Dimmick Michael - Maria Varela Southern Spaces Emergent Ethos

M. Dimmick 5.20.09 D. Brandt En799

Southern Spaces, Emergent Ethos In both Varela's pedagogic statement and her report on adult literacy materials, social and physical space is critically important to the efficacy of praxis, the lateral dissemination of authority (in the collaborative production of multimodal texts), and the re/negotiation of socially situated subjectivities. Varela's acute awareness of class differences and prejudices in Selma (and Mississippi) highlights a need for educators to resolve "outsider"/"insider" dichotomies to participate in the social life of the Selma African American community. She also speaks of sites in Mississippi where the African American farming community congregates to discuss civic practices (voting, farm allotments, market concerns), a filmstrip workshop, and the aims for establishing a community based radio station. Each of these instances illustrates a social space fraught by ideological concerns, regardless of whether it was the threat of an outsider educator's unexamined racist assumptions or whether it was the possibility of a greater allotment of farmland. By pointing out the need to attend to the specific practices of local communities, Varela suggests that the literacy and education practices that would help communities transform their relationship with dominant culture were critically reliant upon the communities developing an ethos of place from which they could articulate a critique of dominant discursive positions and establish a counter hegemonic discursive position.

inventing an ethos of place One of the many difficulties facing African Americans in the contact zone of the civil rights era South was establishing an identity outside of the hegemonic determinism embedded in

Jim Crow practices. To say the least, African American's ethos lay in the nexus of political, racial, geographic, economic, and historic impositions of power. Addressing the social conditions affecting African Americans in the south required a simultaneous engagement with the physical barriers of race, class, and space and the discursive production of those barriers in civic discourse, popular discourse, and local discourse. Varela notes that the representation of the movement is, not surprisingly misleading, built as it is on "second-hand hearsay and newspaper accounts" (Report 2). Amongst the many misleading representations is that the movement is driven by a central corpus of people (King, etc.). This representation presents a faceless mass of African Americans as victims attacked by dogs, hosed down, and arrested; but importantly in suggesting that there are a few central leaders it misleadingly suggests that there is a also center of activity with a clear power structure that can be addressed and negotiated with, and that the members of this "faceless" mass do not have an agency or authority to take action themselves. While detailing "reportable" actions in the movement, the representation deprives African Americans of an ethos by suggesting that they are already being spoken for. It is to this need to establish an ethos that Varela speaks in her discussion of filmstrips. While SNCC had been using visual rhetorics - most obviously in posters and their newsletter - to shape the public face of SNCCs activities and the movements, the filmstrips helped to define an ethos of place by drawing on local rhetorical traditions. Employing narratives, the filmstrips addressed not only how to join civic discourse and to organize cooperatives, but also told "a story which reflects conditions found in most counties of the South"(5). The filmstrips were cheap, easy to make, and could be easily circulated to show communities with no previous awareness of each other that there were other communities, moving to organize on their own initiative, engaged in "changing those institutions making

decisions about their lives"(2). By decentralizing authority and showing that "ordinary people on a local basis are moving and the organizations operating in the area are moving with them,"(2) the filmstrips provide a methodology and a ground from which learners can build their own authority to act. It is then this identification with imagined/real communities that provides the ethics and authority of speaking out, that provides the place based ethos from which the communities can articulate a new discursive position. In producing new narratives of localized movements, the filmstrips helped African Americans to imagine moving as a whole, in tandem with a growing vision of disparate communities as a united sub-nation, helped to frame an ethos built on the identity of an ensemble of communities acting as a whole, helped to frame an ethos of place.

