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The Multilingual Writing Classroom: A Contact Zone
Negotiating Literate Identities in the Contact Zone
Contact Zone-Based Composition Pedagogy
Negotiating Literate Identities in the Contact Zone
Identity and literacy are clearly connected and co-constitutive" (Descourtis et al. 35, in Viera et al.). In order to create praxis from contact zone theory, we must understand how multilingual students co-construct their identities and literacies. Writing assignments must be curated to support the identity exploration happening through the practice of writing in a contact zone. Ana Ferreira and Belinda Mendelowitz offer a strong summary definition of identity:
By identity, we do not mean a unified, stable and autonomous sense of self but rather we conceive of identity as socially located and shaped by discourse. Identity is therefore about an ongoing process of becoming (Hall, 1996), where one is actively engaged in negotiating the multiple and often contradictory subject positions made available by the discourses, or ways of being, thinking and producing meaning, that operate in particular spaces (Gee, 1996). (58)
The contact zone encourages the exploration of different identities through literacy practices, emphasizing that individuals’ social location and discourses impact their access to and membership in certain discourse communities (Gee 6). Thus, identity negotiation becomes a focal point of the class.
Since discussions of identity and interacting with different people’s identities may cause students’ identities to evolve, students can struggle with self-identification. In addition to internal struggles, outside forces may further influence students’ feeling of unknowing of themselves. Min-Zhan Lu includes these as some of the voices that collide in a contact zone: the student’s voice, outside resources’ voices, native speakers’ voices, and the teacher’s voice (478-479). Students consequently face many pressures when trying to find their identity in the multilingual composition classroom (Lu 482; Voeste 217). Richard E. Miller refers to the “matrix” of identities colliding in the classroom and explains that the contact zone will only be powerful “so long as it involves resisting the temptation either to silence or to celebrate the voices that seek to oppose, critique, and/or parody the work of constructing knowledge in the classroom” (144). Therefore, an important part of identity development is allowing time for cultural mediation (Pratt 40; McCook) and not overlooking students’ dialogical nature (Lu 473). As such, teachers should collaborate with their students to make this matrix a safe space that supports individuals’ mediation, though this process may not be easy.
Identity development requires a great deal of negotiation. While the perspectives students bring into the classroom are important and influential in the negotiation process, they are but one voice in a conversation of many. Students therefore must make choices based not only on their own opinions but also those of others that they encounter in the writing classroom. Class activities like peer workshopping, small group work, and large group discussions promote student exchange. By interacting with others and reading outside texts, the contact zone becomes a market of perspectives where students move through a continuum of different experiences. Here, they can self-reflect from different vantage points found in the contact zone and thus negotiate their identity (Ferreira and Mendelowitz 56). This process is a constant pushing and pulling as students negotiate who they want to be (Beauvais 34), which can be supported as students revise multiple drafts, compose reflections, and design summative projects. The identity that results can be a productive, hybrid, chosen one that allows students greater awareness and advanced intercultural communication competencies (Canagarajah 87; Bizzell 51).
This negotiation process is conducted neither quickly nor easily. While the above-described productive, hybrid, chosen identity of a student capable of handling differences is a desired one, it can also feel like an idealistic one. Lu reminds us that the seemingly simplest details like native language or skin color can affect how identities are perceived and portrayed in a multilingual contact zone (481). Pratt, after describing some of the benefits of the contact zone, divulges its liabilities, such as miscomprehension or heterogeneity (37). In such a transnational, multilingual environment, students who may have previously had a strong sense of identity may feel unstable or unsettled with their changing knowledge. Even in a contact-zone-based classroom that focuses on eradicating power differences, different students will maintain different levels of authority (Pratt 38; Voeste 204; Canagarajah 85-86). Students will likely feel resistance to different ideas, especially if they perceive their own ideas as not being heard or valued (Gottschalk 63).
The response to these challenges, however, is what can make a contact zone-based classroom stronger than one that does not employ the ideology. Educators are encouraged “to recognize and take advantage of clashes between differing cultures, values, and disciplines” (Gottschalk 63), attend “to the writer’s effort to look at one discourse through the eyes of another” (Lu 470), and acknowledge writers’ rights and abilities (Lu 482; Miller 140). These tasks require a great deal of emotional and psychological labor for teachers, though. Supporting students’ development of metacognition and socio-linguistic, -cultural, and -political awareness in the contact zone is an ongoing, challenging process.
Writing teachers who have employed contact zone-based pedagogy remark that it was the most difficult teaching they have ever done, but also the most rewarding. Lu (482) comments on sociopolitical inequities that arose within her classroom, but concludes with the positive statement that contact zone-rooted pedagogy acknowledged the writers’ rights, which helped ameliorate discrimination. Pratt (39) also categorizes her contact zones as challenging for her students and herself as the teacher because when speaking about personal opinions of potentially polarizing topics, no one knew how their stances would be perceived. This diversity of thought, though, made for engaged, exciting dialogue. Success stories such as these reinforce the value of the contact zone.