A Classroom is not a Family

A Classroom is not a Family

Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 33). Contact zones result in autoethnographic texts, in which we, as the oppressed, use texts to change cultural perceptions those in power have of us (Pratt 35). This often results in the “appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror” (Pratt 35). I experienced a contact zone in my kindergarten classroom, specifically with my teacher. As a second generation Chinese immigrant abruptly thrust into an American education system, I unknowingly used the contact zone to change the perception that my teacher had of my culture through the appropriation of class activities, slowly erasing the imagined homogeneous community in the process.

I changed my teacher’s perception of my Chinese culture by engaging in autoethnographic text. Although I did not write formal texts to challenge cultural presumptions, I used my voice, in writing and spoken word, to challenge stereotypes. My teacher perceived Asians with a perpetual foreigner stereotype. She told my parents to stop speaking Chinese at home, despite the fact that my parents were teaching me English to the best of their ability and I was simply shy and anxious in a new environment. My autoethnographic texts were constructed “in response to or in dialogue with those texts,” which in my context took the form of my responses to class activities (Pratt 35). When I practiced my greetings with my teacher every morning, I responded with decently good English, challenging the assumption that my English was poor. When the entire class introduced themselves, I told that I was born in Ohio, breaking the perpetual foreigner stereotype. My similarities with the rest of the class were revealed when I shared my favorite television shows on PBS kids. I used the power of my voice as a form of autoethnographic text to challenge the ready-made perceptions of my culture.  

The contact zone also allowed me to expand my autoethnographic responses to the appropriation of entire class activities. Appropriation occurs when a cultures are “merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding” (Pratt 35). In my case, the metropolitan mode of understanding was the English language we were learning as a class. I often used English practice activities as a forum to express my Chinese culture. Once when we were sharing what we had for breakfast with the class. I used English to describe the Chinese food I had for breakfast, appropriating the common language to discuss my culture rather than let the English language assimilate me further into an American education system and society. Another activity I often did in the class was drawing pictures and writing sentences about my weekend. Most of the time I wrote about fun activities with my family, books I read, and TV shows I watched, further proving the point I made about challenging assumptions about my “foreigner” status, but occasionally I drew and wrote about traditional Chinese holidays I celebrated with my family. In this activity I again appropriated the English language as well as a visual arts mode of communication, both of which were meant to improve and enhance our English skills, to express my Chinese culture.

The sum of these actions resulted in a contact zone, rather than a community, of a classroom. Power dynamics in the classroom were undeniable. We were a fairly diverse group of students, and many of the white students assumed I couldn’t speak English and would ask me why I “couldn’t talk.” The power dynamics were even more apparent between my teacher and me, as she was old, white, and very conservative. (I can still clearly remember singing patriotic songs and saying the pledge every morning without question or comprehension.) These are clearly the signs of a contact zone, and the safe and familial community we thought we had did not actually exist. Benedict Anderson describes communities as “imagined entities” based on “the style in which they are imagined,” which is the comfortable kindergarten class we imagine based on our earliest perception of school from our family, the media, and other environmental influences (Pratt 37). However, we were arbitrarily grouped into a classroom with little or no thought. A homogeneous community was not possible with the various backgrounds we came from. “The lecturer’s traditional (imagined) task—unifying the world in the class’s eyes by means of a monologue that rings equally coherent, revealing, and true for all, forging an ad hoc community, homogeneous with respect to one’s own words—this task became not only impossible but anomalous and unimaginable” (Pratt 39). Although I did not know it at the time, by expressing my culture through hybrid mediums in the contact zone, I was slowly erasing the facade of community, reducing the power of my teacher, and amplifying voices of my fellow students.

Contact zones are not just the rare occasions when communities interact. Often times, what we perceive as communities are actually disguised contact zones, full of cultural interactions and “asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 34). Through Pratt’s text, I realized that I participated in the contact zone. I created autoethnographic texts to challenge presumptions about my identity, I appropriated the English language as a means to express my culture, and the safe imagined community and the teacher’s initial power slowly vanished. But the erasure of the safe community was for the better, as it allowed us to understand our differences, or as Pratt says, “no one was excluded, and no one was safe” (39).