Rethinking Literacy as a Pedagogical Art of the Contact Zone

Mary Louise Pratt begins her seminal article, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” by detailing the way her young adolescent son used baseball trading cards as a kind of pedagogical device, first by aiding in his literacy development and then in informing his mathematical, historical, geographic and various other topical education. Pratt ends the rather long introduction by explaining how his baseball-card led education was far more different and far deeper than the formal education he was receiving at his school (1). In other words, baseball cards and the socialization around the baseball cards allowed Pratt’s son a more contextualized and meaningful educational experience than the instruction going on in his conventional classroom. Though Pratt’s son’s educational development narrative does not necessarily highlight explicit issues of the contact zone, it nonetheless functions as important context for the remainder of her essay: it questions, without overtly questioning, traditional conceptions and understandings of literacy.

As Pratt moves away from her son’s own baseball card education and into the history, translation and understanding of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s 1613 eight-hundred page treatise entitled, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, she maintains her focus on literacy, albeit literacy produced and understood at the place of the contact zone, the contact zone being, as she describes, a “social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in high asymmetrical relations of power...” (1). Through detailed analysis, Pratt highlights how autoethnographic work, like Guaman Poma’s, often uses the official discourse, genres and rules of the oppressor in subversive and challenging ways. Noting how Guaman Poma’s work both follows and subverts prevailing contemporaneous linguistic methodologies, Pratt writes, “Guaman Poma constructs his text by appropriating and adapting pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders. He does not simply imitate or reproduce it; he selects and adapts it along Andean lines to express (bilingually, mind you) Andean interests and aspirations” (2). Pratt argues that this sophisticated techniques, along with “transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression” are all literate arts of the contact zone (4). She ends her essay by challenging American teachers and instructors to begin developing pedagogical arts of the contact zone that might better create spaces “where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, [and] temporary protection from legacies of oppression” (6). But what about her son? And literacy? What about those damn baseball cards?

I think maybe one of the pedagogical arts of the contact zone, as suggested in Pratt’s introduction, and argued elsewhere by James Paul Gee, is re-thinking how we understand literacy. In Gee’s What Video Games can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, he sets out to redefine literacy. He moves beyond the traditional understanding of literacy, the ability to read and write, and says we must think about literacy as one’s ability to understand and make meaning in a specific group (or, as he puts it, semiotic domain) (20). This conception of literacy allows for people in various groups and with various associations to actually be “literate” in unconventional and nontraditional ways, permitting a break from homogeneous discourse histories and traditions. Pratt’s son learned how to make meaning and understand meaning in his specific semiotic domain (collectors of baseball cards) and as she suggested, that literacy was rich and deep and meaningful, and ultimately led to more learning. When we can see literacy as something not so rigid and necessarily situated in prevailing white middle class ideologies, we can see the and (maybe) better understand the work produced in the contact zone.

Two years ago, I sat in on a panel that was supposed to be discussing new technologies and platforms (such as wikis, texting, instant messaging, MySpace, etc) and the composition classroom. I was just into my second semester teaching and I was using MySpace in the classroom as a way to facilitate discussion and free exchange. During my use of MySpace in the freshman composition classroom, I was interested in how the social environment might enable students to use their own discourses in academic discussions. The experiment had varied results, but nonetheless I was still optimistic that social sites could be used to provide students spaces where alternative discourses were encouraged. As the panelists each discussed their own pedagogical approach to new technologies and programs I was struck with their underlying intentions. It was clear that these tenured professors teaching at smaller universities intended on co-opting these new technologies and programs and imposing traditional academic discourse on them. In other words, each of the presenters discussed how we needed to correct the “illiteracy” that these technologies and programs facilitated and teach students how to write traditional academic discourse in the technologies and programs. Horrified, I asked the panel, “How can the discourses encouraged by these new technologies and programs instead be used to make academic arguments?” The panelists, obviously not in my same boat (actually there was only one other person in the room that I could tell was having a hard time chewing on what the paneling was feeding us), scoffed at the absurdity of my question. The panelists, working from a traditional and conservative conception of literacy had no regard for the possibilities of alternative discourses in these technologies and programs and were simply not interested in seeing how these new democratic platforms could be used as the pedagogical arts of the contact zone.

The way I saw it (and see it) was/is that new technologies and programs possess a huge amount of possibility in allowing a space for alternative discourses and, what Robert Kaplan calls, contrastive rhetoric, in the traditional classroom. As Kaplan explains, contrastive rhetoric has had little to no impact on the traditional classroom (vii). One of the reasons for this, he goes on to say, is that composition instructors have assumed their audience (students) as monolingual and monocultural (viii). However, not only have instructors assumed a homogeneity amongst their students, they have, as shown in the attitude of the panelists described above, been comfortable with teaching and expecting their students to learn traditional academic discourses. But, as many of us know, the classroom is not as conventional and traditional as the discourse it commonly espouses. It is varied and diverse. And it is in need of alternative discourses and contrastive rhetorics. I think the new technologies and programs explored in the panel I listened to can work to approach some of the challenges that Pratt leaves her audience with. The panelists saw on-line popular mediums/spaces as needing corrected, as needing realigned with traditional and conservative notions of literacy and discourse; but, they missed an opportunity. The mediums/spaces can be used, I think, in the classroom, especially the composition classroom, as opportunities for students to get the chance and make arguments/statements in their own creative and historical discourses. Students, outside of the classroom cross, engage and explore the contact zone everyday through their interactions through/in these mediums/spaces. Students should not be asked to change the way they engage in those spaces, but instead, academics should be asked how those spaces could help to rethink understandings of discourse and literacy.

Works Cited
Pratt, M. L. (1991). "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession 91: 33-40.

Kaplan, R. B. Forward: What in the World is Contrastive Rhetoric?: vii-xx.

Peeples, Tim. Professional Writing and Rhetoric: Reading from the Field. New York: Longman, 2003. Print.