Pedagogy Reading Journal #1: Lives on the Boundary
I get to write these things for my pedagogy seminar, and they're sort of journal-like so I thought I might as well post them.
Mike Rose: from Lives on the Boundary
Although my "traditional" students are dramatically different from the students Rose works with, I think they suffer from many of the same problems - the concerns of the academy seem remote from the concerns of my students, for all that they're white, middle-class, and 19. I heartily agree with Rose's assessment of his student's needs: My students needed to be immersed in talking, reading, and writing, they needed to further develop their ability to think critically, and they needed to gain confidence in themselves as systematic inquirers. They had to be let into the academic club. The fact that they misspelled words or wrote fragments or dropped verb endings would not erect insurmountable barriers to the benefits they would gain from such immersion. (DeLuca anthology 16)
From reading my student's drafts, it's plain to me that most of them don't think of themselves as inquirers of any sort-what they do in school is just that, something they do, just another set of routines to be performed which has nothing to do with their fundamental approach to life inside or outside the classroom. Their writing is, for the most part, bound by convention; it is a process of shaping words into a form they think I'll find acceptable rather than a move forward intellectually. I need to find a way of communicating that academic writing can't be a process of reformatting one's knee-jerk responses until they look like they're supposed to.
There's a sort of anti-intellectual resistance I'm encountering that the readings thus far have not addressed. The selections from Rose, like most of the works in Dialog on Writing seem work from the assumption that students failure is the product of a cultural dissonance between the WASPish world of the academy and the various people struggling to attain fluency in its language. It's easy to understand where this attitude comes from - Rose's teaching experience is from culturally diverse remedial programs at UCLA, and most of the other essays in the anthology seem to be processing experiences that resulted from the open admissions turmoil in the CUNY system back in the '70s. This is fine, as far as it goes, but I think it overlooks the larger dissonance between the culture of the academy and that of the "dominant culture" or of popular discourse. My WASPish students may not have the same problems with "standard English" as that encountered by Rose (et al.), but they have at least the same trouble understanding the purpose and value of academic discourse.
Earlier, Rose identifies the traditional "strategies that kept emerging as I reflected on the life of the undergraduate: summarizing, classifying, comparing, and analyzing" (De Luca 13). Perhaps unlike Rose's students, my students seem to have some basic familiarity with these "strategies"; they just don't know what to do with them.
In vain hopes of communicating "what academics do" and "what I want you to do for your papers," I offered the "machine" related by Rose in an earlier chapter of Lives: "While most readers of _______ think _______, a close and careful reading reveals ______ ." This was only marginally successful. By way of clarification, characterization of my students' responses to their first major essay assignment:
I'd asked my students to read Susan Bordo's "Hunger as Ideology," an essay that offers a feminist-Marxist analysis of gender ideology reflected in advertisements that pertained to food and eating. My assignment asked them to use Bordo's techniques of analysis and "close reading" of the ads, but to examine the ways in which the ads were constructing/reinforcing other kinds of stereotypes .
I did have a few gratifying success stories, wherein students initially nonplussed by the assignment gave their ads careful consideration and found, much to their surprise, that they actually had interesting things to say about what they found there. Consider the following excerpt from one student's conclusion: However it was easy to find stereotypes in a lot of ads that I usually would have just looked at quickly and then flipped the page. It can be thought that people who write about certain topics like this are crazy and looking at the ads to deeply. I thought that too. But once I looked at the ad for more time than I normally would, I saw certain things that popped out at me. Stereotypes are present in advertisements.
For all that it was poorly organized and stilted sounding, I was pleased with this student's paper, as I could see his mind starting to work in new ways, coming up with interpretations of the text (a condom ad) that were distinctly original, or at least new to him. Interestingly, I found that the students who had this kind of positive response-that is, it seemed to me that they were able to grasp the basic idea behind my assignment and make something of it that got them thinking about things in a new and different, a critical, way-were not necessarily those that evidenced the greatest stylistic fluency. This echoes the excerpt from Rose above: that clumsy usage need not be an obstacle in the way of a student's burgeoning critical literacy.
However, for every case like the one above, there were two that suffered from the opposite problems. At least two-thirds of the papers I got back seemed like "canned" responses; in the excerpts that follow, the student clearly tried to do the work that the assignment asked of her, but I don't feel like she ever developed a conceptual grasp of that that work was. [ . . . ] in the advertisement for Charmin Quilted, they show three women sitting around a sheet of toilet paper and they are quilting it. They say that this brand helps keep you feeling dry. At first glance, one would just see that women should take interest in buying these products, but if you take a closer look, you will see more. In this advertisement, the women are telling you what every woman wants out of toilet paper. They, stereotypically, want to feel clean and dry. When women hear the women in the advertisement say that this brand keeps you more clean and dry, women feel they can keep their hygiene better if they use Charmin Quilted.