establishing a productive pedagogical space In elaborating the goals of the SLP, Varela has also elaborated a clear pedagogical position that reflects this attention to social and physical space: any attempt to assist local movements must draw on the lived experiences, goals, and needs particular to the community and to whatever movement the community has already begun; by using the community's language practices, by embedding learning in local culture, and by building on learning styles particular to the community, SNCC envisioned establishing a community sense of worth, agency, and authority - an ethos - as community members came to see themselves as agents in initiating change, as enacting praxis. The development of a grounded identity to speak from is central to this organic relationship between literacy and activism1. Varela speaks at length about problems SNCC would face in implementing literacy efforts in the Selma community. Central to these problems is the introduction of "outsiders" to the community - the group 1 See discussion of Carmichael and the Freedom Schools in Schneider, Perlstein

of northern, middle class, college educated, African American students that would aid in developing community literacy practices. Beyond the polarizing dichotomy of geographic/economic communities (outside/inside, middle class/underclass), the student volunteers' values, learning traditions, and relation to authority cast in stark relief the deeper ideological attitudes and beliefs of the dominant culture. Their introduction to the Selma community is rife with the threat that their unexamined attitudes, embedded deference to authority, and reliance on directed learning may replicate the very systems of oppression that they have come to Selma to collaboratively transform. An examination of the students attitudes helps to frame a discussion of the role a place based ethos played in not only developing counter hegemonic discursive practice, but in developing the social and pedagogical space necessary to develop those counter hegemonic responses from the lived experiences of African American communities. In order to address the learning needs of the Selma community, Varela notes that a process of acculturation is necessary to decolonize the students minds2. Although her staff was largely African American, the volunteers bear the ideological markings of the values of the dominant culture. In this process of acculturation we can see how SNCCs programs were envisioned to provide a means for renegotiating socially situated identities. The students themselves are in a transitional space. Having been born into the privileges afforded a middle class life3, they have consciously rejected intellectually the middle class values they see as complicit in the oppression of the underclasses. Nonetheless, having little to no experience in communicating with the underclass, the volunteers reveal how deeply the ideology of the middle class/dominant culture has imprinted their values and attitudes. The volunteers describe the

2 to adopt a phrase from Ngugi 3 albeit it, importantly, the privileges afforded a middle class minority life

underclass in negative terms: "apathetic, afraid, lack of confidence,lack of ability"; "in role playing situations, these students tend to play individuals from the under-classes as ignorant, uncomprehending," and, as the volunteers so eloquently put it, "retarded" (Goals 1-2). In order to avoid negatively affecting the insiders' learning, Varela notes, they will have to overcome the barriers to communication, overcome the traces of classist dominant discourse: rooted in middle class experience, the volunteers do not see local practices as rich or complex - rather they see them as insufficient from their specific socio-economic perspective, their situated middle class ethos - the very body of discourse an ethos of place will empower the community to transform. Varela does not detail how the volunteers can overcome the classist traces, but she does suggest that by developing a critically reflective engagement with the community's communicative practices they can begin to come to terms with the attitudes and values they have brought to the local literacy sites. In fact, Varela offers experiential evidence that time with an emergent local ethos of place will help facilitate this: "From our limited experience in the community, we feel that time, identification with standard community institutions (such as Churches) and leadership, and working with ourselves to lose self consciousness about being middle class are beginnings towards breaking down these barriers"(2). In this way volunteers can work to decolonize their own situated subjectivities and begin to overcome the barriers to collaboratively creating a learning environment sensitive to the local community's needs and desires. Engaging the community collaboratively, though, will require further critical reflection by the volunteers about their own educational trainings. Varela notes that their experiences in an education system that has "an almost total orientation to directed learning" cultivates a deference to authority, a need for authority to validate their efforts, and a reliance on authority to determine their goals. Accustomed to hierarchical educational practices with defined methodologies and

structured curriculum, the students experience has left them relatively unprepared to attend to collaborative learning situations that evolve out of a creative engagement with local needs with no clear mark of authority. They have almost no experience in directing pedagogical practices toward "needs centered" learning. Consequently they do not have a familiarity with responding to the local learning styles of the underclasses. In this instance we cans see that without the creative capacity to create learning situations in collaboration with the community, they risk reproducing in the class room the arrangement of relationships to power that the community members are in movement against. In relying on a teacher centered pedagogy the volunteers would compromise the goals of the SLP by directing learning away from the immediate needs of the community and discouraging critical reflection on the institutions shaping their lives.. In both concerns, the volunteers run the risk of reproducing and perpetuating the oppressive framework sedimented in their attitudes and learning practices, thereby compromising the development of a social and pedagogical space conducive to establishing an ethos of place.

