Today I was just thinking again about Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”, and how the classroom is a contact zone. I was particularly thinking about this as how it is a contact zone of cultures (“academic” and “beginning writer,” “teacher” and “student,” “adult” and “young adult” or “child”) and how the writing that is done for class is performed. In particular, the following passage came to mind:
Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression–these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone. Miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning–these are some of the perils of writing in the contact zone. They all live among us today in the transnationalized metropolis of the United States and are becoming more widely visible, more pressing, and, like Guaman Poma’s text, more decipherable to those who once would have ignored them in defense of a stable, centered sense of knowledge and reality.
As I read this, I think about what I want to occur in my classroom (and in all classrooms), and I think about the vivacity of the arts in her first list, and how rarely we as teachers see and ask for good autoethnography, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, parody, denunciation, and vernacular expression (and the others as well, but these are foremost in my mind at the moment) and how we ask for and get miscomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces (because they “don’t fit the assignment”), and absolute heterogeneity of meaning (when diverse voices are squelched). I’m sure someone has written about this before, but I wonder if we view the classroom as a place where students must become academics (and not a place where academia must mold as students mold), then how can we expect quality art from students (and yes, I chose the word art purposefully, implying that I think writing should be artistic).
