What follows is a paper I wrote while in grad school last year. I would like to publish/present this more formal someday - any feedback will be greatly appreciated.
In this paper I
want to explore the current conversation concerning code meshing. To adequately
do this, I will first place the debate in its historical context starting with
previous notions of code switching to the present criticism of code meshing.
The subtext of these conversations is that code switching ask people to
practice Standard English. It is also asking them to join White, Middle-class
Discourse (I’m using Gee’s notion of Discourse with a capital D here and through
out much of the essay). Therefore SE is White, Middle-class English (WMCE), and
code switching must be racist and hegemonic because it offers only one path to
middle-class life and determines that this life is largely White. Denying those
outside the barriers of WMCE access to the benefits of the middle-class is a
radical departure from SRTOL (Students Right to Their Own Language) and our
beliefs in diversity. Predominantly, composition instructors have agreed to the
merits of SRTOL, but have also agreed that learning academic discourse is the
surest pathway to academic and financial success (Bartholomae 1986, Gee 1989,
Bloom 1996, White and Lowenthal 2010).
But I believe this
paradigm is false because the job landscape is shifting so rapidly that
academic Discourse becomes a highly specialized, and saturated, mode of
communication that it is no longer needed on such a large scale. In other
words, the need for academic language specifically is dead outside of the
academia (and perhaps inside too). Furthermore, as economics has shown us,
financial success does not guarantee long term financial success, personal
growth, or happiness (McKibben 2007). The question becomes what jobs of the
future are we preparing our students for, and is economic stability the main
role of higher education?
History of SE and Code-Switching in Composition
In the late 1820s, Harvard noticed that their
freshman needed English composition remediation because a larger pool of their
applicants did not possess the written language of aristocracy. Their approach
to remediation is often called the “current-tradition” method that focuses on
error correction. Essentially, that there are rules that must be followed, a
standardized way of writing. Even as Adam Sherman Hill in the 1870s, who was in
charge of the entrance exam at Harvard, notes that the work of scholars shared
similar non-Standard usage in their writing, Harvard and other universities see
Standard English as a lost art (Clark 2012). Yet, Harvard’s institution of the
entrance exam itself, help lead to the birth of ETS (Education Testing
Service), the SATs and much of the standardized testing we have throughout
education. This standardization is based on the belief that the standard exists
and that it is something that can be explicitly taught. Hence, if you are told
a grammar rule, given an uncontextualized example of the rule, and practice
using the rule, then you will learn the rule. There is much evidence that
explicit instruction, especially when concerning grammar, does not work, and
that most grammar rules in English can be broken depending on context. Therefore, what is the reason for holding
such a high standard to Standard English, if it does indeed not exist?
Many instructors
deal with this question by seeing their roles as gatekeepers. And I think this
is a role the University is comfortable giving them. As most students do not
possess the codes of academic discourse, many scholars and educators argue for
teaching students to code switch, that is use their home dialect in private and
Standard Academic English in public. It is believed that switching will produce
academic and career success, while not requiring the student to completely
neglect their home discourse. To complicate matters, Carol Severino, in “Where
the Cultures of Basic Writers and Academia Intersect: Cultivating the Common
Ground” (1992), argues that as members of the institution and gatekeepers to
its privileges, we often see our freshman students, especially our basic
writers, as belonging to a deficient literacy community. However, she believes
this is a false assumption. In fact many of our “under prepared” students have
very complex and multiple literacies before they enter our classroom. She
stresses that it is our job to build common ground with those literacies so
that students can build a bridge to go back and forth between their home
literacies (maybe even combine) with their growing academic literacies. Still switching,
but with a nod to meshing.
In
full celebration of students’ home discourse, Peter Elbow often runs the other
direction and ask his students not to code switch at all. Elbow and other
expressivists believe that code switching is a skill that students are not
ready for yet, and that it will be picked up naturally as the student
progresses through their major. Instead, they believe that students must learn
to work metacognitively in their home discourse first. Expressivists do
understand that adopting to the codes of academia is inevitable. For example, Lynn Bloom notes that Freshman
Composition is setting students on the road to middle class livelihoods by
teaching how to code switch (Bloom 1996). It is in this moment Bloom is linking
financial success with Standard English, and instead of instructors being the
gatekeeper; it is the language itself that keeps students in and out.
