Writing Across Cultures

Robert Eddy, Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781607328735
• eBook ISBN: 9781607328742
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Writing Across Cultures invites both new and experienced teachers to examine the ways in which their training has—or has not—prepared them for dealing with issues of race, power, and authority in their writing classrooms. The text is packed with more than twenty activities that enable students to examine issues such as white privilege, common dialects, and the normalization of racism in a society where democracy is increasingly under attack. This book provides an innovative framework that helps teachers create safe spaces for students to write and critically engage in hard discussions.
 
Robert Eddy and Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar offer a new framework for teaching that acknowledges the changing demographics of US college classrooms as the field of writing studies moves toward real equity and expanding diversity. Writing Across Cultures utilizes a streamlined cross-racial and interculturally tested method of introducing students to academic writing via sequenced assignments that are not confined by traditional and static approaches. They focus on helping students become engaged members of a new culture—namely, the rapidly changing collegiate discourse community. The book is based on a multi-racial rhetoric that assumes that writing is inherently a social activity. Students benefit most from seeing composing as an act of engaged communication, and this text uses student samples, not professionally authored ones, to demonstrate this framework in action.
 
Writing Across Cultures will be a significant contribution to the field, aiding teachers, students, and administrators in navigating the real challenges and wonderful opportunities of multi-racial learning spaces.
 

1

Home Culture(s), Academic Discourse, Critical Reading, and the Eddy Model of Intercultural Experience

DOI: 10.7330/9781607328742.c001

College Culture as Foreign Territory

For several centuries in the United States, faculty have expected that students try to assimilate to the best features of college culture, language, and customs. Often these selective assimilation attempts are a struggle, especially for those students who are first generation, nontraditionally aged, or students of color. One reason for this reality is because those students have been historically underrepresented and have had few or no mentors down the generations to introduce them to the complexity of college passage. Although the demographics of US college students are changing to be more inclusive, the life-altering experience of adapting to college culture has not changed. It is white centered, white focused, and white dominated. Functionally relating to white college culture remains a challenging process, resulting in identity-altering dissonance. Whether one is a first-generation American Indian, an immigrant from Algeria, or an Anglo-Irish American from South Boston, success often depends on one’s ability to gain fluency and competency in college culture, especially writing. These are the challenges for students who want to attempt assimilation to college culture, who want to learn to code switch, which Espinosa-Aguilar describes as learning audience awareness—when, where and with whom one uses which language. As the introduction of this book insists, students can try to assimilate to college culture and its white ways with language and power, as this paragraph relates, or they can react to white college discourse in terms of separation, or resistance, or pluralism, trying to get from college what they want without accepting the status quo of white dominance.

We know our students will carry their “original” selves to this new place, collegiate culture. Their response to the new culture slowly creates a “new” self that interacts with their “old” self. Most contemporary philosophers believe in the linguistic constitution of reality, the concept that our language creates our reality by defining and naming it. We delicately drape our words and ideas (which are the circulating words and ideas of the dominant white culture) onto our world, and they become a map, but also a cage. We think our culture, our “cage,” is natural, objectively real, independent, and inevitable. We assume our views of our self and of the world are objectively real, just as we perceive them to be. When we see people from another city, state, or country, we see them through the cage of our culture, so we stereotype them. We don’t see them as equally complex and as human as ourselves and those who share our home culture. We Other them. But if we begin to get to know their language and view of the world, we begin developing additional ways of looking at their world. In doing so we become metacultural, able to contemplate how our culture is changed by us and we are changed by it.

The road to metaculturalism starts after moving into the college world and learning its language, especially written language. For our first-generation white students, typically working class, they begin seeing their home culture clearly, perhaps for the first time, because there is something to compare it to in college culture. First-generation students of color have no trouble seeing the differences between their home culture and college culture as white and middle class or above. Some of the ideas our students believed in deeply will be regarded as narrow-minded by their new college selves. This change will not happen overnight, but it will happen for many of our students from all racial and class backgrounds. New ideas will challenge the concepts our students think they are certain about, causing them to see the old ideas for the first time. We all begin as monoculturally provincial. New college students didn’t even think of foundational ideas as ideas because they just looked at the world through them. The new does not necessarily turn them against the old; it just leads to an examination of their culture of origin for what may be the first time for first-generation white students and more systemically for first-generation students of color who experience gulfs between white power and their home culture. When human beings, like plants, are taken from their original locale and transplanted to a new place, they must put down roots to survive, and by doing so they are nourished in an alien soil that will come to be their new “home,” at least for a time.

