Bibliographic Information
Title: English and Creole: The Dialectics of Choice in a College Writing Program
Author: Nan Elsasser and Patricia Irvine
Year: 1987
Citation
Elsasser, N. and Irvine, P. (1987). English and Creole: The Dialectics of Choice in a College Writing Program. in Shor, I. (Ed.). (1987). Freire for the classroom: A sourcebook for liberatory teaching (1st. ed, pp. 129-149). Boynton/Cook.
Realms of Application
Summary
Elsasser and Irvine describe two college writing programs they conducted in the U. S. Virgin Islands. Faced with the lack of proficiency of their students in writing in Standard English, they instead focused on exploring their relationship to their own Creole languages, and encouraged an understanding of themselves as bi or multilingual, instead of as speakers of an inferior version of the standard language. Through this process, the students developed more productive relationships to both their own native languages and to Standard English.
The authors start their article with an in-depth analysis of the sociolinguistic, cultural, and academic background of their students. Their careful consideration of the lives and environments of their students aligns with the tools summarized by Kincheloe, and from those abstract considerations on the importance of the students’ environment they construct a series of understandings of how Context determines their practice. They analyze the impact of the local sociolinguistic norms on the academic performance of their students, and they develop concrete, specific understanding of the existing knowledge, needs, advantages and disadvantages of their students. In so doing, Elsasser and Irvine’s work serves as a very good example of how abstract tools can beget particular ones. In the abstract, the authors already hold a commitment to empowering their students within the context of schools, a conviction that the existing structures of power and cultural oppression directly impact their students. So, in the particular, they analyze the specific characteristics of their students at their school at that point in time, in order to construct a concrete set of tools to understand the moment that their students are living at present. They base their practice on the concrete tool, not on the abstract one.
Elsasser and Irvine then describe their course in detail, an artifact that has application within the Realm of Lesson. They have an expert come and talk to the class about the differences between English and Creole. They attempt to write in Creole and read works written in the language. They discuss the impact of these realizations on their identities. Each of these activities is an example of a tool that addresses the question of how to teach the specific subject. Together, they are a composite tool, that takes the question from specific subject or idea, “the differences between Creole and English”, to complex, skill-and-knowledge based course subject, “How can native speakers of Creole write better in English”.
In pursuing the idea that to learn to write in English the students must first understand their relationship to Creole, Elsasser and Irvine present a complex idea of how Learning works. For them, competency in writing English is predicated on the students’ first understanding how they think and communicate in their own native language, and how the act of writing is related to that process. Thus, to learn to write in English, the students must first know Creole, not as the thing they happen to speak, but as a complete, complex system of their own.
Elsasser and Irvine also exemplify how their technologies connect to each other. Based on their Contextual model, they construct an idea of how learning to write works in this particular case, through understanding their own native language better. The Lessons, then, are designed from the combination of these ideas of Context and Learning, so that each individual lesson recognizes when, where and with who it is being carried out, and how students are expected to learn from it. Though they describe no heuristic for designing the lessons themselves, it is clear from their description and their analysis that they flow from the other tools they have constructed to answer questions in other realms of application.