Ethical Representation Multiple Genres Voices Identities

Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives: Multiple Genres, Voices, and Identities Nancy Mack

Vivyan Adair and Sandra Dahlberg (2001) advocate in the first issue of Peda­ gogy that American literature teachers need to help students interrogate representations of social class, especially working and poverty classes, as a means to complicate students’ reading, writing, and thinking about their own subjectivities. To a similar end, Amy Robillard (2003) calls for composition teachers to encourage students to complicate their narrative writing by considering how time is a class-based concept that affects the selection and interpretation of past experiences. For working-class students in particular I suggest that issues of subjectivity present an immediate conflict in all academic writing assignments as these students struggle to compose a legitimate identity within the university.1 Working-class students frequently have problems imagining themselves as scholars. A rhetorical indication of this conflict is the self-effacing commonplaces that working-class students feel obliged to incorporate into their writing to the effect that theirs is only an opinion or just their personal belief about a topic. Nick Tingle (2004) draws from both composition and psychology scholars to explain how readers associate these self-effacing statements with assumptions that the writer is displaying a weak ego. Tingle relates his vexation with teaching a type of academic identity that demands that working-class students uncritically mimic the linguistic mannerisms Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture Volume 6, Number 1, Š 2006 Duke University Press 53

and values of a more elite social class, thereby positioning themselves for self-betrayal. Such rhetorical devices belie the larger issues of legitimacy and entitlement for working-class students. It is my contention that working-class students need writing assignments in which they can occupy an authoritative position in relation to their topic. If they are to survive at the university, working-class students must construct a position that is not discounted as underprepared or limited to an acceptable imitation of the elite original but a respected, working-class-academic identity.

I have long been dissatisfied with traditional research paper assignments that render working-class students powerless by discounting their experiences, histories, and ways of making knowledge. Like most of my university colleagues, I do not look forward to pointless papers about hackneyed topics selected for their available sources, simplified positions, and prepackaged worldviews. I want more interesting writing from my students that reflects their remarkable lives. Through the development of a multigenre folklore writing assignment, I have found that working-class students can successfully compose texts that have complex representations of their families, peer groups, and communities. This assignment has the potential to provide teachers with a pedagogy for recovering the power that the academic experience too often takes away from working-class students. It is designed to respond to the kinds of identity conflicts working-class students experience.

Working-Class Identity Conflicts

Although a college degree does increase the income of individuals, the educational experience should not be misrepresented as a free ride to upward mobility. Hidden beneath the seductive belief that education is the great equalizer is the assumption that being from the working class is a deficit or a liability. Historically, even working-class institutions have been modeled after universities that valorize competitive, elite culture (Alberti 2001: 568).

The academy constructs working-class subjectivity as an oppositional choice between the right and wrong types of culture or worse as an empty binary between culture and no culture at all. As a former working-class student from the same community in which I now teach, my high school years were filled with many well-meaning teachers who transported us to philharmonic orchestra performances, quizzed us on famous works of art, and required us to memorize numerous passages from Shakespeare in an effort to infuse culture into our otherwise supposedly cultureless existence. The psychologist Barbara Jensen (2004: 179) claims that cultural conflicts created by the 5 4  pedagogy

educational experience cause a cognitive dissonance that “is so great, that [working-class students] are more likely to either reject the new culture (one reason for the high dropout rate among such students) or try to eject the former culture from their sense of self.” Jensen identifies these class conflicts as a highly personal array of psychological, sociological, and cultural confusion that can result in “anger, shame, sorrow (loss), ‘imposter syndrome,’ and substance abuse” (171). Jensen suggests that teachers should help workingclass students to acknowledge and clarify this cognitive dissonance instead of implying that one culture must be chosen over another. Consequently, I offer a brief examination of three of Jensen’s categories of negative cultural conflict responses: anger, shame, and fear (“imposter syndrome”) that have helped me theorize my classroom and my life.

Jensen’s work concerns the subtle and unconscious ways that class hurts upwardly mobile people regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity (171).

Undifferentiated anger is a logical response to feelings of pain and powerlessness from being assigned to a weak identity role. There are many overt means to regain power on the social stage of the classroom by challenging the teacher or dominating discussions, but a more passive-aggressive response can be withholding participation or procrastinating (Shor 1992). Procrastination gives the student some power over when the work is completed. My colleague Abigayle Phillips (2003) has elaborated on how procrastination was a counterproductive way that she coped with being essentialized as a “poor dumb black girl” by both her teachers and fellow students at a predominately white, working-class institution. Critiquing the source of her own negative response has helped Phillips to recognize this type of response in her own students (Jan 2005).

More debilitating than anger is the feeling of shame for having an identity that the institution devalues or treats as pathology to be cured (Skeggs 1997: 124). This means that the marginalized individuals have internalized the stereotypical pejorative view of their experiences, families, and friends.

Adair’s (2001: 233 – 34) research found that a substantial number of students receiving welfare leave academic programs because of the way that they “had been made to feel ‘shamed,’ ‘erased,’ and ‘blamed,’ throughout their educational experiences.” Alarmingly, feeling misunderstood or undervalued in the classroom ranks higher than failing grades or a lack of funding as a reason for leaving the undergraduate program.

Perhaps the most puzzling response to cultural conflict is what I call a fear of exposure or, as Jensen labels it, the “imposter syndrome.”2 For example, as I entered the room in a capstone course for graduating seniors, Mack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 55

I overheard students discussing how they were the wrong class of people to get professional jobs. Their feelings of being the wrong type overshadowed their obvious impending success in graduating from college. After mulling over this incongruity, I responded by designing an activity in which students made a private list of all of their perceived transgressions such as transferring from another university, taking longer to graduate, being older, having children, working, being on welfare, living with parents, being a single parent, having had another career, and so on. Then in a second column I had them list the positives that could be matched to these supposed negatives such as perseverance, determination, maturity, responsibility, dependability, frugality, affiliation, independence, altruism, and so on. Marginalized students struggle to pass for the right kind of students, living in fear of being unmasked as undeserving. Understandably, the fear of being caught is greatest when one is nearest to the threshold of success. At such times a safer choice might seem to be stalling before the doorway or closing the door altogether with some type of self-sabotage rather than risking exposure as an imposter. Or as Pierre Bourdieu (1984: 471) might suggest, the anticipation of exclusion may provoke a proactive response of excluding oneself from the place of exclusion. Occupying a lower social status precludes working-class students from having a sense of entitlement about obtaining a college degree.

Class conflicts may intensify for working-class graduate students and professors, since gaining more education and cultural capital leads to learning more about class distinctions and how those with power make judgments.3 Fearful of exposure, working-class students are most conscious of class markers that can make them vulnerable to ridicule and humiliation. As an example of this point, Paul Fussell (1983) provides a humorous treatment of the proletariat lifestyle, including a scale for evaluating interior decorating skills. However, the skills of most concern in the university setting to workingclass students are their writing skills. Ann Penrose (2002) reported that marginalized students — who are most likely to be working class, women, older, or ethnic minorities — leave the university because of the perception that their writing is fundamentally unacceptable to the university. Penrose makes a distinction similar to that of Adair, that students do not leave the university because of poor performance or a lack of ability or general self-confidence but rather because of a lack of satisfaction or comfort that correlates with the undermining of their status at the university. In particular, students perceive themselves as lacking verbal aptitude. It is no coincidence that the very same language traits that academics value are interpreted by working-class families and friends as “showing off” or “acting like a big shot.” This conflict 5 6 pedagogy

adds to their discomfort with their language skills and emerging academic identities.

Since working-class students fear that their language habits are a potential target for humiliation at the university, teachers could benefit from a psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic analysis of the attributes of workingclass language habits. Once again, Jensen’s scholarship is helpful. Using a critical rereading of Basil Bernstein’s work on elaborated and restricted codes, along with her own clinical counseling experiences and observations of parent and child interactions, Jensen (1997: 2) defines the traits of working-class cultural psychology as sharing, cooperation, and belonging.

Jensen summarizes her conclusions that working-class language users are “more metaphoric than literal, more personal and particular than abstract and universal . . . more implicit than explicit, more for members of a defined social group, also more pithy, colorful, and narrative” (2004: 177). Jensen makes the connection between language and identity in this comment about what a working-class sense of identity might be: “I suggest this sense of self does not exist in opposition to others but that it actually includes others.

This person emerges into a [working-class] culture which does not encourage them to grow out of that mutuality, to develop and defend their ‘individual’ identity” (1997: 5). As a result, a working-class identity is connected to family and friends and therefore may be a more collective and a less-favored concept than middle-class identity. Jensen characterizes this rhetorical difference as “belonging” versus the middle-class emphasis on “becoming” a separate individual. Even the academic discourse of individualism may stress some working-class students who are more motivated by the need to fit in and feel comfortable at the university. In this way, the university experience can threaten the working-class student’s sense of self-identity or self-preservation (Reay, David, and Ball 2005: 95).4 For teachers designing writing assignments, it is imperative to theorize how the language that we use can limit the availability of an academic identity to marginalized students.

Language and Identity Formation

My mother’s counsel about the way out of impossible circumstances was to concentrate on finding another way to think about things. These times were when she shared what I would term her critical analysis of life situations. It is with this spirit that I wish to contend that the language that we use to think about identity is a large part of the problem of developing a pedagogy that does not reinscribe working-class identity as a deficit. In other words, we need to take an existing negative construct and make it function as a posiMack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 57

tive for entitling working-class students to an academic identity. To do this, I gloss current theories about the role of language in identity politics before suggesting some additional possibilities.

The label working class itself is a discourse construct used to mediate the existence and legitimization of identity categories. To interject a historical perspective, Beverly Skeggs (1997: 124) should be quoted at length on this topic: The term class came into existence through the attempts by the middle class to consolidate their identities and social position by identifying “others” from whom they could draw distance. They were able to do this with the use of Enlightenment technologies of social surveys, photography, ethnography and observation. The “sciences” of anthropology, medicine and biology were used to legitimate these differences which were not only classed but also raced — so that the “degenerate” other was a conflation of observable and measurable class and race characteristics which were mapped into charts of evolution and civilization with the middle class, of course, positioning themselves as the more advanced and civilized.

Likewise, working-class identity is located outside the university — unless we include the unclassified clerical, food, or building services workers. My colleague James Zebroski (2002) contends that discourse practices themselves speak the ideology of social class and thus limit the range and type of identities that can be assumed by students and professors.

Language further mediates the perception and interpretation of our embodied experiences. Literary scholars like Satya Mohanty (2000: 43) underscore the importance of seeing identity as a socially constructed effect, almost a worldview, used to interpret our reading of experience, affecting perception so that we pay more attention to some experiences than others.

However, Mohanty and his postpositivist realist colleagues move beyond postmodern theory to revive the connection to experience as a significant and political part of knowing (Moya 2000: 99). As one of my students once cautioned me, we must be careful that an emphasis on theory doesn’t have us “living too much in our heads.” Our embodied experiences are tangibly connected to our material conditions.

To summarize, identity is a complex concept: mediated through language, socially interpreted, embodied in experience, and materially situated.

