Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages

9. one cause or at least correlation-point for our negative attitudes toward students is the ways in which "the writing comes to represent a person, a set of traits ascribed to an individual. the students are what they write, and moreover they mark themselves by their unstable writing as something Other than the professionals whose texts are revered in academe"
10-11. sledd on "the literacy crisis of the late 1980s" as "the reult of implicit--perhaps latent--racism in testing" and oakes on ability tracking: "curricular differentiation was made possible only by the genuine belief--arising from social darwinism--that children of various social classes, those from native-born and long-established families and those of recent immigrants, differed greatly in fundamental ways. children of the affluent were considered by school people to be abstract thinkers...oriented toward literacy. those of the lower classes and recently immigrated were considered laggards...ignorant, prejudiced, and highly excitable." thus--> "the descriptions of students as dull, disinterested, apathetic are built upon latent social and ethnic prejudices. however, the student has become such a generalized term, so prevalent as not to be readily identified with any group. thus although the roots of representation lie in prejudice, current representations of students are absent of a specific ethnic or gendered referent"
21. hayden white is (i confess) useful here: "white's work enables us to consider the testimonial not as a mirror of nature but as a semi-fictionalized form that follows strict conventional requirements for the presentation of narrator, characters, subject and tone....one begins to view it as a selection of topoi arranged around a familiar plot....one gets the distinct impression from testamonials that experiences with students are commonly negative. presumably, with a positive classroom experience, there would be no need for pedagogy that corrects students' dullness and apathy"
35. function & form: "by envisioning the testimonial as a construct which obeys particular generic conventions, we can separate ourselves from the notion that the testimonial is a mirror of nature that records what actually happened in the classroom"; "rather than ask in what way representations of students are true we can shift the question to examine how the conventional representations of students are used. in other words, in whose interests are students represented as those who lack?"
53. in one example, a writer describes use-of-detail "errors" & divides students into two sets--those who err to one extreme & those who err to the other: "the students are not divided amongst themselves into those who lack and those who are able. yet students in their difference are all divided from the instructor, who is able to gauge when sufficient detail has been used" (authority & subjectivity--who makes these distinctions & to whom do they matter? how will they be positioned in testamonials?)
59. Douglas as an example of a teacher who, as she presents herself in writing about her classroom practices, "is regulating the extent to which her students may explore outside the boundaries of acceptable academic discourse...placing definable limits on their freedom to create" which puts her at odds with her own deliberate positioning "a continuous spokesperson for the values of the profession, she remains at the center of the students' freedom to create and the center of her narrative. only as the students move closer to the center--the norms of the community--are they defined as acceptable"
70. "children and beginners develop the plot of testimonials because the children need to be given proper direction in order to grow or become. yet unlike the popular representation of the adorable and innocent child, college student beginners are grotesque and deviant. they are stunted, undeveloped, young minds trapped in an aging body. the disparity between mind and body leads to bifurcated expectations for the students: whereas real children would be coddled and humored, adult children are expected to know it all....the metaphor of children does not enable, but rather serves as a further rhetorical ploy to illustrate difference"
75. "there is much of the missionary in the desire of the english teacher to teach great works of literature, the Word of literature"
78. contradictory notions of "beginner"--"children writers of five frequently know how to manipulate a pen, they are aware that writing follows across the page, and they are aware that writing records a story" but "college writers...are marked as beginners....yet, simultaneously...represented, not so much as lacking as a tabula rasa lacks, but as having notions of writing that need to be corrected"... bartholomae & others characterize this more as a new beginning--a beginning not into the world of text but into a new discourse community w/new rules. even freire defines his students by what they lack.
81. students are also characterized by excess, out-of-control-ness; "three types of Others emerge from this focus on surplus: mystical Others (a type found exclusively in writing of the 60's), Orientalized Others, and bestial Others. they are all exotic Others, reaching extreme, irreconcilable difference."
83. ahmed, only easier to follow: "the Other has not completely vanished, but it can no longer be known objectively. there is always something of our own disposition, knowledge and cultural background in the attempt to understand the Other. to define ourselves, we define Others; to define Others, we use ourselves."
