Talks by Wyatt Paige Hermansen
At Any Cost: The Rhetoric of Educational Access, Student Poverty and First-Year Writing
The income disparity between college educated and non-college educated adults is at an all-time h... more The income disparity between college educated and non-college educated adults is at an all-time high (Pew, 2014), and the current presidential administration has made increased postsecondary educational attainment a key policy objective. Against this backdrop, college promotional materials offer uncomplicated narratives about educational access-to-success that often elide the complex stakes for students from low-income backgrounds. These students stand to gain a great deal from postsecondary education, but they often face the greatest personal and financial risks associated with their enrollment.
First-year writing instructors at access-oriented institutions play a crucial role in supporting the success of these students. In order to perform this role effectively, however, instructors need a clear understanding of the situated structural conditions of students’ lived experiences as they shape their engagements with postsecondary education and their experiences in the first-year writing classroom. These include the effects of both chronic and episodic poverty. Our concurrent session explores the complexity of class-related identity positions and effects in a climate of consumerist educational rhetoric. Presenting research from three qualitative studies in access-oriented institutions, we identify barriers—institutional, rhetorical, and pedagogical—that can undermine the success of low-income students, as well as the institutional and classroom pedagogical practices that support success.
Speaker 1: Examining the relationships between poverty, class, and literacy learning is imperative in first-year composition courses (e. g., Lindquist, Peckham, Shor). Understanding these relationships is especially important in two-year colleges and other access-oriented institutions, where students from low-income backgrounds disproportionately enroll and where class effects can create additional barriers to educational success. To open our session, Speaker 1 will draw on the work of labor economists (e. g. Zweig, Metzgar) and census data to disambiguate existing notions of poverty in order to establish a common conceptual vocabulary for discussing poverty risks in relation to first-year writing. Speaker 1 will then present a secondary analysis of a semester-long study about teaching conducted with seven instructors at 3 community colleges in Southeast Michigan, a region dramatically affected by the recent economic recession, to demonstrate ways that class effects are identified, categorized, and in some cases misunderstood by the faculty teaching first-year writing at these access-oriented institutions. Instructors in this study commonly employed euphemisms such as “complex” or “problematic” lives to describe the teaching challenges presented by students experiencing poverty, and they frequently identified classroom strategies and course policies they developed to respond to those challenges. However, participating instructors lacked a common language to marshall resources to support their instruction at the department and institution level. Instructors generally limited their descriptions of poverty effects on learning to material resources rather than structural barriers students faced as they cycled in and out of poverty. Overall, instructors who recognized poverty effects in their classrooms universally identified a lack of systemic support for college students experiencing those effects. This left the burden for supporting students on individual instructors and their understanding of poverty effects.
Speaker 2 will present her analysis of how rhetorical strategies used in college advertisements emphasize higher education as a private good. Her analysis points to ways these advertisements, which are often aimed at high-risk, low-income students, help shape narratives gaps between instructor and student understandings of the purpose of postsecondary education, particularly the goals of first-year writing. Speaker 2 will then present analysis of 12 semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in first-year writing at a For-Profit College to demonstrate ways that conflicts between students’ enrollment expectations and lived college experiences complicate the existing risks they negotiate as low-income students. Overall, Speaker 2 argues that that disjunctures between the rhetoric of education advertising aimed at low-income students and the realities of the first-year writing courses can undermine the success of first-generation and low-income students.
Speaker 3 presents findings from a semester-long ethnographic study with first-year writing instructors and students at a tribally-controlled college serving the Navajo Nation. Nearly a third of Navajo Nation families are considered to be living in chronic poverty. The college was founded in part to foster economic development on the Navajo Nation, and providing education that responds to the particular needs of Navajo students is central to the institutional mission. Faculty typically viewed the challenges of rural reservation poverty as endemic to the teaching context. They responded to students’ poverty-related experiences by: 1) including poverty-related issues in the curriculum; 2) accommodating students’ chronic logistical difficulties; 3) alleviating some of the immediate effects of poverty by providing both material and institutional resources; and 4) imparting strategies to help students persist in their composition courses and degree programs. However, while all four faculty responded pedagogically to the material realities of their students’ lives, they did so in largely idiosyncratic ways, without a common conceptual vocabulary for describing their students’ challenges in structural terms. This lack of shared language for discussing the complex relationships between poverty, class, culture, and settler colonialism led some faculty to explain poverty-related events and behaviors in terms of Native cultural difference, inadvertently normalizing and essentializing inequalities deriving from socioeconomic structures.
