Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
174. "sometimes i wonder just what moral issues might arise in the provocative class you talk about, where students are not being instructed, they're acting and reacting. or is it foolish to think that some sort of ethical awareness might arise there? among the africans there's often an ethical obligation given in their names, as i've said, so individuals are constantly reminded of what they owe the family or community. in fact, one of the african lecturers told me that when students here write 'personally,' they do not in fact tell about their individual selves so much as about the experiences of others like them in the community. they're more sociocentric than egocentric"
181. "to 'correct' the language [of a writer's narrative] would be to place both reader and writer at a considerable remove from events, as though the person speaking to us in the story were much older and looking back with a mind now educated. and yet, are there some changes in language that would improve the effectiveness of the story? these are interesting considerations, it seems to me, and taking them up with young people would get them to thinking about language in a more sophisticated way. they would be learning, for example, that there is a difference between the one who speaks on the page and the one who has written those words--words that may have once been spoken, many of them, when others were first told the story but now in writing have become a voice apart. and the writer is expected to be in control of that voice"
182. "now, even if they decide the language should remain entirely unchanged, they are evaluating it according to a different standard than that or their ordinary speech, a more formal or 'academic' standard. and they are internalizing that standard even as they decide against it. however, to internalize a different or 'higher' standard of language is to develop a feeling of dissatisfaction with one's present life situation (for a different standard of language implies a different standard for the way one is to live)."
184. "so we feel this pressure to do the safe academic thing, to teach various forms and terms--what your colleagues call the metalanguage of thesis, assumption, literal/figurative and the like--while saying in effect, this will all be useful to you later on....our work must have value in the moment if our young people are to be fully engaged with it, so we have very little talking to do and no promises to make. we work along with them, hoping to hear the unexpected voice. we are not going to hear it, however, so long as students think of themselves as lower, as those who only do as another directs. then our meeing is one-sided and alienates not only person from person but inner aspects of a single individual. the learner has no cause for drawing together various parts of the self, no particular expressive need....so let our meeting be a many-sided event, a meeting with individuals who make a difference for themselves through the decisions they make"
194. the value (& ubiquity) of narrative: "one story these young people are living is the adventure of their entrance into the symbolic system of the academic world and learning there the language of academic discourse....much academic writing is the recounting of history. or an academic article may introduce the work of some writer, then another who contradicts the first, and a drama of ideas is set in motion, often with anecdotal asides. in fact, much writing that is not ordinarily thought of as story has a narrative progression which provides a frame for the inclusion of facts, analysis, and commentary. academic discourse in general is a specialized kind of narrative"..."has anyone in composition studies noticed how important personal narrative has recently become in the social sciences? there has been a dispersal of authority, so to speak, and research reports often include the voices [of] their subjects, who become participants in the study rather than simply exhibits"