Class Considerations: An Exploration of Literacy, Social Class, and Family

James Ray Watkins Jr. begins his book A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies (2009) with an anecdote about going through his recently deceased father’s belongings. As Watkins sifts through his childhood memories, he begins to realize how profoundly the literacy that his father developed through his higher education not only shaped his father’s economic life but also gradually formed the entire family’s middle-class sensibility. An important emblem throughout the book is his father’s college composition textbook. In fact, the catalyst for writing A Taste for Language occurs when Watkins finds the book in his parents’ house while he helps his mother move after his father’s passing. The newly discovered textbook, Unified English Composition, was published in 1946 and provides a remarkable illustration of the ways that social class was overtly tied to academic literacy. The textbook also demonstrates how perceptions of literacy and class have evolved over the decades.

Watkins opens the first chapter of his own book with a line from his father’s college composition textbook: “Unsightly and slovenly papers on the whole are like people with dirty necks and uncombed hair. No person of good taste and intelligence would appear in public without having given attention to his appearance” (13). Additionally, the old textbook models a current-traditional rhetoric, and Watkins uses it to reveal how contemporary composition practice has evolved and to explore the connection between literacy and class. It should also be noted that Watkins uses the term taste carefully throughout the book: “Among progressives, the very idea of transforming sensibility, or of taste, sounds imperial at best, racist or ethnocentric at worst” (136). Despite some anticipated discomfort on the part of the reader, Watkins steadfastly holds to the underlying connection between the education one receives and the resulting cultural capital that can manifest as a certain taste or sensibility.

A Taste for Language follows the impressive legacy of critical autobiography generated by other teacher/scholars in the field. Many academics have written openly about their poor or working-class upbringings and the ways in which academic literacy transformed their social class, their families, and even their identities. To name a few, in Lives on the Boundary Mike Rose (1989) describes how he grew up poor and was labeled “remedial” by his teachers. In Bootstraps, Victor Villanueva (1993) writes of the poverty he experienced while making his way to higher education and even after he gained access to it. In Where We Stand: Class Matters, bell hooks (2000) addresses the alienating effects of education on her and her family. In Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez (1982) writes of his struggle to reconcile education and language with his home culture, as well as his family’s struggle to gain and maintain middle-class status. Anthologies such as Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (Tokarczyk and Fay 1993), Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class (Ryan and Sackrey 1996), Coming to Class: Pedagogy and the Social Class of Teachers (Shepard, McMillan, and Tate 1998)—and the list goes on—are all composed by scholars writing about their personal experiences in working-class backgrounds and offering strategies for understanding the effect education has on socioeconomic status. Academics have excelled at using the critical autobiography as a means of thinking critically about the economic realm as it relates to language and literacy. In fact, the field may even attract people from poor and working-class backgrounds, since that population is intimately aware of the complicated intersection of culture, language, literacy, and social class.

Watkins’s book does not remain firmly in the tradition of critical autobiography. Instead, A Taste for Language opens with his father’s history but then goes on to rely more on conceptual concerns regarding the interconnection between literacy and social class. While Watkins draws from his rich personal history to complicate ways of thinking about social class, literacy, and education, the book...