See the sidebar for a reiteration of the upcoming schedule of assignments and some clarification.
For April 21 (no class that day), read the following:
Jessica Enoch, Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students 1865-1911, as follows:
Introduction: The Profession of a Woman
One of three body chapters: Lydia Maria Child; Zitkala-Sa, Jovita Idar/Marta Pena/Leonor Villegas de Magnon.
I'll read the conclusion and report in.
When you're ready, you can try out your CCCC proposal drafts here too.
13 comments:
And I still need a "deliverables" statement from most of you. I have Annarose's and Val's so far. If you did send an update and I missed it, let me know.
I read Chapter 3. After reading Enoch's overview of female teachers in the introduction, and how white female teachers were considered especially suited to teach, I appreciated how Enoch complicated the issue in this chapter by pointing out the role of marginalized women as teachers. Indian women were likewise targeted as candidates for teaching positions (86), but the motives were much difference. Far from being viewed as moral and 'superior', Enoch points out that Indian women tended to be viewed as "'beasts of burden'...whose 'sexually lax' and 'savage' behavior transgressed every 19th century code of female propriety...[but] the greater crime, it seemed, was that the Indian woman passed on her 'primitive' ways to her children" (86). By recruiting these Indian women, dominant society hoped that these women would pass on their 'civilized' ways to children, and effect a change throughout all Indians...a trickle down effect of sorts.
Also of interest in this chapted is Enoch's discussion of the propoganda set forth by administrators of the Carlisle school, the concept of "the man on the bandstand" who saw and heard everything occurring on campus (or so 'the man' wanted pupils to believe...) and how powerfully Zitkala-Sa took on the dominant discourse in order to question it and the pedagogical pursuits of Indian boarding schools.
There's so much to say about this chapter that I'm not sure what to go more in-depth on...
I am really interested in hearing from those of you teaching composition courses what your thoughts are on the "On Beginnings" section of Enoch's introductory chapter (the last section- pages 26-29). She talks about coming to terms with her identity as a TA for composition courses as a graduate student, and questioning "the ways [her] teaching addressed issues of power, access, race, class, gender, and culture (27)."
This was something that just struck me as a section that I'd like to hear the TA's weigh in on....
I'm leaving town tomorrow morning for 3 days, but I'm hoping to get back on here before I go with some thoughts from chapter two...
In chapter 2, Enoch provides really thorough background on education in the south during the reconstruction period. While there were black community organizations that worked to place black teachers in “freedmen” schools, organizations in the North worked to bring Northern white women to the freedmen schools. The sentiment seemed to be one of duty. Enoch (tongue in cheek) calls it a divine responsibility to save. A white woman was ideal for this type of teaching position, because they had the moral and religious purity to inure into their pupils. Enoch uses newsletters from these organizations and teaching materials published by the American Tract Society (ATS) to infer what kind of teacher was meant for these students, and what kind of curriculum (and that curriculum’s aims) was pushed.
Look at the image on page 36. This was published in the ATS monthly publication, Freedmen. A gentle, refined, white woman instructs (and stands over) a group of black pupils lounging on the ground. It reminded me of colonial era paintings and maps that I’ve seen depicting Europeans civilizing the hostile natives. Which is pretty much what one of the aims of this move to send Northern women south seemed to be. A lot of the rhetoric reads like missionary rhetoric.
Enoch examines the pedagogical materials available to these teachers, and finds that they mainly teach submissiveness and obedience. The exercises and readings instruct the students of their place in the scheme of things. Jesus is used as an example of how to live, and while the messages do seem Christian, I think modern readers can certainly see the irony in telling black students “not to demand recompense when they are wronged”.
I haven’t even gotten to the meat of this chapter—Lydia Maria Child’s work—but I can let someone else go into this and chime in again later. I just found this part of the chapter so interesting. Enoch’s work here is very relevant to my project from a methodological standpoint, so it captured my attention.
