reader can see themselves in the situation, they have placed themselves in the other’s shoes, so to speak. I find this to be the most interesting aspect of Jimmy’s voice and messages.  Jimmy doesn’t just ask the reader to think about issues.  He challenges them to feel the fallout of those issues as well.  

Jimmy’s approach to writing is critical in an age where life is data driven.  It becomes easy to intellectualize an issue when an individual cannot see or feel the outcomes of that issue in real life.  Intellectualism doesn’t necessarily lead to action.  More often, it leads to a lot of philosophizing, papers and armchair quarterbacking.  According to the Heath brothers (2010), if you want to make an individual or group change, you have to make them feel something.  Jimmy activates those feelings in his writing with the goal of bringing about change.

Syntactical Regression and Sardonic Enthusiasm: An Analysis 

With this idea of evoking complex feelings through rhetoric to bring about change in mind, I turn to the work Jimmy completed for Aggie Voices.  In these pieces, Jimmy’s voice takes a dramatic shift from advocacy to upbeat enthusiasm (?) in his Aggie Voices posts.  The sophisticated nature of Jimmy’s sentence construction and vocabulary use is dialed down slightly.  What is more interesting is the laissez-faire seriousness that is present in all of Jimmy’s other writing is nowhere to be found in any the Aggie Voices posts. 

Take this excerpt from The Seminar for example:

“It really depends on your major, but there are still some general customs that apply. In my own experience, there’s one kind of class structure that I would recommend to anyone from any major! It’s called the seminar. By its official definition from UC Davis’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, the seminar course is described as “[a]n exciting program of innovative seminars that reflect instructor’s intellectual interests. These once-in-a-lifetime courses promote intellectual exchange, critical thinking and community.” By my own definition, I’d posit that it’s the best kind of class you can take at the UC, EVER!”  

The Seminar is a well-written post that integrates some of Jimmy’s vocabulary along a smidgen of his ideas about “critical thinking” and “intellectual exchange. However, it is clear there is an imposition from an outside force on this piece’s format. The Seminar closely resembles the bullet format that was preferred by the Office of Strategic Communications, not the organic, cadence driven blog format Jimmy typically uses. 

I reasoned this piece had an enthusiastic tone because exclamation points are sprinkled throughout this piece (8). I was taken aback by the exclamation points because in Jimmy does not use this punctuation to emphasize his arguments.  In fact, Jimmy’s argument style shifts as a result of this punctuation, moving him from a writer who encourages a reader to consider an issue to a writer who is doling out advice point blank.     A high level of enthusiasm, happiness and advice giving is also evident in Jimmy’s other Aggie Voices posts. 

Consider these excerpts from Ruby-Red Schwinn:

“It had been ages since I owned a bicycle, so when I finally settled on Gorgeous, it wasn’t just a set of pedals for me, it was special. With a fierce red exterior, a small light frame, and a fresh new feel to it, Gorgeous was the one!

To make things better, Davis being one of the greatest cities for bikers in the nation made our pairing doubly awesome. Together, Gorgeous and I explored the claim and found that it’s true; Davis is where your bike wants to be for its gigantic bike lanes, its overwhelming selection of bicycles, its bike tournaments, and a slew of other reminders that cars are cool, but bikes just give you that connection, man!”

“ Once you have your bicycle, there’s a code to learn about; namely, hand signals. My advice to you: don’t underestimate their power! While you can ride around however you like, it’s courteous to your fellow cyclists to be familiar with the code and to make use of it.”

In Ruby-Red Schwinn, some of Jimmy’s voice comes through when he  addresses the reader as “man” and when he mentions having a conversation with the owner of the Bicycle Depot in Ruby-Red Schwinn. However, in this post Jimmy goes against his nature  again to offer advice to the reader.  Also, in this post, Jimmy’s vocabulary is scaled back even further,making his voice sound like it was written by a high school junior who wrote a quick report, not an experienced college senior from the English department.   An overwhelming number of exclamation points cropped up in this post again (10 in this post) which convey an enthusiastic tone.  

 That tone was a serious sticking point for me because I have some doubts as to whether the enthusiasm that is projected in these pieces should be taken at face value.  Comparing Jimmy’s writing for Aggie Voices to the baseline texts, the interviews we did for the Diversity Forum and then triangulating that information with what I know about Jimmy’s personality led me to feel Jimmy’s Aggie Voices posts could have been written from a subtly sardonic stance. I can’t speculate as to whether that stance was intentional, what I will say is that as a writer I have experienced and devoutly believe in the transmutability of a writer’s feelings on the messages they generate.  Even if the writer actively suppresses an emotion to complete a text, some aspect of their emotions will be infused in their work. Usually, a writer suppresses their feelings to create text for some type of personal gain, but that text runs the risk of being flat and boring if the author was bored/disconnected, or outright insincere.   I feel transmutability might responsible for some of the interpretations readers find in text that were not intended by the author of the text.  So perhaps Jimmy did not mean to have an underlying sarcastic tone, but that is what comes across to me when I see a deluge of exclamation points in these works.  

The tone I’ve found here would not be evident to the common reader who just happened to click on the post from the UC Davis website.  I can only pick up on this undercurrent because I know what Jimmy’s voice sounds like in work and everyday conversation. I know that voice can be subtly subversive and flippant, which is something I really enjoy about Jimmy.  If Jimmy did intend to write this in a sardonic tone (I plan to ask him about this because I’m dying to know), that approach would reflect Jimmy’s confession during our Diversity Forum sessions that he has harbored a  “certain kind of hostility against having to clean up [his] language (pg. 11, Interview Transcripts)” to be successful in school environments.  For Jimmy, switch to a code that is acceptable in the academic sphere isn’t just a strategy diverse students can be used to navigate the institutional environment, as has been argued elsewhere.  It is a subtle indicator that the institutional space is not safe for Jimmy and people like him to be their authentic selves and communicate in the way that feels most comfortable for them. Codeswitching, Jimmy argues “dissuades a person to a certain extent from trying to communicate.”   

That said, I do not feel the peppy voice that is on display in the Aggie Voices blog is not a facet of Jimmy’s diamond, authentic voice in any regard. Jimmy is a drop dead serious intellectual with social issues at the forefront of his consciousness. That seriousness and commitment to social change is clearly demonstrated in Jimmy’s various online publications, the interviews we did on and off air, his fiction (see...) and how he describes his own actions in 20 Years After. I’m not saying that Jimmy is a morose, misanthropic person who is not capable of joy or enthusiasm for the simpler things in life, like his bike.  What I am saying is that I believe if Jimmy were to show that side of himself in his writing, I don’t think his happiness would be portrayed in such a simplistic, cheerleaderish manner.   What we’re seeing on display in the Aggie Voices posts is the cubic zirconia voice passing off false coin, giving the administration what it wants, hyper positivity in bullet points.  Moreover, the Aggie Voices posts are grossly off message when compared to Jimmy’s other rhetoric.  They are the only posts that consistently ignore issues of race, class, incarceration, poverty and social activism.  ALL of Jimmy’s other writing and spoken rhetoric address those issues. So, with these examples from Aggie Voices we can see Jimmy on the surface level is communicating what the administration wants to hear but on a deeper level he is communicating a resentment at having his messages micromanaged and his feelings being reduced to an overly simplified form.  

When I spoke to Jimmy about the tembre of voice that was valued at Aggie Voices, he deftly pointed out:  

“It’s a journey in the writing, it’s a journey in the reading, and they wanted to chop down that journey, and just get to why UC Davis was an absolutely amazing campus with no problems, and with no issues of racism and sexism and class.... This speaks to where UCD is still at, even as it supposedly wants to gain this idea of diversity, it is insulting the very people who they’re seeking it from.”

What Jimmy is getting at here is in the rush to co-opt diverse voices, the school neglected to also integrate the complicated truths those voices wanted to share. What I found in my analysis of the text reflects what Jimmy disclosed during our interview about his conflicted feelings as he wrote for Aggie Voices.   Jimmy felt as though he had  “enticed to sound a certain way for Aggie Voices (pg. 18, Interview Transcripts),” that he had been lured in to tell stories, but ultimately it became apparent to him that he was just “a commodity... some sort of object  (pg. 17, Interview Transcripts)”the Office of Strategic communications could use as a tool to portray the school in a positive light.   Jimmy claims he writes “with enthusiasm (pg. 17, Interview Transcripts),” and approaches storytelling “with honesty, with humor, with criticism, with contemplation, and ultimately with optimism about what is going on, but... an optimism” that is “reach[ed] through getting through these difficult steps (pg. 19, Interview Transcripts).”  

Those difficult steps were clearly omitted in Jimmy’s Aggie Voices posts because social justice issues and the complicated emotions social justice conversations dredge up simply were not welcome in that space.  It could be argued the tangled emotions social justice activists bring up won’t sell.  I counter, being real about those issues does attract students who are critical thinkers who want to engage about ideas, but those students probably won’t come from the white monoculture.  Jimmy’s voice got whitewashed to keep those students comfortable while portraying a brown face to give potential students of color the illusion that everything is hunky dory in Davisland.  That whitewashed voice joins in with the chorus, one note monolithic university voice.  It is a voice that is blissfully and intentionally ignorant of every vocal movements on campus, like the ASCUD’s vote in 2015 to divest in Israel.  That voice also overlooks more negative forces on campus,by refusing to condemn the students who “spoke” against the predominantly Latino Kappa Sigma fraternity through an attempted arson, or to tell the young men who gang raped a biracial young woman in the campus arboretum they do not represent our community.  

Yes, these events are ugly.  Denying that they occurred, however, is even uglier. Denial of the harder issues on campus sends a signal to the bad actors that their behavior will be overlooked.  Allowing students to confront the bad behavior of their compatriots head on in their writing demonstrates the institution is not only paying lip service about these issues, it shows that students, community members, and the administration are willing to examine these behaviors to create solutions that will mitigate violence and hate crimes in the future.    

When the institution denies or covers up negative happenstances or social activism that seeks to remediate negativity on campus, the school misses the opportunity to demonstrate that it is the progressive, inclusive space it claims to be. The missed opportunity to rectify wrongs through confrontation confirms the feelings of mistrust diverse students harbor when they come into college, those same feelings that drive them to refrain from using their authentic voice. Mistrust prods them into engaging with people in community developed safe spaces, not interacting with people in the institution they are paying to attend. Jimmy’s case is a prime example of this vicious cycle. As Jimmy points out in his reflection, the manipulation of his voice led him to neglect his post at Aggie Voices to pursue other social justice based opportunities that were more in line with his message and his hopes for societal change.

Rectifying the Omission of Voice

The constriction of voice Jimmy experienced was evident to me when Jimmy was generating those posts I describe above for the blog.  As I mentioned before, I felt it was my responsibility to give students another avenue for sharing their messages, which fed into the development of The Diversity Forum.   Jimmy was one of the main students I had in mind when I created the show, which is why he was one of my first guests.  

As I listen to the recordings now and look back on the transcript, I think it would be easy for a critic of this research to say  I led Jimmy in my line of questioning for the Diversity Forum. We’re so tightly focused on issues of equity, culture and race and in some parts of the discussion it seems like we’re in concert with each other.  The reality is that those recorded conversations sprung from informal conversations we had over the course of weeks.  In essence, these interviews are simply an on air continuation of those conversations that were shared because we thought the public would be interested.

I also notice something else as I listen to those recordings.  Jimmy’s rhetoric is simplified in comparison to his written text, which is not surprising considering the amount of editing a writer undergoes to build that linguistic precision into their work. The sentences are compound, not complex and his extensive academic vocabulary is traded in for code that is exclusively reserved for smart homies who are down.  What sets the simplicity that Jimmy conveyed during the Diversity Forum apart from the simplicity he projected in his Aggie Voices posts was the language was simple but the ideas were anything but. Also, the emotion I described before is there and it is raw. Take this portion of the second interview (9:10) where Jimmy discusses the challenges of being a chameleon for example:

“I just grew up with a lot of homies from the hood, and their interest or the things which surround us, the kinds of conversation we had, dealt with who was slanging, who was selling, who just got into the hood, or um what happened with the homie that got locked up. And everything in relation to the pigs, and the way that young people deal with an environment that sort of prompts them to grow up faster, and become, in my community, an environment that prompts them to become men faster, like tough men, men that are just ready to get down whenever need be.

