Audre Lorde: contextualizing strategies.

Abstract

Providing contextual background is vital when teaching reading (and writing) to normative speakers of English. Moreover, contextualizing activities themselves are a rich source of creative reading and writing assignments, and they are especially useful for linking offline and online learning. Therefore, this paper presents and discusses contextualizing activities based on Audre Lorde's "That Summer I Left Childhood Was White." It demonstrates how a focus on the Emmett Till case, Jim Crow laws, and the question of silence can be pedagogically effective in the ESL classroom.

Introduction

The pedagogical issues and activities I will discuss clearly originate in a variety of research and studies pertaining to overall ESL reading comprehension. For example, Tang and Moore (1992) emphasize the importance and effectiveness of using pre-reading activities with ESL students, while Richgels (2002) discusses the necessity of providing background knowledge to the students before beginning actual reading instruction. Both Kitao (1990) and Drucker (2003) focus on the applications of schema theory to the ESL classroom, arguing that reading comprehension involves more than just linguistic understanding and that it should rightfully be seen as an interaction between text and prior knowledge of the topics referenced in the text. In my view, the theoretical case for the importance of contextualizing activities is quite persuasive, so my intention in this paper is to concentrate on applications. Thus I have intentionally adopted an anecdotal, narrative approach.

The American University of Sharjah has a four semester composition sequence required of all students. The first two courses in the sequence are Communication (COM) 101--Academic Writing--and Communication (COM) 102--Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum. The Com 101 and 102 sequence closely parallels a standard first-year writing program in the United States. Both courses are based on process writing, with the focus on argumentative/persuasive essays. The primary difference between Com 101 and Com 102 is that in Com 102 the students move from personal opinion to more research-based documented writing, reading and critiquing a variety of texts and constructing their own arguments accordingly.

The students in a Com 102 class typically write three 1000-word essays in the course of the semester. Teachers can choose the genres they wish to assign and concentrate on, but the first essay is usually some kind of narrative while the latter two essays are nonnarrative (for example, an evaluation and a position paper). In any case, the student essays always follow close readings of various writers anthologized in the Com102 textbook--the sixth edition of Rise Axelrod and Charles Cooper's Reading Critically: Writing Well. The narrative essay itself is designed as a response to issues and topics raised by those writers in Axelrod and Cooper whom the students have read and discussed in the first four weeks of the semester.

The Text

Axelrod and Cooper has many fine selections, and I use a wide range of them when teaching Com 102. The story I enjoy the most, however, and find the most productive for my particular teaching situation, is Audre Lorde's "That Summer I left Childhood Was White." As a white heterosexual male raised in a fairly comfortable middle-class environment, I have never experienced firsthand the sort of systematic exclusionary practice that she presents. But I know good writing when I see it, and Lorde's story is very powerful writing indeed. At the same time, Lorde is also capable of great subtlety, or rather, deceptive simplicity, and one point we discuss in class is how Lorde is able to take a relatively minor, personal incident and turn it into a highly persuasive, political critique of both American racism and the culture of silence among whites and blacks that sustains it.

At first glance, Lorde is writing a conventional "coming-of-age" narrative, a fictionalized account of a journey she took with her family after graduating from the eighth grade. Her mother and father took Lorde and her older sister on a summer trip to Washington DC, traveling by train to DC from their home in Harlem. After a day of sightseeing, visiting the Lincoln Monument and other symbols of American freedom and liberty, Lorde and her family were walking down Pennsylvania Avenue when her father decided to buy them a treat. They walked into a soda fountain and ordered some ice cream, only to be told that they could not eat it inside and would have to buy it take away. This denial of service was Lorde's first experience with overt racism, and she concludes her story by describing how she went back to Harlem and indignantly wrote a letter to the president of the united states (not capitalized in Lorde's account).

Although I will on occasion use a reading that I do not really like in a composition class, I prefer relying on writers that I personally enjoy. By doing so, I find it easier to convey the excitement and passion I believe is necessary for effective teaching. That being said, even if I hated "That Summer I left Childhood Was White," and disagreed with Lorde's premises and conclusions entirely, I would still use her story when teaching writing, especially with normative speakers of English. For the simple reason that because it requires contextualizing activities in order to be fully understood and appreciated by the students, the story provides a number of profitable teaching and learning opportunities.

