Finding the biases in a community of scholars. (Perspectives).

A BIAS MAY BE PROVIDED BY A THEORY or an experience or an image or an ideology. Without a bias, however, language is only words as cloth is only threads.... To write is to find words that explain what can be seen from an angle of vision,--Linda Brodkey, "Writing on the Bias"

Inviting students to embrace rather than avoid bias challenges what some would argue is the purpose of a liberal education: to teach students to eliminate bias from their thinking and writing. Bias, the argument goes, limits vision, obscures understanding, and impedes intellectual development. This is true when bias is understood as an unreflective habit of mind. But bias is equally a feature of thoughtful scholarship: the deliberate selection and representation of human experience according to the interests, perspective, and methods of analysis that characterize a given discipline. Reflective disciplinary work accounts for its own perspective and pursues it as Linda Brodkey observes. A specific angle of vision is a feature of intellectual analysis and a primary tool, not just an obstacle to be overcome. By recognizing this central element of academic achievement, a liberal education should explore the various biases that crisscross human lives and texts and that define the communities in which we live and wo rk. A liberal education should teach students to see, read, and write--both analytically and passionately--not from one but along many and various angles of vision.

In recent years, interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship have raised substantial challenges to how we conceive liberal studies, challenges that have to do with these competing notions of bias. The legacy of the nineteenth-century development of the disciplines has been the cultivation of deep but narrow slices of human understanding, reflected in the divisions of study that still organize academic institutions. Must interdisciplinary endeavors present a kaleidoscope of scattered angles of vision, which capture neither the shared features nor the true differences in the academic landscape? Or, can the increasingly specialized endeavors of different disciplines be integrated by emphasizing shared truths that underlie their different interests and habits of analysis?

The Bryn Mawr College Seminar Program raised precisely such questions for us as three professors coming together from the fields of education, literary studies, and history. The program replaces a traditional reading and writing course for freshmen and sophomores housed in the English department, and it emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to the development of critical thinking and writing skills. Teams of faculty from different fields design each course and collaborate to produce a common syllabus. Each section of the course accommodates between twelve and eighteen students. The aim of the program is to foster richer, more integrated, and more complex representations of human understanding than a single field might offer.

Our goal in designing our College Seminar course was to draw upon but also complicate traditional disciplinary distinctions, emphasizing the shared processes of intellectual endeavors rather than common truths those endeavors might or might not produce. "Finding the Bias: Tracing the Self Across Contexts," focused on identifying, tracing, and accounting for the biases that guide our explorations as a community of scholars. In this discussion we offer an overview of the guiding premises and the reading and writing assignments of the course.

One test of the positive use of "bias" in the classroom is the subtlety with which students learn to address the biases that guide their own thinking and the texts they analyze; accordingly, the second half of the essay frames the critical insights students came to in the seminar, offered in their own words. We conclude with a reflection upon how the metaphor that gave the title to the course and this essay illuminates our work as teachers and scholars.

Description of the course

In challenging students to develop their critical and creative abilities, we asked them not to separate and distance themselves from what they studied and who they are but rather to recognize, name, and trace a variety of biases along which they and we live, think, and write. In this respect, we hoped to model our own multiple commitments: both to a successful collaboration and integrated syllabus, and to the separate passions--personal and professional-- that led us to the scholarly fields we have each chosen. At the intersection of the academic and the personal--both of which are informed by a range of biases--we aimed to help students see that inhabiting bias with self-awareness is necessary and generative to thinking and writing in a community of scholars. Through reading and writing assignments that challenged the assumed separation between the academic and the personal, we helped students to reflect on the various angles of vision that constitute a disciplinary bias.

The texts we assigned all productively violate the boundaries of academic and personal writing and of specific disciplines. The initial reading assignment, "Writing on the Bias," is a meditation on Linda Brodkey's development as a writer. Published in a prestigious academic journal of literary study, this essay surprises undergraduates by its use of the first person pronoun, its lack of footnotes, and its combination of deeply personal and rigorously intellectual analysis. Richard Rodriguez uses his own entry into formal education to offer a class-inflected analysis of the American educational system and to show the mismatch between institutional and family culture that minority students must negotiate. Theodore Zeldin and Dorinne Kondo challenge the conventions of their fields--history and anthropology, respectively--while similarly integrating the personal and the academic. In "How Men and Women Have Slowly Learned to Have Interesting Conversations," Zeldin positions himself as an interviewer of contemporar y French women and uses their words to weave and explain the evolution of conversation between men and women over time. Kondo employs key anthropological tropes, including thick description of setting and the first person spectator, to problematize both the scholar's immersion and objectivity in the scene she describes.