And so um the kind of mindset that instills in a person is a very gritty sort of competitive sort of also insecure type of mentality, in which you know, you’re just trying to make sure that you get your respect, you’re just trying to make sure you’re known, that you’re known in the right sense...

...when I go back home, I’m in the same neighborhood, I see the same kind of friends that didn’t go to college, that didn’t get a job after high school, that are still kind of out there doing their thing. And just so much as speaking to them, it feels strange, it feels kind of awkward, and there’s almost a sense of that I’ve betrayed my friends, you know, people I grew up with, which both of us kind of experience.”

Initially, I thought Jimmy’s pared down language was the result of speaking extemporaneously on air.   Further examination of this text makes it clear to me Jimmy consciously or unconsciously switched code to speak directly to audience members who are like him- those who are caught in the liminal space between their cultures, communities and the academic realm.  This stripped down code where individuals drop knowledge based on their own experiences signals to listeners who speak the same code the level of the speaker’s trustworthiness.   When it comes to the type of code Jimmy uses here (there is no word for it.  It is a hybrid of hood slang and “standard” English), An untrustworthy speaker is one who uses inaccessible language, whether out of hubris or ignorance when trying to project their message.  The speaker who has been inducted into the community’s covert prestige (Labov, 2006; Trudgill,1983) knows not to alienate themselves from those who speak hood code by speaking in an elevated way, yet they still have to possess the sophistication to drop knowledge.  Jimmy walked that fine line here, which gave him the opportunity to address listeners from his community and those who might have never heard his perspective.  Most important, all of those listeners heard his message through a facet of Jimmy’s authentic voice.  

I argue here Jimmy was only able to project the voice that is experienced when listening to the Diversity Forum interviews because we were given a great deal of autonomy as students to project the types of messages we liked, as long as they were in the boundaries of FCC rules.  Although KDVS is housed on UC Davis academic campus, shows like The Diversity Forum are required to read disclaimers absolving UC Davis for the content contained in those show.  Those disclaimers allow KDVS to be a marketing tool of sorts for the school while also keeping school communication policy out of student-generated messages.

The analysis above demonstrates that the genre Jimmy typically publishes through, blogs, shifts based on the socio-emotional space within the academic institution. The contexts where Jimmy’s social activist voice was well-projected, The Aggie Newspaper and The Diversity Forum, were student or activist created contexts embedded within academia. While those contexts were informed by academic debates, on campus events and the mix of diverse cultures converging in one locale, those contexts mitigated the reach of the institution communication policies, so students were allowed to communicate more freely. Those non-institutional contexts made socio-emotional space for Jimmy’s intellectual voice by allowing his intellectual and emotional autonomy.

In contrast, when Jimmy wrote novel texts on the behalf of the academy, an institution that is supposed to augment an individual’s linguistic dexterity, his linguistic prowess was truncated and his philosophical sophistication was dramatically muted/constricted. The constriction that is apparent in Jimmy’s writing can be attributed to the sub-genre Jimmy’s writing in, the marketing blog.  What we’ve seen in Jimmy’s work for Aggie Voices is the effect marking, commoditizing, (mis)appropriating and prioritizing capital over communication has on the diverse individual’s voice.  In contrast, the voice we saw in Jimmy’s Diversity Forum interview is a voice that has been afforded a certain amount of protection from the powers of the institution while using the institution as a platform to project a critical message about social inequity, education, and institutions.  

In the next section, I will move on from text to examine the feedback students gave to me during on air and one on one interviews about the projection of their voice as community leaders and in their disciplines.  That feedback gives more insight into how the projection of voice is an act of confidence, interpersonal trust and self-trust in discipline specific knowledge.

[writingatthecrossroads]

Teaching Methods

(Methods Section 2)

Across the contexts I’ve described in the past three post I work to illuminate the wealth of opportunity well-developed writing skills can afford a diverse individual. I demonstrate the value of writing by teaching experimentation, advanced critical thinking about the relationship between the disciplines and society at large, evaluation of texts, the translation of analysis into writing, awareness of written genres and, finally, how to effectively apply genres in different contexts and disciplines to achieve the author’s desired effect.  To teach these writing skills I employ research-based pedagogies that are built upon Genette’s  (1981; 1997) theory of transtextuality, Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of zones of proximal development, and  the student-centered, dialogic pedagogy that is advocated by Freire (1970) and Bakhin (2004).  In this post, I will describe the theoretical foundations of my teaching strategies, how those theories manifest in practice and how those practices shifted from context to context.  

The Collective Unconscious and Genre

Half the work I do with students is teaching them to decode genres so they can write for specific contexts and audiences. I agree with Bruffee when he argues “traditional classroom learning” has rendered diverse students “unprepared (24)” to tackle advanced academic writing “in the first place” because traditional approaches focus on covering up student differences instead of providing a means to effectively communicate their uniqueness to diverse groups of people.  One difference that is covered up during instruction are the varied levels of genre awareness students bring to the classroom and how that awareness is informed on an individual level by students’ cultural backgrounds.  Among compositionists, I partially agree with Friedman (1993; cited by Devitt,2004 ) when she argues against explicitly teaching genre because the endeavor could fall into rote mechanical practices and would fail to address the totally of genres simply because it is impossible for an individual teacher to understand and convey every aspect of all genres.   However, I also partially agree with Devitt who, in response to Freedman and others, who  argues ignoring students’ genre use and failing to describe it makes genres a part of the hidden curriculum (Devitt citing Christie, 1985). Devitt concludes, “If we teach a genre explicitly, we will inevitably teach it incompletely, but students will understand more about it than they would have if we had taught them nothing about it at all”(p.341).  

In this research and my teaching, I built upon these two seemingly conflicting perspectives by coming to the conclusion that as a teacher I do not have to completely teach genres because students already have a great deal of genre knowledge, whether consciously or subconsciously.  The trick is to bring genre knowledge to the forefront of students’ minds and to get them to meta-cognitively think about the knowledge they already possess in regards genres. This realization addresses issues of impossibility and the dangers of rote practice because it opens space for students to access their own funds of knowledge (Moll, 1992) and gives more possibilities for students to add to their funds of knowledge through collaborative learning that works within students’ zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978).  

I take a layered approach to understanding genre and how culture influences they way they are perceived.  First, I strive to transcend the cultural, the sexual and the racial by tapping into our most basic human understanding of genre.   The most primal genres, like the lyric poem, the argument, the epic journey are a part of humanity’s collective unconscious as defined by Carl Jung. The genres and the archetypes they contain form the base upon which our individual and culture derived understandings of genre build upon, which is why genre knowledge is mostly intuitive, unconscious and extremely difficult to teach.  Thus instead of starting with a genre and trying to transmute my understanding of genre to students’ minds, I use the Socratic method to get students to articulate and compile as many aspects of a genre as we can in a group setting.  

After those understandings are articulated, then I invite students to share their cultural and experience-based perspectives on a genre so we can understand how genres change and act across contexts and cultures. I encourage students to compare those understandings with their classroom colleagues. Sometimes students come to different understandings and decide to stick with their own. More often than not, they integrate their colleagues' understandings if those ideas dovetail with their own.   Once the group has reached some modicum of consensus on what constitutes a genre, we then discuss how society’s expectations dictate how the writing that is embedded in a particular genre will “act” when it is released to an audience.  Discussing how a genre acts “in the wild (Soliday, 2011)”  helps students have the foresight to preemptively modify their language or structure  to meet the needs of audience expectation while getting their messages across. 

Trans-textualism and Critical Thinking

Once students feel comfortable with framing their messages in a particular genre I use a transtextual pedagogic approach that encourages students to think critically about their text, the texts they are using as resources, and how the texts on their topic interacts in relationships that ultimately shape how the subject at hand is perceived in academia and society at large. According to Gérard Genette transtextuality is defined as “textual transcendence of the text” or  ”all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (1981; 1997). In Genette’s typography of writing those relationships can be:

1. Intertextual, the simultaneous presence of more than one text within a text. 

2. Paratextual,  the relationship between the text its surrounding text.

3. Metatextual, the criticism of the ideas in one text that is embedded in another text. 

4. Architextual, the generic positioning of a text as indicated by the title.   For the purposes of this project, I build on Genette’s definition of architextuality by including the generic positioning of a text as indicated by the genre markers embedded within the text.

5. Hypertextual, which is the extension of a text by a following text or, in the context information technology, text that leads a reader to another text. 

Students and I uncover the relationships texts have with one another through in class or one one one discussions. During those discussions, the students and I make webs of connections between ideas and the rhetoric surrounding those ideas across disciplines.  Though I never explicitly define Genette’s topography for students (I always fear talking about it will come across as discipline-specific mumbo-jumbo to students), in general, students are usually able to pick up on how texts influence other texts and how those texts influence the writing they create.  

For example, when the McNair scholars initially approach the GRE analytic writing task they view it as just a standardized test with an arbitrary prompt that doesn’t mean anything in real life. Throughout the course of my class, I work with students to see how the textual problems in the GRE (and other standardized tests) are informed by other text.  Revealing that information unveils the real writing task students face- synthesizing the rhetoric about an issue based on all those texts to develop their own arguments about the issue at hand in their writing. Once they gain that understanding they are able to see the GRE writing prompt is not just an exercise that tests how well a student does at taking tests.  Gradually the students come to realize the skill it takes to synthesize multiple texts to develop a novel argument during the GRE writing section is a skill they will use every day in graduate school. 

Take this Issue task prompt for example:

A nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.

This prompt, like the others in the GRE Issue Topic Pool,  comes off a little opaque for the uninitiated student.  It is easy for a student who doesn’t have insider knowledge about how writing prompts are crafted to fall into the trap of taking an either/or approach (either it is good for all students to study the same curriculum or not) when drafting their response. At best, a student who takes a simple dualistic approach to GRE prompts in the form of the standard five paragraph essay will score a 4.   

I have students take a step back from simply diving into the prompt to avoid falling into the dichotomy trap.  I push students to question every aspect of the prompt so they can come to understand who wrote the prompt and why they would write it.  In class, I invite students to imagine what type of person would create this small piece of text.  They’re always shocked to find out these types of writing prompts are not computer generated or written by some distant, unimaginable “testing experts.” Verbal portions of writing tests are typically written and scored by writing nerds like yours truly.  Knowing what kinds of people write the test makes it easier for students to imagine what kind of mindset manifested the prompt. 

Once students begin to understand the ghost in the machine of the test, I ask students what they think “the word nerd friends in the parallel universe of standardized testing” are trying to get at with this prompt.   I ask them if there is anything in history, literature or current events that could inform the creation of this prompt. Once we’ve had an extensive discussion, I show them other texts that have a clear relationship to the prompt we’re examining using digital resources.  In the case of this prompt, I usually show students the Common Core Curriculum, the PISA exam that sparked the creation of the Common Core, information on No Child Left Behind, background information on the people who created the Common Core, debates in the news about the curriculum and instances in history where a national curriculum was instituted for better or for worse (Nazi Germany anyone?).  We talk about the relationships and the dialogues between those texts and how this testing prompt is prompting test takers to engage in the dialogues surrounding national curriculum. 

By the end of this exercise, students come to realize the prompt is not pulled from outer space. and the word nerds are not trying to stump them.  The people who have drafted these prompts write them with the expectation that test takers read the newspaper every once in a while to get informed about the issues happening in the world around them.  Moreover, they expect test takers to have ideas of their own that they are able to expound upon.  The underlying assumption is individuals who aspire to attend graduate school are not critical thinkers and responders.  In short,  every prompt on the GRE writing portion is a gimmie because they are based on widely available texts.  Once students get that understanding, it is easier for them to investigate, compile and critically analyze texts that relate to the topics on the GRE.  Moreover, once students master this skill, it is easier for them to replicate the strategy of understanding the perspective of individuals who draft writing prompts (their professors) and respond to those prompts in a sophisticated manner for their other classes.   