Building the Background

With relatively short selections (Lorde's story is a bit more than three full pages), I have the students do their first reading in class. I ask them not to stop to use their dictionaries and not to worry about details or specifics. When teaching fiction I focus on the event-line first, making sure the students can summarize the actual story itself before continuing on to the idea-line, the author's argument(s). In other words, I move from "who, when, where, and what happened?" to "what is the meaning of what happened?" As a prereading activity for "That Summer I Left Childhood Was White" I begin by putting two questions on the board--"How would you feel if you were 12 years old and you went into a restaurant, ordered an ice cream, and were told you could not be served because of your skin color?" and "What would you do?" I have the students quickly write a one or two word answer to each question, and then we review those answers as a class. Interestingly, I invariably get a wide range of emotions and responses, many of which resemble Lorde's own feelings and actions. For example, students have said they would feel inferior, embarrassed, furious, and insulted, while answering that they would shout back at the clerk, complain to authorities, or walk out as proudly as they could.

The final paragraph of Lorde's story, with its haunting evocation of Lorde's hatred for the very word white, is an excellent example of English writing at its best, and after the students have completed their initial silent reading, I always read that paragraph aloud to the class. I do so because the passage is beautifully written, but also because it establishes the central pedagogical question of the story; namely, why in the world is this woman so angry? My students at AUS come from over 30 countries, mainly but not exclusively from the Middle East and South Asia, and they are by no means uninformed or inexperienced in terms of problems like racism. For the most part though, they come from fairly wealthy or privileged backgrounds in their home countries, and the depth of Lorde's animosity and hostility to American culture and society is somewhat [foreign to them--as it is to me, for that matter. In short, I must contextualize the story for the students if they are to truly enter into it and engage Lorde on her own terrain. They do not ultimately have to agree with Lorde's critique, but they must at least begin to understand the historical rationale for her perspective.

At this point, I link the traditional (offline) classroom with the Internet. I am not an expert, but I do have some experience with technology-enhanced instruction. Although I am certainly aware of the shortcomings of such instruction as well as the dangers of an over-reliance on the Internet, I also feel that most university-age students are more comfortable with Web-based texts than print sources. In their personal and professional lives they will also be operating almost totally in an electronic environment, so I believe it would be a serious mistake not to use the Internet when appropriate. When teaching Lorde I employ the Internet in several ways, two of which I will discuss here.

First of all, either in the lab or as homework, I have the students do a Google search for "Emmett Till." Since I only spend around two weeks on Lorde, I cannot, unfortunately, get into the incredible richness of the entire American Civil Rights Movement. But the Emmett Till story functions well for my purposes, especially because like Lorde he took a journey south when he was a child on the verge of adulthood. His journey ended much more tragically, of course, and I have been amazed at how that story resonates with my students. A key learning outcome of Com 102 is the ability to summarize, and after locating an Internet article on Emmett Till the students write summaries of what happened to him (see Murder of Emmett Till, 1997). l review those summaries carefully with the students to make certain they understand the case and its aftermath. Significantly, several of the websites have before-and-after photographs of Emmett Till (see Emmett Till, 2000). When the students see pictures of Emmett's burned and battered corpse, they start to realize what Lorde was reacting against and why she is indeed so angry. I have been in the computer lab when the students first look at some of the photos. At that moment "That Summer I Left Childhood Was White" loses its abstract, distant quality, and becomes for them a real, living text.

Next I have the students search "Jim Crow Laws" and ask them to bring in five different examples for classroom discussion (see "Jim Crow" Laws, 1998). I put many of their examples on the board to demonstrate how comprehensive these restrictions were and how they governed, or intruded upon, every aspect of life--personal, social, political, economic, and religious. When the students see laws dictating separation of the races in mental asylums, in cemeteries, and, most absurdly, in homes for the blind, their first reaction is to laugh. But having already read about Emmett Till, they rather quickly understand that these Jim Crows were no joke. And again, like the Emmett Till reading, this activity provides a context for Lorde's story. It builds a background for the students that allows them a meaningful entrance into the text, creating a learning space where they can critically engage Lorde's anger and arguments in a much more productive manner.

