Shawn McDaniel - "Our Students Aren't Readers...Or Writers": Legibility, Rurality, Multiplicity

1. “OUR STUDENTS
AREN’T READERS
…OR WRITERS”
LEGIBILITY, RURALITY, MULTIPLICITY
Shawn McDaniel

2. Like many of my classmates, I worked as an adjunct in New York City
while pursuing a Ph.D. After years of teaching all levels of Spanish
language during the day and taking classes at night, a wonderful
opportunity fell into my lap. For the first time, I would be able to design and
teach various upper-level writing intensive courses, taught in English,
aimed at juniors and seniors. I was ecstatic to be able to teach a different
kind of class in a different language. After carefully crafting a syllabus for
Imagining the Americas, a course that used critical theory and cultural
studies to think about such diverse issues as democracy, citizenship,
borders, gender, race, sexuality, and linguistic normativity, I
enthusiastically walked through the readings and assignments with the
director of the program. He seemed impressed at the work I had invested,
but cautioned me bluntly that “You know, our students aren’t readers.”
Deflated, but undeterred,
by such a perplexing
statement, I got the green
light to proceed. A week or
so later, while discussing
my new course with a
colleague, she doubled
down on a similar
sentiment, saying
unequivocally, “Our

3. But it didn’t take long for me to
realize that my students already
knew much of the rather
sophisticated material we went
over in class, but did not share
the same critical vocabulary to
talk about it that I did. And not
only were students reading, but
they wrote insightful essays that
beautifully blended the academic
rigor of close reading and
secondary research with moving
personal testimonials that spoke
to, among other things, the trials
of being targeted by ‘stop and
frisk’ police tactics, later ruled
unconstitutional, but now looming
again on the not-so-distant
horizon. ‘Our students’
understood Foucault’s analysis
of carceral and social
surveillance, since their
neighborhoods and routes to
“You never know if anybody’s
actually in there behind the tinted
glass, but you assume there always
is,” remarked one student. “And I
think that’s the point.” They
understood this, not to mention an array
of other issues, in ways that I never
could.

4. Growing up in rural Oklahoma, I wasn’t much of a ‘reader’, either. “Boys can’t sit still
and read like girls can,” or so I was told. The fact that I’m now a university literature
professor is, for me, the pinnacle of irony, especially in light of the regional, and perhaps
national, stigma of stupidity attributed to Okies, who, like other rural folk, purportedly rely
more on ‘common sense’ than ‘intelligence’.
In both foreign and domestic locations, most people that I’ve run into don’t really know
where Oklahoma is, what’s there, and have never been there. Much to my surprise, people
seemed fascinated to meet me because I was from Oklahoma, a state that I considered
remarkably inconsequential while growing up. Most sing, with varying degrees of accuracy,
the title song of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musical. Others inquire if we all ride horses.
And the select few talk about how they’d love to run through our expansive corn fields
(they’re perhaps thinking of Iowa). In short, Oklahoma seems like a mysterious place to a
surprising number of people.

6. Now that I find myself teaching at Cornell University (in the “Irish
League,” as my grandma once proudly, albeit imprecisely, proclaimed),
I reflect on my rural roots and my public urban teaching chops, and
think about how the concept of multiplicity (as a process of personality
and a pedagogical strategy) can be a viable tool to challenge
geocultural divides and rigid assumptions of constancy and
comprehensibility.
Just how legible are we to ourselves and others?

7. In the wake of the 2016 US presidential
election,
when core components of the Humanities
(such as critical interrogation, nuance, and
context) are being devalued on the national
stage in unprecedented ways, Stanley
Fish’s deflationist motto of “do your job”
loiters in my mind in both an appealing and
appalling way.
In Save the World on Your Own Time
(2008), Fish argues that university
professors cannot, and therefore should
not aim to shape students’ “moral, civic,
and creative capacities.”
While I share Fish’s skepticism about
professors as sacrosanct purveyors of
ethical thought and behavior, I think it
misses the point. Far from prescriptively
molding passive students into my mold, my
pedagogy identifies their individual
strengths, calls attention to the evolving

8. “Each one of us is, successively, not one, but
many. And these successive personalities, which
emerge one from the other, tend to offer among
themselves the most strange and surprising
contrasts.”
— José Enrique Rodó (Uruguay), Motivos de Proteo (1909)
Using the idea of personality (as theorized by
Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó), I think about
how my pedagogy—bolstered by my personal
experiences in diverse rural/urban and public/private
terrains—seeks to facilitate a deeper understanding
of self that recognizes that we all experience distinct,
and sometimes simultaneous, iterations of self,
informed by, but not beholden to, our respective
convictions, hypocrisies, and hopes.