Clearly, she's formally operating from the "Machine" described above ("if you take a closer look, you will see more"). Conceptually, however, she's working at cross-purposes to that machine, as her conclusion only serves to confirm one's "first glance." Instead of looking at the "hidden agenda" of the ad (and I think that there are quite a number of ideological messages coded in this particular ad), she merely reiterates the ad's surface message: at first glance, it seems the advertisement is only trying to attract the attention of women. But a closer look reveals that they're extolling the virtues of the product. The dissonance between these two statements is purely a function of form. The contrast between the paper's formal strategies (i.e. exposing a text's underlying assumptions) and actual content comes to a point in her conclusion: I believe that women are in these advertisements because women are the ones who usually do the shopping and have the consumer knowledge of what the best brands are. There are exceptions when men need shop so why do they not appear in the advertisements? These advertisements are mostly directed to middle aged women who have families. I believe most men do not care as much about what they are buying than women do. Women take the time to look into the products and think about what would be the best quality, but also at the best bargain. [ . . . ] Also, youth in the advertisements activate the youth in women. Since they get this confidence boost, they feel encouraged to buy these products.
It's difficult for me to explain exactly what's wrong with this paragraph, but it's clear that she didn't do what I wanted-which, to be honest, is much easier for me to identify in student work than it is to explain beforehand. But it seems to me that, in spite of the rhetorical form (i.e. one that is, in form, antagonistic towards the simplistic reading of the "first glance") she so readily adopts, she manages to produce a response heavily informed by that "first glance." What I had asked students to do with this assignment was to investigate how ads play a role in constructing what "stereotypes"; what I got was instead a reiteration of those stereotypes in some sense validated by the analysis of the ad.
Here are some possible explanations for this situation:
Pragmatically, I suppose I've got to address this sort of situation as though explanation #1 is the root cause, since there's not a great deal I can do about the other two.
Mike Rose: from Lives on the Boundary
Although my "traditional" students are dramatically different from the students Rose works with, I think they suffer from many of the same problems - the concerns of the academy seem remote from the concerns of my students, for all that they're white, middle-class, and 19. I heartily agree with Rose's assessment of his student's needs: My students needed to be immersed in talking, reading, and writing, they needed to further develop their ability to think critically, and they needed to gain confidence in themselves as systematic inquirers. They had to be let into the academic club. The fact that they misspelled words or wrote fragments or dropped verb endings would not erect insurmountable barriers to the benefits they would gain from such immersion. (DeLuca anthology 16)
From reading my student's drafts, it's plain to me that most of them don't think of themselves as inquirers of any sort-what they do in school is just that, something they do, just another set of routines to be performed which has nothing to do with their fundamental approach to life inside or outside the classroom. Their writing is, for the most part, bound by convention; it is a process of shaping words into a form they think I'll find acceptable rather than a move forward intellectually. I need to find a way of communicating that academic writing can't be a process of reformatting one's knee-jerk responses until they look like they're supposed to.
There's a sort of anti-intellectual resistance I'm encountering that the readings thus far have not addressed. The selections from Rose, like most of the works in Dialog on Writing seem work from the assumption that students failure is the product of a cultural dissonance between the WASPish world of the academy and the various people struggling to attain fluency in its language. It's easy to understand where this attitude comes from - Rose's teaching experience is from culturally diverse remedial programs at UCLA, and most of the other essays in the anthology seem to be processing experiences that resulted from the open admissions turmoil in the CUNY system back in the '70s. This is fine, as far as it goes, but I think it overlooks the larger dissonance between the culture of the academy and that of the "dominant culture" or of popular discourse. My WASPish students may not have the same problems with "standard English" as that encountered by Rose (et al.), but they have at least the same trouble understanding the purpose and value of academic discourse.
Earlier, Rose identifies the traditional "strategies that kept emerging as I reflected on the life of the undergraduate: summarizing, classifying, comparing, and analyzing" (De Luca 13). Perhaps unlike Rose's students, my students seem to have some basic familiarity with these "strategies"; they just don't know what to do with them.
In vain hopes of communicating "what academics do" and "what I want you to do for your papers," I offered the "machine" related by Rose in an earlier chapter of Lives: "While most readers of _______ think _______, a close and careful reading reveals ______ ." This was only marginally successful. By way of clarification, characterization of my students' responses to their first major essay assignment:
I'd asked my students to read Susan Bordo's "Hunger as Ideology," an essay that offers a feminist-Marxist analysis of gender ideology reflected in advertisements that pertained to food and eating. My assignment asked them to use Bordo's techniques of analysis and "close reading" of the ads, but to examine the ways in which the ads were constructing/reinforcing other kinds of stereotypes .
