Identity Papers: Literacy And Power in Higher Education - Couverture souple

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0874216494 ISBN 13 : 9780874216493

Editeur : Utah State University Press, 2006

Synopsis

How do definitions of literacy in the academy, and the pedagogies that reinforce such definitions, influence and shape our identities as teachers, scholars, and students? The contributors gathered here reflect on those moments when the dominant cultural and institutional definitions of our identities conflict with our other identities, shaped by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, location, or other cultural factors.

These writers explore the struggle, identify the sources of conflict, and discuss how they respond personally to such tensions in their scholarship, teaching, and administration. They also illustrate how writing helps them and their students compose alternative identities that may allow the connection of professional identities with internal desires and senses of self. They emphasize how identity comes into play in education and literacy and how institutional and cultural power is reinforced in the pedagogies and values of the writing classroom and writing profession.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Bronwyn T. Williams is associate professor of English at the University of Louisville. He writes and teaches about issues of literacy, identity, popular culture, and cross-cultural communication. His books include Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing and Written on the Screen: Representations of Literacy in Popular Culture with Amy A. Zenger. He also writes a column on issues of Literacy and Identity for the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

IDENTITY PAPERS

Literacy and Power in Higher Education

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-649-3

Contents

1 Introduction: Literacy, Power, and the Shaping of Identity Bronwyn T. Williams..................................................................................................................12 Social Class as Discourse: The Construction of Subjectivities in English James Zebroski.........................................................................................................173 Excellence is the Name of the (Ideological) Game Patricia Harkin................................................................................................................................294 The Feminist WPA Project: Fear and Possibility in the Feminist "Home" Shannon Carter............................................................................................................425 When "Ms. Mentor" Misses the Mark: Literacy and Lesbian Identity in the Academy Tara Pauliny....................................................................................................576 She Toiled for a Living: Writing Lives and Identities of Older Female Students Mary Hallet......................................................................................................777 Literacy, Identity, and the "Successful" Student Writer William Carpenter and Bianca Falbo......................................................................................................928 Speaking from the Borderlands: Exploring Narratives of Teacher Identity Janet Alsup.............................................................................................................1099 "Who Are They and What Do They Have to Do with What I want to Be?" The Writing of Multicultural Identity and College Success Stories for First-Year Writers James R. Ottery.....................12210 Migratory and Regional Identity Robert Brooke..................................................................................................................................................14111 Some Trouble with Discourses: What Conflicts Between Subjects and Ethnographers Tell Us About What Students Don't/Won't/Can't Say Sally Chandler...............................................15412 Composing (Identity) in a Posttraumatic Age Lynn Worsham.......................................................................................................................................17013 Conclusion: Working Bodies: Class Matters in College Composition Min-Zhan Lu...................................................................................................................182Notes..............................................................................................................................................................................................192References.........................................................................................................................................................................................196Contributors.......................................................................................................................................................................................207Index..............................................................................................................................................................................................209

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION Literacy, Power, and the Shaping of Identity

Bronwyn T. Williams

We've all seen them on college and university catalogues, brochures, posters, and viewbooks. They are the obligatory photographs of happy, attractive students in classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and fresh green lawns, reading and writing under the thoughtful and attentive guidance of their professors. Though the clothing and the faces may have transformed over the years-the photos are no longer only of white men, but now reflect a carefully chosen mix of race, culture, and sex-and today's students may be shown writing on computers rather than by hand, the message of such photos is remarkably unchanged. What these images imply about the identities of college students and literacy remains much as it did twenty or even forty years ago. The students look comfortable in their literacy practices, no one seems to be struggling, and the professors seem to be offering useful advice. The message seems clear: Come to this college and you will be welcomed into the community of scholarly readers and writers.

Yet for many arriving on college campuses, these images do not reflect reality. For both students, and for many teachers, there is a feeling of alienation, isolation, and frustration. They feel they do not fit the images or identities they have seen portrayed, and they feel their literacy practices are not what they should be even if they are not entirely sure why. Too often they blame themselves when the real conflict centers on questions of identity and institutional power.

As Donna Alvermann (2001) has noted, the goals and interests of educational institutions often create narrowly defined identities for us, whether as scholars, teachers, or students, that we feel compelled to accept to remain a part of the institution. Yet the literacy identities that are regarded as legitimate in the academy can often run counter to our other identities outside the classroom, leaving us feeling isolated and powerless. At such moments we must decide whether to accept the institutional and cultural definitions of ourselves, or to try to find some way to resist or negotiate a professional identity that allows us to live with ourselves while continuing to do the work we value.

