"Hey" v. "Hello" = Academic v. Colloquial language

Patricia Bizzell states right up front that there is a fissure in the way members of society use language. Jacqueline Royster agrees when she puts up for examination her three insights about language. Insight number one states that "Academic discourse, like all language use, is an invention of a particular social milieu" (Royster 25).

Basically what these two women are saying is that when academics teach language to students, they are teaching something alien. Something that these residents of our classrooms have never encountered: academic discourse. It's a matter of us versus them.
"There is the language, the discourse of academe and there are other languages and discourses that are not academic" (Royster 24). We really are a haughty bunch aren't we?

When I started teaching English 101 approximately, oh 3 weeks ago, give or take a minute or two, and attempted to describe different forms of literacy to my students I got various versions of "literacy is the ability to read and write, and maybe understand the text." I was shocked, but I shouldn't have been. After spending a semester surrounded by the creme de la creme of English academics, I should have expected to be confronted by this (whaddya know?) different form of literacy. We use words like "drastic revision" to describe our students' work. "Whether by intent or by default, we have centralized in our conversations [with other academics] a default view of what can be sanctioned as good writing (as enacted through a traditional view of the freshman essay), a view that has functioned ultimately to tether, rather than enable an evolving discussion" (Royster 24).

This reminds me of my second paper assignment for the classes I teach. So far we've (as a class) discussed what they expect out of an English 101 class and their personal definitions of literacy...of which you heard an aforementioned example. This next essay is about writing from sources, and I gave them Mina Shaughnessy's "Diving In" and Lisa Delpit's "The Silenced Dialogue" to read and pull from. These women offer a position that it is the teachers who ought to be doing the adapting, rather than the student. I wanted to see what they thought of that position. I'll try to keep you updated on those results.

Anyways, what Bizzell and Royster are trying to say is that academe is a "specialized territory," and that those outside of it don't understand those inside (Royster 23). They encourage us to work for change, to work for a blending or at least slight cohesion in different types of discourses; to make academic discourse at least a teensy tiny bit more accessible.

We can try.

Alternate Dicourses - I'm not sure how to tell my students it's OKAY

Sorry I took the deadline for this post down to the wire... Lost track of time. This is first class I've taken in graduate school to attempt to explain to me the overall use of alternate discourses in academia. While I'd been exposed to the idea before, but I'd never tried to convey it to someone else, as a teacher does for a student.
When I tried to explain something like different types of literacies to my first-year-comp students, they looked at me like I was crazy. Because I couldn't find a way to even explain the definition of the alternate discourse concept, I could not find a way to incorporate it into my teaching style. They've been exposed to the traditional model for so long, that Bizzell's idea of different discourses in the teaching of writing/composition is alien to them, and to be honest, not a little alien to me as well.
She (Bizzell) sees traditional academic discourse as a way of promoting hegemony in the classroom. If traditional methods use language that comforts white, male, middle class students, she encourages us to challenge our students into stepping outside their boundaries. (Hybrid 11)
After she quoted Dr. Villanueva, I automatically thought of something Dr. Eddy spoke on when he described alternated forms of the English language and how putting slang, other languages, and personal narrative, etc. into academic texts was a form of hybrid discourse.
I do have to agree with Bizzell's thoughts on eeveloping a curriculum that uses alternative/ hybrid discourses, but wasn't sure how to go about that in the FYC classroom. The majority of the students I'm teaching are fresh out of the high school English classroom. Maybe they took AP or Honors English but the University comp program is still unfamiliar to them.
In reading Bizzell's "Basic Writing" I couldn't help but think about how many papers I have read in the Writing Center over the last 3.5 years. Students come in every day with assignments insisting they have to write it the professor's way or their grade suffers. My job at the writing center as a tutor is to help them do that in the most efficient/painless way possible. Most professor's in other fields aren't (in my experience) open to alternative discourses in the classroom. Traditional is the least "messy." If I could tell just one student to step across that traditional/ alternative discourse line, I wonder what they would come up with?
As a teacher I have to try to find a way to teach students what they need to know to survive their other college writing, but expand their idea of discourse/ literacy beyond what they know. By allowing them to keep their writing style, I think they can create a new niche for themselves in academia. We have certain standards for how we critique college writing and they'll have to live up to that, but it doesn't mean they have to lose their voices.

Mary Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone" got me thinking as to exactly how limited my experience with this type of rhetoric I was. When her son, Sam, was learning how to say the name Carl Yastremski, I was reminded of the times I've had to call out names during attendance and butchered them. His first-grade antics were reminiscint of my limited literacy with cultures different from my own.

On page 582, Pratt defines "contact zones" as "the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict..." (582).

While I'm not sure coercion is involved to any measurable degree, I can say there is a definite degree of inequality between myself and the students I teach.

Like Guaman Poma, who used Quechua and ungrammatical Spanish in his New Chronicle, my students aren't always comfortable crossing that zone to create a message I am able to understand. In their eyes, I'm the Spanish: the one in charge of the situation.

Pratt uses a variety of examples of contact zones across literacies, but it was Robert Kaplan in his article "What in the World Is Contrastive Rhetoric?" that got me to reconsider what questions I was aking of my students and the different way they might answer them.

I might not be able to pronounce their names at the beginning, but to create a successful contact zone, the classroom must be a safe place where they can answer Kaplan's five questions.

1: What may be discussed?

2: Who has the authority to speak/write? Or: Who has the authority to write to whom under what circumstances?

3: What form(s) may the writing take?

4: What is evidence?

5: What arrangement of evidence is likely to appeal (be convincing) to the readers?

Kaplan states that for the "individual who does not participate in the monolingual, monocultural assumptions that dominate the composition classroom" these questions are terrible, because the answers might not be the right ones.

And each student must learn this for themselves, and the teacher has to be open to connecting with students for that to occur. The students will answer each question individually and each will be different than the student next to him/her. The classroom is a contact zone in a way that a tourist stop is...

After a limited time you never see these people again, but you have a drastic affect on the further actions of the people you are immersed in the contact zone with. So pay attention to each face and interaction.