DOCUMENT RESUME ED 461 856 CS 217 805 Wolff, Janice M., Ed. AUTHOR Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice TITLE Together. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL. INSTITUTION ISBN-0-8141-3740-7 ISBN 2002-00-00 PUB DATE NOTE 327p. AVAILABLE FROM National Council of Teachers of English, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096 (Stock No. 37407-1659: $28.95 members, $38.95 nonmembers). Tel: 800-369-6283 (Toll Free); Web site http://www.ncte.org. Collected Works PUB TYPE General (020) Books (010) MF01/PC14 Plus Postage. EDRS PRICE *Classroom Communication; English Curriculum; *English DESCRIPTORS Instruction; Higher Education; Multicultural Education; Personal Narratives; Teacher Education; *Theory Practice Relationship; *Writing Instruction; *Writing Laboratories Contact Literature; Contact Narratives; Contact Zones IDENTIFIERS ABSTRACT This collection of essays brings together Mary Louise Pratt's original essay, the 10-year-old "Professing in the Contact Zone," with 14 responses that interpret, extend, and challenge Pratt's work. The essays examine how contact zone dynamics play out in various pedagogical spaces. Following an introduction by the editor, essays in Section I, Spaces, ."First Contact: Composition Students' Close Encounters with College are: (1) Culture" (Paul Jude Beauvais); "Multiculturalism, Contact Zones, and the (2) Organization of English Studies" (Patricia Bizzell); "Contact Zones: (3) Composition's Content in the University" (Katherine K. Gottschalk); (4) "Frontiers of the Contact Zone" (Thomas Philion); "Safe Houses and (5) Sacrifices: Filling the Rooms with Precious Riches" (Daphne Key). Essays in Section II, Clashes and Conflicts, are: "Fault Lines in the Contact Zone" (6) (Richard E. Miller); "Reconstitution and Race in the Contact Zone" (7) "'Can't We All Just Get Along?' When a College (Robert D. Murray); (8) Community Resists the Contact Zone" (Diane Penrod); "Contact, (9) Colonization, and Classrooms: Language Issues via Cisneros's 'Woman Hollering Creek' and Villanueva's 'Bootstraps'" (Mary R. Harmon). Essays in Section III, Community, are: (10) "Teaching in the Contact Zone: Multiple Literacies/Deep Portfolio" (Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson); (11) "Writing Centers as Linguistic Contact Zones and Borderlands" (Carol Severino); (12) "Teaching in the Contact Zone: The Myth of Safe Houses" (Janice M. Wolff); (13) "Contact Zones. in Institutional Culture: An Anthropological Approach to .Academic Programs" (Carole Yee); and (14) "Telling Stories: Rethinking the Personal Narrative in the Contact Zone of a Multicultural Classroom" (Jeanne Contains an afterword "On the Teacher's Zone of Weiland Herrick) . Effectivity" (Richard E. Miller) . (NKA) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. U S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Off ice of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION 11111.-- CENTER (ERIC) O This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it o Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY H A ivly.e.6_ BEST COPY AVAILABLE TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Li AS. NCTE EDITORIAL BOARD: Willie Mae Crews, Colleen Fairbanks, Cora Lee Five, Andrea Lunsford, Jaime Armin Mejia, Kyoko Sato, Jackie Swensson, Gail Wood, Zarina M. Hock, Chair, ex officio, Kent Williamson, ex officio, Kurt Austin, ex officio 3 Professing in the Contact Zone Bringing Theory and Practice Together Edited by JANICE M. WOLFF Saginaw Valley State University National Council of Teachers of English 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096 4 Staff Editor: Tom Tiller Interior Design: Jenny Jensen Greenleaf Cover Design: Cadton Bruett NCTE Stock Number: 37407-3050 ©2002 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trans- mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including pho- tocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright holder. Printed in the United States of America. It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teach- ing of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Professing in the contact zone : bringing theory and practice together / edited by Janice M. Wolff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8141-3740-7 (pbk.) 1. English languageRhetoricStudy and teaching. 2. Report writingStudy and teaching (Higher) I. Wolff, Janice M., 1947 PE1404 .P658 2002 808.0420711dc21 2001054671 5 CONTENTS vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOREWORD Patricia Bizzell ix INTRODUCTION Janice M. Wolff xiii ARTS OF THE CONTACT ZONE Mary Louise Pratt 1 I Spaces 1 First Contact: Composition Students' Close Encounters with College Culture 21 Paul Jude Beauvais 2 Multiculturalism, Contact Zones, and the Organization of English Studies 48 Patricia Bizzell 3 Contact Zones: Composition's Content in the University 58 Katherine K. Gottschalk 4 Frontiers of the Contact Zone 79 Thomas Philion 5 Safe Houses and Sacrifices: Filling the Rooms with Precious Riches 102 Daphne Key II Clashes and Conflicts 6 Fault Lines in the Contact Zone Richard E. Miller 121 7 Reconstitution and Race in the Contact Zone 147 Robert D. Murray 6 Contents 8 "Can't We All Just Get Along?" When a College Community Resists the Contact Zone Diane Penrod 166 9 Contact, Colonization, and Classrooms: Language Issues via Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek and Villanueva's Bootstraps Mary R. Harmon 197 III Community 10 Teaching in the Contact Zone: Multiple Literacies/ Deep Portfolio 215 Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson 11 Writing Centers as Linguistic Contact Zones and Borderlands 230 Carol Severino 12 Teaching in the Contact Zone: The Myth of Safe Houses 240 Janice M. Wolff 13 Contact Zones in Institutional Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Academic Programs 257 Carole Yee 14 Telling Stories: Rethinking the Personal Narrative in the Contact Zone of a Multicultural Classroom 274 Jeanne Weiland Herrick AFTERWORD: ON THE TEACHER'S ZONE OF EFFECTIVITY Richard E. Miller 291 297 INDEX 307 EDITOR 309 CONTRIBUTORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS t seems a long time ago that Jeannie Weiland Herrick and I sat I on her patio and selected essays from those that had been sub- mitted for the contact zone collection. We thought that was the hard part. A couple of publishers and several years later, the project has found a home at NCTE. I have read many, many acknowl- edgments, and now that I write my own, I understand more deeply what writers/editors mean in their statements of thanks. First, I thank Mary Louise Pratt for providing us with a starting point for examining our own professional situations. Second, I thank Kurt Austin for taking our work seriously and for providing us with the opportunity to publish a volume such as this. I thank all the contact zone authors for contributing to the collection and for their patience and belief in the worth of this project. When I would hail them in their busy lives and ask for yet another draft, or follow-up, or query, they would put this work first on their list. I owe a huge thank-you to Tom Tiller, a tireless editor, an intelligent reader, one who has asked all the big and little ques- tions about text and context for this book. My friends and colleagues at Saginaw Valley State University have been a great support: Mary Harmon has been a strong ad- vocate for the collection, Kay Harley has been long interested in the project, and Gary Thompson has given me advice about aca- demic publishing. I must give a world of credit to Saun Strobel, Honors secretary and support person for faculty publications at SVSU. She said it would happen, and her work is in a large way responsible for that. Finally, I thank my husband Terry for his support and love throughout the process. FOREWORD PATRICIA BIZZELL College of the Holy Cross T vividly remember sitting in a large hall at the 1990 MLA Re- sponsibilities for Literacy Conference in Pittsburgh and hear- ing Mary Louise Pratt deliver the keynote address. That was my first exposure to the concept of "contact zone," and it was an unforgettable "Aha!" moment in my thinking. Just the year be- fore, Joe Harris had published his essay "The Idea of Commu- nity in the Study of Writing," critiquing the concept of discourse community that David Bartholomae and I had been advancing in our work. Harris's analysis had started me thinking about the limitations of the discourse community concept, and "contact zone" struck me as just the conceptual tool I needed in order to go beyond it. In my earlier work on discourse communities (e.g., "Cogni- tion, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing," 1982), I had suggested that a "discourse community" and that was held together by shared ways of using language; people typically belonged to several discourse communities. I was most concerned, however, to explore the academic discourse com- munity, since I wanted to redefine the problems of my basic writ- ing students as problems of entering a social group in which the linguistic habits and customs and taken-for-granted knowledge were unfamiliar (rather than entertaining any of the then-pre- vailing "deficit" theories to explain their difficulties). But, as Harris had pointed out, my approach tended to mute the voices of the nonacademic discourse community allegiances students brought with them to school, seeming to focus only on the neces- sity of assimilation to academic ways of using language, and on methods of doing that more efficiently and humanely. Foreword Pratt's concept helped me to imagine the writing classroom, and indeed, the academy generally, as a contact zone. The advan- tage of this perspective is that it emphasizes that multiple dis- course communities are always present. Moreover, it emphasizes that they are present in relations of unequal power. Thus Pratt's concept enabled me to rethink my students' difficulties as not merely those of assimilation, but rather as those of negotiation between the pressure to enter the academic discourse community and the force of their ongoing, and perhaps competing, allegiances to other ways of using language. And just as important, I was enabled to see more clearly how conflicted such negotiations would typically be: that learning academic discourse might not be as emotionally and politically neutral for basic writing stu- dents as, say, the learning of French was for me when I was a Midwestern, middle-class, high school student, who even had some French blood in the family. In short, the concept of contact zone both subsumed the concept of discourse communitya contact zone typically being a social location in which several discourse communities mingleand also posited intermingling discourse communities as existing in dynamic relations with each other, struggling for power in ways that mirror larger social struggles for political power and justice. It's clear from the essays collected in this volume that Pratt's concept of contact zone has been equally generative for many other scholars and teachers in our field, illuminating our work in many helpful ways. Indeed, as will be seen in my 1994 essay reprinted here, I went so far as to suggest that the entire disci- pline of English studies be reorganized in light of Pratt's insights. What strikes me most about the contributions to this volume is the way in which contact zone theory, as I think we should now call it, following the lead of Janice Wolff in her introduction to this volume, allows us to talk about conflict and negotiation in our teaching and administrative work. Such discussions highlight issues of power and authority that have been under debate in our field for some time. Thus they are of supreme importance if we wish to foster social justice in the classroom, and in the larger society.