Download PDFCase study 1: “Was I wrong to come here, then?”
My concern with the identity work, pedagogy, and critical consciousness began with my interaction with a research participant in my IRB-approved dissertation study, which looks into the knowledge-making practice of transnational graduate students. One of the participants in that study, Brenda, who was a graduate student from Indonesia, discussed with me an op-ed she wrote for an assignment in her health communication class. In that discussion, I positioned myself both as a researcher and informal writing teacher, trying to understand Brenda’s transnational writing practices while also—as a form of mutual benefit and reciprocity—helping her polish her assignment. As I am an Indonesian who, like Brenda, traveled from Indonesia to an R1 university in the U.S. Pacific Northwest for my graduate studies, I came to realize how much these shared geopolitical and identity backgrounds became resources for me to help her approach her writing more critically.
Brenda’s professor asked the students to write an op-ed on a health issue of their own choosing, for an audience of their own choosing. Some students in the class, including Brenda, came from outside the U.S. and planned to return for jobs in their home countries after completing their studies. Brenda decided to write her op-ed on the issue of stunting—malnourishment resulting in impaired growth and development—in East Nusa Tenggara, an archipelagic province in eastern Indonesia. Arguing that the government needed to more closely engage village midwives to solve stunting in East Nusa Tenggara, Brenda addressed her op-ed to village heads in the province. She wrote it in standard academic English, a choice the professor did not remark on.
Because I, as a fellow Indonesian, knew that people in Nusa Tenggara spoke Bahasa Indonesia and around 70 other ethnic languages, I questioned Brenda’s choice to write the op-ed in standard academic English. I sensed that English was not a widely spoken language on the eastern islands, and so, a more effective form of communication probably necessitates a consideration of other languages more widely known among audiences in Nusa Tenggara, as well as how some arguments would need to be constructed differently in those other languages. Brenda acknowledged that she probably should’ve used a language closer to the East Nusa Tenggara people if she were communicating with the village heads. Still, she got “carried away” by the academic environment of the class: she was writing within the social and physical setting of a U.S. university, and she associated such a setting with standard academic English. She assumed that the professor expected the writing to still “sound professional,” like any other assignment in the university context. Because this was still a graded assignment, she then felt the “pressure to show off,” to impress the professor and get a good grade, and the only way to impress the professor was by showing mastery of standard academic English, which she presumed to be the language most valued by the institution she physically existed in.
To this, I said, “But doesn’t that mean you’ll always write in academic English for as long as you’re here [in this university]?” Brenda responded, “Yes, I feel this dilemma sometimes. I feel like I need to consider how to connect what I learn here to my community back home. I always want what I learn here to be applicable back home, but we speak a different language.” In what seemed like an effort to justify her studies to herself, she then said that at least she could still learn analytical skills and communication frameworks here, even if she couldn’t practice applying them to the people she cared about. I pointed out how it was a shame that her American classmates could practice all these skills—both analytical and communicative skills—in the class, but she couldn’t. A little distressed, she said, “Was I wrong to come here, then?” Before our conversation, she had been sure that studying at a U.S. university was the best way to hone the skills she needed to solve problems back home, but now she wasn’t so sure anymore.
Performance of Identity-as-Pedagogy Toward Critical Consciousness
I performed the aforementioned critical questioning with Brenda because my dissertation research took a decolonial approach to the study of transnational composition in order to critique the global nature of Western epistemic coloniality. I wanted to think with Brenda1 about how her desire to study in the U.S. was influenced by the myth of the superiority of Western education (Cupples and Grosfoguel) and how knowledge produced in Western institutions is often automatically regarded as rigorous, universal, and applicable anywhere in the world (Mignolo; Alatas; Kubota). Through our conversation, Brenda was then able to start questioning if her assumption on applicability was indeed correct and realize that the American education she regarded so highly might be too Western-centered and monolingual (Schroeder et al.; García and Baca; Matsuda) to allow her to produce knowledge and intervention that center her community back home.
I was able to start this dialogue towards a critical consciousness because of my scholarly training in epistemic decoloniality, but perhaps more importantly, because of our shared backgrounds. Being from the same geopolitical region, I knew enough about the characteristics of the people in East Nusa Tenggara. Furthermore, because I was also an international graduate student (and one who had spent a few more years in the U.S. compared to her), I had some experience of a similar mismatch between Western-centered pedagogy and the non-Western context I came from, which alerted me to the possibility that something similar was happening with Brenda. Our shared geopolitical and biographical backgrounds also enabled me to build a good rapport with Brenda, which I believed was why we were able to have an open and vulnerable conversation.
