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Exploratory Writing #3
A. In “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” David Sedaris gives us a humorous account of his experience as a foreign student studying French in France. Despite the humor, Sedaris explores serious issues of language, power, and disenfranchisement in educational settings. Thinking about the readings that we have done this semester, discuss how Sedaris and his classmates are marginalized by the classroom discourse. Include in your analysis your opinion of how humor works to further or diminish the effectiveness of this message.
B. (Group Work) With your group mates, make a graphic of Min-zhan Lu’s description of her situation and the discourses she moved in and out of. First, discuss and name her home discourses and school discourses. Then add the layers that the political situation in China, and hence in her school, added to her struggle to form her literacy identities. Consider Lu’s description of her various discourses as “tools” and “clothes” to be changed for new situations. How do these metaphors position Lu to the literacies she describes?
C. Individually, summarize the discussion you had making this graphic. In doing this, consider the internal conflict Lu grapples with in trying to form a unified discourse.
D. At the end of the article, Lu discusses the implications she feels her experiences have for the experiences of students in US schools. She writes,
“Beyond the classroom and beyond the limited range of these (U.S.) students’ immediate lives lies a much more complex and dynamic social and historical scene. To help these students become actors in such a scene, perhaps we need to call their attention to voices that may seem irrelevant to the discourse we teach rather than encourage them to shut them out. We might encourage students to explore ways of practicing the conventions of the discourse they are learning by negotiating through these conflicting voices. We could also encourage them to see themselves as responsible for forming or transforming as well as preserving the discourse they are learning” (171).
Explore the idea of allowing more than just the “standard” discourse into the classroom and encouraging students to see themselves as “transformers” of languages and literacies, even educational literacy. You may take this question in any direction you choose.
