{"id":19977,"date":"2014-09-12t10:12:39","date_gmt":"2014-09-12t15:12:39","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/?p=19977"},"modified":"2014-09-12t10:12:39","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12t15:12:39","slug":"teaching-difference-and-power%e2%80%94with-our-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/2014\/09\/teaching-difference-and-power%e2%80%94with-our-language\/","title":{"rendered":"teaching, difference, and power\u2014with our language"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>by nancy chick<\/a>, cft assistant director<\/em><\/p>\n i\u2019ve been thinking about the role of language in the cft\u2019s theme of \u201cteaching, difference, and power<\/a><\/strong>.\u201d\u00a0 during the first semester of my first faculty position, fresh out of graduate school, i spoke the language of my dissertation. beautiful (to me) multisyllabic terms, an elegant (to me) theoretical framework for my entire world view, references to the authors and thinkers i admired most, and allusions to historical and cultural details i determined to be significant.\u00a0 i\u2019d been immersed in those words, ideas, and moves for months\u2014years, even, if you include the gradual emergence of a specialization.<\/p>\n one day, i was chatting with the dean, and he encouraged me to reconsider how i (try to) communicate with my students and my colleagues in areas outside of my own–and not just across disciplines but also in different specializations within my field. i was stunned. while elements of this conversation were troubling to me then and now, i started noticing how others in this context were (and weren\u2019t) communicating with each other. in retrospect, i’m grateful for his challenge.<\/p>\n i looked around at the colleagues i interacted with most: they were from english (my field), geography, biology, history, and communication studies. my english colleagues were, however, specialists in composition or 18th<\/sup> century poetry or medieval literature or postmodernism.\u00a0 i looked around at the students i interacted with in class and in campus organizations:\u00a0 they were from local farms, small towns, or the reservation.\u00a0 they were younger and older than i, working anywhere from 15 to 40+ hour-a-week jobs off campus. some drove an hour or more to get to campus each day. many were far from naming a major.\u00a0 my dean\u2019s question was spot on.\u00a0 what was i communicating to the people around me through my language?<\/strong> from that day on, i became mindful of how i talked with those around me.<\/p>\n while preparing for today\u2019s teaching. writing. learning.<\/em> institute<\/a>, i revisited linda flower\u2019s classic essay, \u201cwriter-based prose: a cognitive basis for problems in writing<\/a>\u201d (1979).\u00a0 she describes the structures and functions of what she calls \u201cwriter-based prose,\u201d or language that<\/p>\n it\u2019s the adult version of vgotsky\u2019s \u201cinner speech\u201d or piaget\u2019s \u201cegocentric speech\u201d\u2014not a value judgment, but the notion that this language is for the <\/em>writer\/speaker<\/em>. it helps the writer\/speaker generate initial ideas and explanations but is not yet clearly articulated for anyone but the writer\/speaker, a \u201cmedium for thinking\u201d more than communicating (27).\u00a0 flower says this helps explain \u201cwhy people, who can express themselves in complex and highly intelligible modes, are often obscure\u201d (22), such as when we use \u201ccode words, condensing a wealth of meaning in an apparently innocuous word\u201d (32).<\/p>\n flower is careful to defend the value of this language as a \u201cmajor, functional stage in the composing process,\u201d \u201ca tapline to the rich sources of episodic memory,\u201d and a \u201cway to deal with the overload that writing often imposes on short term memory\u201d (34).\u00a0 dawn skorczewski says something similar about students\u2019 use of clich\u00e9s in \u201ceverybody has their own ideas\u2019: responding to clich\u00e9 in student writing<\/a>\u201d (2000).\u00a0 rather than a lazy, generic expression of a flip thought, clich\u00e9s are sometimes markers of striving for complex meanings without yet having the language to express such complexities.<\/strong><\/p>\n in thinking about flower\u2019s and skorczewski\u2019s common point about language that doesn\u2019t (yet) <\/a>effectively convey the intended meaning or meet the needs of the reader\/listener, and in recalling the conversation with my dean some 16 years ago, i realized that these issues are also about power and difference. <\/strong>when we use writer-based speech or prose, we hold the power of meaning and withhold it from others, who lack access to our \u201cinternal monologue.\u201d we establish a hierarchical gap–a problematic one–in knowledge between us and our audience. <\/strong>our thinking is complex (in the best of ways), but our words are just complicated. we express ourselves, but not in a way that others will understand or build on, respond to, or otherwise process. we inhibit the authentic and open discussion that involves the back-and-forth, layered interactions of speaking, listening, understanding, and responding.<\/p>\n add the phenomenon of the imposter syndrome<\/a> to this powerlessness of not being fully welcomed into the full meaning of a conversation, and classroom contexts already rife with complex power dynamics become even more stratified. <\/strong> this mix would exacerbate those anxieties about being \u201cthe only one who doesn\u2019t understand\u201d and serve as proof that one doesn\u2019t \u201cbelong here.\u201d\u00a0 if we attempt to communicate using writer-based language, we hold others at a distance, ensuring that they will not understand us and suggesting that we don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n there\u2019s a fine line between writer-based language and disciplinary discourse, the shared language of a community of scholars, understood by established peers and being learned by emerging scholars.\u00a0 the former is intended for the understanding of the speaker\/writer. the latter is intended for the understanding of the community.<\/p>\n the conversation with my former dean, troubling as it was, taught me to always ask if my language is inclusive in the sense that it invites understanding, or if it requires access to my local, idiosyncratic, and personal meaning-making<\/strong>.<\/p>\n our language has power. i challenge all of us to pay attention this week to the language we use with our colleagues and, more importantly, with our students. do we want them to understand, build on, and integrate into their own understandings, or do we want them to feel lost, lesser than, and unwelcome?<\/p>\n photo credit: prayerfriends<\/a> via compfight<\/a> cc<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by nancy chick, cft assistant director i\u2019ve been thinking about the role of language in the cft\u2019s theme of \u201cteaching, difference, and power.\u201d\u00a0 during the first semester of my first faculty position, fresh out of graduate school, i spoke the language of my dissertation. beautiful (to me) multisyllabic terms, an elegant (to me) theoretical framework…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":452,"featured_media":19959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[256],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wp0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/59\/2018\/07\/09154856\/diffpowfnl.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19977"}],"collection":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/452"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19977"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19993,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19977\/revisions\/19993"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n