The writing assignments for the course used these and other texts as models of how to complicate any simple delineation between the personal and the academic, and between the genres of fiction, history, educational theory, autobiography, and anthropology. Early assignments challenged students to see that selves, including their own, always interpret the world from specific angles of vision. An assignment to write a short essay on a defining family myth, for instance, helped students see that every self has tendencies, interests, preferences-biases--even if they are implicit, unrecognized, or externally generated.

Moving on from an analysis of a single bias, we asked students to explore competing perspectives on a single event or experience. The assignment for this segment of the course was to tell the same story from two or three different angles of vision--to embody those perspectives and write from them--and then to step back and analyze how, as authors, students invested each perspective with authority. The different angles of vision from which they had to write for this assignment helped students to grapple with the idea and the practical implications of bias. When does a writer or scholar need to acknowledge his or her assumptions? How might a writer accommodate competing interests?

We then shifted the focus from personal perspective to disciplinary perspective. Striving to integrate the personal and the academic, and scrutinize our own disciplinary bents, each of us taught the same lesson to each of the three class sections. The subject of the rotating class was Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother. Our lessons emphasized the different assumptions the fields of education, literary study, and history might bring to this text, yielding particularly rich readings along each disciplinary bias. For this segment of the course, students wrote an essay that included their reading of Kincaid's novel from each of the three disciplinary perspectives. This assignment required students to identify specific methods and interests that inform a particular discipline, to explore how a text can be read along the bias of that discipline, and to read critically for what it leaves out.

The course culminated in a portfolio through which students critically looked back on the semester's work. In these portfolios students were remarkably articulate about how bias functions in their own and in others' thinking and writing. Furthermore, they came to see the practices of reading, writing, talking, and critical thinking as integrated intellectual and social activities. This self-assessment reflected not only students' developing sophistication but also their ability to analyze and articulate that development. The portfolios dramatically illustrated how each student organized the multiple angles of vision that the texts, their peers, and their instructors embodied. Instead of producing kaleidoscopes of competing fragments, our students were able to recognize and analyze different angles of vision without losing the perspective that each one offered, thus making new meanings for themselves and others.

Students becoming scholars

Constructing a course around explorations of the self may seem to offer immediate pitfalls. Colleagues who regularly teach entering undergraduates are quick to register their frustration with the solipsism they perceive in young college students; they complain that these students read novels to identify with the main characters and write essays that narrate their own thought processes as they encounter a task or text, instead of communicating claims, arguments, core ideas or interests to a reader. Liberal education seeks the kind of cognitive maturity in student thinking and writing that involves recognizing--and claiming--such core ideas as interested perspectives. Approached constructively, what entering students already know how to do--explore the world through the lens of self--can be the starting point for thinking critically about bias and about the specific histories, social contexts, and aesthetics from which different angles of vision emerge.

Students analyze their work

Through their work in "Finding the Bias," students came to recognize that the best scholarly work does not presume a single perspective as the only legitimate one but is, rather, multiply informed and acknowledges its angle as one of many cuts across a shared conversation. Critiquing in their portfolios the papers they wrote early in the semester, students noted how "selectively [they] used the quotes from texts to support [their] arguments" (Janara Nauruzbayeva) with no intention "to provide both sides of the story" (Emily Bogner). Writing early in the semester from a single angle of vision, students focused on single-minded arguments at the cost of excluding the "many biases woven into the fabric of a text" (Brodkey 1994, 546).

Required to write from within three different personal perspectives, students were "forced to 'speak"' in different voices, to embody other positions, to "advocate their roles, voice their concerns, and weigh their responsibilities and their priorities" (Munu Shrestha). The experience of assuming different perspectives and their accompanying analysis of the experience let students see "how narrow-minded" they had been, "how badly afflicted with tunnel vision (Munu Shrestha), and how each story illustrated "a narrow bias, but not the lack of one" (Brodkey 1994, 547).

Explaining both the challenge and the insights gained from tracing disciplinary perspectives through The Autobiography of My Mother, one student, Selena Matthews, wrote in her portfolio that

[t]he largest challenge I faced with this paper was creating a solid thesis. I was so mesmerized by the beautiful language Kincaid used.. that I thought my thesis would easily come after writing the body paragraphs. However, when I took into account the bias of the main character (who felt her past did not exist), my logic was lost. I forgot that it is impossible to describe something that does not exist. I had to re-explore the character's account of history and filter our the biases in order to give an accurate analysis... I trapped myself in the main character's way of thinking...and had to step out of her mind frame in order to recapture my thesis.

Selena is able to discern the biases along which Kincaid wrote her text and recognize that she, Selena, also needed to write along a bias, one that traced her own way of thinking and was not caught "in the main character's way of thinking." Successfully disentangling but keeping in mind her own and Kincaid's perspectives, Selena demonstrated the kind of learning that can happen at the intersection of the personal and the academic.

Reflecting on her development over the course of the semester, Selena continues:

My new strengths as a thinker include the fact that I am more open-minded and less naive. I have learned to analyze situations from numerous perspectives. I am less naive in the sense that now I have to look deeper into the way people express themselves and learn not to accept everything they say as truth. My new advantages as a thinker result from my growth as a listener. The more I listen, the more I realize my own biases. Selena's analysis brings her full circle: from her initial indiscriminate vision, through a widening of perspectives gained through exploring multiple angles of vision, to a rethinking of her own perspective through that wider angle. For Selena, as for another student, Amy Quinn, "writing has become a conversation--between myself and my peers, between myself and my professor, and, most importantly, between myself and myself."

These students have learned to think critically about the angles of vision from which they see and write without losing the perspectives those angles offer. They have learned to follow the biases threaded through their own and others' texts to comprehend and communicate a wide range of human experiences and perspectives.

Conclusion

Lakoff and Johnson suggest that metaphors govern our everyday thoughts and actions in both conscious and unconscious ways; they structure what we perceive and how we interact (1980, 3). To inspire and facilitate education--the making conscious of what may be unconscious or unknown--it is important to identify those metaphors, to make them explicit, to use them to guide our teaching and learning. In "Writing on the Bias" Brodkey begins with the literal meaning of bias--a line cutting diagonally across the weave of a piece of fabric. In "Finding the Bias: Tracing the Self across Contexts," we began with the figurative meaning: a slant, a preference, a perspective, a prejudice. In academic practice and in life, finding a bias is the process of deciding how one will cut across various facts, ideas, experiences, and contexts--and discerning how others have done so. This is the essential work of intellectual analysis in any field.

Just as Brodkey argues that finding and following the bias is as critical to writing as sewing, we argue that when students engage in thinking, reading, talking, and writing along a bias, they continually see one thing in terms of another--the essence of metaphor and of critical thinking. In the process they come to experience and understand their focus of study in different, and deeper, ways. An excerpt from another student's portfolio illustrates this deepened understanding and provides an appropriate bookend to the opening epigraph. Like Linda Brodkey in her reflective essay, Aliya Curmally articulates the challenge we take on in pursuing a truly liberal education:

In writing and in life, biases attach themselves to us and we follow them as guides to a chosen way of living. A self moves through many biases over the course of a lifetime. To cut across the bias would essentially mean to cut across the self, and thereby create a new self with new biases.

REFERENCES AND REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS ASSIGNED

Bleich, D. 1991. Reading from inside and outside one's community. In J. Cahalan and D. Downing, eds. Practicing theory in introductory college literature courses. Urbana: NCTE. 19-35.

Brodkey, L. 1994. Writing on the bias. College English 56: 5, 527-547.

Kincaid, J. 1996. The Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1992. Silence. In G. Colombo, et al., eds. Rereading America: Cultural contexts for critical thinking and writing. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press.

Kondo, D. 1990. Crafting selves: Power, gender, and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Larsen, N. 1928/1986. Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Lewis, M. and R. Simon. 1986. A discourse not intended for her: Learning and Teaching within patriarchy. Harvard Educational Review, 56, 457-72.

Lorde, A. 1984. The transformation of silence into language and action. Sister Outsider. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press.

Rodriguez, R. 1992. The achievement of desire. In G. Colombo, et al., eds. Rereading America: Cultural contexts for critical thinking and writing. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press.

Rose, M. 1989. I just wanna be average; and Entering the conversation. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin Books.

Tompkins, J. 1996. A life in school: What the teacher learned. MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

Winterson, J. 1985. Oranges are not the only fruit. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Zeldin, T. 1994. How men and women have slowly learned to have interesting conversations. In An intimate history of humanity. New York: HarperCollins.

ALISON COOK-SATHER is assistant professor of education at Bryn Mawr College and director of the Bryn Mawr/Haverford education program. KATHERINE ROWE is associate professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. ELLIOTT SHORE is the chief information officer and professor of history at Bryn Mawr College.