literacy materials While the student volunteers brought attitudes and learning styles antithetical to the needs and practices of the local community in Selma, Varela also points out that the existing literacy materials reflect a world view wholly alien to the experiences and realities of the Selma community. Varela critiques the materials available to teach literacy, noting that "the materials which exist are inadequate and insult the dignity and style of life of the black-belt Negro community"(Goals 2). While we do not have the materials Varela is responding to, we can get a sense of what they might have entailed from how she describes the materials that she wants to

create for literacy education and what she feels should be excluded. The effect of these materials on the development of a locally based ethos of place is apparent in how Varela envisions the materials will impact the valuing of local based knowledge and authority. Varela advocates against the oppressive "hidden curriculum4" in existing literacy materials like "primers specifically for the teaching of reading" and "children's materials"(4). Her immediate concern lie in the fact that the learning scenarios and language practices in the literacy materials portrayed a world that excluded the African American community in which she would be working. Initial efforts to assemble literacy materials to use in Selma met with constant frustration as it soon became obvious that "there was no adult education materials that didn't have white people all over it," leaving SNCC members to fend with the need to show "black folk as a part of" a local movement effecting change in their lives (Interview). By depicting a world of white middle class values, the primers offer a normative vision of social life and language practices that likely seemed alienating to the students, suggesting their own experiences must be somehow exotic or peripheral in comparison. In Mississippi, Bob Moses, the head of another SNCC literacy program, ran into the same problem: I had gotten hold of a text and was using it with some adults . . . and noticed that they couldn't handle it because the pictures weren't suited to what they knew.... That got me into thinking about developing something closer to what people were doing. What I was interested in was the idea of training SNCC workers to develop material with the people we were working with. qtd. in Perlstein 306 Rather than imposing a normative vision of a white, middle class world, SNCC worked from the heartfelt belief that they could help define a world view that reflected and drew from the lived realities of the oppressed communities in the south. In this way, literacy training could be an 4 See Canagarajah, Resisiting Linguistic Imperialism

active "dialogue between activists and adult students about the conditions affecting black life"(306). The kind of collaborative effort Moses discusses here is central to SNCCs beliefs that critical reflection on the community's conditions of life will result in a new sense of identity from which members of the movement can take action. Creating literacy materials from the local community's own lives focuses the students' efforts on developing a reflective engagement with the conditions affecting their lives. In addition to evoking a vision of the world in which the students did not exist, the existent literacy materials also create a learning situation that compromises the abilities and practices a student already has by imposing a standard of language use that reflects dominant language practices. Divorced from the social context of the community's learning environment, the primers emphasize a teacher centered, banking model of education in which students learn discrete and isolated language practices on which they will subsequently be tested to see how well they have learned the material. The curricular emphasis in the primers on testable materials - "proper language use" - is inadequate for the situation for multiple reasons. By offering a discrete program of literacy training and language practices, the primers serve as a de facto embedded authority to which students must submit their efforts for "approval," thereby stripping the students of the opportunity to see literacy as a means to embolden their ability to engage dominant discourse, to see themselves as invested with authority. Instead of being an opportunity for creating new modes of response, the learning context replicates the hierarchical division and power relations at a microcosmic level that the community has been subject to in the macroscopic context of the south. Following a banking model of education, the existing literacy materials deemphasize critical thinking and creative strategies for responding to locally based needs and, instead, simply emphasize correctness. Instead of cultivating critical, questioning