Beth, On Beginnings resonated with me as well, especially page 27 where Enoch talks about the concept of first-year composition classes as the "drudge" work given to TAs, and the "nurturing" class students must take before they move on to "real" courses. Thinking back on the training and pedagogy materials I've worked with throughout the years, there is always this pervading sense that first-year writing, and English in general, is where students are to get the kind of hand-holding and mothering that will prep them for the "real" classes later. I think students also feel entitled to this mothering too, especially if they have a female instructor. I've addressed this misconception in my classes this semester (and I believe Calinda has too), by using writing assignments that ask students to learn more about their potential career fields. They were required to analyze and evaluate scholarly articles in their fields of interest (business, medicine, computers, etc.), as well as interview professors and working professionals in their fields about what they can expect in the future. In this way, students got to enter their "real" coursework through the writing they did in basic English 102.
Also, while Enoch stresses the challenges of teaching marginalized students, I've found it's sometimes just as much of a challenge to teach students to think and write with an awareness of their own privileged position in our culture and in academia. One student wrote on my evaluation (for a composition course that included an equal amount of male and female writers) the he wished we could have read more stories by male authors. In reading Uncle Tom's Cabin with my high school classes (at a boarding school comprised of mostly white and upper-middle class students), it was so difficult to get them to look at race issues critically. Many did not want to talk or write about the novel at all, saying that race "didn't matter" anymore, and to acknowledge race was being "racist." Enoch states at the end of the intro that she does not wish to "pretend that teachers today have similar concerns or constraints" as those from the late nineteenth century (29). Since Enoch and others have done so much work on incorporating marginalized discourses and students into the classroom, our next step might be to address the concerns of “non-marginalized” students (those whose right to be an active participant in public life as never been questioned, or those whose socioeconomic circumstances have paved the way for their education).
More to come after I read chapter 4…
I really enjoyed Enoch’s text and found it really useful for a number of reasons. First, her project as outlined in the introduction provides a good example of how an emerging scholar enters a conversation and demonstrates the importance of her work. While plenty of other texts follow a similar format, I found myself closely following her methodology, perhaps because so many of the theorists she mentioned were authors we’ve already read for class. Her reach back to Isocrates is appropriate and yet and interesting one—Enoch is certainly concerned like other feminist scholars to understand where various women fit into rhetorical history. I especially liked how she relied on JJR’s “confessional” in Traces of a Stream as it demonstrated just how significant JJR’s use of personal bias can be in laying the foundation for one’s work. Perhaps this approach is much more characteristic of feminist scholarship than more male dominated theoretical areas?
Second, I found her topic raising some really important questions regarding women’s role in education and public life. In the intro she explains that “the female teacher was to prepare her students for civic life” (3). This seems obvious enough—this is a major tenant of education today although not specific to just female teachers. However, the irony of course is that you have a whole sector of society not able to enter civic life because of their gender and yet they’re expected to be able to prepare students for that world from which they are excluded. That’s perhaps why I found her chapter on Zitkala-Sa so interesting. Here’s a women who despite her marginalized background becomes a very powerful speaker and writer through what Scott Lyons calls “rhetorical sovereignty.” This is another very useful term to use for our own work as it explains the “inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires . . . to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles and languages of public discourse” (qtd. on 75). This term seems to best sum up what so many of our authors have been describing about women and African American rhetors. They decide what rhetorical strategies of mainstream discourse are most useful for them and then put their own twist on those methods to create a space for their own voices.
Finally, as Enoch concludes her discussion on Zitkala-Sa’s work, she points out that this unique woman “teaches her readers to listen to the presences and the absences in Carlisle’s script” (120). This is certainly a useful strategy for us as teachers and scholars. I’m quite struck by Zitkala’s boldness in critiquing Carlisle’s master narrative of education and had hoped that Enoch would talk more about the debate between this woman and the school. I can only imagine what kind of reaction and controversy this created in the readership. Zitkala is a fascinating individual for her complex background—someone definitely worth learn about.
Beth, I agree with Annarose's feelings about first-year writing expectations. I feel like these classes are definitely set up for hand-holdingand mothering for several reasons: they are typically small classes where the instructor knows everyone's name, they are typically taken in the first year of college, when many students have a kind of high-school mentality, and they are courses that many students who are prepared can test out of, so the students who do end up haivng to take them are usually struggling in some way as a writer. I've seen some students come into these courses and kind of "cling" to me as an instructor, particularly here at UNM, where I may be the only instructor who knows their name and a little about them. Students also often expect "mothering" in these courses because they think these classes are most like high school, for the reasons I mentioned above. Because of this mentality, we as instructors then have to fight against students' tendency to whine and expect us to "baby" them.
