Fenobia I. Dallas
Assistant Professor of English Appointed to SVSU 2005
Ph.D. Michigan Technological University
M.A. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
B.A. Fisk University
BOOK
The Pedagogy of Practice: Technical Communicators Interrogating the Raced Audience. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2008.
The many studies on scientific and technical communication theory discuss the necessity of audience analysis in the classroom. These discussions often focus on how to negotiate the oppositional influences of the academy and industry. As a result, scientific and technical communication pedagogy and practice often omit race as a salient component. While contemporary theoretical and research efforts pursue humanistic-subjective perspectives, the discipline's pedagogy of audience analysis has not yet extended to interrogating racial characteristics. This book fills that gap by constructing the audience from a raced perspective, examining language use and visual identity. Social construction theory, along with discourse and visual analysis methodologies, are used to analyze the social practices of members of an African American women's online community. This analysis can equip students of scientific and technical communication with practical tools for constructing a more complex audience. Students and scholars interested in online communities, African American rhetoric, and the National Pan-Hellenic Council member organizations may also find this book informative.
PAPER
"From the Melting Pot to the Diversity Diversion: Multiculturalism as Anathema." Association for the Study of African American Life and History Conference, Birmingham, Alabama, 1 to 5 October 2008.
Historically, some cultural groups were not targeted for the melting pot of the United States. Their cultural ways developed differently from European Americans, and as a result the cultural groups exhibit cultural characteristics of their ancestral lineage. These cultural groups have been told that in order to reap the benefits of the democratic society in the United States, they have to conform to European American standards. Some members of these cultural groups chose to assimilate while others chose to maintain their cultural identities. These cultural identities have always existed and exist today-the one difference is that we now learn about them in school. Prescriptive schooling taught that these cultural groups were invited into the melting pot, and if they chose not to assimilate, then they should not be learned about in positive ways. Thus, negative and derogatory terminology was associated with these cultural groups, and individuals from the groups were stigmatized. But what are we teaching our students in school today, or better yet, what are they learning in school about the melting pot ideology? A short questionnaire was given to students from a small Midwestern university to gain some insight on this subject. This presentation offers a glimpse to students' ideas on multiculturalism, diversity, and the melting pot by analyzing their responses. The resultant discussion on their comments can guide us to a different understanding of how multiculturalism and diversity are perceived, and challenge a "new view" for a pedagogical offering.