Single Story, Single Voice

There are so many directions I want to go in regarding my reflection on the Haas piece, "Toward a Decolonial Digital and Visual American Indian Rhetorics Pedagogy." I'll do my best to keep my excitement concise. No promises.

Of the many big points this chapter has, the few that stuck with me in the strongest ways are as follows:

--> Many cultures, as highlighted by the American Indian cultures at the forefront of this article, are deemed as lesser or uncivilized for having different literacy histories.

--> This is learned both actively and passively, in both formal and informal educational settings.

--> In order to redefine what we know about these cultures, we must do more than analyze/critique what is directly in front of us. We must research, create, and reason from many angles and dimensions.

--> Only when we understand that all of these stigmas exist, whether intentional or not, can we resist them and commit to teaching for social justice.

What we've done is fallen into the trap of the single story. As my students this past year had heard of this TED Talk before I even showed it to them, I am not going to go into too much detail about Adichie's talk. What I want to tie in though, is this idea of a prescribed identity that all of our students experience due to the single stories created about their unique cultural backgrounds (Haas, 191). The ways we address our students, assign projects and readings to students, grade students, even think about our students become "habits of mind," as Haas put it, which was very interesting to me. As educators, we were taught of all of the pedagogical practices we could institute to help x-students, y-students, and z-students; we've been placing students into brackets and divisions since our own formal education.

I love the idea of having students help us to debunk these groupings, give multiple voices, identities, and stories to populations usually dominated by one. I was recently having a conversation with Kurt about the Netflix show Atypical, which I respected greatly until he told me about a critique made by someone with autism: "There is nothing about us without us." It is up to us to create the voices if they belong to us, or seek the voices of those who do have them. I loved reading about the interviews of curators in charge of putting together museum displays and critiquing the displays or all mediums, such as books, movies, displays, art, music, costumes, etc. Representation of all cultures can be assessed, critiqued, and created through multimodal compositions, which is eye-opening for me because I typically associate multimodal composition with writing, not also critiquing and assessing.

I also really appreciated the attention brought to the cultural amnesia experienced by many that hold power and have a platform to project an accurate voice, but take the single story instead. As Haas points out, American Indians are usually portrayed as "resistant" to basic tools and technologies (194). We see in frequent portrayals the violent, illiterate, dark stereotypes of a culture that came much before ours and has prevailed through disturbing times. Yet, that is never how it is portrayed. Something interesting I've seen recently, and something maybe y'all have seen too, is that there is now another wave of cultural amnesia that tries to present itself as helpful, but is--arguably--equally as harmful as the former. We're typically used to people branding harsh stereotypes and using incredibly "normalized oppression" that is sold constantly. The example I can think of from 2018 that relates to the GAP shirt mentioned by Haas on page 198 is the H&M Monkey Shirt (as pictured below). That racism is ingrained, disturbing, and projects the harshest single story to an entire world population. That is a single story in the hand of someone with bad intentions, bad judgement.

The other brand of ignorance I've seen recently reflects the point Kurt explained to me: "There is nothing about us without us." in an effort to protect these voices and cultures, people outside of the culture will step up and tell others how to behave towards the quieted cultures. You can see that in the second picture below, with the article titled, "Hey Parents: Maybe Don't Dress Your Kid Up As Moana This Halloween." In response, @been_801 states his own opinion, the opinion of someone who belongs to the culture. A white woman wrote this article as if to defend the culture, but really just took over the voice of people in the culture--created a voice that was not there. His tweet has stuck with me for a while, I think because it showed me how easy it is for people to take over the voice or story of another culture, even when sometimes you think you're helping (like us when we teach). It showed me just how careful we have to be when we create, and Haas showed me how difficult it can be for people to recognize these faults and apologize, like McNairy with his GAP shirt and H&M and their Monkey Shirt.

Now, it is up to use to investigate. We can't just accept the voices and stories we think we know; we should be skeptical of the sources and work towards social justice. We can provide formal education that accomplishes social justice, and we can do so with multimodal research and critique, not just multimodal composition.

Thank you, Haas.

