Writing the World: Multicultural Approaches to Teaching Writing

1. Writing the World:Multicultural Approaches to Teaching Writing Kristen B. French Center for Education, Equity and Diversity February 9, 2009

2. Where I Am From • Liberal Education/Liberating education=Education for Liberation (not assimilation) • Not “either or…”, but “both and …” solution (Tatum, 2007, p. 114) • “Many students of color will have had reduced access to high-level college preparatory courses and the facilities to support such curriculum. Many White students will have had less effective social preparation for diverse campus life” (Tatum, 2007, p. 108). • The following theoretical foundations frame this discussion: • Critical Literacy • Decolonizing Theory • Multicultural Education

3. Critical Literacy • “… resists any simplistic or generic definitions because its agenda is to examine the relationships between language practices, power relations, and identities - and this analysis involves grappling with specific local conditions.” (Comber, 2001, p. 271)

4. Decolonizing Theory • …the recentering of Indigenous and neocolonial sociopolitical and historical perspectives for community empowerment through critical personal narratives. • Focus on strength model rather than deficit model • Critical Personal Narratives • Writing from the margins • Maori Spiral Discourse Model • based on a culturally constituted discursive practice, begins with a formal welcome that values all participants voices equally, emphasizing the sharing of power and reciprocity (Bishop, 2005, p. 122). • This spiral does not necessarily end when all have shared their stories. Stories are retold, modified, deleted or adapted. • Making meaning

5. Multicultural Education • Alternative is monocultural education • Multicultural Personhood • 1. We simply must learn more. • 2. We need to confront our own racism and biases • 3. Becoming a multicultural person means learning to see reality from a variety of perspectives (Nieto & Bode, 2008, p. 425) • Ethic of Care • “..caring is just as important–and in some cases, even more so– than larger structural conditions that influence student learning” (Nieto & Bode, 2008, p. 292). • “Care means loving students in the most profound ways: through high expectations, great support, and rigorous demands” (Nieto & Bode, 2008, p. 292). • Naming/Noticing, Acting, Reflecting (Bode & Raible, 2008; Pollock, 2008)

6. Challenges for Students from Diverse Backgrounds • “I don’t belong here.” • The struggles of first-generation and other marginalized students • “Where do I belong?” • Reading the world then reading and writing the word.

7. First-generation students experience difficulties prior to and during college, which makes them vulnerable to lower academic performance (Ramos-Sánchez & Nichols, 2007) : • Predominantly from lower socioeconomic strata • Underrepresented ethnic groups & speakers of home languages other than English • Less familial support • See selves as: • Less prepared, lacked basic knowledge about college, and worried more about financial concerns • Compared to traditional students first-generation students: • Take fewer humanities courses, studied fewer hours, took fewer credits, worked more hours, and were less likely to participate in honors programs • lower academic performance, more problematic transitions, and higher levels of attrition • Results: First-generation students encounter more obstacles.

8. Reading the World then reading and writing the word: Where do I belong? • Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world (Freire, 1983, p.10). • Students are already literate when they come to school, how can we build on their ‘funds of knowledge’? • Understanding that teaching students to read and write (Freire,1983): • As a political act • As an act of knowledge • As a creative act • We transform our world by writing it and rewriting it.

9. What I have learned • In 2007 WWU student body 83.1% White/ 16.9% students of color • The ABCs of Creating a Climate of Engagement (Tatum, 2007): • Affirming Identity • “It is often harder for those students who have been historically marginalized in our culture to see selves reflected positively in school” (p. 114). • Building Community • “Most of us are more willing to engage in the often-taxing work of crossing social borders when we are operating from strength” (p. 115). • Cultivating Leadership • “Leadership … requires the ability to think critically and speak and write effectively, it also demands the ability to interact effectively with others from different background” (p. 117).

10. Importance of Critical Literacy • Writing the World • Embedded in students’ lives • Investigate structures and uses of home languages and the language of power…standard English. • Explicitly uncovering Power Relationships in the World (Christensen, 1999): • Whose language or dialect has power? • Whose does not? Why not? • What happens if someone has a Spanish or Vietnamese accent? British accent • How does language benefit some and hurt others?

