Funds of Knowledge

I like the sound of those words…Funds of Knowledge. Funds de conocimiento. In her essay, “Arts of the U.S.-Mexico Contact Zone,” the title a little play on words to Pratt’s essay, Jaime Armin Mejía uses the collocation of these words to display the resources surrounding Texas Mexicans as they formulate identities within the reality of now. These resources create an agency within the individual that may or may not want to be expressed in an outward physical form…unless implored to do so in a composition classroom using Scott and Denney-like impromptus. The fact that Mejía uses the signifier Texas Mexicans to describe a people shows the cultural force of the Texas region. It’s a bold rhetorical move that works because Texas is a culture that existed long before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This is the reality and the knowledge of the region.

The culture of the United States (if there is one) does have some cultural inflection in Texas, mostly in the form of consumerism and English language policies. However, it is the intermingling of cultures that creates another culture all its own. It is a unique reality. A regional reality. A borderlands reality. Mejía explains, “People of Mexican origin in the Southwest have a great deal to teach us if we only begin to imagine ourselves living together in an increasingly smaller world, which makes all the exclusionary practices all the more absurd as technology works to connect people around the globe” (172). Mejia points out those English departments may also be applying exclusionary practices by only presenting other cultural texts which illustrate a stock minority characterization of racist victimization or subordination. I don’t know if it ever would be possible to completely be rid of this state of impending acquiescence or resistance inside a cultural contact zone. It would take some compromising and understanding from both contactors.

To set precedence or an example or an art of what can be done in the contact zone, Mejia presents Elma A. Neal. Again, such a simple act as allowing a non-speaking English student to express themselves with the words and language of their surroundings turns out to be genius. Neal seems to understand that in this region, in this contact zone which is the reality surrounding the child, there are two distinctly different languages that will permeate the student’s being.  The student will filter this as they rhetorically feel using the resources of the reality available to them. Neal explains, “[…] Our immediate purpose is to furnish the non-English speaking child with a vocabulary he may use in expressing his needs in the community in which he lives” (178). It is a smart move at this point for Mejía to advance the idea of “primacy of consciousness.”

I like the idea of impromptus to allow students to display their primacy of consciousness in writing. I’m not going to write about the constraints disallowing the primacy of consciousness. I will focus more on advancing Elma Neal’s visionary ideal of letting students write what they know inside the contact zone. But not every student’s primacy of consciousness will be expressed with the same rhetorical display. This is where Pamela Gay’s idea of location and its influence in the student’s writing becomes evident. Students are going to write through their experiences and not too many will be the same; some from a completely opposite perspective. The experiences they will draw on to write are the funds of knowledge surrounding them. And I think it is an art in the U.S.-Mexican contact zone to confidently write or convey, or as Adams Sherman Hill writes of rhetoric In the Introduction to The Principles of Rhetoric and Their Application, “It is an art, not a science; for it neither observes nor discovers, nor classifies; but it shows how to convey from one mind to another the results of [the funds of knowledge]; it uses knowledge, not as knowledge, but as power” (321). Texas Mexicans may not know they are doing rhetoric when they write in a confluence of language all their own of tamale making or the family holiday, but they are expressing a voice of power, a voice of identity.

The Business of Compositon Textbooks

I was naïve to the textbook business. And it is a business. Connors sheds some light on the evolution of the composition textbook in “Shaping Tools: Textbooks and the Development of Composition-Rhetoric”.  With regards to composition studies, one must always begin with rhetoric and how it remains an essential element to the formation of composition. The first composition-rhetoric textbooks from early to mid-nineteenth century were used as tools for how a classroom session should be conducted and what kind of information was to be disseminated to the students. This was done to aid undertrained teachers. Untrained instructors were not ready to teach composition before 1860.It was the teacher’s job to lecture to the students and they would take notes and rhetorically retort what they learned. But when it came to teach writing, teachers began to realize that students must practice the act of writing in class. This makes sense.

To accommodate the burgeoning requests from teachers, drills, questions, and exercises were infused into the pages of textbooks. Connors uses Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to display how the transmogrification of textbooks took place. Connors writes, “Examining these editions and abridgements, we can begin to see the development of a new rhetorical pedagogy around Blair’s theories, one that would radically change students’ relations with rhetoric texts by making the centerpiece of the course the text rather than the teacher” (74). With these changes, teaching rhetoric moved from a lecture-tutorial system to a question-answer session. After a few years teaching this method, teachers began to notice that teaching rhetoric was becoming a memorization game without any learning taking place. They began to insist on different methods of instruction. This called for a change in textbooks.

