“Indian Questions: Native American Rhetoric, Writing Pedagogy, and the Possible Classroom" by Daniel Cole

I had a great opportunity to facilitate a colloquium on 11/20 with Hofstra’s Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice.  We in the Hofstra community are so fortunate to have this Center on campus, and I was honored and humbled to contribute to its very important work.

We had a very stimulating and wide-ranging conversation about the problem of managing student resistance to course material that involves racial and social justice issues, with particular attention to how an instructor might manage class discussion.

We started by replicating a discussion I run each year with my Writing Studies 1 students, who are part of the cluster for first-year engineering students. I presented details derived from a student essays related to the issue of the Belo Monte Dam, currently under construction in Brazil’s Amazon basin.  Basically, the dam would help Brazil with energy and economic growth, but it would disrupt and displace indigenous peoples whose lives and livelihood relied on fishing.

I put individual colloquium participants on the spot, telling them to imagine being Energy Minister of Brazil, say whether they would build the dam or not, and provide a rationale. I gave other participants other roles, such as an advocate for the indigenous people, and how they might respond to the pro-build arguments. The ensuing discussion helped reveal how and why industrialized and indigenous cultures might come into conflict, and how that conflict might play out.  

We discussed what sort of person might wind up as an energy minister, and how they would probably view such ethical questions. We also noted the tendency of industrialized countries to overlook or discount the spiritual value Indigenous peoples place on their land. How should economic and spiritual value interact? We also considered the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, and the weighing of Indigenous rights versus other marginalized peoples in Brazil who might benefit from the dam. Difficult questions to be sure. In the next phase of the talk, I laid out some of the theoretical underpinnings of how I had managed the discussion.

My field is Writing Studies and Rhetoric, and I posited that the field is predicated on conflict, and yet ambivalent about it. I encapsulated this phenomenon by setting up a continuum between Expressivist pedagogy (which is predominant in my field) and Contact Zone theory (which is also influential). Expressivism seeks to minimize conflict in various ways, hoping to give students space to develop their own ideas. By contrast, contact zone classrooms foreground conflict, in hopes of fostering intellectual generosity, and ultimately empathy. Most instructors of classes like WSC 1 and 2 synthesize these two approaches.

However, there are limitations under both theories. The risks of contact zone pedagogy are well known; it is obviously problematic to have students represent their identity categories and verbally spar with each other, as the approach seems to advocate. Expressivism, meanwhile, seems ultimately to orient students inward in a way that might be counter to the point of cross-cultural curriculum. My synthesis of these approaches is to have students not necessarily speak for themselves, but rather to assume various roles and construct corresponding arguments. This detaches students to some degree, showing them the workings of conflict, while keeping them out of direct, unproductive conflict with each other. This kind of detachment is a conflict resolution strategy. 

On a deeper level, this attunes students to their positionalities, and encourages them to move beyond naïve realism. Students are often skeptical of the idea that we can only experience objective reality subjectively. In response, I suggest the principle might be illustrated by the fact that people might be comfortable or cold in a room that’s objectively x temperature, or that the 85-minute time frame of the course might go by quickly for some and slowly for others. Indeed, people can experience in different ways the same room, conversation, situation, culture, or society.  

It follows then that we should be less skeptical and more accepting if someone else seems to see reality differently. Indeed, as David Takacs argues in his discussion of how positionality profoundly shapes epistemology, this kind of merging and comparing of perspectives can be a critical component of fostering greater empathy and respect for others and their differing views of the world. Cultivating such attitudes can foster more productive student engagement with race and cross-cultural issues in the classroom and beyond.  

I’ll close this post with the idea that was in fact our discussion’s point of departure, the question posed by Mary Rose O’Reilly in her book, The Peaceable Classroom: How can we teach our students so that people stop killing each other? One answer lies in encouraging students not only to appreciate other perspectives, especially those of marginalized peoples, but also to credit those perspectives enough to adjust their own view of the world, and act accordingly.