Teaching Writing through the Immigrant Story

Heather Ostman,Howard Tinberg,Danizete Martínez

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781646421664
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Teaching Writing through the Immigrant Story explores the intersection between immigration and pedagogy via the narrative form. Embedded in the contexts of both student writing and student reading of literature chapters by scholars from four-year and two-year colleges and universities across the country, this book engages the topic of immigration within writing and literature courses as the site for extending, critiquing, and challenging assumptions about justice and equity while deepening students' sense of ethics and humanity.Each of the chapters recognizes the prevalence of immigrant students in writing classrooms across the United States—including foreign-born, first- and second-generation Americans, and more—and the myriad opportunities and challenges those students present to their instructors. These contributors have seen the validity in the stories and experiences these students bring to the classroom—evidence of their lifetimes of complex learning in both academic and nonacademic settings. Like thousands of college-level instructors in the United States, they have immigrant stories of their own. The immigrant "narrative" offers a unique framework for knowledge production in which students and teachers may learn from each other, in which the ordinary power dynamic of teacher and students begins to shift, to enable empathy to emerge and to provide space for an authentic kind of pedagogy.By engaging writing and literature teachers within and outside the classroom, Teaching Writing through the Immigrant Story speaks to the immigrant narrative as a viable frame for teaching writing—an opportunity for building and articulating knowledge through academic discourse. The book creates a platform for immigration as a writing and literary theme, a framework for critical thinking, and a foundation for significant social change and advocacy. Contributors: Tuli Chatterji, Katie Daily-Bruckner, Libby Garland, Silvia Giagnoni, Sibylle Gruber, John Havard, Timothy Henderson, Brennan Herring, Lilian Mina, Rachel Pate, Emily Schnee, Elizabeth Stone

Part 1

Situating the Discussion

1

I Am an Immigrant

Cultural Multiplicities in US Educational Systems

Sibylle Gruber

https://doi.org/10.7330/9781646421664.c001

Introducing an Immigrant Narrative

I became an immigrant many years ago. “Come visit any time,” my uncle from America said during his visit to Austria in the early 1980s. He had left Austria in the 1950s and, after a detour to Australia, had become an American immigrant to “make a better life for himself.” As an impressionable sixteen-year-old who grew up in a small rural town in Austria and who had heard many stories of my uncle’s success in America, I held on to his invitation and, at the age of nineteen, booked an open-ended flight to Chicago. My family protested loudly, but I wanted to find out about the magic of America, where my uncle—whom I had seen only twice in my life but who always sent a ten-dollar bill for Christmas—had made a successful life for himself. I found a job as an undeclared and undocumented nanny-housekeeper, taking care of two very headstrong kids, a very big dog, and an even bigger house. I lasted for six months with little to no income in what I now understand was a hostile work environment.

When I returned to the United States five years later, this time as a Fulbright student from the University of Vienna, my experiences were very different from my nanny-housekeeper experiences in terms of what life could be in the United States. I enjoyed it much more, even though my English comprehension was much less nuanced in my first few years than it is now. After completing a master’s degree and a doctorate in writing studies, I established my career as a professor of rhetoric and writing, and, even though I am not a US citizen, my family and friends make America my home.

In this article, I focus on my experiences as an immigrant to the United States to show the complexity of being different, the importance of looking at multicultural identities, and the need to look at individual experiences and struggles to create an understanding of how internationals, immigrants, and refugees are influenced by and also influence national narratives about difference and diversity. Specifically, I show that my struggles and my interpretations of my social, cultural, and political positionalities as an immigrant influence my work as a teacher on a daily basis. I show that my experiences with learning English and acquiring academic literacies, and my difficulties with fitting into a US system created multiple, shifting, and sometimes contradictory cultural positions that many internationals, immigrants, and refugees need to negotiate in order to be successful in their new temporary or permanent home country. I then address immigrant students’ complicated position in the current US system before providing strategies to encourage learning opportunities for all students, using my experiences emigrating to the United States and teaching in a US educational system. I conclude by pointing out that discussions on identity development are especially important in a time when non-US students’ rights are quickly disappearing. I point out that we need to educate ourselves so that all teachers can participate in working with immigrant, international, and refugee students who have to negotiate changing cultural paradigms, shifting perspectives on immigration, and sometimes hostile attitudes toward aliens, albeit ones from planet Earth.

