|
ENGL567A: Short Paper #5: Commenting in the Contact Zone
by Edmond Chang
Written for |
Commenting on students’ writing begins and ends fundamentally with trust, with some risk. If we take as model Richard Miller and Mary Louise Pratt’s understanding that the classroom is a contact zone, where cultures “meet, clash, and grapple,” then trust is vital for the practice of teaching, learning, “pupiling” (as coined by Pratt), writing, making, evaluating, responding and reciprocating. It is no stretch then to see the teacher-student, mentor-novice, reader-writer relationship as one of many contact zones in the classroom. In particular, it is not in the space of the classroom itself but in the space of the margins, end comments, and grading rubrics where meeting, clashing, and grappling more apparently, more materially happens. It is in the space of evaluation, assessment, and response where the real work of reciprocation takes place. Trust, therefore, serves as common ground, bridge, and olive branch between teacher and student, between comment and commented, particularly when an assignment is politically oppositional or culturally invective. I am consistently struck by the difference between students in situ, in the classroom and students in their papers, in their rhetoric. Miller in his essay “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone” recognizes “the immense pressures exerted by the classroom environment, the presentation of assigned readings, the directions included in the writing assignments, and the range of teaching practices which work together to ensure that conflicts about or contact between fundamental beliefs and prejudices do not arise” (398-399). However, a teaching practice based on trust and on the contact zone can allow for advocacy, opposition, counterclaim, and coalition. The trust does not come easy, but with a little time, patience, and willingness (on both sides), it does come. I express to my students on the first day of class that the class is a “politically polite” space, not a “politically correct” one. I hope to foster enough trust that students can express themselves to me, to each other, and I to them. Like Miller, I strive to “reconfigure the power relations in my classroom so that more contact between the competing interpretive systems of the classroom and the worlds outside the classroom might occur and become available for discussion” (399). This hope, of course, comes with risk. I have had moments in the classroom where students felt that they could openly disagree, openly challenge, even openly reveal frustration, distrust, and hostility, but those moments are few and far between and often require tact and a tactics of restoring the safety of the room. On the other hand, it is often through writing, in the semi-privacy of a paper, that most students feel safe in confrontational and countercultural stances and arguments. And it is in reading, commenting, and grading that teachers, me included, must respond conscientious of the goals of the contact zone. I have included two artifacts, two short papers that demonstrate the remarkable risk of the contact zone. The assignment required students to watch a short video in class—-in this case an episode of Morgan Spurlock’s documentary series 30 Days where a conservative, straight, white man named Ryan moves to San Francisco to live with a liberal, gay, white man named Ed for a month—-and analyze the usefulness of Lister & Wells’s cultural studies and visual studies methodology for critiquing a television show. The assignment, the fourth in my first sequence, asked students to be “meta”, to think about the very structures they were reading, using, and writing. Most students missed the point entirely, focusing most of their attention on supporting the pro-homosexuality bias of the video (a strategy, in some small part I think, to show their alignment with me, their teacher, and my politics). Two decided to use the short paper as an opportunity to react to the content of the 30 Days episode and to express their strong personal feelings, feelings that ran counter to the video’s aims. Trust in my class allowed these two students to critique the show’s pro-homosexual argument and by extension to respond to me, to the class’s overt liberal politics. How do I as an openly albeit unapologetically leftist, activist, slightly anarchist, queer person-of-color respond to student statements like “”I think this can tell you homosexual[s] are not right” or “I do believe that God created [men] and women and only intended for men and women to marry.” I am always taken aback when I find oppositional discourse in my students’ writing, and I have to step back, breathe a moment, and then negotiate a means to respond. At first, I am floored, dumbfounded, and depending on the situation, angry. But it is then that I must embrace the contact zone. Summer Smith in “The Genre of the End Comment” recognizes the potential of the paper as contact zone saying, “The teacher possesses the institutional power…and can use comments to motivate, educate, or chastise her students. But the student, the paper, and the institution can also exert power over the teacher” (250). In other words, she says, “[T]he student’s paper is not without power in this rhetorical situation, since it can frustrate or mesmerize, persuade or offend the teacher” (250). To respond only in what Smith calls the “judging” genre, to call the student only on the fact that they did not accomplish the assignment, to focus only on mechanics or rhetorical rigor would do a disservice to (not to mention totally ignore) the student and their ideas and