Either I’m Nobody or a NationRe-Imaging Diversity through Narrative, New Literacies and the Cosmo-poetics of 21st Century Students

Rationale and Purpose The history of the United States is one of migrations. The true history of these

migrations has yet to be told. –Michel-Rolph Trouillot, (1995)

“I have Dutch, English, and [Negro] in me and either I’m nobody, or a Nation.”--Derek Walcott, The Schooner ‘Flight’

--Social and Industrial History of Indiana, Benton, T.H. (1933).

From My Families: brujería

and Beyond

Overview of the issue 21st Century multiracial, multiethnic, and

transnational students are redefining what it means to be American. In the process, they offer new ways of situating reading, writing, teaching and learning in classrooms and educational spaces. From how we speak about race and place to the history of our shared spaces, aesthetics, and what counts as “literacy”, we are in a moment when student voices are leading the way for social scientists and educators alike in re-discovering and re-conceptualizing identity and literacy in American spaces.

Problem Multicultural Education and “Diversity”

Education are two aspects of language and literacy education that are often championed for their efforts at creating cross-difference understanding and tolerance. However, many programs still employ an idea of “difference” rooted in the Western colonial project which yielded and, arguably, continues to yield, racial, ethnic, and linguistic mappings, typologies, and ill-fitting “boundaries” across much of the World.

Questions What “new” and transcultural ways of seeing and knowing

are students bringing to 21st Century classrooms? What would happen if, instead of treating ‘diversity’ or ‘di-

versality,’a term coined by Walter Mignolo (2002) that denotes a counter to uni-versality and that celebrates mixture and relation, as an addition to the regular, dominant, canonical and euro-centric curriculum, it was made central?

What forms would student responses take to a pedagogical move that embraced mixture and relation over traditional, segregated typologies and identity categories?

Theoretical and Analytic Lenses Trnasculturation and

Creolization (Ortiz, F. (1947), Glissant, (1989).

Cosmopolitanism and Care (Appiah, K. (2007), and Noddings, N. (2002).

Critical Pedagogy (Freire, P. (1970).

“The question was put to him what country he was from, and he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the

world’.”—Diogenes (404-423 BC)

Analytic Questions: Transculturation and Créolité: Are there instances of trans-localism (claiming

more than one location as meaningful)? Are there instances of plurality (claiming more than

one racial, ethnic, religious identity)? Are there instances of ‘becoming di-verse,’ or

seeking meaning across, within, in between, or at the “interstices” (Bhabha, 1994)of boundaries?

What, if any, instances of either embodied, extraordinary, emerging, resistant or other forms of transculturation or créolité are there?

Analytic Questions II. Cosmopolitanism: In what ways are students expressing a

sense of ‘having obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind (Appiah, 2006)?

Do students voluntarily make connections to others or does the curriculum and/or teaching method promote relational connectivity?

Critical Pedagogy III. Critical Pedagogy In what ways do active and purposeful

exercises aimed at creating reflections on identity, power and normativity engage students?

Are there instances of either liberation or conscientization?

Do students take an active role in suggestions for practice of a transcultural curriculum, one based in créolité?

Methods Auto-ethnography and the feminist

narrative traditions in literary studies and anthropology to inform a ‘transcultural and narrative ethnography’.

Practitioner-inquiry based stance

Context “Student Success Center” at a large,

public, and mid-western university. “College Skills Class” : first generation

college students, “mixed” students, and students on the University’s Academic Probation.

Participants: Jeremiah Lily David

Chapter 1 : Diversity is not ElsewhereDigital narrative and multimodal literacies: Re-Imaging the Eye/I in educational space

Re-Thinking the Eye/I of 21st Century classrooms Student digital narrative suggests that

there is no longer a singular “I”, breaking down binaries of the western colonial project.

Digital Narrative as emancipatory and accessible

They Call Me

Jeremiah smith

SO…

THIS ISWHO I AM

If you must know…...

I’m Lily & this is me

I am…

Daniel

Chapter 2: Neo-Historicism and Textual mediation“I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me.” –Derek Walcott, Poet Laureate (1992)

Chapter 3: Art Education and Student Success

(Wollin, J., 2010)

Chapter 4: Hip-Hop Education for 21st Century Student SuccessRocky Rivera, (2010). Hearthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evrJJkUHZ4Y

Implications Greg Tanaka’s call to, “join in the kind of applied research

that might help us look into the interior spaces of both white students and students of color at increasingly diverse campuses, while testing new, more intercultural practices that replace earlier multicultural programs,” is exactly what this research aimed to embrace and practice “in the field.” (Tanaka, 2009). The work and research I offer here is a clear and telling sign of the urgent need to rethink race, ethnicity, and Americanality/Americanidad in the 21st Century.

Additionally, the work here suggests a real and nourishing avenue for redefined “success” with otherwise two or three times (due to a mismatch of racial, ethnic, or currently existing ‘multicultural’ categories) marginalized college students.

Implications, evoking Sonia Nieto’s (2010) suggestions Multicultural education assumes that a curriculum that is more

multicultural is also more complicated and truthful and will, in the long run, help develop citizens who think critically, expansively, and creatively (56) I will add, in a more cosmopolitan fashion that evokes a deep seated care and concern for others.

Our collective consciousness began with—and continues to be influenced by—indigenous Americans as well as by those who were forcibly brought from Africa into slavery (57)

Multicultural education is a process (78) Identity is belonging and belonging is embracing our hybridity—

Identity is not simply a personal issue, but [one] that is deeply embedded in institutional life. (11)

Quoting Frederick Erickson, “When we think of culture and social identity in more fluid terms. . . we can find a foundation for educational practice that is transformative.” (212)