Holding onto Agency

My favorite quote from the scene here is when Snoop gets in the car and explains, “Man said if you wanna shoot nails, this here’s the Cadillac. He mean Lexus, but he ain't know it.”

Despite the curse words, I plan to show this clip to my students this fall so I can introduce them to my research and my teaching objectives.

My students come from all over the place, and this makes some of the workshop sessions very exciting. The cultural divide is clearest when they are trying to explain or persuade. While that is interesting, what I really want to dig into this year are the relationships of perceived power during these exchanges.

In my summer reading about diversity in the classroom, all of the composition people are concerned about the relationship between 'fringe students' and the academy. A fringe student can be one of many types of student - first in the family to go to college, a minority, an EFL student, etc. The academics are worried that the overwhelming force of the academy will wipe out anything unique such a student might bring to a discussion. It's a very real problem, but in my classroom something more interesting is going on.

My students have fairly fixed ideas about each others' countries, cultures, and their places in the world. This means that when the expository essay of an Azeri student is workshopped by a Swede, the relationship between reader and writer is very complex. The expectations of the academy become just one element in a much more complicated exchange.

So, in a more explicit manner than in the past, I want to focus my students' attention on the cultural differences they deal with when presenting expository or persuasive texts to each other. I want them to notice when/how they jump from one style of communication to another. I want them to discuss who they feel is in control of a given discussion. I want them to learn how to navigate between different styles of communication without ever losing their sense of agency. You can see Snoop doing just that in the clip above.

Call it code-switching, code-meshing, negotiating World Englishes, or something else. I believe the skill is only going to become more relevant in the future. So I'm excited to take advantage of the unique make-up of my composition classroom.