Classrooms: Resistance, Hybrid Discourse, and Working-Class Classed Literacies

Brian Nudelman
Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English
University of Southern Mississippi
Email: brian.nudelman@usm.edu

Literacy practices are almost always fully integrated with, interwoven with, constituted part of, the very texture of wider practices that involve talk, interaction, values, and beliefs. You can no more cut the literacy out of the overall social practice, or cut away the non-literacy parts from the literacy parts of the overall practice, than you can subtract the white squares from a chess board and still have a chess board.

-James Paul Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies

The different classes and class fractions are engaged in symbolic struggle properly speaking, one aimed at imposing the definition of the social world that is best suited to their interests.

-Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power

Introduction

Within the last few decades there has been significant debate between diverging fields of linguistics and literacy theory on just how to go about defining the term literacy. Is literacy, as one side of the aisle would argue, the isolated individualized skill of successfully translating texts, symbols, and images (i.e. reading and writing) to one's own system of understanding? Or, as the still-developing field commonly referred to as "New Literacy Studies" argues, should we understand the idea of literacy first within its plural form, as a body of human activities an individual utilizes to not only understand his or her social space (Bourdieu), but to also inscribe oneself within said social space, as an ontological set of tools through which one defines being? The conflict, thus, could be seen as that of between the modern and the postmodern, between an image of the lone seeker of knowledge on the road towards fulfilling a self-empowering definition of self, and a picture of being meshed within a multicultural pluralized sense of world continually manifested and re-manifested in both evolving and communal ways.

"New Literacy" theorists argue for a definition of literacy which places learning squarely back into a space of socioeconomic and cultural conditions. To remove literacy acts from the space of performance would be like performing one of Willy Loman's exchanges with Uncle Ben in front of a local Baptist church -- you might invite an audience of curious bystanders, but the words inherent power in and of themselves would be contrasted against an ultimately conflicting setting. Alternatively, theorists such as James Paul Gee, Brian Street, and Shirley Brice Heath have argued that to truly see how literacy "works," one cannot simply study the results of standardized tests which claim to accurately measure reading and cognitive ability, rather it is through close study of individualized and communal exchanges of knowledge, all with an ear to the proverbial pavement, in which understanding and appreciation of the oftentimes subversive literacy practices of men and women occur.

In this paper, I wish to, in a sense, complicate the discussion and debate that is occurring over the definition of literacy. I will first briefly examine the body of theories underlying "New Literacy Theory," particularly those of Gee and his study of Discourses, ways of being in the world he refers to as "identity kits" of costumes, words, and behaviors one uses to socialize his or herself within larger systems of being.[Note 1] I will then focus more closely on the repercussions "New Literacy" leaves for the English classroom, specifically the college composition classroom, a liminal space where discourse meets discourse, often in potentially conflict-ridden ways. A theory of hybrid discourse will thus be presented which hopes to resolve at least some of the worries that have arisen among both educators and theorists concerning the resistance that arises between working-class freshman and the English classroom (Delpit). By closely examining the interstices between ideas of discourse, resistance, and working-class ideology within the classroom, a theory of hybrid discourse emerges with hopes that present possible "ways out" for educators attempting to work with the distinct bodies of literacies students enter the systems of higher education each day clutching. From the practices involved in consuming the texts of popular culture, to the critical ideologies of dominant religion, our students arrive at the doors of the English classroom "literate" of a body of complex and contradictory discourses that must be seen as operating in a world firmly located within the socioeconomic conditions that gave birth to them and not as some detached skill that has been passively "learned" through eighteen or so years of interaction with the institutions of American culture.

Defining "Literacy"

If the body of literature underlying the movement within linguistics commonly referred to as "New Literacy Studies" could be summarized through the usage of one word, I propose that word to be "association." For this field's primary space of examination are those specific relationships between groupings of "mind, body, and society," the field(s) of information and system(s) of understanding which connect in a myriad of ways, ultimately allowing sociological study to exist in the first place (Gee 65). In other words, the movement wishes to reconnect those links between the individual and society that are often snapped in the name of objective study. Through such sociocultural views of literacy, literacy becomes literacies, systems of skills and ways of seeing and living in the world which ultimately complicate views of literacy as that "great divide" between formal and archaic, between the "domesticated and the savage."[Note 2] To help further elucidate the claims of this sociocultural approach to literacy, Gee deconstructs a system of thought centered on a playful interaction of discourses. In Social Linguistics and Literacies, Gee defines Discourse as:

ways of using language, other symbolic expressions, and 'artifacts', of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or 'social network', or to signal (that one is playing) a socially meaningful 'role'. (131)

Within this complex web of association, Gee goes further to define and describe two distinct bodies of discourses: primary and secondary discourses. Without getting too far into Gee's own discourse-specific terminology, I will demarcate the realm of an individual's primary discourse as that space most often associated around the family. We are "born" into and are immediately indoctrinated into primary discourses that encircle us with accepted ways of being within our social group, our religion, our geographical locale, etc. How we communicate, study, and love is passed to us through a particular primary discourse that surrounds our initial entry into the world.

