My Beloved Community
2020; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/26878003.2020.1815415
ISSN2687-8011
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic Variation and Morphology
ResumoFirst off, thank you for a great semester. This was honestly my favorite class this semester and one of my favorite classes I've had thus far … I truly appreciate the real talks you had with us and the open conversations that took place.—Student 1 (2020)When we love, we can let our hearts speak—bell hooks, All about Love: New Visions (2000)I open this essay with unsolicited praise in the spring of 2020 from a student from the first History of the English Language course I ever taught. Some who know me say they are not surprised by it because I feel my responsibility goes beyond teaching the material. I do my best and then I try again. However, this time was different for many reasons. The professor who had taught this course for many years, including nearly fifteen years prior when I was his student, had to retire abruptly. I had expressed an interest in teaching the course – eventually. I figured I would get an opportunity to explore my research ideas on the rhetorical agency of Black students who identify as African American in language and other nationalities and ethnic groups (Nigerian, Anglophone Caribbean) in a few years. Being asked to teach this course in the second semester of my first year at my university was only the beginning of the adjustments I would have to make in a small window time. After a few hiccups in the book purchasing for the first weeks and the inability to meet with my predecessor – one of my earliest linguistic champions – I could not understand how my department chair remained so confident in my ability to deliver. I planned to teach them historical linguistics through an African American rhetorical perspective to make their foray into language studies culturally relevant. At best, I hoped to persuade them to see the scholarly merit of the language practices that informed their lives but I was willing to settle for a few students who read the material and wrote interesting research papers with the hopes of making an impact on future iterations of the course. How was I supposed to know that our learning community would become more than a space for intellectual exercise? How would I know that we would embody the African American rhetorical practices to enact a beloved community? While the circumstances were not ideal, the opportunity was welcomed. As an alumna of this department, I recall when I took the course from my former professor. When I earned an A, he pulled me aside and said in his rich Sudanese accent, "Kendra, you need to study linguistics." After a couple of years of working as administrative support in our writing center, I decided to pursue rhetoric and composition studies with an interest in African American language study and received a glowing letter of support from him. From the time I earned my doctorate during Fall 2015 and my Fulbright in 2016, I could not imagine I would be able to circle back to my alma mater, my first academic love, and the department and more specifically the course that laid the foundation for my love of Black peoples' translanguaging practices and epistemologies in the U.S. and abroad.However, as a new tenure-earning assistant professor of English at one of the largest public historically black universities (HBCUs), I had to tread softly. This course had been taught for over a decade with the nuanced values of most HBCUs' curriculum as its purview. Standardized English is privileged as the lingua franca of the classroom and workplace, even in a course dedicated to exploring its complicated origin. Though the course recognizes English as having plural forms, the connotation of the course follows a prescriptivist approach to English. Students have been taught that anything else is for less serious scholars or recreation: never to be explored for serious pursuit. To ignore this was at a high cost for me and my students. These students had a sharp understanding of the negative consequences of the casual display of their Southern drawl, afros, and use of too many "ain'ts" and "finnas." They had yet to learn of the value contribution understanding this language variation could offer. I believe HBCU administrators and faculty wrestle with a heightened double consciousness because of their commitment to classical education and their African heritage, which manifests in unique curricula that, with intentional rhetorical excavation, prepares students to benefit from all of the languages they speak. Even if I could not provide my students with an African American Rhetoric course, I knew the importance of teaching the grammar and history of English while juxtaposing these narratives within the global and contemporary contexts. I chose required readings by Black women language scholars, such as Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson (2011), who would introduce culturally relevant topics that clearly align with their lives. We discussed how this language without a singular origin rose to dominance and at whose expense. Despite having to move to remote instruction in March due to the rise of U.S. COVID-19 cases, my students doubled-downed on the lessons and our classroom community online.Their response to these new lessons in the midst of global distress led me to examine my teaching practices through the lens of four classical African communicative practices, which serve as the foundation of the African American rhetorical framework for my teaching: the dignity and rights of the human person, the well-being and flourishing of community, the integrity and value of the environment, and the reciprocal solidarity and cooperation of humanity. This framework, I posit, helped establish my beloved community, as Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned in his Beloved Community treatise for those surviving the trifecta of racism, poverty, and