The purpose of the book is to focus on how definitions of literacy in the academy, and the pedagogies that reinforce such definitions, influence and shape our identities as teachers, scholars, and students. The chapters reflect those moments in higher education when the dominant cultural and institutional definitions of our identities conflict with other identities, shaped by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, location, or other cultural factors. The strength of this book is that the writers are willing to explore that struggle, identify the sources of conflict, and discuss how they respond to such tensions in their scholarship, teaching, and administration. The authors, in their narratives, theory, and research also illustrate how writing helps them and their students compose alternative identities that may allow the connection of professional identities with internal desires and senses of self. The essays emphasize the necessity for reflection in considering how we negotiate the tensions between our personal and professional identities and then bring those to the classroom.

The essays in this book address key questions about how we compose identities in several important contexts. First, they emphasize how identity comes into play in terms of education and literacy and how institutional and cultural power is reinforced in the pedagogies and values of the writing classroom and writing profession. If we in Composition and Rhetoric are to teach writing and conduct research about writing we need to consider how institutional definitions of literacy shape the identities of ourselves and our students. Who, in the eyes of the institution, is a "reader" or a "writer"? What are the consequences of our definitions of these terms in the academy? How can we as teachers and administrators make definitions of literacy more flexible for student identities? How can we as scholars respond to the inevitable conflicts between the literacy goals and values of our institutions and profession and our identities outside of the academy? The chapters in this book raise and address such questions.

Also, understanding more about institutional definitions of literacy and identity and how students respond to them-how we did as students and how current students do-will make us better teachers. The chapters in the book make these conflicts more visible and suggest ways we might address them in and out of the classroom in pedagogy and research. A number of the essays draw in some way on the student experiences of the writer and the effect those had on the future faculty member, scholar, and teacher. The narratives remind us that our identities are more fluid and overlapping than we sometimes think and that our student identities form the foundation for who we become as professionals. Several of the essays also address how we can engage students in similar kinds of critical reflection in writing that helps them explore their identities and how they negotiate and adapt them according to the influence and expectations of the dominant culture.

Finally, as a graduate student I was often urged to think about my "professional identity" and how I would form it during graduate school. I know I was not alone in feeling sometimes troubled or mystified by what this meant and the feeling that it meant I must give something up about my identity to become a professional in the academy. This book helps articulate these issues and I hope will help graduate students consider how they want to approach such tensions, where to compromise, to resist, and what it will mean for them to compose new professional identities in writing. The narratives about literacy that are reproduced in higher education have a substantial impact on how we construct our identities in our professional lives. The chapters in this book reflect how our identities as scholars, professionals, teachers, and students are shaped by the goals and power of these dominant cultural institutions. The writers integrate narrative, theory, research, and pedagogy in ways that illustrate the need for flexibility in intellectual writing about identity and culture.

LITERACY AND INSTITUTIONS

Recent scholarship in New Literacy Studies has challenged the idea of literacy as an autonomous set of skills and has argued instead that concepts of literacy are always contextual and shaped by cultural expectations and goals. As Brian Street (2001) maintains, such an approach argues that

[l]iteracy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill; that it is always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. It is about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity, being. (7)

Reading and writing in any context, then, is not simply a matter of decoding symbols, but is always inextricable from cultural forces in the context in which the act takes place. Those cultural forces make literacy a powerful element of the dominant ideology of a culture. Though there are multiple literacy practices in different domains of life, the literacy practices that are valued in a culture are based not on an objective concept of utility, but on how such practices reinforce and reproduce dominant cultural norms and power relationships.

Schools at every level are, of course, key institutions in maintaining and reproducing such hierarchies of cultural power. David Barton and Mary Hamilton (1998) argue that dominant literacy practices supported in education "can be seen as a part of whole discourse formations, institutionalized configurations of power and knowledge, which are embodied in social relationships" (10). Such a model of culturally constructed literacies challenges the narrative often embraced by writing teachers that literacy skills will inevitably enable students outside of the dominant culture to become empowered individuals able to change their circumstances. Just as possible is that the writing classroom will "do just the opposite, to embed pupils deeply in the ideology and social control of the teacher's social class and deliberately prevent them from arriving at a detached and critical appraisal of their own situation" (Street 1995, 79). Lynn Bloom (1996) has made a similar argument in identifying composition as a "middle-class enterprise" that devalues certain literacy practices that students engage in outside the classroom while emphasizing the importance of practices and texts that reinforce middle-class values such as decorum, moderation, order, cleanliness, and delayed gratification. Whether the focus of composition course is classical rhetoric or critical pedagogy, students often find that their previous literacy practices, and the identities they supported, are dismissed or ignored and that their work must conform to not just a set of skills, but a set of cultural expectations. Those who enter the academy from backgrounds that are not middle class, white, male, heterosexual, often find that adopting the culturally constructed literacies that dominate higher education challenges important identities that have shaped their lives. Though the students shown in college recruitment photos may seem to have just picked up a book and started to read and interpret the material effortlessly and with smiles on their faces, in fact they can do so only when they have decoded and adapted to identities that fit dominant cultures expectations and values.

