Peckham: Argument, the Working Class, and Latino Working Class Students (Pt 2)

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[Part 1 where I introduce Peckham's discussion of argument and middle class "objectivity"]

Di. "Spew" 10 October 2013. Flickr Creative Commons

Objectivity, Redux

 Peckham continues with the discussion of objectified pronouns, with the first person "I" largely permitted in most courses, though even there the first person must be objectified, "the writer in possession of her reason, language and stance" (69). Working-/ poverty-class students resist using the first person "I" in writing even in ethnographic or public discourse writing because of their secondary education training, even when it makes rhetorical sense with the project at hand. On the other hand, they tend to use the second person easily, naturally, as if somehow the first person has been drummed out of them but instruction about second person pronouns was overlooked. Something is happening, then, in secondary education about that author-as-expert vs author-as-observer, and that inquiry deserves more attention.

Peckham then critiques Bloom's foundational essay about the FYW course as a middle-class enterprise, quoting her:
Most of the time the middle-class orientation of freshman composition is for the better, as we would hope in a country where 85 percent of the people-all but the super-rich and the very poor-identify themselves as middle class (Allen). For freshman composition, in philosophy and pedagogy, reinforces the values and virtues embodied not only in the very existence of America's vast middle class, but in its general well-being-read promotion of the ability to think critically and responsibly, and the maintenance of safety, order, cleanliness, efficiency. (655)
This is perhaps the single paragraph I disagree with most with Bloom: first, with the assumption that the middle class should be the goal of liberatory education; secondly, that the middle class "embodies" values and virtues that anyone should aspire to more than values and virtues of other classes and any publics. Bloom, after all, earlier
Rather, my analysis will identify a number of the major aspects of social class that freshman composition addresses in its aims of enabling students to think and write in ways that will make them good citizens of the academic (and larger) community, and viable candidates for good jobs upon graduation. (655)
This presumption that the purpose of a liberal education is to help the student obtain a "good job" and that the FYW is the service course to do that goes contrary to my own views/ideals of education at any level -- this is little more than creating the public school system to prepare the farmboys for work in the factories: lives of drudgery, disassociated from both production and consumption. I'm not arguing for the elimination of the middle class; instead, I simply argue that the working class a) will be with us forever and b) has its own cultural values and virtues that must be advocated for within -- especially -- the community college. This presumes, of course, that the community college has not already been co-opted by the corporate system, which most already have.

Working Class Discourse

And again, back to the writing classroom. Peckham explains that working class writers "write ragged. Their words spew out, an eruption of thought and emotion" (71). Ong argues that these students such such ragged discourse because of their largely oral upbringing, and this would be substantiated by the dearth of printed (or electronic) texts from most of my students' homes -- it's rare to find students who had books in their homes. Most of their physical handling of books came from school libraries, which of course have limited resources and often do not reflect the student's own home culture -- Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, for example. Peckham's summary of Ong, however, short-changes the larger conversation that ensued after Ong's Orality and Literacy, including Bernstein's argument that working class speakers use short, simple unsubordinated sentences but with simple conjunctions. Ohmann countered, however, arguing that working class students are aware of their rhetorical dynamic and can/do switch their discourse patterns when necessary. I go back to Heath, then, where she shows how a speaker, understanding her context, adjusts her discourse accordingly, so that the distance between orality and literacy diminishes. Of course this happens. Adolescents know they use different discourses around professors, Grandma, and their peers. And thus I teach my students about academic discourse while still validating their home discourses for a life that will undoubtedly go beyond the few years within the academy, and hopefully in a life that will affect real change in their home communities, instead of the corporatized ideal of "escaping" el barrio for a middle class lifestyle (a dwindling possibility, it should be noted).

And so, Peckham's summary here is where I can end for now. "... the academic part of me says, if this style will help writers fight their ways through the academy, then I'll teach it. The working-class side of me, however, shrinks from this kind of overly self-conscious prose, particularly when I find myself writing it."

Such as now. But quickly, this attitude that the student must bend to the academy's discourse conventions for the academy's mission to prepare the student to a life of rhetorical silence in his community -- well, Miller:
“Why bother with reading and writing when the world is so obviously going to hell?” (Miller 16). 
[End Part 2]

Bibliography

Bernstein, Basil. "Elaborated and Restricted Codes: Their Social Origins and Some Consequences." American Anthropologist 66.6 (1964): 55-69. PDF.

Bloom, Lynn Z. "Freshman composition as a middle-class enterprise." College English (1996): 654-675. PDF.

Di's Free Range Photos. Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 18 October 2014. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/58631678@N02/> .

Heath, Shirley Brice. "Way with Words: Langugae, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms." Cambridge, Cambridge UP (1983). Print.

Ohmann, Richard. "Reflections on Class and Language." College English 44.1 (1982): 1-17. PDF.

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. NYC: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Miller, Richard. Writing at the End of the World. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 2005. Print.

Peckham, Irvin. Going North Thinking West: The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction. Utah State University Press, 2010. Print.


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