Priscilla Perkins <pperkins@roosevelt.edu> Date: Tue, 03 Nov 1998
Dear Chancellor Broski:
I am writing to offer an educational perspective on current efforts to preserve Chicago's historic Maxwell Street area. As a teacher of college writing, a theorist of multicultural composing processes, and a scholar of American literature, I can say that Maxwell Street offers what we might think of as a "real-world laboratory" for students of the University of Illinois-Chicago and other area colleges (including Roosevelt University, where I teach). Though there are many important reasons why we should maintain and support Maxwell Street, I would like to consider how the preservation of this area relates to the teaching of critical thinking and writing within a postmodern context of American cultural diversity.
My experiences teaching composition to culturally-diverse student groups has convinced me that, whether their families have been in the U. S. for five generations or just one, most of our students are accustomed to seeing themselves as upwardly mobile consumers first, and as ethnically-grounded subjects second (or third or not at all). When our students do think in terms of ethnicity or class background, they take their cues from television and other media, which present these identities in unproblematically sentimental terms. While there is some truth to these media representations, they certainly don't tell the whole story. Being able to walk Maxwell Street, to see the interaction of the groups that currently call it home, to read about the parade of peoples who have left their mark on the place and on our national culture, and, finally, to write about what they have witnessed: this, in my view, might enable our students to see themselves as more than consumers disconnected from geography and history. It might, in other words, give them the critical tools they need in order to knit their futures--as stockbrokers, health care professionals, writers, parents--to the pasts about which our consumption-driven society teaches them so little. This kind of "knitting" requires particular attention to the points of contradiction--between what history books say and what survivors remember, between the perceived values of the university and of the bordering neighborhood--that forcefully appear to students who are confronted with places that are so "intimately foreign" to their experiences.
In the most everyday of language, tearing down Maxwell Street teaches students that history--their own, their neighbors'--doesn't really matter. In postmodern terms--the ones that describe the reality our students live, even if they don't know the vocabulary--preserving Maxwell Street shows how our American identities are woven out of scraps of Alabama cotton and Yiddish newsprint, out of irony heaped on injustice, out of cooperative gestures filtered through faulty (though workable) translations. We owe the students we teach, as well as those who come after, the opportunity to see their pasts preserved, and to use those pasts in order to understand the futures they will construct for themselves.
Sincerely,
Priscilla Perkins, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Director of Writing, Robin Campus
Roosevelt University
430 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL 60605
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