Taken together, our studies complicate many of the assumptions embedded in the access-to-success narrative that informs educational policy and emboldens aggressive educational advertising and enrollments. These complications have important implications for composition pedagogies in postsecondary institutions serving low-income student populations. Our studies suggest a pressing need for an improved functional framework that enables scholars and instructors to discuss the structural nature of class and poverty effects on student literacy learning in the context of the current rhetorical climate surrounding education. In the final half hour of this session, we will invite the audience to strategize ways of improving the existing frameworks for identifying and responding to poverty effects within the specific local conditions of their writing programs and classrooms.
Selling College: The Promises of For-Profit Colleges
This panel presentation addresses the importance of examining and (re)covering the personal narra... more This panel presentation addresses the importance of examining and (re)covering the personal narrative in writing composition classes at the college level. A critical examination of personal literacy narratives and classroom pedagogy is presented to encourage writing instruction that connects personal experience with public discourses and social policies.
“'It Is Essentially Her Own': Authenticating Discourse, Institutional Authority, and Narrative Agency in The History of Mary Prince"
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, published in 1831, chronic... more The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, published in 1831, chronicles the life and experiences of Mary Prince, a Bermudian woman who was born into slavery. Thomas Pringle, a Scottish writer, poet, and abolitionist, edited the narrative and oversaw its publication; Susanna Strickland, a visitor staying with Pringle’s family, transcribed Prince’s oral history. Though the title identifies the narrative as Prince’s personal history—“related by herself”—Pringle frames Prince’s words with a preface, supplement, and over a dozen footnotes. This paper examines—along with other transcribed and edited slave narratives—the complex relationship between slave and amanuensis, particularly the oral history of Prince as a woman fighting for her own subjectivity within the text. While slave narratives’ intended audience of white Europeans necessitated the verification and authentication of narratives—and, indeed, “authenticating documents” provided by white editors lent crucial credibility to texts in the slave narrative genre and buttress the majority of slave narratives—Pringle transcends the familiar role of supportive authenticator/editor and assumes the roles of Prince’s mediator, delegate, and translator. Invoking theorists in black women’s oral history, slavery narratives, and postcolonialism, this paper explores the editorializing voice present in such slave narratives and posits the possibility of excavating the “real” spoken text from the transcribed narratives.
"Like Technology, Like God's Creation": The Universal Zulu Nation, Ideology, and the Reclamation of the Future.
Afrika Bambaataa, an American DJ and hip-hop artist, is a prominent and influential artist who em... more Afrika Bambaataa, an American DJ and hip-hop artist, is a prominent and influential artist who employed an Afrofuturist aesthetic in his music and writing. The relationship that subjugated groups—particularly African-Americans and Native Americans— have with technology and the dominant cultural ideology and the place members of such groups have in the American future—is addressed by many Afrofuturist artists. This paper focuses on Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation, which is a political and spiritual awareness group founded by Bambaataa in the 1970s. While issues of cultural recovery are common aspects of Afrofuturist texts, the Universal Zulu Nation goes beyond the oft-repeated idea of the American Dream as a myth—or, commonly, a privilege reserved for Americans of European descent—and seeks to help other subjugated groups from befalling the same fate as African-Americans by addressing them directly. If the past can be manipulated, the Universal Zulu Nation believes, then so can the future; just as important as correcting falsified versions of history is securing the future and maintaining its integrity. The authority to control the past, then, is transferred to control of the future. If left in the hands of the dominant groups in the world, they argue—specifically those of the European colonizers—then it will be framed according to the dominant ideology.
Integrating such theorists as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kodwo Eshun, and Amritjit Singh, this paper explores Bambaataa’s considerable influence as an Afrofuturist writer, musician, and punk-philosopher. It investigates the ways in which science fiction themes reimagine the future and attempt to reclaim a stolen past and secure a tenuous future. The paper's presentation, technology permitting, will integrate clips of the 1974 Sun Ra film "Space is the Place," an interview with science fiction writer Samuel Delany, and audio clips of Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock."
