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1 Intersections
- Utah State University Press
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1 i n t e r s e c t i o n s This book is about teaching, which is far more than a simple act of transmitting knowledge from those who know into those who are learning— or even of initiating the young into our matrix of discourse communities . The classroom is where community happens, the site of cultural reproduction and revolution, of parroting and creating, of being and not-being. It is the site of power struggles between social classes through the agency of language, where we sort students and distribute privileges, where we train students to accept the kind of life they will most likely have as adults. It is also the place where we were trained to be teachers and where we are constantly being retrained through our praxis. Looked at this way, the classroom is a very interesting place. This book is also about writing. Writing is a fundamental act of literacy , of naming the world and writing one’s way into it. But writing, like teaching, is far from simple. Words, which form the fabric of writing, remove us from primary experience. They shape our understanding and identities. In a literate society, words are a primary agency of exchange. Words, even more than weapons, are consequently the tools of power. Words form webs of aggression and deceit. Through words, we sort people , create and maintain hierarchies, and distribute privilege. They are the way we do things—and they are the agency through which things are done to us. They are the vortex of culture, which is why words and literacies are also very interesting. My interest in the intersections between writing, teaching, and social class is personal because I have changed my identities, allegiances, and ways of thinking as a consequence of my career. I was born into a rural, working-class family. I am now urban and excessively middleclass , although ineluctably carrying my working-class origins with me. I began working as a high school teacher; I now teach, research, and write in a doctoral intensive university. I used to think that educational institutions functioned to encourage students to learn. I now see them 2 Go In G n orT h T h I n kI nG W eST as functioning in part to create failure. The primary agency of failure is language. Although this conflicted interpretation of education may be obvious for postmodern language theorists with a liberatory bent, it is a far cry from what I imagined when I was a high school student, a college student, or an idealistic high school teacher who imagined writing as the road to satori. I also have to consider that I am an agent of the social reproduction project institutionalizing failure for the majority of working-class students, a disproportionate percentage of whom are women, AfricanAmericans , and Hispanics (Zweig 2000, 31-33). What’s worse for me, writing plays an important role in that project. In some cases, writing leads to knowledge, but in others, it is one of the best ways of sorting people. This is not a particularly surprising claim when one considers some of the common ways in which we use language to identify ourselves and the social groups to which we belong. Consequently, an analysis of writing instruction as a sorting mechanism bends back to what I do. Although I do not consider myself to be a radical writing teacher hellbent on restructuring society through the agency of my students, my sympathies lie in this direction, so I am particularly concerned about classroom strategies that I and other progressive teachers might be employing that contribute to the reproduction of social class relationships in spite of our intent to challenge them. Marxist in origin, social reproduction theory has been expanded, refracted, and complicated by Althusser (1984), Gramsci (1971), Durkheim, and more lately, Freire ([1970] 1995), Berger and Luckmann (1967), Bowles and Gintis (1976), Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), and a host of other writers in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s (Shor 1980; Anyon 1980;Apple 1982; Katz 1971; Clark 1960; Aronowitz 1997, Gee 1997; Macedo 1993; McLaren 1989; Giroux 1993, Berlin 1987, to name some of the more widely cited). The foundation of social reproduction theory seems fairly commonsensical. Societies are framed by social structures that define and maintain the relationships among various groups within the society. Among industrialized societies, in particular, these relationships are characterized by a hierarchical distribution of wealth, status, and privilege. Some groups at the top of...