Name: Petros Tedla
Class: FYW: Writing Seminar
In "Home and Away: The Tensions of Community, Literacy, and Identity," which appeared in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Bronwyn T. Williams writes to writing teachers so that they tolerate diversity, background and culture in the classroom. In order to achieve this aim, he uses 3 moves: factual evidence, quotes from experts, and logical organization.
As an introduction, Williams uses his life experience of being raised by a middle class family. He starts the article with his life as a middle class person who was surrounded by a family of intellectuals. Using anecdotes to gain credibility. His childhood, filled with arguments and influences by his family, teachers and professors and
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Surroundings of writing material made his educational journey a rather smooth one. A journey he compares to “as a person growing up on a beach would be at swimming.” (Williams, page 343). His father, son of a coal miner in a small town, sacrificed his relationship with his family to become a middle class scholar. After he went to college, his ideas were different than his family. He also mentions his surprise when he saw other families were not debating on the dining table. Although he was raised in middle class white teachers, he sympathizes with other students who experience differences between what they learned in their communities and in literacy education. He claims that literacy is more than writing and analyzing, saying “if it is shaped by culture and context, then the cultures and contexts we inhabit in our lives outside of the classroom will necessarily influence the way we approach literacy practices in school.”(Williams, page 343). Williams reminisces the experience of a student from his colleague’s class with a background that took class discussions and review in a personal way based on her experience with her family members and community. Williams mentions this to …show more content…
He extends his claim by defining more terms mentioned by Gee, such as Primary and Secondary discourse. Primary discourses are characteristics of our core identity and Secondary discourses are what we acquire throughout our lifetimes (p. 343). Rather than experience and anecdotes, Williams switches to his scholar side and starts mentioning terms defined by famous authors who have credibility. Dyson, according to Williams, noted that middle class students don’t have better parents or intelligence. They are more exposed to material that is valued by school (page 344). They are able to go to zoos, museums, bookstores and libraries. Williams strengthens his earlier point that he could’ve chosen a different career based on his background by citing an author whose work is well known. James Gee makes an appearance in Williams’ writing again with a definition to another term. “ Dominant discourses” according to Gee are “discourses with mastery of which, at a particularly place and time, brings with it the (potential) acquisition of social goods. According to Williams, his father went to college to become a middle class scholar. His father’s decisions created a dominant discourse. Williams’ surroundings were filled with sources that lead him to become a professor and earn credibility to write this article. Without him ever noticing where
Wardle, Elizabeth. "Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces." Wardle, Elizabeth and Doug Downs. Writing about Writing A College Reader. Boston: Bedford/St.Martin's, 2011. 520-537. Print.
To begin, Bill and Bud are clever people, which many people would find likeable, owning a bookstore, “they had read everything ever written and were hellbent on reading everything new published each month” (Moehringer, 3). They didn’t have to read the books, Bill and Bud could have just stocked the books and ordered new reading material for customers to read. Even so, they decided that they wanted to read each book that was published every month, and ever written; concluding, that they are intelligent people, who like to learn new things. In addition, the pair also knew everything, from Yale’s famous graduates to the best teacher in Yale’s English department, “they were suddenly talking over each other, rhapsodizing about Yale, recounting its history, its roll call of famous graduates, from Noah Webster to Nathan Hale to Col Porter” (5).
The next main point that is brought up by Williams is that “whiteness is unnamed, suppressed, beyond the realm of race”. She says that “none of the little white children who taught me to see my blackness as a mark probably ever learned to see themselves as white”. What she is saying here is that as a society, a kid who is white never recognizes there color. Being white is not considered anything
The author and Wes Moore faced very similar environmental changes and challenges. The differences that resulted these two on opposite ends of the spectrum was their family’s influence upon their decisions. The actions of each Wes Moore’s mothers had a great effect in their lives. The author Wes’s mother, as well as his grandparents, played a key role in his success as an adult. The sacrifices of time and the minimal amount of extra money she made went towards the author and his other siblings which ensured him the best educational environment. Without his mother, Joy, a college graduate herself, who “raised all of her children together, and she worked multiple jobs to send all of her children to private school” Wes could not have aspired to be where he is today (Moore 48). She persisted with him by laying down her expectations for him to excel in ...
Wright had a large family that all lived close to one another in Jackson, Mississippi, but Wright felt isolated from them because he didn’t have complete faith in the beliefs and values his relatives had. At a young age, Wright’s father left his family, leaving his own family to support themselves with little money. Wright constantly blamed his father for his constant hunger, and “whenever I felt hunger I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness.” (Wright 16). Living on practically nothing, Wright’s mom, Ella began to push her son into becoming the man of the household. Despite Wright’s constant fear of getting hurt, he slowly started to develop bravery. Without being brave, Wright would have never found the courage to write about his own life. The only source of support his family received was from his maternal grandmother, who ...