militarism. I undergird this reinterpretation of King's treatise by drawing parallels to the gathering place in Toni Morrison's (1987) fictional community of former enslaved Black people in Beloved: A Novel and bell hooks' analysis of love. The centering of these African and African American rhetorical practices in my pedagogy provides insight into the nuances of teaching in these marginalized institutions and expands our understanding of the power of centering pedagogies on nondominant rhetorical practices.To understand the timeliness of my approach and of the multiple consciousnesses Black students and faculty at HBCUs experience, I must provide a context for historically Black colleges and/or universities. As Keaton-Jackson and Howard (2019) explain: HCBUs were founded after the Civil War when slaves were free, yet still unable to attend PWIs [Predominantly White Institutions]. The first Tribal College was founded in 1968 on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Thus, the curriculum, co-curricular and extra-curricular activities all cater to the culture of their student populations. They exhibit what Gloria Ladson-Billings would call a "culturally relevant curriculum," for the students' identities are not at the periphery of the curriculum, but rather fully and consistently integrated.HBCUs could also be considered the "academic ghettos" of U.S. higher education, a term used by Alexandria Lockett (2019) to describes writing centers, where "this metaphor of the 'academic ghetto' playfully (or shamefully?) invites readers to understand the potential of this place as a route to success or detour to failure, depending on who runs it and the extent to which that director recognizes and leverages the power of the space." Perhaps Wonderful Faison's (2019) explanation of her experiences at her HBCU writing center truly captures my teaching context best: To be frank: many of the students we worked with were dealing with and spoke openly of these struggles and asked how they might be able to correlate the ways writing could help them – if it could – find a way out of their individual and social ghettoization. In other words, they asked how writing could free them, when writing and learning to write had done nothing but oppress them. Thus, our tutors had to find connections with former gang members' literacy "issues" by walking them through assignment sheets, helping them dissect and then understand what assignments were asking them to accomplish, with how that assignment (or broadly a general education writing course) could give them an opportunity – a way out of the circumstances they knew so well – circumstances and situations that, while suspect, had somehow provided for them and landed them here in our institution and in our writing center space.These contemporary understandings of HBCUs reveal the remnants of ancient African rhetorical frameworks. These institutions "were created with the sole historical purpose of educating African Americans who, post-Civil War, were not admitted to PWIs … [and are places] where the African American experience … is fully integrated and part of the curriculum and campus life itself" (Keaton-Jackson, Jackson, and Hicks Tafari 2019, 187–88). And even in the centering of "the African American experience," we sometimes, like any institution, have to make room to challenge the perceived singular experience.At any rate, HBCUs have always already been in a constant state of emergency and yet they draw from their loco parentis, which fosters a sense of fictive kinship that bolsters their resilience through external opposition. If I were having this conversation with fellow alumni of my institution – and most proud HBCU alumni – they would define HBCUs in the context of their love for it. Our alumni "bleed orange and green." Other HBCUs have their common affirmations of love. We love our alma maters. We "rep" (represent) our alma matters by wearing our school colors in the community and in the workplace. We also rep our Black languages socially and sometimes, when the classroom is a beloved community, academically. This fictive kinship is intensified during our celebratory gatherings. Homecomings are the embodiment of the sacred-secular continuum Geneva Smitherman (1986) articulates. We socialize together and we gather in worship spaces together as a culminating event. With the same vigor, we rally behind our institutions during the hardest hit times. For good or ill, we place our grievances on the shelf for the greater good of the institution to demonstrate our love for our institutional family. HBCUs are Beloved Communities: physical spaces that function as countercultures for the marginalized to excel in academics in the margins of higher education while discovering and defining revolutionary love.Teaching through COVID-19 put our institution and myself through a battery of tests that required a return to a sense of family. And bell hooks (2000, 2009) teaches us to see "home" and "family" are contested spaces, noting these spaces as culturally specific and limited by patriarchal constructs. Consequently, I saw the benefit of interrogating my love for my institution and by extension, teaching. I saw parallels between the undocumented HBCU membership expectations of its family members and the "good" educators. To know someone who teaches for any other motivation than the "love of it" is to know someone who is moments away from being shamed out of the profession. Administrators, colleagues, and students expect teaching and love to intersect in the same ways as HBCU alumni and love. For this reason, these questions drive my proposition of a Beloved Community: What does it mean to love my students? What does it mean to love them through a global pandemic? How does loving myself help me love them?1My use of love in this essay derives from dynamic meanings of love. When we picture love, we are at once picturing a thing that must be performed and a thing we want to possess or give. We give