A
Review of Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground
Discussion with Banks
Thread 3 - gatekeeping, retention, and making access
One particularly difficult discussion we had while reading Banks’s book was concerning how institutions can address racism and educational access. While Banks doesn't address this issue directly, he offers theoretical possibilities in chapter seven; however, he mainly stays at the classroom level, not the institutional one. The following account of an African American 101 student was the center of much discussion, and it raised lots of productive and difficult questions concerning the larger institutions (and their technologies) our classrooms are a part of:
- How does “making access” to the university (through programs and incentives) create further complications and difficulties for students of color?
- How do we counter the ghettoizing of “at risk” students in programs meant to help them?
- How might the goals of “educating” students of color and “retaining” students be contradictory?
Shannon
I remember discussing one particular program with a young African-American
male last semester [ . . . ] It is a mentoring/tutoring program for “at-risk”
African-American males. He descriptively detailed the wasted time he spent
in mandatory study halls, and the sporadic tutoring sessions he had to
endure for all of his classes that semester. According to the student,
he found the mandatory program degrading and elementary. “They told
me that we are usually the first to drop out of school, so this is supposed
to prevent us from doing that,” he asked. “Honestly, this
program makes me want to drop out – I feel like they don’t
trust me to be a good student.” Even though this program may have
been created with good intentions, its color-blind practice segregates
students, and also serves as a gatekeeping practice, housing the “at-risk”
students together. It is clear that the goal is retention, but ultimately,
in my student’s experience, it was thwarting his education more
than anything. In terms of technology, do mandatory computer classes,
Blackboard orientation sessions, and required technological classes also
thwart minorities? Do they always have access to this type of instruction?
Melissa
The program which Shannon refers is the SOAR program's GAME project. These
African American Males have failed or flunked out, and this project is
a second (possibly last) resort. The program was established to assist
the mere 46 (that is, the total number of) entering African American freshman
from 2005. The program is on going; I have a student this semester. I
have the flip side experience where I hope the program helps this student
to succeed or at least realize the results of his actions [ . . . ]
In a similar way, this switch from the group to the individual exists for us in the writing class, since we have a class of 23 where we know each student. In some ways, I think this helps us recognize and deal with the students concerning issues of technology and race/class. For example, I have a few students this semester who tell me that they ran out of funds. So we have created a solution to the 'computer generated document.' These same students do not have ready access to Blackboard, but how do I deal with that?
Adam
Shannon, to your former student's frustration with the "mandatory"
retention program that seemed to do more harm than good, I can't say a
whole lot because I don't know enough about the program to be able to
get at what the young man's real frustrations were...could have just been
a poorly designed program, could have been issues in his own identity
that led him to resist, etc. In general, though, I tend to support such
programs and will just say we're in a political environment where it is
very difficult to get funding or other resources to do anything to support
students from marginalized groups, so we have to really work to force,
shame, cajole, game, and threaten our way into anything we can get to
ensure the success of those who have been excluded from higher ed.
Of course there's no one program that will work in every context, though....these things are very situational, which is what makes designing and implementing them so difficult...but still worth the struggle.
Art
One problem in this area that I have felt is the lack of responsibility
by teachers to assume that every student will be up to speed with the
latest technological tools in academia, whether that student is Black/White/Brown,
or male/female. [ . . . ]
Moreover, I believe economics play heavily in the mire of usability but also comprehension of the material being sought/taught. The presumption that minorities or international students would automatically fail to do well and ought to be placed in basic courses is at best to deduce the competencies of these citizens solely based on notions governed by whiteness, institutional racism, and racial subordination.
Asao
I agree mostly with Adam and the very real economic and other concerns
that he raises about programs like SOAR in the academy. I believe most
come from good places in good hearts, but as you say Shannon, this one
at least seems to be more about retention, and less about education. I
hope that's not completely true. A part of me says, yes, we need these
programs in order to do the kind of work that Adam's book promotes, the
kind that, as he says, has always been technological and a part of the
African American experience, a history defined often by oppression, which
in my view has made its rhetorics ones articulated through discourses
that play with dominant ones, but they’re also discourses that need
those dominant ones, or at least are created in reaction to them, even
from them. Then there's that other part of me that says that there should
NOT at any cost be experiences like your student's, Shannon. No one should
suffer through a program that he sees as humiliating and demeaning. What
good is the program if it subjects (read submission in that word) those
under its power in ways like you describe? What good does it do him, say,
to get his degree from our school, and leave thinking, "thank, god
I'm done with THAT. College sucked"? What good is a program that
cares more about retention than education, more about numbers than critical
citizenship and growth as a person?
[ . . . ] And what about mentorships? Why not spend the money that SOAR uses on all this structure to offer advanced students of color and professors of color chances to mentor struggling students of color in formal and informal ways, less structured ways, ways that may very well be underneath or outside of the institution, a kind of institutional-level “rhetoric of design” that Banks defines for us? Part of the problem here is the institutional-ness of the program. That's what these programs do because that's usually what institutions do. They create structures that ultimately don’t handle individual cases very well. They create, for good and bad, institutionalization (read prison and Foucault in that word).
And all this really comes to Melissa's smart question, which reminds me of Art's prescient comment he made last week in a reflection on Villanueva's book about being a critical Chicano teacher and academic AND that “good American” that his mother always wanted him to be. How do we join these things, the public-ness of the university, its whiteness, its hegemony, to the private, the plural discourses of the lived worlds of those who seek entrance, and to counter-hegemonic ways. Maybe more importantly, how do we see these things, the public and private, the academy and home, the social and individual discourses, as consubstantial to one another? I'm struck by Bank’s accounting of MLK and African American quilting practices with the brickolage of it all, the very jazz-y, improvisational quality of the practices, but it’s an improvisation based on an understanding of dominant discourses, no? It further reminds me of a novel by Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo. And maybe Malcolm X is a clearer parallel to the comp classroom, a figure who is counter-hegemonic, who resisted outwardly and was demonized, oppressed, like many of our students, but in other ways [ . . . ]
[ . . . ] There are many other reasons that mentors are needed in the academy for students of color, and Shannon’s student is no exception. It sucks being a token, living with that subtext to your authority and your validity as a scholar and teacher, but it’s bearable with folks who have gone before you, who unfold their quilts and lay them on the fence to let you know that shit will be okay, to stay the course, that you’re headed in the right direction, or to turn left quick! This may be what Shannon’s student needs, a quilt hung by someone who has gone before him, who knows his journey and the dangers it contains, who can offer guidance in ways that are meaningful both at institutional and personal levels. The Underground Railroad Banks talks about was a successful institution because it relied on improvisation, on people who knew the course ahead, and people who could be trusted, mentors who knew how to “rewrite the code” of the South and were willing to do it for those coming after them [ . . . ]
Soooo, I think we find ourselves in that Freirean existential problematic: How can our classroom technologies address access (rhetorically, physically, emotionally, psychically, intellectually, economically, etc.) in ways that are meaningful and don’t leave folks out, create more problems, or ignore the individual making her way through larger social systems?
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