Mapping as Sense-Making Practice: Embodied and Ecological Approaches to Composition Pedagogy [Transcript]
Claire Oldham Griffith, oldhamcl@msu.edu, Michigan State University
Jeanetta Mohlke-Hill, mohlkehi@msu.edu, Michigan State University
Video Essay | Appendix: Example Assignment
Jeanetta:
Reuben Rose-Redwood, et al.’s work, "Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Mappings," argues for a "recentering of Indigenous mappings and decolonial cartographies as spatial practices of world-making" (2020, p. 151). Their work explores this idea of mapping and makes crucial connections between decoloniality and mapmaking, and the importance that it plays in understanding our world as a whole. As an example of this idea, they state that "...mapping plays an important ontological role in the making, unmaking, and remaking of 'worlds' from the micro-scale of the home to the macro-scale of the globe as well as framing and enacting the very conception of scale itself" (Rose-Redwood, et al., 2020, p. 152).
Claire:
Rose-Redwood et al.’s concept of mapping helps shape the way we think about applying mapping as a pedagogical practice (2020). The role that mapping has in "making," "unmaking," and "remaking" worlds is crucial to the way we see mapping as sense-making in the classroom, and we use these ideas to shape our sense of what a "mapping pedagogy" is. In the following, we will map out what it means to "make," "unmake," and "remake" in the classroom and learning spaces.
Jeanetta:
During our first semester at Michigan State University, we worked on a course design for our Composition Studies class about using a mapping methodology as a way of understanding the FYW curriculum at Michigan State. This project took ideas of mapping and cultural memory, a combination of both our research interests, as a type of theme that we could apply to the individual projects in the shared course curriculum. However, while working on the project, we started to have some discomfort with the idea of "mapping" because of its problematic history with the colonization and domination of marginalized communities. Although we began to explore that discomfort in our original project through incorporating decolonial scholarship, we felt that we just began to touch on a really productive framework for thinking about our pedagogy. As we’ve moved forward as scholars and teachers, we found ourselves engaging with scholarship that helped us make further sense of our ideas about mapping, but through a decolonial queer-feminist lens. In this decolonial queer-feminist approach, we see mapping as an embodied and ecological process that helps us develop a framework for situating ourselves, our identities, and our bodies as instructors of writing.
Claire:
As Linda T. Smith (2012) articulates in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, "spatialized language is frequently used in both everyday and academic discourses" (p. 81). Spatialized language and issues of metaphor and visualization techniques have critical implications for rhetoric and composition and, thus, situating our field within the context of "mapping" has potential to make more intentional and embodied connections between our values and practices.
Jeanetta:
In our eyes, mapping can also be a way of understanding our positionality in the world as educators and scholars, as well as helping us meet students where they are at—where they come from, their values, and their ongoing development and growth as critical thinkers.
Although we are women with queer and feminist backgrounds—as white settler scholars, we want to acknowledge and be mindful of our positions and privileges as we move forward to thinking about mapping through a decolonial, queer-feminist lens.
Claire:
So I have a background in technical communication (mainly), and I was introduced to the idea of "maps" as rhetorical documents through a project I began in my master’s about my mom’s work in painting maps as customizable and personalized storytelling. From there, I started to see maps everywhere—in all of my work, in all of the things I read. Ideas of geographical, spatialized language are really prevalent in theory-work (positionality, intersectionality, orientation, navigation, directionality, etc.). We so often use spatial language to make sense of who we are and how we fit. Teaching has been an area that I’ve known that ideas of mapping could help me "navigate" new curriculums and my relationship with students, but I’ve never known how to specifically articulate it. This work has helped me make sense of how my past and present studies of mapping as a practice could "intersect" with my teaching. I wanted to see how I could use mapping as a pedagogical tool.
Jeanetta:
In my case, I have a BA in women’s and gender studies and an MA in Spanish. As you can imagine my research interests span from queer and feminist theory to decolonial studies to pedagogy as a social justice practice. Additionally, while I have ten years of experience in education, these experiences range from tutoring at the Writing Center as an undergraduate, to teaching English, reading, photography, and creative writing as Peace Corps volunteer, to coordinating educational after-school programs and summer school for the children of migrant farmworkers, to teaching college Spanish. So, when I first came to Michigan State, I felt a little insecure because, although I do have a lot of professional and educational experiences, I had trouble figuring out how all my different interests intersected and made sense together. Through my friendship with Claire, I was introduced to her interest in "mapping" and it helped me make sense of my own work through a mapping lens.
Claire:
We conceptualize the ideas of this project by thinking spatially and ecologically—mapping out our process, ideas, and pedagogy as a method of situating ourselves and making sense of these complicated and nuanced theories. So in thinking about the Rose-Redwood, et al. (2020) conceptualization of decolonial mapping, our work considers how we might "make," "unmake," and "remake" the spaces we move through as writing instructors. As we move, we deliberately seek to ‘unmake’ oppressive paradigms that exist in learning spaces. And, at its core, we seek to "remake"—to reimagine the classroom in a way that challenges assumptions of what the classroom is and has to be, while also expanding our understandings of what is possible.
Jeanetta:
In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed (2006) provides us a framework for thinking about how spaces, such as the writing table, have been ‘oriented’ for certain people and their bodies and she argues that queering this space allows these spaces to be "re-oriented" to include more types of people and bodies.
