University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations and Theses Dissertations 12-15-2006 (Re)Building Cultural, Community, and Academic Identity: Freshman Composition After Katrina Russo Celeste Del University of New Orleans Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.edu/td Recommended Citation Del, Russo Celeste, "(Re)Building Cultural, Community, and Academic Identity: Freshman Composition After Katrina" (2006). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations.edu/td/486 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use.
For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact scholarworks@uno. (Re)Building Cultural, Community, and Academic Identity: Freshman Composition After Katrina A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Rhetoric and Composition by Celeste A.
Wheaton College, MA, 2002 December 2006 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would not have been possible without the support of many people. I would like to thank my advisor, Doreen Piano, for believing in this project and for her readings of my numerous revisions. Also thanks to my committee members, Anne Boyd and Kim McDonald, for their guidance and support. Thanks to the English department for giving me the opportunity to teach sections of English 1157 as a teaching assistant, and to faculty who shared their post- Katrina teaching experiences with me.
Finally, I thank my students, who were the inspiration for this project, for allowing me to share their writing. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .1 Chapter 1: Place, Placelessness, and Composition Studies .10 Connecting Place, Identity, and Composition Studies.12 Space, Place and Being .20 Students as Intermediaries between University and Community .23 Chapter 2: Where Y’at, UNO?.32 Revamping our Classrooms in Response to Katrina.57 Appendix A: Localized Post-Katrina Writing Assignments.60 Appendix B: Writing After Katrina Archive fact sheet .68 Appendix C: Human Subjects Approval Form.70 iii ABSTRACT Composition studies has become increasingly focused on the connection between place, identity, and the act of writing, maintaining, as theorist Nedra Reynolds states, that “where writing instruction takes place has everything to do with how” (20). Considering the social, political, and cultural contexts of a post-Katrina Southeastern Louisiana, administrators and instructors at the University of New Orleans must begin to question how our freshmen writing program can best serve our students as they enter into the future of a “new” New Orleans. Implementing a “localized pedagogy” into the freshmen composition classroom—that is, a community-based pedagogy that draws from local resources, engages students in acts of public writing, and implements a service learning component—can help students answer to new roles of citizenship.
This project exhibits instructor pedagogy and student writing generated during post- Katrina semesters to illustrate what a localized pedagogy might look like in composition classrooms at UNO. iv INTRODUCTION Place does matter; surroundings do have an effect on learning or attitudes towards learning, and material spaces have a political edge. In short, where writing instruction takes place has everything to do with how. –Nedra Reynolds from “Composition’s Imagined Geographies” (20) As the University of New Orleans rebuilds after Katrina, instructors are faced with a challenge: in an educational institution with a majority population of students from Louisiana and the Greater New Orleans area, how can we help our students (re)identify and (re)connect with the university and, further, with the New Orleans community from which they were displaced? At a time when there is a campus-wide, state-wide, and even nationwide focus on our region and Katrina-related issues, we as writing tutors and instructors have begun to witness our students’ struggles to locate themselves within these conversations.
In freshmen composition, our students are writing essays arguing for or against the rebuilding of the Ninth Ward; contending who, if anyone, is at fault—local, state, or federal government—for the inefficient disaster response. Across disciplines, instructors are framing assignments which ask students to directly engage in the rebuilding of our campus and local community. For example, in an Urban Planning course, students are asked to present proposals for rebuilding the city; in Business Administration, students are positing strategies to aid small businesses in reopening their doors. The Katrina Narrative Project, created by Provost Frederick Barton, has facilitated the collection of interviews of Katrina survivors by students in English, History, Sociology, and Anthropology courses.
It seems that academic departments within UNO are instinctively integrating a more “community conscious” pedagogy into their students’ classroom experience. Nurturing our students’ leanings towards (what I will term) a more “localized pedagogy” in the Freshmen 1 Composition classrooms of UNO also makes sense; in post-Katrina New Orleans, the UNO freshmen composition sequence has the potential to become a venue for engaging students in the (re)negotiation of academic and community identities within the classroom and beyond—into the New Orleans community. How can we help our students reconnect, and why do so through the freshmen composition program? To address this question, we might begin by examining how others have envisioned and defined the actual “space” of the composition classroom. As a discipline, composition studies is preoccupied with space (both real and imaginary spaces) that constitute our field, such as composition’s “place” in research, or its “placement” within English departments.
