The major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the victors and rulers or — the more difficult path — to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatened the less fortunate with the danger of complete extinction, and take into account the experience of subordination itself, as well as the memory of forgotten voices and persons. (Said 35)I've been thinking about student language and their resistance to bring their own languages into the college classroom, their writing, their conversations with their professors. Though I emphasize that translingualism is the norm across the globe and American education looks backward towards the ignorance of monolingualism, and though I demonstrate examples of translingualism in the first weeks, this semester students -- for the first in my professorial experience -- all rejected their natural language in the first project. This says much how powerful the hegemony instills through public space and in contrast to liberatory education.
I come from a position that critical pedagogy begins with a Freirian foundation of problem-posing education, conscientization, and praxis. This critical pedagogy is further problematized by Ira Shor, bell hooks, and others who update critical pedagogy for the 21st century corporate (neoliberal) college.
For example, bell hooks argues that the student’s learning must be grounded in individual experience (“existential experience”) to be authentic learning experiences (hooks 56) where the classroom is a nurturing community. Her emphasis on an irenic or feminized community, instead of an agonistic or masculinized hierarchy, quickly shows a contradiction in the culture of many writing classes where a “standard” language acts as the gatekeeping entrance into the larger academy and “successful citizenship.”
Within such an emancipatory environment, students would need to discover their individual reasons for coming to liberation, where Freire argued for a singular path to liberation. hooks’s writing classroom also delves into the language of power and the power of language — how students are able to talk, when, and how their language affects others.
Finally, hooks disagrees with her mentor Paulo Freire, who argues that the oppressed need to use the language of the oppressors; instead, hooks argues how oppressed groups can create meaning and power with their own language. Specifically, hooks argues — especially appropriate to the writing classroom — that the construct of discourse “has the potential to disempower those of us who are just learning to speak” and stresses that Standard English is not the speech of exile, but is the language of “conquest and domination” (168). To do this, hooks encourages students to use their first language and translate it for various rhetorical purposes (172), similar to Vershawn Ashanti Young’s argument regarding codemeshing, for “If we don’t embrace code meshing or something like it, the separation of the languages and the races will continue” (Young 135). Such a prediction implies a schism that is contrary to the ideals of liberal education in general, and community colleges, specifically.
So I continue to think. But we need readjust our perceptions of student language.
Resources
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the
Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual: The
1993 Reith Lectures. Reprint ed. New York: Vintage, 1996. Print.
Shor, Ira. “Our
Apartheid: Writing and Inequality.” Journal
of Basic Writing 16.1 (1997): 91-104. PDF.
Young, Vershawn A. Your Average Nigga: Performing
Race, Literacy and Masculinity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
2007. Print.
Comments
Post a Comment