From Background to Foreground

Com 102 is an interesting and challenging course to teach because it emphasizes both reading and writing skills. However, in the final analysis, it is a composition class and any given reading text must eventually lead to the development of the students' writing ability. As a composition teacher, what I like most about Lorde's story is the flexibility it gives me in terms of pursuing my preferred dual-track approach to writing assignments. Like most university composition courses, Com 102 is designed to improve academic writing, but I believe that even, and perhaps especially, within the context of an academic writing class there is room for creative writing activities, too. Indeed I have found that combining more strictly academic writing tasks with more imaginative, open-ended prompts can be quite useful both for fostering and maintaining the students' enjoyment of writing and also increasing their academic writing skills. More specifically, contextualizing strategies themselves serve this purpose quite well.

For example, with "That Summer I Left Childhood Was White," I alternate between academic and creative writing. Based on their Internet reading, they produce summaries of the Emmett Till incident and also paraphrases of selected passages. I then have them write a 250-word eulogy from the point-of-view of Emmett's mother, a eulogy to be delivered at Emmett's funeral in Chicago. Time permitting, I select several of these and have them read aloud in class. We next return to Lorde, and the students write summaries of key aspects of Lorde's argument, including her criticism of fundamental symbols of American freedom and democracy, and her refusal to capitalize some proper nouns "correctly." I also have the students write the letter to the president that Lorde claims at the end of her story to have written and sent. The students find this last assignment, in particular, both difficult and intriguing.

The whole point of contextualizing activities is to encourage engagement (again, not necessarily agreement) with the writer of the text being discussed. The students must have at least a basic understanding of the social, cultural, and historical roots of that text. This engagement is crucial when working with American writers like Lorde and Middle Eastern and Asian students like mine at AUS. But contextualizing activities also involve connecting the text to the students' own social, cultural, and historical background, requiring the students to explore how the meaning of the text relates to their individual life experiences. Given its probing of the complexity of racial identity (Lorde's mother, for instance, has very light skin while Lorde and her lather are quite dark) and its total rejection of silence in the face of injustice, Lorde's story is well-suited to this kind of foregrounding. The political and cultural traditions of the students often value silence, especially for women and young people, and as one of their Essay One prompts, the students are asked to address the question of when silence is appropriate and when it is inappropriate. For an 18 year old female student from, for example, Saudi Arabia, such a question is very interesting indeed. It certainly places Lorde's story, and Lorde's discussion of the issue, in a much more immediate context. Perhaps not coincidentally, and I am generalizing here, but my female students tend to "like," or respond to, "That Summer I Childhood was White" more than my male students.

Conclusion

For my teaching purposes anyway, the true, or deeper, value of contextualizing activities is their capacity for transhistorical, intercultural understanding. When using a writer like Lorde (or Anne Dillard, Amy Wu, Rick Bragg, or George Orwell), what I am really concerned with is linkages, with a pedagogical strategy that forges historical and cultural connections between the background of the text (and its author) and the background of the students reading and writing about the text. At first glance, such a connection may seem rather tenuous--after all, how much could my students at AUS have in common with a writer like Audre Lorde? But effective teaching, effective schema building, can help the students discover that in reality they do share common ground with Audre Lorde. With that realization in place, Western teachers and non-Western students can begin to examine what other commonalities they embrace. They can begin to entertain the notion that what unites us is, perhaps, greater than what divides us.

References

Axelrod, R., & Cooper, C. (Eds.) (2002). Reading critically: Writing well. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

Drucker, M. (2003, September). What reading teachers should know about ESL learners. Reading Teacher, 57 (1), 22-30.

Emmett Till before and after. (2000). Emmett Till. Retrieved November 13, 2004, from www.east-buc.k12.ia.us/00_01/BH/et/et.htm

Kitao, S. K. (1990, Fall). Textual schemata and English language learning. Cross Currents. Retrieved November 12, 2004, from Academic Search Premier.

"Jim Crow" Laws. (1998). Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site. Retrieved November 13, 2004, from www.nps.gov/malu/documents/jim_crow_laws.htm

Murder of Emmett Till. (1997). Early Civil Rights Struggle. Retrieved November 13, 2004, from www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/early-civilrights/emmett.html

Richgels, D. (2002, September/October). Schema theory, linguistic theory, and representation of reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Research. Retrieved November 11, 2004, from Academic Search Premier.

Tang, H., & Moore, D. (1992). Effects of cognitive and metacognitive pre-reading on the reading comprehension of ESL learners. Educational Psychology, 12 (3-4), 315-332.

David L. Gugin, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates 

Gugin, Ph.D, is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, teaching linguistics, composition, and business writing.