"Into Them, Avid for Vision": Medical Authority, the Clinical Gaze, and Fertility as Agency in Dystopian Speculative Fiction
The gaze of the doctor—when, for instance, he depresses a patient’s tongue with a wooden stick an... more The gaze of the doctor—when, for instance, he depresses a patient’s tongue with a wooden stick and looks into his mouth with a light—is accepted as a necessary, unavoidable, and essential part of medicine. We might not think to question the authority of the doctor, the power he has over our bodies, or the power that is implied by that kind of surveillance. This paper explores the role of the intrusive medical gaze into the human body in works of dystopian speculative fiction. The genre of science fiction, particularly novels set in a futuristic, nightmarish, totalitarian worlds, lends itself well to a Foucaldian interpretation of power, particularly through the lens of Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, which was published in French in 1963 and in an English translation in 1973. For Foucault, all forms of knowledge and knowing are relative to the historical periods in which they emerge and contingent upon limitations and parameters of thought, and cannot be extricated from the mechanisms of power. His focus was often on real-world situations, such as the prison system, sexuality, and, in the case of The Birth of the Clinic, clinical medicine; his intent was not to propose solutions to real-world problems, but to demystify them and reveal their inner workings. In given historical contexts, forces of power and influence should be considered and revealed in order to understand the situation of their emergence. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault posits an explanation of the importance of the scopic and the dehumanizing, manipulative power of visuality in medicine, which he believes sections and partitions the medicalized body. A brief introduction to the role of clinical authority in Octavia Butler's Dawn, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Samuel Delaney's Nova will help create context for more specific application of Foucaldian logic to an interpretation of the texts.
Papers by Wyatt Paige Hermansen
“It Is Essentially Her Own”: Authenticating Discourse, Institutional Authority, and Narrative Agency in The History of Mary Prince
Representations of Internarrative Identity, 2015
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, published in 1831, chronicle... more The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, published in 1831, chronicles the life and experiences of Mary Prince, a Bermudian woman who was born into slavery. Thomas Pringle, a Scottish writer, poet, and abolitionist, edited the narrative and oversaw its publication; Susanna Strickland, a visitor staying with Pringle’s family, transcribed Prince’s oral history. In the narrative’s preface, Pringle asserts that the narrative was “first suggested” by Prince herself, and assures the audience that the Anti-Slavery Society to which Pringle belonged was not “in any degree responsible for the statements it contains” (Pringle 252).
This dissertation explores the success of for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs) as a socio... more This dissertation explores the success of for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs) as a socio-cultural phenomenon that hinges on distinct public discursive strains and neoliberal rhetorics. This project examines the role of language in creating and sustaining particular discourses of higher education and how those discourses are reinforced and reflected in channels of discourse like documentary films and advertisements. In the context of shifting demands on and representations of higher education, this project critiques the evolving rhetoric of American education and the shift toward a wider acceptance of privatization efforts, as well as the effect this shift has had on prospective and current college students. Through a rhetorical analysis of for-profit college advertisements, as well as interviews with current and former students, this project explores the impact of promotional discourses on students who commit to such institutions. Among other modes, advertisements for colle...
There Was No One Coming With Enough Power to Save Us": Waiting for "Superman" and the Rhetoric of the New Education Documentary
Rhetoric Public Affairs, 2014
There Was No One Coming With Enough Power to Save Us": Waiting for "Superman" and the Rhetoric of the New Education Documentary
Rhetoric Public Affairs, 2014
âIt Is Essentially Her Ownâ
Representations of Internarrative Identity, 2014
"There Was No One Coming With Enough Power to Save Us": "Waiting for Superman" and the Rhetoric of the New Education Documentary
Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 2014
Uploads
Talks by Wyatt Paige Hermansen
First-year writing instructors at access-oriented institutions play a crucial role in supporting the success of these students. In order to perform this role effectively, however, instructors need a clear understanding of the situated structural conditions of students’ lived experiences as they shape their engagements with postsecondary education and their experiences in the first-year writing classroom. These include the effects of both chronic and episodic poverty. Our concurrent session explores the complexity of class-related identity positions and effects in a climate of consumerist educational rhetoric. Presenting research from three qualitative studies in access-oriented institutions, we identify barriers—institutional, rhetorical, and pedagogical—that can undermine the success of low-income students, as well as the institutional and classroom pedagogical practices that support success.
