Reviewing the articles in ComNotes is quite interesting. The following is a semi-formal content analysis of those issues of the newsletter in our possession. This preliminary observation reveals six areas of focus covered by ComNotes: faculty affairs, graduate student affairs, undergraduate affairs, campus news, departmental news, and departmental and campus-wide resources and funding opportunities. Of the issues covered, faculty news, reviews and information have been the most frequently reported issues in ComNotes, closely followed by undergraduate news and messages from departing undergraduates. Reporting on department- and campus- wide grants and fellowships, resources, and career opportunities were covered somewhat frequently. The least frequently covered issues were graduate student affairs and observations and campus news (this issue of ComNotes definitely goes against the grain of previous reporting of and by graduate students.) The frequency of reporting on these issues has varied over time. Early issues of ComNotes focused almost entirely on faculty and undergraduate affairs, while more recent issues have included issues regarding graduate affairs more so than in the past. Reporting on issues about departmental and campus-wide news have remained relatively constant over time.
There are many questions and much information not explored by these preliminary observations. Once the archive is complete, we plan a more detailed discussion, which will include more specific information on the topics covered in the newsletter. Some avenues that seem interesting to us are questions regarding how the content of submissions has changed
Points of Empathy
As most of us would probably expect, the forum did not forge a single "woman's voice" from which to address the issue of mentoring. Rather, over the course of the meeting various voices coalesced around points of empathy - issues or practices through which women could identify with other women. The first point of empathy was the poor quality of mentoring often experienced by women in academia. The earliest generation of women present at the forum - women in their fifties - commonly expressed a feeling that they simply had not been mentored at all, while members of later generations felt oppressed by the mentoring process in various ways. Lana Rakow noted that in her experience mentoring often meant someone trying to talk her out of doing what she really wanted to do. Mentoring, she observed, might turn out to be a well-meaning person telling her not to take the risks that she most needed and wanted to take. Several members of the audience described how they had been advised that they would never achieve successful academic careers if they chose research topics in the field of Feminist Studies. "We were all told that!" one woman exclaimed.
The second point of empathy, following from the first, was a strong suspicion of mentoring as a hierarchical institution and a discomfort with the term "mentoring" itself. Several critiques that evolved over the course of the discussion suggested that the term "mentoring" is ladened with a variety of patriarchal implications - from hero-worship, to the reproduction of narrowly-gendered systems of thought, to the building of "old boy" systems of patronage. Overall, however, there seemed to be a shared feeling that mentoring in some form was critical for "getting ahead" in one's field, and that women held a certain kind of responsibility to help eachother "make it" in the academy. These conflicting feelings led several panelists and audience members to try to redefine mentoring in different terms and recuperate certain elements of the mentoring process for feminist purposes.
Redefining the Mentoring Process
Several panelists attempted to identify different functions of mentoring and find new terms to describe the process. They outlined different roles that the mentor might be called upon to play, including: a supporter (someone who believes in you, who roots for you, and who you can trust); an advisor, councelor, coach, or rabbi (someone who will give you advice and information when you ask for it); a sponsor (someone who will clear a path for you and actively make contacts or solve problems on your behalf); and a role model (someone who shows what paths have already been forged and what can be achieved.) Overall, the mentor was viewed primarily as a resource for the mentee rather than a "producer" of his or her career. In the audience discussion there were several comments emphasizing the importance of the supporter role and suggesting that the role of advisor or counselor was a place where the transfer of information and experience between women could be improved. Liesbet van Zoonen highlighted two skills that might be better transfered to advisees: how to present papers at conferences and how to publish papers.
Panelist Brenda Dervin pointed out that while the discussion had been focused on consultation and advising - what she called a "road map" version of mentoring - teaching is another important sphere in which mentoring takes place. The classroom, she suggested, is a place where professors can and should teach their students the academic trade on a variety of levels. Ellen Wartella also viewed the classroom as an important forum for articulating the connections between the demands of the university and the larger social demands placed on women (for example, children rearing). She advocated that the teacher present herself as a whole person, a "professional woman," with important ties and obligations that connect her to the larger social world.
In looking at mentoring in the larger institutional framework of Communication Departments, several women expressed the feeling that women are called upon disproportionately to mentor students and that this activity becomes translated into a female care-taking or mothering role. Audience members commented that the activity of supporting, advising, and sponsoring students (and other faculty members) needs to be encouraged at the level of "organizational culture" such that mentoring is not perceived as somehow a woman's domain.
