Here is Sara's message obviously aimed at the entire xmca.
-----Original Message-----
From: hillsl [mailto:sara.hill@vanderbilt.edu]
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2000 12:35 PM
To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
Subject: RE: Grad school and women's experiences in academia
Dear Eugene,
You have my permission to use the story, but which one? I told a couple.
By
the way, this leads me to ask about the use of text from this listserve. If
I
ever wanted to analyze an exchange, is that done? Is there a policy on
that,
or should I ask each individual that I'm drawing from? I'm particularly
interested in an exchange a couple of weeks back in which people discussed
how
the listserve did or did not constitute a community of practice.
About your other comments..
>
>As far as I understand your point, the problem is not only to make grad
>school fit more to female (and older male) grad students but also change
the
>culture of academia in general to make it more inclusive. In your
>story-example, the only legitimate poetry is one that uses "the Standard
>English" and the standard spelling. Everything else is marginalized.
>
Yes. To some degree that's what I was saying. But my point was not that
there is only one legitimate form, but to wonder how students can
appropriate
forms and roles. A few years ago I was observing a group of teens doing an
improvisation of an exchange between a guidance counselor in a school and a
youth who was getting into trouble. These were inner city youth who, from
all
appearances, could not speak in standard English. When they got into the
improvisation the one who played the counselor did so fluently, in fact, got
corrected by the others when he said something that wasn't "correct." So, I
think it's not so much a matter of ability, but choice, particularly with
older youth.
>The teaching dilemma is that one the one hand, (oppressive) power of the
>mainstream institutions can't be ignored by the teacher - to make a
>difference in lives of the kids the teacher feels necessity to teach kids
>how to participate in the mainstream institution even at expense of loyalty
>to their own home community that they have to leave for the sake of success
>("moving ahead"). On the other hand, moving ahead is a reproduction of
>oppression -- until marginal practices and cultural patterns are not fully
>legitimized by a broader society, the struggle continues to be lost. This
>struggle cannot be limited by or won in school. It is not issue of
education
>but human rights. It is a human right that a way of taking at home is
>recognized as legitimate by a bigger society (e.g., British ascent is not
an
>issue but a merit unlike Southern ascent in US).
>
Yes. This is the dilemma, as I've experienced it. Others, like Lisa
Delpit,
have recognized and written about it. I think is one big reason why
students,
particularly of color, do not go to or stay in college.
Sara
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: hillsl [mailto:sara.hill@vanderbilt.edu]
>> Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 10:46 PM
>> To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
>> Subject: RE: Grad school and women's experiences in academia
>>
>>
>> Dear Eugene,
>>
>> Speaking as an in-your-face New Yorker, I appreciate that you so directly
>> responded to my posting. In response to your question of whether
>> grad school
>> has been designed for male grad students -- that is absolutely my
>> take on it.
>> And young ones, too.
>>
>> And I don't think that this design is only manifest in
>> assumptions about grad
>> students and their lives. There is also the added task of learning a new
>> discourse, how write in and speak in the academic genre. To some students
>> really a new culture (and at times, a pretty bloodthirsty one). I
>> often have
>> to overcome a lot of resistance to academic culture to continue
>> with my own
>> research. Although I think my (very nice!) advisor would be happy if I
>> started submitting proposals to present at conferences, I'm not
>> about to do it
>> yet. Too scared.
>>
>> I can easily come at this from the point of view of teacher, not student,
>> particularly the question of whether we teach students to be
>> bidialectical or
>> bicultural. Or do we figure out how to honor their home language
>> and culture
>> and change our approach? Not an easy one. To give another
>> example (and I'm
>> afraid that it always seems to come out as a story -- but don't Russians
>> usually feel perfectly comfortable with stories?) Anyway, one of
>> the kids in
>> my reading/writing group at a community center where I'm doing my
>> research is
>> in third grade and he is terribly behind in his reading and
>> writing. Smart,
>> alert, nice, but for some reason he didn't pick up reading and
>> writing. I'd
>> been doing some poetry with the group, and I read a Walt Whitman poem,
>> "Miracles" to them. Afterward, they generated words that they liked and
>> remembered from the poem, and I told them that they could make up
>> their own
>> poems using all or some of the words that they generated. The
>> student, the
>> one who has trouble with writing, asked me if he could write a
>> rap. I think
>> he was surprised when I said of course he could. He came up with a very
>> clever, complicated rhyming piece, and the rest of us really enjoyed him
>> performing it for us. I believe that it was the acknowlegement of
>> his form and
>> his culture (particularly in this case youth culture) that
>> supported this good
>> experience. He then was able to transform and appropriate the
>> words and role
>> of poet and made them his own. This, in and of itself, is not
>> new. Many good
>> teachers do this and better than I ever could. But it's not the
>> end of the
>> story. One of the parents saw the kids' mispelled poems and
>> complained. And I
>> knew exactly what she was afraid of. If her son didn't learn
>> conventional
>> spelling he wasn't going to perform well in school, no matter how
>> creative or
>> inventive he is. And for these families doing well in school is
>> important, and
>> does affect people's lives. So, I couldn't pat myself on the
>> back until I had
>> addressed that, too. It was also the case when I ran an adult literacy
>> program. My students, many of whom were originally from the U.S.
>> South or
>> from the Caribbean basin demanded that I teach them the "right"
>> way to talk.
>> It wasn't easy to respond that they talked just fine when, for
>> them, their
>> jobs or futures were at stake. Anyway, I guess I'm taking the long way of
>> giving you the advice that when you advise your students it makes
>> sense to
>> simply acknowledge their experiences and any expertise they walk
>> in with. Just
>> doing that alone provides a pretty good place to begin to make
>> other kinds of
>> changes.
>> Sara
>>
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