One of the ways I try to squelch the expectation that I'm a mother figure such as the ones these students have encountered before in grammar and high school is to give the classroom a clear structure with rules and policies that I often define as "departmental policy." I do so in order to highlight the fact that we are in a professional academic setting, much like a job, and that I amk in a sense a supervisor to the students' own learning, a facilitator who will help them to get their job done (learn writing skills) but who is also not available to listen to their whining, much in the manner of a boss at a regular job. Another way I try to present the work we do in this course as critical to their education is by giving all of my writing assignments a definite, realistic rhetorical situation. If the students see the writing we do in class as something that is realistic and that can be applied to their futures, they are more likely to get more out of it and carry those skills onto their other classes and later their careers.
Enoch's statement that first-year writing is often the "housework" of the English depts. was so very true to me. Because TAs and PTIs, people who only have or are earning M.A.s teach composition, I think the students might get a perception that writing courses aren't important, that "anyone can do it." Further, the demographics of TAs don't help to alleviate the mother/teacher problem; when we started orientation in the Fall, Dr. Harrison told us our cohort was 80% female. So, I think our jobs become harder as a result of this inherent perception of composition courses and departments' attitude toward and about TAs and courses overall.
On Enoch's introduction: Like Paul, I followed all of Enoch's moves closely, especially her copious use of other [predominantly feminist] scholars' work. She does a very thorough job of positioning herself and her project, and as a student I appreciated her summarizing.
At the same time, the introduction seemed, at times, to sound a lot like the introduction of a dissertation...is dissertationy a word?...Enoch appears to take nothing for granted, and - at least in my view - seems to "overargue" her case at times. I admire it, but I also found myself feeling "told" a lot of things that would reveal themselves in the chapters as she makes her case.
Being an Anglo female writing instructor...
(1) my first year teaching writing (102) I had a moment similar to the one Annarose describes where a male (Hispanic) student expressed - in a very mild, not negative way - an observation that we'd read a lot of feminist texts. I considered this (and looked at the syllabus) and realized we had read a lot of texts by women but I wondered if that was the only point he was making...for myriad reasons (including my own education since) I wonder if he was talking more about the relatively few texts written by non-Anglo writers and/or the idea that the feminist views I presented were largely views I relate to in terms of class, education, etc. Since then, I've also become more aware of the sacrifices of "cultural capital" many Hispanic men, particularly, face when coming to school.
2. Whitney, my best friend who is an assistant professor in Texas, recently came to NM for a conference. As a compositionist, Whitney teaches several FYW sections (like Eng 101). Her students (she has small classes at the private college where she is a professor) were dismayed (one even used the word "abandoned") that she missed a week of the term to attend a conference. Her identity to her students is not scholarly, it's teacherly.
3. This fall, I received the following comment on my IDEA form: "Miss Kinsey is the best teacher I've had at UNM." So, I should have been over the moon because comments typically discuss the fact that I expect too much work or don't teach grammar. Yet, the combination of "Miss Kinsey" and "teacher" in the same sentence actually made me a little depressed. I doubt male T.A.s get the word "teacher" -- students might consider using instructor or professor instead. Moreover, even though I am unmarried, the "Miss" seemed really, I dunno, second grade. Enoch points out, too, that the stereotypical teacher is the harmless, single Anglo woman.
Valerie, my male students call me "Miss" (just "Miss") ALL the time, in spite of my insisting throughout the semester that they should call me by my first name, and that in fact, I prefer it. None of my female students hesitate to call me Annarose, but with my male students, it’s always “Miss,” and it drives me bonkers. I’m not sure if they’re aware of what it connotes, but that doesn’t lessen the aggravation. Aargh!!!
