JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 16, Number 2, 1996 Page: 287
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Writing and Rewriting Racism 287
oppressed social groups [can] learn that people like themselves have been using
language against oppression with eloquence, and some practical success, for a
long time" (5). Bizzell would most likely further critique my pedagogy from a
Foucauldian perspective.
Moreover, in a class where the content focus is on the individual sensibility and on
personal responses to experience, there is an inevitable tendency to teach students how
to feel, teaching them what representations of their own experiences are going to seem
sophisticated and persuasive. . . . In some courses the responsibility for responding
to representations of experience is placed on the students themselves, but these
situations may be no less oppressive, as majority views of how people should behave
get imposed on everyone in the class. This kind of schooling of the emotions borders
on oppressive surveillance. (4)
Yet I believe that it is precisely because I "schooled emotions" by selecting
personal narratives from the multicultural anthology and encouraged personal
expression with in-class writing, journaling, and essaying, that a Dominican
student felt she could bring what was happening in her extracurricular life to the
classroom, rather than transfer out of Boston College. This decision eventually
had an impact on: the milieu of the classroom, the way her dormmates treated
her, political struggle against racism among the student body at large, faculty
responses to that struggle, and on the way students in a Midwestern high school
read Othello.
Wendy Bishop might characterize the following narrative as teacher-
research as it is an observation on my own class. She reports that she "[has] come
to feel that everything about ethnographic writing research is perilous" for a
variety of reasons including that it is "inappropriate in traditional formats" (263).
Specifically, my practice may seem to be under-theorized and, in fact, it was. I
did not plan that the class would unfold the way it did. Frankly, I simply let it
happen, trusting that Lad Tobin, the Director of Freshman Writing, would lend
pedagogical support when I needed it. Any theorizing of my practice came to
me in hindsight.
One day early in the semester, Dayhanara arrived in my office and told me
she was not coming to conference, that she was too upset, and that she was going
home. Not only did she stay for her appointment, but she went to class that day
and made a presentation to her 15 classmates. Recently l asked her why she stayed
and talked with me. She told me that from the text I had assigned, she suspected
I might be "open-minded and that I could understand others' feelings. We had
a relationship [from weekly conferences] and you listened. I didn't think you
would understand, but when I started to speak and saw how upset you were, I
just kept going."
In the presentation she made to the class that day, Dayhanara was unsettled,
angry, and even cried as she spoke. Since I did not tape the class, let me quote
from "Black Memories," a paper she later wrote comparing her experiences to
Sonia Schreiber Weitz' Holocaust testimony, IPromisedI Would Tell. Here are
excerpts from that paper.
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 16, Number 2, 1996, periodical, 1996; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28616/m1/91/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .