Will they ever learn? I don’t care.. it’s THEIR education..
The two readings we had for this week continued to talk along the lines of multiculturalism in the classroom and grammar, the way it is used by students based on their “ethnic and educational backgrounds” (Lu, 444).
Min-Zhan Lu’s article Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone, mentions how teaching methods “invite a multicultural approach to style” (Lu, 442) but sometimes can cause students to have a lot of errors in their writing. She draws this line between teachers and students when teaching writing, and points out how teachers tend to send students who have “problems with usage to the writing center” (Lu, 443). As she mentions it can be frustrated for the teacher, but if you look onto the other side, it isn’t any better. In fact, this is what causes students to become careful with their writing. Grammar becomes a focus when the writing process begins and even though it isn’t meant to intimidate students, they often become careful and being “right becomes a real concern” (Lu 446) when writing an essay. I feel like Lu blames teachers for implicating this way of thinking, and I can relate to this because as a student in high school I can say I was more worried about my grammar than the actual context of the essay. This is when Lu introduces her teaching method in an attempt, to “apply a multicultural approach to student writing” (Lu, 447) which will lead to the classroom being viewed as a “contact zone.” She takes this out of our next article, which the author Mary Louise Pratt describes this as a “space where various cultures clash and grapple with each other” (Lu, 447). Lu hopes this approach will help students with their writing styles, which I found interesting and promising. As student writers or real writers, this approach seems like it will best work with first year writing classes just as Lu discusses.
In Mary Louise Pratt’s article, Arts of the Contact Zone, she discusses contact zones, which was mentioned before as cultures that clash, such as “colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” Pratt describes how it can be seen as a positive thing in the classroom. As we have a classroom full of students from different backgrounds, this can help them become knowledgeable about other cultures and ethnicities, which is important for students to experience in a classroom first hand. Pratt also mentions how it can be seen as a negative thing, such as how a country talking over another native community is domination. These two readings have really given me insight to bringing some of these ideas into the classroom. I personally like Lu’s teaching method but I can’t rule out the “contact zone” approach.
Yeah, I also found Mary Louis Pratt’s article Arts of the Contact Zone very interesting. All of these readings have defined concepts I knew about but could not associate a word with them. Language is very powerful. When I am reading nineteenth-century literature, I often wonder about the word choice, especially in slave narratives. Twelve Years a Slave was written by Solomon Northup an educated, free born, African-American. His use of language was different from other slave narratives because he was more assimilated into American culture. He used proper English opposed to other slave narratives that used more slang and loosely followed English. Pratt describes this shaping of one’s language as the contact zone. I would go as far as saying the shaping of language is also evident in bilingual books, but that might be a stretch. It is interesting to see these texts build on each other; I see a bit of Hooks in Pratt’s article.