The idea of mechanical correctness provides the back and forth of textbook rhetorical theories. After the Civil War, teachers were more trained and began to provide scholarship in the textbooks. Theories and practices provided discourse for instructors and much of this scholarship was inserted in textbooks. Connors calls this the Consolidation period – the time when rhetoric and composition became a single entity. But composition-rhetoric still was not a static discipline. There were those of the rhetoric cloth that were worried that the mechanical correctness madness to produce better writers was taking away from the pure rhetoric side of the Consolidation. The feeling and sway of rhetoric was giving way to the plodding exercises and drills for grammar and punctuation usage.

Teaching rhetoric was not a static business with textbooks. In reading “Textbooks for a New Discipline,” one can see the ideas infusing teaching by changing methods and pedagogies. For instance, Edwin A. Abbott seems to rely on memorization of specific changes. And he also tells the student how and what to write. To me this seems to go against what writing is all about.  But this is how teachers thought students should be taught in 1875. While Abbott may have been somewhat rigid with his textbook exercises that do no more than tell a student what to write, Adams Sherman Hill seemed to implore students to allow themselves to write with grammatical purity and method, or as John Franklin Genung claims, “The crowning excellence of skilled writing as all acknowledge, is naturalness” (332).

Then we have Barrett Wendell who, I must say, absolutely blew me away with his intonations on style. I like how he broke down style to matters of detail and in writing, detail can be applied to words and sentences. A writer’s style shows itself in word choice and sentence structure…two of the smallest aspects in writing. Style has less effect on paragraphs and whole essays. But I think the tone of a paragraph or essay can be attributed to style. His concern for style was evident in his disdain for the complexity and amount of rules to writing. He broke down all the writing rules to three easy principles: unity, mass, and coherence. In Wendell’s textbook, there seems to be the idea for writers to express themselves in their own style. Wendell writes, “Like one another as we seem, like one another as the courses of our lives may look, there are no two human beings who tread quite the same road from the cradle to the grave” (336). We can read Pamela Gray’s idea of location in the aforementioned statement. It is here that we can advance Wendell’s ideas on style, and meld them with Scott and Denney’s impromptus. I like how the authors give teachers a formulation of writing exercises that can be used in a classroom. The authors write, “Constant practice in writing under pressure produces rapidity, facility, naturalness, and individuality of expression” (349). When I was reading this section, I kept thinking, “You learn reading and writing by doing reading and writing.” For me, and maybe for teachers everywhere, the perfect textbook would incorporate bits and pieces from all authors to create an ideal textbook. But it probably would be only an individual ideal to one person and a bastardized method of teaching to another. Teachers can always influence a change in textbooks.

Stuck at the University of Houston

Thought I’d make a post since I’m just waiting on this rain to stop over here at the University of Houston. Man, it’s raining hard.

The research i did today consisted of looking through course catalogs from 1927- 1970. There were some significant changes in the English/composition courses offered from pre-War to post-War. I’m not looking at my notes so I can’t get into the specifics. From the readings that have been done, some of these course offerings seem to coincide with what Connors was mentioning about the texts that were offered and why they were used. Interestingly, the first mention of “Freshman English happened in the 1950′s sometime. Also, the first mention of “English for Foreign Students” took place in the period after WWII ended around 1948 or 1949.

Looks like the rain is diminishing a bit. I heard that TAMUCC is shutting down at 5 pm today and through the weekend. We were supposed to get together and come up with an organization of our paper. Well, we’ll see what happens. Time for me to hit the road back to CC. I’m hungry.

Y’all take care.

 

From Rhetoric to Composition

The first incursion into rhetoric by women came through religious avenues. This makes sense considering Connor’s perspective about Paul’s writings and how they called to mind “the rationale for [the] exclusion from church matters lay in two related claims about women’s nature: first, that women were sacred and private …and second, that women were sinful, irrational, and incapable of public speech” (31).  Women wanted to show men that they were capable of somehow ridding themselves of the stigma of original sin; to be more pure not only to the omni gaze of the Lord but to be pure to the eyes and ears of men. Conner’s inclusion of Paul’s I Corinthians 14 passage makes me wonder how a person can write some of the most beautiful words ever committed to text as Paul does in I Corinthians 13 with Love, and then go on to write something so demeaning and subjugating about women.  Crazy.

What’s more interesting is how the history of composition can be inflected by certain regions of people. Connors points out how the Quakers allowed, even defended the right for women to speak in public. This is an important time in the ever-evolving world of composition rhetoric. Women were afforded a space to create an identity, even if it was through the religious forms and standards; all women needed to do was memorize and extrapolate the biblical passages with their own rhetorical inflections. It was a mindbender to read how these women were inflicted by the extreme reactions of men, sometimes with death as an end result. I know agonistic behavior is a trait psychologically inherent in men, or so the idea was at the time, but to treat women in such a way to berate or subjugate them for only speaking, even within a religious domain, seems excessive. The incursion by women into public speaking was bound to happen…especially in the newly formed region of what was to become the United States. The same revolutionary spirit implanted by a mostly male population at the time was bound to ooze its way into a physical and outward expression by women. The buzzword freedom is an ungendered term more affiliated with a human being than with a subsection, classification, or genre of the species. Even then, the process was slow to accept women into rhetorical oratory.

The funny thing about this is that women, by being slighted to express orally, changed the way rhetoric was taught and changed the landscape of rhetoric to a more composition based discipline. What the Quakerist women started finally found traction in the nineteenth century. Female schools were founded in the 1820’s and continued to sprout up throughout the United States. But more importantly, because of “the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act in 1862,…each state was empowered to found an Agricultural and Mechanical College” (43). These new schools in the “booming Midwest and West were to become the major state universities…[and] unshackled by the all-male traditions of many eastern schools, these western universities were nearly all coed at the beginning” (43). Coeducation seems to be the impetus for the movement from a agonistic form of teaching rhetoric to a more irenic form where the internalized expressions of women would paradigmically change rhetoric form its oral traditions to a written form which would become composition rhetoric.

The effect of coeducation on rhetoric was immense.  Rhetoric up to this point remained based in an argumentative form. Connors notes that “Rhetoric entered the nineteenth century as a central argumentative discipline, primarily oral with a civic nexus…[but] Rhetoric exited the nineteenth century as composition, a multimodal discipline, primarily written and with a personal, privatized nexus” (44). There was no more agnostic teaching and as a matter of principle, the brunt of male agnostic behavior seemed to be suppressed to acquiesce with the female presence in colleges and universities. Changes were afoot and could be noted in

• The gradual change of student-teacher relationships in rhetoric/composition courses from challenging and adversarial to developmental and personalized
• The shift from oral rhetoric to writing as the central classroom focus
• The shift from argument as a primary genre to a multimodal approach that privelaged exposition
• The decline of abstract subjects for writing and the rise of more personal assignments (44)

The female presence can be read into every one of the aforementioned reasons. No longer could teachers be so antagonistic to students who were mostly male and perceived to handle the agonistic styling of their professors. It was crazy to read how students rose up against the faculty or simply dispelled physical harm against them. The female presence shifted the focus of classrooms from oral rhetoric to writing. Women had long been considered to be more private and personal in their expressions. Classrooms pedagogies had to change to accommodate females’ internalized expressions which were never done orally. But to me, the more important aspect of this paradigm is the multimodal factor that females unknowingly brought to this game. No longer was rhetoric to be argumentative based. A more rounded exposition of thought, a more personalized experience of narrative forced rhetoric to move from argumentative oral dominance to a well-rounded process of rhetoric composition.

A Cry for More Anticipation

Adams Sherman Hill – “An Answer to the Cry for More English” (1879)

I understand what Hill’s purpose with this article is: the need for more English. At the time of this writing, Harvard for a few years had already started implementing an English composition course to try and improve the writing quality of Harvard students and graduates.  After reading this essay, it is understandable how some people may come away with an English-only idea, how they can justify their desirous attempt to spread the hegemony of the English language.  However if read in an anticipatory light, this essay also provides other useful elements that can be applied to many present day composition courses.

The context of time and especially place, dictated Hill’s purpose for writing this essay. Harvard needed to implement some sort of composition curriculum to cultivate good English writing and expression among its students and by its graduates. And there were some really good ideas that remain, and should well be, in composition courses. The elective courses that were created show how discussion/collaboration show how “some of the best as well as some of the worst writers make great improvement in recasting their essays after they have been criticized” (55). The collaborative practice should never leave composition classrooms. But what if the collaboration takes on new dynamics such as other cultures and languages? Hill wrote his essay within the context of Harvard, a white school made up of white male students. Collaboration here at TAMUCC and many other higher learning institutions all across the United States, within a more contemporary context, can bring many differing ideas and concepts attuned to different cultures and languages.

Are colleges and universities going to allow students to express their individual agencies in their composition English courses? Some universities have to follow state legislation as in Arizona where ethnic studies are no longer taught in public institutions.  Well with regards to ethnicity, couldn’t it be argued that English and its literature are ethnic studies? Just a thought… Learning other languages and its literatures (even translated in English) would not be detrimental to a student’s composition prowess. Hill writes, “…there are readings and lectures in English, and literary courses in other languages, none of which can fail, in one way or another, in a greater or lesser degree, to cultivate a faithful student’s power of expression” (56). And maybe in this día y época, with many cultures and languages coming into contact with higher education and English, it may not be wise to hegemonically implement English composition rules. There is a need to understand the rules of English composition, but not at the cost of reducing or constricting an individual’s agency and expression to the desires of English-only practioners.  And I think when Hill writes about how “the Faculty anticipated, rather than gratified, the wishes of the students…” (56), he wants teachers and instructors to be forward thinking or anticipatory about the direction of English composition with regards to the reality surrounding the teaching of the subject. Anticipation connotes an idea of flexibility and the ability to adapt to new realities.

