teaching moments, pro and con

[deborah]

My students all appear great this semester: thoughtful, provocative, and engaged with what one another say. I've had some good teachable moments in class so far, including a moment when a student responded to a critical article's claim that ethnic Americans have seemingly no mythology inherently their own, by saying "well, there was a mythology, but we came here and we wiped out everyone, so then it was gone". (I paraphrase what the student said, and the critical article was Celestine Woo, "Toward a Poetics of Asian American Fantasy: Laurence Yep's Construction of a Bicultural Mythology", Lion and the Unicorn 30:2, April 2006. To be fair to Woo, though the quotation is provocative both in and out of context, she is using "ethnic American" to mean... well, I'm not entirely sure, but I think she is talking about non-immigrant WASP culture. And I should emphasize that the student is one of the smart, thoughtful types who occasionally provides teachable moments because high levels of student engagement sometimes mean that such things get said if we are operating at the pace of a discussion class. Moreover, the student responded thoughtfully to the follow-up discussion.)

I thought I did okay in engaging the students with thinking about that one (apart from some teaching/race fail on my part where I said "Anansi" and meant "Coyote", and what does that say about my brain?), and then came home and read sanguinity's essay "...the native peoples had the most troubles with the immigrants...". And... I know I am absolutely guilty about what she is discussing, and I'd never thought about it in those terms before. I shall have to think back about the conversation in class and see if that conversation carry the same connotations.

Class was loaded in all kinds of ways, actually. We were discussing a book by a PoC which was based loosely on non-Western myths, and one student in the class came from a similar but hardly identical background as the author. She did volunteer that she knew a version of the myths. I haven't yet had enough experience navigating the minefield of not wanting to ask that student to Represent On Behalf Of Her Culture, but also not wanting to speak as an expert about something for which one of my students might have substantially more in-depth knowledge that I do. (It wasn't a set of myths for which I am a subject expert, not even an outsider subject expert.)

It makes me think, though, that whenever I am teaching and talking about some culture which is not my own, I should always act as if one of my students might be from that culture. For all I know it's true, anyway. (It's related to how I started to confront a lot of my own internalized racism; always assume that somebody standing behind me in any conversation is a member of a group I'm discussing. When I realized how much I was self-censoring, that made me realize how much I was saying that needed reeducation.)

Comments

[badgerbag]

your last paragraph! I agree very hard with it! thanks for setting that out so clearly.

[sanguinity]

:: ...I said "Anansi" and meant "Coyote", and what does that say about my brain? ::

...that you've been reading Iktomi stories?


:: and I'd never thought about it in those terms before. ::

May I ask what terms you were thinking about it in? (If you'd rather, privately is fine.) I've been puzzled by some of the reactions to the post.


Woo: in endnote 9, the "whereas" appears to set up "ethnic Americans" and "white Americans" as two different categories of Americans. No?

Considering her endnote 9 against her "no mythologies inherently their own" question, it seems to me that she just overlooked Native Americans altogether: Native Americans in America are certainly less displaced than white Americans from Britain, and she seems to be using the latter as her displacement yardstick.

I think Woo is making a special pleading for white Americans in asserting that they don't have to account for displacement within their mythology. While there's a certain something that comes with feeling able to assert (inaccurately, as you point out in the other post) that this one set of stories are shared by us all, there are also clear issues of displacement in the mythologies of white Americans. The mythologies that go with this land are not the mythologies of Britain, and British mythologies cannot be made to serve. (Referencing my own landscape: there are no British stories about Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, and Mt. St. Helens, nor are there British stories about orcas. It is very obvious to me why one so often runs into the phrase, "There is an old Indian tale...")

That said, with respect to this statement from endnote 9(you'd think that was the only thing I read in the whole article), "for self-identified ethnic American groups, the chasm is more evident between their ethnic origin and Britain", I find Malinda Lo's Ash very interesting. Lesbians and East Asians in what is clearly Fantasy Britain, and present without explanation for how they got there: Fantasy Britain had always had lesbians and East Asians.