Writing Across Languages and Cultures: Research in Writing and Writing Instruction

Education 243/English  397R - Winter Quarter

Professor: Arnetha F. Ball
E-mail: arnetha@stanford.edu
Class Size: limited to 15 students
D/T: Tuesday, 5:15pm to 8:05pm
Type: Seminar  

COURSE DESCRIPTION

In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa says, “So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language.  Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity­.  I am my language.”  Anzaldúa goes on to detail her language, with its mix of Tex/Mex, English, and Spanish, and to map the borderland territory those she calls “new mestizas” must inhabit.  Today, classrooms are alive with students from such borderlands, from widely varying cultural and language backgrounds. Yet most professors and teachers of English have been trained to teach to a monocultural and monolingual population. 

This course aims to challenge old assumptions and paradigms of writing and teaching writing and to investigate what we now know about teaching writing across cultures and communities.  We will begin at home, with the languages and cultures students bring with them to the classroom, focusing particularly on the struggle of African Americans, Latino/Latinas, Chicano/Chinas, and Native Americans, and move to broader transnational contexts as we go along.  Our focus will be resolutely on equipping ourselves to teach on the borderlands and on developing materials for use in our classrooms.  Participants in the seminar will carry out a major project, which might be a research study design (or its execution), or an essay/project intended either for conference presentation or publication.

 No prior knowledge required; No prerequisites required

II.  Format:  This class will function as a seminar.  The faculty members will lecture occasionally, and student participants will make frequent presentations. 

III.  Booklist:

Victor Villanueva. (1993). Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Leslie Marmon Silko. (1997). Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on

 Native American Life Today. NY: Touchstone Books. 

Danling Fu. (1995). “My Trouble Is My English”:  Asian Students and the American Dream.  Portsmouth, NH: Boynton Cook/Heinemann.

Mike Rose (2004). The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.  Viking Press.

David Foster and David Russell, eds.  (2002). Writing and Learning in Cross-National Perspectives: Transitions from Secondary to Higher Education. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English/Lawrence Earlbaum..

Keith Gilyard.  (1999). Race, rhetoric and composition.  Portsmouth, NH: Boyton Cook Publishers.

Selected essays by Geneva Smitherman, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Gloria Anzaldua, bell

hooks, Beverly Moss, Guadalupe Valdes, John Rickford, John Baugh, and others. Course reading available at CourseWorks.

IV. Course Assignments

A.     Regular class attendance and active class participation are essential.   

B.     All participants will prepare short responses (double spaced) to our readings each week.  Students will also sign up in pairs or in small groups to lead our class discussion one week.

C.     As our course final, each participant will work on a major project, which might be a research study design (or its execution), an essay/project intended either for conference presentation or publication, or another project that we agree on.

V.  Course Schedule

Week 1. 1/04/05:  a. Following class introductions, students will write a brief literacy autobiography, reflecting on their own cultural and linguistic experiences and how they have influenced their own development as writers.  Freewrite prompt:  How have your own writing practices and/or preferences been influenced or shaped by your cultural, linguistic and/or ethnic background.     b. We will have a discussion concerning Students Right To Their Own Language.  We’ll introduce this NCTE document as well as the work of Mina Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations, chapters 1 and 8 and Geneva

Smitherman, “CCCC’s Role in the Struggle for Language Rights.”  These readings can be found on CourseWorks.  c.  Students will sign up in pairs or in small groups to lead our class discussions in the coming weeks.

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Week 2. 1/11/05:  Discussion of these readings: bell hooks, “when I was a young soldier for the revolution”in Talking Back and “this is the oppressor’s language/yet I need it to talk to you”: Language, a place of struggle in Between Languages and Cultures: Geneva Smitherman, Talkin’ and Testifyin, chapters 1 and 7; John & Russell Rickford, Spoken Soul, chapter 12; Arnetha Ball, Evaluating the Writing of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students in Evaluating writing:  The role of teachers’ knowledge about text, learning, and culture;  John Baugh, Linguistic pride and racial prejudice in Beyond Ebonics. 

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Week 3. 1/18/05:  Discussion of these readings:  Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker; Jabari Mahiri. (2003). “Street Scripts,” in What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth; Keith Miller and Montye Fuse, “Jazzing the Basepaths: Jackie Robinson, Major League Baseball and African American Aesthetics.” 

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Week 4.  1/25/05:  Discussion of these readings:  Victor Villanueva,  Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color; Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in Borderlands /  La Frontera: The New Mestiza; Guadalupe Valdes, Introduction from Con Respecto.

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Week 5.  2/01/05:  Discussion of this reading:  Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today.

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Week 6.  2/08/05:  Discussion of these readings:  Danling Fu, My Trouble Is My English; Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior (an excerpt); Guanjun Cia, “Text in Context: Understanding Chinese Students’ English Compositions,” in Evaluating writing:  The Role of Teachers’ Knowledge about Text, Learning, and Culture.

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Week 7.  2/15/05:   Discussion of these readings:  David Foster and David Russell, Writing and Learning In Cross-National Perspectives; Dixie Goswami’s “Afterword” (chapter 14) from Exploring The Rhetoric of International Professional Communication.

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Week 8.  2/22/05:  Discussion of these readings:  Beverly Moss, “Intersections of Race and Class in the Academy,” in Coming to Class: Pedagogy and the Social Class of Teachers; Jacqueline Jones Royster, “When the first voice you hear is not your own,”  College Composition and Communication 47:1 (February 1996), 29-40; June Jordan. (1988) “Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of  Willie Jordan.”   Harvard Educational Review 58:3.  August 1988, 363-374.

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Week 9.  3/01/05:  Discussion of these readings:  Keith Gilyard, Race, Rhetoric and Composition;  Brenda Brueggemann, “On Almost Passing,” from Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness; Mollie Blackburn, “Exploring Literacy Performances and Power Dynamics at the Loft: Queer Youth Reading the World and the Word,” Research in the Teaching of English  (May 2003);  OR Mollie Blackburn, “Disrupting the (Hetero)normative: Exploring Literacy Performances and Identity Work with Queer Youth,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (Dec-Jan 2002-2003).

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Week 10.  3/08/05:  Student Presentations of Course Projects and Pot Luck