Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone: Min-Zhan Lu
Two concerns: 1) sense of division between the ways in which many of us approach style in theory and in our teaching practices 2) division many of us feel between the role as composition teachers and the role we play as students, teachers, scholars in other, supposedly more central areas of English Studies
What are “real” writers?
historical power of this kind of division:
Early 1900’s, suggest that ethnic and educational backgrounds were two common denominators for determining whether style represented self-conscious and innovative experimentation or blundering "errors
more and more English courses are now informed by a view of language as a site of struggle among conflicting discourses with unequal socio-political
dialogically coordinate the profound heteroglossia within and outside official "educated" discourse
writers' need and right to contest the unifying force of hegemonic discourse
why do we assume-as Dreise-one's ability to produce "error-free" prose innovative "style"?
A common view of "style" as belonging only to those who are beyond "error," and a certain type of college curriculum treating matters of grammar or usage as the prerequisites to higher education, seem mutually reinforcing
one way of helping students to deal w frustration would be to connect their "difficulties" with the refusal of
"real" writers to reproduce the hegemonic conventions of written English
this will not take place until teachers contest the distinction between "real" and "student" writers and stop treating the idiosyncratic style of the not yet "perfectly educated" solely in terms of "error
apply a multicultural approach to student writing: views the classroom as a potential "contact zone"-which Pratt describes as a space where various cultures "clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power"
acknowledges the writer's right and ability to experiment with innovative ways of deploying the codes taught in the classroom
broadens students' sense of the range of options and choices facing a writer
Beyond Internationalization: Multicultural Education in the Professional Writing Contact Zone: Laurie Grobman
To bridge the gap between composition and professional communication studies, should add multiculturalism to the already widely accepted international perspective in professional communication instruction: could thus transform the professional communication classroom into a contact zone
complex relationship between language and ideology and the underlying forces that shape and reflect the ways we use language
provides students with the linguistic, intellectual, and moral tools for resisting what Richard Miller calls the “cultural commonplaces” that lead to fear and prejudices
although internationalization underscores the limitations of instrumental views of writing and transforms the professional comm classroom into a social arena, multiculturalism reframes it by bringing politics into pedagogy
argue that although multiculturalism in professional comm aligns it with composition studies, it also brings a range of pedagogical, practical, and ethical challenges similar to those faced by composition instructors
can teach students the skills they need to participate in academic and professional communities upon graduation while simultaneously providing the skills necessary to enable them to become agents of change where they see the need
multiculturalism in comp studies fulfills this objective because it has the potential to enlarge students’ awareness of cultural difference and social/political inequalities without imposing a critique of corporate capitalism itself on students whose freedom to resist must be respected