me and my ideas. Miller outlines possible ways to respond to distressing student discourse: treat the writing as offensive, unacceptable, and have the student “removed from the classroom” (392); ignore the oppositional material and respond only to the “formal features of the essay and its surface errors” (393); or thirdly find a way to make the writing a “teachable object” (395). There are times, I think, when writing that is clearly destructive, hateful, or mean in intent should be dealt with both authoritatively and as object lesson. However, I do not believe that the majority of students mean ill. They are stretching their comfort zones, and my reaction must be responsible and responsive to that. My comments, in general, tend to be multi-purposed, a combination of judging, reader response, and coaching genres. I employ, as defined by Brooke Horvath in “The Components of Written Response,” formative responses that most often correct, suggest, question, and assign. In response to the oppositional discourses above I relied more heavily on questions, on invitations to reframe, and on recognition of the fact that the students had a stake in their points-of-view. I attempt, as Horvath recommends, to treat papers as revisable products, to make comments as “suggestions, questions, reminders, and assignments,” and to place “learning where it belongs—with the student” (245). My end comments on both of the short papers are nearly identical in formulation. Genre holds true. (I think this is a product of the fact that both papers are similar in content and that the reality of grading—-time, effort, anguish spent-—necessitates convention, genre, formulae while trying to “be student- as well as text-specific” (Horvath 247).) I begin with a positive, thanking the student for their openness, then I follow-up with questions and suggestions on how the student can reconfigure their ideas and energies to better satisfy the assignment. I am not afraid to tell a student that I disagree with their stance-—they already know this—-but I am clear that their opinion is not what is being graded. I think it is helpful for both sides to see that we each come from particular social and ideological locations. I do struggle to make sure that I am not blasting the student ad hominem; as Horvath says, “Perhaps most inappropriate of all are comments posing veiled attacks on the student, her opinion and interests, her worth as a writer” (247). I try to respond with “equal seriousness and respect” (Horvath 248). Though I do make some corrections (which is a product of habitual close reading with a pen, a practice I wish my students to inhabit), I focus marginalia and end comments on ideas, exigence, provocations, and overall intelligibility, and at the same time, I ask a lot of questions, pose possible alternative readings, and push on their assumptions. Then, my comments to individual students are supplemented by a class-wide e-mail that focuses on more technical and mechanical issues. I do realize that I need to find more ways to break genre, to write in more complete sentences, and to allow for more transformative comments that “transcend the context in which they appear” and allow for “transplantation to the student’s mind where they may grow into larger truths” (Horvath 246). I agree with Smith who says, “As teachers, we must heighten our awareness of the constraints of generic conventions and the danger they pose to end comments’ effectiveness” (267). But I also believe that we must keep in mind the material and situational constraints of our jobs as teachers, our dedication as students, and our lives as citizens inside and outside the classroom. I know and feel and I hope my students know and feel that the class, the assignments, my comments, and their voices are all held in trust. In the words of Pratt, the contact zone is made bearable, livable, understandable by the formation of “safe houses” within and without the zone. Trust and context and climate make a huge mark on the ecology of the classroom. I encourage my students to see their work and my comments set in the space of the particular assignment but also in the specific space of our class, our climate, and our face-to-face interaction (something which Smith and Horvath gloss in their analysis of end comments). Trust and respect become mutually constitutive. I realize that when my students walk out of the room, sit at their desks in their dormroom or bedroom, alone at some wee hour of the night, they have only my comments on paper, which may become more than just words but signs of their success or failure. Therefore, as long as it is within my time, resources, and power, I too must reconfigure (not necessarily further complicate) my comments and evaluations. As Miller says, “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). In this way, I serve myself and all of my students, including those open, oppositional few.
Works Cited
Horvath, Brooke K. "The Components of Written Response: A Practical Synthesis of Current
Views." In The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook, 4th Edition. Eds. Edward P.J. Corbett,
Nancy Meyers, and Gary Tate. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 243-257.
Miller, Richard E. "Fault Line in the Contact Zone." College English
56.4 (April 1994): 389-408.
Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." In Reading Contexts. Ed. Gail Stygall.
Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005. 583-597.
Smith, Summer. "The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student
Writing." College Composition and Communication 48.2 (May 1997): 249-268.
© 2005 EYC.
|