A Retrospective: Revising Cultural and Social Identities

Culture is often used to show a shared set of values, ideas, and rules for its members. Cultural norms differentiate one group from another group. Geert Hofstede, focusing on organizational cultures, tells us that culture “is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others” (3). It can refer to a nation, ethnic group, religious group, organization, and occupational group. Culture, however, is never stationary and never exists in a vacuum, but instead functions within specific norms and evolves and changes when norms change. Because culture is a socially constructed reality, this reality changes when different cultures meet and interact. Mary Louise Pratt explains this concept of the “contact zone” in her work on transculturation where she points out that “a contact perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understanding and practices” (Imperial Eyes 7).

Contact zones, however, are rarely entered without preconceived notions of privilege and power. As Pierre Bourdieu explained in his 1977 work on “cultural reproduction and social reproduction,” we privilege those whose cultural capital, which “consists mainly of linguistic and cultural competence” (494), is shared by the dominant culture. The majority of immigrants, even those who come on a specialized work visa, are seldom seen to exhibit the dominant culture’s linguistic and cultural competence in their new country or to contribute successfully to established social frameworks by the majority group. Continuous attempts to close down the borders, build a wall between the United States and Mexico, restrict immigration from largely Muslim countries, backtrack on in-state tuition eligibility for DACA students, and deport Mexican immigrants, attest to the belief that the cultural capital of immigrants is not valued or welcomed by the US government. Immigrants are described as “aliens,” “foreigners,” and “outsiders,” and they are seen as “exotic,” “different,” and “strange.” Derogatory terms for immigrants include “rapists” and “criminals,” and executive orders such as the “Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into The United States” on January 27, 2017 contribute to further dehumanizing attitudes toward immigrants.

The uproar caused by the order, the resulting protests, and the restraining orders upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on February 9, 2017, and on May 15, 2017, provided a more hopeful picture on immigration—at least for a few weeks. No longer the “problem,” posters at the protests that I joined proclaimed that “refugees are welcome here,” “I love my Muslim neighbor,” “We are all immigrants,” and “We can’t unify with hate.” Our language at the 2017 protest marches reflected Gloria Anzaldúa’s belief in multiple and overlapping identities, a concept that she emphasized in Borderlands/La Frontera (99). Before immigrant and international students come to the United States and become part of the immigrant narrative, many are unaware of Anzaldúa’s discussion of multiple identities and multiple cultural frameworks. For example, in my home country, I identified most strongly as a daughter, sister, friend, and student. I grew up Catholic in a small rural Austrian town of nine hundred people who socialized right outside the church doors before and after church service. My friends and I went to a small elementary school of twenty students. We knew each other well and shared many experiences and beliefs. My world remained small, and we never had a reason to question our nationality, our beliefs, and our values.

Even though international and immigrant students have widely differing experiences in their home countries, many of us learn that our lives become more complicated when we leave our known environments, even if the move doesn’t involve physical border crossing. When I moved 120 kilometers east to Vienna for my university studies, my small world expanded drastically. I learned about city people and how differently they communicated. I learned about people from the western part of Austria and how hard it was to understand their dialects. I learned about people from different countries, and how difficult it was for them to speak German, and for me to find a common language. I also learned about assumed cultural norms, and how strange our Catholic customs were to internationals from non-Catholic countries. I grew up with a statue of a saint on every bridge, and a painting of a saint on many houses, creating a norm that was not widely shared beyond Europe’s Catholic borders. It was the first time that I became conscious of difference, but it was a consciousness rooted in the knowledge that I was a member of the majority group whose identity was rooted deeply in many of the Austrian cultures—cultures that were neither questioned nor clearly articulated.

Similar to mainstream students in the United States or in other countries, I was a mainstream student in my own country. Because I was a member of the majority group, it wasn’t necessary to dig deep and learn about inclusion and exclusion. It became necessary when I didn’t fit into a preexisting system, and when I became a first-time immigrant to the United States. During my (mis)adventures as a nanny-housekeeper in the United States, my English language skills—acquired from an Austrian teacher, very accented, and grammatically passable—were abysmally inadequate as a communication tool. My farm experiences and my first language weren’t helpful, and even though I had much to say, I wasn’t able to express myself to the many kind and not-so-kind people I encountered during my initial introduction to the United States. Much like the experiences of our international and immigrant students, my life experiences were substantially different from those around me; I couldn’t communicate successfully; I had never seen a big city with skyscrapers; I was not a member of the English-speaking majority group, and my economic situation was dismal.

