Issues of Race, Class, Culture, Sexuality, and Gender

Pam Takayoshi
Jeff Grabill
Samantha Blackmon
Jonathan Alexander

Some of the recommended texts:

When Race Breaks Out

Social Change In Diverse Teaching Contexts : Touchy Subjects And Routine Practices by Nancy G. Barron, Nancy M. Grimm, Sibylle Gruber, Editors.

My notes are a little sketchy, but below is some of what we talked about:

Jonathan: When filling out profiles online (e.g. at facebook) and you have to choose a gender, it says something about how our culture enforces representing as a particular gender. However, it is possible at facebook to select interest in either or both male and female.

Gail: academic culture is largely heteronormative and facebook may reinforce heteronormative ideals. However, Heidi McKee said that some of her students are identifying as the other gender in facebook, but then it can be just an island of queer space.

Pam: referred to Gunther Kress and Theo vanLeeuwen’s text, Mutimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, and said, the issues of difference need to start at the level of discourse, not at the level of just design and choosing an image that represents other than a white woman.

Dickie: all primary and secondary teachers have done multimodal texts…so why are we in higher ed not as interested, or thinking about it differently?

Samatha: issues of difference are a vicious circle because if kids are not in technology-rich schools at a young age, then even when they get to schools with more resources, then they might not choose to use digital media because they haven’t been exposed to it much in the past.

Mary: there is a lot of redefining going on to redefine “serious” scholarship to accommodate new media texts.

We try and make our classrooms safe places for students so they will take risks, but are our classrooms safe places?

Scott: Students can be in labs at night and it could be a risky space.

Cindy: Often our students will tell us if they don’t feel safe. Ask them and they’ll tell us.

Gail: We can feel safe physically, but not necessarily safe representing difference.

Jason: How do we get our students to talk about audience issues about difference?

Pam: maybe we can get them to talk about non-academic texts as a way into this conversation. IM…how do students make rhetorical choices here that we want them to make?

Sam: generically as English teachers we may have done our jobs too well that we’ve taught students what is ok to right.

If a student writes a 47 single-spaced page story related to a game that he didn’t feel right playing or writing about during the semester even when he was taking a class about gaming, then what is going on?

Jeff: The online multimedia world is one that our students inhabit. We’ve done a lot of hand wringing, and maybe we needed to do that, but maybe we need to get beyond that…

Jonathan: Having students understand issues of difference enable richer rhetorical moves…

Ok, and let me just say…Cindy and Scott said at the beginning that here at DMAC we are on a first name basis, but with so many big names in the room, I feel a little uncomfortable referring to them just by their first names here in my notes, but I’m not going to go back and edit them now for lack of time. I hope no one takes offense, and btw, this issue that I’m feeling raises another issue of difference — the one between faculty and students and issues of culture. At different uni’s, the culture will be different.