Bibliography: Finding an Urban Aesthetic Voice
Abbate-Vaughn, Jorgelina. ""Not Writing it Out but Writing it Off": Preparing
Multicultural Teachers for Urban Classrooms." Multicultural Education 13.4 (2006): 418. ERIC. Web. 24 Sep. 2012.
Abbate-Vaughn addresses the disparity between the worldviews of teachers (from a
middle class environment), and those of urban students with whom they will be working.
She lays the groundwork for her suggested approach to alleviating the problems resulting
from this situation by providing demographic information firmly supporting the fact that
urban school districts constitute the greatest number of children of color, and possess the
greatest diversity of language and culture. The issue of having an overwhelming number
of non-minority teachers in urban districts is that the cultural differences between the two
populations creates a monolithic block of inauthentic relationships masquerading as real
ones. Urban students find themselves in a constant state of disagreement with the
thoughts and beliefs of their teachers, but unable to say anything about it because the
teacher is an authority figure. Teachers make shortsighted assumptions about students’
behavior because they seldom attempt to investigate the circumstances of their lives.
Abbate-Vaughn stridently asserts that teacher education programs must have course work
centering around understanding the context of students’ lives, the character of home
cultures and the prevailing customs of urban communities. Her recommendation is to
have teachers become extensively involved in service learning within the community,
thus establishing a genuine place for themselves. Teachers become members, and no
longer strangers. Abbate-Vaugh prescribes the use of writing as a tool for teachers to
critically examine the changing quality of their assumptions about the community and
their place within it. This writing will provide teachers with a type of reflexive data about
such difficult issues as a deficit perspective toward students, and the retention of
culturally sensitive beliefs. This article supports my application by bringing the teacher
facilitating it to awareness of the unique qualities of her or his urban students. The study
further helps me in understanding the importance context contributes to shaping the
worldview of urban students, context which will be the foundational element the students
will depart from in their self-genre study.
Bethlehem, Louise, and Ashleigh Harris. "Unruly Pedagogies; Migratory Interventions:
Unsettling Cultural Studies." Critical Arts 26.1 (2012): n. page. Print.
Bethlehem and Harris propose an approach to aesthetic pedagogy from the
perspective of politically disenfranchised observers. They begin by suggesting that to
engage an aesthetic product (art, literature) the subject must first engage it in a political
act, which will enable them to derive meaning. The act they envision is not overt
(meaning physical), but a mental reorientation to the product as informed by the
observer’s own political status. By doing the political work necessary to engage the
product the authors aver, it then becomes meaningful. The authors’ foundational
assumption involves the product possessed of (or more accurately imbued by) a certain
political code, and that because of the way we define an aesthetic object in today’s world
(where certain groups are at leisure to create or buy such objects), it would mean the
political code must be hegemonic. The representational part of their essay centers on the
experiences of migratory and under privileged populations. But more importantly, it
focuses on how we would expect members of such populations to approach aesthetic
experience. The thrust of this article speculates on how instructors can take the outsider
perspectives their students possess, and inspire them to political action. Bethlehem and
Harris aren’t suggesting that the action be in the manner of civil disobedience, but rather
as a disruption of stereotypes that the dominant culture has of them and their history, and
to turn that disruptive activity into a new aesthetic. The authors posit that the nature of
aesthetic hegemony is the same around the world because it is tied up in the global
production of knowledge. They further go on to say that contact zones will always be
places where the dominant group is unable to divest themselves of their own resilient
preconceptions about aesthetic objects. So it is the duty of the under privileged to
reinterpret the aesthetic dimensions of any particular object. This essay is helpful to me
in that it outlines the contexts that my proposal may visit. It charts some of the qualities
of these interactions, offers me a possible theoretical position (that of disruption of
established aesthetic forms) and shows me approaches to developing an “urban aesthetic
voice.”
