Making Every Body Count: Multicultural Teaching and Autobiographical Journals

Joan Gabriele, University of Colorado, Boulder

A  few years ago I was in a graduate course entitled "American Writers and Radical Education" which was a review of several writers' views on education from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth. Despite attempts by the professor, who wanted to divest himself of authority and offer students the opportunity to restructure the course, there was a great deal of resistance to anything resembling radical education.

One student, however, insisted on disrupting the peaceful conservative ambience of the course by performing different identities throughout the course of the semester. Jim is an out gay activist, artist, writer, and sometimes performance artist who repeatedly brought the radical back to radical education. He introduced us to Go-Go Dancer, a transgender individual in leopardskin, sunglasses and go-go boots who questioned everything. He brought another student named Tim into class. Tim was silent and sullen, wore headphones and read the paper, while the rest of us ironically role-played a class with a teacher who largely ignored Tim's resistant behavior. In fact most of the students--all of whom were future teachers--for the most part ignored the presence of these two students and their performance of transgressive student behavior.

As a teacher myself who is interested in multicultural pedagogy I was, and still am, disturbed by the fact that we can virtually ignore bodies that are sitting right in front of us--bodies that might be called "inappropriate bodies" or bodies that, according to Judith Butler, "don't matter" because they do not fit into signification systems for what constitutes the norm. (2) For it seems to me that, at its core, multicultural education is about coming to terms with the actual multicultural bodies in our classrooms and what that means in terms of the curricula, structures of learning and institutionalized power and privilege as it is manifested in those bodies. My vision of multicultural pedagogy relies on James Banks' conception of multicultural curriculum reform, which comprises four levels:

Level one: The Contributions Approach. Focuses on heroes, holidays, and discrete cultural events.

Level Two: The Additive Approach. Content, concepts, themes, and perspectives are added to the curriculum without changing its structure.

Level Three: The Transformation Approach. The structure of the curriculum is changed to enable students to view concepts, issues, events, and themes from the perspective of diverse ethnic and cultural groups.

Level Four: The Social Action Approach. Students make decisions on important social issues and take actions to help solve them.(3)

Though for more than a decade discussions of diversity and multicultural education have permeated educational rhetoric, these discussions have remained mostly just that: rhetorical. Little change has been made on institutional levels which really addresses the multiple needs of diverse students. In fact, for the most part education remains at Banks' levels one and two of multicultural curriculum reform. In English departments that may mean adding more writers of color, white women and gay/lesbian/bisexual writers to syllabi or to the departments themselves. However, structures of power remain the same; These writers are still taught as if they are marginalized and, needless to say, these faculty are still treated as if they are. For example, my department still offers courses called "Ethnic American Literature," or "Ethnic Women Writers," thus confirming the presumption that there are American writers and then there are Ethnic writers; there are Women and then there are Ethnic women. More often than not these courses are taught by so-called ethnic teachers reinforcing the courses and the teachers as marginal.(4)

While we--and in that I especially include white people like me--must continue to work on structural and institutional change if we are to really achieve something like multicultural education, we can also do a great deal in our own courses to reach levels three and four of Banks' model. What follows from here is my own model of a multicultural curriculum for a Women's Literature course which strives for those levels. The primary tool I offer here is the writing journal, a self-created autobiographical text in which students come to terms themselves with who they are and what that means in the world in which we live. I begin from the assumption that our classrooms are "contact zones," defined by Mary Louise Pratt as

social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.(5)

Working with that assumption means acknowledging the "culture of power" in the classroom--the inequities and asymmetries Pratt refers to--manifested in teachers and students and their relation to educational background, social standing and everyday experience.(6) As educator Lisa Delpit has pointed out, students of color are often aware of and familiar with the culture of power in the classroom. Dominant culture students, on the other hand, usually are not. Autobiographical journals provide a mechanism for working with those knowledges, through the lens of the students' various experiences.

Most of us know that any teaching exchange works best if we recognize the humanity of students and appreciate that they come to our course with vast life experience. Further, students are more invested in learning when the process is filtered through their experience. But, though I encourage students to begin with their selves, I want them to move out from there. I want them to explore their relationship to their families, their chosen discipline as well as the one we are studying, the university, their communities and the world. The journal invites them, to borrow from Sharyn Lowenstein and others, to "engage in larger academic and social conversations . . . to get their work and 'the world's work' done."(7) So, while some of the work in my classes could qualify as consciousness raising, it soon becomes more than that--it becomes consciousness raising in a global context, or what Lowenstein and others call "writing oneself into the community."

Because multicultural teaching requires appreciating and honoring the different ways students learn and communicate, I have come to accept that some students will reject journal-keeping as a learning tool. Nevertheless, I strongly encourage its use, albeit in non-threatening ways. For example, I make the contents of the journal central to the course by asking students to explore issues brought up in the literature in their journals and we frequently begin class with short related writing assignments or by otherwise sharing responses. I also sequence journal assignments so that they require more and more synthesizing as the course progresses. There is a final assignment which asks students to analyze and evaluate their process as outlined in their journal and which asks them to actively engage with the problems they have identified as important to them. Finally, I don't grade, or even collect and read these journals. They are a mechanism for students to learn about themselves and themselves in relation to others. The process of self-knowledge and consciousness-raising which occurs in these journals cannot, and in my opinion, should not, be graded. Rather, I want to see the manifestation of that understanding as it unfolds in discussions of the literature we read. Their identities and experiences should inform these discussions, but not be the focus of them.

bell hooks once said in a talk at my university that she doesn't theorize for tenure; she theorizes for survival. But students must be taught how to theorize. Personal experience, delineated in a journal, is a place to begin that learning to theorize process. According to Alison Jaggar and Paula Rothenberg, theorizing always begins with the personal, though it bridges the personal with the intellectual:

A theory, in the broadest sense, offers a general account of how a range of phenomena are systematically interconnected; by placing individual items in a larger context, it increases our understanding both of the whole and of the parts constituting that whole. Because people always want to make sense of their worlds, for the sake of intellectual satisfaction as well as practical control, every human society develops theories designed to organize reality in ways that make it intelligible.(8)

Journals, then, help students make sense of their worlds. Clearly in order to do that they must transcend the merely autobiographical to grapple with Pratt's "asymmetries of power and legacies of oppression." In my class, we do this by looking at issues of culture, human conditions, love, family, politics and much more.