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:
Shannon Melissa 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 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 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 [ . . . ] 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? -- -- -- |