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Articles Conference Reviews |
2007B9DeanB.9: “Dude! Where’s My Voice? Language, Identity, and the Working-Class Writing Instructor” Participants and Presentations:
There are moments when my bad habits at the 4Cs (like waking up late after staying out very late and chatting with folks in the hall) lead me to miss things that I rue missing, and this presentation—the best that I saw at this year’s 4Cs—was that sort of moment. As someone who is “to the manor born,” I’ve been keenly aware for the last ten or so years (since starting graduate school and full-time college teaching) that I do not share the home language of my students. I believe my parents made a conscious point of speaking in complete sentences, minus profanity, and with the flat, seemingly unaccented voice of news broadcasters. My students, on the other hand, do not share my language or my views about language, and while that’s more than alright (sic) with me (it would be awful if all my 20-something students shared the world view of a 40 year-old failed comedian and teacher of writing), I’m sometimes at a loss on an affective level to understand everything that my students say and do in class. That’s where this wonderfully moving and funny presentation comes in. I missed the whole of Leonard Podis’ presentation, and that saddens me—because, judging by the Q and A session, he had a lot to say about the way that the academy privileges a very controlled, and perhaps controlling, type of discourse. Fortunately, Leonard Podis was willing to share his presentation paper with me, and one passage gets at the tension that Podis and the other presenters spoke of. While Leonard Podis, JoAnne Podis, and Nick Tingle were working on their panel, they found that they weren’t receiving emails from Nick Tingle, and they were perplexed at why this would be. It turned out that the reason had everything to do with their topic. Leonard Podis writes that he and JoAnne Podis were not receiving the messages from Tingle because, “the messages had been intercepted [by Instructional Technology] because they contained foul language, in particular, the f-word.” Leonard Podis goes onto say, Here we were, a group of academics from working-class backgrounds, trying to discuss our proposal on the effects of working-class language on students and teachers, and we were encountering an unexpected obstacle: Our college servers were censoring our messages because they contained the very words we were studying as sites of contestation for working class folks in the academy.
This really is ultimately, the major point that I drew from the whole of the three interlocking presentations: that the academy prudishly censors language that it considers “foul”—but it is a language that teachers and students from a working class background recognize as the language of home and hearth. And it seems like more than a few “profane” words get lost in this sort of censoring. As Nick Tingle pointed out in his presentation, one of the things that gets lost is a sense of humor. When I walked into the room, Tingle was regaling the crowd with a delightfully profane story about Elvis dying on the crapper—presumably after binging on fried food and speed—wondering if “alright” was “all right” to use. Tingle’s point was remarkably funny, but it was also completely apt in the way that all great humor is. Tingle, a South Carolina native who grew up loving Elvis, does not want to be a gatekeeper who tells students that their language doesn’t meet the requirements of the academy—that “alright” is a linguistic marker of their incompetence with the language of the academy. Also, Tingle pointed out that most of his students at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) are not working class students. At UCSB, where the average familial income now hovers over $100,000 a year, most students have very little, if any, connection to working class people and working class language. Tingle views himself as an ambassador of sorts—showing these students what sort of language and culture that they have not had access to. A result of this is that students, and I know this as his colleague, see Tingle as someone who they can “say anything to.” There is an openness to his discourse and the discourse of his classes that encourages serious thinking about serious issues—either using, or not using, “foul” language. (Whatever the hell “foul language” means.) After Nick Tingle’s presentation, JoAnne Podis shared a moving, and remarkable piece. JoAnne Podis’ piece was a meditation on what it meant for her to go to school and leave behind her Bohemian, Broken-English speaking mother. It was not, as you might imagine, a tale of dislocation and loss: it was a tale of love for speaking “like everyone else.” At least initially. Podis pointed out that it was her mother weeping when she first went off to school—not her. She could not wait to learn English, speak with her classmates, and engage in education. In fact, she did this all very well, but, particularly as she became a teacher, she began to wonder about her students and their voices. Were they thinking that the way that they spoke and wrote was “wrong,” when it in fact was neither right nor wrong—it was simply a part of them? JoAnne Podis ultimately made a very important point about the need to give students access to the “language of power” that is the language of the schools—without pathologizing or patronizing the language that students use at home. Also, her final point really hit home for me: immigrants, like her mother, put tremendous faith in the school system; they believe that schools can help their children learn and “belong” to the wider culture of the United State of America. This sort of faith in us as teachers humbles me. Ultimately, I still find it fairly miraculous that parents trust us, and me in particular, to help their students learn to read in write in ways that will make their children “successful.” It’s a helluva a responsibility, and it is one that I now, particularly after this fantastic panel, temper with this realization: that students want and need to speak and write in the pristine language of the academy, but that doesn’t mean that I, or anyone else, should shame them for using their home languages. Perhaps, profanity, the riotous and rich profanity that I so love in South Park and The Millers Tale, has a place in the language of the academy. I think it does, and, if it has a place in my students’ lives, then I owe it to them to listen to that sort of language with a more open mind. Comments? |