The resulting outcome from the transtextual pedagogies I have used in my teaching is students come away with intertextual and metatextual understanding of texts across genres and context. Students develop sophistication of written message and their ego strength,  two variables Emig (1971) identified that affect the length and nature of students’ writing process, as they relate to drafting a sophisticated argument that takes into consideration all of the rhetorical information students have knowledge of on a particular subject.  Once students can define for themselves how texts are in conversation with each other, it makes it easier for them to enter those conversations. 

“Teaching” Genre and Style Experimentation

To transform Genette’s expanded theory of transtextualism into a viable pedagogy, I balanced that theory with the experimental grammar pedagogy that is advocated by Bakhin (2004). Bakhtin’s (2004) research on grammar focused dialogic pedagogy emphasizes style and device development as a way of moving past focusing on grammar mechanics and puts emphasis on developing sophisticated messages that are grammatically correct. Bakhtin begins his argument with the following:

“One cannot study grammatical forms without constantly considering their stylistic significance. When grammar is isolated from semantics and stylistic aspects of speech, it inevitably turns into scholasticism.”

Bakhtin goes on to argue Russian teachers, and, in turn, their students, are typically trained in the most cursory way on the interplay between grammar and stylistics. After asserting grammatical forms must be thought of in terms of their “expressive potential (p. 13)”, not simply mechanics, Bakhtin claims language teachers give generalized instructions like, for example, limiting the repetition of the word “that (p.14)” and to select forms that sound the best in the sentence.  Bakhtin concludes, “such answers are inadequate, and, furthermore, essentially incorrect” (p.15).  Bakhtin claims the outcome of this instruction is as students progress through schooling, their lively personalized style shifts to an impersonalized, clichéd, “colorless (p.23)” bookish style that mimics what they perceive to be academic writing. This shift is a crystallization of the student fear that any sense of style will corrupt their work.  Students write for the eyes, not intonation and gesture, yet their put upon erudition, unfortunately, is the sign of a “half-educated writer (p.24),” not of a writer with a sophisticated message.

Instead, Bakhtin proposes a dialogic pedagogy in which students experiment with reconstructing sentences from model texts as a group.  During this process, students manipulate the sentences in multiple ways so they can see how the meaning and style of a sentence shifts with each sentence’s iteration and to make clear grammatical changes can be more than a “simple mechanical process.” After this type of experimentation, students are encouraged to incorporate this practice into their writing under the guidance of an instructor. 

Morrell (2004) asserts the type of pedagogy Bakhtin advocates can be a vehicle of engagement for “teachers, as transformative intellectuals” (p.90) when working with diverse students. I concur with Morrell, which is why I’ve made student experimentation in writing a focal point of my teaching.  Instead of using model texts as Bakhtin advocates, students used drafts of their own text to experiment on. During the editing phase of student writing, I had students read their texts aloud so they could hear the voice they were projecting in their writing.  Once students could hear what they were projecting, students edited their work and experimented with sentences based on what sounded most effective to them while integrating their voices.  

What helped this experimental process was the contexts that I worked in were low stakes, meaning students received credit but they were not evaluated through grading. Students evaluated their own performance based on the completion of their projects, the goals they had for their own writing and whether they felt their messages were adequately conveyed to their respective authentic audiences. Self-evaluation opened up space for students to experiment more with their writing because they were not writing to meet the requirements of their professor (me). They were writing for their own growth.  My only requirement was students ensured their writing clearly articulated what they wanted to convey and that it be turned in on time.  

Students ended up presenting me with ideas of things they wanted to do with their writing and rhetoric.  Together we would discuss the myriad of options they could use to meet their goals.  Some of those approaches were generated by me but the bulk of the approaches were defined by what the students wanted to see in their work and their ideas on how to make those rhetorical moves happen. For the most part, I highlighted the well-executed parts of the text that project their voice and messages with strength and effectiveness in my feedback in addition to pointing out problematic portions of the text. Students would then take their pieces and “try out” some of the moves they developed themselves, some moves I suggested and moves we hashed out together.  Finally, students selected the rhetorical moves they thought worked best for their projects and I would evaluate the work, again, solely based on message clarity and whether it was turned in on time.  

Morell (2004) argues that the type of pedagogy Bakhtin advocates requires a different type of assessment than what we are used to. However, Morell does not provide a definitive way to go about conducting that assessment. In building on Morell’s assertion, I believe a dialogic pedagogy demands the evaluation of the writing resulting from that pedagogy requires dialog as well. Aside from evaluating the students as their teacher, for the purposes of this research, I evaluated student writing development by measuring their level of engagement with the process (Did they make appointments with me? Did they complete the writing tasks we agreed to? Did they ask me or their peers writing questions?), whether their writing behaviors changed during that process, whether they developed more skill in describing how their writing process went.  I also assessed the students based on their own satisfaction with the process and their satisfaction levels with their finished products.  As you can guess, I spent a lot of one on one time working with students throughout and after their writing process to perform these assessments.  That said, the conversations I had with students one on one influenced group discussions because the engaged students brought their new knowledge to the group.  The group, in turn, built more knowledge from the group discussions, so even students who were not highly engaged gained more writing skill by interacting with the students who were more committed.

Freire’s Dialogic Classroom

It is clear in the teaching practices I described above the dialogic classroom strategies that are advocated by Freire (1970) are interwoven into every teaching strategy I use.  Although I advocate explicit writing instruction, the explicit ideas that are discussed in class arise from student knowledge and experience.  I play the part of group discussion facilitator and a more experienced colleague.  I may be viewed as an “expert” by students, but I remind them they are experts in their own knowledge as well.  I am there to “fill in the gaps” so to speak of some of the blind spots they may have about writing. They are also there to point out my blind spots and tell me when I am missing something so we can investigate the answers together.    Taking a democratic approach where all the participants (including my teaching colleagues) contribute knowledge and hold one another accountable in a respectful manner gives rise to a safe space that is not only accepting of students diverse backgrounds but is dynamic in that it integrates students’ cultural knowledge and lived experiences into the task at hand- boosting students linguistic dexterity. 

The teaching practices that result from the integration of these theories:

1. Exposes students to diverse types of texts, literary practices, rhetorics and registers through reading & writing to promote student linguistic dexterity.

2. Encourages students to make comparisons between genres.

3. Teaches students how to critically examine texts.

4. Provides the space for students to practice writing varied genres and literary devices.

5.  Teaches students to metacognitively transfer the skills learned from one genre to another to improve writing skills.   

6. Empowers students with methods they can use to teach themselves new writing skills long after instruction has ceased.

But Wait, There’s More...!  Context Specific Teaching Strategies

The 10 Step Method for Building Vocabulary

Having the skill to building a high-level vocabulary was of vital importance to the McNair scholars.  They needed that skill to best the GRE and to take with them to graduate school where they’d have to learn sophisticated, discipline-specific language.  Before I got the instructor position I had developed a vocabulary strategy to help diverse students because the students I previously worked with consistently reported vocabulary development as their number one writing challenge in postsecondary school. 

In composition studies, it has been well documented that entering the various academic disciplines requires the acquisition of discipline-specific registers or vocabulary. Blumner (1990) stresses the crucial role discipline-specific language plays in a scholar’s academic success.  He asserts gaining mastery over the peculiarities of a discipline’s register is a prerequisite for “acceptance into the academic community (p.35).  Bean (2001) and Goshert (2011) suggest dictionary and context review strategies (Bean, p.138. Goshert, p. 63) are adequate approaches students can utilize to meet this prerequisite.Yet these approaches are not in line with the discoveries researchers in cognitive psychology and linguistics have uncovered over the past twenty years about the nature of vocabulary acquisition in native speakers and second language learners.  Linguists Herman and Nagy (1987) assert dictionaries provide insufficient background information on complex words.  Studies in both fields indicate in order to master new terms, vocabulary must be presented numerous times to students while embedded within contexts to create webs of meaning and understanding (Webb, 2007; Pressley, Levin and McDaniel, 1987; Jenkins, Stein and Wysock, 1984). Blumner echoes these linguists and cognitive scientists when he argues students need multiple opportunities to try out different registers without judgment. He goes on to suggest writing centers a place to try on different discourses, which led me to focus on crafting a fast way to teach students how to teach themselves new vocabulary.

When I created the 10 Step Strategy, I wanted to combine vocabulary building with developing research skills while tapping into literacies outside of textual literacies. I transferred techniques I learned from literary criticism and poetry analysis to the academic context and condensed those methods into ten quick steps. To integrate a research component within the strategy, I made steps 1,2, 3, 5, and 6 research based so students would have to practice digging into information on the internet and in libraries to create their own word contexts, not just have contexts handed to them by the teacher.  

Step 1,word deconstruction, also provides students with the opportunity to tap into their prior knowledge and “chunk (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000, p.32)” that information into their word root schema if they know a ranges of roots, prefixes, and suffixes as I did when I first encountered the word panopticon. In general, I made the assumption students would have limited knowledge of word roots and would have to look up the roots of some words.  I stress “some” here because when I did three workshops with diverse students in 2012 and 2013 to test the pedagogies in this dissertation, some students knew the root of “opti” and others knew “pan.” When students pooled their knowledge, they got really close at guessing the definition without me saying a thing. In this research, I found students can pool their knowledge of roots more often if they have the opportunity to regularly deconstruct words in groups.  

Steps 4 and 9 rely on visual literacy to help students who learn through images rather than words while step 7 taps into students’ orality. Typically, teaching steps one through nine strategy takes 7-10 minutes. What usually makes this pedagogy a longer lesson is drawing word maps based on the connections students make in relation to the word.  In addition to connecting instances of the word’s usage in real life through maps, I have students extend their word maps into word families that integrate other words that have the same roots, prefixes, and suffixes as the word they are trying to learn.    In every run of teaching this strategy, word maps always sparked lively critical discussions among students because the maps connect the word’s academic definition to phenomenon outside of the academy. Students reported this strategy is extremely helpful overall when they struggle to comprehend vocabulary from their disciplines because when the words are extracted from a wall of words and  into maps that are coupled with pictures, the student encodes the target word and other words into their long-term memory with chunking.

Writing in Practice, Not Just Discussion

Another strategy I swear by is making students write in class.  Yes, I make them. I don’t invite them to write like I do with other exercises.  Writing in class is required because students have the tendency to do their writing at the last minute if they do it at all.  For some students, my class has no teeth because I can’t punish their lack of work through grades.  Instead of punishing them by giving them an F, I make them perform under my watchful eye. It’s easy to intellectualize writing in classroom discussion especially for students who talk a good game.  It’s harder to put what we’ve intellectualized into practice in the moment.  

To mitigate the issues all talk and no action students experience,  I dedicated in-class writing time throughout the quarter.  After that writing period, students talk about their writing process and review each other’s writing at the end of class.  Discussing a piece after writing puts students in the hot seat.  It forces the students who have been in avoidance about their work to face their shortcomings.  It also gives all the students the opportunity to figure out what they’re doing right so they can replicate those strategies. Finally, they get knowledge about what their classmates are doing well so they can build on their successful practices. Together we go through the cycle of writing so we can see we all have the same “writer woes” of being burnt out on our topic, hitting writing walls, untangling sentences/ideas and, finally, feeling the exuberance of completing a solid draft.

During classroom writing time, I also write.  Working in front of students models what real, planned, incremental writing looks like.  Modeling incremental writing demonstrates the difference in quality between planned writing in a group context and writing a draft all alone at 5 am the morning the paper is due.  Working through the motions of scheduled incremental writing teaches students self-discipline in writing and helps them break bad habits. 

While there are other strategies I use with students depending on the circumstances, the strategies I describe above are the bulk of the work I did with the students  who participated in Aggie Voices, McNair Scholars, and the Diversity Forum. In the following posts, I will describe the results of my investigations in those contexts and conclude with an analysis of how student voice shifts based on student trust, comfort within a context and student self-confidence in their own discipline specific knowledge.  

[writingatthecrossroads]

When  Academic Language Becomes Discipline Specific

Context 3: The UC Davis McNair Scholars Program 

For the past 2 years, Thursdays and Fridays have been my favorite days of the week. Before then I loved Thursdays and Fridays because they heralded the coming weekend, with all its time to lounge, do absolutely nothing and think about nothing serious or academic at all.  Nowadays (writing that makes me feel sad because these days are coming to an end in a week and a half)  Thursdays and Fridays are the most mentally challenging days for me because I’m constantly plumbing the depths of my poetic mind to challenge the future scientists and professors of the UC Davis McNair Scholars program. And that experience is amazing.