Moreover, to this definition I wish to add that identity is multiply conflicted, temporally developmental, and continually open to revision. The notion of plural identities is essential to my project of designing writing assignments 5 8 pedagogy

for working-class students through which they can compose an academic identity in addition to their other existing identities. Sandra Dahlberg (2003: 81) challenges the goal of class transcendence when she advocates that teachers “replace the dual existences predicated on oppositional identities with concepts that promote plural identities.” Some scholars even propose that conflicting multiple identities provide fertile ground for the study of self, subjectivity, and consciousness of social class ( Jones 1998: 7).

If we can conceive of class identity as a multiply conflicted development process, then we can make room for the changes in awareness or critical consciousness that so many teachers desire for their students. However, it is important to qualify that my conception of development is recursive and dynamic and does not place teachers in the role of critical consciousness snobs who believe that they have it and their students don’t, setting up yet another arena in which working-class students are remedial (Mack and Zebroski 1992). Instead, I view professors and students alike as possessing a developing consciousness about class identity that changes from one year to the next — being influenced by economics, experience, and, we hope, education. Like my working-class students, I am engaged in a life project of identity formation as I struggle with my own confusion and pain about who I am and who I wish to become.

Since educators value change and critical analysis, I put forward revision as a workable analogy for the life process of identity development.

As compositionists have increased their interest in pedagogy, revision has become separated from editing and proofreading as a complex process of rereading, reinterpreting, reorganizing, reformulating, and reconceptualizing meaning — often with an emphasis on the social relation to the reader or audience. For a specific type of identity revision, I cite William Wilkerson’s thorough analysis of how acceptance of gay identity is a political act that comes from a revision of interpretations of past events. Wilkerson (2000: 277) states: “The identities do not need to be fixed forever, but neither should they be viewed as solely the product of distorting outside forces. Instead, through continued examination and interaction with others in similar situations, more accurate and comprehensive views of one’s place in the world can be gathered.” In all likelihood individuals will probably revise their interpretations of past experiences multiple times as they gain more information about cultural patterns over a lifetime.

Certainly, if identity discourse varies by class, so too must the rhetoric connected to agency. Would middle-class students be more interested in individually advocating change on a global level while working-class stuMack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 59

dents would be more interested in belonging to a group that advocated local change? This is the point at which we need more information about how claiming an oppressed identity can be connected to group identification, a growing awareness of one’s positionality in relation to others within a social structure of inequality, affiliation with other oppressed groups, and agency to create new social structures (Young 2000: 117). Or, as Zebroski might argue, we can create an antistructure space within the larger structured institution, a rhetorical space to inhabit from which one can ponder questions of language and representation. In this regard, a writing assignment can offer students some agency in their own identity formation.

As I have shown, the pervasive pressure to choose one identity over another provokes a class conflict for working-class students when they strive to assume an academic identity at the university through writing assignments.

This class conflict can lead to several dysfunctional responses, the most severe being withdrawal from the university altogether. Teachers must create a pedagogy that assumes that each student’s subjectivity is composed of multiple, conflicting, developing identities. A type of writing assignment that focuses on the conflicts among academic, working-class, and other identities may further students’ developing critical consciousness. One of my goals for multigenre writing assignments is to give students the discursive space to construct a powerful academic identity that legitimates and ethically represents their multiple identities. In the sections that follow I explain how such assignments can open up the topics, formats, voices, and representations available to working-class students.

Respectful Writing Topics

My students are assigned to research a topic related to family, community, or peer group folklore. The multigenre folklore assignment challenges students to combine first-person interviews with scholarly readings and to convey this information as a unified project, composed of multiple pieces of writing from several genres.5 Folklore topics fit well with the larger life agenda of identity construction. Most working-class students are at the university precisely because they are initiating significant changes in their lives. These life changes are necessarily interrelated to the revision of one or more of their multiple identities — be they female, African American, gay, disabled, Christian, midwestern, working class, college student, and so on. The motive to improve one’s life is the very reason why so many faculty like myself find these workingclass students eager to learn.

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Regretfully, the act of adopting a different writing topic cannot in itself subvert the status quo of what students choose to write about. Beginning teachers naively hope that a free choice of topics will entice students to write about what interests them (Mack 1995). But working-class students have little reason to believe that one teacher will want to hear about topics different from those that have pleased previous teachers. Teachers must bear the burden of proof that they are willing to listen respectfully to what marginalized students have to say. In her article “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” the composition scholar Jacqueline Jones Royster (1996: 37) raises the point that academic audiences must be willing to hear each person’s multiple voices instead of essentializing one voice as more valid than the others. Out of necessity, working-class students have learned to silence those voices that have been excluded from their earlier educational experiences (in particular, see Fine and Weis 2003).

Notably, the label working class itself is rarely one my undergraduate or graduate students will publicly own. To confront students about their social class — or to decree class analysis as the only valid interpretation — is to enact the same oppressive social relations that have been previously used to marginalize these students (Mack and Zebroski 1992). What we do as teachers speaks more loudly than what we say. In lieu of privileging my critique of working-class experiences, I make students’ lives the topic in question — to be researched and interpreted through their own reading, writing, listening, and critical examinations. Representation of students’ lives within their own texts has to be open to their control. Writing to value one’s identity, whether explicitly named or not, is an ethical act especially when that identity is not affirmed within the academic community.

