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cally assigned ones).
55 In mass schooling and standardized testing, an attempt is made to insist on an engineered community of practice, where the practices are dictated and the naturalization process is monitored and regulated while ignoring borderlands. They are virtual factories for monsters. In the 1970s and 1980s many attempts were made to include other communities in the formula via affirmative action and multicultural initiatives. But where these lacked the relational base between borderlands and the naturalization of objects, they ran aground on the idea of measuring progress in learning. This is partly a political problem and partly a representational one. As feminists learned so painfully over the years, a politics of identity based on essences can only perpetuate vicious dualisms. If a white male science teacher were to bring in an African-American woman as a (Platonic) representative of African-American-ness and/or woman-ness, for example, then attempt to match her essential identity to the objects in the science classroom (without attending much to how they are fully naturalized objects in another community of practice), costly and painful mismatches are inevitable. The teacher risks causing serious damage to her self-articulation (especially where she is alone) and her ability to survive (a look at the dismal retention statistics of women and minority men in many sciences and branches of engineering will underscore this point). Any mismatch becomes her personal failure, since the measurement yardstick remains unchanged although the membership criteria appear to have been stretched. Again, both borderlands and anomalous objects have been deleted. Kal Alston (1993), writing of her experience as an African-American Jewish feminist, has referred to herself as a unicorna being at once mythical and unknowable, straddling multiple worlds. |
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But all people belong to multiple communities of practiceit is just that in the case of the African-American woman in science, the visibility and pressure is higher, and her experience is especially rich, dense in the skill of surviving multiplicity. Thus Patricia Hill Collins' title, "Learning from the Outsider Within," has many layers and many directions to be explored as we all struggle for rich ways of mapping that honor this experience and survival (1986). Karla Danette Scott (1995) has recently written about the interwoven languages of black women going to college, and how language becomes a resource for this lived complexity. They "talk black" and ''talk white" in a seamless, context-driven web, articulating the tensions between those worlds as a collective identity. This is not just code switching but braided identitya borderland. |
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