However, it is not just a matter of “adding” an old culture to a new one; they do not simply coexist equally. They compete, and the prize is our students’ ethos. The cultures compete for our students’ beliefs, emotions, goals, and dreams, and often for their politics and religion. We don’t wish to be overly dramatic. The experience is dramatic enough, over time. But we say this because we wish it had been clearly stated to us when we were first-year students. Entry into a foreign land and its language inevitably changes how people view fellow humans, read a text, use digital media, and make decisions, as well as how our brains process data. There are big questions: Who am I? What will I become? What values do I believe in most strongly now? How will those values be influenced by my new college culture? Students need to face these questions as central if we are to achieve our most vigorous and effective goal: the development of meta-, poly-, and intercultural beings. Our student colleagues need to consider our argument that the end of college is not just that students earn an educational credential but that they develop a critical ethos for operating in the world as a wholly human, intellectually curious, and fully engaged person.

With this text you will help your students understand that their old and new selves will compete. At home, the old self was sometimes comfortable, in part because things were accepted as habitual. At college, through peer pressure and other cultural power differentials, the new self will become increasingly operative because it seems like the appropriate one to use in that setting. Students, if they want to live a life of code switching, must learn to become consciously intentional when using one culture or language rather than the other, based on which will be the more persuasive given their audience and rhetorical purpose. Even though these two cultural selves will compete, neither can win completely. When they gravitate toward their college selves, students will not be able to pretend they didn’t live for years in their home culture(s). Likewise, when rejecting college and trying to regain the monocultural security of their home culture, students won’t be able to successfully pretend their college experience hasn’t affected them or never happened.

Cultural Backpacks and Academic Discourse

When students come to college, they bring the intellectual and emotional artifacts of their home culture with them. The container for this culture, which we envision as a backpack, is heavier than their literal suitcases stuffed with clothes and other possessions, and even on the most practical level, it is more important. For example, residential students’ cultural backpacks probably determine which material belongings they carry to college. For commuting students, their home cultures determine what vehicle they get to classes in or, for online students, how they get to their particular keyboard and whose keyboard it is, personal or public.

To be the strongest and most aware writers, our students need to unpack their cultural backpacks. They need to see how their native cultures structure time, action, and discourse. All cultures have discourses vying for influence and power. Notice we aren’t suggesting students lose their cultural backpacks; that is impossible. Instead, students must supplement their luggage set. They need to ask themselves what the dominant discourse of their home culture is and how it will interact with academic discourse and the writing they produce in that discourse. However, before students can answer these questions about discourse for themselves, we must first talk with them about what it is.

We tell students discourse is the formal conversations of groups involving what constitutes legitimate knowledge and who decides which groups benefit from such legitimacy. Academic discourse is the conversation carried on in books, journals, conferences, classrooms, and digital spaces. The characteristics of academic discourse vary depending on discipline. Certainly there are important differences in the sciences compared to the social sciences or to the humanities. But it is important to realize that in spite of differences, there are general characteristics of American academic discourse that are valued across disciplines and majors. Academic discourse is skeptical, analytical, and critical. It is concerned endlessly with the relationships between fact and theory. It will not accept an idea without vigorously looking at the evidence from as many sides as possible. This is the idea US academic discourse has of itself: a dispassionate, multiperspective, scientific search for truth. Unfortunately, the context of academic discourse is white supremacy, and its language rules. Laura Greenfield reminds us that “if ‘Standard English’ is imagined to be a finite language system when it is not (as no living language is finite), then people in power can always use it as a socially acceptable measure for making decisions about affording access to people of color, obscuring the racist motivations behind their practices” (2011, 42). She wants to make certain we know exactly what she is arguing.

Black people are not discriminated against because some speak a variety of Ebonics—rather, I argue, Ebonics is stigmatized because it is spoken primarily by black people. It is its association with a particular people and history that has compelled people to stigmatize it. Our attitudes towards language, it appears, are often steeped in our assumptions about the bodies of the speakers. We assume an essential connection—language as inherently tied to the body. In other words, language varieties—like people—are subject to racialization (50).