Asking working-class students to write about their lives can be met with flat refusal, since most do not view their lives as a source for acceptable academic topics. Savvy students often believe that impersonal writing is the only way to play the game of school to succeed. Hannah Ashley (2001) found that proficient working-class writers sometimes employed a gaming analogy to deal with difficult assignments. As Julie Lindquist (2001: 271) aptly queries, “What is one to do when students think that the only way to upward mobility is to inhabit an intellectual persona that disclaims the value of local knowledge as an intellectual practice?” This is why establishing folklore as a scholarly discipline is an early goal when I introduce the multigenre assignment. I want students to understand that nonelite groups have cultures and are legitimate subjects for academic study and analysis. Although Paulo Freire (1985) forwarded an anthropological concept of culture for oppressed Mack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 61

groups, I also view folklore as an important concept for middle- and upperclass students to develop respect for diverse cultures. After a brief definition of folklore, I use a heuristic quiz based on one from Elizabeth Radin Simons (1990: 65) to get students thinking about the intersections among folk, popular, and elite cultures.

Although we were horribly rushed to complete this large project the first time, I was pleased with the work of several students; in particular, Rachel Dunlap’s project centered on a story about her Mexican American grandfather being denied entrance to a diner because his skin was darker than his father’s — who was already being served. Rachel complicated the story with her grandfather’s own prejudices and changing views about race throughout his lifetime and with her literary and sociological readings about Hispanic culture and identity. Rachel’s writing is so compelling that I currently have all my classes read aloud and discuss her project — which gives me the opportunity to enact my respectful representation of a student writer as well as that writer’s respectful representation of working-class lives. I have discovered that the social themes in previous students’ papers play a significant role in the topic selections of subsequent students. For example, sharing Rachel’s complex treatment of racism has influenced one student to write about bilingual discrimination and another student to write about a light-skinned relative being barred from giving a valedictorian speech when her dark-skinned relatives showed up at her all-white high school graduation.

None of these topics were chosen because they were particularly easy for the authors to undertake; indeed, students revealed that they wanted to examine a troubling incident more extensively. In each case, the topic had connections to the student’s developing personal identity.

I have begun to think about the invitation to write as a demonstration of respect for students’ lives. Requiring that a significant portion of the information for these reports comes from first-person interviews authorizes students to become the experts of their folklore topics. In most cases, these projects ensure that stories about local and family history will not be lost or misrepresented. Students initially approach friends and family members about interesting stories. Many are surprised to learn more about incidents of which they are only vaguely aware. Christa Heys recovered stories about her father’s preparations to die from brain cancer that ranged from humorous to touching. While inquiring about the naming of a new child, Holly Elkins discovered that her grandmother had kept the journals of her brother who had died during World War II on the first destroyer to be deployed after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. From an initial appreciation of her grandfather’s 62 pedagogy

ability to repair her broken-down car, Shauna Comer discerned a theme of pride in mechanical skills from three generations in her family. April Leaverton traced the history of her grandfather’s barbershop in a small town from its owner’s postwar GI Bill education to the threat from big business to its survival. More important than a celebration of cultural heritage or an exercise in academic skills, a writing assignment must engage working-class students in speaking as scholars of their own culture, and these examples testify to that engagement.

As much as I value using folklore topics for research reports in my own classroom, I would not be in favor of uncritically mandating this topic for an entire first-year writing program. Students risk a great deal when they write papers about topics close to home and share them with teachers and other students who might respond disrespectfully. Some life experiences should never become fodder for writing assignments. Students need to be counseled about the dangers inherent in holding up parts of their lives for public scrutiny and possible misinterpretation — particularly at the university.

Lindquist (2004: 188) cites Janet Bean’s work to explain the ethos necessary for the teacher to create a safe affective environment in which students can engage in a type of emotional critique. Consequently, it is the teacher, not the assignment, who must provide a respectful space where students can represent their lives in a way that brings them power and integrity.

Writing Multiple Genres

My first foray into assigning students to do multigenre writing projects about three years ago was motivated by an assortment of somewhat simplistic needs and beliefs about problems associated with the traditional research paper assignment. I was attracted to multigenre assignments from Tom Romano’s (2002: 57) scholarship in which he defines multigenre writing as “composed of many genres and subgenres, each piece self-contained, making a point of its own, yet connected by theme or topic and sometimes by language, images, and specific actions.”

A growing number of educators at all grade levels have been experimenting with multigenre writing as a hybrid format to enliven student writing for a wide range of assignments and topics such as biographies and selfportraits; narratives about work, education, family, and friends; reports about science and history; and arguments about social issues and responses to literature (see in particular Romano 1995, 2000, 2002; Allen 2001; Johnson and Moneysmith 2005; Jung 2005). Admirably, Linda Adler-Kassner (1999) has incorporated multigenre writing into the composition program at EastMack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 6 3

ern Michigan University, culminating each year in a celebration of student writing with research projects representing more than a thousand students.

Inspired by some of these teachers’ positive experiences, I chose to adapt the multigenre format to folklore topics, since I had experience with using folklore assignments on several grade levels.

My list of possible genres for students’ projects draws from academic writing, literary publications, popular culture, public documents, and visual media. Since the diverse strengths of working-class students are rarely acknowledged let alone incorporated into their academic pursuits, I advise students to include at least one genre in which they already have personal expertise, whether that is music, art, scrapbooking, popular media, and so forth. The nontraditional quality of this assignment offers workingclass students the possibility of breaking from established patterns of school inequality. Indeed, working-class students often suffer the most traditional and mundane assignments (see Jean Anyon’s [1981] frequently cited study that documents how working-class students are usually restricted to massproducing answers on worksheets while elite students are permitted to create collaborative, special projects).

Professors may find the multigenre format to be more familiar than working-class students do, since postmodern art and literature abound with hypertextual, multigenre, and multimodal examples. Likewise, multigenre writing has become cutting-edge in many academic disciplines; I have read a master’s thesis from architecture that artfully combines graphics, maps, texts, photographs, and interviews, so I do not view such projects as superfluous or nonacademic. Even though working-class students may be prepared in high school to write traditional research papers, the professoriate at most universities do not subscribe to the common myth that there is one generic research paper format (Larson 1994). If this myth about a generic format were true, teaching writing would certainly be a much easier job. Experience composing several genres can help students adapt to the many demands of writing across the curriculum. I would argue that the skills of defining, imitating, and innovating multiple genres are the very skills that all students need for a future in which academic, professional, and popular textual genres and conventions will change rapidly.

