125 (Spring 2000): 59-60
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Borders, Bridges, and the Value of Humanities Outreach
CLARA McLEAN
Borders are set up to define places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place [. . .]. It is in a constant state of transition.
THE quotation above, from Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera, is the one Corrie Martin and I used to initiate discussion on the first day of the Humanities Out There modules we taught at Santa Ana High School in winter 1998. Our two consecutive modules focused on border in a range of senses--national, ethnic, linguistic, literary, and even interpersonal. The quotation speaks not only to the issues we were privileged to explore with the Santa Ana students but also to questions about the structural relation between the university and the community and how humanities outreach programs might challenge and transform that relation.
The border as a dividing line is a central problem of university outreach, which itself harbors the radically transformative potential of Anzaldúa's borderland. When we conceive of outreach from the standpoint of the university, we tend to think in terms of a border crossing between two utterly distinct spheres. In the rhetoric of university outreach, the relation of these spheres to each other is often implicitly hierarchized; the university is figured as a walled-off, culturally powerful domain sending its coveted goods and services "out there" into the wild beyond. In the case of HOT, aspects of this way of envisioning outreach, which might be called a philanthropic model, are suggested by the program's name. The report of the 1997 University of California Task Force on Outreach frames the aims of outreach as "achieving diversity" in the university by "providing students in disadvantaged circumstances access to all the necessary tools to equip them [. . .] for admission to the University's most selective programs and campuses." This vision of outreach invites imagery of bridges--the bridge motif figures prominently in the language of many university outreach programs. Emissaries of the university are sent into the community, bearing their "unparalleled educational expertise and considerable resources"; in turn, members of the community who otherwise would not have access to these privileges are enabled to gain admission to the university's selective sphere.
These aims--increasing the university's presence in the community and working to increase disadvantaged and underrepresented groups' presence at the university--have become ever more important given the continued erosion of funding for public education and the dismantling of affirmative action. Outreach programs like HOT are struggling to fill the gaps in a public education system that no longer has the resources to teach basic literacy skills to many of its children, much less give them stimulating exposure to an array of cultural production. As the report of the UC Task Force on Outreach suggests, an active approach to diversity in enrollment will soon be more crucial than ever if we want our public universities to be representative of, and responsive to the needs of, the public.
Yet this vision of the aims and potential of university outreach may finally underrate the varieties of socially transformative work that outreach programs actually do. Presenting the university as the benevolent source of knowledge and value in this exchange and admission to this fortified center as the goal no doubt helps garner support for outreach programs. Still, this image of learning leaves the power and prestige of the ivory tower, the hegemony of its knowledge, relatively unchallenged. My experiences as a HOT outreach instructor suggest that the benefits of university outreach (particularly humanities outreach) may be harder to define than the rhetorical emphasis on admissions implies. Yet these benefits may have the potential to transform not just relations between the university and the community but also the way we think about the privilege of university knowledge.
In the HOT modules that Corrie Martin and I taught together, we joined six undergraduate tutors in Santa Ana High School English classes for an hour a week over a six-week period. Each class focused on short readings by contemporary multicultural writers. We would read a piece together as a large group, then discuss the ways in which it raised issues of borders and identity, forming connections between broader humanistic questions and personal, individual ones. For example, on our first day, using an excerpt from Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street ("My Name"), we talked about how the different components of a name reflect histories of border crossing, war, and immigration, as well as the individual stories of family, friends, and community. Then we'd break into small groups to do in-class creative writing exercises focused on the students' own lives and family histories. Our first assignment was, "Write about your name. What does it mean? What does it mean to you? Where is it from? Does your name come from more than one language or culture at once, and which ones?" Fifteen minutes of writing were followed by small-group discussions of what the students had written.
What was learned in the class was, I think, quite different from what we set out to teach. Arriving with our university training, we expected the large-group discussions to be the most important aspect of the class, the point of reference for what would happen in the small groups (a lecture-based model of teaching). We found, though, that we came to emphasize the large group less and less, so that by the last class we were doing almost all small-group work. In the small groups, students really began to open up, sharing personal anecdotes and constructive feedback. This degree of informal and egalitarian exchange and of individual attention is rarely possible in either the overcrowded schoolroom or the university classroom. Similarly, our conception of the role of the undergraduate tutors shifted. Where we had gone in with a kind of mentor-apprentice relation in mind, a familiar echo of the university's long-standing construction of the professor-TA relationship, we came out with the knowledge that we had much to learn from the tutors. They became active contributors to designing and conducting both the large- and small-group discussions and assignments. They were inexperienced teachers, most recently out of local high schools themselves. But this often meant that their own experiences were closer to those of the Santa Ana students than ours were. Many were themselves from immigrant families, and their rapport with the students was phenomenal. The tutors, it seems to me now, clearly occupy an intermediate position between the university and the community. They are true borderland dwellers and thus provide a pathway for deeper connections--friendship, identification, and a genuinely two-way exchange. They are undoubtedly one of the most valuable and unusual aspects of the HOT program.
The worth of this program is not as directly measurable as counting pedestrians on a bridge. Yet it has opened a field of communication with potentially long-term benefits for an educational community encompassing both "us" and "them." What has proved most valuable is not simply providing new texts or knowledge for students but valuing and building on their rich cultural knowledge--and helping them gain confidence in their ability to articulate it--so that learning takes shape as a conversation rather than as a gift bestowed. Finally, one of the HOT program's indelible effects has certainly been on us, the graduate instructors. Working with HOT has deeply affected the way we think about the structural relation between the university and the community and about our own training. Why is teaching in the larger community, rather than solely within the confines of the university, not an integral component of all graduate training? Why was our HOT experience the exception rather than the rule if our long-term aim is truly to democratize the university and open its walls? Might not this kind of opening for graduate students and faculty members augment and challenge entrenched university modes of learning and our conception of our social role and responsibilities? Might it not also raise the level and relevance of current academic discussions about multiculturalism and transforming the canon, which often seem ironically out of touch with a world beyond the university? Our sense of ourselves as citizens--not just visitors--out there is one of the most important and transformative impacts of outreach.
The author is a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. This paper was presented at the 1999 CCCC Annual Convention in Atlanta.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.
New Directions for Outreach: Report of the University of California Outreach Task Force. July 1997. U of California. 11 Jan. 2000 <http://www.ucop.edu/acadaff/otf/otf.html>.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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