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ENGL567A: Short Paper #2: Accommodations in the Contact Zone
by Edmond Chang
Written for |
I have been thinking a lot on the idea of (and need for) accommodation, specifically about accommodations in the writing classroom in terms of language proficiency and acquisition. Where is the line between identifying and meeting students needs and overindulgence, overparticularization, and just plain abuse? I would argue that this line is what Mary Louise Pratt and Richard Miller would call a contact zone “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (as qtd. in Miller, 390). I keep trying to articulate that line of contact for myself and in terms of my students. What are the strategies, the advantages, the limitations, and the slippages in making accommodations for a student in terms of their (dis)abilities, their (in)experiences, their beliefs and values, and their overall social locations? These “incomes” that students bring—consciously and unconsciously—into the classroom space and community call attention to the tensions in the social technology we call “reasonable” accommodations. Miller in “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone” argues that we, teachers, must “begin where students are, rather than where one thinks they should be” (405); we must revel in the contact zone where our “traditional claim to authority is thus constantly undermined and reconfigured which, in turn, enables the real work of learning how to negotiate and to place oneself in dialogue with different ways of knowing to commence” (407). In a deep way, he is talking about pedagogical and ideological accommodation. But there are dangers in this sword, which is double-edged, for it can be exhilarating and it can be eviscerating for both teacher and student. It is no wonder that most composition teachers prefer the safety and often uncontested authority of the pen. Teachers focus solely on the skills at hand, the intended “outcomes” of the course, and their pedagogical agendas that they rarely step back and see the forest for the students (as individuals, cliques, geographies, and even nationalities). If we take as assumption that education is about “uplift”, be it of writing skills, social consciousness, or personal happiness, then how do we ensure that all students have the same opportunity to be uplifted? What happens when “where students are” are wildly disproportioned? Is it fair and just to treat all students the same, flatly across the board, to treat them totally independently and individually, or to treat them in relation, in ratio to one another? All of these questions lead me to a clear example in my own 131 classroom: English as a Second (or third or fourth) Language (ESL) students. At my previous institution, the freshman writing program’s “solution” for students with disparate English language and literacy skills was substreaming: English 101 was the “standard” model and was for all students, English 101X was for ESL students, and English 101A was for “native” but “at-risk” or “remedial” students. Clearly, this flavor of accommodation has strengths (e.g. communities of like writers) and weaknesses (e.g. stigma for students in non-standard sections). Both 101 and 101X/A were considered to be equivalent classes, though most times 101X/A sections cut assignments, allowed for more time between assignments, and graded on the student’s apprehension of the rhetorical skills rather than on grammar or mechanics. It is the ever present, ever confounding disparity between grading on high-order issues (e.g. claim, ideas, reasoning) and low-order issues (e.g. mechanics, usage, spelling). Is this accommodation or is this patronization? Here, UW’s program really only offers students one choice: 131 (barring those select able to get into 104 and 105). How then do I accommodate ESL students in my mainstreamed class? Are they to be held to the same standards and criteria as “native” speakers and writers? Are ESL students to be accommodated much in the same way that students with learning disabilities (LD) are attended to? In the past years, I have taught both standard and ESL sections of freshman composition, and I have been conflicted over the double-bind, the double-standard that my students (on both sides of the issue) face. All students are expected to complete the work, to learn the necessary skills and concepts, and to demonstrate proficiency in writing and reading and overall literacy. On the one hand, understanding that ESL students are disadvantaged by their nascent language skills, they are often accommodated with more time, more leeway in terms of grammar or vocabulary, and more understanding over “naive” (and often humorous to us) and what Min-Zhan Lu calls “dissonant” uses of language. On the other hand, some more authoritarian or “fairness-minded” teachers try to hold all students to the same standard, try to get all students to come up to the same bar. I must admit that I fall into the latter category. It has always been my hope and tactic to get students through the door, to lead them to water, and to make them understand that my job as teacher, guide, friend can only go so far and that they must advocate, motivate, and articulate