perspectives in students, the banking model of literacy practices embedded in the primers' curriculum relegated students to a passive role. By emphasizing "proper" language use, the students are positioned as passive subjects of dominant discourse and social organization of knowledge rather than active agents transforming social structures and creating knowledge anew. The materials Varela wanted to create would, however, address these concerns and ground learning in the local community efforts to transform social mores and civic institutions: curriculum would reflect these community efforts; reading and writing would be taught "through teaching content" like African American history, which would cultivate a positive sense of identity and awareness of a history of agency, activism, strength, and resistance in the African American community; learning would be designed to encourage learners in continuing learning practices by avoiding testing practices and arranging a "maximum of success possibilities and personal gratification in learning" which would also build learner's sense of authority; materials should be practical so that learners integrate learning with specific use oriented practices that build their capability to continue local action in the movement and develop fluency in reading and using "official documents"- "a job application," "voting applications," welfare and social security forms," "contracts," and "finances"; whenever possible, literacy materials should reflect a curriculum drawn from the conditions of local life - in this way literacy education would directly respond to the demands of the immediate environment. Perhaps the farthest reaching decision Varela makes though is in insisting that the "curriculum should attempt to include wherever possible movies, audio-visual materials and other experiential situations to broaden the experience of the adult"(4). In reflecting middle class values, hierarchical/banking learning strategies, and dominant discourses regulating the organization of social life, the available literacy materials also

reflected dominant discourses of supremacy, exclusion, and deprivation by taking white, middle class life as the central tenet of value and effectively erasing African Americans from the educational landscape; absent from the literacy materials, the effect was to subject the lives of African Americans to the same projected discourse that they faced in institutional settings: that the needs and desires structuring their lives was of little to no consequence. In contrast to the oppressive ideological framework offered by the primers, Varela's projected design of literacy materials sought top create a space from which the students could speak. Central to her objectives in addressing these concerns by creating new literacy materials, then, is Varela's desire to achieve three basic goals: "to work with the identity problem by introducing Negro History" and "to help an adult create a vision for himself as a political entity and as an agent for social change" (qtd in Perlstein 304). By shaping literacy materials to build on local practices in Selma, Varela hoped literacy education would promote a cogent identity (ethos) from which the African American community could engage dominant, oppressive practices and discourses, and articulate a vision that would transform the social realities resulting from that oppression. Varela's effort to produce an ethos of place took a much clearer direction when she shifted her efforts to focus more overtly on visual rhetorics. Varela's frustration with the preeminence/predominance of white, oppressive culture in literacy materials and her desire to create literacy materials that reflected an ethos of place in showing communities taking action "grew into, then, the idea of filmstrips"(Interview). In examining the use of filmstrips, we can, perhaps, better elaborate how an ethos of place is central to the relationship between literacy practices and community action.

filmstrips, ethos Flickering up on the parish hall walls were photographs of Mexican American union organizers and field workers being assaulted by white growers and hauled away to jail by white law enforcers. When the strip ended, there was a long silence. In the audience was an older gentleman who had worked all his life on a plantation in Tennessee and was now homeless, evicted as a result of his participation in the movement. He rose up and with tears in his eyes said,"you don’t know how it feels to know that we are not the only ones." - Maria Varela, unpublished memoir

In this rather dramatic moment of catharsis, relief, and joy, Varela narrates the emergence of an ethos of place in this man's dawning awareness of his camaraderie with a sub-nation moving in tandem with his own actions. The flickering narrative, the portrayal of local people organizing a union, the dissemination of shared knowledge, the embodiment of local spaces, the identification with a larger strata of communities all help to theorize how the filmstrips help structure an ethos of place. I would like to return to my earlier comments about how the filmstrips offered a rhetorical position largely unavailable in the popular media by redefining the spaces in which African Americans were taking action and by offering an alternative model of leadership. Popular media produced an endless rotation of images of African Americans as subjects of of brutal violence or in chaotic confrontations with institutional forces. news reports often framed their discourse around a centralized leader, a figure like, for example, Martin Luther King. As I said these representations presented a faceless body of people, spoken for by a charismatic