11. What has worked for me • I Am From poems (Christensen, 2001) • Grounding curriculum in students’ lived experiences. Affirming students’ multiple identities. • Culture becomes visible, not just for students of color! • Connecting students across lines of difference (Tatum, 2007) • Critical engagement with socialization. Creating “communities of conscience” (Christensen, 2001) • Building relationships: • Provide spaces for students to “feel significant and cared about” (Christensen, 2001).

13. Family Education History Project “I can voice my ideas without hesitation or fear because I am speaking, finally about myself (p. 189). ~ June Jordan (1989) • Me-search • Assignment Overview, for FEHP : • Four-six pages, 1.5 spaced, 12 - Font /Times New Roman • Critically engagement with course concepts and personal reflections. These may include quotes, footnotes, or direct connections to concepts or particular readings that you identify with in the course, such as privilege, colorblindness, Americanization, tracking, language diversity, racism and discrimination, etc... • A bibliography of the course readings that you reference in your FEHP using APA format (see below). • Clear and concise writing and organization. • Three rough drafts: connection to history, education critical personal narrative, and synthesis of text. • Creative choice (ex. This American Life, historical fiction, art~ boat, tree, book)

14. Critical Personal Narratives …are reflexive self-narratives based in our multiple identities and cultures, highlighted by performance, storytelling, the power to disrupt, reproduce, reimagine, debate, and dialogue for social change, reflecting our various ways of knowing – our written and oral languages, with explicit charges for charting new spaces for democracy, liberation, and consciousness raising as cultural workers. • Testimonio = to bear witness • The single voice has a multidimensional history reflecting the language, symbols and cognitive values of a subaltern or marginalized people with the purpose of speaking to hegemony and calling for action (Beverly, 2005). • Autoethnography: • is a “performance text,” a “turning inward waiting to be staged” (Denzin, 1997, p. 199) • According to Holmes Jones, autoethnography, as a performance and personal text, is a critical intervention in sociopolitical and cultural life called to disrupt, produce and imagine the world for social change through viewing the world from specific, perspectival and limited vantage points to engage readers in dialogue and debate (2005, p. 761).

15. Concluding thoughts: • Imagining the possibilities of a liberating education with “fierce hopefulness” (Raible and Bode, 2008) • Dialogue…

16. References Beverley, J. (2005). Testimonio, subalternity, and narrative authority. In N. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 547-557). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc. Bishop, R. (2005). Freeing ourselves from neocolonial domination in research: A Kaupapa Maori approach to creating knowledge. In N. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 109-138). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc. Bode, P. & Raible, J. (2008). Talking About Race. National Association of Multicultural Education Conference presentation. New Orleans, Louisiana. Christensen, L. (2001). Where I’m from: Inviting students’ lives into the classroom. In B. Bigelow, B. Harvey, S. Karp, and L. Miller (Eds.), Rethinking Our Classrooms, Volume 2: Teaching For Equity and Justice, Rethinking Schools, Ltd., Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Christensen, L. (1999). Critical literacy: Teaching reading, writing, and outrage. In Carole Edelsky (Ed.), Making justice our project: Teachers working toward critical whole language practice, Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. Comber, B & Simpson, A. (Eds.) (2001). Negotiating critical literacies in classrooms. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Denzin, N. (1997). Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Freire, P. (1983). The importance of the act of reading. Journal of Education, 165(1), pp. 5-11 Holmes Jones, S. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In N. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 763-791). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc. Jordon, J. (1992). Technical difficulties. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Nieto, S. & Bode, P. (2008). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education (5th ed.). New York: Allyn & Bacon Pollock, M. (Ed.) (2008). Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school. New York: The New Press. Ramos-Sánchez, L. & Nichols, L. (2007). Self-efficacy of first-generation and non-first-generation college students: The relationship with academic performance and college adjustment. Journal of College Counseling, 10 (1), pp. 6-18 Tatum, B. ( 2007). Can we talk about race?: And other conversations in an era of school resegregation. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.