“Subjectivities-in-Process:” Writing Race and the Online Discussion Board

CECILIA DE CORRAL

“As writers return time and again to enter the virtual worlds we discover and create, we leave behind cryptic markers of our subjectivities-in-process. Each time we log on, the scripting of identity starts anew.”

—Juana Maria Rodriquez, “Welcome to the Global Stage”¹

Taking up Juana Rodriquez’s idea of online conversations as a continuous rescripting of identity, this essay considers the ways teachers’ identities—those of graduate students who are teachers-in-training— are scripted within a discussion board centered on issues of race. Focusing on students’ postings, I consider how a graduate English course, Writing Race: Language, Identity, Power, (re)directed digital writing toward needed investigations of race, language, and pedagogy, particularly for teachers just beginning work in the multiracial classrooms of New York City. In particular I am interested in the benefits and liabilities of holding conversations about race, an often “charged” topic, in an online format and the ways its protocols both broadened difficult conversations and circumvented others. Describing their “in-betweenness,” A.M. Bomberger notes that discussion boards are “both in the class and outside of it,” existing as an “intensely personal space” for some students, but “an extremely distant” one for others.² This essay examines how the liminal nature of discussion boards productively supports a curriculum focused on race and writing, but also considers the limitations of the medium, particularly its social detachment and disembodiment, for addressing the all-too-embodied topic of race. Online discussion boards, as I will discuss, if linked to off-line assignments and used for their archival nature, can provide critical forums for teachers (often white educators working with students who are members of an expansive range of racial and ethnic communities) to more meaningfully listen to and compose interrogations of race, particularly whiteness, and the racial politics, particularly around language, in their classrooms. But these spaces, far from utopian, are still deeply racialized. In my concluding comments, I discuss some of the changes in teaching and writing practices that are needed if educators, radical or otherwise, are truly committed to using online technology as a tool for facilitating meaningful dialogues about race.

Writing Race: Language, Identity, Power was an ambitious course (which is a kind way of saying I tried to do too much). In its objective to explore relationships between race, language, and power, the course had three interconnected strands. First, students analyzed how literature (particularly stories of education) written by a diverse group of American writers (among them Sherman Alexie, Jessica Hagedorn, Elizabeth Bishop, Linh Dinh, and Langston Hughes) explored the connections between language, identity, and power. The course participants also familiarized themselves with a select (but far from comprehensive) group of contemporary scholars in rhetoric and composition and critical race theory who have interrogated the relationship between writing and race, including Patricia J. Williams, AnnLouise Keating, James Baldwin, Carmen Kynard, and Min-zhan Lu. Finally, students explored their own writing process, composing their own critical race narratives and connecting the class topics and writing strategies to their own work as teachers. The course was also a reluctant return to my own experience in teacher education courses, a reaffirmation that teachers needed to be reflective on the racial dynamics ever felt in teaching, but also a wary acknowledgement that most teacher-training programs address racial difference in ways that are far from satisfying.

As an English professor at Lehman College, a four-year liberal arts college within one of the largest public education systems in the United States, the City University of New York, I regularly teach American literature and writing courses to a diverse group of undergraduates with varied academic majors, educational backgrounds, and countries of origin, as well as occasional Composition and Rhetoric courses in our small graduate program. I had used Blackboard’s discussion board tool in ancillary ways in some of my courses but relied mainly on in-class discussions and writing assignments for engaging students in the course material. The course Writing Race was already designed when I was asked to...