Immigration to the United States, and a willingness to leave behind the known and familiar, is often connected to economic conditions, starting a better life, and creating opportunities we could not have in our home countries. Many of us don’t come with money; many of us don’t come with perfect English knowledge. When the six-year-old girl who was one of my charges in my nanny-housekeeper job said confidently: “You are different. You talk funny,” I learned quickly that being different wasn’t a good thing. The nannies spoke English with an accent, and even though some of us might have spoken with a preferred accent—Western European in general and French and British in particular—none of us were part of the mainstream culture that surrounded us. My accent kept me company during those years, and it made me different from the family for whom I worked, and the friends that they invited to the house. To them, I was invisible, voiceless, and powerless.

Accent alone did not relegate me to the powerless group of immigrants who have few resources to improve their situation and who encounter many roadblocks when trying to fight for their rights. Because I was an underpaid and overworked live-in nanny-housekeeper, my economic and social status, in conjunction with my accent, left little room for acceptance into the dominant mainstream culture. Like many new immigrants, I didn’t have the language and academic training to understand the complicated system that keeps us in positions of disempowerment. Many years later, I would read the first edition of Rosina Lippi-Green’s book on language ideology and discrimination in the United States, which put into words what I had no words for during my nanny life. My accent was a constant part of my daily life. It contributed to how I understood my place as an outsider. As Lippi-Green points out, having an accent often tells the speaker that they are different from the mainstream group. In her words, “accent becomes a litmus test for exclusion, an excuse to turn away, to refuse to recognize the other” (64). This refusal to engage with an accented speaker is reinforced by a standard language ideology that only exists as part of “an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language” maintained by the upper-middle class (64).

I could claim whiteness and European cultural roots, attributes which Lippi-Green argues should have provided me with Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” in the United States since it is “only accent linked to skin that isn’t white, or which signals a third-world homeland, that evokes . . . negative reactions” (Lippi-Green 238–239). However, my inferior social and economic status associated with my position as domestic help, combined with my accent, diminished my cultural and social identity to one of “otherness.” I was neither accepted nor welcomed by the dominant US culture, working twelve-hour days in an upper-class family who took social differences very seriously. I identified as an outsider, as somebody who was different from the dominant group, and as somebody who was silenced because of my inability to speak English without an accent in a socially inferior category. My accented English was not a positive attribute, and my low social status as “the help” exposed many stereotypes and prejudices. Even though I looked and most likely sounded “white enough” (Lippi-Green 229)—a prerequisite for Lippi-Green’s argument that accents from most Western European countries are considered acceptable by the dominant group—being white and from a European country was not enough when the point of the accented contact is clearly one of economic inferiority in a classist system.

My struggles with adjusting to a new cultural paradigm, my struggles with participating in a preexisting social system, and my struggles with communicating successfully are struggles that immigrant and international students encounter on a daily basis. We make sense of these hardships because we learn about others who have been in situations where their identities were questioned, undermined, and often dismantled. I am reminded of James Paul Gee and Michael Handford’s comments on how we can comprehend of who we are, and who those around us are. Gee and Handford tell us that “people do not make meaning just as individuals. They do so as parts of social groups which agree on, contest, or negotiate norms and values about how language ought to be used and what things ought to mean” (5). During my life as a nanny-housekeeper, my world was limited to the house where I worked and to the country club where the family went to socialize with their friends. There was little opportunity to talk to other nanny-housekeepers freely and without being observed by the families who employed us. This meant that I could only make meaning from a very limited perspective because I did not have access to social groups that could help me contextualize my experiences in the United States.

I was lucky that, unlike many involuntary immigrants, I could escape from being a second-class alien. I could escape from a situation that undermined my self-worth. I didn’t need to remain in a situation where monolingual English speakers spoke very loudly to make themselves better understood to foreign-language speakers, and where my intelligence was downgraded and equated with my accented and “broken” English. I could return to Austria where nobody would laugh at my language skills, and where I could communicate and express myself without being afraid that I would be misunderstood or that I would be categorized as “different” or “funny.” My experiences as a hopeful immigrant who lost much of her hope, pride, dignity, and self-respect took some time to work through. However, once my environment changed to one where I could regain my self-confidence, my distressing experiences became learning and language experiences that pushed me to study English language and literature at the University of Vienna. If, as teachers, we can create learning environments that promote positive student self-perception, we can encourage participation and success not only for traditional US students but also for students whose positions as voluntary or involuntary immigrants and minorities make it more difficult to succeed in educational settings.

My initial experiences in the United States brought to the forefront the importance of paying attention to cultural values and cultural differences and to how identities develop and shift with experiences, interactions, and langu...