The McNair Scholars Program is a federally funded TRIO program that was created to boost the number of diverse students who complete Ph. D programs, particularly in the sciences, by preparing undergraduates for graduate level work.  That preparation is accomplished through faculty-student mentorship, independent research in the student’s discipline, articulating student research in an article that is published in each program’s journal, GRE instruction and instruction in completing graduate school applications.  In addition to preparation for graduate school, McNair scholars are given academic support throughout their time as undergraduates and after they move on to graduate school. 

Currently, there are 151 McNair programs at colleges across the United States. Those programs and the students they support are a living tribute to Dr. Ronald McNair, the second African-American who went into space and whose life was tragically cut short  during the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster.  The story of Dr. McNair is inspiring, particularly as it relates to diverse students because his uphill journey is reflective of some of the issues McNair scholars face when pursuing their doctorates, like encountering micro-aggressions or just outright being discouraged by individuals who feel they don’t have a right or the ability to pursue doctoral studies.   This video from Storycorps encapsulates Dr. McNair’s story and one of the challenges he faced (I’m sure there were many more than this one) in his journey to get a doctorate.

  I feel honored I can be a small part of this legacy, so I take the work I do at the McNair scholars program very seriously. As the McNair Academic Journal Writing and GRE Analytic instructor, I get a chance to play the “mean, hard teacher” that gives the students a lot of difficult work out of love for them and their intellectual growth.  At first, I thought the students would hate me for my teaching approach, but these students are special, which is why they were selected as fellows. Across the three cohorts of scholars I have worked with, the UC Davis McNair Scholars are not just serious about their individualized research. The research they engage in invigorates their natural curiosity, which in turn motivates them to investigate even further, as research should.  These students’ dedication to their research makes them really love the fact that I lay down all the work with intensity, straight talk, rigorous exercises, an expectation of self-discipline and a dash of good old fashioned teacher care. 

Every Thursday morning when I walk into Undergraduate Research Center, where the McNair Program is housed, students are typically waiting for me in the conference room.  Some are making up classes they missed with me, others want extra help, some students want help with their papers with other classes and students from past cohorts come in to finish their journal articles.  From time to time we also have study sessions where we’re all writing together, me motivating the scholars on their papers and they, in turn, motivate me on this dissertation.  During office hours and classroom time, I constantly synergize with students to refine their research questions, develop strategic data collection methods, push their thinking on the presumptions that underlie their disciplines and teach them strategies to unravel their logic as to bring their own presumptions to the forefront of their consciousness.  I also make plain the connections between the types of thinking strategies they will need in graduate school and how those strategies relate to the verbal and written portions of the GRE.  

The work I do is just one component of the team effort that is put forth by all of the McNair graduate instructors. We instructors, who are graduate students of diverse backgrounds, teach from our own experience in addition to teaching content so the hidden curriculum of graduate schooling gets illuminated for the scholars.  We candidly tell the scholars how we’ve succeeded, what our strategies are and what we’ve learned from our mistakes so they can build on our experiences and, hopefully, go further than we have. The time we spend together working among ourselves and with the other instructors fosters a community atmosphere of collaborative scholars who are on different points of the same trajectory.  We all are learning from each other and supporting one another because we all want to see our colleagues, graduate and undergraduate, succeed.  

With that glowing image of what happens when the McNair Scholars team is together in mind, there is a hard reality to the program.  Every last single scholar is working on overdrive.  The scholars who participate in McNair balance full course loads, work multiple jobs and manage their personal issues in addition to doing the coursework and research that is required by the McNair program. The sheer amount of work each McNair scholar takes on guarantees their personal time will be extremely limited, especially when it comes to writing. These students welcome direct instruction because they literally don’t have the time for me to walk them through writing journeys where they “discover” the basic rhetorical moves for the genre structure of their discipline.  They need to jump straight to mastering how to execute rhetorical moves with finesse by practicing  literary techniques project the message, timbre, and style they want in their piece.  

The scholars also need a safe space where they can work collaboratively and get honest feedback before they show their mentors. Faculty mentors typically have an idea of what a good paper looks like in their discipline, but they may not have the language to adequately instruct students in how to create that type of work in their writing.  I work to bridge that gap with students so they can learn the rhetorical moves of their discipline before they present their papers to their mentors so mentors can focus on helping the scholars refine the theoretically based ideas in their papers.  To do that, I pull from my understanding of how so called, general “academic language” shifts from the general to the more precise as a learner moves higher up in each discipline’s ranks.  I also view the work I do with students as an opportunity to learn more about discipline specific lexicon and genre so I can preemptively help students meet the expectations of their mentors.  

For the purposes of this research, I interviewed these scholars to get a better understanding of how they had previously been enculturated into academic writing and whether that enculturation prepared them for the writing they were doing in the McNair program.  I also asked them about their specific writing styles, the origins of their voices and  whether they felt they were able to integrate their perceived authentic into the standards of their disciplines.  During our interviews, I also talked to students whether the additional explicit instruction, especially when it came to understanding and fusing genres, I provided during writing instruction deepened their higher-level writing skills in their eyes, because, ultimately only they could tell me whether they thought they evolved as writers.

The responses I got ranged quite a bit.  What surprised me was they weren’t defined based on the social sciences versus the hard sciences, as I thought they would going into the interviews.  Before I describe those findings, please allow me to give some deeper insight into the teaching methods I used and how they shifted from context to context.  After that, I will present my focal textual case study from two contexts (Aggie Voices and The Diversity Forum) and student interviews addressing voice. 

#mcnairscholar

[writingatthecrossroads]

When Old Media Becomes New Again

Context 2: The Diversity Forum on KDVS Radio

                                   (Image source: pacificanetwork.org)

If you go down to the basement of the soon to be renovated (razed?) Freeborn Hall and meander down the windowless passageways, eventually you’ll stumble KDVS radio,  the home of freeform radio in Davis since 1963. As you enter the station, the silence that permeated the hallways right outside the station doors is enlivened with the sounds of experimental interviewers, non-mainstream music, experienced djs, syndicated shows  and community advertisements.  These are all blended down together then disseminated on 10,000 Hz bandwidth. In the station student volunteers can be found editing audio in sound proof booths, exploring or cataloging the extensive music library, having fundraising meetings or planning future events.  

What happens down at KDVS can seem a bit antiquated at first, particularly since radio as a form of media has been overshadowed by new digital media streaming platforms (like Spotify) that allows listeners to obtain what they want to hear when they want to hear it. However, despite past claims that radio is a dying media form, radio has become stronger than it ever has been, as demonstrated by radio’s gains in listeners during 2015 (McIntyre, 2015). 

Radio’s current strength is reflected in KDVS’ listenership in the Davis community and beyond.  For example, KDVS was the first media outlet to cover The UC Davis Pepper spray incident.  As a result of KDVS staffers’ position on the ground, NPR worked with KDVS to syndicate those student reporters’ journalistic pieces nationwide. On an individual level, deejays have the opportunity to extend the reach of KDVS’ listenership through their own popularity.  Most famously, DJ Chief Xcel of the rap duo Blackalicious got his start at KDVS.  Also, Papa Wheelie, the deejay for the Sunday morning reggae Radio Wadada Show, boasts listeners as far as Japan who listen via streaming of prerecorded shows. Papa Wheelie’s example shows the bridge where the new digital media platforms converges with the old platform of radio. Individual DJs and talk show hosts at KDVS and world wide have been able to democratize radio’s old media approaches because digital equipment has made it easier to disseminate audio to audiences through podcasts and audio streaming, making the comeback Freddie Mercury predicted for radio in Queen’s hit song,Radio Gaga, real in our time.   

KDVS’ wide listenership gives student volunteers and community participants the opportunity to connect with communities they may not typically encounter because it provides access to a media platform while lowering barriers for entry, because the station offers deejay classes to anyone who would like a show.  What’s important about this wide dissemination in regards to this project is students and community members can use their voices as they see fit to project their own messages without directly having to “fight” any system.  Although the station is run on an academic campus, throughout the history of the station student volunteers have fought to exercise free speech within the studio walls.  As a result, the station has to comply with FCC law, but not school policies in regards to communication.  That difference is made clear when the KDVS- UC Davis disclaimer is read before any public affairs show. 

Initially I was attracted to KDVS as a former New York house music DJ, not as an activist or a student researcher.  Long before this project began, working in academia left me longing to be behind the turntables again, interacting with an audience through sound. I kept reading about student voices in the literature, but I felt disconnected from the theories about voice because they seemed disconnected from sound itself. For example, Bowden develops the image of a carnival when trying to define voice. That image relies on the physical sensations of sight, the kinesthetic and sounds that overwhelm the senses to encapsulate all of the tonalities, the varying speeds, the range of lexicons and all the other characteristics the voice encompasses.  I’m not sure that metaphor works because it divorces the voice from the body. Before we can intellectualize a sound, or a voice, by interpreting it within the context in which it was experienced, we have to physically hear it first.  Even the deaf can “hear” to some extent by feeling the physical vibrations of a sound with their hands instead of their ears.  I feel before we can understand the voice in a text, we have to understand, to some extent, the physical voice of the author because their voice, or the voices of those around the author that they have internalized for better or for worse (see Ivanic, 1988 on ventriloquation)  will ultimately inform the voice on paper.  

As a poet who writes for the ear, I consider writing to be the original podcast, the most basic form of recording and preserving speech. That said, as a  poet living in this time in history, I have the choice to write or make a podcast.  I wanted to do both.  I needed to get back to the physicality of the voice and its sounds in order to better understand how the voice’s sound is solidified and preserved in writing. What came out of that craving was a collaboration with Nathan Ellstrand of the Cross Cultural Center to create a show called Versus, which compared old school and new school music in each genre. That experience was extremely rewarding, despite the fact that we were on from 4am to 6am on Tuesdays in the Summer. We got a handful of dedicated listeners who listened to us through streaming.  They said we were the cheeriest people on Earth at 4am. 

When I ran into message constriction at the Aggie Voices job site, I kept wondering if there was something else I could do to build a platform for student expression.   While I was working at Aggie Voices, I kept seeing email call outs from the KDVS Public Affairs Officer asking for people to make a show or at least play syndicated shows.  Thinking back to the freedom I had with Nathan, I saw those calls as an opportunity to do some of the things I couldn’t do at Aggie Voices.  I thought a public affairs show could open up space where specifically where students could articulate some of their deepest thoughts about ethnic diversity within academia without the constraints of tailoring their message to suit a professor or without requiring students to speak in “academic” language and without the pressure of grading.  

The Diversity Forum grew out of the desire to provide a safe space that cherished the free speech of diverse students.  The goal of the show was to promote the understanding and acceptance of diverse people across the UC Davis campus.  During the show guests talked about issues that ranged from rape culture and trigger warnings, to the implications of being Native American on a UC campus that harbors Native American remains. To get guests on air I used the connections I made during my time as the Cross Cultural Center’s GSR to ensure students from a range of backgrounds came on the show.  

My connections to diverse communities led students to trust me.  They would come on air to say things they would never write in a paper because I meet with them as an equal ( a diverse student and activist) and I presented myself as someone who was there to listen, learn from and appreciate their perspective while opening up a door for them to be genuinely heard.  

As “safe” as I tried to make the space, there was one aspect of the radio show that made it dangerous- the authentic, immediate audience.  Sometimes that audience acted in ways we didn’t expect.  Sometimes we would get calls from listeners who complained about the hip-hop we played because they heard one bad word but didn’t listen to the whole message of the song.  Sometimes listeners resonated with our messages too much, so much so they tried hijacking the show with their conversations.  I learned to preemptively curtail those callers to ensure the focus stayed on the student guests. 

The worst issue with audience proved to be how students imagined they would be perceived by the audience.  Students sometimes overestimated the reach of the show to the audience, and that scared them to the point where they would truncate their messages.   My teaching task ended up being developing work-arounds for students to mitigate the impact student perceptions of the immediate authentic audience on their messages.  Interestingly enough, some of those strategies proved helpful for the final context I worked in, at the McNair Scholars Fellowship program.  In the next post I will describe the McNair Scholars.  After that post I will overview the strategies I used in all three context and how those strategies changed from context to context.    