Composition theory has reconceptualized genre to be more than a text type or form. In particular, some scholars describe genre as unstable, contextualized social practices that are culturally situated actions implicated in unequal power relations (Johns 2002a; Macken-Horarik 2002; Schryer 2002; Devitt, Reiff, and Bawarshi 2003). To some extent, genre pedagogy 64 pedagogy

theorists are advocating a curriculum that emphasizes genre as a larger social concept than mere mastery of one reified artificial format. Without the benefit of having read these theories at the time, I intuitively decided to have students teach one another about genres. Small groups of students selected one genre of interest for their projects, located real-life models, identified its language traits, and presented their findings to the class. Students’ reactions to this brief activity were interesting and unexpected. One group usually selects the genre of stream of consciousness for its ability to portray emotional conflicts with the class questioning punctuation conventions in depth. Additionally, the group teaching the obituary genre predictably erupts with extensive complaints about its restriction to facts as well as the per word costs. In more than one case students have placed a rewritten version alongside an actual obituary in their final project. The multigenre format encourages innovations on genres, as students demonstrate their knowledge of discourse conventions by consciously pushing their limitations.

One feature of genre that students enjoy working with is its visual traits. They excel at imitating documents from public life complete with appropriate content, vocabulary, diction, fonts, graphics, layouts, and even artificially aged paper. These inclusions add quite a bit to the visual quality of these projects and also necessitate endnotes for students to tell which documents were written by them and which are authentic. In this regard, students define genres in both their textual and visual rhetorical forms, with an occasional student feeling compelled to educate the teacher about the graphic qualities of comic books, video games, and so forth. As an example, Eileen Williamson created an interactive Web site to gather stories and pictures about the customs of her high school drill team.6 Frequently having technological skills superior to their professors, students can gain power within a university that currently values multimedia.

Many students report that they conceptualize the more visual genres prior to or in conjunction with the composition of the textual parts. Carmel Morse’s attractive project about the history of two local cinerama theaters not only features film posters but also has round pages contained within a 16-mm film canister. Kim Slagle made a resourceful use of overly light copies of a relative’s photograph when she developed a ghost story that linked a haunting to the community’s lack of acceptance of the couple’s age difference.

Patricia Dunn’s (2001) scholarship about diverse learners indicates that some writers use nontextual modes to generate, organize, and structure their ideas.

Graphics can lead to thinking metaphorically, enabling students to create a symbolic central image. For example, Rachel Howell used the image of a lit Mack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 65

candle to tie together several elements of her project about Reverend Rankin’s house on the Ohio River, the Underground Railroad, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Visual images can also serve as a means for students to create coherence among the multiple genres of their written texts.

Including graphics in a writing assignment does not mean that I have lost sight of the more traditional curricular goals of composing purposeful coherent prose, following culturally accepted language conventions, and citing academic scholarship. Prior to adopting an unorthodox writing assignment, teachers need to realize that this practice may make them suspect to administrators, colleagues, students, and even their own cultural beliefs. Teachers must articulate and document the curricular goals being met by alternative practices. To this end, I would assert that a multigenre assignment can provide the same opportunities to teach writing and research skills as a more traditional assignment. I have claimed elsewhere that because of its emphasis on multiple points of view, the multigenre assignment also can compel more work with critical analysis, documentation, coherence, and aesthetic unity than students generally experience with typical research paper writing (Mack 2002).

My students expend an incredible number of clock hours in researching, writing, and producing their multigenre projects. As with any large assignment, the teacher must pace students so they do not put everything off until the last minute; ironically, this project has placed me in the position of warning students not to invest an unreasonable amount of time and money in its preparation — especially given the material conditions of working-class students’ lives. Their personal investment can result in the completed project being shared, presented as a gift, and revered by those for whom it is intended. Catherine Vickers’s account of her mother’s childhood experiences in New York City was crafted into a handbound book containing several artistic elements such as a pullout brochure, unfolding notes, and a poem on paper strips strung with beads that can be removed from an attached small envelope. After receiving the project, her seventy-nine-year-old mother was inspired to begin writing her own memoirs. Some of these projects become what I would classify as a major literacy event that commands respect from an audience of family, friends, fellow students, faculty, and staff. It is my hope that producing writing that garners respect both inside and outside the university is more than an individual teacher’s moment of sentimental pride.

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Finding and Integrating Academic Voices

More than one colleague has pointed out to me that the text of the multigenre folklore project itself could be a metaphor for the hybrid lives of working-class students at the university as they construct a coherent representation of their working-class and academic experiences, learning to speak with and through multiple voices. I view the integration of academic sources with first-person accounts as a primary goal of this assignment. My expectation that students are learning to write a scholarly examination of a folklore topic necessitates that they research related disciplines of academic study. Therefore I emphasize secondary textual research from books and Web sites while directing students to integrate both contextual and analytic research into their projects. The former can be about the topic’s historical time period or its current pervasiveness; the latter, about social issues related to class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, generation, location, ability, religion, occupation, leisure, age, body type, personality type, or health. Locating analytic research by an expert requires a rigorous information search — a search more demanding than the readily available materials for popular topics such as gun control, the death penalty, steroids, and pornography. To establish what academic writing is, I share at least one article by a university professor with a scholarly treatment of a topic related to students’ daily lives. A recent favorite of mine is an article by Liz Rohan (2004) that analyzes quilt making as a rhetorical activity similar to scrapbooks and photography as an aid to preserving memory.