87. her terminology here has to go, but the distinction is valuable: "the speech genre itself--the language and form that the text employs--is not inaccessible to the student, for testimonials reflect the colloquial speech of casual conversation. but the text's audience and its mode of dissemination serves to exclude students from active participation with it"--our writing tends toward both "silencing the students" and publishing in "journal[s] read by experts...obtained by membership in a professional society"
97. "representation can also be violent when incorporated into the discourse of colonization in which indigenous inhabitants of exotic locations were to be represented in order to be made literate and to be made citizens of a new order. the term illiterate is itself a representation, naming not just one person, but a whole group of people and it suggests certain norms that those represented have failed to realize"
101. "there is a standard description of students as Others that is rooted in the concept of lack, and... the specific terms of lack vary according to the historical situation and the aims of the instructor. there are, therefore, differences in difference."
109. "humans are distinguished by their ability to use words to express ideas....animals, on the other hand, can only respond to signs as signals; signals exist only in the present, linking a discrete event with a reaction. therefore, if students are perceived to be animals, their verbal abilities are percieved also to be limited"; "metaphors...are never innocent. lakoff and johnson postulate that metaphor has the power 'to create a reality rather than simply to give us a way of conceptualizing a preexisting reality' (144)"; "highlighting certain qualities of an individual or a thing, such as drawing attention to the animalian qualities of students, results in downplaying other qualities"
111. & imperialism: "as long as student essays have been plagued by poor organization, riddled by errors, and overcome by a glut of uncessary detail, teachers have wanted the problems to disappear. with disappearance comes silence, the ultimate stance of control for it does not allow any other voices to intrude upon one's own." (yes, she's using those words deliberately in reference to works she's working with)
116. "the personal story defines the field of composition....yet the evidence for personal narratives is difficult to quantify, except as a rhetorical gesture. testimonials, like ethnographies and case studies, must be understood in their rhetorical sense as a transaction between writer, reader, and represented subject. the rhetorical structure of the testimonial is complicit in determining the types of representations found within"--and they're not pretty: "the focus of the personal story on the self results in a glorification of the self as hero, and the exploits of the self may be exploitative to those who stand in opposition to its aims"
128. "one of the ironies of the cultivation of the feminine ethos for composition has been that student voices have remained marginalized. nurturance, investment in the classroom, a pedagogy based on personal voice (which allows students to acquire authority as writers by speaking from their own experience), critical dialogue, multicultural storytelling are all methodologies designed to reinscribe students in the center of the classroom experience--at the center of discourse." but we don't write them there.
131-2. sally miller gearhart's argument: "attempts to remove oneself from power relationships reveal an underlying reliance on power" <--& "there is a dual action in testamonials: the actual classroom event and the narration of the event. the pedagogical act that initiates the testimonial is--in practice--a rhetorical act....the teacher attempts to persuade students to develop better writing habits." she argues: "our 'rational discourse...turns out to be in itself a subtle form of Might Makes Right. speech and rhetoric teachers have been training a competent breed of weaposn specialists who are skilled in emotional manoeuvers, expert in intellectual logistics' (gearhart 197). underlying the narrative, with its links to the christian testamonials of religious converstaion, is the concept of converting others, changing them to a form which suits the proselytizer"--& (still g) "conversion models of human interaction are much more insideously dangerous than conquest models because invasion and violation are authorized by the certainty that the victim is being given what she wants"; g "argues that the communication environment must be reconceived as a matrix, a womb in which language can gestate, a nurturing atmosphere"
133. g "is not the first to propose a dialogic model of interaction for actual and textual practices," but hers is unique in that "it relies on a model of submission to accomplish its aims"--"in order for dialogism to successfully replace conversion and conquest models, each participant in the dialogue must be 'willing on the deepest level to yield his/her position entirely to the other(s)'" (emph. mh)
148-9. she tries to propose a new topoi to take the place of the flawed testamonial but, admittedly, fails; "it is quite possible," she concludes, "that there may be no escape from representation. ultimately, stories that work within established generic conventions sound similar....certainly, recognition of our familiar plots and topoi is the first step. beyond that, we must examine our need to testify. what purpose does self-affirming testimony serve? in whose interest is it offered? must we be the heros of our own discourse?" her answer: "power relationships between students and teachers can be reversed neither by a change in epistemology (current traditional to expressivist) nor by an alternation of ethos (authoritarian to student-centered). in the final analysis, it would appear that composition must negotiate its own academic troubles before its discourse may reflect a change in attitude toward students"