#kdvs #radioshow

[writingatthecrossroads]

When Institutions Compromise Student Voice

Context 1: Aggie Voices

“If they keep censoring students like this, the blog is going to suck.” 

I sucked in my breath, let it out slowly and replied to Joey, “Dude.  I know. You’re totally right.”   

Ohhhhh the truth bombs.  They are the most dangerous side of student voice, if you’re not prepared for it. Sitting at Delta of Venus having what was supposed to be a laid back conversation with student writer Joey Grey about a blog that was supposed to be laid back and empowering for student voices, I felt stymied as a teacher. I felt like I was in the teacher’s edition of Dave Chappelle’s skit series When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong. Usually I’m prepared to hear students’ personal truths because I pride myself on the ability to hear students out while reserving judgement, no matter if what they’re saying is honey to my ears or as harsh as a chainsaw on scrap metal.  What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that Joey’s truth closely reflected what I felt inside about the work we were doing but I never articulated to anyone.  We both felt the project we were working on was going in the wrong direction.

Here’s the back story:

In the fall of 2013 was my first quarter working for the UC Davis Office of Strategic Communication.  My job was to launch a blog that featured student stories and highlighted their individual voices.  From the start, the student blog Aggie Voices was designed to be a marketing tool that draws in prospective students. In accordance with that design student writers were to develop content that would be read by young people like themselves. The initial plan for my job as Aggie Voices Editor was to have the student writers go through a learning process of preemptively assessing reader needs in regards to interesting topics and meeting those needs in their posts.  Engaging unknown readers through the imagination before delivering work to the actual body of the previously imagined readership is a critical portion of writers’ process. Most diverse writers do not get the opportunity to formally engage a readership by beginning with an imagined audience then shifting to an authentic audience in academia, so writing for the blog was a good opportunity to gain skills in extrapolating reader tastes.  For Aggie Voices, student writers had to imagine how UC Davis potential students would react to their writing. Envisioning how potential students would react (sometimes the students thought of themselves in the past, sometimes they thought of freshmen) helped the students find the right tone, topics and approaches for their work.  

When I signed on to the team my goal was to encapsulate the conversations students have among themselves when they are walking across campus with a friend or studying with a classmate.  Those conversations are peppered with insider information about how professors operate their courses, the politics of getting into a sorority and where to find the right parties.  Profiling student stories!  Giving voice to student experiences! That’s the type of work I live for. I never imagined those conversations would be watered down, censored outright, or that I would be having hard conversations like the one I was having with Joey. 

When Joey and I discussed his submission for Aggie Voices, he was one of the first student bloggers we had who completed a post for the blog in the turn around time the Aggie Voices team had hoped for.  Initially Joey was enthusiastic about writing the piece.  It was a quick blurb about his experiences as a KDVS DJ, a role Joey relished.  The first draft the Aggie Voices team got from Joey was laugh out loud funny.  Unfortunately it had some cursing in it and it was definitely not PC.  I thought the PC parts could be problematic but worked around.  I didn’t have a problem with the cursing because they punctuated Joey’s jokes and because, hey, students are adults and sometimes they say “shit” and “hell.” Ok, let’s be real.  They say it a lot.  No biggie, right?  

Nope! Wrong, wrong, wrong.  

The UC Davis staff who worked on the team also thought the post was funny but not publishable.  They basically wanted Joey to rewrite a new post that was still funny but didn’t include his rude language, which was an integral part of his humor and...his voice. Joey tried to appease the team by editing his draft multiple times. However, the team kept sending it back, asking Joey to rework it even more.

By the time I caught up with Joey at Delta,  the way he looked me in the eye made it clear he was exasperated with the writing process we were undergoing together, especially since the work he was doing was only being compensated with a gift card to the campus bookstore, which is not a great motivator.   Listening to the way Joey talked at Delta made it evident Joey wrote the piece the way he spoke. Joey’s spoken cadence was punctuated by swear words, straight talk and funny rudeness.  Joey’s draft was turning into something that did not reflect his voice at all. Joey resented that fact because he thought he had signed up to express that voice. 

My supervisor suggested to me that I have a talk with Joey about “professionalism.” Ugh. I did no such thing. I didn’t want to turn into an “adult” lecturing a “kid” because, damn it, Joey and I were both adults.  Instead I struck a compromise with Joey- he edit the post according to my suggestions to keep in some of the funny bits but cut all the “bad” stuff, then submit it with a take it or leave it approach- either the department would run it or they could forget about Joey submitting.  They ran it.  

Despite the fact that Joey and I were able to reach a compromise, I knew Joey wasn’t the last student I would have problems with concerning voice.  I knew it would be an ongoing battle I would have to face as Aggie Voices’ blog editor, which it was. Joey’s example, and the example of the Aggie Voices Blog overall, highlights the problems that arise when an institution works to co-opt student voices for institutional gain and how institutional protocol clashes with students’ constitutionally protected freedom of individual expression. 

Institutional Co-opting Student Voice and Learning Outcomes

Joey’s example makes it clear there was a ideological disconnect between what the Office of Strategic Communication ( Orwellian doublespeak for the marketing department) wanted and what this student thought he should deliver. Originally the Office of Strategic communication advertised student blogger positions as an opportunity for students to tell their “stories” in their own voice for twenty to forty dollars per post. 

The main problem that caused a disconnect between the Aggie Voices staff and students was the Office of Strategic Communication’s goal points kept shifting. First the department stated their goal was to attract potential students to UC Davis.  When pressed about how they defined potential students, it was revealed over time that really their target audience was high school students and international students, which cut out a significant portion of the current student population, namely community college transfer students, older students and graduate students.  But sometimes they wanted transfer experience stories.  And sometimes they wanted graduate student stories.  Those constant shifts made it hard for students to anticipate who their audience was and what they should be writing about.  Ultimately those target audience shifts made it hard to capture an audience.  Initially we wanted potential students.  At the end we were only analyzing the metrics for hits, not who was behind those hits, so it was never really clear how effective we were at reaching our initial goal of attracting potential students. 

Shifts appeared in the type of copy the department wanted as well.  At first they wanted stories of student experiences.  The desire for stories devolved into how to tips for managing classes, showcasing fun things in and around Davis, or highlighting resources on campus.  The staff handed down formulas of how they wanted to posts to look.  They preferred quick blurbs with bullet points that included lots of links back to the UC Davis website.   Those preferences were pulled directly from corporate blog writing resources that focused on using formulas to tap into google analytics and thus push blog readership. The administrative team also mandated the tone of the posts.  All of the posts had to be 127% positive. There could never be a mention of challenges that weren’t overcome or remaining issues students had on campus. Posts that made even the briefest mention of challenges (even ones I wrote) were censored. The result was highly formatted work that took individual student’s voices and merged them into one monologic university voice. 

What the department really what they wanted was marketing copy written by students that made the school look good. Moreover, the “pay” that was advertised in the flyers wasn’t really pay at all. Instead of being given real money for their work, they were “paid” in gift certificates to the bookstore.  Eventually that “motivator” was taken away. Instead, the team focused on getting interns who would get some credit for writing.  Essentially the department wanted students to write bland copy for free and they got want they wanted by continually misrepresenting their objectives.  

The worst part outcome of the department’s bait and switch tactics was it turned really enthusiastic student writers off from the project. Some of the hard core writers who signed up for these jobs, didn’t (or couldn’t) read between the lines of the initial advertisement for bloggers. When they found out what their real purpose was on the team, writing for the blog wasn’t interesting for them because they wanted to tell real stories, not create generic marketing copy.  For the students who could meet the Office’s needs, writing the posts was easy for them, because they read (and wrote) like one page high school book reports. That said, after a few round of those types of reports, student writers lost interest quickly because the work wasn’t intellectually challenging. They were college seniors writing at the high school level.  Typically, the students who got the most out of their experience working for the blog were the visual artists who created images and videos because they could practice and refine their technical skills while creating appropriate marketing material.  Writers were left out in the cold as they were never given the opportunity to push their writing skill to a more sophisticated rhetorical level.

Old Media vs New Media

As I worked through this project with the students I kept having the nagging feeling that I was complicit in the whitewashing and tokenizing of diverse student voices by only presenting two dimensional triumph stories and upbeat copy about how great the resources are at the school. Here’s my confession: during every staff meeting in my mind, I called Aggie Voices, Aggie Sockpuppets. Just sayin.

In hindsight, I can see my intuition may have been correct.  A recent Sacramento Bee article revealed UC Davis spent thousands of dollars and used the Office of Strategic Communications to scrub negative posts about the university and to divert consumer attention by creating off topic content with overwhelmingly positive sentiments.   There’s a strong possibility the goal posts the student group aimed for kept shifting because they weren’t the real goals at all. Perhaps the real goal of Aggie Voices wasn’t to attract potential students, it was to generate content that would divert public attention from the pepper spray incident.   

The possibility that Aggie Voices could have been another component in the Chancellor’s overall cover-up scheme is concerning because it indicates the administration’s had lax ethical standards in regards to using students as pawns to improve the Chancellor’s image. The contract also demonstrates the administration had low regard for students’ and the public’s intelligence because the underlying assumption behind the internet scrubbing scheme is that once negative information was buried, the public would magically forget the past and simply buy into the positive messages they were presented with. That assumption implies the internet viewing public has limited critical thinking skills in so far as reaching conclusions about the institution based on recent events and discerning truth from those happenstances, not from marketing material. 

It’s clear from the contract and the approach the Strategic Communications team took to make the blog successful that the team was superimposing an old media paradigm on new media. Old media operates via subtle control of the information that is available for the public in an effort to generate a desirable image for the institution or product. That subtle control is typically exercised through controlling the information that is made available to old media outlets like the publishing industry, newspaper, television and mainstream film.

In contrast, new media is a convergence of participatory culture and collective intelligence (Socha and Schmid, 2014).  That convergence typically happens through the internet, but it can also occur in other mediums, like through visual arts or radio.  New media hinges on the participatory-culture creator/consumer who seeks out information and combines that information as they see fit before presenting it to other participatory-culture creator/consumers.  Participatory culture thus makes new media more dialogic in nature than old media.  As a result, if savvy consumers feel you’re talking at them rather than taking with them, they’ll tune you out.

In accordance with the contract’s recommendations, the University attempted to game the internet through analytics and thus gain old media styled, subtle control over what the public viewed by supplying carefully crafted media that was designed to shape viewers perspective of the school.Many of those recommendations filtered down to the Aggie Voices student team. What the admins and the consultants didn’t count on was how participatory culture would clash with that fabricated image.  

For example, the Strategic Communications team frequently hoped posts would go viral and they assumed using analytics and formulas would be enough to make the blog popular. Analytics boost readership to a certain extent, no doubt, but they do not make for internet breakers.   The team couldn’t grasp the fact that viral posts act like viruses; one person has to catch the fever before other people can catch it. The spread of viral posts across the internet is largely unpredictable. Viral posts typically catch on based on the level originality in the post, controversial or unpredictable content and if the content relates to the human experience. 

Internet users respond to unpredictability because it is novel.   Consider Netflix and Chill, Ryan Gosling “Hey Girl” Memes, a New York City rat taking home pizza. Not. Logical. At. All.  The formulas that generated bland copy never tapped into internet unpredictability or novelty, so post would plateau out at a few hundred views.  I get why the administrative team didn’t want to be too avant garde.  They had to protect their jobs so they needed to stay on the safe side of their work.  That said, it is extremely difficult to have safety and success on the internet. Getting attention on the internet is all about taking risks. 

In accordance with the idea of unpredictability and human experience, the most unpredictable part of the human experience spills out on the internet- our emotions, especially the emotions we’re supposed to suppress in everyday life. I like to joke, “The internet is the place for rage.” What I mean by that is if you want to get views, work people into a froth about something. Anything.  The more you can piss them off, the better.  The New York Times recipe for guacamole that added mashed peas is proof positive of that. People were outraged at the sacrilege of substituting peas for avocados.  Even President Obama commented on it.  The trick to internet rage is being able to handle the rage and transmute that emotion into more views by being in dialog with the anger and A) generating more anger with a controversial response or B) negotiating with that anger to reach a group consensus so the readership feels they have been heard.  In essence, the internet content creator has to be comfortable courting controversy if they want to be successful. 