Williams was a great one for “nigger” jokes. One day during my first week at school, I walked into the room and started singing to the class, as a joke ‘Way down yonder in the cotton field, some folks say that a nigger won’t steal.’ Very funny. I liked history, but I never thereafter had much liking for Mr. Williams. Later, I remember we came to the textbook section on Negro history. It was exactly one paragraph long. Mr. Williams laughed through it practically in a single breath, reading aloud how the Negroes had been slaves and then they were freed, and how they were usually lazy and dumb and shiftless. He added, I remember, an anthropological footnotes his own, telling us between laughs how Negroes feet was so ‘Big’ that when they walk, they don’t leave tracks, they leave a whole in the ground.” (The Autobiography of Malcolm X,32 )
When he was fifteen years old, his mother died from appendicitis. From fifteen years of age to his college years, he lived in an all-white neighborhood. From 1914-1917, he shifted from many colleges and academic courses of study as well as he changed his cultural identity growing up. He studied physical education, agriculture, and literature at a total of six colleges and universities from Wisconsin to New York. Although he never completed a degree, his educational pursuits laid the foundation for his writing career.
...er the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which Passover the palm of the white brother’s hand, and when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of the hand, the black brother was surprised to find his white brother so strong that he nearly knocked him off his feet. By such means as these and a few boxes of gin, whole villages had been signed away to your majesty.” This account explains the exploitation the Europeans used to get their lands. Williams’ point of view seems biased against imperialism. This may be because of the clerical background. He probably wrote the letter to show the king the atrocities that were being committed against the Africans. This cultural spread ultimately led to revolts against the Europeans. Many African ethnicities changed their culture to match their European contemporaries and, using the technology had revolutions of their own.
Williams targets rap music, the “public airwaves”, and the mass who listens and watches. To narrow the public, she targets mostly male African Americans. Williams paraphrases Isiah Thomas on how it is offensive for a white man to call black women a demeaning name but it was okay for a black man to do so. Taking into consideration Isiah’s comment, using profanity against women, he understands using such a word to name women is unacceptable. Although he has not fully developed the idea that it is unacceptable no matter who says it but the thought was there. In an interview of sorts with the comment Isiah Thomas made, it can be reasoned that calling a person by an offensive name if it is “within the family” it is okay. For example, it is normal for an older sibling to pick or tease on the little sibling, however, when an “outsider” does the same action the older sibling will become defendant of the little one. The interviewer asks Thomas “a male calling a woman a b---- you find to be offensive?” to which he responds, “most definitely, black or white, but a white male calling a black female is highly offensive”. This could be what Isiah Thomas’s thought process when it comes the offensive name calling towards African American
The article then went on to talk about how a suburban Massachusetts city held professional development to learn about the Latino students and held two Family Literacy nights with the Latino families. During the professional development the teachers did activities that promoted “the teachers to think about their own cultural perspectives and recognize multiple perspectives as well as cultural linguistics differences(Colombo, 2005, p. 2).”
Mellix, Barbara. ?From Outside, In.? Writing Lives: Exploring Literacy and Community. New York: St. Martin?s, 1996. 75-84.
From an early age, Frederick Douglass refused to accept the life of confinement into which he was born. The way he learned to write is a fine example of his exceptional resourcefulness and persistence to rise above. In The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Douglass's depiction of his self-education can be found on page 94...
Williams is very satirical in the presentation of her topic, and the way that she addresses the reader from the very first paragraph is very interesting inasmuch as she is almost offensive with her gestures. This served it's purpose well as an attention getter or hook, but it was a little over done to the point of being unecessarily redundant. If the author's intention was to seem obsessively passionate about her topic then she did a wonderful job, but if her aim was to provide helpful information regarding the seriousness of her percieved problem, then she may have offended some of the readers that would have benefited most from understanding her point of view. Also the reader gets the impression from the authors voice that she is very pessimistic about the future, almost as if she has given up and is simply lashing out in anger at the percieved harbingers of this atrocity.
Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Tenth edition. Edited by Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. New York: Longman Publishers, pp. 371-377, 2008.
Never should students be steered away from their goals or looked down upon because of their grammatical abilities. Overall, students should be proud of their ethnic background and proud at the same time to be an American. Works Cited Hairston, Maxine. Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing. College Composition and Communication 43.2 (May 1992): 179-195.