Outsiders Within: Resolving Working-Class Experience within the Privileged Classroom
In Shirley Brice Heath’s seminal ethnographic study of Appalachian communities, Ways with Words, she describes how lower-class citizens are not socialized into the dominant discourse the way middle-class people are. Heath describes how the black and white middle-class townspeople of her study were more familiar with the language of public institutions because for generations they had been part of the town’s administration. Heath states, “unlike Roadville and Trackton folks, they have not been tied by the historical circumstances so closely to home communities, limited work opportunities, and restricted education,” (11). If you work a labor job and socialize mostly with your family and neighbors, chances are your discourse is different from the mainstream. Middle class people understand the language of bureaucracy, legal transactions, and public institutions because conversations about such things are part of their everyday discourse. They are at an instant advantage because they are already socialized to participate in public and civic life. Once socialized into this discourse, which clearly has an advantage in terms of material wealth, the speakers become gatekeepers of it.
Of course, working-class students are not the only students who experience friction when trying to fit into academic discourse. Non-native speakers, people from non-traditional learning environments, women, and many other groups feel alienated by academic discourse. When these students come to school they are disoriented. Not only must they take in the complicated information of their courses, but they also must navigate the new discourse used by their peers. Faced with this outsider status, students have several options: try to acquire/learn the new discourse, silence themselves, or drop out. Choosing any of these options means the student will inevitably struggle. That is because most teachers, from kindergarten up to the university level, ignore multiple discourses and focus only on the “right” way of using SWE. As Kutz and Roskelly explain, “…most schools have regarded ‘home’ language and anything else that students carry with them ‘from the outside’—stories, ideas, beliefs—as excess baggage rather than chests of tools to aid their learning,” (57).
If we see the classroom the way Kutz and Roskelly do, as places where individuals converge and learn from one another, then we appreciate the ways students can be arbitrators of knowledge. Individual lifestyles, manners of speech, belief systems, etc., can become part of classroom content.
The American model of classroom conduct is much different from other classrooms in the belief that student discussion can form the bulk of classroom time. I have met students from India and Egypt, for example, who are shocked by the level of student discussion in their classes in America. They are used to sitting in class, eyes focused on the teacher, taking notes during lectures. The American model of classroom discourse is a reflection of the importance of democracy and free expression; we believe that all members of the polity should also be participants. Despite this noble belief, many students are left out of the discourse, unable to find their way into the conversation.
But teachers can use the content of students’ lives to form the content and narratives of the classroom, so that students feel “a part of” instead of “apart from.” This notion of having the “word reflect the world” gets to the very heart of Paulo Freire’s view of pedagogy. For example, when teaching an adult literacy class, Freire taught the word “brick” by showing a picture of bricklayers building a house (26). Because his students were laborers he used a representation that would speak to them. His students were do-ers, so he showed people doing something. The “outside” world of the classroom was brought inside in a meaningful way. Freire says, “[W]ords should be laden with the meaning of the people’s existential experience, and not of the teacher’s experience,” (25). This is a revolutionary idea, for the classroom to be conducive to learning from both the teacher and from one another. Thus development comes from the validation of the students’ lives and the teacher’s experience as a professional.
How is this desire for a multiplicity of discourses reconciled with the pressing expectations and demands of acquiring academic discourse? According to The Practical Tutor, SWE is a dialect that no one speaks, and therefore is like a second language for all students (Meyer and Smith). Because students from all backgrounds come to the university and write in SWE, SWE is actually an egalitarian dialect. While such a notion is tempting, it is akin to the naïve desire for the entire global community to speak English, just for the sake of convenience. Yes, people who are socialized into SWE can communicate with each other, but they do so at the risk of hiding or losing parts of themselves. By no means am I suggesting that we do away with SWE. Rather, while we uphold SWE as one way to express academic ideas and expectations in the U.S. classroom, we must also emphasize to our students that SWE is to be used in addition to their primary discourse. SWE is a discourse that can allow students to gain ideas, identity, and income within certain professional markets. Furthermore, it can be acquired without losing or degrading one’s primary discourse because SWE, like all discourses, is context bound—appropriate for achieving certain goals in certain circumstances. Understanding this is key to the delicate balance we all strive to maintain in negotiating our assortment of discourses.
In Negotiating Academic Literacies, teacher and writer Min-zhan Lu describes her personal struggle trying to reconcile the bourgeois English of her family with the proletariat Standard Chinese of her classroom. No matter where she was or how she expressed herself, she felt as if she were compartmentalizing her speech, writing, and identity to fit a given situation. As an adult she came to realize that giving students mere tools to pull out when a situation arises is counterproductive; instead students must see their multiple discourses as reflections of themselves and as a source of strength and struggle. Lu advises other teachers, “Don’t teach them to ‘survive’ the whirlpool of crosscurrents by avoiding it. Use the classroom to moderate the currents. Moderate the currents but teach them from the beginning to struggle,” (83). The classroom can be the site of dissecting discourse issues and acquiring academic discourse. If a teacher is candid and tenacious enough to confront discourse hegemony, students can begin to articulate their experiences with their discourse privilege.