Campbell, K. E. (2007). There goes the neighborhood: Hip hop creepin' on a come up at
the U. College Composition and Communication, 58(3), 325-344. Retrieved from
http://search.proquest.com/docview/62024525?accountid=14556
Campbell’s article, written from the perspective of someone who has grown up in an
urban environment, from a position of social and economic disadvantage, explores the
condition of difference between the white (“perfect”) model of life with that of the urban
one. Campbell explores the rhetoric behind the most prominent (and most socially
acceptable) form of urban discourse, hip-hop, and how that discourse, through parody
and ridicule, confronts that of the white middle class. He analyzes the messages of
different hip hop artists and how teachers have used the form and content in applications
where students both urban and suburban have explored the nature of their own and
other’s race. Campbell is interested in how urban youth are not only aware of differences
between these racial/economic worlds, but also fully capable, through their music, of
critiquing these differences, including mounting a cogent attack on those values that
white people believe but seldom examine. Campbell also affirms two salient points
important to my proposed application. The first is that language forms (linguistic codes)
of urban peoples are not only important to the structure of their rhetoric, but are essential
to what their messages are. His second point is that people from an urban background
know who they are, and know that their lives should not to be seen by those coming from
middle class white sensibilities, as problems to be solved, but as lives of joy, uniqueness
and love.
Carlin-Menter, S., & Shuell, T. J. (2003). Teaching writing strategies through multimedia
authorship. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 12(4), 315-334.
Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/61885134?accountid=14556
This article concerns methods of employing multi-media techniques focusing on
communication rather than content acquisition. The thesis of this article is that by
allowing urban students to access multiple methods of communication, they can look
upon the writing process more holistically and with multiple perspectives, meaning, they
see the writing process as an outgrowth of other fluencies they are more comfortable with.
The authors were interested in how students with less exposure (as a result of social
circumstances and quality of available education) to writing techniques, both practical
and academic, could use a multiple of textual methods to create a coherent and
meaningful piece. They established criteria for assessing the information value of what
the students would create, emphasizing that their end product be easily understandable to
a variety of readers, and reminding them that the focus should still be on ideas over form.
They instructed the students to adhere to the practice of collaboration. The authors
provided guidance in creating their multi-media project (a multi-media representation of
a seven paragraph article on teen smoking) in the manner of an analogue to the way a
textual essay is constructed, generating ideas, planning, composing, revising. The authors
of the study discovered that regardless of educational deficits, and coming from
communities in poverty (as indicated by a rate of 90% free an reduced lunch), students
were able to make a multi-media production of substantial complexity matching the
criteria set up initially. The student participants where then brought back into a formal
writing environment and asked to use the things they learned to produce traditional texts.
Post-production data about the effectiveness of the project revealed, while not
outstanding, there was a significant improvement in the more formal aspects of student
writing. The resultant findings of the exercise revealed the benefits for recognition of
differences between linguistic representations of visual-spatial, aural and actual visualspatial aural events. And that writing (in this multi-media format) individuates the way it
is received, in that each reader has her or his own unique way of reception. Use of multimedia texts expands the breadth of possible points of contact –and unites the receivers by
means of producing a public experience. This essay is helpful to me in my application
because it provides a possible template for approaching student writers in developing a
collaborative project (along with the heuristic benefits for production of writing). The
essay is also helpful outlining ways in which students multiple competencies can be
brought together to form a more organic whole.
Gallagher, Kelly. Write Like this: Teaching Real-World Writing through Modeling &
Mentor Texts. Stenhouse Publishers. 480 Congress Street, Portland, ME 04101, 2011.
ERIC. Web. 1 Oct. 2012.
