Rhetorically Listening to Hateful Rhetoric

The implications for composition studies is quite simple: listening has almost ceased to be theorized or taught as  rhetorical strategy. …I want to suggest that rhetorical listening may be imagined, generally, as a trope for interpretive intervention, one on equal footing with the tropes of reading and writing and speaking. 

– Krista Ratcliffe, “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a “Code of Cross-Cultural Conflict” (p. 196) (emphasis mine)

This blog took too long to write, but practicing patience with myself is necessary.

In an age where we have heightened awareness for intersectionality, there also is a need for us to improve our listening. The very recent and controversial US General Election, for me, is a prime example of what it means for both political representatives and the voting population to rhetorically listen and what interpretive speaking means.

(Sole) Metacognition Does Not Feminist Praxis Make

Of this week’s readings, I chose to focus on Valerie Clifford’s “Does the use of Journals as a Form of Assessment put into Practice Principles of Feminist Pedagogy?” and Nadia Behizadeh’s “Mitigating the Dangers of a Single Story: Creating Large-Scale Writing Assessments Aligned With Sociocultural Theory.” Both of these articles spoke out to me because they connected with my experience as a first-time freshman composition instructor.

In some ways, being an X tutor or facilitator of learning designates my “true origins” in teaching. I found some of the self-imposed reflection and criticisms quoted by Clifford in her assessment of journals in facilitating feminist analysis to be reminiscent of my experiences in leading group workshop classes as well as serving as a student assistant for both literature and composition courses, during my undergraduate and graduate careers. As a scholar, I am fascinated with metacognition. To me, being able to reflect on one’s thoughts and actions is one of the key practices necessary to improve in just about any skill or practice. Being able to understand what didn’t work well and what did makes it easier for us to tackle similar situations later, or to be able to take on unprecedented challenges by assessing how they relate to previous experiences and then by our memory we can attempt several kinds of remedy. In my years of instruction, this has led me to redesign workshop strategies and layouts, and has sharpened my intuition in which I guide my student-writers to focus on certain aspects of their assignments and writing that are of vital importance. While I did not keep a regular teaching journal (as I should do), I oftentimes kept observation notes of other instructors and their practices, consulted my peers and colleagues on said observations, and made memos of my own teaching practices. I do not recall sharing any of these reflections directly with anyone, save for an observation assignment last term for my ENGL 220A: “Teaching College Composition” course.

The readings this week also made me consider how assessment could be oriented more towards feminist agendas. One of my close peers and friends – a “school spouse” of mine – gears her research towards students’ sentiments towards assessment, and how assessment practices may better reflect them. As such, the intersection of assessment with feminism isn’t really something I haven’t considered before, but it certainly does feel like one hell of a mental puzzle. In Behizadeh’s piece, I especially liked her challenge to include a large-panel, portfolio assessment mythology in K-12 education in order to stop perpetuating the “single story” of DWA that severely misrepresents a large portion of the student population. In my own teaching practice, I am incorporating a portfolio assessment for my freshmen that is also multimodal. For their final portfolio, they are tasked to revise their first two assignments and then post them in conjunction with their third assignment onto a web platform of their choice: WordPress, Blogger, or Weebly. Throughout the semester, they have worked with multimodality in different forms: in print, through analyzing and demonstrating the graphic novel genre, and through collaboration in a group research assignment of plagiarism and honesty, both within and outside the academy. Throughout the semester, I encourage my students to participate in self-reflective writing  by way of free-writing in journals, quick-writes, holistic letters, and in composing essays with some elements of personal narrative mixed in.

In the conclusion to her study, Clifford states that journal writing does not have a direct correlation with fostering feminist analysis and/or agenda. And I agree – I don’t think that just my affinity and practice of metacognition reinforces or promotes a feminist agenda. There are other things to consider, like teaching new genre styles and conventions as well as encouraging students to reconsider what we mean by writing and composition. There are also the few but very enriching discussions of culture and politics that suggest sociocultural awareness as also having a crucial impact in fostering feminist praxis, and not just metacognition. My question to my peers this week, then, is what kinds of forces do they believe drive their praxis towards feminist means or feminist ends. In other words, just as Clifford concludes that journal refection solely cannot promote a feminist agenda, I want to know what are other ways or means that we can include with journal-writing that can promote feminist awareness.

Queering Language-Learning

In her article, “The ESL Classroom and the Queerly Shifting Sands of Learner Identity,” Jacquline Dumas asserts discussion of sexual identities not only carry high significance for potentially-queer L2 learners, but such discussions of gender and sexual norms also have practical applications in classroom pedagogy and curriculum. At the forefront, she states “Identities, then, are about becoming instead of being” (2). She elaborates on how identity-formation plays a key role for L2 learners to not only grapple with the hegemonic biases present within the English language but how such language use also shapes and favors certain parts and populations of English-language users more than others. Identity-formation in the ESL classroom sometimes involves the negotiation of several identities. Put another way, the process of identity-formation is the becoming and we, as language-users, must learn to negotiation the various beings, or identities, which result from identity-formation. In a more practical sense, then, L2 learners are involved in a process of becoming English-language learners and thus develop a English-language being that sometimes intermingles and clashes with the other beings the learner has also developed, such as their L1 being.

(trans)Praxis

“Because the formation of any story is not fixed within some individual identity or within an established public position – but rather is formed among competing public or private voices – identity, the writer’s story and voice, includes the writer’s shifting relationships with the peculiarities of our culture.” – Michelle Gibson, Martha Mariana, and Deborah Meem in “Bi, Butch, and Bar Dyke: Pedagogical Performances of Class, Gender, and Sexuality” (qtd. in Kirsh 469).

Pipelines, Intellectualism, and Educational Feminism

This post consists of two parts. First, it is an enhanced revision of a social media post. Secondly, it reflects my struggles with intellectualism and working in an semi-literate workspace. What both seek to illuminate are the critical reflections and ties between access to education and feminism.

Total Self-Awareness

“A writing for the people, by the people, and from the people is, literally, a multipolar reflecting reflection that remains free form the conditions of subjectivity and objectivity and yet reveals them both. I write to show myself showing people who show me my own showing. I-You: not one not two.” – Trinh Minh-ha T, from Woman, Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, p.22

Toward an Androgynous (Political) Discourse

People write well – with passion and color – when they write out of their experience and when that experience is seen as valuable so that they have the confidence to write it. A successful approach to teaching of writing… cannot focus on the writing product to the exclusion of the person writing. Students’ lives will ‘intrude’ into their classroom performance, their attendance, their attention, and their writing. They need to ground their writing in their lives rather than to surmount their lives before they write.

  — Pamela J. Annas, in “Style as Politics: A Feminist Approach to the Teaching of Writing”

Disrupting Discourse and Finding My Voice

Like Roxane Gay or even Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I too struggled with the idea of being a feminist.

Reflection Week 13: Weaving it All Together

Reading Response: Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Center Pedagogies

For this week’s (and the last!) reading response I will be “loosely” addressing both chapters in CP discussing Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID) pedagogy and Writing Center Pedagogy.

(And yes, I am reusing the same image because it’s the only one I have of the University Reading and Writing Center.)