We can apply this concept to the space of the classroom. Higher education, and particularly composition studies, has an exclusionary history that has been oriented to certain kinds of bodies. For example, Ahmed (2006) states: "...if the action of writing is associated with the masculine body, then it is this body that tends to inhabit the space for writing. The space for writing—say, the study—then tends to extend such bodies and may even take their shape" (p. 34).
Then, in applying this to thinking about the space of our classrooms, we must intentionally "unmake" the practice of this "orientation" because the classroom has been oriented towards and tailored to the bodies of the most privileged students and teachers. Ahmed (2006) continues to say that "...for bodies to arrive in spaces where they are not already at home, where they are not 'in place,' involves hard work; indeed, it involves painstaking labor for bodies to inhabit spaces that do not extend their shape" (p. 38). Claire and I know this feeling of not quite belonging somewhere due to the everyday microaggressions (and sometimes aggressive aggressions) that happen in educational spaces and we want to intentionally unmake that experience in our classrooms for our students.
Claire:
In reorienting our classroom, the texts and materials matter. The resources and texts that we draw upon to form knowledges is a type of "making" practice that both students and teachers engage in. As a way to remake the classroom, we must look to the practice of "unmaking" the use of texts that only privilege certain voices. This requires a "remaking": asking the question of "who counts?" as writers/scholars and "what counts?" as a text.
Barbara Christian (1987) points out in her seminal essay "A Race for Theory," that "people of color have always theorized- but in a form quite different from the Western form of abstract logic" (p. 52). This quote emphasizes both of these questions (who counts as scholars, and what counts as text). The idea of "different forms" asks us to consider (and unlearn) our assumptions of the different modes that knowledge comes from and is produced.
Decolonialism and intersectional feminism require us to rethink the texts we engage in and privilege in our class and also how to read these texts in an ethical way. So again in the words of Barbara Christian (1987), "we need to read the works of our writers in our various ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature" (p. 59). This works on multiple levels—the way we as teachers read our students' work, the way that we read the ‘texts’ we engage in, and the call for a wide array of knowledges, theories, voices, and modalities—a layered, multimodal composition. Even more, the language of "making," "unmaking," and "remaking" are in themselves ideas of materiality—asking us to consider how much of students’ writings are affected by the materials that we present and use to create knowledges in the writing classroom—asking them to consider what is possible.
Jeanetta:
But even more than the knowledges we use in the classroom, what about the knowledges we produce? In the making, unmaking, and remaking practices of mapping—we want to start our understanding of "unmaking" by unlearning the ‘banking’ model of education. As explained by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), the "banking" model is problematic and inaccurate in its assumption that students are vessels to be filled with knowledge by their teachers. Instead, we believe students already come to the classroom with knowledges and theories, which we seek to respect and give space for in their writing.
Claire:
One place to start this work is creating assignments where students think about where they come from, where they are now, and where they think they are going. We find this place-based writing to be a productive way to help students "map out" their cultures, values, and knowledges. However, we also acknowledge that many of our students come from places of privilege, especially at predominately white institutions, in which their experiences have been limited—essentially, sometimes students’ knowledges and theories are based in the oppressive paradigms that have been used to silence and/or invalidate the experiences of historically marginalized peoples. On the other hand, we also want to actively support our students whose knowledges and theories are informed by their own experiences of marginalization and oppression. And this is where it becomes tricky to navigate.
Jeanetta:
This is why we find this idea of "mapping"—making, unmaking, and remaking—really useful in navigating these experiences as teachers. The making, unmaking, and remaking of our worlds, our surroundings, and our knowledges as a mapping practice helps us view our teaching through a more grounded, useful lens—one in which is cyclical and ecological. Thus, our continuous development of our knowledges and reevaluation of our work as teachers isn’t a linear process, but one that requires us to slow down and meditate in our positionalities, our teaching, our materials, our students’ writing, and our engagement with one another in the classroom. We view the classroom as a collaborative ecosystem where we, ourselves as teachers and our students, situate our social locations and bodies not only within the classroom space, but in the world at large to reimagine and build a more just future. Our work, then, emphasizes that the act of writing is never "done" or "finished" but rather a constant, never-ending bifurcation.
Claire:
Making, unmaking, and remaking. Mapping, unmapping, and remapping. Learning, unlearning, and relearning. It’s all connected, and it gives us space to grow and develop a more robust understanding of the world and the ecological networks we are consistently navigating. Because it’s not just a framework for teaching, but the very way that we are able to theorize and make connections between these different and difficult ideas and experiences. We are theorizing by mapping about mapping, because we believe that mapping is about making connections, and writing is about making connections. Mapping as a form of sense-making gives not only students room to grow and make connections through learning, but it also gives us as teachers a set of tools to be able to adapt to our surroundings and to navigate our way forward through the failures and difficulties that come with teaching and learning. Because learning is messy and mapping allows us to try and find our way.
References
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press.Christian, B. (1987). The race for theory. Cultural Critique, 6, 51-63.
Friere, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury.
Rose-Redwood, R., Barnd, N. B., Lucchesi, A.H., Dias, S., & Patrick, W. (2020). Decolonizing the map: Recentering Indigenous mappings. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 55(3), 151-162.
Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Zed Books.