                                                (Boo Hoo!)

At the root of the complications with Aggie Voices and the administration’s complications with internet scrubbing was the administration’s discomfort with controversy, volatile emotions and unpredictability.   The institution couldn’t handle the fact that UC Davis’ online image wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It responded by trying to make perfect copy that always seemed happy instead of courting the controversy that attracted attention to our school. That effort to make UC Davis sound like an academic Disneyland, in turn, made students sound like one-note Charlies.  Yes, the pepper spray incident made the school look bad.  But instead of covering it up, the administration could have used the incident to engage internet creator/consumers into a dialogue to demonstrate some of the more progressive values people on our campus have in regards to student issues. Running from controversy aggravated the situation and made more controversy.  Now the institution has more volatile emotion it has to handle.

The worst part about this situation is the energy that was used to suppress student voice could have been used to address the original concerns the student protesters articulated. If those issues had been resolved, students would have written the positive posts about the school on their own and the schools image would have genuinely changed.  No cover up would have been needed. 

Student Voice in a Compromised Context

Taking all of the issues described above into consideration in regards to the context students’ wrote in, in essence, the students on the Aggie Voices team were working to project their voices in an ethically compromised context since UC Davis sought to use student voice through deceptive means to suppress the voices of other students. For details on this please see page 2 the contract between Nevins & Associates and UC Davis, which describes co-opting student run media for the use in this cover up scheme. While we students will never get the time and energy we put in back, at least we can rest in knowing the school’s efforts backfired dramatically, causing more negative press in prominent news venues including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic.  

Knowing what I know now, I am thankful I followed my intuition in response to the administrators’ requests for formulaic, censored work. My first year on the blog I resolved to put the administrations’ wants on the shelf to focus on the students so we could get some learning out of our time together. To do that I ended up acting as a buffer between the students and the administration. I took the administrators’ suggestions with a nod and a smile in meetings and promptly forgot them when I met with students. I trusted the students to come up with ideas for their own posts and their own formats.  More often than not, students came up with ideas for the most successful posts on their own. As a team of student collaborators and colleagues, we focused on creating a safe space where we could communicate the student experiences with precision, personality, and sometimes humor. It was a space students and I worked to enjoy despite the pressure on us to create hyper-positive content.

It was in this milieu that I met Jimmy Recinos. As a social justice oriented writer, Jimmy was extremely perceptive about the control the institution pushed to exercise over his voice, the ramifications institutional control had over his development as a writer, how he was going to be perceived online as a Latino male student, and how the school would perceived through the projection of his voice. 

This complicated teaching (there’s a strike through there because I didn’t get to teach the way I would have done in an authentic situation) experience made me consider how these circumstances could happen to other teachers in informal spaces, or to formal teachers who want to integrate digital media into their writing classrooms. When I formulated specific interview questions for Jimmy and examined his data I considered the following questions in conjunction with the original research questions: 

What role does student voice/autonomy play in digital writing pedagogy and student writing development?

How is student writing development unique in the digital realm?

Do so called “old media” paradigms impact what instructors/administrators expect of writing from students who are operating from new media mindsets? 

How does the “authentic” audience shift based on those paradigms?

Under what circumstances does the projection of "student voice" become an echo chamber for the academic/administrative status quo?

What Jimmy discusses and the analysis of his writing is extremely revealing, especially when considered in light of the new internet scrubbing information, so please stay tuned for the next few posts!

[writingatthecrossroads]

Data Collection Methods

Research Methods Framework

The Deleted Drafts is a research study that uses creative ethnography to illustrate effective pedagogical strategies for diverse students in diverse contexts. To create a complete picture of students, their work and the environments they work in, this research combines the academic strategies of portraiture as defined by Lawrence-Lightfoot, qualitative interview methods, discourse analysis as taught by Karen Watson-Gegeo and genre analysis (Devitt, 2004, Swales, 2004)  with rhetorical strategies from online blogging, creative non-fiction, poetry and journalism based interview methods.   These methods were selected to illustrate in vivid language the nuances each student’s ethnic background, their personal history, their outlook on society influenced the rhetoric they generated when coupled with environment and instruction.  

These methods were also selected because they allow space for this researcher to meta-cognitively reflect on how my participation with students influences student work and how environments are shaped around students, which includes this student researcher. The ability to meta-cognitively examine my role in student learning is of critical importance especially given that I too am a student of color who walks many avenues between different genres in different contexts.  The understandings and findings I uncover about the students presented here are also findings I’ve uncovered about myself in this teaching and writing process.  Writing in the traditional academic format, which obscures the researcher and divorces the interpersonal connections between the participant and the researcher from the data, does not allow for the type of synergistic reflection I expect to produce in the resulting analyses.    

Participant Selection: Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

The ten informants for this study were writers for the Aggie Voices blog, interviewees for The Diversity Forum and McNair Scholars students I worked with during the 2013- 2014, 2014-2015 and the 2015-2016 school years.  All the participants who are depicted in this blog are over the age of 18.  These participants were willing to have their real name published in conjunction with the data that is reviewed, since the bulk of the textual data that will be analyzed is, was or will be made available to the public through 3 online sources, The Aggie Voices Blog, KDVS Radio, and The McNair Scholars Journal.

Before submitting text or being interviewed, each participant read an information sheet that describes this research and they were given the opportunity to ask questions in regards to the research topic, the methods of research, how their name will be used before providing consent to participate in this research.

Recruitment Methods

The sample for this study is a convenience sample as all potential participants worked with the researcher in the venues described above.  Individuals who expressed interest in participating in this study when the project was first conceptualized were contacted individually in person, via personal email or telephone. The consent form and information sheet were made available to potential participants via email when they were contacted.  No students were compensated for their participation in this study.

Interview Methods

Participants had the option to have their text and radio interviews analyzed without consenting to a private interview. Six of the ten participants gave consent to be interviewed privately. Those private meetings were semi-structured interviews that were based on predetermined questions and questions that were tailored in response to the individual student’s text and personal circumstances.  As a result, each interview is unique to the student. Interviews had a typical duration of one hour. Interviews were conducted over the phone or in person. 

Interview and Textual Analysis Methods

All interviews and text were analyzed using discourse analysis, genre theory, ecocomposition and critical theory.   Two to three writing samples were collected after the instruction period was completed to ensure students felt their work in class and their final assessments would not be influenced by their willingness to participate in the study. For each student I examined and compared writing samples to annotate genre conventions, cross genre pollination (the fusing of multiple genres), rhetorical style, voice and shifts in voice.  Voice and voice shifts are determined through tone, lexical shifts and stance (i.e. first or third person). 

To analyze the data I collect I will use grounded theory based discourse analyses to extract themes that arose before, during and after instruction. Themes that arose were:

~ The connection between the diamond (authentic) voice and student interest.

~ Limitations on student voice that were imposed by academic structures.

~ Conscientious genre mashing employed to reflect the totality of individual voice.

This combined data serves as the foundation from which I compose ethnographic student profiles that feature thick description (Gertz, 1973) of the students, students writing processes, students’ interactions with contexts and genres, their interactions with me as a teacher and social justice activist, and the post instruction dialogues between students and myself.  

Ethical Considerations: Provisions to Protect the Privacy Interests of Subjects

To ensure this blog is representative of the safe zones these students composed in, measures that support student privacy and safety frame the presentation of data in this online venue.  Participants have been given the right to withdraw their participation from this study at any time before the publication of their data. The withdrawal of participation could happen at one of two stages.  The first stage was at the end of data collection, when participants were given the option to have particular parts of their data removed .   To ensure privacy and accurate representation in this blog, participants are given the opportunity to pre-approve posts before they are published, which is the second stage where students could withdraw their participation. Although students are not given the option to withdraw from this study after posts are published, they are given the opportunity to offer editorial suggestions to redact posts that feature their data.  

#dissertation #methods

[writingatthecrossroads]

Context, Diverse Students & Ecocomposition

Research Methods Part 1 

Safe Spaces are currently a hot button issue, especially when it comes to diverse college students. While some view safe spaces as areas student groups use to insulate themselves from a complicated world, proponents of safe spaces, like myself, view these areas as environments where diverse people can express ideas and aspects of themselves that are censored or suppressed by the white, heteronormative monoculture.  Students also go to safe spaces to gather strength and strategies to respond to monoculture when they leave the space.  

Expressing ideas in safe spaces releases students from the worry of grading, teacher censorship or approval while creating space for student debates and the development of sophisticated argumentation.  Contrary to popular belief, safe spaces are not places for group think; when diverse students speak clearly through their diamond voices, the diversity of their ideas typically clash with one another.  However, the student-created rules of safe spaces facilitate the expression of difficult conversations that are typically silenced in traditional classrooms, whether that silencing is overt due to teacher or student bias, or covertly due to other forces, like the power grading exerts on how students craft their messages, for example.

To paint a portrait of what safe spaces that encourage new language would look like and how they would operate, I will present evidence that is examined through ecocomposition’s and critical pedagogy’s theoretical lenses. I’ve described my stance in regards to critical pedagogy in previous posts, so I’ll focus on my approach to ecocomposition in this section. 

Ecocomposition as a theoretical stance “investigates ecologically (original emphasis) the relationships between discourses and places (Keller, 2001 citing Dobrin, p. 11),” or  “the relationships between ‘individual writers and their surrounding environments, between writers and texts, between texts and culture, between ideology and discourse, between language and the world’ (p.193).” Ecocomposition theory based research has tended to focus on how writers examine, exalt or integrate the “natural” world in their rhetoric.  Keller argues “place,” with the exception of places that are “exotic or out of the ordinary” is rarely examined “as an effect on how writerly behavior (p.202)” develops despite the fact that so-called “neutral places,” like universities and or workplaces “are the most important sites of investigation for ecocomposition” since those so-called neutral spaces also has an impact on how a writer composes.   

My work builds on Keller’s assertion by arguing spaces which have been deemed “neutral” by academics are quite the opposite for ethnically diverse students; so called neutral places can be politically charged minefields that require the linguistic dexterity and diplomatic finesse to code-switch between cultural rhetorics to academic English in writing and speech as students shift from context to context. The processes and strategies students use to navigate verbally can be completely different from those they use in writing.  Moreover, students may have strengths in one or both realms depending on the path their journeys have taken them. 

Ecocomposition theory is unique in the regard that it can also be used to inform teaching practices while leaving a lot of space to freely define the environment instructors work within.  Although much of the literature examines nature or classrooms (Dobrin, 2001; Keller, 2001), researchers like Drew have called for a broadening of environments to be examined in composition research.  Drew argues,

“ understanding students as traveling between and dwelling in multiple whose discursive pedagogies help to construct them as writers is one important component of what ecocomposition might engender. Equally important- especially for research-is gaining a more complex understanding of the classroom as an artificially bordered location where research is conducted and conclusions are drawn.”

This dissertation builds on Drew’s (2001)  piece, The Politics of Place, by extending the metaphor of students as travelers to examine diverse students in novel rhetorical environments. Ecocomposition grew from the tradition of ecology and reflects that discipline in the regard that writing instructors who want to integrate ecocomposition into their pedagogy have a tendency to require students to examine nature in writing assignments that are administered in the traditional classroom context.   Like Drew suggests, I move a little further past that tendency when I teach. Instead of inviting places to the composition classroom or asking students to evoke places in their work, I bring the composition classroom to different environments, like coffee shops, online forums, student cultural centers, poetry groups, libraries, parks and hippie potlucks. I do this to see how writing genres, student stances, student voices and my stance as an instructor shifts in response to contexts in order to better understand the intersection between environment, diverse students, and rhetoric. 

In this research I narrow my focus to instruction I’ve shared with writers who compose in the blogosphere, rhetors I invited speak on a radio show and students who participated in a fellowship program, three environments that place extremely different demands on students and their rhetoric while opening up different doors to varied levels of student agency.   I don’t wish to argue here the locations I have chosen are “more real” or less contrived than the classroom context.  Instead, I put forth the notion contexts overlap with one another and the parameters of the genres that operate in those spaces are constantly in flux because of the movement, motivations and actions of the players in those contexts. 

While the contexts I will discuss in the following posts seem novel because they contrast so sharply with the familiar rows of desks and writing board at the front of the room that have characterized the traditional classroom, they are reflective of some of the environments and students can expect to encounter as university demographics and teaching modalities continue to shift. For example, at the University of California, Davis, where I teach, the so-called “traditional” white male student is in the minority.  Diverse students make up 71% of the undergraduate student body and 57% of the student population are women. Many of these students, myself included,  have already taken courses that featured online components or turned in projects that feature digital media while concurrently turning in traditional research papers, some of which were informed by the realizations that came about through that experimentation with media.  It is for these reasons I argue none of the environments instructors work within can be considered discrete entities with firm rules that set the parameters for writing within those contexts. Instead, teaching environments could be viewed as cities within a region that are interconnected by highways and roads-- although each city and neighborhood has its own distinct style. When it rains in a region, all of the cities get wet.  That is to say, when students learn to write in contexts outside of the classroom, there can be spillover effects from those experiences, which reflects Perkins and Salomon’s research on transfer. 

In the next post, I’ll describe how I collected data to uncover how and when students transferred their skills between contexts, and what were the key characteristics of the contexts where students felt confident in using their authentic voices.  

[writingatthecrossroads]

New Language, Disruption & Academia

Over the past decade or so, the term disruption has become the go-to buzzword used to describe how technological advances are employed to throw monkey wrenches into the machinations that perpetuate the status quo of institutions that were previously viewed as indomitable.     Disruptions like President Obama’s rise to preeminence through social media, or the war between Amazon and Traditional Publishers demonstrate how the innovative use of technological platforms allows users to not only bend the rules that govern “the way things are” in society, but also gives users the power to create new rules, thereby exerting influence to change society overall. Even less dramatic examples, like the recent rickrolling showdown between Foo Fighters, and  the Westboro Baptist church, demonstrates by choosing a new type of discourse, the author/rhetor can effectively overshadow the institutions they are advocating against will refusing to allow the opponent to co-opt their communication. 

When innovative technological use is combined with unique rhetoric, like culturally specific humor (like Aziz Ansari’s commentary on how black people respond to magic tricks), activist poetry or afro-futuristic motifs, for example, that combination gives rise to new language that names, defines, exposes and then ousts prevailing systems of oppression.   New language that has its roots in postmodern multiculturalism is critical to generating inclusivity that isn’t characterized by assimilation or white washing because it:

A) Does away with discipline specific jargon, rhetorical styles and genres that are based in white monoculture because using those rhetorical tools is a concession to rules that govern the monoculture.

B) Acknowledges the spiritual, emotional, psychosocial, physical and culturally aspects of the human experience, things traditional academic language, which typically celebrates only the logical, ignores.

C) Refuses to buy into the so called dominance of white monoculture at every turn. 

The creator of new rhetoric recognizes the mnemonic power of words on the psyche and how that power reifies or breaks down prevailing constructs in the reader’s subconscious. A prime example of the this type of reification is seeing the words “white” and “dominance” in print so many times the individual begins to start believing, either consciously or subconsciously, those words automatically go together. 

As a result of these ideals, when social justice educators who are steeped in new rhetoric, like myself, read literature like Giroux’s or Villanueva’s that encourage other progressive educators to “comply with” or work within the confines of “dominance,” the first and final visceral response is, “How about no?”  That refusal to comply by talking back with new technology based language disrupts the nature of the prevailing discourse, opens up new avenues of communication that are attuned to diverse voices, and, in turn, syphons attention and energy away from racist mono-culture.  

New language is extremely effective when responding to pervasive, systematic oppression within the academic sphere. One example of how new language reframes ideas about deeply entrenched, unquestioned academic practices is  Uneasy Remains, a film project spearheaded by students in the UC Davis Native American Studies department. Uneasy Remains examines issues of ethics, human rights and spirituality to reveal the racism and disrespect for dead people of color that is embedded in the common anthropological practice of unearthing, testing and withholding the remains of indigenous peoples by Caucasian researchers. The film argues putting the bones of American natives on display quietly reiterates the genocide of native peoples and sends the subconscious message to viewers that the totality of their vanquishment has resulted in the death of their cultures. In response to this silent message, Uneasy Remains is an advocacy piece created to fight for the repatriation of human remains and cultural items to their tribal descendants. 

The film also puts Anthropology’s necrophilic paradigm (see 8:25- 9:12, “shocked and pleased”) and white researchers complete disregard for living Native people on full display.   Watching the film leads me to think, “If these so called researchers were really interested in the lives of native people, why don’t they ask their descendants about the information they are looking for?”  The unearthing of the issue surrounding the fetishization of the dead and the marginalization of the living casts light on a vital ethical question- do the ideals of science supersede the basic human rights of people, living or dead, especially when it comes brown people? Is it ok to unearth the dead and put them on display against their families’ wishes (the 9/11 families say “No.”)? The answers to that question hold implications not only for Native American people but for all people, especially when it comes to, like in the case of Henrietta Lacks, the harvesting of valuable DNA samples embedded in remains and how those samples are used to benefit the careers of scientist, pharmaceutical companies, medical corporations and universities without compensation to the individuals or families from whom the DNA originated.

Angel Hinzo, a UC Davis Doctoral Candidate, continues the conversation Native activists initiated in Uneasy Remains with a humorous short piece, Skeleton Time.  In Skeleton Time, Hinzo channels the voices of her ancestors to create a spooky Halloween song that responds to Anthropology’s grave robbery. Although this short has a lighter tone and is brief, it points to the same ethical concerns Uneasy Remains unearths to allow audiences to see this issue from a basic human standpoint- we’re all going to die one day.  Shouldn’t we all be granted the right to rest in the places designated by ourselves and our families no matter what our ethnic background is?

Both of these films exemplify the new language of students in that they combine media and culturally specific rhetoric to respond to the racism and oppression that is embedded in a specific discipline. In taking the argument from the academic sphere and into youtube, their message is more accessible on two levels.  First, Youtube films are more readily available to the public than academic journal articles, since journals are usually only accessed for free if the individual audience member is affiliated with an institution.  Second, the films’ language is in plain everyday talk any English speaker, no matter what their race or culture, can understand.  Most academic research does not feature the type of succinct, transparent language that is on display in these films and is off-putting for individuals who are not initiated in the academy.  These two levels of accessibility effectively shifts the discourse from being only within the academy, or between universities and tribal groups, to the public sphere. Allowing access to the public positions tribal groups to get support from outside groups who can effectively put pressure on anthropology departments and universities to repatriate artifacts to their rightful owners under the law.

I have presented these two examples of disruptive new language to demonstrate how new language can challenge traditional pedagogical truisms about the need for students of color to master academic language in order to be successful outside of school. These films demonstrate discipline specific lexicon and genres are not required to put forth a cogent, persuasive argument, but they can serve as supplements to non-academic rhetoric.  Moreover, these films demonstrate academic disciplines are not above reproach and that students have enough agency to respond to the more problematic parts of specific disciplines in constructive ways if they choose to.  In this way the creators of these films have created radical rhetoric- in addition to putting forth their culture based advocacy through new media, they have incorporated aspects of academic argumentation by creating a thesis and bolstering it with visual evidence in the form of interviews and images. 

These sophisticated rhetorical moves are critical strategies all students could benefit from once they leave the academic sphere.  What’s left is for educators to create safe spaces(Booker, 2007; Holley and Steiner, 2005) for students to experiment with those strategies. Safe spaces, whether they be in traditional classrooms or in informal teaching spaces, can serve as crossroads where students experiment with different rhetorics, genres and ideologies to conjure up their own rhetorical strategies that help them master matching the appropriate language for the appropriate context before returning to the roads they choose to travel. Experimentation in teaching locales, rhetorical mediums or the language and genres used breaks barriers on multiple fronts- between students and teachers, between the classroom and “the real world,” and between the sneaky compartments we have designated for people and text in our own minds.   

Fearless barrier breaking, not acquiescence to thornier parts of the status quo, is the most effective action a teacher can bring to table when working with diverse students. If progressive teachers want to support diverse student voices and/or incorporate media into their classrooms they must be willing to give up some of what they know to be true about “good writing,” what “effective” activism is, what are good ideas, and what we think  students need in regards to acquiring academic language. When we give up (even temporarily) our previous notions about what constitutes good rhetoric or an appropriate argument, we open up the space to tap into our own abilities as rhetors to create new language that frames new discussions around diverse students, what diverse students are concerned about, and around teaching itself.   In this way teachers can transform their classrooms into safe spaces  where they, in conjunction with students, can develop environment based communities of practice (Eckert, 2006) that support the development of ethnically diverse students’ writing and rhetoric development.

In the next (2?) posts I’ll describe how I worked to incorporate the ideals of fearless barrier breaking, new rhetoric and disruption in my teaching and research. Then I’ll (finally!) present student case studies that highlight the successes and challenges of bringing new rhetoric to a Research I university.   

#newmedia #disruption #people of color #dissertation

[writingatthecrossroads]

Current Pedagogical Approaches for Working with Diverse Students

Obligatory Literature Review Part 3

A range of researchers within the fields of composition and education have worked to create roadmaps for teachers by putting forth a multiplicity of recommendations on how to initiate emerging, diverse student writers into language based cultures of power while respecting the right to their own languages and cultures (Kells, 2007; cited by Poe, 2013; Villanueva and Smitherman, 2003; Canagarajah, 2003; Villanueva, 2001; Chappell, 1997; Mangelsdorf, 1997; Giroux, 1992).   The bulk of those recommendations are based on two schools of thought, border-crossing and ensuring diverse students have access to the knowledge of genre based text.  In this section I will review the benefits and drawbacks of both approaches, then put forth the framework for my teaching approach, which draws from the research on teaching genre based texts to diverse students.

Chappell, Mangelsdorf, Moll and Ladson-Billings all cite Giroux (1992) when they argue language instructors should become “border crossers ( p. 4)” who augment their teaching practices by addressing students’ cultural backgrounds and engaging that diversity within the “existing configurations of power” in local contexts.   The hope behind border crossing-based pedagogies is educators can transform their classrooms into spaces where students and instructors can learn about each other’s cultural practices while critically examining the positionality of diverse groups in America’s social hierarchy.  The examination of positionality is used to foster cultural acceptance among students and to further the tenets of radical democracy. In an ideal border crossing classroom culturally diverse dialects would ultimately be accepted as valid alternatives to standard edited English in student texts and classroom dialogues, that is, until students master academic English.  Theoretically, othering on an individual level could be overcome with such teaching.

One recommendation researchers have promoted to facilitate border crossing is integrating ethnic rhetorics into the classroom through the use of language diversity teacher training courses that would help English instructors become more sensitive to the needs of multilingual and multidialectal students.  (Ball and Muhammad, 2003; Okawa, 2003; Richardson, 2003)  This recommendation is based on findings that indicate teacher trainees who take at least one course “are more tolerant toward the use of language variation (Ball and Muhammad, p.81)”.   Okawa, for example, describes modifying her language awareness course to fit the "particular linguistic and social context and these particular students" in conjunction with using case studies to encourage attitude shifts in teacher trainees who came from predominantly white neighborhoods in the Mid-West. Like Okawa, Poe argues compositionists who advocate the use of diverse rhetorics need modify their practice and advocacy work to fit their local context. Poe encourages compositionists to investigate “the rich body of literature in composition studies on ethnic rhetorics and literacies” that is waiting to be tapped for pedagogical use. Poe admits addressing the issue of race may not be as simple as “importing theory” into pedagogical practices as “frames about race” that “circulate in the university community,” frames like the “achievement gap frame,” “the multicultural frame” or the “post-racial frame” would need to be engaged in order for those theories to work.

