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The Political Power of Language in ELA

Politics and Literature
In her landmark essay, Literacy in Three Metaphors, Sylvia Scribner directs our attention a three-fold purpose in appropriating literacy skill and insight: adaptation, power, and grace.  Adaptation, she allows, features the work skills that students need in order to be able to adapt and survive; as with organisms within the metaphor of natural selection, literacy in this metaphor focuses on being able to survive in the "real world" and "work skills."  This metaphor dominates public discourse on literacy education at the present time because we have anxiety about the  shape that our knowledge economy is taking and where the jobs will be in 5-10 or more years.  This metaphor has swollen itself and has pushed aside two the metaphors which have constituted the fibre of our  culture and democracy.  We need again, to think about how language enshrines political power within the context of political rights, and we need to attend to the personal cultivation or "grace" that comes with the life of the mind.  We are more than busy ants.

This year, then, I am focusing my students on exploring the political power of language, first by reading Animal Farm by George Orwell, and then by reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  It's been a worthwhile journey to explore how the stories they tell help create resistance to abuses of power.  Or as in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, the understanding that each of us internalizes as members of a free society: that we struggle against abuses of power across time, space, culture and location.  In these texts and in additional texts by Malcom Gladwell, David and Goliath (chapter 6 about Wyatt  Walker) as well as Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," a company of agitators, resistors, thinkers, egalitarians, and trickers come together to help students to consider their own place in our world, to combat modern slavery as Kevin Bales suggests in his TED talk urging us to end modern slavery, or to assert their claims  against a machine that they vaguely perceive: Each of us has dignity and worth, and each story is worth telling.  From an ELA vantage point, the language that these writers variously use hits me and my students with jaw-dropping power and precision.  Each presents lessons in empathy and wisdom.

In terms of assessment, all of this is coming to a crescendo as the students will write personal essay and spoken-word oeuvre in which they stake their claims on what issues--personal or political--can be confronted through the force of their sheer will--their sheer will, and ours.  I am calling this assignment, and I Battle(d) a Giant, and it asks students to mix narrative and call-to-action, much as Douglass did in his powerful autobiography.  I am hoping that the students will write with power and grace and that their words will move the class and our world.  Details on the assignment will be on the next entry.

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