Not Quite a literacy narrative

 In the First Year Writing course I am teaching this semester we have been reading mentor texts to support our own work in writing literacynarratives.  Four that we have been reading are Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue, AnneImbrie’s Words Become Us, Carpet is Mungers by Megan Daum and Living Like Weasels by AnnieDillard.  The first two pieces by Tan andImbrie are as one might expect about

Language

Words

Reading

And writing

Things we think of as literacy

These two pieces are creative, personal, academic,narrative, theoretical and for many of us “good reads.”  With their help we can start to see okay,yes, a literacy narrative might be about how literacy is part of my life… whatit has to do with me. 

Then at the suggestion of my wise friend Cindy Urbanski wealso read two more pieces from Daum and Dillard.  Neither piece seems to be directly related toreading and writing or language particularly. So then we start to think…. Well a literacy narrative is just anarrative.  Can be about anything?  Huh?

A look on Google defies this answer many a writing teacherhas assigned a literacy narrative and guideline after guideline mentions thatthe piece should be a narrative about one’s experiences with reading andwriting.   Where do carpet and weaselscome in?

I entered class on Tuesday with all of these thoughts on mymind.  Not totally sure why these two pieces are literacy narratives.  I was both curious and scared to figure this out with my students.   As we talk in small groups I came up with a question, what is our broadest definition of literacy? What does it mean to read and write? Some ideas begin to surface. Literacy is about

Making meaning

Sharing ideas

Symbolic thought

Creating stories we live by

Oh!  So it starts tocome together, the reason why the weasels fit in here.  Just as the words I type here are representations or symbols of my thinking, the weasels are symbols of a theoryabout experience.   So is thecarpet.  So are the words.

And you know how when you learned the word “meme” or “pedagogue”or “kvetch” you then hear it everywhere? Well, this week alongside thinking about literacy narratives with 1101students, I have also been reading for the gender and language studies course Iam taking.  In one of these, Lakoff andJohnson goes right to the idea of metaphorical thinking, they map the ways ourlives are narrated by cultural-specific metaphors.  The metaphors not only describe our lives butcreate them as we live out the metaphors of our culture. 

M.J. Hardman and Lisa Perry describe views of women asshaped by language.  I particularly latchonto her making visible the derivational naming of women in English.  In English women in word and idea are derivedfrom men and are marked that way by language like

Female

Once the French femme

Stewardess

Waitress

-ess

The Bachelorette

Kitchenette

Not hardly leather

-ette

And

When Harry Met Sally (See the subject position of Harry?)

Does it matter?  Well,if a metaphor describes what something is like, narrates an idea togenerate connections in our thoughts, what if something or someone is know onlythrough being not quite enough like something else, a diminutiveversion, not even lucky enough for a metaphor of her own.  Just derivation.  

The words matter. They hold the intention of social thought behind them.  They do things and create things in theworld.     

Donna Wilshire writes about metaphorical thinking as a primarysource of feminist activity in that metaphors offer a different kind ofworldview that can and has challenged the literal and linear mindness ofpatriarchy.  Metaphors get messy, theydon’t tell us exactly how things are, they make visible the stickiness ofunderstanding .

Today as I am writing up the literacy narrative work as an assignmentI am wondering how I can make this writing and work recognizable enough in the academiccontext, where linear and literal rule, while also creating space for play withour own conceptions of literacy, academy, and our understandings of what getsto count here and why.

Yall, See Here Now! Thinking Further About Essentialism and Native Tongue

 “It’s an essentialist argument about what language is… about how it works.  It’s like she has this belief about how certain kinds of language are right or proper…. And so they like…. Hold some kind of power… I mean I know words do hold power… but like she is not questioning that power in terms of …. It’s about social class!  Okay, this guy who says ‘See here’ rather than ‘Perceive this’ on page … lets see …. ”  

Imagine the above with rambling hand motions to accompany the rambling tone.  Imagine these spoken and emoted into a room where no heads nod in affirmation.  That would be a picture of me last week speaking into the Language and Gender class I am taking this semester.  Everyone had their copy of Suzette Hayden Elgin’s Native Tongue open in front of them, but the discussion wasn’t all that open to my go at critique.  For the rest of class I scribbled sideways notes into my daybook to try and peel back the stammer and see the idea under there.  So here I am again with another try at articulation-away from the in-class-ego-talk, so that I can make visible this question I have in terms of the arguments about language, power and gender being made in the science fiction novel, Native Tongue.  

