Anna Rita Napoleone
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,
University of Massachusetts- Amherst
napoleoa@stjohns.edu
In my teaching practice, I often work within moments of
ambiguity in the classroom as an attempt at making conversation as
organic as possible. This ambiguous space is productive because
students and I are working collaboratively to understand where
conversations, written and oral, can take us. At times this sort of
pedagogy is difficult for students who have become accustomed to
learning within what Paolo Freire describes as the “banking
concept” of education. Such students look for stability, exactness,
and already-established meaning without thinking of other
possibilities. Working within the frame of critical pedagogy, I
work with my students toward a more democratic process in which we
struggle with our own understanding and interpretations of
language.
Working-class discourse is often seen as antithetical to
academic discourse. For me, my own working-class experience has
brought about conflicting understandings of how academic
performance is understood in the classroom. As I continue on with
my educational career, I note how my working-class identity
(alongside gender and ethnicity) is assessed in the classroom and
in my writing. My own writing experience in the academy has fueled
my interest in looking at how students perform their working-class
subjectivity via their writing and how the academy assesses such
performances.