Please excuse my rant :P Now for some thoughts on Chapter 4:
I wanted to look at this chapter since my own project deals with newspaper articles, and I really like how Enoch looks for thought patterns on how teachers saw themselves and their students in U.S. culture through putting together these sort of collages of different statements from articles in La Cronica. Also, I appreciated how towards the end Enoch pointed out that more work of this kind needed to be done, given that La Cronica was not the only Spanish-language newspaper in the U.S. at that time (160).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth, charity was considered one of the few forms of work outside the home that was acceptable for an upper-middle class woman. Enoch explains how the perception of Anglo women as nurturing caregivers was employed in the mission to Americanize the Mexican immigrants ASAP. The excerpt she provides from the 1916 chair of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs on p. 134 could be cut and pasted into any imperial rhetoric on “the white man’s burden” or on the education of former slaves, both of which wanted to “help” the Other culture realize their inferiority to whites.
In this chapter, Enoch really delivers on the promise she makes in the introduction to show a narrative of “resistance” that entails women’s “acceptance of their gendered roles” (26). Some of the African American female rhetors we read in Logan’s collection also embraced their gendered roles, but did so in order to show that they were worthy of assimilation into the white “True Womanhood” culture. These teachers, however, used their gendered role in order to negotiate a space for their students to maintain a sense of pride in the Mexican culture and language, while learning the language and discourse systems of their new American world.
This chapter definitely made me think of how patriotism, politics, and activism may play a role in my own identity as a teacher, and of how my decisions on where and what to teach can be construed as part of a patriotic discourse. I’m not sure how Horner and Trimbur’s claim (which Enoch cites on 162) that university composition classes require English to be written in only “one fixed standard” holds up today as a negative aspect. At least here at UNM, the other composition teachers and I are expected and encouraged to teach our students to keep the rhetorical situation of their audience in mind when writing. If we ask them to write for an academic community, then yes, this may require them to write in a “standard” English with which they might not normally communicate. On the other hand, we may ask them to write a letter to a friend or relative, in which case this more academic standard might be relaxed.
April 17, 2009
Katherine Alexander
19th Century Rhetoric
Professor Susan Romano
My commentary this week will center on Jessica Enoch’s chapter on Lydia Maria Child whose Freedman’s Book was intended to give strength and courage to those slaves recently freed. Contributors to this volume include poet John Greenleaf Whittier, whose epigraph appeared on the title page:
O dark, sad millions,--patiently and dumb
Waiting for God,--your hour, at last, has come,
And Freedom's song
Breaks the long silence of your night of wrong.
Other contributors to this extensive volume include William Lloyd Garrison, Maria Child herself, Frances E.W. Harper, John Brown, Mingo (a slave), Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, and many others. As Enoch states, Child has presented a range of conservative and radical opinions that result in a “two-pronged” rhetorical education whose purpose is to prepare the freed slave for active engagement in public life (31).
Child was, of course, a Northern White young woman who entered the cause of educating African American’s after the Civil War. In this role, she was expected not to disrupt the postwar worlds of the freed slaves, but rather to teach language practices and social behavior calling for obedience and compliance. Child moves in another direction in her resistance to “the designated plan” as she brings her readers into a complex rhetorical conversation. Her mission was to offer her students rhetorical tools to change their lives rather than their continuing to live in submission. In her quest to create awareness, she was quite revolutionary.
Education of African American slaves and freed men had been an issue evoking heated discussion for many years. While many African Americans wanted their schools (many times held outside with no buildings to support them) to have African American teachers, it was deemed acceptable for White women to enter the fray as “Women’s Work for the Lowly” was considered an important calling (37). Here again we find a double-edged sword as women are allowed to work, but only in positions deemed “women’s work.” However, because of these women’s efforts, many former slaves were able to learn to read and receive educations. However, their mission “to purify the South” could hardly have been regarded well by those living in the South. I argue that this might also include some African Americans who might not need northern white purification (Ibid).
Enoch also discusses the influx of black women to teach in the freedmen’s schools. Their work established the basis for an organization later to become the National Association of Colored Women. Child was very clear in expressing her outrage at the “twisting” of the bible to serve what she calls convenient purposes. She also was quite adamant about the teaching of children, and, in fact, composed a number of children’s books herself.