 In Native Tongue Elgin assumes that language holds power to change material circumstances.   She assumes that this power is contained in knowledge of language use, and particularly knowledge of the best, clearest, most articulate language.  She thus assumes that there exists a best, clearest and most articulate form of language.   In the novel Elgin ties this authority with language to a particular group of people, the Linguists, who are for the most part a ruling class in a hierarchically organized culture.  The non-linguist characters could be analogous to working class peoples (though there are even more hierarchies within and within and within).  In the novel’s world, these characters do not have the facility with language that the Linguists, both female and male, do.  

When I put this up next to the ways that language works in my life, it feels like maintenance of current systems of power.   In another reading I did for class this week, a chapter from Sexed Texts, Paul Baker gives his tour of early research in language and gender studies.  His basic claim is that while all of this early work is historically interesting and useful in making critical turns toward the current discipline, it still does the theoretical and political work of maintaining understandings of gender through essentialism.   According to Baker, this period of research saw traits of women or gay people or men as bounded together in firm categories of difference.  The characteristics of categories could be known through essential and “true” qualities.  

Elgin similarly frames language itself in essential ways.   Language in Native Tongue has a true and pure nature, which can be mastered and put to creative use.  I am with her (to a point) on thinking that language holds power in the world.  My question is more about the essential qualities of this power.  I believe that power through language is socially constructed and that no pure and best or true or clearest language exists naturally.  It’s all contextual.  

Elgin’s argument is that the Linguist’ language is superior to others, not just culturally constructed superiority, but materially is better: better at doing things in the world, better at changing reality.  Well.  I do see (perceive!) how some language use is socially constructed as better, clearer, more articulate.   There is as a material reality to the ways that, for instance, Standard White English functions as a language of power, but this doesn’t mean that the Standard White English is naturally a better dialect or that language users, teachers and theorists should go along with this socio-historical creation uncritically.

Native Tongue sees the creative opportunity of language and is itself a critique of power relations, but it is not a critical examination of how power works through language (and other tools) and to whose benefit.   Elgin does an imaginatively intellectual job of naming and disrupting gender hierarchies at work in our own culture by hyperbolizing them in the world of Native Tongue.  She does this useful and interesting work, though, by sustaining notions of social class boundaries, which maintains the normalizing of all gender traits as white and middle class, marginalizing all others.

In the end of the novel, through the powerful work of their language use, the upper class, Linguist women begin changing reality to the material advantage of upper class, Linguist women.  Meanwhile, Michaela, the only heavily narrated non-Linguist, working class woman, is left to be an awesome listener and to do the dirtiest labors of murder.

Freewriting My Way to Critical Teaching

So last week I brought Theme for English B by Langston Hughes to our Writing 1101 course as the starting point for Writing Into the Day. We generally begin class this way with a point of inspiration and time to just write anything that comes to mind.    

The day I brought the Langston Hughes poem was the second day of class.  As I sat writing with students also writing around me, I had one of those moments when I was struck by an immediate idea about what I wanted to say about this poem.  (I don’t always just have a spark of an idea right away when I write... sometimes I can’t think of anything to say.)  But in this moment I was immediately reminded of a recent conversation with a friend and my ideas just flowed out onto the page in a messy and sprawling kind of way.  I put pen to paper and just freewrote my thought-flow onto the page,   

 I learned this strategy of freewriting from Peter Elbow... and it is one of the most useful tools to me as a writer.  Just get your thoughts down on the page.   Keep your pen moving.  Even if you are writing “I don’t know what to write...”  It frees my thoughts up (even at 8:00 am) to go in directions I didn’t even realize I wanted to go.  

When I did this writing in response to Langston Hughes, I knew that issues of race, class, gender and sexuality... issues of identity... are concepts that I want to be visible part of our conversations in class.  And I did choose Langston Hughes’s piece about school writing for that reason, but I guess as I sat down to actually write alongside students and Langston (via the coffee stained poem glued in my daybook) I started thinking newly about my own position as white, middle class teacher and feelings of insecurities in broaching issues of race, even as I know intellectually that I want to and need to.  Writing into the day with the Langston Hughes poem let me start to articulate ideas that had been simmering that I didn’t even realize I needed to think through.

