September 4, 2014 - 21:34
I'm still struggling with the way we define contact zones and the way we experience agency and power in our classroom spaces. I want to reclaim some of the agency I feel we all pushed away during our discussion today in class.
I think that some classrooms make spaces for contact that allow us to change the power dynamics. Does that make sense? That in some classrooms, rules of engagement are assumed and those with less power are excluded in dangerous ways, but that in other classrooms, those with less power are given space to interact in ways that might upend the unequal power dynamics. In thinking of examples, I'm reminded of the ways some of my faculty try different pedagogical techniques to give students more agency (making students facilitators, having silent discussions so no one voice may dominate, having fishbowl discussions so select students may voice thoughts/opinions/experiences). I'm also thinking of classrooms in which "rules" of engagement are made explicit – where students are asked to think about how much space they take up, and to think of how much space they are making for others. I'm thinking of classrooms in which a faculty member signals what kind of question they're asking and what kind of response they expect.
There are classrooms where this does not happen, where interactions are unequal. Here I think of when a student enters a class and the faculty says, "You should know this from high school so I'm not going to go over it..." – here privileging those who had particular educational experiences and setting back those who have not had that same access. When students and faculty assume that everyone has entered the space with the same resources and background, those without that are disadvantaged.
I'm thinking now of Bryn Mawr as a larger institution and I acknowledge that YES the people in the administration have more power to make decisions and change in the campus than I do (in most ways). I think of how I monitor the way I speak to people in the administration, the way I try to maintain a respectful and cool tone – avoid getting overly emotional. I also think of the way that in using these tools or rules of interaction (in knowing how to speak in order to be listened to) I am using "transculturation" – I'm "select[ing] and invent[ing] from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture," (Pratt). I am subordinate because of age and because of location within the community, but of course, I am also simply using the tools of my people, the white upper middle class dominant culture.
So is Bryn Mawr a contact zone? Yes, sometimes. But is SGA and our Honor code our way of "determin[ing] to varying extents what gets absorbed into [our] own [culture] and what it gets used for"? Our mode of transculturation? Are those our spaces to respond to authority and take power in that response? Pratt's son's school assignment for his teacher was a subtle way of upending or responding to the power structure in his classroom. Is our use of SGA our way of responding to the power structure of the Board of Trustees and the President's office? OR if we don't currently trust or use that outlet, does it have the potential to be a source of transculturation? Am I even using these terms correctly?