By juxtapositioning the rhetoric of Frederick Douglass more conservative views (in many cases her own), Child was able to open the dialogue that allowed freed people to participate. Douglass, of course, questioned the systems that controlled the lives of African Americans. Without these divergent views, the lives of the freed slaves may never have been changed. Enoch suggests that Child confronted her own whiteness distinct from and equal to black voices in The Freedman’s Book. To this I add my view recalling the theory of Gayatri Chavravorty Spivak regarding the subaltern. In this sense, I question whether Child’s voice could ever be “equal” to the black voices. We cannot know this because what constitutes the black voice cannot easily be determined without the white lens. This is approaching the issue from a very intense theoretical perspective certainly not intending to diminish the efforts of Child and other young white women who went South on humanitarian missions.
More of my male students tend to call me Ms. Shely also, but they are also usually the ones with whom I have issues of misbehavior and respect, and I always get real peeved and think, "they wouldn't do that if I were a man." I try not to see it that way, but I just can't help it. :P
I read chapter 3 on Mexican education in Laredo. The thing that struck me about it was this embracing of "biculturalism" as a means pf reaching the students within the classroom. I think this method is something that we as teachers, particularly in NM (and also something I realized in my time teaching in TX) need to keep in mind. And, now that I wrote that, not only do we need to maintain awareness in these places, but everywhere. I would say that we need to keep an awareness of the diversity of our students, no matter where we teach.
I think what Enochs is getting at is that this awareness will help our students to bond with us, which can aid us in teaching them. If we can relate to them, we can find ways to tailor the lessons to them as a class and on a more individual level. If they see us as helpers rather than dictatorial instructors, then they are more likely to learn. They won't see us as Tartarsout to change who they are.
The problem that this multiculturalism and understanding can create, though, is that we then seem take on the role of nurturing mother-teachers, the hand-holders we don't need to be. It's a really hard balance to strike, that of friend and teacher, and I think I fail miserably more often than not. I don't think Enochs is giving us a clear understanding in this chapter, though, of how to adapt to these situations; what we're doing now is very, very different from what these women did back then. Maybe the conclusion will give a me better grasp of the applicability of her project.
What is it about the "Miss"?
I read the Zitkala-Sa chapter (3) and want to add a bit to what Paul has already said.
While I found the prose in this "content" chapter incredibly readable and engaging, I was disappointed in a few aspects: first, Enoch never addresses Zitkala-Sa's approach to teaching in any detail, only her impression of being sent to boarding school. (This is indeed a very moving story, but it's also been documented in many other texts.) Also, even though she begins the chapter with an epigraph from Sa discussing the missionary creed of the Anglo teachers and their interest in self-preservation, I don't really see this idea being engaged. The missionary creed discussed is really Pratt's creepy creed, but nowhere do we get Sa's impression of her fellow teachers and her engagement with /resistance of either a missionary creed or self-preservation. In short, I felt very little of this chapter deals with Sa's pedagogy.
That said, the excerpts from Indian Helper and Red Man were incredibly telling and used effectively.
Enoch does a very nice job, too, exploring the ways Sa inverts the binaries used to exploit native peoples and justify the violences used against them.
The discussion of rhetoric and the body was also intriguing here. On page 90, when Enoch introduces Sa, she provides a very interesting description of a speech given by Sa called "Side by Side." The content of the speech is very political wherein Sa begins her project of exposing "the savagery of white America" (91). What's fascinating, though, is that her speech (language was "'clear and sweet'" and "'that of a cultivated young woman'") and manner ("'real, womanly, and refined'") so conforms to the true womanhood ideal, that her audience (and perspective employers) completely miss the content of the speech...it's almost as though the audience is so involved in the aesthetics, the bodily conventions, that they are deaf to the words themselves.
Now, this ignorance of her message may not literally be the case, but later when Enoch discusses the importance Pratt and Carlisle put on appearing "civilized" and performing (or, to use the rhetorical cannon, "delivering") whiteness in public, we really see the way Sa outwitted her "teachers"/Pratt and turned the tables on her oppressors. She certainly deployed her rhetorical education effectively. Of course, becoming "fluent" in both the dominant language and accepted delivery came at a terrible price. The strength of this chapter, I think, is on 117 where Enoch argues: "Through Zitkala-Sa's writings, it becomes clear that pedagogies for and discourses about delivery make a number of unarticulated assumptions concerning how one should look, act, walk, and talk before the rhetor can even imagine taking part in a rhetorical performance."
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