Open Access to the Academic-Personal

In reading around rather than actually within Paul Baker’s book, Sexed Texts, I have possibly figured out more about the book than I would have having had it in front of me.  Here’s what I know.  

1.       Paul Baker and his readers are either "not into" or "not up in the know-how on" open-access sharing.  A pdf of the first chapter of this book (required reading for the fall course course I am taking, Language, Gender and Power) is not to be found on the internet.  And the book, of course, is out of stock everywhere from Amazon to our local Grey’s University Bookstore.  So, what does one do?  Read around the internet to see what I can find out about this book. 

2.       Elaine Fraser (2009, Sociolinguist Studies) reviewed the book, naming the work of bringing current context to a history of research in language and gender.  Fraser names part of Baker’s larger work as critique of the project of Queer Theory.  She also problematizes the range of contexts Baker uses, particularly naming his foregrounding of male over female gay communities.

3.       Lancaster University identifies this as an undergraduate textbook.  Dang. (If one day someone names something I write a textbook, I will be totally irate.)  More handily, Lancaster University also provides the only snippet of this text to be seen on the web.    This pleasantly turns out to be a narrative of the author’s problematic encounter with gender-labeled muffins.  This excerpt really gave me enough to go on until my nice, used copy arrives next week.  Baker, like many of us, wants to disrupt category boundaries.

As I will be doing with most of my “school” readings, I am putting alongside Baker, my summer reading of Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin.  This book is actually also a required course reading.  For some reason it is the first one I picked up to get started on while on a family RV trip to Indiana in July.  Somewhere in the North Carolina mountains I opened the book and read the preface.  And read it again, stopping to tell my mom that this book seems weird.  Finally, I flip the book over and to the back cover and realize this is a novel!  And science fiction!  Woot!!  Well, then it actually felt like summer reading!!  Through several states and a campground stay in Kentucky, I read the first couple of chapters, intermittently also attending to children, work emails and somehow risking the danger of fixing myself cups after cup of tea en route.  The book opened with narrative and dialogue of men in a meeting and a rather pitiful if hardened introduction of the novel’s protagonist, Nazareth.  Putting these alongside my knowledge that this was a “feminist” book, I started getting worried what kind of feminist Suzette Haden Elgin might turn out to be.  I probably flipped to check the copyright date, 1984… hmmmm…. Somewhat before movements I knew of to complicate ideas of gender difference.  I kept reading, still rather hungry for whatever kind of fantasy that this novel might let me have the rare dip into.  

Fascinated as I was with Elgin’s fiction I have similar feelings when reading her writing about her work with language, particularly in her Introduction to The First Dictionary and Grammar of Laadan.  I feel compelled to read much more about her, from her.  I want to ask her about the ways that difference is constructed in Native Tongue and in the language primer for Laadan.  I want to ask what she thinks about critiques of essentialism in this kind of work.  I would tell her that I am so drawn to the way she makes visible the material issues of women and that still I find problematic the firm categories between gender that, for instance, a “women’s language” might sustain.  I am wondering, in what ways could a women’s language disrupt the appearance and social activity around firm categories of gender.  And by using categorical and possessive words to name a language as “women’s” doesn’t that continue the binary way of patriarchy?  Sigh.  

To bring all of this together for now, I want to think about how identity categories construct my literacy practices in these readings.  I am maddened and offended at required readings that are categorized as “textbook” reading.  It puts both the book and me as a reader into a box that presses in on me, defining me as someone in-need of learning, not someone who brings ideas to a text.  It makes my reading, my ideas, my identity as a student less part of “real” work.  And yet, I am reading and writing about Baker and Elgin here because of my identity as a student, while I somehow don’t make time to post to my blog about readings that have to do with my life at home and in community outside of “work”.   And so, I also name here on my blog my academic and professional lives as the “real” part, the part worth sharing and talking to others about.  And I don’t tell you that as I type a four year old with an earache is pressed against my arm or that in another window on my computer screen is an email to a the women who run our preschool co-op. It seems that at just about at every turn as student, as mother, as teacher (more on that elsewhere) my work is shaped as other.