Potentials and Pitfalls of a Feminist Definition of Mentoring
Several participants commented that women should avoid the pitfall of using mentoring simply to reproduce themselves - that is, to encourage the success of mainly white, middle-class women in the field of Communication. This warning sounded with particular resonance at the ICA Conference with its virtually all-white and mostly male membership. Several participants suggested that a feminist mentoring project should not only tolerate diversity, but should actively promote it. Liesbet van Zoonen encouraged the group to expand their notion of diversity beyond U.S. borders in order to include Third World women in the dialogue of U.S. academic life. Sponsoring Third World women to attend Communication conferences is an example of how to achieve greater diversity.
While many women expressed a desire to de-hierarchize the mentor- mentee relationship, there were a variety of viewpoints on what this might look like. Some women voiced the view that - at least in the early stages of their academic careers - women should be able to count on one mentoring individual to guide them through the academic maze. Other voices responded by saying that for both practical and political reasons, one should look for multiple mentors to play the different roles of supporter, advisor, sponsor, and role model. Another alternative to the mentoring relationship voiced by forum participants was the idea of organizing informal groups of students, junior faculty, and senior faculty to build a process of co-mentoring at the department or university level.
Another approach to mentoring raised indirectly in another ICA session was the possibility of seeing the mentoring process as a bridge between the academy and the community. In a forum on "Women in Academic and Other Organizations" one speaker raised the question of what is lost when women's organizations are tied to the academic workplace rather than to the community as a whole. If the goals of mentoring are defined broadly enough, it might be possible to locate mentors and mentees in a number of institutions outside of the narrow confines of the university. At least one audience participant at the mentoring forum identified her practice as a mentor with Gramsci's idea of the Organic Intellectual, an intellectual with a class-based mission to radicalize and guide the aspirations of his or her students.
Conclusions
In summing up the dialogue generated by the ICA forum on mentoring, I would like to pose a question raised at the panel on Women in Organizations: With so many women entering institutions like the university, why hasn't the organizational culture changed more than it has? What place does mentoring hold in our organizational culture and how should the mentoring process be redefined as the percentage of women in our program continues to increase? What is the role of co- mentoring at the department, university, or community level and how could or should it be expanded? In various ways these voices from the ICA forum have identified and articulated different oppressive and liberating moments in the mentoring process and, perhaps, have begun to suggest new directions and possibilities for mentoring relationships. Joy Hayes is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication.
The analysis of testimony by the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance in l983 demonstrated very little changed in the hiring practices of minorities in the television and entertainment industries in the preceeding fifteen-year period. Wilson and Gutierrez note that minority hiring in the film and television industries remained "slow and at minimal levels," (p. 159) while advances in technologies such as cable, pay TV, satellite video transmission, and video recorders made major strides in serving the American public.
As in hiring practices, programs designed to recruit and advance persons of color in the industry are often the first to go amid budgetary crises. For example, the Minority Advancement Program was among the first programs eliminated when the new CEO of CBS Television network, Laurence Tisch, found a need to cut the budget as a result of the growing competition from cable, home videos, and fluctuating advertising revenues (Auletta, l991). When asked about the impact of his polices on women and minorities in television, Tisch's response was all too revealing of where his priority lay. His answer, "Is there a problem?" clearly placed the concern on cutting waste rather than on the lack of female and minority personnel in the rank of management.
Other factors such as the dismantling of affirmative action and issues of pay equity have been a source of frustration for women of color in virtually every field of employment. Affirmative action policies, for example, have often been ineffectual and have, on occasion, resulted in a backlash for women. Recent data compiled by the Office of Women in Higher Education reveal that "in and out of higher education, the wage gap between men and women exists at every level of employment, making it abundantly clear that women get less monetarily from their investment in higher education than their male colleagues" (Touchton and Davis, 1991).
In academia, the gross under representation of persons of color and their diminishing presence is also of great concern to policy makers and educational planners. Hope (1992), reports that minorities , i. e., Asians, African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans comprise less than five percent of the total Ph.D. population. In 1992, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, found that nine percent of the faculty of 19 journalism schools accredited in 1991 were minorities, with (all) women comprising about 20 percent of the faculty (Quill, 1992). Educators of color point out that in journalism schools there is no academic pipeline to help guide minority students through the doctoral level work (Mercer, l991). Other factors contributing to the under representation of a more diverse faculty can be found in research indicating that fewer minority Ph.D. recipients plan academic careers (Vining Brown, l992). Industry and government are the major competitors for new minority doctorates, offering them more attractive careers and salaries than those in academia. Additionally, minorities with doctoral degrees maintain they cannot find employment in their area of study.