leader, suggesting that they were unable to speak for themselves or act independent of that leader's directions. In contrast to these portrayals, the differences in the filmstrips, Varela said, is "that we were shooting the people as actors, not as victims" (Interview). The filmstrips redefine the notions of leadership and space in which the communities were taking action. Focusing on local efforts, the filmstrips emphasize that "There is no one organization organizing this movement; there is no one group of elite leaders creating its program"(Report 2). Instead the filmstrips illustrate the construction of communal leadership by narrating the story of communities organizing on their own around their needs. Detailing this process also offers a richer conception/redefinition of the nature of resistance communities are engaged in. Instead of focusing on the staging of protests, pickets, or sit-ins, the filmstrips "communicate the specifics of how to do something"(3). Principally the filmstrips tell the stories of local communities acting to take control over the political-economical institutions that make decisions affecting their lives. One film for example narrates how local farmers can be involved in nominating and electing candidates to the ASCS Committee, a committee historically run by white men that has favored assigning any extra allotments for each county to the larger, white farms, a process that has managed to maintain the disparity in wealth between white and African American farmers. Again, the filmstrips redefine a model of leadership by showing how authority is constructed communally through collaborative efforts. The images in the filmstrips also redefine the nature of the spaces in which African Americans were taking action. By focusing on how communities are engaging institutional discourse, the filmstrips show African Americans in social spaces participating in civic practices - holding and participating meetings, nominating candidates, interviewing African American

candidates. Instead of showing spaces in which African Americans are subject to violence, the films show how local subjects are acting to participate in and exert influence in civic process governing their lives. In each of these instances the filmstrips portray values and conditions critically important to establishing an ethos of place: they project agency in depicting the ordinary person taking action; they project images of people as actors, not victims; create an embodied sense of community efforts and struggles by producing an imagined/real sub-nation; they show people as active citizens; they employ and privilege local language practices and rhetorical traditions; they are the result of local people deciding what to document and where

from local to public (a conclusion or resting point) In a recent interview, Maria Varela spoke of Ella Baker's advice to SNCC organizers. She suggested that SNCC organizers "should be listening to what she called the semi- public discourse of resistance, that which you might find in barber shops family get-togethers things like that where she said you could determine what people that were in Resistance were against and maybe how far they would go." The new literacy practices seen in the filmstrips reflect just that attention. Barber shops, churches, and living rooms have often served as "hush harbor sites5" in the African American community - local sites of activism, celebration of African American language traditions6, and resistance to the overdetermined hegemony of a dominant white culture. The filmstrips Varela discusses draws on the strengths of that tradition. By capturing that discourse and sense of resistance, the filmstrips introduce a communality to the

5 See Nunley, "From the Harbor to Da Academic Hoood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition." 6 See Smitherman, Talkin' and Testifyin: The Language of Black America.

discourse, where previously it may have been constrained to local currents, to "semi-public" discourses. These new literacy practices help evoke an ethos of place from which disenfranchised African Americans are able to navigate dominant discourses, re-narrate dominant discourses, and produce counter linguistic practices that effectively authorize African American voices in democratic practices that had historically privileged white citizen. While providing an intergroup sanctuary in which multiple voices circulate, the social space born of an ethos of place produce new, differently articulated "agitational" and arguably liberatory alternatives to the hegemonic stratification of social relations, as can be seen in the rise of multimodal literacy practices in response to the specific social needs of African Americans in the South. Works Cited Canagarajah, A. Suresh. resistsing Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Nunley, Vorris L."From the Harbor to Da Academic Hoood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition." African American Rhetorics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed Ronald Jackson and Elaine Richardson. Carbondale: SIUP, 2004. Perlstein, Daniel. "Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools." History of Education Quarterly, V. 30, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990). 297-324. -------. "Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics and Pedagogy in the African-American Freedom Struggle." American Educational Research Journal, V. 39, No. 2(Summer, 2002), pp. 249-277 Schneider, Stephen. "Freedom Schooling: Stokeley Carmichael and Critical Rhetorical Education." College Composition and Communication. 58.1 (2006): 46-69. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Varela, Mary. Goals of The Selma Literacy Project. May 1964. -------. Interview with Author. May 15, 2009. -------. Report to Mrs. Deborah Cole. 20 Feb. 1966.