The constructivist, David Bartholomae, makes no
bones about it, he believes we, as composition educators, must teach our students
to be academics, or at least to act like one. In his seminal article,
“Inventing the University” (1986), he addresses the need for students to enter
the dominant discourse of privilege in order to receive said privileges. Use of
what Bartholomae refers to as “common” language or codes, are most often what
deny people access to discourse communities of privilege. The student who uses
“common” language cannot infer different meanings, nor can he find the nuance
in his own discourse. The arguments that come out of such students are often
moralistic and egotistic. Students fall back on this language and these
arguments because their deep identification with the “common” language
(Bartholomae does note that all discourse communities have common language, but
he is using quotes to indicate non-privileged language). Still many students
can grasp this new academic discourse community through what Bartholomae calls
“imitation or parody,” or rather learn to code switch.
James Paul Gee builds upon Bartholomae’s work by
trying to understand why some discourse communities thrive in the academy,
while others struggle to get by (1989). He sees discourse first as primary, the
discourse of the home we are born into; next is a secondary discourse of the
outside world. Secondary discourse can be forever added onto but it alters,
rejects, and critiques each previous discourse. By breaking down the
characteristics of the changes that occur into sub categories, Gee reveals the
dialectical nature of discourse communities in each individual person, as all
people can be said to belong to at least two Discourses (Gee changes discourse
to a proper noun to include values, costume, manners, social identity, etc.).
Gee also marks the differences between learning or being taught and
apprenticeship or performance. He argues that successful students have had
early secondary discourse, perhaps primary discourse, which mimics academic
discourse. Therefore when they enter school they don’t have to learn the rules
of the discourse, they can simply practice it. On the other hand, unsuccessful
students primary and secondary discourses do not share traits with academic
discourse. Therefore when they enter school they are being tested on
proficiency of discourse standards that they never been able to practice. Gee stresses the need for code-switching
because of the liberating nature of aquiring a secondary discourse as it will
often lead to a metacognition of previous discourses. And though this may happen,
Vershawn Ashanti Young argues that since the secondary discourse of academia in
most cases is Standard English, many non-White, Middle-Class students will fail
at acquiring it, or at least have to deny part of themselves in order to be
successful in the institution.
To Code Switch is to Divide the Self
Young
points to W.E.B. DuBois and his notion of double consciousness to ground his
argument in the need to code switch has always been known to minoritized
people. It’s similar to when Talib Kweli emotes one of the reasons the receiver
of his affection is a “Hot Thing,” he raps, “I love the way your crib smell
like Votivo candle incense/The white voice you use on the phone when you handle
business” (Green 2007). Or rather as Du Bois proffers, African-Americans are
always part of at least two consciousnesses that quite often force the holder
to practice cognitive dissonance, like using a “white voice...[to] handle
business.” A Black person in America must be fully conscious, that is versed in
the codes of the white man’s Discourse as well as their own, in order to be
accepted and generally survive in both worlds. This is code switching, and
where much of the ideology, I believe, resides why we still focus on teaching
students to code switch. Part of the belief is that discourses and identities
are not intersectional, nor are their exigencies. By keeping rigid lines
between discourses, we essentially burn the bridge to ever go home. Which is a
very violent act. Which is why Du Bois calls for a merging of identities, and
latter Young calls for merging of discourses.
Academic
writing is important and can serve as a growth point for students to explore
other avenues, but by allowing students to apprentice in blending their home
language with a emerging academic language, hence practice code meshing, will
allow for growth of an authentic self. In other words, that the language they
write in should reflect where they are from and where their education is taking
them (White and Ali-Khan 2013). By asking students to keep their identity
separate and place a hierarchy on them, we are asking students to deny a part
of themselves in the name of capitalism.
Furthermore, those
outside of White, middle-class Discourse are often held to a higher level of
scrutiny in towing the line laid out by the Discourse than those inside it. In
other words, Black people are held to higher standards in regards to speaking
and writing Standard English, even as Whites are not held to the same standard
or are expected to know the standard. A Black colleague, Beth (not her real
name), told me a story when she was working in a different industry and her
boss accused Beth of not using SE on a report. The boss told Beth that she
understood that Beth spoke a different language but she needed to be more
careful in the future. At the time, Beth was working on her third Masters
degree and had a more than proficient grasp of SE, but she simply made a
mistake and was accused of forgetting to code switch. Though anecdotal, it does
illustrate how SE is not only used to put Black people in their place, it is
also a power move, because the boss was employing the function of white man’s
guilt by first pitying Beth, then by stating she understood Beth’s culture and
language, which also tells Beth which culture she belongs to, denying her the
ability to define it for her self.
As Young argues,
Standard English itself is a myth, which is further supported by Lippi-Green in
her book English with an Accent
(1997). It is here that Lippi-Green explains how even as lexicographers
acknowledge that learned people pronounce and scribe in different manner, they
still maintain that there is such a thing as Standard English that is most
widely used by learned Americans. What lexicographers forget to add, though
Lippi-Green spends considerable time explaining, is that the variations used by
learned Americans also reflect their social, economic, and ethnic affiliation
and that those that affiliate closest to White, Middle-class standards, also
speak and write in Standard English. So instead of Standard English being a standard
that is organic or natural or correct, it is yet another tool that is used by
educators to whitewash language, and therefore identity. And by instructing
students to code switch to Standard English we are telling them that speaking
and writing as a White, middle-class person is the only path to success in
academia. As June Jordan’s students discovered, you can speak in your own
dialect and be true to yourself knowing that your message will not get across,
or you can adopted the language of your oppressor which alters the message for
the oppressors sensibilities (Jordan 1988). Either way you have failed.
In the face of the binary options that fail to
fulfill our needs, Victor Villanueva (2006) makes the case that code meshing
might be the close the subaltern comes to speaking. As he asserts, “an
international blending of dialects…is more than simply a great concept; it is
right; it is some assertion of the subaltern speaking. But before code meshing
could work…outside the English classroom, we would have to educate an awful lot
of educators. We’ve been trying for over forty years now, but some notion of
“proper English” continues to hold sway” (Villanueva 2016). This is akin to when I told White colleague
about the merits of code meshing, and she said it sounded great but a lot of
teachers are “gonna have to die first.” But that is only part of the problem as
many new and continuing instructors hold steadfast to grammar conventions and
an idealized notion of SE. I believe much of this is due to having spent so
much time being educated in SE that we end up telling our students essentially
that they have to learn the rules of SE to understand how to break them in the
future. Which in of itself is a crazy notion: that we must apprentice
(Bartholomae 1986) in academic Discourse (Gee 1989) in order to gain entrance
into the academe, that which is the gatekeeper for the power bloc, so that we
may make changes from within. If this is the story we tell our students, and
the story that was most likely told to us, then we are forever kicking the
proverbial can of radical progression down the road.
What does code meshing look like?
To
combat this cyclical gatekeeping paradigm code meshing honors the necessity of
rhetorical exigency to dictate choice, but it also honors the right to choice
and hence SRTOL. One of the ways code meshing can be accomplished in the
writing classroom, and other classrooms that demand writing, is to provide
students with assessments that require them to use multiple voices interwoven together.
For example, in my first year composition course I have my students read Joe
Sacco’s non-fiction, graphic-novel, Palestine
(1996), because it is an honest portrayal about a subject most of my students
are unfamiliar with and curious about. I pair this reading with the Part I of
Edward Said’s “Introduction” to Orientalism
(1978). Students often comment how moved intellectually and emotionally they
are by delving into such tense subject matter. Therefore, I have created an
assignment that asks students to write passionately about what they have
learned. One part is analytical, academic English, and the other is more
personal self-reflection. However, both styles require the student to use their
intellectual growth and emotional growth as grounding points for composition.
This weaving, perhaps differentiated by italics, is what we see most often by
professional writers; yet often deny as a means of expression to our remedial
writers. I too have been guilty of this in not allowing students to use personal
voice when writing, or saying that an argument is too conversational. But when
we do this, we are telling students that the most truthful honest part of them
is not acceptable for public consumption. Code-meshing does not accept this and
presses that no discourse is better than another, yet all have merits unique
and shared.
Moving
beyond the English classroom, code meshing seems most akin to learning
communities and their program of support and accountability. What is special
about learning communities as it relates to code meshing is that learning
communities acculturate a small group of students into academic Discourse in
multiple disciplines simultaneously. And since self-reflection and group
sharing are often part of the learning community experience, this group of
students will practice communicating with each other with their home, natural
language, along with the discipline specific discourses they are acquiring.
Even if the assignments don’t ask them to code mesh, their natural
conversations will be exhibiting code-meshing qualities. Therefore, if
educators within learning communities incorporated more assignments that asked
students to code mesh, which they are already doing naturally, maybe we would
have fewer at risk students and more successful students. Not merely financial
success, but self-fulfilled civic liberation.
Work
Cited
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4-23.
Bloom, Lynn Z.. “Freshman Composition as a Middle-class
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Green, Talib Kweli. “Hot Thing.” Eardrum (2007).
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Lippi-Green, Rosina. English
with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States.
New York: Routledge (2012).
McKibben, Bill. Deep
Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durible Future. Henry Holt and
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White, John Wesley, and Patrick R. Lowenthal. "Minority
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Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Nah We Straight”: An Argument
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