and receive love but we must possess it first to give it. In the context of the classroom, we possess love for our classroom and teaching while we perform actions to express this love. I had to consider Mitchell and Randolph's (2020, 25) words: "With the specter of death painfully present at every quotidian turn, we must ask: And how exactly do we quantify or qualify student success under such strains?" as the pandemic encroached upon our national and local borders and its death slowly reached our local community. I needed a dynamic understanding of the love that led me to the classroom.There is not much saliency about admonishing an instructor to love their students and their classrooms, for even the exhausted instructors with outdated teaching philosophies will likely have some sense of love for their students and the profession, even if it is buried under exhaustion. What is radical is the practice of self-love in the classroom. Unlike the flight attendant, we rarely tell the instructor to put on the metaphorical mask before trying to mask the more helpless. I am aware that this metaphor takes a new meaning as I am typing in our local grocery store with people adorned with my mask. Whether literal or metaphorical, instructors must wear our masks to protect ourselves. Even if this material mask does not actually keep me safe from COVID-19, the rhetorical act of wearing it is my way of telling others I respect myself and requesting they do the same. This practice stems from my African American rhetorical worldview, which is grounded in the African communicative practices Karenga (2003) outlines.Prior to COVID-19, I had already been living in my personal epidemic. By January 24, 2019, my thirty-ninth birthday, my mother had already had her second stroke and lost her lateral vision, among other functions. After spending months advocating for her healthcare, I began my thirty-ninth birthday sharing cupcakes with my mom's favorite certified nurse practitioners and helping her distinguish between my birthday balloons and my physical body. When I reflect back to the beginning of this year, I can see how love was driving me. Despite my promise to myself I would not spend another day in a medical facility, that was not the case. By December 25, 2019, she had almost had her third stroke in two years. Within this two-year period, I had returned from my Fulbright without a tenure-earning position (or gainful employment), accepted a non-tenure track administrative position, lost that position, and accepted my current tenure-earning position. Managing my mother's health while managing my career and well-being became my new reality. Reflecting on these experiences, I see how my choice to prioritize my mother's recovery over the love of my career was the embodiment of the African communicative practice of the support of well-being of family and community. Reading my inclusion of my role as caregiver to my mother through this rhetorical lens provides more context for my teaching when read through this communicative practice because, like the authors of the ancient autobiographies, my narrative "reveals how self is called into being and constituted in community and through the communicative practices it elicits and sustains, that is, a practice of discourse and action within a community" (Karenga 2003, 17).While I could see evidence of a communicative practice of well-being for family and community in the way I prioritized my mother's care, I also saw evidence of self-care as the establishment of dignity and rights of the human person – for this context, the instructor. When I realized my first response to canceled national conferences was a sigh of relief, I knew I had to reconsider how I prioritized my love for my profession over loving myself. I identified with April Baker-Bell's (2017, 3) reflection of her first few years on as tenure-earning faculty. Her articulation of the myth of the strongblackwoman in academia – one that expects Black women to disproportionately and unwaveringly to divide themselves in ways that are palatable for academia – is amplified in my HBCU context. These spaces are not devoid of this myth, which remains alive under the framework of loco parentis, where the Black woman is celebrated for sacrificing herself to uphold the family. In this context, the unspoken expectation for young, Black women teacher-scholars to shoulder responsibilities without the same compensation of their male counterparts echoes the higher race tax (Baker-Bell 2017, 5). In 2020, this issue is magnified as university presidents release public statements on how they will forge ahead, loving faculty and staff in tow, to return to the physical classrooms. E-Mails and social media feeds have been flooded with reentry plans meant to reassure the constituents that the administration has a safe way to return to business-as-usual safely, while many have charged faculty and staff to outline their strategies for replacing faculty and staff in case someone dies as a result of the often-deadly virus. Staff meetings have become means to corral faculty to spend their breaks learning new technology – sometimes incentivized, other times not. Embracing this unachievable goal post works counterintuitively to the love I want to nurture. I began to consider remedies along the lines of Baker-Bell's recommendations. I began to invest into other activities I love but have had to neglect. I found myself sketching again. I talked to my colleagues about non-work-related activities. I cooked food for my mom and I. I actually slept for eight hours some days.Choosing to love myself was a radical act, one that seemed a counterculture to the quick advice given to instructors new to online instruction. Those well-meaning academics who felt that self-love looked more like survival (if it existed at all), chided others about their resistance to pseudo-hacks to online instruction. To tune out the debates and other quick-fixes to an already taxing semester felt necessary