Here, I was essentially doing what Brian Morgan calls teacher identity as pedagogy, which is a “strategic performance of a teacher’s identity in ways that counteract stereotypes held by a particular group of students” (172). Drawing from the work of Cummins, Morgan argues that “cognitive development and academic achievement are inseparable from teacher-student identity negotiation” (175) that happens in the interactions between teachers and students because these “micro-interactions between educators, students and communities are never neutral; in varying degrees, they either reinforce coercive relations of power or collaborative relations of power” (Cummins, as quoted in Morgan 176). Importantly, in this specific pedagogical context, this identity performance and negotiation happened around—or was prompted by—a piece of writing, the writing process behind it, and the knowledge production they entail. This follows Ellen Cushman’s assertion that “language [and writing] provides a connection to identity and being in the world” (234), and engaging with it critically can “hasten the process of revealing and potentially transforming colonial matrices of power that maintain hierarchies” (235) of languages, knowledges, and beings.
When discussing teacher identity-as-pedagogy, I do not regard identity as merely static labels. Instead, I think of identity in relation to the necessity of unsettling the long-held belief in the objectivity and universality of (Western) knowledge. In lieu of universality, decolonial theorists insist on framing knowledge production in terms of geopolitics of knowledge and body-politics of knowledge. The geopolitics of knowledge can be simply captured by the expression “I am where I think and do” (Mignolo xvi), which troubles the universality of knowledge by highlighting that knowledge is always produced in local histories, anchored in particular locations, a product of its context. The body-politics of knowledge encapsulates “the biographic configuration of gender, religion, class, ethnicity, and language” (Mignolo 9) of the knowledge producer, highlighting the subjectivity of knowledge and how knowledge is always shaped by the perspective and lived experiences afforded by the knower’s body and position in society. In the context of epistemic decoloniality, the concepts of geo- and body-politics of knowledge are meant to counter white Eurocentric normativity in knowledge production, emphasizing that knowledge is not neutrally produced from an omniscient perspective, but instead comes from particular locations and bodies. These concepts thus enable the centering of the “responses, thinking, and action” (Mignolo xxii) of populations struggling against oppression, as well as affirmation of the knowledge-making done by bodies that are seen by white Eurocentric normativity as less capable of thinking. The two concepts, geo- and body-politics of knowledge, undergird decolonial thinking because “the imperial classification and ranking of regions (for example, developed/underdeveloped or First/Second/Third Worlds…) goes hand in hand with classification and ranking of people (for example, civilized/barbarians … black, yellow, brown, white…etc.)” (Mignolo xxi—xxii), and, therefore, any approach to knowledge-making needs to critically consider this classification and ranking of locations and bodies.
My awareness of the geopolitics of knowledge (I came from Indonesia; this is a university in the U.S.) and body-politics of knowledge (I am a brown Indonesian woman whose mother tongue is Indonesian) made up my performance of identity-as-pedagogy. It enabled me to question how differences in locations and bodies being centered in pedagogies and acts of communication can fundamentally shift the knowledge and writing being produced. Because of that, I was able to communicate how it mattered that Brenda wanted to center the East Nusa Tenggara people in her imagined communicative act. Still, her U.S. university classroom implicitly centered English-speaking Westerners, and thus wasn’t doing enough to help Brenda shape her writing in ways truer to her intended geo- and body-political knowledge-making. Importantly, I suspect this critical questioning wouldn’t have happened—or been received so earnestly by Brenda—had it not been for my position as an international GTA. As an international GTA, at that time, I was holding together lives as both a student and teacher who traversed geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and epistemic borders between unequal locations: Indonesia (a non-Western, Global South, Third World location) and the U.S. academia (a Western, Global North, First World location). Being a student, I had first-hand experience of the negative consequences of Western-centrism on the learning process of students who didn’t come from the same location and rhetorical tradition (Prihandita). Being concurrently a teacher, I was able to use the insights I gained as a student in my own teaching, helping my students/tutees to reach the same critical consciousness I had come to in my own learning experience as an international student.
While studies on international GTAs have often focused on the struggles they face (e.g., Jenkins; Subtirelu; Collins), my critical awareness of geo- and body-politics of knowledge and my use of those in identity-as-pedagogy attest to a strength that international GTAs can bring to their teaching. It is precisely their experience of differences in language, geopolitical locations, and body-political identity that sensitizes them to inequalities in education, knowledge production, and writing. In turn, they become well-positioned to teach their students about this in an attempt to foster critical consciousness.
