Response to Gee and Monroe

Stop the Face Lifts

We understand the social to be a large part of learning places/spaces. The classroom, office hours, writing, and presentations all reflect the social nature of school. Much like Gee’s examples of student writing in “Language and Identity at Home,” how one understands language and how one is able to convey such in the classroom is important. Unfortunately, there is this issue with what constitutes literacy and “correctness,” as we read in Bizzell that resurfaces in Gee. We see this issue most evident as Gee speaks about Leona and the ways in which she shows literacy. He notes “the school will start her apprenticeship on academic language too late --- right when she is ready to be a victim of the fourth grade slump” (35). The problem is systemic and is the result of the school system’s ideologies about correctness and literacy…its failure to acknowledge the historical, and its lack of care, time, and understanding about new voices. The question I ask, then, is how can one exercise genuine and honest social skills in an environment that has been “historically … impervious to change” (Gee 35)? Of course there have been changes, but these changes simply cover the surface level problems ; these changes are face lifts that hide the inner workings of the real problem.

bell hooks, in her first book, Ain’t I A Woman, speaks about this surface level change in a powerful way. She notes, “teaching women how to defend themselves against male rapists is not the same as working to change society so that men will not rape. Establishing houses for battered women do not change the psyches of men who batter them, nor does it change the culture that condones and promotes brutality … Demanding an end to institutionalized sexism does not ensure an end to sexist oppression” (191). What hooks is getting to here is a thorough look into a system, one that includes a matrix of domination (race, class, sex) that continues to oppress, even if the rhetoric points other ways (so there is an illusion of change). What we can glean from hooks is that there has to be an ideological shift in how one thinks, in this case, about learning, discourse, literary, and language.

Monroe calls for a shift in thinking in “Storytime of the Reservation” as she looks to home discourses as ones that shape the way in which a student will perform at school. She talks about literacy as a learned behavior, as one that can be cultivated and praised if the teacher understands the context of the writing. Monroe notes “for students of color, academic literacy is an issue of interethnic communication, and that they need to become bicultural in order to succeed in school” (113) which speaks to having to grapple with multiple identities in order to “make it.” Monroe also says that “the lesson that literacy is epistemology is one that all students --- not just students of color---need to learn English in the classroom” (113). Monroe’s work speaks to an active approach to helping students reach their full potential. First, however, there has to be understanding, on the teacher’s behalf, about the different epistemological underpinnings that ground a student so that they can include classroom practices that help students so that they will not become “a victim of the fourth grade slump” (Gee 35) or a victim of poverty.