RADICAL TEACHER
a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal on the
theory and practice of teaching
Teaching
Notes
By Hua-Ling Nieh.
Translated By: Linda Lappin and Jane Parish Yang. New York: The Feminist Press, 1998. $12.95
I
recently taught in a learning cluster for first year students at LaGuardia
Community College. Our cluster,
entitled ³Youth, Identity and Culture,² sought to look at the ways in which
youth identity is socially constructed.
The three cluster teachers each employed a distinct disciplinary lens in
his/her courseIntroduction to Sociology, Exploring the Humanities and two
English Courses, Composition I and The Research Paper. In the English courses, I paired Student
Resistance and Mulberry
and Peach to
encourage students to think outside the current ³norms² of youth culture. Many of the students I teach struggle
with the conflicting material expectations of a media culture largely defined
by upper-middle class white youths and my studentsı own particular
identification with a racially and economically diverse urban youth culture. Their frame of reference jarringly
juxtaposes Britney Spears with Sean ³P. Diddy² Combs with Scooby Do with J. Lo with Diesel and Gap
clothes.
While
composition courses often take on themes related to contemporary events,
focused on the idea of asking students to write what they know about, leading
them to a platform for critical thinking and cultural analysis, I wanted to add
to that model, contrasting studentsı easy ability with pop culture with an
altogether different construction of student identity. In the English courses we began with
popular culture, first with music and film, and then made an intentional move
from youth culture to student identity to student activism.
I asked students
to read Student Resistance to begin to get a sense of how student communities were
defined, the origin of those definitions, the history of student conflict, and
the specific issue-oriented struggles that ignited student imaginations and
sometimes changed the material, social, and historical circumstances of student
life.
Student
Resistance presents
a panoramic view of student resistance that is a wide-ranging and quickly paced
history of student struggle beginning with the ³town and gown² clashes in
medieval Europe and moving quickly through a timeline of student resistance in
Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. While the
students read the book, I assigned several smaller papers to help them think
about connections between the history of student resistance and their own
lives. At the beginning of the
term I asked students to write their activist history. If they didnıt have an activist
history, I asked them to reflect on why they hadnıt been involved. Only one or two students in the class
had been involved in any activism;
others wrote about never having the idea presented to them by friends or
family; a few others wrote about
their disenchantment with the idea of activism.
As their reading
continued, I asked students to think about what kind of student group they
might form. They had to create
ideological platforms for their groups and then, via our on-line course
management system, Black Board, they had to solicit class members to join their
groups (who then became their peer review groups). The groups ranged in topic from the S.R.P. (Stop Racial
Profiling) to the Independent Thinkers Group (a group devoted to free thinking
and free speech) to the Deaf Squad (a group devoted to issues of disability and
perceptions of ³normalcy²). Students
began to talk in terms of issues of concern to themtuition increases, CUNYıs
new policies about undocumented immigrants, financial aidand to really
fantasize where education might lead.
I then asked
students to become familiar with one or two groups that interested them the
most. In small groups, I asked
them to identify why the groups were formed, what they did, and what they
achieved. Students supplemented
the information in the book with outside research. Then, students were asked to compare a group from the book
to a contemporary student activist group.
As students wrote their papers, they chose a variety of contemporary
groups from those battling globalization to gay rightsı groups to animal
rightsı groups to womenıs rights groups.
In each case, students again saw connections between their lives and the
lives of other student activists.
Some students, however, remained critical of activism, seeing it as
something historical and with little or no current relevance.
We moved from Student
Resistance to Mulberry
and Peach, a work
of fiction that presents the story of a young woman, Mulberry, fleeing China
for the United States. Through the
course of the novel she ages into a middle-aged woman and also acquires a
second personality, Peach. The
novel is told in both Mulberryıs voice, through diary entries, and Peachıs
voice, through letters she writes to an INS Agent, Mr. Dark. Students created two timelines, one for
China from 1911 to the present and one for the United States during the same
time period. Using research to
fill in the significant historical events that serve as a backdrop for
Mulberryıs conflicted relationship with societal expectations in China and
Peachıs desperate acceptance of the possibilities of freedom in the United
States, students analyzed this text to make some analyses of how culture
affects identity.
The course
culminated in an extensive research paper in which the students were to take a
product marketed to children and youth and to trace the history of that
productıs marketing and advertising over the past sixty years. Their research
papers at the end of the course critiqued, among other things, Barbie, rap and
pop music, and the cigarette and alcohol industries. Two papers looked at comic books and science fiction as
alternate constructions of youth identity. By the end of the term, many students clearly saw the
connections between Student Resistance and Mulberry and Peach. They were able intellectually if not in practice to
recognize the importance of critically analyzing cultural norms and values and
working against materialism to construct alternative identities that arenıt
commodities to be bought and sold in stores around the city.
TALKING
TO FAITH RINGGOLD
By
Faith Ringgold, Linda Freeman, and Nancy Roucher. New York: Crown Publishers,
$9.99.
SONNY
ROLLINS: TENOR MADNESS
Giants
of Jazz, CD 53061.
When
I decided to create a basic writing course around the theme of ³Quilts,² I knew
it would involve art, history, politics and, of course, writing, but I did not
anticipate the role music would play, at least for a small part of the
course. The idea of a ³Quilt²
theme came to me after I saw Faith Ringgoldıs exhibition in New York City at
the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgoldıs
French Collection and Other Quilt Stories.
Ringgoldıs work combines quilt-painting and narrative, which appear in
the form of written stories on the tops and bottoms, and often sides, of her
quilts. To both see an image and
read words describing it seemed like a viable approach to enhancing the content
of a basic writing course.
The large museum
book was both too costly and too inclusive but an accompanying shorter version,
Talking to Faith Ringgold, looked perfect since it showed the major works and related
them to Ringgoldıs own life, a combination of analysis and personal writing a
basic writing course tries to bridge.
The book contains sections on Ringgold growing up in Harlem, with an
analysis of her famous Tar Beach; her years in college at City University of New York, where
I teach; her growth as a feminist; a history of quilt-making as related to
African American history; and the effects of the Civil Rights Movement on her
art.
For an early
in-class writing assignment, and as an example of how I used a part of the
book, we looked at a Ringgold painting called ³Sonnyıs Quilt,² which shows
Sonny Rollins floating above the Brooklyn Bridge with the skyline behind and
the river below him. The girders
and wires of the bridge look like quilt borders and the squares and triangles
of the bridge towers have the same construction as the squares and triangles of
a quilt. Sonny Rollins is in the
center of the painting and all the lines move towards and away from him as he
plays his saxophone to the stars.
The essay topic
was to analyze the composition of ³Sonnyıs Quilt² by naming everything in the
painting and focusing on Sonny at the center (Introduction). The Body was to explore the theme or
meaning of the painting by writing what moods or feelings Faith Ringgold
conveys in Sonnyıs musical meditations above the bridge. The Conclusion asked how the painting
³Sonnyıs Quilt² was like a real quilt and, finally, how the music of Sonny
Rollins being played during the in-class essay related to the painting. I initially threw in this final musical
question only to enhance the two hours of writing but found out that it
generated some of the most interesting parts of the student essays. The music helped students tie together
their understanding of the painting by synthesizing what they were seeing about
Rollins as he played in the painting with what they were hearing on the
recording.
Students bring a
variety of skills and interests to a writing class and giving them as many
avenues and options as possible for expression in their writing can only make
them better writers. Using Faith
Ringgold and the theme of ³Quilts² brought into the writing class the substance
of art, social movements, feminism, and the personal narrative. I did not suspect how important the
role of music also would become.