It is all about identity; it is all about otherness. It is all about how you leave your print in your piece of composition. In her article Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric, Lunsford argues for that. She asks for breaking rules. She calls for developing one’s norms. The change, she knows, is not easy. The process is inclusive. “ It is kind of like a fish in the Pacific Ocean, with the analogy that the Pacific Ocean is the dominant field and the fish is this postcolonial, this feminist, or this queer, or whoever is trying to make changes”(50). The problem for her is how to make students involved in this. She realizes that they will never dare that. She believes that their instructors will not accept their exotic style. Swearingen and Moe give an example of the way we perceive the world with different lenses. They argue that the rhetoric of their Chinese predecessors are not explained very well and their they contributed to rhetoric in the same way their Western peers did.
I do agree with Lunsford that everybody should write his point of view and should show readers how he sees the world around him. However I disagree with her when it comes to second language learning. In my experience, speaking and writing cross culturally are so dangerous. This is because your writing will reflect your identity which is a product of a culture different from natives. I remember when I was in the Intensive American Language Center, I wrote a paper on September 11 event in which I discussed the topic from an Islamic viewpoint. I showed in detail that what happened was against Islamic teaching and that Islam was always a religion of peace and goodwill. I remember I presented the paper in front of three teachers. I could see signs of dissatisfaction on their faces. They perhaps did not like me to praise another religion in front of them or perhaps associated the event with Islam. In sum, they were unhappy. However, in the case of natives, Lunsford’s ideas are illuminating; they will help people think for themselves and develop their critical sense.
The applicability of her ideas in teaching composition seems to be difficult. Her model is amorphous. No specific rules; no definite steps. It is a great challenge. It is all left to the student to choose his own way of joining the conversation. Even if the student writes very well, teachers will not appreciate that. From an observer point of view, I can confirm that some of our 597 blogs are of that kind. They are personal and academic. The important question is can we teach this experience to our 101 students? Can we urge them to find their way?

Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis
In his article Inquiry and Discourse, Gees presents a more different concept of discourse than that we have studied earlier in this semester. For him discourse it is not that stretch of sentences and utterances that we produce in order to communicate with others. For him, discourse is a way of “combining and integrating language, actions, interactions, ways of thinking, believing, valuing, and using various symbols, tools, and objects to enact a particular sort of socially recognizable identity”(21). For him discourse is the scenes that we live everyday in every place (our homes, schools , streets, workplace, etc…) The discourse he is talking about is that one connected to previous discourses; the discourse he is addressing is a complex net of relations. The idea he wants to communicate is that our life is a thread of beads. Each bead represents a discourse and each bead consists of different elements. In her chapter Putting One’s Business on Front Street, Monroe takes one bead of her life and the lives of some people in two schools in Michigan State and analyses its elements. In her chapter she wants to show how these elements ( technology, people, institution, and knowledge) interact together to produce a different discourse.
The findings of her analysis are in sync with Gee’s idea that discourse changes according to time, situation, and people. The results she is presenting only applies to her situation. The people she was studying, the technology she was using and the situation she was in were unique in terms of identities, culture, family backgrounds and quality. Since I was a teacher of English as a foreign language, I had a similar experience of using technology in teaching. My people were female and male, Libyan students who formed a
homogenous group in terms of race, class and culture. My situation was teaching Advanced Composition. My time was Spring 2007. The topic I was teaching was How to Write a Formal and Personal Letter. The assignment was to write two letters( formal and personal) and send them over email to me. The results were different from Monroe’s, of course. My students did very well with formal letters. The expressions they used and the topics they broached were so formal. The topics ranged from applying to a job or a university, asking for one day leave from the boss or inviting me to a party to writing a formal complaint to the dean. The students made every effort to use so formal expressions that many native speakers may not write in similar situation. In sum, their emails were amazing.
The students’ problems arose when it came to writing a personal letter. Around 90% of them wrote about formal topics and used less formal expressions than those written in the previous letters. The topics were about some hot issues in the media, discussing some points in class, or explaining the recipe of some dishes. Only 10% of them performed very well on this assignment. They talked about their personal lives- their likes and dislikes, families, hobbies, etc… And all of them were male students.
The reason was our culture. The student-teacher relationship is so formal in Libya. When a student converses with his instructor, he should use titles such as Dr., your honor, discuss formal topics, and talk while standing even if the teacher is sitting. It is such nice a dream to have a seat in her office. This is why my students wrote perfect formal letters and failed to write personal ones. In my point of view, they found it difficult to paint a picture in their minds of their teacher other than that of a stern and scowling face. It is true, then, that a discourse draws another discourse.

Identity and Culture

I strongly agree with Manroe's statement that "ethnicity alone should not be taken as having predictive value. A teacher should not prejudge that an individual student will automatically produce a certain kind of narratives, basing that prediction solely on a student's ethnicity"(89). We, as teachers and researchers, should not attribute students' educational problems to a specific element of the social force(race, gender, or class) And here, of course, I am not belittling previuos research or refuting their results. What I want to get at here is that we live in a large discourse consisting of many elements each of which affect and contribute to our culture and, thus, to our identity. This, perhaps, acounts for the conflicting results of the previous research. some studies mentioned class as a cause for educational problems; others considered race and gender as direct reasons for them. In other words, no fixed and lasting reason exist.
It was always the concern of scholars to disclose the factors that affect our identity and form our culture. Classical and orthodox marxists, for example, relied on economic reductionism to do so. They argue that the base( economy) overdetermines our life(social relations, education, politics, etc...) Consequently, economy is the engine that generates everything in the society. This, of course, was refuted by cultural theorists who believe that our culture consists of " a relationship among levels [race, gender, class, etc...], constituted in relations reducible to a single essential one-to-one correspondence"(Slack,2007:117) Accordingly, our education is affected by all these levels, all of which contribute in one way or another to it. What remains is the degree of affect of each level.
( Sorry for being late, Malcolm. I have a cold)


References
Slack, Jennifer(2007)'The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies' in Morley, David and Chen, Kuan-Hsing (eds) Staurt Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge.