Connections; symbolic violence

One advantage I find in undertaking this crazy whirlwind of work we call Summer doctoral studies is the immediacy of information, which makes it possible to recognize connections between and across courses so easily and readily. A couple so far:

• Erickson’s statement that “everybody is multicultural” (p. 33) certainly ties closely into identity research in second language studies, which we are addressing in 823 next week. This also ties into work from last summer in 825, when I first encountered reference to Firth & Wagner (1997) and the deluge of studies that have followed related to the multiple identities of language learners - especially going beyond the identity of individual as language learner/”nonnative” speaker.

• Perhaps my favorite connection so far (or for today at least) is that between Kumaradivelu’s postmethod ideas and the ethnographic approach to research. Kumaradivelu’s postmethod underscores the importance of particularity, practicality, and possibility in teaching approaches, and the “particularity” element (in particular, excuse me) is especially appropriate for attempting ethnographic work. The anthropological tenets of making the familiar strange and the familiar strange seem indeed impossible without consideration of the particularities of the individual setting against the backdrop of all of the other particular settings that surround it. There is one sentence especially that illustrates this connection: “By making particular student culture and family history a deliberate object of study by all the students in the classroom, the teacher can learn much about what he or she needs to know in order to teach the particular students in ways that are sensitive and powerfully engaging, intellectually and emotionally” (emphasis added) (Erickson, p. 45).

• Another connection to issues from 825 last summer has to do with Bourdieu’s ideas of cultural capital and symbolic violence. Although Bourdieu is not specifically cited in this paragraph, we surely see the following as an example of “symbolic violence”: “When such issues as racism, class privilege, and sexism are left silent in the classroom, the implicit message for students of color appears to be that the teacher and the school do not acknowledge that experiences of oppression exist. If only the standrard language, the standard American history, and the voices and lives of White men appear in the curriculum, then the further implicit message (by what is left in and what is left out of the knowledge presented as legitimate by the school) seems to be that the real United states and real school are only about the cultureal mainstream and its establishment ideology” (Erickson, p. 47).

I look forward to using this blog as a way of discovering connections among all of the materials/authors I encounter during these 5 weeks!

Chicken soup

Is there really research out there on what gender Americans associate with chicken soup? This is funny (both funny-haha and funny-interesting and only slightly funny-weird) to me. I guess, from the standpoint of viewing culture as a verb, we would need to delve into whatever subset of American culture in which this is "true" (major air quotes there) and determine why that is so, and how it came to be that way.

Gramsci and hegemony

Street’s “Culture is a Verb” paper references “Gramsci’s concept of hegemony - the predominance obtained by consent rather than force of one class or group over other classes”, or the idea that one factor leading to oppression is the oppressed’s consent to being dominated/subordinated. This manifests, among other places, in cases of linguistic insecurity, when “cultures” abandon linguistic elements of their identity because of the notion that these elements characterize inferiority.

I see my practice - both as an educator and as a researcher - as decidedly counter-hegemonic, not from a blind “question authority” stance but from a well-sighted one; although the intention to make the world better, whatever that means, may itself be seen as oppressive, as if I am somehow imposing my visions of an ideal world onto those whose worlds are starkly different from that ideal world - I see the goal of critical practice as uncovering hegemonic structures both for my own benefit and for the benefit of those most affected by them. It seems possible, if not likely, that some oppressed populations accept things the way they are because they don’t know any other way, and therefore they consent to those “things”. That is a remarkably simplistic summary of my own counter-hegemonic stance, I admit, but it is my actual starting point when I think about matters of subjugation and legitimacy, and further as I think about research ideas that embrace and engender counter-hegemony.

That said, I can foresee one challenge of undertaking ethnographic work as going into a situation with such a specific stance and intention as discovering and explicating otherwise hidden power structures. If I go into a situation that I informally think to be subject to hegemonic practices, am I not influencing what I will see? If I expect to find hegemonic practices, won’t I surely see them? I think so. This will require some specific preparation, both through reading and through self-reflection, so that I am able to actually see what is happening, not just what I think is happening.

Reflections on Egan-Robertson & Willett (and Heath too, sort of)

On Egan-Robertson & Willett (1998):

For some reason, many articles I read on sociolinguistic topics always bring me back to one of my first graduate lessons in linguistics. Specifically, on p. 11 of this article, we read “This research [within ethnography of communication] has led to studies that have helped explicate how miscommunication may occur when people from different cultural groups interact”. This - and numerous other readings so far in this course - call to mind the SPEAKING model (Hymes, 1962, I think) of “doing” ethnography of communication. The “N” of this model relates to norms - norms of interaction and norms of interpretation, and how these may differ among the participants engaged in the communication. To summarize Hymes, norms of interaction involve rules for how people should interact in a particular situation, and norms of interpretation involve determining what particular communicative (though not necessarily verbal) practices mean within those different interactions.

I also find the ongoing distinction between education and schooling (p. 15, among other citations in this week’s reading) to be an important one, especially for those of us professionally engaged in (or planning to engage in) the former. This distinction is especially relevant when considering Heath’s work on community literacy as well as her highlighting the importance of studying home literacy as a way to augment and clarify issues of school-based literacy. Egan-Robertson and Willett pose a potential question for ethnographic research on page 16: “How might children be able to employ the cultural knowledge they have from their community and family in the classroom” - and I would extend that as a question that is also relevant to studying literacy and language learning in the adult population as well.

Spurred both from past readings of Heath and from revisiting some issues in this article, I am perhaps most interested (dissertation-wise) so far in something that comes up on page 21; the authors identify literacy practices as being related to some “taken-for-granted assumptions about educability, how people learn to read and write, what reading and writing mean to people, how reading an writing fit into people’s lives, and what people use reading writing for”. I work full-time in a Learning Center, where I supervise numerous student workers and tutor numerous language learners each semester (and sometimes students find themselves as members of both categories); over the course of my employment I have come to work with a number of multilingual women educated in Soviet-era Armenia (among many other people). I have done some past projects for classes that have involved interviewing language learners about learning to read, and I would like to continue those explorations in a larger-scale study of literacy practices among these women. I look forward to reading the references identified in this article that relate to literacy practices - and if anyone has any additional suggestions, please do tell!

Brainstorming Ethnographic Research Topics

I have just learned today that, most likely, 50-100% of the adjunct positions at my school will be cut in the Fall semester, so my teaching context for the Fall is still to be determined. However, my primary employment is as a Learning Center employee (mostly classified, with some hours as part-time faculty), where I tutor individuals in so-called “English fundamentals” and supervise a staff of approximately 20-35 students (but who knows how many that will be in the Fall with the current California budget situation). I have a number of ideas that might be appropriate for ethnographic study, including researching the following situations:

➢ On a seemingly regular basis (at least once per semester?), I tutor students from our noncredit ESL program, and each semester it seems as if at least one student comments derogatorily to me about how fellow students from their particular “culture” act in class - the women talk too much, in “their language”, not paying attention to the teacher and not taking the course seriously. I think it would be interesting to observe classroom interactions, hopefully without too many preconceptions (such as the ones I might walk in with based on these student comments), and see what kinds of interactions are really occurring - in small groups of students, in the group as a whole, with the teacher; it might also be interesting to compare how students’ behavior differs in different teacher situations (teachers of different genders, nationalities, home languages, teaching styles, etc.). This would be interesting information for anyone who wants to know more about classroom interactions as they takes place in the noncredit ESL setting as well as perhaps to compare to similar credit course settings at the college/community college level.

➢ In my position as a student worker supervisor, it would also be interesting to examine interactions and language development/usage within my employee population. Our employees speak a number of languages at home (English, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, Hebrew, Vietnamese, etc.), and I would like to investigate how students (who are employees) negotiate their multiple identities in their work setting - identities as students, employees, friends, rule-enforcers, language learners, etc.). This is a setting that would be easier to navigate in terms of access but perhaps more difficult to immerse myself in as participant/observer (ironically) since I do this as part of my daily routine. I would find it more difficult to see the invisible patterns that I am accustomed to, but going into a project like this knowing that, perhaps I would be more sensitive to some of the otherwise undetectable patterns. This topic would also appeal to other language professionals interested in identity construction not only of language learners but of students in general (since not all of my students are language learners); it could also contribute to the growing body of research on students simultaneously engaged in language learning and student work, which currently consists of a lot of research on students in volunteer/service learning settings.