With this primary discourse in our pocket, we then enter into a world made up of multiple and complex discourses Gee refers to as secondary discourses. Examples of secondary discourses include the discourses of education, childcare, and employment. Similar to primary discourses, secondary discourses are also systems of being but whose ideology requires association, indeed through the addition, subtraction, conflict, and coincidence with that primary discourse we initially "left the nest" with. Thus, primary and secondary discourses become one way in which to examine the complex systems in play when an individual meets the social. Such moments of initiation often involve and take place within an arena of competing ideas, beliefs, and ways of being, such as the entrance into formal educational institutions or into the realm of capitalistic exchange. In short, discourses, understood in both their primary and secondary versions, are associations of shared ideals that often invoke unavoidable initial conflict, but then a hopefully secure union of compromise in order for a sense of movement to exist. As in the words of William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "without contraries is no progression."

Gee, then, thus defines literacy as the "mastery of a secondary Discourse" (143), opening up the realm of discourse analysis into a way of seeing the world as a complex yet playful system of ideologies each struggling against the next to be "acquired" and "learned" (Gee 138). Where things really begin to get messy is with Gee's introduction of "dominant discourses." For Gee, a discourse becomes dominant first with recognition of the underlying "distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society" (132). So by extension, certain discourses carry with them often elusive yet powerfully felt and appreciated potentialities for the acquisition of social hardware (i.e. money, power, status). These particular "dominant" discourses thus become sources of empowerment for its fellow members. Those who have acquired or will more-easily acquire the methods of these specific secondary discourses open up avenues of advantage whereby power and status come with less conflict to one's own primary discourse.

Yet, for there to be a "dominant discourse," there must be a "dominated discourse," a facet of Gee's study which he chooses, by default, to not directly address. Those whose membership within a primary discourse that allows for a smooth and easier transition into certain secondary discourses, Gee calls members of the "dominant group" (132). These particular initiates often serve the duel-role of gatekeeper for the discourse. In other words, certain primary discourses have adopted specific aspects of a respected secondary discourse that would allow an easier transition from the former to the latter. Once there, the dominant discourses, and those members of said discourse (members of the dominant group and those which hold the possibilities for greater amounts of power and status), often test newly arriving non-members of the dominant discourse in a prerequisite-like body of knowledge (usually surface knowledge). An example of this would be the cycle of interviews a person undergoes in the hope of securing employment with a given company, interviews which usually focus on the problematic area of "skill requirements," a body of detached aspects of a job description which often complicate the "real" sociocultural aspects of the job position (Darrah). Those whose primary discourse has not provided suitable acquisition of such celebrated, yet often-trivial aspects of the dominant discourse's surface concerns are asked to politely exit the interview room.

And this particular point in the game of discourse analysis will serve as a transition into recognizing one of my primary concerns within this paper. As I mentioned previously, Gee's creation of a "dominated discourse" through his recognition of dominated groups within our present society goes unnamed within his work. I would like to apply this idea of a dominated discourse to that of a working-class ideology. This substitution should pose no initial discomfort, for I would subscribe to Pierre Bourdieu's understanding of socioeconomic class as:

sets of agents who occupy similar positions and who, being placed in similar conditions and submitted to similar types of conditioning, have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing similar practices and adopting similar stances. (231)

There is, therefore, a symbiotic relationship that exists between socioeconomic class and Gee's theories of discourse. One is born into a primary discourse in much the same way that socio-economics often define one's status within a given culture. In the following sections, I will create links of understanding between ideas of just what constitutes working-class literacy and what "New Literacy Studies" points to as possible methods of reconcilement between dominant and dominated discourses. In other words, I will be interested in working through what Sennett and Cobb have called the "hidden injuries of class." By first attempting to define a set of expressive practices we can ascribe as traditional working-class discourses, and then seeing how these discourses, arising from a position of a dominated discourse, come in contact with and often time conflict with the dominant discourse of the English classroom, strategies at dealing with potential spaces of resistance will emerge from the discussion.

