ENG 101 Social Location Assignment
Fall 2015
Who Are You?
Social Location Exercise: Searching for Identity
“A gourd is a hollowed-out shell, used as a utensil./We make our bowls from the stuff of nature. Of life./We carve and scoop, discarding the pulp./Ink on paper, picking up trails I left so many lives ago./Leaving my mark, my footprints, my sign./ I write what I know.”-Beth Brant
During this class you will be reading and writing many different modes of expository writing. Through each writing assignment I hope that you begin to realize that your writing and the work that you do in this class is an extension of yourself. You are beginning a search and a positioning of your identity through your writing. As we begin this class we will talk about social location and how your location is an integral part of who you are, how you approach topics that you choose to read and write about, and how you approach topics that you are assigned to read and write about.
Part One
When we write or when we approach written texts, we are beginning to make meaning and creating understanding of the world and our place in it. Your "social location" affects how you experience the world, how you make and create meaning— and how you compose and read certain texts. By reflecting on your social location, you can better understand how it affects the meanings you make of specific contexts, the decisions you make, and the way you see the world.
This reflection will assist you in your ability to see issues or problems from multiple perspectives and will enhance your critical thinking abilities.
For the first part of this assignment, you will be focused on reflecting upon yourself and where you stand in life—think of it as a geography of self.
For example, let's say you have been part of the honors program in your high school since freshman year. You have always worked very hard to get decent grades. However, as the years have passed, you have begun to notice that some of your peers a tendency to cheat as much as they can to get the work done. You also notice that your peers feel entitled because of their intellectual ability to receive a good grade in an honors or AP class regardless of cheating, turning in late work, etc. How does this affect the meaning you make about being involved in the honors program at your high school? How does this affect your decision to enter an honors program in college? By extension, how does your social location as an honors student affect the way you might relate to a reading about whether the grading system matters?
Another example: You are a teenager and like all of us, choose to express yourself through your appearance. To do so, you gauge your ears, pierce your lip, shave your head and get a neck tattoo. You are also an honors student and are very interested in studying genetic engineering when you get to college. To assist in furthering your chosen career path, you decide to apply for an internship at T-Gen. You arrive to the interview for the internship without changing anything about your appearance. You feel that you have the intelligence for the position, so why should your appearance matter? You do not get the internship. How does this affect the meaning you make about the importance of appearance in certain aspects of society? How does your social location as someone who may have been discriminated against on the basis of appearance affect the way you portray yourself in writing? How does this affect the way you make meaning of a reading about appearance-based profiling?
Directions:
1. Make a list of all the different ways you are socially located:
a. Gender
b. Family Size
c. Nationality
d. Relationship Status
e. Race
f. Political Affiliation
g. Class
h. School Associations
i. Religion
j. Educational Background
k. Work Experience
l. Any other social positions that influence the way you experience the world.
2. Jot down an association, memory, or example beside each category that would illustrate, or provide an example of, how this social location shaped your identity. (The positions you choose are your choice. You should choose at least ten for this exercise. This list is a reminder of some of the positions that contribute to a person’s identity. Feel free to add anything that is not on there.)
Example: I am Caucasian. A white girl’s white girl from Cleveland. When I took Chicano Literature my first year in college, I became very aware of my race because I was the only non-Hispanic student in the class, including the professor. I had a very limited experience of being in the minority for a semester—without any of the contempt or privation that minorities have been historically subject to, of course, but I always felt like there was some kind of inside joke that I was missing, in spite of everyone’s attempts to include me.
Social Location Exercise: Part Two
Every writer and reader has many social locations that shape what and how they write and read. For the second part of this exercise you will need to create a short composition of at least 300 words exploring the ways in which you feel your social locations a) have an effect on your writing processes and b) have an effect on the way you approach reading certain texts.
In your composition, be sure to answer these questions:
¡ How would the factors you listed affect the way you approach writing, who/what you write about, how you write?
¡ How would these factors affect the texts you read? Those you are automatically drawn to? Those you would rather not read about? Those that you cannot put down? What about how you make meaning about certain social topics: assault, hazing, drinking and driving, affirmative action, etc.?
Here’s an example social location piece that I (that’s me, Mrs. Gordon!) did for you. My piece only discusses the way I approach reading because of my social location (yours will need to cover writing as well) but it illustrates for you my personal voice and style—two things I hope will come through in your social location paper too.
I'm a teacher. I gripe about my salary, respond in a Pavlovian way to bells, joke about patenting an aerosol form of Ritalin for incoming freshmen, and gag a little whenever a well-meaning student places an apple-themed gift on my desk. But when it comes down to it, I love what I do.
I think.
Let me clarify. I love the teaching part. I have, believe it or not, a deep and abiding love for the teenage psyche. I love the material I teach, and I love the semi-annual educator discount days at Borders. I even secretly love the motivational pencils and computer screen wipers the administrators dole out to us every Teacher Appreciation Week: “Teaching Touches Lives!” and the like—really, what other vocation has such collectively low self-esteem that it all but funds its own inspirational gift industry? Yes, I love my profession. I just can't read about it anymore.
It’s not that I’ve lost my heart for satire. I find myself oddly unruffled about educators being lampooned a la John Hughes. I can even tolerate a certain amount of the evil headmaster stereotype. But between the headlines and Hollywood, you’d think only two diametrically opposed personas in education exist, and ones far more dangerous than the bully or the buffoon: the charismatic martyr, or the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Either I’m supposed to donate a kidney to a child while teaching her Shakespeare through interpretive dance, or I’m supposed to show up on the six o’clock news as the red pen-wielding vixen who seduced some underage kid into a “study session” in Cabo—I can see the video surfacing on YouTube now. I won’t deny that there are teachers like that. It’s just a shame that we only ever hear about the Mr. Keatings and Mary Kay Letourneaus.
The day-to-day minutiae of good teaching will never make good copy. Little miracles occur regularly in the classroom, but to a world conditioned for extremes they are unexceptional, generating the sort of headlines that would get buried between the obituaries and the crossword. And until the real work of teaching becomes newsworthy, I'll happily use any articles with the word "teacher" in them to line the bottom of my hamster cage.