ERIC ED461856: Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together.

328 Pages·2002·3.1 MB·English

by  ERIC

DOCUMENT RESUME
ED 461 856 CS 217 805
Wolff, Janice M., Ed.
AUTHOR
Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice
TITLE
Together.
National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL.
INSTITUTION
ISBN-0-8141-3740-7
ISBN
2002-00-00
PUB DATE
NOTE
327p.
AVAILABLE FROM National Council of Teachers of English, 1111 W. Kenyon
Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096 (Stock No. 37407-1659: $28.95
members, $38.95 nonmembers). Tel: [phone] (Toll Free);
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Collected Works
PUB TYPE
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MF01/PC14 Plus Postage.
EDRS PRICE
*Classroom Communication; English Curriculum; *English
DESCRIPTORS
Instruction; Higher Education; Multicultural Education;
Personal Narratives; Teacher Education; *Theory Practice
Relationship; *Writing Instruction; *Writing Laboratories
Contact Literature; Contact Narratives; Contact Zones
IDENTIFIERS
ABSTRACT
This collection of essays brings together Mary Louise
Pratt's original essay, the 10-year-old "Professing in the Contact Zone,"
with 14 responses that interpret, extend, and challenge Pratt's work. The
essays examine how contact zone dynamics play out in various pedagogical
spaces. Following an introduction by the editor, essays in Section I, Spaces,
."First Contact: Composition Students' Close Encounters with College
are:
(1)
Culture" (Paul Jude Beauvais);
"Multiculturalism, Contact Zones, and the
(2)
Organization of English Studies" (Patricia Bizzell);
"Contact Zones:
(3)
Composition's Content in the University" (Katherine K. Gottschalk);
(4)
"Frontiers of the Contact Zone" (Thomas Philion);
"Safe Houses and
(5)
Sacrifices: Filling the Rooms with Precious Riches" (Daphne Key). Essays in
Section II, Clashes and Conflicts, are:
"Fault Lines in the Contact Zone"
(6)
(Richard E. Miller);
"Reconstitution and Race in the Contact Zone"
(7)
"'Can't We All Just Get Along?' When a College
(Robert D. Murray);
(8)
Community Resists the Contact Zone" (Diane Penrod);
"Contact,
(9)
Colonization, and Classrooms: Language Issues via Cisneros's 'Woman Hollering
Creek' and Villanueva's 'Bootstraps'" (Mary R. Harmon). Essays in Section
III, Community, are:
(10) "Teaching in the Contact Zone: Multiple
Literacies/Deep Portfolio" (Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson);
(11) "Writing Centers
as Linguistic Contact Zones and Borderlands" (Carol Severino);
(12) "Teaching
in the Contact Zone: The Myth of Safe Houses" (Janice M. Wolff);
(13)
"Contact Zones. in Institutional Culture: An Anthropological Approach to
.Academic Programs" (Carole Yee); and (14) "Telling Stories: Rethinking the
Personal Narrative in the Contact Zone of a Multicultural Classroom" (Jeanne
Contains an afterword "On the Teacher's Zone of
Weiland Herrick) .
Effectivity" (Richard E. Miller) .
(NKA)
Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made
from the original document.
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AS.
NCTE EDITORIAL BOARD: Willie Mae Crews, Colleen Fairbanks,
Cora Lee Five, Andrea Lunsford, Jaime Armin Mejia, Kyoko Sato,
Jackie Swensson, Gail Wood, Zarina M. Hock, Chair, ex officio,
Kent Williamson, ex officio, Kurt Austin, ex officio
3
Professing in the Contact Zone
Bringing Theory and Practice Together
Edited by
JANICE M. WOLFF
Saginaw Valley State University
National Council of Teachers of English
1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096
4
Staff Editor: Tom Tiller
Interior Design: Jenny Jensen Greenleaf
Cover Design: Cadton Bruett
NCTE Stock Number: 37407-3050
©2002 by the National Council of Teachers of English.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trans-
mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including pho-
tocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
from the copyright holder. Printed in the United States of America.
It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a
forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teach-
ing of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular
point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the
Board of Directors, or the membership at large, except in announcements
of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Professing in the contact zone : bringing theory and practice together /
edited by Janice M. Wolff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8141-3740-7 (pbk.)
1. English languageRhetoricStudy and teaching. 2. Report
writingStudy and teaching (Higher) I. Wolff, Janice M., 1947
PE1404 .P658 2002
808.0420711dc21
2001054671
5
CONTENTS
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD
Patricia Bizzell
ix
INTRODUCTION
Janice M. Wolff
xiii
ARTS OF THE CONTACT ZONE
Mary Louise Pratt
1
I Spaces
1 First Contact: Composition Students' Close Encounters
with College Culture
21
Paul Jude Beauvais
2 Multiculturalism, Contact Zones, and the Organization
of English Studies
48
Patricia Bizzell
3 Contact Zones: Composition's Content in the University
58
Katherine K. Gottschalk
4 Frontiers of the Contact Zone
79
Thomas Philion
5 Safe Houses and Sacrifices: Filling the Rooms with
Precious Riches
102
Daphne Key
II Clashes and Conflicts
6 Fault Lines in the Contact Zone
Richard E. Miller
121
7 Reconstitution and Race in the Contact Zone
147
Robert D. Murray
6
Contents
8 "Can't We All Just Get Along?" When a College
Community Resists the Contact Zone
Diane Penrod
166
9 Contact, Colonization, and Classrooms: Language
Issues via Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek and
Villanueva's Bootstraps
Mary R. Harmon
197
III Community
10 Teaching in the Contact Zone: Multiple Literacies/
Deep Portfolio
215
Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson
11 Writing Centers as Linguistic Contact Zones and
Borderlands
230
Carol Severino
12 Teaching in the Contact Zone: The Myth of Safe Houses
240
Janice M. Wolff
13 Contact Zones in Institutional Culture: An
