When Cultures Collide, Do We Lose Focus?

The scene:  A college English department meets to assess student achievement in English 101(entry level freshman composition).  The meeting stalls on format.  With sincerity and passion, faculty members insist that the student artifacts before them demonstrate nearly complete failure of the composition program because students have not typed their end-of-course essays in 12 point font, have neither correctly placed the period outside a parenthetical citation nor used a hanging indent in their Works Cited page entries, or in some cases, have included a Works Cited page but failed to cite the source in text.  Angry and frustrated professors announce, “An entry level college composition course that fails to produce essays in compliance with the Modern Language Association’s strictures is failing to meet its stated objectives.” 

Objectives are the stated goals of a course -- what a student should be able to do at the end of a given course. Teachers use these objectives to evaluate both their students and the programs in which they teach. 

As it generally will at such meetings, dissent breaks out, and the conversation fragments.  Voices decrying slavish adherence to archaic documentation styles vie with those questioning the value of soulless writing at the altar of the freshman argumentative research paper.  Hyperbole runs rampant (We are, after all, English teachers). Woven throughout this chaotic and dismally, repetitively, familiar drama, the thread of culture goes virtually unnoticed.  But, if, as Rueda (2011) states, culture is the “beliefs, attitudes, and social practices that literate individuals and social groups follow in a variety of settings and situations,” then something as theoretically “simple” as writing program assessment can and will be made complex by the impact of culture on students’ development of their own academic identities.    

Rueda (2011) suggests that when we assume that culture is universal, we set up a right/wrong dichotomy that is unhelpful for both students and educators because it ignores the cultural influences and the “funds of knowledge” (Li, 2011) which students bring with them but which might not be included in an assumed universal value. 

 
 In the case of this English department, the guidelines of the Modern Language Association (MLA) represent one aspect of literacy that some members of that department hold to be universally significant.   Those well-educated and well-intentioned faculty members learned the culture of MLA as graduate or undergraduate students in much the same way they learned to say “professor” instead of “teacher” and to differentiate a “journal”  from a “magazine” and an “article” from a “story.”  By hearing and seeing their professors and classmates use these terms, they developed an academic identity that included the ability to adapt to the language of academia, and because the Modern Language Association sets the documentation standards for the segment of academia to which they belong, they likewise learned to structure their writing and communicate about their sources in ways that are consistent with the MLA culture.

The MLA is here to answer your style questions, about anything from choosing a typeface to citing an e-book: https://t.co/Xwa0zH3Fja

— MLA Style (@mlastyle) July 13, 2016

For these professors, essays that fail to adhere to MLA guidelines are outside the culture and represent a failure of the student to assimilate to the MLA culture as well as the department’s failure to induct these acolytes in a timely manner.  

Because it ignores the identity development involved in entry-level college writing, such an assessment is too simplistic. Kucan and Palinscar (2011) reflect years of cultural and educational research in stating that, “learners become different kinds of people as they learn” (p. 352). For entry-level college students, post-secondary identity development encompasses every aspect of their lives, and as Li (2011) indicates, for many students, the identities they develop as college students are in frequent opposition to their primary (home) cultures.  As a result, when we ask English 101 students to create a source-based argumentative essay, we stretch them in ways we (and they) may not recognize.  We expect them to synthesize the literacy instruction and practice we have given them during one semester of English 101 with the literacy they developed over 12 years of elementary and secondary education.  In cases where their secondary literacy culture differs from our post-secondary culture, we expect them to see the differences and choose the post-secondary culture.  In addition, we assume a level of “college readiness” -- that students have already developed an academic language including the ability to maintain logical argument in English, to control their grammar and syntax, and to use vocabulary and sentence structures that position them as developing academicians.  In so positioning themselves, first-year college students must negotiate a delicate line – moving beyond simply restating their sources without moving too quickly to an assumption of expertise they can’t defend (Bartholomae, 1986).  

 In all of this, as we usher students into the academic culture, we are often asking them to read and write about topics beyond their experience.  Li (2011) indicated that “literacy instruction that is not made personally meaningful to minority students will probably impede their reading development” (p. 525).  At a college level, we assume that students (universally) have already developed academically appropriate reading strategies (As Rueda (2011) notes, this assumes a universal cultural norm – and exclusion of any students who have not achieved that norm), but we should not discount the cognitive load that both reading and writing outside of their expertise will place on first year college students (Rueda, 2011, p. 93).  In reality, because post-secondary culture is different from secondary culture, what we ask first-year students to do in college is qualitatively different from what they were asked to do in high school, but, as Flower (1989) indicates it looks “remarkably the same.  . . . [so that] some students never realize that significant strategic changes are called for. They may simply fail to see what all the fuss is about” (p.11). 

What an English department may see as a significant failure to meet expectations may well not even register for students.  When they have struggled to maintain a coherent argument about a topic over which they have no more than two months’ worth of expertise, when they have danced and wobbled on a line between emojis and academic gibberish, when they have created sentences in a voice their own mothers would not recognize, maybe the correct placement of the period after a parenthetical notation is the last thing they would think to value or even see. 

What does it say about us, as English professors, if we notice the absence of that period first?
    

Our student stories should support the design of our colleges. Here are some of their reflections.@AchieveTheDream https://t.co/BOsf9Tl8iI

— Dr. Karen Stout (@drkastout) September 16, 2016

References

Bartholomae, D. (1986). Inventing the university. Journal of Basic Writing, 5(1), 4–23.

Flower, L. (1989). Negotiating Academic Discourse (Reading-to-write Report No. 10) Technical Report no. 29. Reading to Write Report No 10. The Center for the Study of Writing,  Berkley, CA. Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Kucan, L., & Palincsar, A. S. (2011). Locating struggling readers in a reconfigured landscape: A conceptual review. In Kamil, M. L, Pearson, P. D., Moje, E. B., & Afflerbach, P. P. (Eds.).  Handbook of reading research (4th ed.). (pp. 341 - 358).  New York: Routledge.

Li, G. (2011). The role of culture in literacy, learning, and teaching. In Kamil, M. L, Pearson, P. D., Moje, E. B., & Afflerbach, P. P. (Eds.).  Handbook of reading research (4th ed.). (pp. 515 - 538).  New York: Routledge.

Rueda, R. (2011). Cultural perspectives in reading: Theory and research. In Kamil, M. L, Pearson, P. D., Moje, E. B., & Afflerbach, P. P. (Eds.).  Handbook of reading research (4th ed.). (pp. 84 - 103).  New York: Routledge.