Locally Responsive Composition Pedagogy:A Tribal College Case Study.

Writing Pedagogy;Tribal College;Native American/Indigenous Rhetorics;Local Pedagogy;Social Sciences;English & Education

Toth, Christina M.Mesa, Vilma M. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Writing Pedagogy;    Tribal College;    Native American/Indigenous Rhetorics;    Local Pedagogy;    Social Sciences;    English & Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/108725/cmtoth_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Over the last decade, the field of rhetoric and writing studies has become increasingly conscious of the importance of location to language, literacy, and learning. This dissertation contributes to that conversation by examining the pedagogical approaches of composition faculty teaching in one distinctively local institutional setting: a tribally-controlled college serving the Navajo Nation. Drawing on a semester-long ethnographic case study, I analyze instructors’ teaching practices as contemporary examples of what historiographer of rhetorical education David Gold calls locally responsive pedagogy. The study brings together findings from 81 interviews with instructors and students, 50 classroom observations, and 77 course documents, as well as my own experiences as a teacher and student in this setting. I find that tribal college faculty respond pedagogically to three broad dimensions of the local: the student population they serve; the institution in which they are teaching; and the communities of varying scale in which the institution is situated. Instructors’ responses to these dimensions are shaped by their own personal, academic, and professional backgrounds, as well as their understandings of and experiences with the local context. These varying influences result in a diverse range of locally responsive pedagogies that interweave disciplinary and local knowledge in distinctive ways. Bringing together theoretical insights from rhetoric and writing studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, education, and anthropology, I argue that the concept of locally responsive pedagogy offers a more useful framework for understanding instructors’ pedagogical adaptations to their teaching context than the more widely used concept of culturally responsive pedagogy, not least because it more directly engages the social geographies and rhetorical exigencies of twenty-first century US settler colonialism. This project contributes to the field’s knowledge of composition instruction in tribal colleges, the literacy experiences and writing needs of Native students, the intellectual work of two-year college English faculty, and what it means to respond to the local in the writing classroom.