Melanie Kill wrote "Acknowledging the Rough Edges of Resistance: Negotiation of Identities for First-Year Composition" during her doctoral program at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in English-Language and Rhetoric and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Additionally, she co-authored "Tracing Discursive Resources: How Students Use Prior Knowledge to Negotiate New Writing Contexts in First-Year Composition". If you'd like to know more about Kill, you can check out her website.
While reading, I highlighted quotes that I thought would help us discuss the article:
(see proceeding paragraphs) "These challenges involve, first and foremost, the problems that can result from the relationally nature of identity performances. Any new curriculum, particularly one that calls for rhetorical agility, requires students and teachers to undertake renegotiations of identity on at least two interrelated levels: 1) in their interactions with others, and 2) between their various presentations of self" (214-215).
"Understandably, being compelled to take up unfamiliar subject positions (that lead to unknown ends) can provoke resistance (216). Examples: Jacqueline Ho
Presenting Selves in Genre
Identity and Performance
Here, we could relate Kill's perspective on identity and performance to ideas in Bawarshi's "Sites of Invention: Genre and the Enactment of First-Year Writing": topoi, inventio, genres as instruments and realms (habits and habitats)....
"The fact of the matter is that for most, if not all, students, familiar ways of reading, writing, and thinking are challenged to some degree as they first encounter the particular academic reading, writing, and thinking practices of college classrooms. As a result of this shift of terrain, their ability to position themselves deliberately, and thus their self-presentation, is challenged. To a significant extent, this shift in practices and self-presentation is experienced as a shift in genres, as student's are reading and writing not only new types of texts with new and different purposes" (216).
"As people orient themselves toward particular social spaces, they enact the genres valued in that system..." (217).
"Self-presentation is impacted by genres and genre systems not simply because people choose to fit in, but in large part because sense if most easily made from within the roles generally perceived to be relevant to a particular rhetorical situation" (217).
"Systems of related genres provide particular ranges of subject positions in relation to which identities can be enacted and understood, and, as part of the production of coherence, people enact selves and behaviors that are meaningful within a given situation by performing roles in relation to them" (217).
"It is because of this relationship between genre and identity that we cannot escape the possibilities and problematics of identity in the composition classroom" (217). Of course, we''ll be talking about the possibilities and problematics! :)
Uptaking Identities
Here, let's talk mix identity with a little "uptake". Let's also talk about the variations of performance, especially as teachers of FWC.
Also, remember Ann Freadman's tennis analogy for uptake? It's on pages 83-84 in Chapter 6 of "Rhetorical Genre Studies".
Performative speech acts (218).
"..uptake is less useful as a means of distinguishing between types of speech acts and more useful as a way of naming the process of exchange that takes place in all speech acts" (219).
"By determining what is there to take up, a speaker's utterance sets the stage for their interlocutor's response" (219).
"To participate successfully in the academic and intellectual communities to which they are presumably pursuing entrance, they must write in genres, and thus assume subject positions, for which they might not yet understand the motivations or possibilities" (219). I think this relates back to Tuesday's class discussion.
"...students also and already have their own purposes and motivations as well as repertoire of more and less practiced means of realizing them" (219).
Freadman: "uptakes [...] have memories--long, ramified, intertextual, and intergeneric memories" ("Uptake" 40).
Uptake's memory (students) and our own intentions regarding self-presentation (220).
"...if we can't secure the subject position we want to occupy, it matters little, if at all, who we presume to be in actuality" (222).
"Our performances of self dot succeed because we are successful in communicating our intentions; they succeed because we place them effectively within an already established series of signs" (222).
"Identity must secure uptake; without uptake, it is not secure" (222).
"We depend on those whom we interact to be who we think they are so we can secure the uptakes we expect from them" (223).
Writing Selves in Relation to Others
Let's talk about the negotiation of self presentation. Obviously.