Single Story, Single Voice

There are so many directions I want to go in regarding my reflection on the Haas piece, "Toward a Decolonial Digital and Visual American Indian Rhetorics Pedagogy." I'll do my best to keep my excitement concise. No promises.

Of the many big points this chapter has, the few that stuck with me in the strongest ways are as follows:

--> Many cultures, as highlighted by the American Indian cultures at the forefront of this article, are deemed as lesser or uncivilized for having different literacy histories.

--> This is learned both actively and passively, in both formal and informal educational settings.

--> In order to redefine what we know about these cultures, we must do more than analyze/critique what is directly in front of us. We must research, create, and reason from many angles and dimensions.

--> Only when we understand that all of these stigmas exist, whether intentional or not, can we resist them and commit to teaching for social justice.

What we've done is fallen into the trap of the single story. As my students this past year had heard of this TED Talk before I even showed it to them, I am not going to go into too much detail about Adichie's talk. What I want to tie in though, is this idea of a prescribed identity that all of our students experience due to the single stories created about their unique cultural backgrounds (Haas, 191). The ways we address our students, assign projects and readings to students, grade students, even think about our students become "habits of mind," as Haas put it, which was very interesting to me. As educators, we were taught of all of the pedagogical practices we could institute to help x-students, y-students, and z-students; we've been placing students into brackets and divisions since our own formal education.

I love the idea of having students help us to debunk these groupings, give multiple voices, identities, and stories to populations usually dominated by one. I was recently having a conversation with Kurt about the Netflix show Atypical, which I respected greatly until he told me about a critique made by someone with autism: "There is nothing about us without us." It is up to us to create the voices if they belong to us, or seek the voices of those who do have them. I loved reading about the interviews of curators in charge of putting together museum displays and critiquing the displays or all mediums, such as books, movies, displays, art, music, costumes, etc. Representation of all cultures can be assessed, critiqued, and created through multimodal compositions, which is eye-opening for me because I typically associate multimodal composition with writing, not also critiquing and assessing.

I also really appreciated the attention brought to the cultural amnesia experienced by many that hold power and have a platform to project an accurate voice, but take the single story instead. As Haas points out, American Indians are usually portrayed as "resistant" to basic tools and technologies (194). We see in frequent portrayals the violent, illiterate, dark stereotypes of a culture that came much before ours and has prevailed through disturbing times. Yet, that is never how it is portrayed. Something interesting I've seen recently, and something maybe y'all have seen too, is that there is now another wave of cultural amnesia that tries to present itself as helpful, but is--arguably--equally as harmful as the former. We're typically used to people branding harsh stereotypes and using incredibly "normalized oppression" that is sold constantly. The example I can think of from 2018 that relates to the GAP shirt mentioned by Haas on page 198 is the H&M Monkey Shirt (as pictured below). That racism is ingrained, disturbing, and projects the harshest single story to an entire world population. That is a single story in the hand of someone with bad intentions, bad judgement.

The other brand of ignorance I've seen recently reflects the point Kurt explained to me: "There is nothing about us without us." in an effort to protect these voices and cultures, people outside of the culture will step up and tell others how to behave towards the quieted cultures. You can see that in the second picture below, with the article titled, "Hey Parents: Maybe Don't Dress Your Kid Up As Moana This Halloween." In response, @been_801 states his own opinion, the opinion of someone who belongs to the culture. A white woman wrote this article as if to defend the culture, but really just took over the voice of people in the culture--created a voice that was not there. His tweet has stuck with me for a while, I think because it showed me how easy it is for people to take over the voice or story of another culture, even when sometimes you think you're helping (like us when we teach). It showed me just how careful we have to be when we create, and Haas showed me how difficult it can be for people to recognize these faults and apologize, like McNairy with his GAP shirt and H&M and their Monkey Shirt.

Now, it is up to use to investigate. We can't just accept the voices and stories we think we know; we should be skeptical of the sources and work towards social justice. We can provide formal education that accomplishes social justice, and we can do so with multimodal research and critique, not just multimodal composition.

Thank you, Haas.