I could start this week’s post by noting that I yet again know someone personally from this week’s readings, but publically announcing my acquaintance with Charlotte Hogg (she teaches at TCU) would just be bragging at this point. Don’t you think? ;-)
In reading Fleming and Boulton’s chapter “Principles for Practice: What is Social Action?,” I must admit I felt a bit perplexed. While they provide a very clear definition of Social Action (see top of 87), outline three clear essential features of SA (see 88), and thoroughly explain the five phases of SA activities (see 88, 90-92); I remained confused about what this type of pedagogy really looked like or what was really meant by the theoretical framework they present. What is an SA “facilitator” and who becomes one? Are these teachers or individuals who work for the Center for Social Action? And how, if a facilitator is needed, does this work play out in the schools? However, though she does not indicate that she is specifically working under the “Social Action” model, the application of this pedagogy became infinitely more clear in Susan Swan’s “From Urban Classroom to Urban Community.”
Though I imagine Stephen North would refer to many of our readings this week as rooms in the “rambling House of Practitioner Lore” (see The Making of Knowledge in Composition 27; 1987), I rather loved the opportunity to see, in clear detail, the ways in which some of these ideas (SA included) can become the foundation of an entire course and can be sustained or reused year after year, in equally meaningful ways. Swan’s “work autobiography” strikes me as both a meaningful route into discussions of social power and cultural influences, while also representing a non-threatening entry point into these sometimes difficult or polarizing discussions for students. By asking students “What types of work don’t we as a group represent?,” she opens the door for students to begin to consider their social positions, the cultural collateral they and their families may or may not have, and widen their perspectives to see those whose lives might be very different, all without invoking that notorious sense of “white liberal collegiate guilt” that can so often shut students down in challenging conversations like these (88). Moreover, this particular assignment seems like one that may also be very applicable to a secondary classroom.
As Swan’s course outline continues to unfold, though—while I am still drawn to the “real-world,” community based, social awareness work she is asking her students to do—I am concerned about how her assignments position her students (and their thinking) in relation to the workers they are studying. When she asks her students to observe workers in a service industry worksite “until ‘something happens’” and then “interview actual food service workers about problems in the workplace,” I am concerned that though Swan is putting her students in the position of being knowledge-makers, she may be constructing the workers as mere “subjects” to be studied. Teaching at institution such as Carnegie Mellon, where the cost for an incoming student is estimated at $57,500, I would imagine that many of Swan’s students are upper middle class to high income and white (though a brief perusal of their website didn’t give any concrete demographics). If this is in fact the case, than the kinds of work she is asking her students to do places them in the position of white, power-holding observer, watching the (likely) minority, less powerful worker. Though the intent of the project is clearly a good one and evidently provides a great learning experience for students, the whole scenario feels a bit like students observing lab specimens. In addition, though she notes the value and wide range of final projects students produce, I am also concerned that many of these projects—“brochures on how to prepare for college while working at the same time, …guides on how to start a new job in an unfamiliar career, …online guides to problem-solving strategies for worker/manger disputes,” and “a board game about how to succeed at work”—while clearly representative of students’ literacy and composition learning, seem to either position the student as the “educated, white savior who sweeps into save the poor people,” or trivializes the issues (92). Having students who likely never had to work (at least not full time) while preparing to go to school create instruction brochures for those who live such a reality, feels a bit evangelical and patronizing. And creating a board game about a deeply serious issue, while perhaps informative to those who might play it, seems to trivialize the experiences of the workers.