themselves. I can only uplift so far—the rest is up to the student. With that in mind, I am slowly coming around to the idea that accommodations and fairness do not necessarily have to be enemies. There is considerable discourse around disabilities in the classroom and the empowerment of students with disabilities. In the essay “Becoming Visible: Lessons in Disability,” the authors wish for and require, “Aesthetically and ethically and pedagogically, we aim here for the kind of ‘enabling conclusion’ that will make it more possible in the future for students with disabilities in our writing classrooms…to be their own best advocates, their own authors, and their own best representatives” (Brueggemann 391). LD students are afforded a number of institution-sanctioned accommodations, which most teachers and administrators are more than willing to employ. (Of course, the spectre of abuse arises here as well as the troubling trend that most students diagnosed with LDs are white, male, and affluent. Class and race and gender are crucial intersections often glossed by LD studies and accommodations.) But what of my ESL students? Or my so-called at-risk native speaking students? Or what of the traditional, “standard” student? Lu, in her “An Essay on the Work of Composition,” poses very similar questions: Are the “[e]xperiences of dissonance and struggle for responsive and responsible jiaos across competing languages, englishes, or discourses relevant only to users of English with Special Needs?” (17) and “How and why have we become so certain about what socially or self-identified Native-Speaking, White, and Middle-Class users of English (don’t) need or want?” (17). In other words, what are our responsibilities and our responses to students of need of any stripe? I do recognize that the institutions of academia, of composition programs, and of English itself treat different needs differently. LD students are given sanctioned accommodations. ESL students sometimes earn institutional assistance but are often told to “seek extra help” or to “keep practicing” till they arrive at fluency. Underprepared and “at-risk” students, who are often raced and classed, are simply written off as lazy, ignorant, or stupid. I know I have been guilty of this kind of “what the right hand giveth, the left hand taketh” away treatment. I am trying to discover a way to reconfigure my position as teacher, to be responsible to attend to the jiaos in the class, and to make accommodations that ensure uplift is proximal for everyone realizing each student is starting at a different place. Lu encourages, “At the microlevel, we might probe what one’s discursive acts can do to and for one’s actual, possible, imagined life. On the macrolevel, we might begin to recognize that how each of us uses English in all areas of life, at all levels of jiao, matters” (42-43). Ideally, then, accommodations for an ESL student should not be too different than the accommodations for an LD student, for a genuinely struggling student. Again, the line between accommodation and indulgence comes up, and another line between accommodation and assimilation appears, between particularizing and universalizing, between only one English and a cacophony of englishes. In a way, accommodation can be a colonizing move with the end goal of making sure students reach, fit, and demonstrate the norm. Victor Villanueva in “Maybe a Colony” writes about this fear: “Assimilation runs counter to multiculturalism. Assimilation is cultural flattening. And even when assimilation is achieved, full participation still tends to be denied the internally colonized” (188). I must remember to attend to my students’ “incomes.” I understand that my ESL students, akin to my LD and “native” students, must be responded to with detail, dignity, and trust. There must be a median, proximal zone prime for accommodation. It is a contact zone. Here is where accommodation becomes reciprocal, collaborative between me and student, student and me, and student and student. Fairness and justice must be upheld but not at the expense of students’ learning, hopes, and lives and vice versa. Accommodation cannot be pushed to the point of undermining the very fairness and justice in the classroom I am looking to employ. It is in this place, this liminal space where Miller encourages, “The most promising pedagogical response lies...in closely attending to what our students say and write in an ongoing effort to learn how to read, understand, and respond to the strange, sometimes threatening, multivocal texts they produce while writing in the contact zone” (408).
Works Cited
Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, et al. "Becoming Visable: Lessons in Disability."
College Composition and Communication 52.3 (February 2001): 368-398.
Lu, Min-Zahn. "An Essay on the Work of Composition: Composing English Against the
Order of Fast Capitalism." College Composition and Communication 56.1
(September 2004): 16-50.
Miller, Richard E. "Fault Line in the Contact Zone." College English
56.4 (April 1994): 389-408.
Villanueva, Victor, Jr. "Maybe a Colony: And Still Another Critique of the Comp Community."
JAC 17.2 (1997): 183-190.
© 2005 EYC.
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