Hey! Upon receiving a hilarious email from a student last night, some notes on how to discuss rhetoric, discourse without resorting to a phrase like "good manners."

NOTES. 

Late last night, I received this email from a student:

Hey,I'm looking at my schedule and trying to determine where our class will be meeting. Under the tab on the scheduling software labeled "schedule details" it says: "Location: None Building: None Room: None"

One bad email can get a person thinking. Even one not-so-bad email can wreak havoc on relationships. Considering the new freshman's words, written hours before embarking on his college career, I remembered James Paul Gee's famous line, "All discourse is like an identity kit." My student's identity kit might make him come off as sloppy and rude to a mean(er) professor. And, since the student's style was not at all unusual, I was hoping to use his words as a lesson. Hey.

Thinking of the line from Gee, I began kicking around the identity/discourse angle. Blogger Natasha Wickenheiser has clearly done some work in this area. Here she rounds up these excellent quotations from Gee’s Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics. Wickenheiser, an English prof in Bloomington, can be found discussing Discourse and many other cool topics on her Wordpress blog, Scrapbooked Inquiries.

1. “[Language] is not just about how you say it, but what you are and do when you say it” (525).
2. “At any moment we are using language we must say or write the right thing in the right way while playing the right social role and (appearing) to hold the right values, beliefs, and attitudes. Thus, what is important is not language, and surely not grammar, but saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” (526).
3. “A Discourse is a sort of ‘identity kit’ which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize” (526).
4. “Discourses are not mastered by overt instruction…but by enculturation into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse (Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1983)” (527).
5. “After our initial socialization in our home community, each of us interacts with various non-home-based social institutions–institutions in the public sphere, beyond the family and immediate kin and peer group” (527).
6. “I believe that any socially useful definition of ‘literacy’ must be couched in terms of the notion of Discourse. Thus, I define ‘literacy’ as the mastery of or fluent control over a secondary Discourse” (529).
7. ““Classroom instruction (in language, composition, study skills, writing, critical thinking, content-based literacy, or whatever) can lead to meta-knowledge, to seeing how the Discourses you have already got relate to those you are attempting to acquire, and how the ones you are trying to acquire relate to self and society” (532).
8. “It is sometimes helpful to say that individuals do not speak and act, but that historically and socially defined discourses speak to each other through individuals” (539).
9. “Children from non-mainstream homes often do not get the opportunities to acquire dominant secondary discourses–including those connected with the school–in their homes, due to their parents’ lack of access to these discourses” (541).
   
   

My student was telling me an enormous amount about their identity--family and immediate peer group--as well as their confidence in their discourse--as well as where their composition professor falls in this realm. The only problem? Their assumptions are wrong. They're playing on university turf now. As Gee intimates, there's no half-way mastery of a discourse.

On a related note, Wickenheiser has a blog post on Lisa Delpit, an education theorist grappling with student identity and the politics of teaching the "dominant" discourse. In Other People's Children, Delpit writes that teachers 

“must understand that students who appear to be unable to learn are in many instances choosing to ‘not-learn,’ as Kohl puts it, choosing to maintain their sense of identity in the face of what they perceive as a painful choice between allegiance to ‘them’ or ‘us.’ The teacher, however, can reduce this sense of choice by transforming the new discourse to that it contains within it a place for the students’ selves.”

The thought of a student rejecting arcane prescriptions that have nothing to do with their lives today fills me with as much pain as it does admiration. I'd do the same thing, of course. There are discourses I've said hell no to. But when money and class come into the equation, as they generally do, race is along for the ride, and this white lady has been painfully conscious of the conundrum (and not terribly articulate about it) on several campuses. Forcing my white-lady discourse on others was most concerning, especially when I was teaching creative writing to a few fabulously creative kids with rotten grammar in New Jersey. 

I think of the kids still. All the Yeats I gave them. Ugh. Hey.