Working-Class Literacies and the Politics of Education

Of course, to define what one means when referring to the term "working-class literacy" is no simple task.[Note 3] Should we be concerned strictly with aspects of economics, or should issues of culture be examined? Is an idea of working-class literacy inherently political, or can a space be created whereby the words working and class are identified and respected for each term's own worth in and of itself? Possibly I should start with an "official" definition, one provided by a recent edition of Webster's New World College Dictionary, in which "working-class" is defined as, "workers as a class; esp., industrial or manual workers as a class; proletariat." Alas, the officials in definition leave us once again grabbing for more.

In her critical study of high school social groupings, Penelope Eckert argues that, in addition to the almost unbreakable hierarchical status structure of public education, working- class students, a social group she refers to as "Burnouts," come to school with a body of literacy practices that, while grounded in many "normal" and acceptable human behaviors, ultimately clash with the solidly middle class theory underlying much of education's stated objectives. Here, Gee could step in and provide a tidy clarification to such issues: "it's the discourses, stupid." And what does Eckert's study illustrate as a working-class discourse? For one, working-class ideology dictates to working-class adolescents a seeing of the world that firmly replicates a view of the world that their parents hold. Such a view in turn holds that one's "material security depends on mutual support both in the workplace and out" (Eckert 138).

At the same time, Eckert argues that working-class students value a stronger sense of community than many of their middle class peers. Working-class students, thus, drift towards social groupings that usually center on activities outside the walls of the school, very often around their own neighborhoods. In addition, working-class students arrive at the classroom often resistant to what they see as an unfair, hierarchical system of privilege that infringes on their own abilities to create positive spaces that can also satisfy their personal desires. Other theorists add that a notion of a working-class literacy is often based on a more communal, less adversarial approach to knowledge making and instruction, a discourse surrounded by what Anne Ruggles Gere has called the realm of the "extracurriculum."[Note 4] Away from what many working-class individuals see as a solidly middle class education system, Gere's aspiring writers seek a space where what they bring to the "kitchen table" not only matters, but also contributes to the body of knowledge amassing all around them.

But what indeed does happen when, as recent figures attest, growing numbers of working-class adolescents are proceeding onward into higher education in never before seen numbers (Aronwitz 84-91)? Peter McLaren argues that the very idea of resistance in the classroom is most often born directly out of hegemonic relationships the working-class students recognize existing within a system that professes to be above such uneven power distribution. Therefore, in every applicable instance, student resistance must be questioned, "ask[ing] in what ways oppositional acts signal and inform the contradictions between the human capacities that schools profess to nurture and promote and the institutional pedagogical forms in which schooling actually occurs" (McLaren 197). If working-class students, along with many educational and critical theorists, can "see through" many of the structures that allow for uneven support of dominant discourses over dominated discourses within our classrooms, express their insight through classroom resistance, yet still remain engaged in the extracurriculum aspects of knowledge making that comes with the package of higher education, the question left outstanding for the perpetually perplexed educator to answer becomes, "how can we adjust our own pedagogies to account for such ideological turmoil?" How can we turn a working-class resistance initially stemming from occasions of dominated discourse practices into a tool for classroom success?

The possible repercussions of such a situation as presented above, where working-class students enter the college composition classroom armed with a discourse that as yet has shown little promise of return, and enter into a space where they are asked to assume the role of, not student, but "writer," can be quite unclear.[Note 5] Composition, literacy and educational theorists, in turn, have offered the bewildered educator conflicting advice. On the one hand is the view of the "teacher-as-emancipator," a role most often linked with the writings of Paulo Freire. Freire argues in several well-received books and articles that the teacher serves not as the gatekeeper of some lucidly defined idea of truth, but rather as a sort of guide for the student's own reconfiguration of the world around them. To become critical of one's own space and the multiple systems of power that enter unnoticed into it is the key theme of emancipatory literacy.

In this debate, the writings of Freire form a body of theory which ultimately sees the English classroom as a space for questioning, indeed, a space for the educator to meet students halfway, "to enter into dialogue [...] about concrete situations and simply to offer him the instruments with which he can teach himself" (622). Freire's enlightenment claims do not go unanswered, however, and the rebuttal comes from an unlikely source: the very working-class student he wants to liberate. In her article entitled "Protean Shapes in Literacy Events," Shirley Brice Heath makes the argument--based on her ethnographic study of a Piedmont community in the Carolinas--that an increase in literacy skills among the families she writes about would have had only the slightest effect on their overall ways of being. For them, "successful completion of composition and advanced grammar classes [...] would not have secured better-paying jobs" (Heath 463; emphasis mine), and thus a more secure way of life. What was needed, however, were covert tools on how to, in essence, work the system to one's own favor. For instance, role-playing exercises of imagined interactions with the human resources department of the local textile mill were what these students desired in the hopes of establishing a solid sense of self within the community. Emancipation just did not appear on their "things-to-do list." Heath's study raises several important questions at this point in the paper. What is the educator to do when the student's desires are to enter into practices the "enlightened" believe ultimately further subjugates them under the "dehumanizing cultural tendency of capitalist societies across the board," where "humans manage each other and their own performances in the same way they manage the production and circulation of commodities" (Willis ix).

At the same time, who are we to say that students, specifically of the working-class, are ultimately wrong to desire such material facets of life, that they are obviously caught within the gripping web of false consciousness?[Note 6] The adept student would also point out that the idealized image of higher education, as an institution that has somehow magically exorcised itself out from under the creaking belts of capitalism and its bedfellows, status and power, is a mirage--a striking and mesmerizing print dangled in front of idealistic, advanced degree-seeking students in an effort to increase enrollment within the nation's graduate programs (Lindquist 263). The English composition classroom, unlike the majority of classrooms in higher education that follow the more traditional top-down approach to knowledge acquisition, encourages its students to bring such proverbial "baggage" (i.e. discourses) with them as they engage the world through literacy. What I am arguing, however, is that not all students carry with them a backpack containing the same body of discourses. Out of the potential pitfalls I have highlighted, a pedagogy concocted with equal parts multiplicity and reality is necessary to play in and amidst the varying discourses that arrive on the backs of each semester's new crop of freshmen.

Hybrid-Literacy and the English Classroom

Seeing the college composition classroom as this space where dominant discourse meets dominated discourse should appear initially discomforting for both educator and student. If Gee is indeed correct in believing that "true acquisition of many mainstream Discourses involves, at least while being in them, active complicity with values that conflict with one's home- and community-based Discourses" (147), and that the college composition classroom, at least in theory, is the space provided within higher education whose primary aim is acclimating the student body of both working and middle-class discourses within such a conflicting secondary discourse, the bewildered yet hopeful educator must ultimately fall upon a more heterogeneous and yielding understanding of his or her role within. For the remainder of this paper, I will argue for an appreciation of the composition classroom in light of such conflict. Specifically, I wish to explore the ramifications, both social and pedagogical, that a theory of hybrid discourse posses for students and teachers.

Hybrid literacy practices have first been introduced as a direct response to aspects of what some see as the overly determined repercussion of Gee's theory of discourse.[Note 7] Specifically, hybrid discourse has come about as a powerful pedagogical tool within specific bilingual, ESL and TSOL classrooms in the southern California community schools made up primarily of Latino/a, African-American and Tongan students. Central to this program is the idea that:

individual learning cannot be separated from the ways the larger learning context is organized. The goal, then, is to create rich zones of development in which all participants learn by jointly participating in activities in which they share material, sociocultural, linguistic, and cognitive resources. (Gutiérrez, et. al. 88)

Hybrid theory necessarily involves recognition, association, and understanding between the divergent bodies of discourses that are prone to exist in our classrooms. In addition, hybrid theory involves harnessing what Kearney and Plax call constructive resistance, a form of student response unlike destructive resistance that threatens the overall leaning space of the class. When, however, the students' own resistance to the materials of the classroom are harnessed and actually used to enhance pedagogical desires--a direct result of hybrid discourse--both students of the dominant group and our working-class students benefit.

Unlike counter-discourse theories proposed by Gee, a pedagogy based on hybrid discourse takes the inherent conflict that emerges out of theories of dominant discourse head-on, directly incorporating concerns arising from a dominated discourse within the space of classroom concerns.[Note 8] The teacher's primary goal would be to accept and even reproduce working-class discourses within the classroom through a combination of understanding and application. In a Bakhtinian sense, a theory of hybrid discourse practices increases the possibility of honest dialogue between discourses, and thus the increased possibility of more meaningful and constructive collaboration and learning. As mentioned earlier, communal practices of knowledge making and sharing have often been directly attributed to specific working-class discourses. Hybrid discourse theory would attempt to tap into that body of discourse practices specific to Gee's dominated discourse, and utilize these discourse practices as an active and transformative practice students could apply directly within the invention and audience stages of a rhetorical process-based composition pedagogy. Rather than simply shedding primary discourse practices, students would be able to place those social practices and identities in dialogue with new ones in the creation of original ideas.

