As composition teachers,
how should we make sense of the successes and failures of our dialect speakers,
our new immigrants, and our immigrant heritage students? What factors
(home, school, community, etc) might promote success and failure? And how
as teachers can we foster success?
In the composition classroom, our
dialect speakers, new immigrants, and immigrant heritage students face (and
have faced) many challenges. They may have encountered institutionalized racism
in their previous educational experiences, in the form of standardized testing,
unsympathetic teachers, negative attitudes about their personal variety of
language, and even ridicule in the classroom from other students or worse,
teachers. They may have experienced many years of subtle or obvious oppression
in their classrooms, where their teachers have repeatedly told them that their
variety of English is no good. They may have experienced a conflict between
their family and their teachers , where the two sides have conflicting
expectations and values. They might be a product of generations of oppression,
and might be rebelling against this oppression by digging in with their home
identity and community dialect, refusing to conform to standards that they see
as unjust and foreign.
We can do many things to help these
students; the most important, I think, is to show them (don’t just say) that we
are on their side. That we are invested in their success, and that we respect
them as individuals. Because we respect them, we won’t lower standards or
otherwise condescend to them, but rather we will keep high standards and do our
best to help them achieve those high expectations. The second important piece
to helping our students succeed is to be aware of whence they have come. We
have to be sensitive to their needs, and know that when we experience
rebellious attitudes in class, our students might not be rebelling against us
personally, but rather the system that they perceive us as a part of. If they
identify school as a system of oppression, we have to convince our students
that they are safe in our classroom. That their presence is valued, and that
their backgrounds and varieties of language are respected. We can show them this
through everyday interaction. Our students will be very tuned in to the way we
speak to them, and will be very aware of any condescension in the way we treat
them. Lastly, we should give students
readings written by good role models, people who have successfully navigated
the educational waters and understand the conflict that these students might be
experiencing every day.
I have seen this in action here at SFSU
with one of my tutees. W is an African American twenty-something, and she is taking
an FYC course for the second time. The first day of class, her instructor
announced to the class (according to W) that he did not care if anybody asked
questions or made comments in class, because he loved the subjects he was
talking about, and could talk about them all day all by himself. W was turned
off immediately. I think she felt that the instructor had shut the students out
of the class and that he said that they were not important. She decided that
she did not like the instructor and I think she is not motivated to do any work
for him. I think one of the ways she is expressing her distaste is by not
engaging100% in the class or the
assignments. She has said that she wants to take the class credit/no credit,
get the no credit, and take the class over in the summer at a community
college. Now I don’t really know what happened in her class, or how the
instructor makes her feel, but it’s clear that he missed his chance to pull her
in and get her to engage in the class and in some deeper learning about herself
and the world. This has been a good lesson to me, one that I hope will allow me
to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
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