Technology in Education

This post has nothing to do with our reading. It is instead about our presentations and what I learned. I had a lot of fun during our presentations and thank you to all that brought all the goodies-I was wired all week. I must admit that when I realized that we had to maintain a blog I was apprehensive, to say the least, because I did not feel confident in using technology. And then when we were given our presentation assignment and had to use technology I became more afraid. But when Gina presented and she did her video I felt sort of relaxed; it was short, to the point and was interesting and much more important, it seemed easy. Well, I went home and decided to make a film (thanks for the inspiration Gina). I learned how to use my webcam (but unfortunately did not learn how to use the audio) and got to work. I had a lot of fun making the video and kept wanting to add more stuff to it but that would have been to wild; to much MELUS to handle.

The journal itself was very eye opening. Like mentioned in my presentation I had never considered Anzaldua's borderland theory to apply to anything but Chicano/a culture, even though her definition addresses that blending of cultures. And so while reading the articles I was surprised by how much her work was cited in article after article. One article that was eye opening was “Charting the Past and Present: Iranian Immigrant and Ethnic Experience through Poetry” by Peris M. Karim.

This article is about Iranian poetry and how it relates to Iranian identity in the United States. It is a perfect example of living on the border. The author describes how the Iranian community felt they had to change their identity after the hostage event of 1978 (I think). They went from being proud of being Iranian to calling themselves Persian and then having to deal with the consequences.

Using the webcam and learning about border identity applied to different cultures, made the presentation easier.


I have attached the puppet presentation that started it all.

Text vs. Document

"To find flesh and blood is the ultimate purpose of reading and its sophisticated partner, interpretation."(McGann 161)

What caught me by surprise in this essay was mostly the first section of the "document", to take from Jerome McGann, in which, as demonstrated in the quote above, he requires finding life, literally, as part of the process of interpretation of a document.

He separates text from document and makes a strict and important distinction by stating, "For unlike texts, documents in fact do often have real holes in them, or are otherwise marked by marks of their actual historical passage (161)." McGann proposes that in order to be able to fully interpret a text, we must first see it as a document; recognize it's history, who wrote it, why it was written and what the physical journey of that document has been in order to interpret it.

As students of English literature we are asked to separate the speaker or narrator from the text, that this will not assist in interpretation. However, relating writer to narrative or in this case scholarly work, I have always argued, and in accordance to McGann is necessary for an accurate, or accurate as can be interpretation.

Because documents are not simply print words; at a specific moment in time, in a particular part of the country or planet, there was actually someone thinking, at a desk or some other physical place, about what to write, and more importantly why or for what purpose to write and probably thinking about a specific audience. All these components separate a text, a bloodless fleshless artifact, from a living breathing document. McGann goes on to explain his reasons for wanting to know answers to the above questions,

Because interpretation is a social act --a specific deed of critical reflection made in a concert of related moves and frames of reference (social, political, institutional) that constitute the present as an interpreted inheritance from a past that has been fashioned by other interpreting (161)

I completely agree with him.

Homework Assignment

In this week's episode of English 609 we found ourselves doing page upon page of homework using the trusty "They Say/I Say". Granted I was first thinking, "Why" but when I actually sat down to do it I found it rather helpful. I, like a few other students, wait a little to close to the deadline to finish my assignments, but this assignment actually gave me a head start.



My final project will have to do with identity, voice, language and cultural borders that are constructed or addressed in young adult Chicano/a/Latino/Hispanic literature. In having to put together a works cited list I went through and looked at what I was most likely to use and then found some essays that would support my argument. The two essays I choose were "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" by Gloria Anzaldua, and "When I was a Young Soldier in the Revolution" by Bell Hooks. These were the two essays that I used for the They Say/I Say assignment.



Graff and Bikenstein offer many options for templates, some better than others, and some that are easily restructured to use in our writing. The quote introduction seemed a little, "I know how to do that", but what I really found helpful and useful were the quote commenting, agreement and disagreement. The disagreement in particular helped me look at the two essays and question what it was I was agreeing with and how that would fit into my argument.

There was I point that I thought to myself, "How can I disagree with Gloria Anzaldua, I mean it is Gloria Anzaldua, she is the reason I have questions about borders to begin with," but forcing myself to disagree brought more understanding.

Bilingualism

"And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife...And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life" ("Art" 12). The idea that habit is the death of life and that art has the ability to bring you back, to awaken senses you thought were gone or had forgotten you had, rings true more often than not.

Doris Sommer address bilingualism as having more possibilities of understanding different worlds and being more creative than being monolingual. Johann Herder argues that "Human spirit...thrived on one vernacular per person and would not tolerate the foreign contamination" (Sommer 5). In other words one language per person, per nation. This makes for a very boring world, not to mention the inability to communicate, interact or learn from different cultures and peoples. Without bilingualism or polylinguasim we let the door open for fascism, as Sommer suggests "Nazism is a glaring example of the conflation of a particular people and a political state" (5).

Working in public education I see this debate on a daily basis. They (bilingual students) need to speak only English. They are in America, so they need to assimilate. There is always a feeling of them vs. us and if they don't assimilate then they are seen as threat and definitely unpatriotic. I don't believe this is the case and tend to lean toward Sommer's perspective that being bilingual allows you to see the world through different lenses.

For example, Sommer talks about code switching, switching in and out of a language something (as far as I know) only those who are bilingual are able to do, and mentions Drown, by Junot Diaz (a great collection if you haven't read it) and Gloria Anzaldua. Both writers address the idea of being bilingual as living in to different places. To Anzaldua this is the "borderlands or Nepantla". A place where there is a linguistic and cultural border; here you must be at least bilingual in order to survive or be accepted. This could be seen as problematic becasue it creates a case of insider vs. outsider, where of course those who are bilingual are in the favorable position and I could see why those who are monolingual could feel threatened.

But still...

Being able to step in and out of languages enables the speaker to shift and understand different realities that those who are monolingual could ignore or see as separate or not of their concern. I think of the example I have of teachers who believe that because students live in America that their main concern should be with English and that Spanish should not be in their world. These teachers, being monolingual and irrational, ignore that perhaps their students reality outside of school is in Spanish or Spanglish and because that is not how they see the world are quick to disregard their students other language as unimportant and not American, regardless if the child is American or not.