The negative in academic discourse, invisible to most white students and clearly apparent to most students of color, is that it is steeped in systemic racism and must always be resisted and challenged on that account. The positive side of studying academic discourse for students is that they learn the undeniable value and legitimacy of multiple perspectives, especially linguistic ones, but only within Standard English. They also learn how to be critical readers of texts and the ideas being thrust at them from their college environment. By reading, we don’t just mean that physical action in which our eyes take in thousands of bits of data per second as they fall across texts and images. Yes, when we read critically, we interpret what others have written, but more important, we are able to apply this skill to our response to our own writing and also to the responses others give to our work. The more perspectives from which one can read an object, idea, or theory, the better one’s chances are of judging them fairly. Most cultures take their values and beliefs for granted and do not want them systematically analyzed. Most people and perhaps all cultures dislike being judged, especially the dominant culture, which wants college culture and our country generally to be “colorblind.”

How Academic Discourse and Critical Reading Affect College Writing

In a perfect world, from the perspective of many employed in higher education, academic discourse would be based on the scientific method at institutions funded publicly, not through self-interested private funding. But rather than listening to and fairly judging all voices democratically, academic discourse rejects more than only what it regards as untenable. It also rejects what it considers undesirable. Unusual voices that try to enter the conversation of academic discourse, especially to change it, do not have an easy time. Academic discourse wants to weigh evidence carefully before it accepts opinions as facts. If it is truly scientific, healthy, and open to new points of view, academic discourse requires perpetual rereading and review. Academic discourse, thus, is characterized both by the need for criticism and the fear of it. It needs criticism and constant review because if we are to make sense of the world we strive to know, we cannot put faith in those in power and in the status quo; we must constantly question and evaluate them. The white leaders of academic discourse fear criticism because of the loss of power and influence they will experience if currently Othered voices become equal.

Most of the writing produced prior to college in typical large classes is completed as homework assignments. Writing in secondary schools relies on material drawn from experts or authorities of some kind. Students learn to gather information and organize it and often try to make some judgments as well. But often they don’t have strong or clear or carefully thought-out views. There is little of their own thinking in their papers. The differences between secondary and college writing are partly a function of biological maturity and of the nature of academic prose, which must demonstrate a voice in which the author is in control of the material and intending an original point of view. College writers are learning how to become equals of the experts by learning their language and sharing their methodologies, such as critical reading and evaluation. They are learning to code switch between EAE and their home languages.

For over thirty years, composition scholars have argued that writers learn how to write by writing and by learning how to read their own, and by extension others’, writing. We can’t stress enough that effective rewriting of anything is only possible if students know how to critically read and reread their own thoughts. This is also why peer review often doesn’t produce meaningful evaluation for many FYW students. If students haven’t been trained to read with this level of sophistication before they come to college, it is unrealistic to expect them to be able to do it without training from us. Peers give effective feedback only after being taught how to read a text with the express intention of helping the author review the effects their rhetorical choices have on fulfilling the evaluation criteria, achieving the major assignment requirements, and affecting the audience. Students who can critically read their own texts in this way find no difficulty in doing the same with anything else they read thereafter.

The Eddy Model of Intercultural Experience and Writing Processes

As they become increasingly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: How Writing Across Cultures Positions Itself in Current Rhetoric, Writing, Racism, and Diversity Scholarship
• Introduction
• 1. Home Culture(s), Academic Discourse, Critical Reading, and the Eddy Model of Intercultural Experience
• 2. Entrance to the Preliminary Stage: Brainstorming about Culture
• 3. The Preliminary Stage, Part 2: Prewriting Using the Eddy Method
• 4. The Spectator Stage: First Draft
• 5. The Increasing-Participation Stage: Working Drafts and Revision
• 6. The Shock Stage: Writer’s Block and Fear of Change
• 7. Convincing the Audience by Using Edited American English
• 8. The Adaptation Stage: Final Drafts and Congruence
• 9. The Reentry Stage: Future Compositions and Dissonant Voices
• 10. Cultural Meshing or Switching in Poly- or Intercultural Writing Classes
• References
• Index