Gallagher writes about the growing need for writing in the real world, and this is
how he phrases his book. Like many books dedicated to the improvement of student
writing, the majority of the text is devoted to various approaches and exercises, which
can be directly applied to classroom situations, or serve as components to the
development of curriculum units. It is not written in the typical “cook book” style of
many books on teaching writing, where the author presents their thesis (almost always as
a qualitative reflection of teaching experience), and then proceeds to offer a litany of
exercises the reader can choose from to fix the stated problem of inadequate student
writing. Gallagher does, to a certain extent, structure his text this way. But the difference
from those other books is how he undergirds the disbursing of applicable exercises within
a framework whereby the teacher can teach writing improvement gradually and
progressively. Gallagher’s central charge is that student writing has become a
meaningless exercise in academic compliance. He sees writing teachers teaching a form
of writing that has no particular meaning outside the act of writing for a teacher.
Gallagher believes as many adherents to the social-epistemic paradigm that “authentic”
writing is borne from, and is in service to, a social community where writing serves a
purpose other than just to generate itself. He is a firm believer that the best method to do
this is for the teacher to demonstrate her or his learning right alongside the students and
for students to join the community of quality, real-world writers by using their texts to
mentor the students own attempts. This book is process-oriented with the stated objective
that constructing a piece of writing is always recursive and any end product can and
should be thought of as provisional and open to revision. For my application proposal, I
would like to draw from Gallagher’s first chapter, Moving Writing to the Front Burner. In
this chapter he emphasizes that using real-world writing as “mentor texts” is not
sufficient to inspire students who are disconnected from the writing process. He says that
student writers should feel themselves qualified to enter into the arena of written
discourse and not feel that they must labor through an exhausting an abstruse initiation
processes, which establishes the requirement that a writer must first posses and
demonstrate a distinct quality of usage. While he doesn’t discount standards of usage, he
does emphasize that writers can best built their competence through engagement, rather
than direct instruction. This is helpful to me because my application does just that students writing in their own vernacular in order to publicly debut their vernacular.
Lam, Wan Shun E. “Border Discourses and Identities in Transnational Youth Culture.”
What They Don't Learn in School. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 1-277. Print.
Lam examines an aspect of growing importance in America these days, that of the
transnational immigrant. Unlike the experiences of the past, where people coming to
America would seek to assimilate into the dominant culture as quickly as they could, the
modern immigrant is joining a nation of multiple cultural perspectives. The state of this
current configuration is such that slowly but consistently room is being made, not only to
accommodate new immigrants, but also their new discourses. Lam, focusing on the
experience of Asians coming to America, establishes that any immigrant voice is always
first placed in opposition to the dominant one. But in contrast to the past, American
society is self-selecting to explore varying aspects of Asian culture like the rise in the
popularity of Asian comic books. Central to her theme is the syllogistic proposition that
whereas race has historically been a major determinant of how the establish culture in
America determines place, the rise of transnational groups in this country has gone to
adjust this paradigm. Lam asserts that the changing attitudes about race, and changing
demographics has resulted in greater emphasis on action as a determining force. She
argues that in this environment, immigrant discourse can act as a transformative force as
it comes into contact with dominant discourses in the competition for material rewards.
For the immigrant, the ability to act in a manner that satisfies both the norms of her or his
nation of origin, and the dominant American culture is the modality for advancing
discourse. The informing experience behind the ability to maneuver in this manner comes
from history of colonial occupation of many of those who come to America. They have
learned from their home country the art of cultural code shifting. For my application
proposal, I would like to buy into the concept of “a third space” or a surrogate reality
where immigrants can compose identities for themselves that are apart from their
immediate social and racial ones. Lam explores how comic books help Chinese (and
other Asian) immigrant students participate in, and feel comfortable with, discourse they
wouldn’t otherwise have access to. For me the most valuable aspect of Lam’s theme is
how powerfully inclusive this approach can be for students, and how quickly and
distinctly their voices can be heard. As my application involves students creating an
electronic encyclopedia of an urban aesthetic, this study provides a significant foundation.