Anthropological Approach to Academic Programs
257
Carole Yee
14 Telling Stories: Rethinking the Personal Narrative
in the Contact Zone of a Multicultural Classroom
274
Jeanne Weiland Herrick
AFTERWORD: ON THE TEACHER'S ZONE OF EFFECTIVITY
Richard E. Miller
291
297
INDEX
307
EDITOR
309
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
t seems a long time ago that Jeannie Weiland Herrick and I sat
I
on her patio and selected essays from those that had been sub-
mitted for the contact zone collection. We thought that was the
hard part. A couple of publishers and several years later, the project
has found a home at NCTE. I have read many, many acknowl-
edgments, and now that I write my own, I understand more deeply
what writers/editors mean in their statements of thanks. First, I
thank Mary Louise Pratt for providing us with a starting point
for examining our own professional situations. Second, I thank
Kurt Austin for taking our work seriously and for providing us
with the opportunity to publish a volume such as this. I thank all
the contact zone authors for contributing to the collection and
for their patience and belief in the worth of this project. When I
would hail them in their busy lives and ask for yet another draft,
or follow-up, or query, they would put this work first on their
list. I owe a huge thank-you to Tom Tiller, a tireless editor, an
intelligent reader, one who has asked all the big and little ques-
tions about text and context for this book.
My friends and colleagues at Saginaw Valley State University
have been a great support: Mary Harmon has been a strong ad-
vocate for the collection, Kay Harley has been long interested in
the project, and Gary Thompson has given me advice about aca-
demic publishing. I must give a world of credit to Saun Strobel,
Honors secretary and support person for faculty publications at
SVSU. She said it would happen, and her work is in a large way
responsible for that. Finally, I thank my husband Terry for his
support and love throughout the process.
FOREWORD
PATRICIA BIZZELL
College of the Holy Cross
T vividly remember sitting in a large hall at the 1990 MLA Re-
sponsibilities for Literacy Conference in Pittsburgh and hear-
ing Mary Louise Pratt deliver the keynote address. That was my
first exposure to the concept of "contact zone," and it was an
unforgettable "Aha!" moment in my thinking. Just the year be-
fore, Joe Harris had published his essay "The Idea of Commu-
nity in the Study of Writing," critiquing the concept of discourse
community that David Bartholomae and I had been advancing in
our work. Harris's analysis had started me thinking about the
limitations of the discourse community concept, and "contact
zone" struck me as just the conceptual tool I needed in order to
go beyond it.
In my earlier work on discourse communities (e.g., "Cogni-
tion, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about
Writing," 1982), I had suggested that a "discourse community"
and that
was held together by shared ways of using language;
people typically belonged to several discourse communities. I was
most concerned, however, to explore the academic discourse com-
munity, since I wanted to redefine the problems of my basic writ-
ing students as problems of entering a social group in which the
linguistic habits and customs and taken-for-granted knowledge
were unfamiliar (rather than entertaining any of the then-pre-
vailing "deficit" theories to explain their difficulties). But, as
Harris had pointed out, my approach tended to mute the voices
of the nonacademic discourse community allegiances students
brought with them to school, seeming to focus only on the neces-
sity of assimilation to academic ways of using language, and on
methods of doing that more efficiently and humanely.
Foreword
Pratt's concept helped me to imagine the writing classroom,
and indeed, the academy generally, as a contact
zone. The advan-
tage of this perspective is that it emphasizes that multiple dis-
course communities are always present. Moreover, it emphasizes
that they are present in relations of unequal
power. Thus Pratt's
concept enabled me to rethink my students' difficulties as not
merely those of assimilation, but rather
as those of negotiation
between the pressure to enter the academic discourse community
and the force of their ongoing, and perhaps competing, allegiances
to other ways of using language. And just as important, I was
enabled to see more clearly how conflicted such negotiations
would typically be: that learning academic discourse might
not
be as emotionally and politically neutral for basic writing
stu-
dents as, say, the learning of French was for
me when I was a
Midwestern, middle-class, high school student, who
even had
some French blood in the family. In short, the concept of contact
zone both subsumed the concept of discourse communitya
contact zone typically being a social location in which several
discourse communities mingleand also posited intermingling
discourse communities as existing in dynamic relations with each
other, struggling for power in ways that mirror larger social
struggles for political power and justice.
It's clear from the essays collected in this volume that Pratt's
concept of contact zone has been equally generative for many
other scholars and teachers in our field, illuminating
our work in
many helpful ways. Indeed, as will be seen in my 1994 essay
reprinted here, I went so far as to suggest that the entire disci-
pline of English studies be reorganized in light of Pratt's insights.
What strikes me most about the contributions
to this volume is
the way in which contact zone theory, as I think
we should now
call it, following the lead of Janice Wolff in her introduction
to
this volume, allows us to talk about conflict and negotiation in
our teaching and administrative work. Such discussions highlight
issues of power and authority that have been under debate in
our
field for some time. Thus they are of
supreme importance if we
wish to foster social justice in the classroom, and in the larger
society.