This article is not an easy read for students, so I have designed an activity in which students skim its sections for keywords and collectively generate a poetic summary of its contents. I also begin each class with a check of sources and spontaneous testimonials from students who have tenaciously tracked down academic studies on their topics; this encourages others to believe that academic studies actually exist that are related to their topics — a significant barrier for inexperienced scholars.

A scholar can gain no power by composing a simplistic, uncritical treatment of an important topic. As might be expected, a few of my students utilized very little analysis by presenting a one-dimensional view of love at first sight, religious faith, economic hardship, or the work experiences of a relative. An easy answer to this problem might be to forbid personal topics, but this solution oversimplifies the problem of oversimplification. In her essay about the representation of emotions in students’ essays, Bean (2003: 103) warns that we should not write off students’ narratives as failing to demonstrate critical thought processes until we realize how these particular narratives function in their authors’ lives. Students’ insistence on some topics has Mack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 67

caused me to rethink my dismissal of these topics as purely romantic or sentimental. Certain parts of our lives, like marriage and maybe even teaching for that matter, may need to be valorized in order for individuals to persist in the face of difficult circumstances. I point out that those people who have been successful at an enterprise for twenty or more years may actually have some expertise that deserves further research and scholarly analysis. To the extent possible, students have to be responsible for composing their own integrity in their writing while teachers must be empathetic enough to continually reexamine their own values about acceptable topics and formats.

The majority of my students have been able to make the connection among the stories of individual people and collective social issues. David Seitz (2004: 196 – 200) proposes that learning to interpret their own data engages students in inductive theorizing that is more internally persuasive than consuming someone else’s critical analysis. As with ethnographic research, the social themes that emerge are not always ones that the students or I would have predicted at the outset (Zebroski and Mack 1992: 205). For instance, Alex Wenning’s project about his stay-at-home mother emphasizes her economic critique of Barbara Walters, who was championed by feminists at the time as an attainable model for working-class women. Students have the potential to relate the material conditions of their lives to larger patterns of social, economic, and political theory.

My current research is on the multiple ways that students have effectively incorporated their academic readings into their writing. Scholarly analysis can frame the whole project. For instance, in her cover letter Rebecca Henderson references a sociological text in order to introduce the stages of friendship of two elderly women from her church. Others author facsimiles of public documents, news programs, or textbook pages to integrate academic content. Bernice Money, in writing about Mary Kay cosmetics, quotes a business management expert in a fictitious newspaper article informing readers that this company grants women many more financial opportunities than the male-dominated ones. Frequently, whole characters are invented to pre­ sent a dissenting view such as in the case of Sandra Hadick’s use of a nurse’s telephone conversation with a doctor to dramatize a rebuttal to the belief that sending a patient to hospice is a prescription for death. In an endnote to her project about her mother’s punishment for speaking Spanish on a Texas playground, Angela Burns cites the voices of ESL educators about the importance of first languages. I eschew what I characterize as the “drive-by” citation method in which students fire off the words of an unnamed expert without any explanation. My goal is for students to engage in a responsive 68 pedagogy

dialogue with a scholar whether that dialogue takes place within a cover letter, a newspaper article, a telephone conversation, or an endnote. Where the commas and periods go on the works cited page is less important to me than the quality of the engagement with the scholar’s ideas.

The addition of academic perspectives to first-person accounts compels students to construct a hierarchy of power among the various sources of information. I ask students to consider carefully who gets to speak, who gets the first and last words, when accounts will agree, and when they will conflict. Dialogue as it functions in several genres provides a way to respond to, question, interrupt, refute, and change the tone of the information presented.

Conceptualizing texts that complicate cultural conflicts is a worthy curricular goal for academic writing. One unique feature of multigenre writing is that the voices involved more closely embody real individuals — those from the interviews and those from the academy — than in more traditional formats in which even the author disappears. Consequently, if we omit the social relations of real people by skipping the dialogue that constructs academic knowledge in favor of just telling students how to imitate a generic research paper format, we may lose that which shapes the thought processes of academic scholarship. Students are literally creating a social relation among the identities in their texts (Mack 1998). By composing a dialogue of embodied voices in their multigenre projects, students can learn the rhetorical strategies used to produce academic knowledge. Getting the chance to speak as a scholar is particularly important for those who may not have received an invitation to Kenneth Burke’s elite parlor or Gerald Graff’s disciplinary debates.

Authoring Ethical Representations

Many students view their projects as a tribute to a person, group, or place, taking seriously the responsibility of testifying for the beliefs of others. Ethics is not usually an issue in writing courses unless we are talking about inappropriate student behavior like plagiarism. As Mikhail Bakhtin (1981: 294) would have us acknowledge, language itself implicates us in social interaction with others because language contains the ideologies and intentions of others.

Writers must determine how they will represent themselves in relation to the implied other; that is, society may have authored an identity for students that they might wish to revise. Writing presents the unique possibility of actively creating a revision of self-identity.

However, Bakhtin advises that language resists efforts to appropriate the alien word that is saturated with the intentions of others (293 – 94).

Constructing a scholarly identity requires great linguistic self-control as the Mack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 69

author creates the multiple selves portrayed within the text. If self-identity is a semiotic social formation, therein lie the cultural forces that can make identity both fatally predictable and hopefully imaginative. Bakhtin (1990: 2) describes a model of an answerable text that constructs a dynamic architectonic between life and art, self and other. Working-class students become answerable when they author writing that creates a dialogue among the competing voices from their multiple lives both inside and outside the academy.

Writing assignments that do not allow working-class students the agency to make ethical decisions about their texts deny them an important opportunity to develop academic integrity and to gain agency to construct their chosen multiple identities.

From interviewing until the final sharing, students are challenged to solve problems related to the representation of the people involved. Sometimes, questions come up spontaneously, while at times I force the issue.

Before the first interview, students receive a release form modeled after one created by my colleague Marjorie Mclellan based on the guidelines from the Oral History Association (2000). Mclellan believes that interviewees have ownership of their stories, including the right to take back what they have revealed in an interview. In addition to explaining the purpose of the research and making the interviewee feel comfortable, we address methods for giving power to the speaker by asking about typical misconceptions, by requesting assistance generating and wording questions, and by offering respectful silence after significant narrations and disclosures. For example, James Sky, a former graduate student, reported to the class that the most productive way that he found to interview an Appalachian matriarch for his project was to sit on the steps of her front porch, facing away from her while she reminisced in a rocking chair behind him. Conflicts sometimes arise when students are determining whether the person interviewed will be permitted to read the final project. I try not to provide pat answers to these ethical problems; instead, I help students consider multiple factors, imagined consequences, and alternative solutions. The respectful treatment of real informants is a beginning step toward learning how to treat the words of others ethically.

While students are writing their genre pieces, questions related to ethics come up, as students must make decisions about how they will use language to represent others. Students may wonder about changing names, creating a composite incident, adding characters, depicting negative points of view, including oneself, and using dialect, slang, or profanity. I want students to compose a text with ethical social relations among multiple identities — those of others as well as those that they claim for themselves.

70 pedagogy

I return to Rachel Dunlap’s project once again for an example of how students can develop ethical, academic identities through this type of writing assignment. During the last week of the term, I experienced one of those teachable moments that can send a professor gleefully skipping across campus after class. Rachel initiated a classroom discussion about documentation and citation by asking how to identify where she had used factual information and where she had fictionalized details in her writing. Rachel explained that she had chosen the date of the lunch counter incident to be the same day that Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball because she wanted to present a historical background for beliefs about race at that time. Rachel also wanted to note that she had researched racist language from Ku Klux Klan brochures to represent accurately the character who denies service to her relative. Although I had come to class that day never dreaming that I would be teaching about endnotes, I remarked that without explanatory endnotes, it was unfortunate that the reader would have no way of knowing how meticulous Rachel had been about her research. My students were hooked; they insisted on knowing more about what endnotes were and how to use them. Students’ questions multiplied into an interrogation of the ways to employ endnotes to show off their scholarly labors of interviewing and reading academic sources, with the majority using documentation correctly in their final projects.

Such interest in endnotes was in direct opposition to the pedagogical trend of simplifying documentation requirements in college papers; namely, the major composition handbooks rely exclusively on the MLA and APA systems, which prefer in-text citations and no longer include model papers with explanatory or bibliographic footnotes or endnotes.7 Granted, some students may have gone a little overboard with an occasional student having twenty or more notes, but pride in one’s academic accomplishments seems to be a more effective motivation for documenting sources than the fear of being caught for plagiarism. I was pleased that several students intentionally used endnotes to solve conflicts related to the representation of others.

Endnotes supply another rhetorical space in which students can assume multiple identities, including that of an academic scholar. Rachel uses endnotes to achieve several objectives: to elaborate on the historical context; to explain the semantics and pronunciation of words; to document what was directly quoted, paraphrased, and fictionalized from interviews with family members; to clarify when and how a family story was told; to relate how her life experiences were similar to published writers’; and to make connections to academic critiques about gender, race, and culture. Rachel’s representaMack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 71

tion of her multiple identities can be evidenced in two of her endnotes. I read these endnotes as a complex dialogue in which Rachel, her family, her chosen cultural groups, and her cited authors interact. In endnote 11, Rachel invokes voices from her interviews with that of an essayist published in a newsletter as well as her own analytic voice that establishes an ethnic and gendered interpretation of her family’s relationships: My aunt Lali and my dad both shared that grandpa didn’t share his feelings openly in front of his children. Roy Gonzalez in his essay “Being Hispanic” says the Hispanic Culture is patriarchal and the father is the one who influences his children the most. He comments on the irony of the situation when the father encourages his children to support each other, yet they are discouraged from demonstrating emotion and grief. He argues that it is a father’s responsibility to be the one to show and allow grief and frustration to be demonstrated in the family unit. I see these parallels in my own family. My dad never cried at grandpa’s funeral. In all my life, I have never seen my father cry.

Endnote 12 begins with information that Rachel presents from her interviews and continues with her own scholarly assertion about the connection between language and identity, which indirectly references the theme from Dixie Salazar’s poem, “Taking It Back,” which Rachel included in her project.

In her interview, my aunt Lali revealed that my great grandpa was extremely light skinned with green eyes. The people at the restaurant assumed he was just like them and they were shocked when he started conversing with his “dark” son in Spanish.

I am ashamed to admit that I don’t know Spanish very well. That is why I only have one phrase [in this piece], but it is important: My name is Mr. Lerma. Your name is your identity.

At least seven more of Rachel’s endnotes contain what I would classify as critical analysis, with three of these referencing scholars of Hispanic culture — a total of nine of her seventeen endnotes. In fairness, I should mention that at least one of Rachel’s sources came from another course in which she studied multiculturalism, which I view as a cross-curricular benefit. This is not to say that there were not small errors in punctuation and a lack of other skills that I might have preferred such as remembering to introduce the cited authors’ areas of expertise. Given that I did not supply models of endnotes for her class or collect rough drafts to comment about their use, I was more than satisfied with Rachel’s first attempt at endnotes. Also, I do not wish to point to these endnotes as the only place in her project where Rachel displayed 72 pedagogy

critical analysis. Endnotes 11 and 12 correspond to a one-act play titled “Discriminatory Service” that dramatizes seven conflicting points of view about racial integration. Rachel used the combination of her cover letter, a poem

by Salazar, six original genre pieces, a quote by Martin Luther King Jr., and seventeen endnotes to interpret her grandfather’s changing views about racial identity. Taken as a whole, the multiple genres and endnotes furnish a forum for students to dramatize an intellectual exchange among the voices from both their homes and the academy while positioning themselves in the academic role of the authority who is interpreting and ethically representing others.

