Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 11 of 12

Abstract

Brief excerpt from interview: I have taught Cultural Influences on Communications class in Santa Barbara. UCSB where I was is very white, I mean, it's very white. One of the things that I'm really struck by and that I love about being here so far... one of the things Iʻve tremendously appreciated so far is the diversity of experiences that people are coming from and the richness as far as... the linguistic experiences that people are drawing on... Frankly my students at UCSB probably would have scored higher on their exams, but I, particularly teaching a culture class, or when I was talking about language last semester teaching a verbal communications class... talking a lot about language and what's the social meaning behind language and things like that... I think it was very abstract to my students at UCSB. I think they would sit there, and they would dutifully take notes about what is the social meaning of talking in different ways... But working with students here, I feel like on a very fundamental level, they get that. They just get it. It is their everyday lived experience. For myself, having lived in other places, language has social meaning in Europe in a very different way than it does in most of the United States... Language means something different [in Europe] than it does in the Mainland U.S. where it's predominantly monolingual and people don't think twice about it. I think in my own case also, having grown up in the San Francisco bay area, I'd have to say that demographically, this is much more comfortable to me and much more like what I what I grew up than anywhere I have lived like since growing up. Princeton felt so white. Santa Barbara was so white. I had a really strong Asian influence from early. I mean most of my friends in high school were Asian. I played badminton fairly seriously, and people used to joke that I was easy to find in the gym because I was the only white person there... One thing that has been an adjustment for me here, as trying to gauge this class, is that in picking examples, and things to draw on, Iʻve have been trying, to the extent that I can, bring it back again to student's experiences. But in doing so, it's been very much a learning experience for me... In the verbal communications class last semester, I made a point to going out and finding... empirical articles that dealt with Pidgin, as opposed to any other language that I could have chosen. If I were in Santa Barbara, I probably would have picked something that was Spanish English, because of the... ethnic composition there. But... to the extent that I can and more and more really, I am trying to just open it up to them to give me examples... As far as my own learning and my own gaining and understanding of a place, I feel like I'm learning a tremendous amount from my students just listening, asking them these questions of: ʻwhat does it mean to have this?,' 'where did you learn this?'... Last week in 385 we were talking about world view, and I said ʻokay, what are different... ideas we could have about people's relationship with nature?... A couple of my local students had really interesting things to say about local attitudes toward nature and contrast that to... a more stereotypical, Western Christian dominion over the land kind of approach. I'm trying... to come with a couple of examples in my pocket, but really to let them provide the examples, because the examples that I would come up with are not necessarily the ones the ones that are the most relevant here.