in the midst of a fast-changing world where my mother could not receive home health or even go to the emergency room if she had another stroke because this virus could be her end. I chose to place my needs before everyone else's demand for attention and my students and family were better for it.After several naps and a few hot meals, I was still unable to consider what I needed to do or say to gather my students who have now returned home to unknown circumstances, some to other parts of the world where reliable internet connection was nearly impossible. Then it happened. A friend and senior colleague began sending daily, non-intrusive check-in text messages. "Good morning. How's it going?" became my new alarm clock. His texts became louder than the remorse I was feeling for "indulging" in rest. I would make light jokes about sleeping too much and he'd send retorts such as "Your body must have needed it" or something similar. The simple conversations evolved to sharing steps he was taking to move his class forward, which would quickly inspire my pivot toward some experience I had with the topic. Time seemed most arbitrary at the beginning of remote instruction because our campus closed during our spring break. By the end of the first real week of remote instruction, I found myself opening my laptop to review the individual work I had assigned. I had already given up on attempting to write for publication because it took everything I had to show up for my students and my mother. Besides, many academics on Twitter decried tweets about writing productivity or successful teaching. Tweets about academic productivity led to a barrage of criticism or indirect tweets pointedly referring to academic productivity as inhumane. Many overwhelmed with grief questioned why others wrote to work through the trauma of the spring semester without hesitation. Guilt, not love, seemed to govern the Twitterverse. Maybe it always had. Once we collectively adopted self-isolation, quarantine, and masks, however, these bold tweets evolved beyond statements said in the heat of frustration and uncertainty.2 Even still, this communal space lacked the affirmation I needed most days to reconnect with my love for teaching writing. It lacked the nuance I needed to negotiate the weight of responsibility I had for earning tenure as someone who represents communities of people who see my accomplishments as an extension of our shared community. I was acutely aware that earning tenure (which means publishing despite a global pandemic) was not mine alone and felt like it was not mine to refuse. Lynette Mawhinney (2011, 215) explains how this guilt is embedded in the teaching profession as well, especially HBCUs. While Mawhinney's autoethnography of her experiences as a Black, tenure-earning assistant professor left her questioning "When does caring as a teacher become too much?", I was learning how to nurture self-love and the love I had for my students by learning to strategically invest in my Beloved Community.I use Beloved Community in a couple of ways here. The first sense is an extension of the term Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used before his assassination. Although I reference Martin Luther King, Jr.'s popularized definitions of Beloved Community, which details his actionable plan to use nonviolence as a means to eradicate the trifecta of evils affecting all humankind: poverty, racism, and militarism (The King Center n.d.), I reframed this community in terms of my teaching context at my HBCU. I saw adapting my lesson plans as an act of nonviolence to already traumatized students, some who learned they would not have a traditional graduation ceremony. For those who may not have experienced graduation ceremonies at HBCUs, they carry similar sentiments as a wedding ceremony. For mine, the planning surely mimicked one. While writing final essays, I also coordinated hotel rooms, menus, and recreational activities. By the end, though, my grandparents, my parents, extended family, some professors, and a few of my closest friends sat under the same roof sharing fond memories of my process and next steps. For my undergraduate degree, my friends surprised me with a video with private messages from my family, professors, and closest friends expressing their appreciation. My maternal grandparents, who are now deceased, shared their expectations of my completion of graduate studies, something I had not yet considered for myself. This gathering was also the first time I could recall my parents under the same roof for any extended period of time, and yet they centered the attention on my "special day." This communal act, though tiresome and not without tension, represented a culmination of the expression of love from the graduate to the community they represent and vice-versa. To this day, our students carry the weight of supporting family members and representing whole communities. I recall when I prepared for my doctoral graduation from a Predominantly White Institution. The Black custodial staff saw me in the library days before and asked about my progress. They witnessed my undergraduate journey at my HBCU and their eyes swelled when they congratulated me. They knew I worked during their late shift in the graduate lounge because I couldn't afford a personal laptop or internet at home. I thanked them in my dedication. I know my students who worked full-time jobs were not doing so just to make extra cash. These jobs funded their survival for their homes and put food on their tables. I had to reconsider how I could leverage my self-love as a lesson for them, which could only happen if I sought nonviolent ways to reengage them in practical ways.After a conversation with the same colleague and friend about King's Beloved Community, he admitted he kept picturing the community of ex-slaves in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). His simple mistake inspired another connection to the kind of love I aimed to give myself and foster