The 'Where?' Response

Antigua Beach. Image Source: http://www.onecaribbean.org/

While I have not had a chance to read Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”, I trust that Miller has hit the highlights for us in his analysis of it and I think he uses it productively to call for a reconfiguring classrooms and teaching styles to generate more interplay between the various interpretative systems that students and instructors carry into class. In doing so, he makes some key points about viewing potentially offensive discourse within the context of the course work and a student’s life.

When we’re offended, when we feel a line has been crossed, we often have a knee-jerk reaction of assuming a malicious intent behind the statements or actions that bother us. And this isn’t always the case. As Miller stresses, we need to be aware of the contexts that students are writing in (and from) and of the influences (personal, cultural, situational etc.) that shape their work. Students’ apparent breaches of political correctness (and other, often implicit rules and expectations for academic conduct) can stem from a lack of awareness or confusion over new material they are encountering. We might think about calling such instances ‘unintentional’, rather than ‘unsolicited’, oppositional discourse.

 As a TA for an anthropology of the Caribbean class, I read a large number of student response papers (essentially in-depth book reports with some analysis of larger themes and a little room for personal reflection) to ethnographic texts about several islands. Many of them had just returned from spring break, so this was a topic that students were interested in and felt that they already knew something about. There were also several students of Caribbean descent in the class. The majority produced responses that summarized the assigned texts, made a few connections to themes like globalization, and reflected on the darker aspects of tourism and agricultural industry. Others wrote comments that seem to blame indigenous groups for political corruption, poverty, and environmental destruction. These same students had trouble summarizing what they’d read; many also began their response papers with the words “this novel”. I suspect that their comments came in part from an inability to fully engage with our texts (some of which were dense and probably overwhelming). It was hard to tell, however, what came from panicked skimming and what, if anything, might be expressing insidious or overt racism and hostility. Since I had been instructed to assign grades based upon whether or not students appeared to have completed their reading and connected it to ideas from lecture, many of the response papers that expressed this prejudice also received low grades. At the time, though, I wondered if my own shock at their comments blinded me to other, more valid and insightful, comments they might have made. I also think this might have been a missed opportunity to discuss stereotypes and the tourism industry’s portrayal of Caribbean people.

While I think that we need to differentiate (if possible) between what is inadvertent and what is intended as an attack in order to shape appropriate responses (rather than reactions). I think it’s also important for us to stop and consider where are own responses come from rather than immediately red-flagging certain kinds of student responses as problematic. I like what Miller says about beginning “where students are, rather than where one thinks they should be”. That said, sometimes it’s difficult to figure out just where students are.

Miller and required self-reflexivity

image source: http://www.glasbergen.com/education-cartoons/?album=4&gallery=86

I appreciated Miller’s endorsement in his article of a pedagogy which, as he says, “closely attend[s] to what our students say and write in an ongoing effort to learn how to read, understand, and respond to the strange, sometimes threatening, multivocal texts they produce while writing in the contact zone.” (21)  This is a progressive notion for an environment where a large number of presumably progressive individuals are placed in positions of authority as educators yet fail to recognize on occasion, when faced with an adversarial viewpoint, the incredibly complex ways in which individuals form their world view. This is obviously not a problem relegated to the relationship between educators and their students, either. It’s an issue which may get to the heart of any conflict: those who are “in the know” and take for granted that others will have been provided with the same tools they were to reach the “correct” conclusions; and those who aren’t, those who presumably had the tools but failed to use them properly or, worse, simply choose not to. Ignorance or hatred can be willful, of course but there’s usually an origin story, so to speak, and I think it’s useful for any human in relationships with other humans to remember this, particularly educators. 
          I was actually surprised, after Miller revealed several key biographical facts about the author of “Queers, Bums, and Magic” that there was still a call from some to have the author removed from the classroom, rather than wait and see, by engaging with the student, if there was anything else to be done. I don’t discredit the need for a space in which both students and their teachers feel safe and it’s intimated by Miller that the professor, Lankford, was indeed personally affected by the violent rhetoric of the essay. Whether he handled the situation ideally or not, I find it interesting that someone who did have a personal stake in the matter would not choose, as others say they would have, to bar the student from his class.  The result of that choice was also interesting in that the student appears to have received an education of sorts after all. To what degree this “education” changed the student’s thinking is unknown but certainly what was achieved through Lankford’s methods are preferable to what would have been achieved had the student exited the classroom altogether, knowing only that his work was "wrong" somehow but completely un-rehabilitated, so to speak, otherwise.

            As Miller points out after discussing at length various strategies for asking students to become engaged with and critical of their own views and interpretations, he admits that “required self-reflexivity does not, of course, guarantee that repugnant positions will be abandoned.” (20) Regardless, it seems more logical to develop methods for working in the "contact zone" which move students toward more inclusive beliefs and thought processes, rather than seeking to simply sweep the bad stuff out of the picture because it is offensive to a professor who may be, in many ways, privileged by his or her own education and worldview.

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