February | 2016 | (De)Composing Dis/Ability

Pluralizing Literacies Blog — No Comments
29
Feb 16

Anchoring into Richardon’s African American Literacies

Kai Davis says it, as per always, so much better than I ever could.

Kai Davis, here again taking three minutes and one second to drop word bombs that pack just about the same punch to white supremacy as all those pages of academic theory on navigating Blackness in classrooms that most white professors swear doesn’t exist (Elaine Richardson’s African American Literacies, for one, talks and testifies against that for sure [yep, a pun to honor Geneva Smitherman, because it’s necessary]).

Kai Davis, without my words to mince hers, because she doesn’t need an introduction from some white girl professor (and yet I guess I just wrote one. *sigh*).

That says it all. I am almost tempted to write nothing more. It was all just said.

“Yo: why these books never be about my peoples?”

Jamila Lyiscott says it all, too (thank you, Carmen, for the gift of linking this video on our class blog!).

And yet I’ll write anyway, because today Carmen wants us to find an anchor in Elaine Richardson’s brilliant African American Literacies; an anchor to “ground [our] thinking, reading, and research”; to haul the thick piece of iron in our pockets with us, bring it to class so we can process how to use it not as an add in, not as a tack on (at the end of term, “if there’s time”), but rather, to use an anchor from Dr. E’s work to fundamentally reshape our own pedagogies so that we, too, can make sure we’re centering Black literacies instead of shredding them with red pens and white books.

“Any approach that does not seek to facilitate liberatory literacy is detrimental as it is subtractive,” Dr. E tells us.

Among the most radically important one-liners in this entire text, Dr. E here answers writing instructors who understand Black literacies as “extra”, as something they “don’t have time or space to add into” the curriculum. Flipping the script completely — as Heather A. Williams did in Self-Taught, discussed here last week — Dr. E suggests instead that liberatory literacy engagement should in fact be the very fabric of all writing courses, rather than “add-ons” or extra. It’s not extra — I mean this colloquially as well — quite the opposite. Any course that does not engage literacy in these ways is actively harmful to students. This reframing of the norm as destructive rather than simply a “netural” engagement with what students “need to know” is extremely powerful, especially in the face of the abundance of white (women) teachers of college composition (and K-12 ), who all too often object,

“But I don’t know how to do this,” and “there’s just no room in my curriculum.”

Yoda from Star Wars shaking his head as he says, “Do or not there, there is no try.” Gif from http://www.sharegif.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/7-star-wars-quotes.gif

Dr. E reframes this refusal to centralize minoritized discourses and literacies as actively harming students (which, of course, it is). It is this reframing that needs to be taught in every intro to the English PhD class and every teaching practicum.

To address the “but how?”, Dr. E espouses learning, learning, and learning. She writes,

“To make literacy education relevant to the lives of Black students, an effort must be made to confront unethical educational practices, such as cutting Black students off from investigation and appreciation of their classical culture. When we cannot facilitate students’ participation in investigating and exploring their literacy traditions, we’re actually teaching them that the world cannot be changed and rhetoric ain’t nuthin’ but rhetoric.”

So we must learn how to facilitate such participation, which — for white teachers like me, whose bodies and classroom presence inherently represent an active threat to the mental health and learning goals of students of color because my body and classroom presence inherently represents white supremacy — involves the surrender of expertise, the surrender of positioning ourselves as knowing more, knowing better, than our students.

Because, of course, we don’t.

A gif from the TV show Friends, featuring a wide-eyed, open-mouthed Joey staring in shock as Phoebe spews out, “That is brand new information!” Gif from https://s3.amazonaws.com/fanning-cloud-front/brandnewinfo.gif

So I suppose that sums up my proverbial anchor from this text: as a white teacher of college writing, I already make it my goal to weave my students’ various identities and forms of knowledges into the fabric of the course, rather than simply tacking some “supplemental” or “extra” readings here and there into a mostly white syllabus.