in my classroom. By simply looking at the front matter of Beloved, which includes Romans 9:25: "I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved," I saw the premise of Toni Morrison's fictional humanization of the interior life of a Black mother's trauma during U.S. slavery, arguably one of the world's most notorious global pandemics, as a way to process my remote instruction. These two concepts depict my deliberate approach to minimizing the harm my students experienced in our classroom.Prior to our shift to remote instruction, I had already unknowingly created an infrastructure for our culturally-situated community practices. I began by informing them by using the collective "we" to establish a sense of dignity that was not contingent upon their knowledge of the subject or their ability to avoid making mistakes. As a graduate of the department who has also studied this department, I understood the multiple consciousness that my mostly female students faced before they ever completed a task. They were skilled in literary analysis and the explication of literary texts. They would have to learn to discuss language variations, borrowing, and creolizations from the perspective of the selected textbook. Even more important, I was learning how to teach them what I understood and was still understanding about these topics. They completed SRRQ, or summary, response, research question, for each textbook chapter instead of taking exams as was the practice of the previous professor. I revised this assignment from a graduate course with Kathleen Yancey, and thought it would be a great way to prepare them for the graduate studies they wanted to pursue. Before I could get them to process historical linguistics like social scientists, I had to teach them the difference between taking notes and studying in this course and their masterful studying in prior literature courses. Although I had not remembered ever receiving that instruction explicitly, I realized my students desperately needed this guidance. Their contextualization of the chapters made them more than passive learners, it made them co-creators of the kairotic lessons for the multiple consciousness as members of systemically marginalized groups. One student posed this question in response to a chapter on dialectic variations: I come to wonder just how effective linguists can dismantle the pedagogical system in favor for one that is truly diverse and a safe space. The issue has been discovered, but what is the solution? How do we push educators to realize their biases and challenge them? How do we push speakers of supposed less-prestigious languages to understand themselves phonetically with confidence? (Student 2 2020b)This student was developing more than a research question: she was establishing the pillars of her own beloved community founded on culturally-situated community practices. Another student explored Old English through the lens of mixing languages the unequitable power inherent in this mixing as she writes: "As language is about power, it raises the question of how the mixing of languages encouraged groups to overpower each or exposed vulnerabilities in one group." She made connections between the Celts being left with place-naming influence only and the local roads and the U.S. cities and states with Native American names while denying them the power of the use of their names. Evidence of these "real talks" as Student 1 called them, appeared in their SRRQs in ways that demonstrated their ownership of the new knowledge because they came to trust my respect for their ideas.The African rhetorical communicative practice, the integrity and value of the environment, captures the two key course redesigns for my remote instruction. I began our class during remote learning with extensive wellness checks. Before we discussed Celtic invasions, I made sure they had eaten. Rested. Had shelter. I did not assume they shared the same securities I had. My previous personal challenges taught me that. Since I had already established our collective love, they were more apt to join our Zoom meeting earlier and share how they were coping now that they were laid off or back home. These were some of the open discussions my student mentioned in the opening quote. I knew little about the trajectory of the pandemic or how it would affect their future careers as juniors and seniors, but I could reassure them I would not harm them by bulldozing past the reality of the fear that gripped them to discuss Middle English.The response from faculty in our college and the broader university community seemed to differ from my concept. During meetings with our dean, I heard more examples of faculty leaning toward seeing remote instruction as slight variation to teaching in person. However, the goal for my course was always to offer them an unforgettable lesson of loving the languages they speak. I made it a point to use vernacular languages during our exchanges, especially during wellness checks. It was my way of creating a liminal home base for us to return. It differed from our classroom bond where students felt the need to always perform their most assembled selves.It was as if I became, as in Morrison's Beloved, their Baby Suggs speaking in the Clearing, reminding my students of the need to love themselves because the pandemic did not erase the preexisting circumstances surrounding our lived experiences as Black students and faculty. Although people were dying around the world at the hands of COVID-19, prominent and lesser known Black people were beginning to lead COVID-19 related deaths. I had to love them in my unofficial capacity, just as Baby Suggs loved this community of formerly Black families, admonishing them to "in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it … You got to love it … love your heart. For this is the prize" (Morrison 1987, 88–89). My students and I chose to love our hearts by sharing this common space in a shared language. As Lynnette Ma
Referência(s)