"In opening with the invitation for students to tell me about their backgrounds, it is my intention to address them as people with lives beyond the classroom" (224).
"...a challenge to the division between personal identity and student/academic identity" (224).
Looking a student responses to Kill's writing prompt... "My problem, as I see it, was this: I needed to respond in a was that both supported by self-presentation as teacherly and at the same time addressed the immediate utterances these students had produces" (228).
"I found these responses to my assignment threatening to the legibility of my performance of teacherliness" (228).
"In this situation, these students' uptakes responded appropriately to the writing prompt as an immediate utterance, but didn't account more fully for the larger context in which their texts would operate and the effect they might produce" (229). Oooh, let's talk about this!
"That students have the power to influence our self-presentations is important to keep in mind because, if we feel that the legibility we need to be productive in the classroom is threatened, this can lead us to adopt defensive postures" (229).
Creative Resistance (230)
Conclusion
But even beyond the 'resistance built into the nature and function of genre' is the defensive resistance motivated by the relational nature of identity, which places individuals in the situation of depending on others to serve as reference points and sources of validation for their presentations of self" (232).
"In this way, we might begin to find ways to negotiate with students the new classroom identities and genres in which these visions may come to be naturalized" (233).
"If we aren't prepared to enact, and react with, new strategies at the level of daily interaction, we risk uncritically perpetuating the same narratives and power relations that we are so strongly, in theory, struggling against" (233).
Questions, thoughts, comments....
1. How can we relate Kill's ideas and arguments to Bawarshi idea that genre are sites of invention? (Thinking about the writing prompt and the syllabus? We might also make connections to Davis and Shadle's alternative research writing.
2. Do you find yourself (constantly) negotiating your identity, performance, and self-presentation in the classroom (and while assessing/evaluating students' work)?
3. Thinking about Heilker's question: "If genres are ways of being in the world through language, then what happens when we stop using a genre" (23)? What happens to identity and performance?
4. I'm not sure where I'm going with this one (or where this question came from), but should we talk about performance, self-presentation, and identity in the classroom? (If that comment/question comes up about what a student "should" write.) We might tie this to Chapter 11 of Rhetorical Genre Studies.
5. I'm curious to know what you all think about Jacqueline Ho's decision to drop the class (in relation to dominance and resistance). Also, Kill's desire to "show her that [she] could be a more responsive and responsible reader of [Ho's] writing than she may have imagined" (231).
And this may not have anything to do with what we're talking about, but I thought about Baldwin's essay, "A Talk To Teachers" after reading Kill's article. Let me know what you think!
I'll probably add more thoughts and questions later! Hope you all enjoy!
Peace.
Simone,
ReplyDeleteI was really interested in your experience with the destabilized composition classroom and how the lack of adequate guidance on assignments created a greater sense of urgency to identify what the instructor wanted from students in response to assignments, and in how that ties into ideas of instructor/professorial identity as created by assignment prompts and syllabi in Kill's article. Do you think there is a "tipping point" at which the instructor has abdicated so much of her responsibility to identify herself as the person evaluating student work that students are then unable to construct a meaningful understanding of themselves as the producers of work which will be evaluated?
Simone--
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry I missed this discussion. (Frowny face)
My question is very similar to Sarah's:
At what point does an instructor have to *stop* questioning his/her identity and performance in order to maintain an appropriate level of authority in the classroom?
This question is a bit confusing, but I hope someone can make sense of it:
What happens to uptake if an instructor changes concepts of his/her performance? What if all of the teacher writing (syllabus, prompts, homework, emails, etc.) suggests something different than what the instructor's performance encourages? Where does that leave students? (I feel this is a real question--at least personally--because my syllabus attempts to present the course as very rigid, almost strict, and as workworkworkwork. But in the classroom, I take a more "human" approach.) And then going off of this last question, what happens to the generic actions students take if the instructor doesn't have a firm identity and unchanging performance throughout the course?