Categories of identity, as I write them, write into them, rewrite them, shape me.  Somehow I would like to lean on both Elgin’s disruptions of dominant power stories and Baker’s critique of the naturalization of gendering language to figure out how to tell my academic story in a way that values and complicates my too personal and too private work of mothering and teaching.  So that's where I'm headed in more discussions of  readings coming this fall :)

String Games Inquiry

Back in the spring Paul Allison invited me to hang out in an episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers on String Games.  On the show Fred Mindlin taught us string games and shared his string game stories.

I shared that evening about the finger knitting the kindergartners and I used to work on, and I just haven't gotten string off my mind ever since!  Finally this week at the UNC Charlote Writing Project Partnership Institute,  I had the opportunity to explore with other teachers some of the thinking I've been doing in the last few months.    On Monday as a way to find some common ground around the idea of inquiry, I brought some string, a little James Paul Gee and my daybook. Here's how we spent the session:

Getting Some String... Finding some string, tying

Writing into Session:  What do you know about string games what do they remind you of?

Learning a simple string game- The Saki Cup (scroll to page 14)

               Modeling
               Exploring, trying, failing, collaborating, sharing expertise, using resources, etc

               Explore links and videos

                                    

               Extending to other games/ideas based on expertise in room

Reading of and Responding to Gee, Good Video Games and Good Learning

GeeGood Learning                             

 Discuss in small groups: What elements of learning did we engage in figuring out a string game?  What about inquiry?

Closing: Learning Narratives

Peter Kittle’s unicyle video as mentor text (How does Peter narrate his inquiry?)

Writing out of session: 
            Personal narrative of inquiry experience.  What was it like to engage in string games    today?  Narrate your experience. 

Piecing together Myself with Public Memories of SI

Roaming through my understandings of the summer, I’m thinking about the ways that people have participated in creating my Summer Institute experience.  A few months ago I listened to Anne Wysocki speak about the location of memory.  I’m imagining myself literally roaming around in my memory spaces.  It’s a populated place.

Jackson’s Java

 And I seem to know that the woman sitting at the third table must be Renatta

 Maybe she was looking at the door searchingly. 

Then, listening to her

I breathe out

Ah.

Now we have our group.

I write my criticisms

On the American Dream

So well

So solid

Until Mary’s

Story

Makes me wobble.

This is the third time

Tony and I

Have come to SI together

Haiku, Jackson’s Java before Fretwell, Mixing teaching and theory

#feelslikeitssupposedto

Jessie looks at me across the open space

Of SI

Speaks her words

Considered and Curious.

And I want to steep my thoughts too

A story about doctors visits

How a woman is positioned

Sally’s story

Around the table from me

At Amelie’s

So many

windows

Tabs

Sticky notes

Daybook pages

Swirling all over me.

Until Melissa

Calm, invites me to write.

Her ease seeps into me,

And I do

I am cautionless

Asking for movie

Meredith

Presses this,

And devotes to making it

Happen anyway

Cindy and I crisscross our ideas

Flowing them

Throwing them

Through Jackson’s Java

To a Google Doc

Riffing from shared experience and

New possibility

This SI

My unquestioned

Theory on silent lunch

Moves, skids around

Reynelda’s unapologetic

Real story of school

Forces, makes me name

The complexity

I slide behind

Her computer screen

Slip on her headphones

Listen to her voice

I blink

Surprised, enthralled, engaged

Laura sings.

I write a little list

Of my mismatched inquiries

Fulfilling Christin’s task

Until squiggles and connecting lines arrive

And her request becomes

Just what I needed

 This reminds me of…

Most likely Peter Elbow

Steve

Weaves texts

Into the day

A mentor for the kinds

Of literature review that requires no heading

Teena gifts me

With stories

Of her Narnia

And two little girls are still sitting whittling on a hillside

In the corner of my mind

I’m waiting outside swimming lessons reading

And I’m not

I’m still at SI

Debbie blogs about my demo

Winding her reflections into my practice

Revisioning my understandings

Tricia’s flutter

Of Twitter

7 Posts

Ever

Reserved

Considered

Makes space for me

To wobble

Jennifer’s voice echoes

With smart thinking

Around my brain and living room

Seeping ideas about leadership

Shared

Messy

Moving

Into my own thinking

As I splice her lines in video

Lil skypes me from across the room,

from home,

from her infusion

Using conversation and the best placed muscle arm and dancing person emoticons

To push me, question me and narrate with us the story of this

Summer Institute.