Speaker 1: Examining the relationships between poverty, class, and literacy learning is imperative in first-year composition courses (e. g., Lindquist, Peckham, Shor). Understanding these relationships is especially important in two-year colleges and other access-oriented institutions, where students from low-income backgrounds disproportionately enroll and where class effects can create additional barriers to educational success. To open our session, Speaker 1 will draw on the work of labor economists (e. g. Zweig, Metzgar) and census data to disambiguate existing notions of poverty in order to establish a common conceptual vocabulary for discussing poverty risks in relation to first-year writing. Speaker 1 will then present a secondary analysis of a semester-long study about teaching conducted with seven instructors at 3 community colleges in Southeast Michigan, a region dramatically affected by the recent economic recession, to demonstrate ways that class effects are identified, categorized, and in some cases misunderstood by the faculty teaching first-year writing at these access-oriented institutions. Instructors in this study commonly employed euphemisms such as “complex” or “problematic” lives to describe the teaching challenges presented by students experiencing poverty, and they frequently identified classroom strategies and course policies they developed to respond to those challenges. However, participating instructors lacked a common language to marshall resources to support their instruction at the department and institution level. Instructors generally limited their descriptions of poverty effects on learning to material resources rather than structural barriers students faced as they cycled in and out of poverty. Overall, instructors who recognized poverty effects in their classrooms universally identified a lack of systemic support for college students experiencing those effects. This left the burden for supporting students on individual instructors and their understanding of poverty effects.
Speaker 2 will present her analysis of how rhetorical strategies used in college advertisements emphasize higher education as a private good. Her analysis points to ways these advertisements, which are often aimed at high-risk, low-income students, help shape narratives gaps between instructor and student understandings of the purpose of postsecondary education, particularly the goals of first-year writing. Speaker 2 will then present analysis of 12 semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in first-year writing at a For-Profit College to demonstrate ways that conflicts between students’ enrollment expectations and lived college experiences complicate the existing risks they negotiate as low-income students. Overall, Speaker 2 argues that that disjunctures between the rhetoric of education advertising aimed at low-income students and the realities of the first-year writing courses can undermine the success of first-generation and low-income students.
Speaker 3 presents findings from a semester-long ethnographic study with first-year writing instructors and students at a tribally-controlled college serving the Navajo Nation. Nearly a third of Navajo Nation families are considered to be living in chronic poverty. The college was founded in part to foster economic development on the Navajo Nation, and providing education that responds to the particular needs of Navajo students is central to the institutional mission. Faculty typically viewed the challenges of rural reservation poverty as endemic to the teaching context. They responded to students’ poverty-related experiences by: 1) including poverty-related issues in the curriculum; 2) accommodating students’ chronic logistical difficulties; 3) alleviating some of the immediate effects of poverty by providing both material and institutional resources; and 4) imparting strategies to help students persist in their composition courses and degree programs. However, while all four faculty responded pedagogically to the material realities of their students’ lives, they did so in largely idiosyncratic ways, without a common conceptual vocabulary for describing their students’ challenges in structural terms. This lack of shared language for discussing the complex relationships between poverty, class, culture, and settler colonialism led some faculty to explain poverty-related events and behaviors in terms of Native cultural difference, inadvertently normalizing and essentializing inequalities deriving from socioeconomic structures.
Taken together, our studies complicate many of the assumptions embedded in the access-to-success narrative that informs educational policy and emboldens aggressive educational advertising and enrollments. These complications have important implications for composition pedagogies in postsecondary institutions serving low-income student populations. Our studies suggest a pressing need for an improved functional framework that enables scholars and instructors to discuss the structural nature of class and poverty effects on student literacy learning in the context of the current rhetorical climate surrounding education. In the final half hour of this session, we will invite the audience to strategize ways of improving the existing frameworks for identifying and responding to poverty effects within the specific local conditions of their writing programs and classrooms.
Integrating such theorists as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kodwo Eshun, and Amritjit Singh, this paper explores Bambaataa’s considerable influence as an Afrofuturist writer, musician, and punk-philosopher. It investigates the ways in which science fiction themes reimagine the future and attempt to reclaim a stolen past and secure a tenuous future. The paper's presentation, technology permitting, will integrate clips of the 1974 Sun Ra film "Space is the Place," an interview with science fiction writer Samuel Delany, and audio clips of Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock."
Papers by Wyatt Paige Hermansen