Friday, March 2, 2007

Accidental Alienation

Was it just me or did anyone else find it painful to read, in "Resisting Privilege," Gail Stygall’s grad student’s excerpted letters to the so-called basic writers—especially given the nature of the course and the assignment? Perhaps I wouldn’t have reacted in the manner that I did if I had been unclear about whether or not the grad students had been kept in the dark, if you will, regarding the assignment’s intent. But Stygall clearly states that her "students knew that part of their task was to try to understand what being labeled ‘basic’ meant to Anderson’s students and what their lives were like at a large urban university" (191). Just to be clear, I don’t mean to unduly criticize the grad students or their efforts since I don’t believe that any of them were acting with any sort of malicious intent. On the contrary, I feel confident they were attempting to do only exactly what they’d been instructed to do and that they were operating as such with only the best intentions. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel that at times there was an underlying sense of condescension (albeit unintentional) and/or trepidation on the part of the grad students, as if they were not quite sure how best to engage with this type of student (i.e. "basic" or "Other" or "outsider," etc.). Thus they determined to err, perhaps unconsciously, on the side of being "nice" (for lack of a better term right now). This is not to suggest that they should have been anything but nice; but rather that they were perhaps overcompensating for an internalized perception of a distance between themselves and their addressees. Maybe I’m only sensitive to this element because of my limited volunteer experience working with inner-city youths in St. Louis and eventually realizing that I was unconsciously overcompensating with them in this very way. By doing so I was, in effect, perpetuating the very "distance" that I was trying to bridge because they were acutely, if not always consciously, sensitive to the subtle differences in the way I behaved toward them compared to other peers or acquaintances. Despite my best intentions, then, they were put off by a pretense I wasn’t then aware of even demonstrating. Once I figured this out and dropped the pretense I was dramatically more successful in engaging with them. Anyway, all this just to say that when working with any marginalized group, be it a class of "basic writers" or otherwise, we need to be careful not to further alienate them by accidentally overcompensating for any perceived distances or differences, no matter how good our intentions.

Stygall, Gail. "Resisting Privilege: Basic Writing and Foucalt's Author Function." Landmark Essays 185-203.

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