Negative Affect as a Consequence of Critical Consciousness
The section above describes the identity work that enabled teacher-student interactions working toward a critical consciousness that troubles both Western-centrism in education and the monolingual language ideology in writing. But another thing that struck me about my interaction with Brenda was the affective consequences of such critical consciousness. Toward the end of our critical questioning of whether or not her participation in the U.S. university course had enabled her to better communicate with the Indonesian community she cared about, Brenda’s eventual response was a question uttered in distress, “Was I wrong to come here, then?” This utterance hinted at palpable self-doubt and fear that she had wasted time, money, and energy in pursuing graduate studies in the U.S., that her hope in gaining better skills to improve her community back home was wrongly placed. It was a moment of disillusionment that was, at the same time, a process of gaining awareness that education was not a one-size-fits-all solution and that U.S. education may not be a universal solution to problems elsewhere. While this awareness might be a good thing, it also affected her personally: if the American dream was wrong, then she was wrong in following it.
This attuned me to the fact that achieving critical consciousness could come with a side-effect: pain, discomfort, disempowerment, and other negative effects. “Reading the world” may be necessary for education as a practice of freedom, but “reading the world” can be profoundly uncomfortable if it’s a world that marginalizes you. Eve Kosofski Sedgwick brings up this question of negative effects in her unsettling of “paranoid reading” as the valorized mode of academic knowledge production. What she means by paranoid reading is similar to what Paul Ricoeur calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” whose stance is that “the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation hidden-shown” (Ricoeur, as cited in Sedgwick 125). Thus, paranoid reading is a reading practice oriented toward unearthing and demystifying processes that are otherwise invisibilized or not obvious—including, for example, reading the world critically to articulate its underlying systems of oppression. What I did with Brenda was essentially paranoid reading: our discussion was grounded in paranoia directed at U.S. higher education and its Eurocentric and monolingual pedagogies, with the goal of finding faults within it—a goal that we achieved.
One characteristic of paranoid reading that Sedgwick problematizes is, indeed, that it is a “theory of negative affect.” In a paranoid reading, one’s motivation is “the forestalling of pain” (Sedgwick 14); one demystifies systems of oppression in the hope that a better understanding of how these systems work will help stop the pain they cause. This becomes a problem when paranoid reading—in other words, a stance of criticality—is taken as the most rigorous method of knowledge-making and apprehension of reality. Sedgwick is concerned that this “monopolistic strategy of anticipating negative affect can have … the effect of entirely blocking the potentially operative goal of seeking positive affect” (136). As Brenda showed, the effect can be paralyzing: she became overwhelmed by the critical/paranoid reading of her world in the U.S. university where she was studying. Critical consciousness did not immediately entail the capacity to change her situation to something more enabling; in fact, the more aware she was of the marginalization she experienced, the more disempowered she felt. It seems like there needs to be something more, something other than paranoid reading and its critical stance, to offset any paralyzing negative effects that result from critical consciousness.
Luckily, Sedgwick’s critique of paranoid reading functions to situate it as only “one kind of epistemological practice among other, alternative ones” (128). To correct the monopoly of paranoid reading, she draws attention to “reparative reading,” which stands in diametrical opposition to paranoid reading by setting as its goal the “seeking of pleasure” (137). To read reparatively means to look at an object—one that may seem broken, especially when viewed paranoidly—in search of ways that it can also “offer one nourishment and comfort in return” (128). The reparative position aims to “[extract] sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150–151). This made me think that perhaps one mistake I made in my one-on-one interaction with Brenda was that in focusing too much on paranoid reading and critical consciousness, we weren’t attentive to the possible reparative practices we could’ve done together.
How, then, do we teach students to repair? How could I have handled this interaction differently? Posing this question makes me think of another memorable teacher-student interaction I had, long before my conversation with Brenda. At that time, I wasn’t yet thinking about the necessity of reparative reading alongside paranoid reading, but looking back, I was already doing one thing to ensure a critical consciousness wouldn’t merely result in paralyzing, negative feelings of disempowerment. In the next section, I will recount a one-on-one conference with Mario, a student in a first-year composition class I taught four years before I met Brenda. In that conference session, I wasn’t only using paranoid reading to help Mario be more aware of how monolingualism had negatively affected his educational experience; I also made use of a reparative practice by re-reading Mario’s “grammar mistakes” as examples of an agentive and skillful translingual practice. This conference session with Mario thus demonstrates how paranoid and reparative reading can go hand in hand to foster critical consciousness and soften any negative affective consequences that may result from it.
[1] This is a pseudonym.