I did have a few gratifying success stories, wherein students initially nonplussed by the assignment gave their ads careful consideration and found, much to their surprise, that they actually had interesting things to say about what they found there. Consider the following excerpt from one student's conclusion: However it was easy to find stereotypes in a lot of ads that I usually would have just looked at quickly and then flipped the page. It can be thought that people who write about certain topics like this are crazy and looking at the ads to deeply. I thought that too. But once I looked at the ad for more time than I normally would, I saw certain things that popped out at me. Stereotypes are present in advertisements.
For all that it was poorly organized and stilted sounding, I was pleased with this student's paper, as I could see his mind starting to work in new ways, coming up with interpretations of the text (a condom ad) that were distinctly original, or at least new to him. Interestingly, I found that the students who had this kind of positive response-that is, it seemed to me that they were able to grasp the basic idea behind my assignment and make something of it that got them thinking about things in a new and different, a critical, way-were not necessarily those that evidenced the greatest stylistic fluency. This echoes the excerpt from Rose above: that clumsy usage need not be an obstacle in the way of a student's burgeoning critical literacy.
However, for every case like the one above, there were two that suffered from the opposite problems. At least two-thirds of the papers I got back seemed like "canned" responses; in the excerpts that follow, the student clearly tried to do the work that the assignment asked of her, but I don't feel like she ever developed a conceptual grasp of that that work was. [ . . . ] in the advertisement for Charmin Quilted, they show three women sitting around a sheet of toilet paper and they are quilting it. They say that this brand helps keep you feeling dry. At first glance, one would just see that women should take interest in buying these products, but if you take a closer look, you will see more. In this advertisement, the women are telling you what every woman wants out of toilet paper. They, stereotypically, want to feel clean and dry. When women hear the women in the advertisement say that this brand keeps you more clean and dry, women feel they can keep their hygiene better if they use Charmin Quilted.
Clearly, she's formally operating from the "Machine" described above ("if you take a closer look, you will see more"). Conceptually, however, she's working at cross-purposes to that machine, as her conclusion only serves to confirm one's "first glance." Instead of looking at the "hidden agenda" of the ad (and I think that there are quite a number of ideological messages coded in this particular ad), she merely reiterates the ad's surface message: at first glance, it seems the advertisement is only trying to attract the attention of women. But a closer look reveals that they're extolling the virtues of the product. The dissonance between these two statements is purely a function of form. The contrast between the paper's formal strategies (i.e. exposing a text's underlying assumptions) and actual content comes to a point in her conclusion: I believe that women are in these advertisements because women are the ones who usually do the shopping and have the consumer knowledge of what the best brands are. There are exceptions when men need shop so why do they not appear in the advertisements? These advertisements are mostly directed to middle aged women who have families. I believe most men do not care as much about what they are buying than women do. Women take the time to look into the products and think about what would be the best quality, but also at the best bargain. [ . . . ] Also, youth in the advertisements activate the youth in women. Since they get this confidence boost, they feel encouraged to buy these products.
It's difficult for me to explain exactly what's wrong with this paragraph, but it's clear that she didn't do what I wanted-which, to be honest, is much easier for me to identify in student work than it is to explain beforehand. But it seems to me that, in spite of the rhetorical form (i.e. one that is, in form, antagonistic towards the simplistic reading of the "first glance") she so readily adopts, she manages to produce a response heavily informed by that "first glance." What I had asked students to do with this assignment was to investigate how ads play a role in constructing what "stereotypes"; what I got was instead a reiteration of those stereotypes in some sense validated by the analysis of the ad.
Here are some possible explanations for this situation:
- This student (and she is most certainly not alone) does not understand the nature or purpose of the work I'm asking her to do. She's got the form down well enough, but perhaps the goals and values of the academy - very much a foreign culture to my students, for all their middle-class upbringings - have yet to sink in. She hasn't been properly acculturated to academic life, that an assignment like this asks one to recast herself as a member of a peculiar subculture, one that is highly critical of the assumptions commonly held by broader society. If this is the case, I'm rather at a loss as to how I should approach the requisite process acculturation, or even what that practically entails. A low grade on this paper - and I don't know how I can in good conscience give her a high grade for such unreflective work - will probably only send the message that she is incapable or unwelcome.
- She has correctly understood the assignment, but disagrees with me-where I see a welter of ideological subtexts in her ads, she understands this position but really believes that there is nothing more at work there than simple sales pitch. If this is the case, then I have a larger problem on my hands: I'm interpreting intellectual diversity as bad thinking; however well-intentioned, my attempts to get her to say something else aren't educational so much as they are attempts to destroy her intellectual autonomy.
- The student is simply not smart enough to understand what's going on. This is an attractive explanation, as it locates responsibility for the student's failure comfortably far away from me. On the other hand, it also means I've got a class full of dummies, which means there's nothing I can do to improve the situation.
Pragmatically, I suppose I've got to address this sort of situation as though explanation #1 is the root cause, since there's not a great deal I can do about the other two.