ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
5.2
5.2
IntroductionAmerican universities are experiencing a demographic shift that includes increasing numbers of cross-cultural and multilingual students, and faculty are recognizing the need to develop pedagogical practices that are more culturally and linguistically inclusive. Data compiled by the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics on the enrollment demographics for the student population’s ethnicity and race at my own institution, the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, hints at the linguistic and cultural diversity of the student body and reflects a trending majority enrollment of Hispanic/Latino/a students at the College. According to BMCC’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics, the “Minimum Number of Foreign Languages Spoken” by students at BMCC is “102,” and the top ten languages listed are “Spanish, Chinese, Bengali, French, Creole, Arabic, Russian, Albanian, Cantonese, and Urdu” (“Factsheet Spring 2018”). Previous enrollment data compiled and posted to the College’s website by BMCC’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics tracks the shifts in enrollment demographics and notes that from Fall 2010 to Fall 2016 Hispanic enrollments increased at the College from 37.0% in Fall of 2010 to 39.9% in Fall of 2016 (“BMCC Factbook Enrollment Dashboard”). The most recent official “Student Race/Ethnicity” data notes that this trend has continued: 44% of the students enrolled during Fall 2017 were Hispanic/Latino/a (BMCC, Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics, National Center for Education Statistics). Thus, this article focuses on the need for valuing linguistic diversity at institutions of American higher education by discussing what happened when I brought “border pedagogy” (Giroux 28) into a unit of my English 101 course to disrupt the traditional monolingual approach to teaching English, which often “forces … students to erase their language differences … in order to enjoy an equal opportunity for success” (Lamsal and Paudel 762).
As an English professor who regularly teaches the first-year English composition courses at BMCC (English 100.5 and English 101), I am concerned with making sure that students do not feel marginalized during class activities or as if their linguistic differences are at odds with the courses. While I assign informal, low-stakes activities and have discussions in the classroom, they are structured to prepare students for formal writing assignments that largely measure departmental and university Student Learning Outcomes and proficiency in Standard American English (SAE) in a required departmental final exam that constitutes thirty percent (30%) of the final course grade. The English 100.5/101 exam requires students to write an essay of 500 words or more that supports a thesis generated by a prompt while referencing two essays (taught across all sections) that are selected by the Composition Committee, and it is scored by a rubric. Thus, the very standards and outcomes measured by the courses in some unavoidable respects reify monolingualism at the institutional level along with the cultural and ideological dominance of SAE. Therefore, many linguistically diverse students who experience academic success may do so by sacrificing parts of their identities “at the expense of their cultural and psychological well-being” (Ladson-Billings 475). Given the high cost of academic success for students at a moment when the vast landscape along our national borders is being increasingly weaponized both literally and figuratively, it seemed necessary to consider how critical and pedagogical intervention might disrupt the ideological effects of monolingualism and quell fears of difference that often accompany nationalistic expectations for the use of English only in America. Political discourse about the national border affects how students interpret borders and situate themselves in relation to those borders as well as how they negotiate linguistic borderlands within and beyond classrooms. Border pedagogy offers faculty and students the opportunity to consider the intersections of language, identity, and culture in ways that decenter nationalistic views to promote inclusion and equity. This decentering is possible because the concepts of translanguaging and multilingualism (Creese and Blackledge 106) that inform border pedagogy conceive of all individuals as if they possess “a complex of specific semiotic resources” (Blommaert 102) that they use to communicate and fashion identities. To stage this intervention, I developed an in-class essay unit that was meant to model the exam and introduce border pedagogy to students in ways that would encourage critical engagement with expectations for accommodation along with the institutional and ideological structures of higher education and assessment in my Spring 2018 English 101 classroom. I assigned a unit on “Language, Identity, and Culture” and asked students to read David Foster Wallace’s “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” which was originally published in Harper’s Magazine (2001), and Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” which is often anthologized and excerpted from her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). While the assigned texts do not necessarily constitute two opposed positions within an ongoing debate over language usage, the authors provide two nuanced positions and different perspectives students must reference to support their own claims in an in-class essay. Both texts introduce and address linguistic differences as the authors discuss language usage, identity, and culture. Pairing them gave me an opportunity to assess whether or not elements of border pedagogy could engage my students and encourage them to develop their personal voices as they considered and took positions in discussions about language usage, language instruction, the intersections of language, identity, and culture. Further, the assigned texts for the in-class essay could be easily supplemented by more recent nonfiction selections to broaden the scope of the unit and discussion and add depth to revisions of the in-class essay. Additional texts considered for the unit included excerpts from Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Zadie Smith’s “Speaking in Tongues” (2009), Ta-Nahesi Coates’s “Acting French” (2014), and Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines (2008).
|
Trisha Brady is an Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, where she teaches diverse courses in American and World literature along with intensive writing and composition. Her teaching and research interests span American literature and culture with an emphasis on and modernism. Her most recent creative nonfiction publication appears in the journal Months to Years (Summer 2018), and she has a pedagogy article that is forthcoming in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College (March 2019).
|