Race, Culture, and the Education of African Americans

Lynn, Marvin. “Race, Culture, and the Education of African Americans.” Educational 

Theory 56.1 (2006): 107-119. print.

Lynn analyzes three approaches to the study of African American education. In his analysis, he debunks ideologies developed by Elaine Richardon, Peter Murrell and John Ogbu, all respected scholars in the field of African American education. Lynn accuses the scholars of being guilty of sociologist Charles Valentine’s  “uses and abuses culture” theory (109). This theory simply states their is an overlapping of the terms “culture” and “society”. For example, Ogbu blames Black culture’s poor attitude about education as the cause for the achievement gap and suggests changing a cultural attitude to see results. Elaine Richardson suggests pedagogical practices that avoid “banking education (forcing students to learn skills without connecting them to broader social, political, and economic processes in society)” and address social and academic needs of students instead (110). Lastly, Peter Murrell believes pedagogy should draw primarily from the lived realities of African American learners. These ideologies are all considered abuses of “culture” and not a premise for pedagogical practice to stand on. 

Lynn later provides a solution that social scientist find far more practical than approaches of the aforementioned scholars. This solution is critical race theory (CRT). CRT is “a wider body of knowledge including ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, education and more (116). This approach is supposed to allow more flexibility to appropriately address African American learners. 

After thoroughly reading this article, I immediately began to think about classic Aristotle and Sophist practices, and how they can be useful for pedagogical strategy. As a rhetorician, how can I meet the needs of my audience? In this case the audience is African American learners who already have a distrust for “white supremacy” education. Do I think of rhetorical strategies as an educator or as a Black educator? Does my race give me an advantage in a rhetorical stand point in regards to ethos? Is this the Aristotelian practice educators need to think about when teaching minority students? It seems evident the distrust that is getting in the way of education is not one of logic but more so a judgement of intent. Findings in this article especially from Elaine Richardson and Peter Murrell suggest Black educators have an advantage over their counterparts pedagogically, although Valentine and other social scientist question the credibility of this belief. White educators may need to bring Sophist strategies to convince their audience to trust them. As a Black educator, it is important to me to maintain my credibility as a professional and would not want to rely solely on my common ground culturally as my only rhetorical resource. This article was a starting point for me to start researching rhetorical strategies I can use beyond ethos to motivate my disadvantaged, distrustful, uninterested African American learners. I must admit before reading this article I was comfortable with relying on my cultural common ground as my primary rhetorical strategy to motivate. 

Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments

Hocks, Mary E. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments.” 

College Composition and Communication 54.1 (2003): 629-656. Print.

Literacy demands of the 21st century cannot ignore the presence of digital writing environments. Visual rhetoric is the most common convention that makes literacy possible in non-traditional platforms. Hocks investigates how teaching and learning of visual rhetoric is possible. Visual rhetoric developed by instructors are analyzed as well as visual rhetoric designed by post secondary students. Inevitably, Hocks provides enough research and analysis for the reader to understand the cognitive process of evaluating visual rhetoric and how the result of this instructor student hypertext is a more informed, productive student. Post secondary students end up not only satisfied by what was learned, but by their contribution to the authentic learning experience. 

Hocks cited audience stance, transparency, and hybridity as the keys to the operation of  visual rhetoric in electronic environments. Audience stance is the ethos the author creates to engage their audience. Transparency is the use of established conventions such as print to help deliver the new visual rhetorical strategies. Imagine the transparency strategy as training wheels, and the development of new academic conventions as the bike without training wheels. Transparency is a tool to introduce new conventions. For example RSS feeds, would be a great example of an end result of transparency. Lastly, hybridity is a combination of visual and verbal design. 

Hocks analyzed scholarly hypertexts from Anne Wysocki and Christine Boese. These two scholars appeared to have a goal of introducing their audiences to new academic conventions. They took into the account the needs of their audience and began with linear text. The more engaged the audience became within the hypertext, the more opportunities were available for new conventions. The audiences of these two hypertexts were not analyzed, however students reactions were investigated that were exposed to similar hypertexts on the world wide web. These results documented student exposure to new academic conventions via audience stance, transparency and hybridity.  Students ended up enjoying an authentic learning experience where students were active not passive learners. 

This article was interesting and informative because I never realized how important transparency was for us to make this transition into the world of hypertext. I agree we do  use traditional rhetorical strategies from print and other sources to become comfortable in a digital environment, but we end up developing new rhetorical strategies in this setting, particularly with hypertext. As a digital native it seems natural to have these “visual literacies” that are maybe more of a conscious effort than I would have ever realized. In the past I had such a hard time understanding hypertext in print format because I was used to only reading text one way. Yet, in a digital environment the options of hypertext does provide a sense of freedom and dominance.