Perhaps my discomfort with this part of the unit spawns from my past experience (and likely from the Writing Center Theory class as well; thank you Frankie Condon). While teaching at TCU, a school with a remarkably affluent white population, I asked students to complete profile essays in which they were to interview someone who was a member of a cultural or social group other than their own. The individuals they interviewed need not come from a different race, ethnicity, or cultural background, but could also represent a set of experiences the student themself did not have (so, for example someone who held deep-seeded stereotypes about cheerleaders might choose to interview a cheerleader). What I found, though, is when students really did stretch outside of their comfort zone (which was great) and interview someone whose life was very different than theirs, the student struggled to really see the cultural differences and power differential between them and their interviewee. Often these profiles concluded that X person might be African American and might work at a fast food joint near campus, but “she is successful because she works hard and is always cheery – yay – go American Dream!” In spite of my efforts to ask provocative questions of these students about their interview subjects, they either did not see or did not want to see the real social issues embedded in their subject’s story. I had the sense that while the project helped some students humanize groups of people they may not otherwise have even acknowledged, it failed to help students see inequitable distributions of power in our culture and almost “otherized” those they interviewed more than helping students identify with that state of “otherness.”
All of this having been said, I nevertheless think there is real potential for the concept of “community problem-solving dialogue” which Swan highlights. I think in this model, while some tweaking of the way she positions her assignments might be necessary, there is real potential for helping to scaffold students toward more critically aware thinking.
Schell’s portion section of “Toward a Sustainable Citizenship and Pedagogy,” in contrast, had me sold on her course design from the first sentence! While her course does draw attention to the ways in which rural and small town life is portrayed, she is exactly correct in saying “Food’s cheapness, abundance, and accessibility for many Americans make it one of the most taken-for-granted, although essential, commodities that directly affects our health and the health of the environment” (170). And because of this, it is a social issue that applies to everyone, rural or urban, and it is course theme which fosters place-based education, critical thinking, community engagement, and provides meaningful writing opportunities for students. While I think Schell’s version of such a course has a great deal of potential, her description of her unit lead me to think of similar work I might do in my own course. I have long wanted to teach My Year of Meats (which focuses on the practices of the meat industry) in a composition course and I think this might be just the course for such reading. Furthermore I am reminded of a fabulous article I read years ago (though I can’t find it online now, for the life of me, or I’d post it here), which addressed the way in which American food production and eating habits have so drastically cheapened the cost of a calorie, that many people can no longer afford to eat the kinds of calories that are actually nutritious. I can imagine students reading books and articles such as these and using them as jumping off points for discussion of the role food and the acquisition of it plays in their lives, engaging in ethnographic and community research that explores the ways in which other groups acquire food and where such food comes from, rhetorical analysis of the ways in which food is marketed to us, and writing projects which ask students to create materials that might help to change the way we imagine food and the ways in which we consume it.
As I read Schell’s section, I was reminded of a story a woman, who facilitates a community garden, recently told me: a local elementary student was helping tend the garden and as he pulled carrots from the ground she overheard him exclaim “what are these carrots doing in the ground?!” While indeed a laughable story, I also think it epitomizes a good deal of the concerns Schell raises and which plague our current model of food production and consumption. I just can’t believe, in all the PCE reading we’ve been doing, such a course focus hasn’t occurred to me earlier!
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A Comment on the “Stories of Home” Project:
Grandma, Opal Jean Clark, 1943
As I read several of the
interviews done for the project I was deeply touched by the stories the individuals and families shared. I was led to imagine using the project as a starting place/readings for a similar project in my own class. Though many of our readings have suggested family-based ethnographies or interview projects, for some reason the way in which these articles were constructed for the Journal Star, struck me as the kind of work my students could meaningfully engage in.
Recently I am in the midst of an interview/family history project focusing on my 92-year-old grandmother who served in World War II as one of the very first members of the Women’s Army Corps. My project, which I am presenting next week at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference in Minnesota, focuses on my Grandmother’s war rhetoric and her contemporary rhetoric about the role of the modern woman in and outside of the military. The project still has a long way to go and “extracting” (because that’s what it’s felt like I’m doing) the stories from Grandma has been challenging. In spite of the work, though, the time I have forced myself to take to sit down with her and record the stories she’s been telling for years, is priceless. Grandma is “failing” these days, as my mom would describe her, and she is not as well or as optimistic as several of the women profiled for the project, but I nevertheless will always cherish the time I’ve taken to capture these stories. And, as I think about how much this experience has meant to me, both as a human being and as a writer, I would love to give my own students such a “forced” opportunity to really listen to their own family members and/or close friends and consider their words by writing about them.
