Autobiography Others (Gilyard, Rose, Villenueva)

I think that the question that has kept my attention in regard to the various autobiographies I am reading is how or why these writers (Rose, Gilyard, Villenueva) felt authorized to tell their stories publicly, whereas Murray did not. And why were and are we ready to receive them--as a field, as a discipline. Why do their autobiographical stories count for us? Why do they matter to us, when they're not scholarship. Or are they? So, two questions:

1. How and why do they feel authorized to share their stories of schooling and literacy.
2. What role do these stories play within our field? How do they count? We seem to desire them, but why? What is their worth of value to the field (this final question seems to be the right one)? Testimonials. The role of personal stories in composition...something along these lines.

It occurs to me now, of course, the irony--these men are drawing on their personal experience as a form of evidence. To talk about what? Language acquisition, school, literacy, identity, gender. Murray, too, was drawing on his experience as a form of evidence, but to talk about the writing process. And as I saw with one of the passages I read this morning, he felt rather embarrassed/anxious/insecure about this, at least some of the time:

What is the instructive line? What is it in a line that leads me on, that teaches me that meaning may lie ahead? Well, it's not something that I think about normally; it's something I do. If you think about hitting a curve, you won't. And so I don't think about it. But if the batter becomes a coach? Alright, I have to think about it. To make money I am led to arrogance. I presume to teach, to find out what I do, and then, no matter how embarrassing or unacademic and unprofound and unintellectual, to expose it, to reveal what is simple and obvious to others. And then to be surprised, for it isn't, apparently, quite so obvious--and perhaps not so simple. ("Writing Badly to Write Well" p. 115)

The sad part, I think, is that all along, Murray's autobiography was informing much of what he did and this is the argument I want to make in response to that Yagelski quote. And yet the interesting question is how others were allowed to call on their experience as a form of evidence and Murray was not (or did not feel that he could due to his lack of credentials and outsider status--probably more accurate).

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Keith Gilyard, Voices of the Self

When I look at Gilyard's book, I note that his primary concern, at least from the beginning paragraph, seems to be language and identity:

Over the past quarter century few problems in education have received as much media, professional, and parental attention as the fact that, by and large, young urban African-Americans have not achieved Standard English competence in public schools. (9).

Here, Gilyard more explicitly addresses his purpose:

...I am concerned with language pedagogy along the full length of the curriculum. (11)

My interest is not merely in the ways Black students can learn; I am also concerned about the psychic costs they pay. A pedagogy is successful only if it makes knowledge or skill achievable while at the same time allowing students to maintain their own sense of identity. (11)

I have chosen to write about the various voices I have come to possess, to speak of my own psychic payments. Using my autobiographical narrative (the even-numbered chapters of this book) as a focal point, I have explored how I, as a native Black English speaker in an urban public school environment, acquired Standard English language skills. In addition I have addressed the broader subject of what was involved in acquiring certain strategies beyond strictly linguistic skills, namely mainstream sociolinguistic competence, which I employed in order to be a successful participant in certain settings. (11-12)

I developed my analytic approach out of the beliefs that, first, autobiographical artifacts serve as fairly accurate historical documents and, second, that human behavior is sensibly studied within the framework of a transactional model. (12)

An autobiographical account, despite its subjectivity, provides an important record of events the author has responded to--in short, what has shaped him or her as a social being. In a quest for such significance, the chronological facts of an individual's existence are not nearly as important as the psychological facts of forging a life, something autobiographies reveal quite well. Analysis of details presented in my autobiographical narrative, therefore, is crucial to an adequate understanding of my sociolinguistic development. (12)

This analysis of my autobiographical materials should prove useful to all those concerned with helping African-American students develop their ability to communicate in mainstream settings, for I have also dealt with issues of language pedagogy in more universal terms. (13)

I sought to present an account that will further illuminate matters for those involved with the education of African-American students. (14)

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Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary

These are the first lines of the book, which seem useful to my project with Don:

This is a hopeful book about those who fail." Lives on the Boundary concerns language and human connection, literacy and culture, and it focuses on those who have trouble reading and writing in the schools and the workplace. It is a book about the abilities hidden by class and cultural barriers. And it is a book about movement: about what happens as people who have failed begin to participate in the educational system that has seemed so hard and distant to them. (xi)

Here, Rose situates himself among the issue or problem or topic about which he is writing:

I've worked for twenty years with children and adults deemed slow or remedial or underprepared. And at one time in my own educational life, I was so labeled. But I was lucky. I managed to get redefined. The people I've tutored and taught and the people whose lives I've studied--working-class children, poorly educated Vietnam veterans, underprepared college students, adults in a literacy program--they, for the most part, hadn't been so fortunate. (xi)

In trying to present the cognitive and social reality of such a life--the brains as well as the heart of it--I have written a personal book. The stories of my work with literacy interweave with the story of my own engagement with language. Lives on the Boundary is both vignette and commentary, reflection and analysis. I didn't know how else to get it right. (xi-xii)

I started this book as an account of my own journey from the high school vocational track up through the latticework of the American university... But as I wrote, the landscapes and inhabitants of the sketches began to intersect with other places, other people: schools I had worked in, children and adults I had taught. It seemed fruitful to articulate, to probe and carefully render the overlay of my scholastic past and my working present. The sketches grew into a book that, of necessity, mixed genres. Autobiography, case study, commentary--it was all of a piece. (8)

This is not to say that I see my life as an emblem...But there are some things about my early life, I see now, that are reflected in other working-class lives I've encountered: the isolation of neighborhoods, information poverty, the limited means of protecting children from family disaster, the predominance of such disaster, the resilience of imagination, the intellectual curiosity and literate enticements that remain hidden from the schools, the feelings of scholastic inadequacy, the dislocations that come from crossing educational boundaries. This book begins, then, with autobiography--with my parents' immigration, my neighborhood, and my classrooms--but moves outward to communities beyond mine, to new encounters with schooling, to struggles to participate in the life of the mind. (9)

I'm listening in to Rose framing his project.

I'm struck by the phrases "the feelings of scholastic inadequacy" and "the dislocations that come from crossing educational boundaries". These seem to describe Don well. I think there is evidence to suggest that he spent a good deal of his career negotiating those feelings.

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Victor Villanueva, Bootstraps

Breaking into the professional academic community is tricky business for most, I'm sure. Harder still for the person of color still weighted down by a GED, my personal psychological baggage of failure. (viii)

I can't say nothing about how it is I come to know some things, come to regard some theories on literacy and writing and rhetoric more tenable than others... (xi)

And he realizes that there is more to racism, ethnocentricity, and language than is apparent, that there are long-established systemic forces at play that maintain bigotry, systemic forces that can even make bigots of those who are appalled by bigotry. Now to try to make that realization explicitly understood. It is an aim for what follows: this book. (xiv)

He has made it by the bootstraps: GED to Ph.D.--an American success story. (xiv)

Then how a doctorate? There are always some who get through. Some must get through, a mater of ideological credibility in the land of opportunity, the workings of hegemony. (xv)

I didn't know what I was getting into, but knew I was getting into something not intended for the likes of me. (xv)

Yet fellow academics are foreign to me in many ways, and I think they will always be, that I will always be somehow an outlander. (xv)

Yet I can tell of my journey, and I can tell of the theories, some mine, some others', that help to explain such journeys. (xvi)

In what follows I will tell of systems and anomalies, of contradictions, of how the things that happened to me were systemic, and how I managed to slip through the cracks in the hegemonic bloc. I will tell of hegemony. What it means. How it operates. How, maybe, to counter it. (xvi)

My views are grounded in experience, elaborated upon by theory, and tested in research. (xvii)

Of all those who prompted me to write this, Gramsci resounds the loudest. For he says in his Cultural Writings that

Autobiography can be conceived "politically." One knows that one's life is similar to that of a thousand others, but through "chance" it has had opportunities that the thousand others in reality could not or did not have. By narrating it, one creates this possibility, suggests the process, indicates the opening. (132)

Perhaps in narrating, the exception can become the rule--boots for everyone, strong straps. (xvii)

Praxis is what I'm attempting to do here, more than providing a self-serving story, either glorious me or woe-is-me. What I'm attempting is to provide a problematic based on sets of experience: an experience which leads to a theory, a theory that recalls an experience: an experience which leads to a theory, a theory that recalls an experience; reflections on speculations, speculations to polemics to reflections--all with an aim at affecting what might happen in classrooms, the sites of action. (xvii)

This is an autobiography with political, theoretical, pedagogical considerations. (xviii)

This is the personal made public and the public personalized, not for self-glory nor to point fingers, but to suggest how, maybe, to make the exception the rule. (xviii)