IDENTITIES AND PERFORMANCE

At the same time that definitions of literacy have become more complex and situated in cultural contexts, conceptions of identity have undergone similar transformations. Increasingly identity, as opposed to an internal somewhat stable sense of "self," has been recognized as a construction, influenced by culture and ideology and changeable depending on the social context. Indeed the concept of "performing" identity, depending on the context, has influenced much of the discussion on the issue in recent years. The idea of performance emphasizes that, rather than having a single stable identity that I present to the rest of the world, my sense of identity is external and socially contingent. Depending on the social context I find myself in and the social script I believe I should follow, I negotiate and adjust my identity. Sometimes these constructions of identity are conscious and calculated, other times they are so deeply learned that they seem spontaneous and natural. When I enter a classroom I am conscious of constructing my identity for my performance as a teacher. And I am certain that my students are engaged in identity construction of their own to fit the classroom context. When I am talking to a friend I believe I am being "myself" but if I am honest I know that I perform different identities for different friends, not always being the same identity for my friends from childhood as I am for the people I met last year. Consequently I have not a single identity, but multiple shifting identities, determined by culture and context, and sometimes in conflict with one another.

The ways in which we perform identities only seem natural, however, when we are confident of our understanding of the cultural context we are inhabiting. Tensions emerge when we cannot read the cultural context or construct an identity that fits the expectations of others. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1994) notes that "identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past" (394). It is the narratives of the dominant culture that are most often accepted and reproduced as the only relevant narratives. Most people within a culture position their identities within those dominant narratives, and as such are able to perceive identity as singular and stable, as the person you are in the culture that surrounds you. In U.S. culture this seemed a comfortable and rational perspective to a middle-to-upper-class, white, Western, heterosexual, male; but was more problematic and troubling if the identities you wanted to construct did not fit comfortably within the dominant culture's narratives. We all position ourselves within the narratives of the past as a way of constructing and "performing" identities. Yet if the dominant culture rejects or dismisses narratives by "others," those individuals are left feeling as if their identities are misunderstood, devalued, or ignored.

In recent years marginalized groups have succeeded in questioning which cultural narratives should be privileged. Such questioning has included critiques of the concept of stable, unified "truth" and the credibility of the institutions, structures, and processes, such as religion, science, education, and politics, that defined "truth." Through the questioning of such concepts and institutions there has also been a growing conversation about how we construct and perform our identities and what role different social structures and cultural forces play in those processes. We have all heard discussions about the influence on our identities of cultural aspects such as gender, race, class, religion, sexual orientation, location, age, ethnicity, profession, and education. Although some of these discussions have devolved into crude identity politics from both right and left, there are important issues involved in thinking carefully, and without hyperbole or inflammatory language, about how such cultural forces influence our identities and how we can use such issues as important lenses through which to consider who we are and when and why.

The ways in which we read others, how they read us, and how we try to communicate our identities in different cultural contexts are particularly important in the context of literacy. Writing is a deliberate construction and expression of identity on a page (or today, often on a screen). Even if we try not to reveal anything personal in our writing, we are taking on a particular identity, that of the detached, scientific observer-or to put it another way, the white male in the lab coat-in our attempted voicelessness. The way we arrange words, choose to disclose or not, assume our audience, construct our sense of credibility through language are all inextricably bound up with issues of identity (Williams 2003). What James Gee (1990) says about Discourse is also appropriate to questions of literacy in that we use language in such situations as "a sort of 'identity kit' which comes with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write so as to take on a particular social role that others will recognize"(142). And if we misread or misjudge, if we get the discourse and literacy conventions wrong as reader or writer, we risk more than misinterpreting the meaning, we also misread identities. Such concerns are directly related to both our work as teachers and researchers in and out of the classroom as well as the work our students do when they enter our classes. Issues of identity influence our work in teaching writing; our decision is whether we acknowledge such influences and what we do to address them in our work.

(Continues...)

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Utah State University Press
• Date d'édition: 2006
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0874216494
• ISBN 13: 9780874216493
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 212
• Éditeur: Williams Bronwyn T.
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne