Wu, Hui. “Writing and Teaching behind Barbed Wire: An Exiled Composition

Wu, Hui. “Writing and Teaching behind Barbed Wire: An Exiled Composition
Class in a Japanese-American Internment Camp.” College Composition and
Communication. 59.2 (2007) 237-262.

Summary:
“By reflecting on Japanese internment camps executed by the U.S. government in World War II, this article examines camp schools’ curriculum and writing assignments and an English teacher’s response to student essays to show how racially profiled students and their Caucasian teacher negotiated the political meanings of civil rights and freedom” (237).

Area Cluster:
Methodology: case study
Citation: Russell, Bizell, Pratt, Glenn, Tidball

Provocative Quotes:

“Student essays, as part of the literacy, activities designed and controlled by the government, nonetheless reveal independent thinking and forceful resistance to evacuation, a result opposite to what the government sought” (238).

“This historical case study will peer backward into classroom at Denson High School within the Jerome camp in Arkansas as the students and their English teacher, Virginia Tidball, attempted to negotiate together the political meanings of civil rights in a complex environment where they were required to learn and teach democratic ideals and a discourse that conflicted with reality—the classroom behind barbed wire. The collective memories of racially profiled and segregated student writers leave a bitter taste in the mouth when the reader realizes that despite American success stories and the national hallmark of democracy and freedom, ours remains a xenophobic society which amidst patriotic zeal…may still disenfranchise its citizens and residents” (239).

“it must have been difficult for students to develop their points logically in an illogical political situation where democracy still remained an illusion” (246).

“Student internees presented Japanese immigrants as people, instead of impersonalized, even dangerous “enemy aliens” living in “little Tokyo’s” described in government document” (248).

“In spite of loneliness, separation, and disappointment, students demonstrated patriotism and loyalty to the country and were determined to follow the government plan, only with their own strategies” (249).

“student papers present their strong identity as American citizens whose civil rights were deprived without justifiable reasons, an institutionalized persecution with which they could not come to terms and that they felt obliged to criticize as citizens” (250).

“The crescendo that students’ voices reached made it possible to conclude that Tidball, teaching with her mouth shut, deployed silence as pedagogy, likely as a political strategy as well, to provide a forum where her students were able to express their political positions openly and freely without being patronized or judged by the teacher” (253).

“In many ways, Virginia Tidball’s experience teaching a marginalized ethnic group about whom stereotypes abounded and whose national loyalty the hysteric wartime society suspected is not unlike that many composition teachers today struggling to navigate and hear the voices of similarly marginalized populations, some of whom our increasingly xenophobic societies also suspect” (255).

“Tidball’s silent teaching has resulted in student empowerment and symbolizes an effective pedagogy that can mitigate negative political dynamics even in today’s composition classroom” (255). S

“Tidball’s silence…transforms the classroom from a passive, ideologically suffused environment to one that allows, indeed listens to, voices of dissent. Her tacit teaching provides a model for the “contact zone” (255).

“if teachers acknowledge their limitations of their training and acknowledge about their students, they would be willing to give up their voices as authority. They would rather serve as “voiceless” instructors, who recognize, intimately and respectfully, students’ right to their own cultures and languages” (256).

Flower, Linda. “Intercultural Inquiry and the Transformation of Service.” College English 65 (2002):181-201.

Summary: Flower believes a fundamental conflict remains unresolved when students confront the suddenly realized limitations of their own understanding in service-learning. They come prepared to act; they really needed to inquire. She argues that the conflicts and contradictions of community outreach call for an intercultural inquiry that not only seeks more diverse rival readings but constructs multivoiced negotiated meanings in practice.
Methodology: case studies, discourse analysis

Area Cluster: 112—Community, Civic & Public

Valuable Citation: Cushman, Dewey, Du Bois, Flower, Haraway, Freire
Provocative Quotes:

“we must recognize the “multitude of disparate elements, voices, and viewpoints” (68) that emerge as contradictory ideologies, and practices within events and the activity systems that shape them. We could respond to the crosscurrents of motive and assumption within community outreach with a theory-based cultural critique” (182).

“The field of contradictions I have just described is not unique to community outreach. Like any vigorous activity system, it is a site of diverse voices and agendas. But advocates and critics of service-learning often fail to recognize the full range of contradictory voices that students and teachers alike need to encounter within this space” (185)
“Whether the matter at stake is education, work, social identity, racism, risk, or respect, an intercultural inquiry seeks rival readings of that issue that have the potential to transform both the inquirers and their interpretations of problematic issues in the world” (186).
“students use the practice of intercultural inquiry to go beyond a contact zone into confronting contradictions, inviting rivals, and constructing and negotiating meaning through the eyes of difference.” (187).
“Having entered the contact zone of cultural difference, we must be prepared to go beyond contact into the struggle to understand with others in a collaborative intercultural inquiry. We must be ready to step beyond the safe distance of critique to the active negotiation of the inevitable contradictions within service and the conflicts within our own thinking and understanding. Finally, we must set for ourselves and our students the explicit goal of creating a transformed and transformative understanding, not as a lofty ideal, but as an operational, achievable, and profoundly significant expectation”(194).

“Intercultural inquiry not only transforms what we know; it alters our relationship with others. It asks us to acknowledge the expertise and agency of people whom service has traditionally cast as the served, the patient, the client, or the ones in need. But sometimes we must look in new ways to perceive that agency” (197).

Connal, Louise Rodriguez. “Transcultural Rhetorics for Cultural Survival.” Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the Official English Movement. Ed. Roseann Duenas Gonzalez. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000. 318-332.

Summary: Connal proposes a pedagogy of transcultural rhetoric to address the need of increasingly diverse body of students in U.S. classroom. “One of the many questions this situation raises is how the students who carry the cultural and linguistic marks of diversity can flourish in the classroom and benefit from knowing—two or more languages and rhetorical styles. What follows is an attempt to respond to this question using my experience as a Puerto Rican woman and a writing teacher, as well as insights from postcolonial theory and feminist writing” (318).

Methodology: critical analysis, literature review,

Cited: Anzaldua, Bhabha, Spivak, Pratt, Trimbur, Said

Provocative quotes:

“English as the sole prerequisite of success in U.S. society is a rationalization that informs public policy much too often…Therefore many minorities within the United States feel coerced into assimilation by the prevailing practices of our educational system” (319-320).

“The transcultural rhetoric I use in my teaching can loosely be defined as a rhetoric that crosses and includes multiple languages, genres, and styles. Transcultural rhetoric expresses the sensibilities of people whose cultures are hybridized—people who affiliate with two or more cultures, languages, or dialects. Transcultural rhetoric is the argument for using and appreciating the different critical and cultural awareness that hybrid people can contribute to our society and knowledge base” (321-2).

“…transcultural rhetoric, of necessity, requires a willingness to cross into another person’s style, point of view, and so forth” (322).
“The challenge to the notion of cultural and linguistic purity or concepts such as English Only makes hybridity a useful alternative in cultural and linguistic education” (323).

“The idea of English Only seeks to eradicate differences that exist as a consequence of enslavement, immigration, and colonization of other nations. Yet these differences exist, and the pedagogy and language we use should address them” (325).

“The existence of hybridized student populations in our classes, indeed throughout the world, call for teaching that crosses barriers. As teachers owe should practice the “pedagogical arts of the contact zone” (Pratt 1991, 40). In other words, difference and diversity should not be interpreted as signs of crisis, Instead they should be embraced and celebrated in both our rhetoric and our pedagogy “ (326).

“The concept of transcultural rhetoric is important because it reveals the creative practice that is in fact already a part of the composing processes we teach in our composition classrooms” (330).

Willians, Bronwyn T. “Speak for Yourself? Power and Hybridity in the Cross-Cultural Classroom.”

Willians, Bronwyn T. “Speak for Yourself? Power and Hybridity in the Cross-Cultural Classroom.” College Composition and Communication 54.4 (2003):586-609.
Summary: “In this article I use the lens of postcolonial theory to reflect on my uses of a varied series of writing pedagogies in cross-cultural classrooms at an international college. Such reflection helps reveal how relations of power between teacher and students and underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often resulted in hybrid responses of mimicry, frustration, incomprehension, and resistance. A pedagogy constructed against the backdrop of postcolonial theory might provide both students and their teacher in such a cross-cultural setting with a more complex and useful way of understanding issues of power, discourse, identity, and the role of writing” (586).
Research Methodology: sampling, interviews
Most Valuable Citation: Bhabha, Appadurai, Spivak, Pratt, Newkirk
Area Cluster: 103 Theory
Provocative Quotes:
“Though the pursuit of writing as a fundamental part of the liberal education was the goal of the course, the underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often led to mutual frustration, resistance, incomprehension, and aporia” (587).

“To teach in a cross-cultural classroom with such terms as originality and analysis as an unexamined foundation perpetuates a disruptive epistemic violence for the students trying to come to terms with these unstated assumptions of power and the dominant culture” (589).

“Any writing about experiences that the student in a cross-cultural classroom might do is necessarily done in ways that serve the interpolation of that student into the dominant culture no less than the overt assimilation attempted through the current-traditional assignments” (594).

“For postcolonial students in a Western classroom, this presence of the Other in the dominant culture as “somewhere between the too visible and the not visible enough,” (Bhabha, “Culture’s” 56, author’s emphasis) is a site of ambivalence and resistance to the attempts of the dominant culture’s inscription and control” (603).
“Rather than either trying to assimilate students into the dominant culture’s discourse or helping them seek an ahistorical, apolitical synthesis from cultural differences, we should instead engage with them in an exploration of the cultural conflicts and power struggles often hidden in a cross-cultural writing classroom” (607).