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10:002 or 10:003 Unit ~ A Sense of the "Other": Perspectives
on America's Ethnic Diversity and the Challenge of Multiculturalism
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Formal Assignments
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The U.S.’s growing ethnic diversity has been the source of many controversial topics. Miscegenation laws, affirmative action, the English Only Movement, even the idea of multiculturalism itself as pedagogy are just a few of the ways issues of diversity shape how we think about the myriad groups that make up the American social mosaic. The following unit is designed with two objectives: 1) to teach students the Toulmin model of rhetorical analysis, demonstrating the relationship between claims, reasons (or data), and warrant—showing them how to critique different positions within a controversy and evaluate the evidence used to support these views; 2) to teach students how to use these skills to describe or "map" different positions within a controversy. The materials I’ve chosen for this unit approach arguments within the discourse of multiculturalism from two angles. The first asks by what criteria do we define what “being American” means? The second explores how the controversial subject of interracial dating/marriage tests the limits of one’s tolerance for diversity. The essay portion of this unit focuses on the role warrant plays in determining an argument’s credibility. Thomas Jefferson’s“Notes on the State of Virginia” and an excerpt from Ronald Takaki’s “A Different Mirror” offer examples of the values, assumptions, and interests that inform notions of what qualities define what “being American” means in different contexts, showing how these ideas have been presented in the past and how they have been challenged and reconstructed from the perspective of social history. Jefferson’s “Notes” offer his view of the purported “natural” differences between blacks and whites, using them as justification for the colonization (in this text, deportation) of newly freed slaves away from the United States and the import of more white immigrants to take their place. The fear of racial violence and maintaining the purity of the white race serve as the motivations for his reflections. The implication is that whites, with their supposed superior faculties of mind, organization, and ingenuity are better suited for life in America than blacks are. In “A Different Mirror” Ronald Takaki challenges Jefferson’s tenuous arguments by focusing on the multicultural history of America. One’s claim to “being American” is not located in the saga of a single people, he suggests, but rather in the variegated past of those who have made significant contributions throughout America’s history. “The deeper significance of America’s becoming a majority non-white society”, Takaki argues, “is what it means to the national psyche, to individuals’ sense of themselves and their nation–their idea of what it means to be American.” The speech assignment teaches students to use skills learned from the Toulmin model of claim, reason, and warrant and apply them to “map” and evaluate different positions within a controversy. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” has been a very successful tool to teach with. The film’s format is a series of vignettes with each character coming into contact with one another, culminating in an open ended and, at least to some, a problematic “resolution”. The film makes it very easy for the students to track different characters’ take on interracial marriage, approaching the controversy from ethical, logical, and emotional standpoints. In addition to the readings and the film, I’ve used the cartoon on pg. 652 (4th ed.) to help orient students’ thinking about the assignments for this unit, focusing on the role that cultural context plays in how we interpret rhetorical texts. For example, one informal exercise I’ve used asks students to deconstruct the depiction of the “us” vs. “them” binary presented in the cartoon without revealing its source. I then use their answers to show how different interpretations of the cartoon’s “meaning” is dependent on individual cultural biases, setting the stage for my introduction to the unit. I include a variety of materials in this unit to emphasize how the skills students acquire from these assignments can be used to think critically about the many different forms of rhetorical “texts” we encounter everyday from an array of media–in this case, literature and film. |