in response to Veritas Chick and MsLaoShi75

Back on September 28, VC and MsLS brought up some points that shape a discussion we need to have, ongoing and ongoing.

The tension is huge between acknowledging the backgrounds of people in classes and their efforts and holding them to an "objective" standard. That is, we want everyone to get 5s in their portfolios (the objective level), at the same time we want to acknowledge, first, that people in classes come from all sorts of different backgrounds and, second, that they then put in all kinds of different efforts.

In other words, someone who had all sorts of AP credits ought not to receive an A in class for never doing drafts, never really pushing, but still producing a shiny well-written research paper -- right?

All this make me think of Lisa Delpit's work in Other People's Children. The book is now over 10 years old, but is still provocative and important to me. Delpit was writing in response to arguments that we don't need to teach grammar and other 'basic skills' in (elementary) schools because children pick those things up anyway. She argues that this position is based in class structures: children who grow up in homes of privilege will learn -- without direct instruction -- the 'basic skills' that signify privilege and power.... and children who grow up in non-privileged homes will not. So we need to be providing overt instruction in 'basic skills,' Delpit is arguing, and we need to be aiming for a high bar.

But what is most compelling, to me, about her argument, is that Delpit didn't stop there. She didn't stop with arguing, "So we need to be giving overt instruction in 'standard' grammar." She argues, instead, that we need to teach grammars, that we need to help people in our classes see what their 'home grammars' give them, and what that other -- "standard" -- grammar gives them. She gives an example of a teacher in a Native community in Alaska, who helps people in her classes learn that their home language is about connectedness, family, closeness -- and that Anglo English is about distance, formality, hierarchies, etc. Delpit also has examples from teachers in other kinds of communities. Her examples -- about the real psychological and lived experiences of others -- are tremendously compelling.

So -- her argument (as I understand it) is that, if you want people in your classes to have the most cultural fluidity and agency, they have to know how to suss out AND USE the grammars of the powerful. They have to understand why trying to achieve that matters -- at the same time that they have to understand that doing this is not giving up on any home grammars.

In classes at Tech, this is weird, I think, because people in Revisions are either in the powerful grammar already (those students with all the AP credit) -- or they come from a nebulous middle/lower class background that hardly seems to be a community or a culture with its own grammar.

But if we can help people in Revisions understand that what we mean, in part, by 'choices' in the composition of texts is that they can be in a position to choose among a number of registers for writing -- including the so-called 'highest, most polished, most proper, most formal' (and that they have some understanding of how and why that register is considered 'highest, most polished, most proper, most formal') -- boy, if we can do that.... then we are golden.

So we can talk with them directly, I think, about this tension in teaching. We can talk with them directly about how we acknowledge their backgrounds and efforts, and how we also want them to have the agency to move among the different communities they will need to....

(Which means that those people with all the AP credit have to learn how to move in different communities, too... What would be ways to make THAT happen????)