As a result, those within composition studies have no lack of spatial metaphors to describe what actions (in terms of student-student or student-instructor interactions) occur in the writing classroom and beyond; some of these metaphors are more problematic than others. One example of this can be found in contact zone theory, as set forth by Mary Louise Pratt, which has long recognized the classroom as a space where students’ identities and belief systems collide, a space where, for the first time, many students are confronted with views and values that conflict with their own. While the term contact zone suggests a classroom full of “conflict” and “unrest,” Joseph Harris’s term “community,” promotes a kinder, more receptive classroom where students do not “conform” or “negotiate” their values and beliefs, but “reposition” these beliefs in relation to others instituted by their classroom of peers and the academy itself (105). However, the problem inherent in these functions of the freshmen composition classroom, as Jonathan Mauk has pointed out, is that such theorizations of classroom space ask students to only recognize the classroom as “academic space” (380).
In terms of pedagogy, this is evident in the number of composition programs across the country, including our own at UNO, 2 that ask students to perform analysis and exploration within the classroom, but don’t require that they bring these academic tools outside the classroom or campus. As a result, there is a stratification between the world “in here” (the university) and the world “out there”—the worlds that make up our students’ lives. A more useful perception of classroom space, as Mauk suggests, introduces a wholly new concept of what defines terms such as “classroom” and “space.” For Mauk, the classroom (a term that can easily be substituted for academia) extends beyond the “material surroundings” into “all the directions of being which constitute students’ lives” (380). While contact zone and other theories that are currently influencing writing pedagogies across the country (including our own at UNO) account only for students bringing their own discourses into the academy, Mauk calls for a rearranging of academic space to include spaces beyond the college classroom, therefore requiring that students bring the academy with them into these alternate spaces.
His classroom is not a place of “conflict” or fostering a false sense of community, it is a place where pedagogy must “fuse various social spaces of students’ lives” in order to “better serve their [students’] needs” (382). Without this “fusion,” students may feel “dislocated” from the university and “unconnected” to the community in which the university resides. According to Mauk, this dislocation is a result of their not having a sense of academic space; that is, students are not experiencing academia or the act of learning as occurring in a “knowable place” (i. the university), a place to which they must become acclimated.
Rather, students experience a constant “movement away” (372) from the university towards other aspects of their lives. Such “dislocation” becomes particularly troublesome for students at the University of New Orleans. Although our students have undoubtedly found some semblance of “normalcy” in returning to New Orleans and their academic careers at UNO after Katrina, they may still experience a sense 3 of “dislocation;” not yet wholly adjusted to a new New Orleans, or to a very different experience of “campus life” at UNO, students may feel caught between a pre- and post-Katrina world and, in turn, may struggle in locating a sense of purpose. Expanding our students’ conception of what determines academic space to involve their personal lives and the New Orleans community is imperative if we are to reconnect our students to a post-Katrina university and New Orleans community.
A pedagogy of “location,” one which not only raises student awareness of the physical location in which they live and learn, but also draws from local resources, asks students to write for local audiences, and engages students in the discourse communities which make up their lives, encourages students to be active participants in multiple “locations” of school and community. In order for our students to recognize their role as “active participants” in the rebuilding of the University of New Orleans and their home communities, they must first realize how “location,” as in actual “place,” shapes their identities, personal beliefs, and cultures. As previously mentioned, composition classrooms have been viewed as a meeting place of varying discourse communities, where all aspects of a student’s identity coalesce, yet there have not until recently been pedagogies that actually ask students to examine this evident attachment to their home communities. Derek Owens describes the importance for students and teachers to explore the implications of “place” on the human psyche: Where do I live? Where do you live? What passes for living where we live? You can…talk to hundreds of students on an annual basis, and yet never really know what these people’s apartments, houses, yards, street blocks, developments and neighborhoods look, feel, and sound like.
What impact does this detachment have on one’s teaching? One’s profession? One’s students?.We need to 4 recognize…that who we are and what we have to say is in so many ways interwoven, directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously, with our local environs (36-7). Owens describes a sense of “nowhereness,” a sense that our classrooms (and to a certain degree, our students) are left unconnected to the world and events around them, resulting in students’ feelings of detachment and indifference towards home and university communities. This detachment, Mauk claims, is the result of not realizing the interconnectedness of place and personal identity; for students who feel “detached,” examining place may help them visit the “unconscious” connection between such feelings and the shape of their New Orleans surroundings. The advantage of a curriculum which addresses the “local environs,” the actual surroundings of “where we come from,” is that it allows students to view themselves as people “shaped” by their surroundings, not floating, formless beings uninfluenced by place and time (Owens 37).
As it currently exists, UNO’s curriculum is not so unlike other composition programs across the country in that our courses rarely ask students to explore connections between place, identity, and the act of writing; rather, they fall in line with what Elizabeth Ervin claims as the “current issue” trend in composition studies.