Lauer, C. (2009). Constructing the self in/as thirdspace: New potentials for identity
exploration in the composition classroom. Composition Studies, 37(2), 53-74. Retrieved
from http://search.proquest.com/docview/61826301?accountid=14556
Lauer proposes a critical pedagogy that centers on the construction of identity. The
object of this pedagogy is to liberate the multiple (plural) personalities we each posses.
And the rationale informing the need to actuate this is the what she regards as the
oppressive nature of self, itself. Lauer’s theoretical base is supported by what Iris Young
identifies as “the culture of logic,” which presumes that our identities are singular,
unified, and ultimately, measurable. Lauer suggests that the individual’s desire to have a
unified identity ignores the multiplicity of other selves one may harbor –many of whom
are internalized constructs of societal messages. She cites Lester Faigley’s concept of
“Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the subject of composition” and his
assertion that most composition classes support the creation of a unified self who can be
the subject of analysis. Because most college composition students are in their late
adolescence, they are very concerned with developing a singular identity, and in writing,
their compositions show signs of a gravitational pull toward this tendency, and attempts
to write outside of the immediate, singular perspective only results in repeated versions of
that self. By employing technologies in the “Thirdspace,” a virtual world of possibilities
is opened. In a virtual world, Lauer argues, the opportunity of creating multiple iterations
of oneself is realized. A writer in this world can depart at any juncture toward any
destination, or many simultaneously. In her study, students felt free to create texts (or
other virtual surrogates) in versions quite apart from their self-conceptions in the
“Firstspace” –the immediate measurable world, and students would do so. In the form of
these iterations, students lived surrogate lives, which put them into conditions of
exchange with identities they wouldn’t associate with in the firstspace, and in doing so,
assume the perspective of one other than they. Lauer found in her students’ explorations a
shedding of anxiety while exploring in the thirdspace. When Lauer had her students write
about their time in the thirdspace they were able to critically assess how identity is
formed and rendered as a construct. This area of study is particularly helpful to me in my
proposal in two ways. The first is my application involves creating a web
dictionary/lexicon by students writing in an urban aesthetic voice in a medium that has no
identifiable locus, like thirdspace. Secondly, my students will be conducting a critical
genre self-study where they will not necessarily discover constructed identity, but instead,
write from a place where identity is acknowledged to be a construct.
Pondiscio, Robert."How Self-Expression Damaged My Students." The Atlantic. N.p., 26
Sept. 2012. Web. 2012. <http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/how-selfexpression-damaged-my-students/262656/>.
Pondiscio (a former South Bronx English teacher and contributor to The Atlantic
Magazine) represents the argument against expressionistic writing pedagogy. He joins a
number of educators including David Coleman (developer of the Common Core
Standards –which my district follows), and critic Lisa Delpit in support of a traditional
paradigm of teaching writing. Pondiscio’s argument is that to teach urban (at risk)
students to write through the process of writing and to develop personal and rhetorical
acumen through self-discovery, while de-emphasizing building traditional writing skills,
is doing these students a disservice. These educators support the opinion that good
writing is as much the product of a consistent, education friendly upbringing, nurtured by
parents who themselves already possess the rigorous thinking processes of the academic
world, as it is the product of creative discovery. There is a social/economic cant to this
argument, in that teaching all the aspects of an expressionistic writing approach to a
student from an under resourced background, yet knowingly not giving them the
foundational vernacular of people in power (who often have greater decision-making
authority over the economic life of this student than the student has herself) is to doom
her to live in poverty and confusion. Pondiscio uses the metaphor of the New Guinea
“cargo cults” where during World War Two, the primitive people of the island became
obsessed with the seemingly miraculous airplanes of the Untied States Air Force; and
created a religion around the assumption that if they could make bamboo replicas of these
airplanes, these too would fly and bring them the wonderful cargo. This is a hyperbolic
device, but it may be closer to the truth than most middle class people would like to
admit, and it does delineate a difficulty in the teaching of writing that doesn’t get
adequately addressed, that is, that the problem of economic division in America is a
historical entity. This article helps me in my application because it does not flinch from
the economic differences that inform urban students’ creation of meaning.