Changes to the traditional ideals of the English classroom that have already taken place in the wake of multiculturalism and poststructuralism would be taken further with a pedagogy of hybrid theory in application. The traditional "personal essay" students are often asked to construct in our first-year composition classrooms could be transformed into "literacy autobiographies," or better yet, "auto-ethnographies;" spaces for introspection and questioning one's own pathway towards "literacy." In addition, "comparison-contrast" papers could focus on the similarities and differences students sees occurring between their primary discourse and the secondary discourses of the academy. For if, as James Zebroski and Nancy Mack argue, "working-class students need to actively write themselves into the language," a theory of hybridity within the college composition classroom has the inherent power to, at least, get us started on that path towards critical literacy (157). It asks students to bring that backpack filled with primary discourses that have served them somewhat satisfactorily in their initial hurdle of the secondary school educational structure to higher education. It even asks them to take them out of the backpack, and in a socioeconomic version of "show-and-tell," share, learn and apply this body of primary discourse to the general theme of collaboration (hopefully) found in our classrooms.

In turn, a theory of hybrid discourse encourages the creation of what Antonio Gramsci calls "organic intellectuals," a body of thinkers born out of their own socioeconomic condition. (5). Gramsci hoped that, instead of the working-class borrowing compassionate liberal intellectuals from the middle and upper classes, they would grow their own intellectuals, individuals who arrive at the interstices of our country's countless number of ongoing debates, armed not only with knowledge and experience of a system of status quo argumentation born out of our systems of higher education, but also of their own primary discourse, out of their own systems of belief, contradiction, and desire.

Notes

[1] In capitalizing the "D" in Discourse here, I am following Gee's own work in directing emphasis and distinction between the textbook, purely language-based definition of "discourse" and this proposed, extended and enlarged construction he puts forth. He writes,

Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes. A Discourse is a sort of identity kit which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular social role that others will recognize. (127)

For the remainder of this article, however, I will utilize a lower case "d" for discourse (except in instances were I quote directly from or make reference to Gee) to reduce drawing attention away from, or needlessly complicating, the primary ideas I want to establish. <Back>

[2] See Goody and Ong for representative arguments in this particular realm of literacy work often labeled "great divide" theories. <Back>

[3] To avoid theoretical tendencies that often essentialize ideas of a working-class discourse, I will work from a combination of studies whose work complicates any solid-notions of definable and universal traits associated with socioeconomic class structures. <Back>

[4] See Folley, Eckert, and Willis for further observations of particular working-class discourse practices. <Back>

[5] Robert Brooke has argued that a composition teacher's desire for his or her student's to see themselves not as students but as writers is, in his borrowing terms from Erving Goffman, creating a "disruptive underlife" a form of resistance which "tries to undermine the nature of the institution and posit a different one in its place" (151). <Back>

[6] The Association of American Colleges writes:

Today's student populations are less well prepared, more vocationally oriented, and apparently more materialistic than their immediate predecessors. College administrators are required, at the peril of losing their jobs and their institutions, to pay attention to the peculiar characteristics of each generation of students. (99). <Back>

[7] For instance, Lisa Delpit has argued that Gee sets up a theory which is "as flagrant as that espoused by the genetics;" where "you are now locked hopelessly into a lower-class status by your discourse" (153). <Back>

[8] Within Gee's theory on discourses, he presents two methods that attempt to reconcile the determinism of much of his results. The first is the existence of "borderland Discourses," spaces where "people from diverse backgrounds, and, thus, with diverse primary and community-based Discourses, can interact outside the confines of public-space and middle-class elite Discourses." (162). The second is what he calls "mushfake Discourse," "partial acquisition coupled with meta-knowledge and strategies to 'make do'" (147). What is important to mention here is that both of Gee's "counter-discourse theories," unlike hybrid discourse theory, are not specific pedagogical tools per say. There are rather, tricks that "get around" the roadblock of primary and secondary discourses Gee sets up within his work. <Back>

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---. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1981.

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