However, I have found myself stuck on how to move forward not only with affirming, but with developing the various modes of knowledges and literacy practices of my students of color (I’m not only thinking of my Black students, here). Dr. E lays out excellent practices and model works in African American Literacies, and I guess the takeaway from my anchor is the same thing we tell our students when they are stuck in a writing clusterf*ck:

Self-Taught to Challenge Exceptionalist Narratives

I started reading Heather Williams’s Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom on day two of my bronchitis-ridden body’s stubborn attempt to trudge out into the snow and do things, after resting (eg not going to the gym) for a highly irritating four whole days. Day two witnessed the same thing as day one of trying to emerge from sickville too soon: intense dizziness, fits of violent coughing, and the urgent, urgent need to crawl back under the covers after begrudgingly admitting to my concerned girlfriend that she’d been right in the first place: I’m still too sick to be out and about.

So, naturally, I decided to get ahead in course readings. Which brings me to Williams’s Self-Taught. After getting through a page or so — quickly excited by her presentation of a methodology that necessarily runs a blade through the mandate of periodization — I realized something else with glee: I was reading through this text without a problem. My dragging eyes and utterly exhausted mind were having no problem processing Williams’s introduction. Which is when it hit me how beautifully this book is written, and how it performs the kind of access that the history that infuses its pages emphasizes.

In her own introduction of this book to us (by way of the syllabus), Carmen reminds us not to “try to sound like Grad-Student-Turned-Derrida-Extraordinaire” (which I appreciate more than I can possibly describe. No syllabus has ever made me snort with laughter before. Life seems… complete now.). This reminder is particularly apt for this text, because — while it is supremely researched and is by leaps and bounds the most powerful monograph contribution to U.S. educational history that I can think of — the text itself defies expectations of what scholars are “supposed” to write like. It does not make itself incomprehensible in the name of “sounding academic.” Instead, its poetics are of a different kind: its incisiveness is made all the more powerful by the crystal clarity and accessibility of its language.

Perhaps as important as the history it provides is the rhetoric with which Self-Taught provides it. Williams brilliantly rewrites the typical codes with which dominant historical narratives refer to freed people and enslaved people: almost always identified alongside the note that x person was a slave, freed person, or former slave, dominant histories (like the rest of society) rhetorically establish whiteness as the identity that need not be spoken. Williams, however, only ever identifies white historical actors as such, making Blackness the default identity, decentering default whiteness from her history.

With each new personal literacy journey that she portrays, Williams rhetorically forces her readers to assume the Blackness of that the historical figures she discusses (who most often go nameless in white accountings). This centralization of Blackness in her narrative style reflects the centralization of Blackness in the history she tells, which powerfully situates Black Americans as the force behind the creation of a public education system in this country.

This issue of centralization comes up for me all the time while I’m teaching. With each syllabus I design, lesson plan I write, and lesson plan I change on the balls of my feet, I am constantly considering the immense impact of my white privilege in a CUNY freshmen writing classroom. We are taught — through everything we are exposed to — that teaching generally, and teaching writing specifically, is for white people (because everything is for white people). We are taught it so deeply that I hear colleagues say too proudly, too often, that they teach Octavia Butler’s work… amidst an otherwise overly bleached literary backdrop. Always the exception, like Frederick Douglass, for example, is always figured as the exception in narratives of Black literacy history. (Except, of course, in Williams’s telling.)

So, in the interest of refusing to only tack “other” things onto whiteness — in the interest, rather, of completely decentering whiteness, as much as my white body permits in the classroom — the question I ask myself during the design of my courses is always “what will this do for my students of color?” How can I centralize the various narratives of my students of color in my courses, such that I am not teaching an imaginary white classroom? (This imaginary white classroom is what white liberals inadvertently picture when they go simply for ‘awareness of oppression’ and tokenizing teaching agendas whose backbone is in fact, always, the re-centralization of whiteness.)

Williams’s Self-Taught is an excellent enactment of narrative construction that refuses to put whiteness at the center, recreating Blackness as the default. It is therefore, now, an aspirational text for me, both in terms of sharing the history it provides with my students, but also in learning from its models of accessibility, refusal, and reclaiming.

Creative Texts — No Comments
09
Feb 16

A Scholarship and A New Writing Journey

My girlfriend tends to send me along any and all writing-related opportunities and articles she finds (she finds many, being a writer/editor herself). A few weeks ago, she sent me a link to apply for a directed scholarship for taking an online course on writing middle grade literature. The link came with one word: “apply!”

I texted her back, biting the inside of my cheek as I do when new things crop up. “Thanks babe, this looks cool, but I do YA, not MG.”

An iphone-style ellipsis in a speech bubble, showing that the person you’re texting is currently typing. Image from telegraph.co.uk

“Apply anyway.”

So I did, and I’ve just received an Andrea Davis Pinkney Merit Scholarship from the Children’s Book Academy. The scholarship enables me to take their 4-week online intensive on writing middle grade lit.

So, for the next few weeks (before the course begins), I will be ceaselessly editing and re-writing bits of my YA manuscript; during the course month, I will continue editing YA, while writing a new MG novel.

Because I agree wholeheartedly with the beautiful words and wondrously radical sentiments of Daniel José Older that we (especially those of us who are not straight white cis non-dis/abled middle class men) do not need to write every day, and that we certainly need to endeavor not to shame ourselves for living our lives.

But sometimes — sometimes, when the proverbial wind is right and I’m feeling very healthy — I’m going to apply anyway, and see what I can create from it.

Pluralizing Literacies Blog — 1 Comment
08
Feb 16

“New” Literacy Studies, Old Composition

As itself an act of composition, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams’ “History in the Spaces Left” navigates the consequences of the narrative erasure of Black people (and a plethora of other marginalized people) from the composition of history and the dominant histories of composition. Royster and Williams, after generously but incisively dissecting white-dominated texts like James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality, Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition, and Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals, locate the consequences of white-washing histories of composition in dominant assumptions about students of color here and now.

Noting the hegemonic conflation between “basic writing” and young Black writers, Royster and Williams turn to “the shadows of composition history” to expose the ways that “basic writing” was a concern discussed at CCCC conferences in the 1950s, when the “basic writing” student population was predominantly white (571). This reconstruction of recent interlinkage between African American history and composition studies is extremely generative not only because of the reparative recovery (as opposed to whitewashed re-covering) that it represents: many white activists advocating against imperialist teaching styles in higher education assert that the rise of concern about “basic writing” was associated with the 1960s increase in POC population in public colleges and universities. Re-situating “basic writing” anxiety as a white anxiety about white abilities that subsequently became a white anxiety about students of color who became conflated with “basic writing” is a more precise — and more effective — way to articulate the ways that ability is racialized in the academy.

In a similar vein, Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell — in the first chapter of Literacy and Education, present a textbook-style account of new literacies which frames literacy as a “social practice” (9). They imagine the ways that marks on a page (or on a computer screen) are “inscribed” (and in another spot, they say “infused,” giving appropriately fleshy language to literacy practices) with cultural experiences (10). This chapter indirectly elucidate the ways that the operationalizations of hegemonic understandings of literacy as an “objective” set of skills in actuality soaks literacy in a bleach that infuses it fundamentally with cultural identity… just those privileged ones that are rendered unmentionable and invisible. In resituating the definition of literacy as fundamentally about cultural experiences and identities, a social definition of literacy exposes the whiteness associated with the particular skill sets rendered legible by dominant notions of literacy. The need to decenter school as a primary site of literacy is a crucial takeaway of this chapter, largely because schools invalidate “narrative as a form of knowledge” (16).

Pahl and Rowsell’s chapter is largely informed by the idea, articulated by Brian Street in “Autonomous and Ideological Models of Literacy”, that an autonomous model of literacy “disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it” (1). This disguising can be articulated as a corollary to compulsory heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness, for example, which render cishet and non-dis/abled identities as the normate and anything/anyone deviating from that norm as hypervisible. In a classroom context, this autonomous model of literacy can easily be found in the hypervisibility of non-“standard” Englishes in which only white, middle class, able-bodied-articulated Englishes have the privilege of being unremarked-upon.

In these texts, I don’t think that the authors don’t so much politicize literacy as they expose the ways that notions of literacy are already inherently politicized. From Royster and Williams’ re-centering of Black participation in composition history to Pahl, Rowsell, and Street’s de-centering of the classroom as a site of some sort of supposedly apolitical, “correct” literacy, these readings resituate New Literacy Studies as stretching beyond the typically-figured association of NLS with an (again, often supposedly apolitical) digital technologies. Moving forward, I’m curious about the relationship between these (decidedly not identity-less and power-less) digital connotations of NLS with the kinds of direct, social-/power-based analyses recovered here as the original driving impetus of NLS.

Contact Me — No Comments
04
Feb 16

Contact Info

What fun is a blog without any interaction?

Follow me on Twitter @jenniferpolish, on LinkedIn here, and feel free to email me at jpolish at gradcenter dot cuny dot edu .

Creative Texts — No Comments
03
Feb 16

Fictional Journeys, Non-Fictional Career

Welcome to the creatively-oriented section of this website! As I teach freshmen writing, fiction and creative nonfiction writing keeps emerging as a vital lifeblood of learning. In my life, too (not to be extracted from my teaching life), creative writing sustains me just as much as flipping truck tires at the gym and tossing together new vegan recipes for a sometimes skeptical, but always supportive, girlfriend.

This mini-blog will document my experiences with fiction writing while in graduate school and teaching; it will also serve as a space to explore creative writing processes as I polish my first novel, a queer YA fantasy.

Pluralizing Literacies Blog — No Comments
03
Feb 16

White Teachings and Black Literacies

Welcome to my mini-blog devoted to my weekly reflections on the course readings for Carmen Kynard’s African American Literacies and Education spring 2016 class at the CUNY Graduate Center! (For more on the class, check out the awesome course website here!)

In this blog, I will respond to the weekly writing prompt questions that Carmen provides, while grappling with how my body — ensconced in white privilege — interacts with Black and other POC literacies in my writing classrooms.

Teaching by Learning Blog — No Comments
03
Feb 16

Writing through Teaching

This mini-blog will enable me to write through teaching as I teach writing at CUNY Queens College. Since we often encourage students to write through their thoughts, I will use this space to write through mine, endeavoring to post about lesson planning, dis/ability in the classroom, and curricular design.

Orals Reading Reflections Archive — No Comments
03
Feb 16

A Web Spot for Reflection

Throughout my period of Orals exam incubation, I will be immersed in composition/rhetoric scholarship, dis/ability studies, and children’s/YA literature. To help keep my thoughts (somewhat) organized, I will use this Annotated Bibliography mini-blog to post my responses to texts that I find particularly generative for my thinking.

Welcome — No Comments
03
Feb 16

Welcome to (De)Composing Dis/Ability by Jennifer Polish

Hello, and welcome to my web-space for exploring literature, teaching, writing, and the teaching of writing (I will endeavor to keep this online forum better organized than my various scrawl-marked notebooks).

An assortment of my writing notebooks on a bookshelf, accompanied by several published texts: these texts include the Students' Right to their Own Language Critical Sourcebook; Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye; Corrine Duyvis's Otherbound; Jewelle Gomez's Don't Explain; and Veronica Roth's Cuatro.

An assortment of my writing notebooks on a bookshelf, accompanied by several published texts. Photo by Jennifer Polish

I am an instructor of first year composition at CUNY Queens College while pursuing my PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center.

As a teacher, I am dedicated to student-centered pedagogical practices that create writing environments meant to affirm students’ own expertise while encouraging critical thinking and growth.

As a researcher, interests include affective whiteness in writing classrooms and the intersections of dis/ability, race, and trauma in children’s literature and media.

I am currently working on my first novel, a queer YA fantasy, the writing process for which is intimately informed by both my teaching and academic research.

(De)Composing Dis/Ability Notes on Embodied Writing and Teaching

Monthly Archives: February 2016