Ranker, J. (2009). Student appropriation of writing lessons through hybrid composing
practices: Direct, diffuse, and indirect use of teacher-offered writing tools in an ESL
classroom. Journal of Literacy Research, 41(4), 393-431. Retrieved from
http://search.proquest.com/docview/61806592?accountid=14556
This article is potentially very exciting. It discusses how teachers in urban schools,
supporting very heterogeneous populations, brought students of these diverse
backgrounds together, and through an array of social activities and processes (such as
encouraging students to work on hybrid writing projects inspired by their unique cultural
perspectives) fostered the creation of their own discourse. I didn’t read the whole article,
but there is probably some good research that I could use to support the focus of my own
proposed project.
Tate, Stacie. "Equity and Access through Literacy Development and Instruction: The use
of Critical Text to Transform Student Writing and Identity within a Research Seminar."
English Teaching: Practice and Critique 10.1 (2011): 199-208. ERIC. Web. 24 Sep. 2012
Tate sought to put into practice (in the practice of a research, writing workshop)
techniques of critical pedagogy through the creation of critical texts. She envisioned this
as a method whereby urban students could use expressionistic/critical approaches as an
“alternative path to self and social development” (200). Tate supports the perspective of
Ira Shor who proposes that urban students can use writing to become conscious that their
feelings and experiences have been historically constructed within power relations (201);
and that their very identities are constructs of the dominant culture. The political
implication for this point of view is to exhort urban students to confront the idea that
because so much of their thinking is mediated through the mainstream culture, it is
actually a social reproduction, a social reproduction of the inequalities which already
exist in their lives. Tate supports this assertion with the help of theories by Soviet
philosopher Mikahail Bakhtin, in his identification of “Internally persuasive” texts
existing within seemingly innocuous discourse (201). Tate used an expressionist
approach to let students create a discourse of becoming, thus reinventing the self through
writing, particularly writing in journals. She then shifted the focus to topics away of the
students’ internal experiences by having them critically apprise these topics. In the
process, the subsequent journals become critical texts about how the student is becoming
critical. The students learn how texts cannot be stabilized or stationary, that each one is
evolving. Learning to write in this manner grants the student an authority over their lives
and other discourses they had not known before, and by writing in this tone they
appropriate the quality of writing that was once used to subversively define them. This
applies directly to my application because for urban students to develop an urban
aesthetic voice, they must know, simultaneously, what that voice genuinely is, and that it
has a equal place within the stream of other more privileged ones.
Tatum, Alfred W. Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the
Achievement Gap. Portland, Me.: Stenhouse Publishers, 2005.
Alfred Tatum’s book is a very practical tool in the understanding of how urban
writers approach life. This is not a theoretical book. It doesn’t take a rhetorical stance
defending or analyzing the determining factors for any particular social perspective. It is
an unadorned examination of the lives and academic expectations of young African
American men as applied to the teaching of literacy. Tatum looks at the typical lifeevents and constructed worldviews of young African American men, and proposes
solutions to their difficulties with literacy and self-expression through writing. The
greater part of this book is devoted to specific approaches to solve social and academic
problems (especially in using powerful examples from literature –mentor texts- as
templates for students’ own personal exploration). However, I chose to focus on chapter
six, A Culturally Responsive Approach to Literacy Teaching, for its insights into how
physical action, and expressive attitude come to embody the cultural identity of a young
urban person, particularly an adolescent male. This chapter also underscores the
importance of observation and how differing concepts of time and the stages of life
imbue an urban approach for a culture that’s acutely aware of its difference. This section
is important to my proposed application because it helps to set the stage for an urban
aesthetic voice. It clearly describes how transient the lives of urban people are, yet shows
how all movement (social or otherwise) is delimited by rigid economic boundaries.