On one hand, the idea of instilling the concept of border crossing in instructors through teacher training courses is attractive because such classes could hold a myriad of possibilities for instructors who want to demonstrate for other instructors how diverse rhetorics are appropriate in a range of contexts. Experienced instructors would be in a position to introduce novice teachers to the ways in which diverse rhetorics and world Englishes manifest in student writing and how to respond to those rhetorics with strategies that go beyond pointing out syntactical “errors.” Teacher training classrooms or faculty workshops would be advantageous environments in which to hold those discussions because instructors would be given the opportunity to learn from their peers and grow communities of progressive instructors that are responsive to the needs of the students in each institutional context.  Moreover, frames like the ones Poe describes shape conversations about ethnically diverse students and reinforce stereotypes about those students among faculty and even the students themselves, so it would be critical to “air out” those frames, so to speak, in preparation for working with diverse students.  Finally, teachers would be given the opportunity to learn how to recognize different culture based  rhetorics students bring to the classroom with them.  Armed with that knowledge, in theory, composition instructors would be able to accurately assess student challenges with writing, which could manifest as acknowledging a culture based rhetorical strategy in student writing instead of attributing the work to a grammatical mistake, for example.

Yet on the other hand, while it sounds plausible and even advantageous to “create borderlands” within existing power structures, approaching instruction with diverse students as an act of “border crossing” that promotes radical democracy among students is problematic on multiple levels.  On the most surface level the teacher training approaches Okawa, Poe, Richardson and others advocate may have difficulty transforming talk into teaching. Although the possibility for instructor paradigm to shift is strong, that mental shift does not automatically translate to classroom practice. The fact of the matter is the ethnic rhetorics students bring into their learning environments frequently run counter to the rhetorics and genres they are expected to learned in the academic context, thus integrating student rhetorics into pedagogical practices may not fit the ultimate goals of initiating students into the discipline specific languages and genres they need to master in order to be successful in academia and their careers (Bazerman, 2005). As a result teachers may not even act on what they are taught in such workshops, as much as they agree with what’s shared. 

As Lovejoy notes when he cites Elbow’s support of student dialect use in the rough drafts but not in their final papers, progressive educators in composition and across the disciplines like Elbow may be willing to support student language variation but may be unwilling to deviate from the standard practice of accepting submissions written in standardized academic English because of the tradition of assessment in standard English I described earlier in this chapter. When that reluctance to change collides with difficult conversations surrounding race and culture, teachers may be torn between what they feel they must do (integrate students in the prevailing discourses) and what they want to do  (encourage student discourses in student writing and rhetoric).  I feel that tension and I don’t believe any teachers should have to walk a tightrope between those two discourse types.  Later on in this dissertation I will propose methods instructors can use to support both discourse types in student work to demonstrate the key to supporting both types of student rhetoric is working outside of the existing configurations of power to disrupt the status quo.

Moving beyond teacher practices, there are deeper ideological issues with the pedagogy Giroux advocates.  Border-crossing pedagogy unwittingly falls victim banking pedagogy despite its roots in Freirian critical pedagogy because it rests on the premise of promoting radical democracy in the classroom, meaning it comes to the classroom with an agenda of imparting a way of thinking instead of organically co-creating a new mode of thought with class participants, as Freire recommended.  Aside from welcoming difference and dissent, which are extremely important practices for facilitating diverse student participation in the classroom, border-crossing pedagogy’s goal of imparting the foundations of radical democracy to students could be viewed as:

A) presupposing diverse students come to the classroom as tabla rasas without their own notions of how they, or their ethnic groups they are a part of would like to be governed or

B) that diverse students are willing to (or should be willing to) shift their ideas from their socio-political ideological roots to radical democracy.  

The radical democratic political orientation of border crossing pedagogy does not acknowledge the range of non-Western thoughts of governance students bring to the classroom, like the governance by elders in some African traditions, being ruled by spiritual beliefs and the rejection of man made governance as in the Rastafarian tradition, or consensus governance, like in Native American traditions, for example. Border crossing pedagogy’s inability to acknowledge those traditions continues to act within the confines of the colonial mindset it claims to fight against.

Moreover, using a radical democratic pedagogical approach to confront othering does not take into account the othering that is embedded in the democratic process itself. The history of democracy is rife with examples of the othering of women, the poor, the illiterate and the young  that range from ancient times (Athenians denying women the right to vote) to today (the Koch brothers using their financial clout to rig school board elections in North Carolina).  Democracy’s main premise, that equal rights are guaranteed to all citizens, automatically others the non-citizen, which poses problems for student groups like American born students of undocumented immigrants.  Democracy also others whoever is not in the majority when voting happens, whether that majority be ideological or racial. 

It is important to keep in mind as valiant as the ideals of democracy are, democracy as a political practice was foisted on colonized peoples after an extended period of extreme violence that was perpetrated under the guise of “freedom.”  Diverse students know this and their knowledge of democracy’s sordid history may lead them to distrust the democratic process, whether it is radical or not. As Kohl (1994) notes in I Won’t Learn From You: and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment, diverse students often come to to the classroom with a suspicion that teachers and the schooling process itself is a vehicle that is being used to indoctrinate them, not empower them as individuals with their own minds and agency with the tools they need to make their own imprints on society. Having that suspicion confirmed by a teacher’s unveiling  of political motives, no matter how right or just they are, can lead diverse students to willfully not learn whatever is being presented to them. Diverse students deserve classrooms that focus on teaching the subjects students are paying to learn, not politics. Teachers will need perspectives that moves beyond personal politics to pierce that calcified layer of distrust this demographic of students may bring with them to the classroom.

My final, and in my opinion, most important, argument in challenging the notions of border crossing pedagogy is the approach does not directly confront hierarchal delineations of power (the borders themselves) that are reified by the genres and language that are embedded in institutions.  The phrase “border crossing” itself rhetorically reifies those delineations of power because the implications of foreignness, exoticism, and distance are embedded within the phrase.  Giroux’s “theoretical emphasis on the recognition of difference, of otherness” leads me to question as Carby questioned, “different from and for whom? (12; Cited by Soliday, 1997).” I’m well aware that in addition to Giroux other researchers, including academics of color like bell hooks, have defined themselves as others.  Still, I can’t shake the feeling of being personally offended by othering and being designated as an “other” in academic text. The theoretical framework of Otherness operates from a paradigm of a white American norm.  I don’t operate from that paradigm simply because that “norm” doesn’t reflect the reality of what the American people are (for example, even low-income Caucasians don’t fit that norm)  and the history of America’s development due to the shaping of diverse hands. My African and Native American ancestors were here before America was even a country, so I find it extraordinarily and bitterly ironic that white academics, some of which are the descendants of recent immigrants, would designate me, an American through and through, as an “other.” While other academics of color identify with the idea of otherness and (I respect their well informed decision to do so) I reject the designation of “other” because the term continues the divisiveness between Americans that Giroux and other critical pedagogists claim to work against.  I agree with Soliday (1997) when she argues we need to promote a “dialogue that moves between” students and teachers “to illuminate connections as well as highlight differences.”  

To facilitate the type of dialogue Soliday suggests, I theorize a new language must emerge that describes what is happening in new rhetorical spheres with definitions that move past the so called “dominant” white culture monolith to include diverse perspectives that can serve as the basis for teaching diverse students. In the following posts, I’ll present a Treatise on New Language, and examples of New Language in diverse student rhetoric that instructors can use as references and/or models when teaching students. 

[writingatthecrossroads]

Writing at the Crossroads: Pedagogy at the Intersection of Ethnic and Contextual Diversity

Obligatory Literature Review Part 1

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

― Flannery O'Connor

The image of crossroads looms heavily in humanity’s collective consciousness, signifying the liminal space in which divergent ideas, opportunities and life paths collide. Initial metaphorical interpretations of the crossroads are obviously imbued with the unknown ramifications of deciding one life path over another, like in Frost's famous poem, The Road Not Taken.  On a more subtle level, across, the image of the crossroads represents a state of limbo or a spiritual portal that allows individuals who traverse the space to perform sacrifices, divinations and spirit conjuring, much like Faust when he summoned Mephistopheles to gain worldly pleasures, or when Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become a blues legend.

Much like individuals who are faced with metaphorical (and physical) crossroads, native English speaking emerging rhetors of color occupy internal and external liminal spaces after they leave the first year writing classroom.  As they move from class to class, through work environments, and among their peers, emerging rhetors of color simultaneously traverse paths that cross digital media, the rhetoric of the professional world and discipline specific academic discourse all while retaining rhetorics that signal their cultural identities. To maintain this delicate balancing act, students from this demographic often require support from faculty and community members to help them successfully navigate the different environments in which they compose and speak. In turn instructors need to, according to Poe (2013), anticipate the “moments where race and writing come together” inside and outside of the classroom, whether those moments come during group dialogue or during the analysis of student texts.

Instructors may be willing to respond to that student need by acting in the moment, however they may be at a loss when it comes to devising pedagogies that support students on their journeys, particularly since research on writing pedagogy for students from this demographic is limited (Poe, 2013 Anson, 2012; Prendergast, 1998; Shor, 1998; Shor, 1997) since WAC research circumvents the issue of race by investigating students’ linguistic identities in lieu of investigating how students’ ethnic identities impacts student rhetoric (Poe, 2013). 

On the face of it, linguistic based research approaches to student identity gives a nod to the diversity among students as it acknowledges the variability of student linguistic backgrounds by assigning students as native English speakers (L1) and those who speak English as a second language (L2). Yet on further examination it becomes clear L1 and L2 designations masks the diversity within those two student groups as it projects two false monolithic and diametrically opposed groups, native English speakers and everyone else (Ferris and Thaiss, 2011). 

Those linguistic designations do not adequately account for students who, like myself, speak African American Vernacular and “Standard English”, Native American students who speak English in addition to their tribal language,  Generation 1.5 students (Harklau, Losey, & Siegal, 1999; Roberge, Siegal, & Harklau, 2009; Cited by Ferris and Thaiss, 2011), or second generation immigrant students who have spoken English since birth and at home, but who also fluently speak their native tongue due to frequent interactions with relatives from older generations. It is not clear from the research whether the students described in the examples I’ve presented could be considered “native” English speakers. The underlying presumption is if the student comes from an immigrant family, English is automatically their second language.  In the case of second generation students, the L2 designation  may not adequately describe a student’s fluency level in English as it projects the image of a speaker who is still learning to master English, which may or may not be true.  The L1 and L2 designations also do not take into consideration students who only speak English but who struggle with mastering standardized academic English in their writing and speech. Much like the L2 designation, the L1 label projects an image of a particular type of student, one who stands in contrast to L2 students as a student who has gained a high level of control over the English language in the academic sphere which, again, may or may not be true. 

The dichotomized nature of  linguistic identity research marks a blind spot in composition research. In other words, WAC’s tendency to focus on the differences between native English speaking students and those students who speak English as a second language overlooks the nuances of diverse students’ experiences “as writers across the range of their college courses”(Anson, p. 27) who work within a broad spectrum of Englishes (Ferris and Thaiss, 2011) and how students’ cultural rhetorics and ethnic paradigms inform those students’ English language use in varied contexts.

In his review of WAC literature online and in text, Anson finds it “strange” writing-across-the-curriculum’s “most visible representations” of it’s “philosophy and working assumptions (p. 14),” like the WAC Clearinghouse and The Handbook of Writing Research, “skirts issues of race or ignores them entirely(p.18).” Anson attributes the reticence in WAC to address race in research to a perception that race creates “layers of additional complexity over principles, theories, and pedagogies (p.20)” that already challenge instructors. Issues of race  become “beside the point” when they are superimposed over pedagogical challenges and when students “become the subject of abstract principles operationalized in generic classroom strategies.”   Moreover, Anson argues, engaging “politically charged subjects like race (p.21)” could prove to be a powder keg that is detonated by the wrong word or action which could obliterate the relationship between a teacher and their students, or seriously damage an instructor’s career. Astute instructors who are confronted with these and other tensions surrounding race and ethnicity understand there are no fast and easy answers or one-size-fits-all approaches to working with diverse student groups.

That said, having some insight into how other instructors work with emerging ethnically diverse student rhetors in non-traditional learning settings could work as a launchpad for the enterprising instructor when devising their own pedagogical approaches. The action-based research I present here was devised to fill that gap in the literature by responding to instructors’ and students’ needs in and out of the classroom.    

In the following posts I will review the literature that is available in regards to emerging writers and rhetors of color, present my research questions in response to that literature, then describe the terms and frameworks I will use to address those questions. The methods and analysis that results from those terms, frameworks and questions will be used to develop suggestions and strategies writing instructors can immediately use in their practice.

#literature review