On the Border

It’s weird how I feel empathy for Villanueva much more than I do for Noe.  Or for Grant.  With Noe, I put myself in the teacher’s position, a position that is fraught with responsibility to assimilate or acculturate students into academia, with all of its Western culture implications.  I don’t have a problem with this, at least not from a teacher’s view.   If I were a student living and studying in France or Russia or China or Brazil, I would assume that my success in that society would depend to some significant degree on how well I mastered the discourse; it would serve me well then to try on the clothes of that university, that culture, that nation.  My understanding from language learning is that language reflects a culture.  If I try to communicate in Spanish using American idiomatic expressions, I will generally fail.  Success depends on both my mastery of the language technically and my understanding of, and blending into, the culture.  If this is true for me, then this would seem to hold for my students as well.  Moreover, I feel I have an obligation to help my students to fit into the garb of the university and the garb of the culture as much as I can without asking them to compromise unduly.  How do we decide where to draw the line?  We need to dialog about it together.

On the other hand, when I read Villanueva, I see the issue from the side of the minority student being forced to speak the dominant language.  Why is this?  Perhaps it’s that Villanueva expresses the awkward hybridity of assimilation that leaves people feeling “tonto” or foolish.  I feel empathy for such people because I’ve felt “tonto” myself so many times.  This feels human, vulnerable and three-dimensional.  On the other hand, Noe celebrates the myth of the trickster, much as Grant celebrates the trickster Ehu and the Signfyin(g) Monkey, the evil genius archetype, not a three-dimensional human.  This means, in the words of Grant and Noe, that minority people’s best tool is the rhetorical technique of double-talk, pun and the put-down, all of which seem to set up the minority student in an adversarial role in relation to the dominant society and, it seems, to the teacher.  Personally, I don’t need to feel I’m an educational savior, but I’d really rather not have to assume my students deem me Satan from Day One, and are trying to put one over on me.  Maybe I’m taking Noe and Grant too personally, but that’s my take for now.

On the other hand, Villanueva makes an excellent point that our assimilating students tend to be filled with “anger like Levia or resignation like Rodriguez” (though I’ve read Rodriguez and, to me, he didn’t sound resigned so much as divided).  Clearly, if our students are truly arriving in class angry or resigned, then we need to give them opportunities to express this, and this needs to be acknowledged as part of the classroom reality. 

As a teacher, I suppose I feel deeply, awkwardly tonto myself when confronted with imagining an open-minded solution that embraces all cultural variations in writing yet guides students responsibly into mastering compositional skills needed for college and beyond.  I suppose the best I can do, as Noe says, is to create a classroom that is a border and not a boundary.