Download PDFCase study 2: “I’m so sorry your teachers made you believe you’re a bad writer”
Mario was one of my students in a first-year composition class designated for low-income, historically underrepresented, and first-generation students. In the first week of the class, I assigned a preliminary essay that asked my students to describe their thoughts and feelings surrounding writing. Mario’s essay was written in piles upon piles of run-on sentences, comma after comma after comma. Being a self-identifying Chicano, a second-generation immigrant, and a bilingual Spanish-English speaker, Mario talked about how he believed he was lacking in all the aspects that make up good writing: sophisticated words, well-structured sentences, and perfect grammar and punctuation. He hadn’t been raised in a traditional English-speaking household, and as a child, he’d experienced some delay in developing his verbal language skills. He believed all of these contributed to his less-than-stellar writing skills, an assessment he’d internalized from his former teachers’ comments.
A few weeks after this assignment, I had a one-on-one conference with Mario. In our conversation, I was able to reframe the story that Mario told in his preliminary essay not as signs that he was a student who needed more help than usual, but instead as symptoms of the overzealous adherence to prescriptive grammar and standard academic English that is characteristic of the monolingual language ideology of the Eurocentric university (Canagarajah). My primary goal for the meeting was to let him know that he was a writer with potential, and that his so-called “bad grammar” could also be seen as a talent for rhythm. I copied and pasted the first sentence of his preliminary essay onto a blank Microsoft Word document and explained how, if he’d wanted to be grammatically correct, he shouldn’t have joined three different sentences with only commas, not periods or semicolons. However, the way he wrote the sentence, though grammatically incorrect, was actually more illustrative of the anxious feeling he was trying to describe—the repeated use of commas made him sound breathless and upset. I told him that perhaps he wasn’t bad at grammar—perhaps he just had an ear for rhythm and had simply been composing by ear. I told him, “I’m sorry your teachers made you believe you’re a bad writer.” It pained me to see how much his teacher’s comments had diminished his self-confidence and to realize how his pain could have been avoided. I started crying, perhaps partly because his predicament was something familiar to me, being a multilingual speaker myself. Perhaps moved by my reaction, Mario also started crying.
Critiquing Institutions, Repairing the Self
Like Brenda, Mario’s coming to critical consciousness was also colored by a moment of pain. We did not explicitly talk about why he was moved to tears—in my recollection, I was too preoccupied with emphasizing that he should have more confidence in his potentials as a writer, and he left my office shortly after, looking slightly embarrassed and busy wiping tears from his face. But I also had the impression that the conference ended on a different note compared to my session with Brenda. Mario left my office with his eyes red from crying, but there was also a smile on his face, and the curves of his shoulders spoke of a tension released. In the rest of the quarter, Mario was no longer the timid student he was in the first two weeks of class; instead, he became one of the most active contributors in class discussions. At the end of the quarter, he expressed how much of a difference it made, the confidence he gained after realizing he wasn’t an irredeemably bad writer like he’d been led to believe. Like in my interaction with Brenda, I used my identity as a linguistically and racially marginalized student (which I shared with Mario) to help him consider that the comments he’d received from his previous teachers might have come from an exclusionary language ideology. I myself had struggled as a “non-native” English-speaking international student, but my encounter with translingualism (Horner et al.) in my graduate-level coursework had allowed me to move beyond native speakerism and a deficit framing for myself. In this way, I had successfully re-imagined myself as someone able to negotiate monolinguistic and raciolinguistic ideologies and the constraints they put upon me, that my idiosyncratic use of English was not “mistakes,” but instead a meaningful and agentive engagement with difference. In other words, I had fashioned for myself a translingual identity, and I was then able to use this translingual identity-as-pedagogy (Motha et al.; Zheng) in my interaction with Mario. My awareness of the translingual approach enabled me to help Mario see that approaching his writing with a disposition of openness (instead of uncritical adherence to standard academic English) would reveal potential he hadn’t previously seen in himself as a writer.
But despite similar deployment of identity-as-pedagogy and achievement of critical consciousness, why did my interaction with Brenda end in a negative effect, but the one with Mario ended positively? Looking back, I’m coming to the conclusion that it may have something to do with how I reframed their subjectivities as I nudged them toward criticality. In both situations, my main focus was to critique the Westernized academic institution Mario and Brenda studied and how its pedagogical and linguistic orientations weren’t inclusive enough to help them grow the way they needed to. In Brenda’s case, this institutional critique also inadvertently led her to frame herself negatively—“Was I wrong to come here, then?”—as if the fault lay solely on her for deciding to come to the U.S. for her studies. Unfortunately, I didn’t do enough to intervene in that negative self-framing. I didn’t respond to Brenda’s distressed question about whether she’d made a mistake by coming to the U.S., thus letting her be consumed by self-doubt and self-blaming. Perhaps I could have helped her repair her confidence in what she did, for example, by helping her find other ways to practice communicating to non-academic and non-American audiences, showing her this could still be done as she pursued her graduate studies here. However, I did no such thing; our critique of the monolingual and Western-centric U.S. classroom was the endpoint of our discussion. We only engaged with paranoid reading.
In Mario’s case, however, my critique of the academic institution was also accompanied by a positive reframing of Mario’s self. It was painful for him to consider that he’d been wronged all this time, but the reframing of himself as a writer with potential also gave him confidence and agency to alter his situation. In short, with Mario, I wasn’t only doing a critical/paranoid reading of the Eurocentric and monolingual academic institution; I was also doing a reparative (re)reading of his writing: my reframing of his writer self as one with an ear for rhythm was an act of repair that offset the negative effects of the paranoid reading. The result was that, unlike Brenda, Mario didn’t become disempowered by the awareness of the oppressive structure characterizing the higher education institution he worked in. The fact that he participated in classroom discussions more actively and assumed a more confident writing voice after our conference worked to punctuate how paranoid and reparative reading must go hand in hand. Critical consciousness must be accompanied by active efforts to repair the subjectivities who, through paranoid reading, experience pain from being made more acutely aware of their own oppression. One way to do this is by consciously helping students see themselves not merely as victims of invisible discriminatory structures, but also, most importantly, as capable and resilient people. I had done this with Mario by reframing his “grammar mistakes”—his run-on sentences—as proof that he had an ear for rhythm: he’d subconsciously replicated the breathlessness of anxiety through his use of run-on sentences. This was an example of a reparative practice.