Mary Louise Pratt’s presentation titled “Arts of the Contact Zone” shows a revolutionary approach to culture and thinking. Pratt’s presentation is relevant to someone exploring learning and growth, as she challenges the status quo and looks forward to change and diversity. Her discussion of education and transculturation is particularly insightful.

           

Pratt, a professor at Stanford University, starts her presentation with sharing a story of her son that often comes to her mind when thinking of the subject of literacy. By researching and collecting baseball cards, he found a “luminous point of contact” with the world, learning something of topics ranging from geography to economics and getting accustomed to holding his own in discussions with adults. Pratt recognized that school gave her son the “tools with which to find and open all these doors (Pratt 33).” Baseball cards gave him what the National Research Council refers to as “a key finding”: a means of “organizing information into a conceptual framework [which] allows for greater ‘transfer’” (How People Learn 3). This is crucial to learning and literacy. Still, she “found it unforgivable that schooling itself gave him nothing remotely as meaningful to do” (Pratt 33). His education gave him tools that transferred to other circles but did not supply him opportunities to apply those skills.

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Pratt concludes the address with a story about another son. She explains a time when his creative response to a standard assignment was ignored, then questions, “What is the place of unsolicited oppositional discourse, parody, resistance, critique in the imagined classroom community? Are teachers supposed to feel that their teaching has been most successful when they have eliminated such things and unified the social world, probably in their own image? Who wins when we do that? Who loses?” (39) Is the role of teachers to make students think and act exactly like them and overlook any instances of originality or deviation from the status quo? In criticizing a setting where legitimacy is defined by whoever has power, and anything deemed illegitimate is simply ignored, she is challenging the popularly homogeneous view of education.

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This makes me think about how those in authority have the power to define expectations and ideals. This is an immensely influential position to be in, and it ought to be approached with some discretion and responsibility. Teachers, especially, have a massive influence on what and how their students learn. According to Carol Dweck, psychologist and author of Mindset, “it is a human right” for students to grow, which requires what she calls a “growth mindset.” Essentially, this involves what Nancy Chick, assistant director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, similarly recognizes as a vital part of learning: “recognizing the limit of one’s knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability” (“Metacognition”). This idea of open-mindedness and goal of growth is particularly relevant for teachers, lest they become trapped by limited expectations and prevent their students from growing to their full potential, either by not allowing that growth or just not helping to facilitate it. Pratt brings this up to encourage educators to work on figuring how to make “the best site for learning” (40).

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The fact that Pratt brought up her children in these stories that she opened and closed her presentation with, in a setting where such stories are discouraged, is exactly the kind of activity which is crucial to the contact zone. The contact zone as Pratt describes it is “intended in part to contrast with ideas of community that underlie much of the thinking about language, communication, and culture that gets done in the academy” (Pratt 37). The contact zone dissolves the widespread utopian ideas of what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities,” or views of society as a unified entity that does not actually exist (37). This idealized, homogenized idea of a group is often at play in the classroom, as already discussed. An important counterpart to this is transculturation, “a phenomenon of the contact zone”. She defines transculturation as “processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (36). Transculturation is a way that subordinate groups can claim some independence and assert some autonomy by selectively using the materials introduced to them by the dominant group. As Pratt explains, Guaman Poma’s groundbreaking letter, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, is a prime example of this phenomenon. He adapted Spanish processes to suit his purposes by using writing and images to communicate in his letter to the Spaniards. These both were European genres, as Poma’s society had neither a system of writing nor a custom of symbolic drawing. He adapted these to express specifically Andean tendencies, aspirations, and traditions of “spatial symbolism” (36), crafting his own picture of the world with his people as the center and denouncing Spanish crimes against them. This is the sort of “unsolicited oppositional discourse” that is typically discouraged yet is vital to the growth of a society (39).

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Pratt discusses an example of transculturation by examining Poma’s letter and becomes another example by using children, a taboo subject, to reach literary experts and professors who dominate the audience she is addressing. She does this to urge us to look for the “pedagogical arts of the contact zone” such as “exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others, experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique, parody, and comparison… [and] ground rules for communication across lines of difference hierarchy that go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect” (Pratt 40). With these goals in mind, and a solid growth mindset employed, Pratt’s approach lays the foundation for changing the way we look at literacy, communication, and education.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Chick, Nancy. “Metacognition.” Center for Teaching. Vanderbilt University. www.cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/. Accessed 26 August 2019.    

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Dweck, Carol. “The Power of Believing That You Can Improve.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, Nov. 14,

www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve?language=en#t-354758

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How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice. "Chapter 2 Key Findings." National Research Council. 1999. How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.  doi: 10.17226/9457.

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Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, 1991, pp. 33–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25595469.