Giving Props to Pestalozzi

“No Ideas but in Things” by Schultz

I’m a huge William Carlos Williams fan, so my interest was piqued when I saw the title of this reading. I began to think that this essay would be about objects and what idea they might convey and provoke. Williams’ eight-line epic, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” comes to mind. Williams creates an image by using objects like a red wheelbarrow and some white chickens. Under the practice of Pestalozzi’s “object teaching,” each object within the image would be given special and subjective meaning through the combination of an individual’s thought and experience. The idea comes from or the reality is expressed through the conduit of the individual.

Object teaching is a good idea for composition-rhetoric. It allows for an individual to express written or orally the internal experiences and ideas combining with the reality of an image. It’s an especially good idea when confronted with many different cultures and perspectives in a classroom. Books for school-aged children drew on Pestalozzi’s theories emphasizing observation and experience. “Comenius was one of the first educational theorists to argue that instructional practice should be based on the natural learning patterns of the child…” (58). Just because this practice was designed for children does not mean that it cannot and should not be practiced in higher education environments. Object teaching allows for each individual, regardless of their backgrounds or affiliations, to infuse their experiences with an object, and then write about it. The object derives its meaning from an individual’s experience and perspective.

Pestalozzi was not a composition instructor; however his educational concepts for children can be applied to composition-rhetoric. As Schultz notes, “…she [Sharon Crowley] writes that Parker, as a ‘gesture toward supplying students with ideas about  which they could write, ‘ asked students, ‘to enumerate the parts of visible objects,’ ‘to enumerate the qualities and uses of objects,’ to enumerate objects’ ‘parts, qualities, properties, uses, and appendages’” (80). Composition instructors are doing Pestalozzi without mentioning him or giving him his proper due or his “props,” so to say. Object teaching in classrooms with an array of culturally differentiated students can be utilized. Object teaching allows for each individual student, child or adult, to write their ideas and experiences of an object through their own expressions of individual experience and agency. A red wheelbarrow as an object may be a dirt transporting mechanism to someone or a symbol, a capsule of being regardless of what the damn white chickens say, to someone else.

Agitating and Provoking Truth, Goodness, Beauty

“Emerson and Romantic Rhetoric” by Berlin

Speaking and writing are similar acts in that they both expressively externalize into reality the desired concepts within a person.Interestingly, one can sense Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone idea or theory emanating from Berlin’s statement, “Emerson’s rhetoric is preeminently concerned with the role of discourse in the public domain, centering on the place of communication [my emphasis], a modern democracy” (43). “Contact zones” may have been her rewording of “place of communication.” Agitation and provocation are words that can describe a rhetor’s mediating interaction with readers or hearers making internalized decisions.

Berlin writes, “We recall the importance of language in Emerson’s thought: the discussion is necessary in order that idea and experience may be united in the creation of meaning” (50). The use of a metaphor gives the idea or image a certain desired sway to convey the connection of experience and thought. For instance, describing some Queen Palm trees, standing tall behind AAA Radiator Service, with the fronds swaying to and fro with the breeze like an idea gently seeping into the ears, kindling an emotive desire to exist without condescension. I know I used a simile in the previous description of the palm tree, but it can be used as a metaphor or trope to move the connection of the rhetor’s experience and the reality before their eyes, “grounded in the plainest narrative” (52). But to move the reader or hearer in a desired way requires a simple eloquence and use of language, dependent on the direction of the concept within the rhetor.

And there is a new metaphor that is picking up steam: borderlands. This is the place of contact zones, a place of communication, a place where “truth is a product of a relationship; its source is neither subject nor object, but is located at the intersection of the two” (47). It’s the confluence of cultures interacting and communicating out in the streets. “The streets must be one of the schools” (52).  The idea that English is and should be the only language spoken and taught in United States stagnates and reduces the concepts of individual agency and freedom, especially within a borderlands context. The borderlands metaphor can morph composition-rhetoric into a different dimension if institutions, academic, societal, and governmental, accept the notion that borderlands is a contact zone, a place where “polarities meet,”  a place of communication where different languages fuse with one another to create a hybridity of language and ideas, two different styles of communication co-existing…it’s a new reality that must be acknowledged. Borderlands is truth, goodness, and beauty.