To supplement the multiple genres and the endnotes, I require an expository cover letter in which students are to reflect on the processes involved in the project’s creation. I asked Rachel’s class to describe how they selected their topics, conducted primary and secondary research, and evaluated the significance of their projects to themselves and others. Halfway through her cover letter, Rachel reveals her claim for the authority to tell this story, and she explains her interpretation of her grandfather’s behaviors: My paper is set up to show the reader how racial intolerance can influence a person’s sense of identity. And I am just the person to write this story because I know what it feels like to be singled out for being different. I know what it feels like to want to be included. . . . This paper reflects my belief that grandpa’s intolerance of outside races stems from his fear of being singled out. Like me, he wanted to be “safe” and “included.” Therefore, he saw change as a dangerous thing. My main sources for this paper deal with the issue of identity. . . . I interwove the ideas of the writers in the voices of different characters in the text.

Rachel explains how she has combined interviews and academic sources to inform her representation of herself, her grandfather, and her analysis of identity. More important than the text itself is the knowledge gained from creating a dynamic, discursive self composed of and with multiple, conflicting identities. Of course, not all students are as insightful about issues of subjectivity as Rachel is, but the point is that the potential for critical consciousness is there when students are permitted to function as scholars.

After this first group of students, I have added more topics for reflection that ask students to speak more directly as scholars about problems they had with ethical representation and suggestions they have for further study by other scholars. Students’ metacognitive understandings of how and what they learned are of paramount importance, since the conscious thought processes developed while learning about language are all that remain after Mack Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives 73

the writing assignment has been completed. Without reflection, I believe that it is possible for students to complete a writing assignment and learn the wrong things. In much the same way — w ithout reflection — teachers can adopt teaching practices that have unintended negative effects. Reflection can help us to connect theory to practice, enabling both teachers and students the agency to make conscious changes for the better. Thus an assignment that I adopted somewhat uncritically has on reflection turned into an answerable deed related to my ethical concerns for working-class students and will be continually revised for that intent.

Those interested in developing pedagogies for working-class students must begin by critically examining the discourse practices that create academic identities, including how these identities function inside and outside the academy as well as imagining a way that working-class students can engage powerfully in intellectual work. The respect with which we view students’ lives is apparent in what is and is not deemed a sanctioned writing topic. Benevolent acts of providing simplified topics, airtight formats, and readily available sources belie assumptions that working-class students are incompetent writers and researchers incapable of scholarly analysis and offering nothing of importance to impart to others. Is it ethical to teach people whom we disrespect? The more I know about their lives from reading their multigenre folklore projects, the more I have come to respect my students as scholars.

Notes 1. Defining working class as a concept is necessarily problematic, since it is a discursive category with a great deal of ideological baggage. I prefer a definition that permits multiple opportunities for affiliation, such as Kevin Harris (1982) does when he includes three functional forms of identification: economic, political, and ideological in his Marxist analysis of teachers. However, I have learned from disability theory that the right to self-disclosure belongs to the individual.

2. Louise Morley (1997: 115) identifies this concept of exposure as feelings of “fraudulence” and attributes it to P. McIntosh, who has explored this issue in her scholarship. I was interested that Morley also mentions her own overworking as a way to prove herself in the academy — perhaps another familiar dysfunctional response to class conflict.

3. Essays in these excellent volumes testify to the conflicts experienced while developing a working-class-academic identity: Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (Tokarczk and Fay 1993); This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (Dews and Law 1995); Liberating 74 pedagogy

4.

5.

6.

7.

Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness (Zandy 1995); Class Matters: “Working-Class” Women’s Perspectives on Social Class (Mahony and Zmroczek 1997); Coming to Class: Pedagogy and the Social Class of Teachers (Shepard, McMillan, and Tate 1998); Teaching Working Class (Linkon 1999); and Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America (Adair and Dahlberg 2003). I also recommend an essay by Frank Dobson (2002) in which he analyzes the intersections of race and class as they affect his role as a worker in the academy.

It is important to qualify that working-class experience varies greatly. Reay, David, and Ball (2005: 105) point out that more research has been done about diversity and heterogeneity within the middle class than the working class.

The students in this article were from two sections of an undergraduate writing course for education majors and one graduate composition and rhetoric seminar about folklore. After sharing an example paper taken directly from Romano (2000: 73 – 86), I designed four weeks of classroom instruction to support students’ writing processes from prewriting to publishing. For a copy of the assignment sheet and other teaching handouts see www.wright.edu/~nancy.mack/. Photographs and scans of some of these projects can be viewed there, including the full text of a project about hospice. Since space is limited, only parts of these projects are displayed.

A link to Williamson’s Web site about her Texas high school drill team can be found on my Web site. However, her site is no longer interactive, with posts about bulimia and weight requirements removed for reasons of privacy.

My intent is not to resurrect an antiquated practice but to engage students in a scholarly activity that I find both useful and interesting as a reader. I explain to students that I frequently read the works cited and endnotes for academic articles first — w ith almost voyeuristic curiosity — in order to critique the depth and breadth of the scholar’s reading as well as to reveal the author’s hidden affiliations with powerful groups within the field.

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