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Composition Beyond the Classroom: How Social Protest Ignites Students ’ Interest in Writing, Creating Lifelong Writers. Osen Bowser Jr. Assistant Professor of English Community College of Baltimore County. Why Social Protest Writing?.
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Composition Beyond the Classroom: How Social Protest Ignites Students’ Interest in Writing, Creating Lifelong Writers Osen Bowser Jr. Assistant Professor of English Community College of Baltimore County
Why Social Protest Writing? "Though we can't call a strike or launch a social movement from a classroom, we can teach and learn the attitudes, relationships, and practices that are the preconditions for imagining oneself and others as participants in social policy making and agents of social change" (Welch 15).
Why Social Protest Writing? • Provides students with a reason for writing • Provides a logical connection between the personal and the academic • Helps students develop a sense of agency
Sample Unit What does this pedagogical approach look like in the classroom?
Making the Content Relevant • Keep a pulse on current trends, those social issues with which students’ lives are intertwined. • While you can’t please “all of the students all of the time,” something in at least one unit will strike a cord with each student. • Provide a mix of academic and periodical readings. • Continuously “rework” your units as readings and/or topics become obsolete. • Don’t be afraid to discuss controversial issues!
Major Topics • Overt and influential racism • Claiming • Acting white • Invisibility • White privilege • Assimilation • White trash stereotype • Good country folk stereotype • Difference or “otherness” • Gender constructs
Readings • “Membership Has Its Privileges: Thoughts on Acknowledging and Challenging Whiteness” • “In Living Color: Race and American Culture” • “Acting White” • “Working Class Whites” • “Being an Other” • “Of Cholos and Surfers” • “Goin’ Gangsta, Choosin’ Cholita” • “Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes” • “The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?”
Providing a Reason for Writing “Pedagogically, students learn that they are supposed to have something at stake in writing an argument, academic or otherwise. When we stick to impersonal topics, students have a hard time making this cognitive connection. Rhetorically, students who do write when something is at stake are participating in public discourse; they expect something to happen as a result of writing. This profound belief in the possibility of action is the best prospect we can offer as teachers” (Danielewicz 421).
Unit Introduction: Establishing the Purpose for Writing Grab the students’ interests • Attention grabbing title • Thought-provoking images • Short YouTube clips Pose Essential Questions (EQ’s) that guide students’ learning throughout the unit: • 1. What is your identity, and how did you form it? • 2. How has the media and/or other external factors influenced how you see yourself and how others see you? • 3. What does this mean for the lived experienced?
Thug, White Trash, Terrorist: Who Am I? • What’s happening here? Have you seen and/or experienced this either in person or in the media? • How might this experience shape how the guy being handcuffed sees himself? How others see him and/or other minorities? • How might this experience shape how the police officers see themselves? How others see them?
Thug, White Trash, Terrorist: Who Am I? • NYC’s Stop and Frisk practice • Short discussion about experiences and identity (refer to EQ’s 2 and 3) • Read Tim Wise’s “Membership Has Its Privileges: Thoughts on Acknowledging and Challenging Whiteness”
Introductory Discussion After reading Tim Wise’s “Membership Has Its Privileges: Thoughts on Acknowledging and Challenging Whiteness,” respond to the following via Blackboard: • 1. How does Wise’s central argument relate to the “Stop and Frisk” practice? You must incorporate two quotes from Wise’s article into your analysis. • 2. What is Wise suggesting about identity and experience for whites? For minorities? Explain. • 3. How we see others may result in the mistreatment of them. The “Stop and Frisk” practice violates victims’ rights. What are the repercussions of this? Explain. • Don’t forget to respond to a peer’s post.
Connecting the Personal to the Academic Considering how “people use language and literacy to challenge and alter the circumstances of daily life,” composition instructors can and should foster an environment in which students feel their writing has a purpose in their lives beyond the classroom (Cushman 12).
Connecting the Personal to the Academic • Provide tangible activities that allow students to draw upon their actual experiences with the topics and connect them to the “real world” implications of these experiences. • Remember authenticity is key! • Structure scaffolded writing assignments so that students can relate their personal experiences to the “big ideas.”
Critical Thinking Activity: “The Apprentice” • Completed before reading “In Living Color: Race and American Culture” • Select potential employees for an engineering job based on “identity” characteristics (Game courtesy of the Equality and Human Rights Commission) • Discuss the implications of stereotypes and prejudice and how they contribute to one’s identity • Discuss gender roles and how they impact identity
Critical Thinking Activity: Role Play Completed after reading “In Living Color: Race and American Culture” In your group, design a role play of at least 4 minutes and no more than 6 minutes in which you bring your “complex term” from Omi’s essay to life. When creating your role play, think about the essential questions and themes of this unit and your own personal experiences with these concepts. Complex Terms: • Overt racism • Inferential racism • Unexamined racial beliefs • The ideology of difference or “otherness” • Situation context • Invisibility
Writing Assignment: Scaffolding in Preparation for the Essay • Completed after reading “Being an Other” • Establishing Identity Writing Assignment • TED Talk on Self-Identity • Write a three to four paragraph response in which you describe an account of how you developed a sense of your identity. While ethnicity is important to identity, think about other aspects of your life that also contribute to who you are, such as language and/or religion.
Excerpt from a Student Response In my early childhood age many people would not believe I was mixed. I was told I was adopted because I did not favor my dad which I thought was crazy. Whenever someone asked where was I from I replied Congo but my mom is African and my dad is Italian. Most people refused to accept both African and Italian because I am not dark enough to be African, and I look nothing like and Italian person. This was stereotype. I asked myself what an African person looks like and how does Italian people look, thought we were all humans. When you look at me what do you think? I know what you are thinking a black American female. Am right? Why is it that many people are quick to judge others by their skin complexion not knowing their ethnic background. There are many times when people think that I am a black American without even asking. They will automatically think because I speak proper English and my skin tone I am American. I do not get offended I just laugh because I get all the time. I just wonder what they would identify my cousin which is white but African. A lot of people in America identify people just by looking at them and I do it to at times.
Developing Agency • “This element of agency—that writing is action and that voice increases its power—is what makes voice such a crucial quality of written texts” (Danielewicz 421). • “…individual agency is the result of interactive relations, the self in dialogue with others, the world, and its own past” (Danielewicz 421).
Developing Agency • Unit should culminate in assignments that allow students to demonstrate they have found their voice. • Although students are focusing on the academic texts, be sure to look for their voice. • Has the student grasped the “big ideas” and used them to support his or her argument in an authentic way? • Has the student developed agency? • Do you get the sense the student is developing tools for “navigating the terrain?”
Critical Thinking Activity: Debate • Completed after reading “Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes” and “The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?” • Topic: Defend or oppose Deborah Blum’s assertion that gender behavior is socially constructed.
Tying It All Together: The Essay • Write an essay in which you synthesize at least three sources for support in response to the following question: • Is identity something people are born with or given, or is it something people create for themselves?
Excerpt from a Student’s Essay • Sometimes the environments people are placed in are negatively stereotype and which builds their identity. In “Working Class Whites”, Angeline F. Prince addresses “Working class whites … poor, sick, lazy, trailer park, rural south, and hillbilly”. The problem is that people are judging people by their lifestyle. To be honest all of this is stereotype because they are what people want them to be. This is one way people’s identity is given to them because nobody wants to be identified as hillbilly, poor, and lazy. People do not choose to be identified as these negative things, but other people look at them this way and that’s why their identity is given to them.
Your Turn • How have you or might you incorporate social protest into your writing courses to engage students in writing? • Volunteers to share!
Works Cited Cushman, Ellen. “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change.”College Composition and Communication 47.1 (1996): 7-28. Print. Danielewicz, Jane. “Personal Genres, Public Voices.”College Composition and Communication 59.3 (2008): 420-450. Print. Welch, Nancy. Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2008. Print.
Questions Osen F. Bowser Jr. obowser@ccbcmd.edu