In terms of African-American Ph.D.'s, Mickelson and Oliver (1991) note the dwindling supply from which schools can easily choose, but argue that a significant number are overlooked and deemed unqualified "if they are not found in the graduate programs of the universities considered to be the best in the field." They maintain "this pattern leads to the faulty perception of a greater shortage of quality African- American academics than is actually the case. In reality, the search process itself is to blame for not uncovering highly qualified Black candidate" (p.177-178). The researchers contend that the roots of this dilemma can be located historically in a racist ideology that reaches back to examples like those of W.E.B. DuBois who was unable to obtain a university position after he graduated from Harvard in 1899. Like many academics with degrees from prestigious universities, Dubois was forced to accept work as a research assistant before joining the faculty at a Black college These universities became the refuge for early African-American scholars.
A diverse faculty is a necessary component in any discipline and particularly in journalism schools. These faculty members can help students to expand their worldview to represent a growing multicultural society. Additionally, they can mentor students of color who often feel culturally alienated and uncomfortable in university settings where all their professors are Anglo. A diverse faculty can help give students of color the impression that there is something to strive for (Mercer, l991). African-American female students , in particular, have felt an enormous amount of academic pressure on white campuses (Allen & Haniff, l991). Incidents of faculty insensitivity toward students of color can also be traced historically. Jane Bolin, the first African-American woman judge recalls the following event in 1928: The sharpest and ugliest memory of Wellesley days occurred in my senior year during a conference, mandatory for seniors, with a guidance counselor. She exhibited obvious physical shock when told of my plan to study law. She threw up her hands in disbelief and told me there was little opportunity for women in law and absolutely none for 'colored ' one. Surely, I should consider teaching" (Ihle, l992, p. 148).
Over sixty years later, the negative preconceptions of students of color remain unchanged. One of the authors, a television producer, who is now working on her doctorate, remembers her undergraduate advisor suggested she change her major because she had experienced difficulty in a particular journalism class. "Years later I saw my advisor while shooting on location in Hawaii. I wanted so much to remind him that he'd discouraged me. I passed, however, because I knew I was fortunate to have had other sources of academic and moral support." Another barrier found by one Chicana doctoral student was the preconception of her ability based on gender and ethnicity. She recalls, "one professor went as far as to admit that at first he didn't think I could complete the program, but I surprised him with my ability to meet the assignments" (Achor & Morales, l990, p. 279).
Cheng (1990) who argues for a paradigm shift admonishes that "to be empowered, students need to feel confident about themselves and not feel inhibited," (p. 268). Cheng suggests that we move beyond stereotypical notions such as being "affirmative action charity cases." Cheng explains that "tolerating difference connotes an underlying disregard and indifference" whereas acceptance "connotes approval and support." A diverse faculty of women who adequately reflect the female student population in journalism and communication schools will help alleviate these problems. Additionally, a multicultural perspective that includes a more pluralistic curriculum, can also provide key and critical components for effecting a much needed change in higher education.
Diane Bartlow is a graduate student in Communication. This piece is excerpted from "Exploring New Frontiers: Women of Color in Academia," R. Diane Bartlow, Virginia T. Escalante, Olga A. Vásquez. In Women in Mass Communication, Pamela Creedon, editor. 2nd. ed., Sage Publications 1993.
Contemporary examples of English language use in China include the "Hello" belted out from the muddy semis driving by my bicycle, English language bookstores, movies, and songs, and the fashion statement of the ubiquitous English on t-shirts. Here, the English language as object is special. It is "cool" to wear such a t-shirt. Perhaps the actual language on the shirts is significant; it is also possible that the language is arbitrary. I know from many conversations with Chinese shopkeepers and friends that most Chinese do not understand or even care about the actual words that adorn their chests and backs. To a native English speaker, the language is at best peculiar and often non-sensical. I found one stunning example in a private enterprise shack outside the language institute where I lived. White block letters on a black t- shirt read:
VIOLENCEONE
But we haven't got the words
We now have new things
In spite of the incongruity of these phrases, this slogan must be more than the arbitrary juxtaposition of words.
Other English language-related "activities" that hold multiple significances in China, either cultural or political, include: speaking English to a friend while strolling the streets; displaying English language books in one's home; attending foreign films; listening to or singing songs in English; reading The China Daily, an English language newspaper; or listening to "The Voice of America" or the BBC radio programs.
These language activities point beyond themselves to reflect a fascination with the West and an embracing of "modernity." They are cultural expressions that reflect Chinese people's changing self-image and world view. As cultural expressions of the 1980's and 90's, these uses of English are pointedly different from previous cultural expressions of Chinese Communism which were deeply Chinese, conformist (in dress, hairstyle, literature and music), and explicitly anti-international. To interpret the significance of participating in these activities requires an understanding of the complexity of the contemporary socio- political and cultural scene in China. At different historical moments and in different contexts, these language practices might alternately mean that one is "cool," sophisticated, radical, educated, progressive, or even "non-Chinese."
Depending on the ideological orientation and the consequent goals of government administrators or teachers promoting English language education in China, the study of English may be presented and taught as either a "tool" or as a cultural activity. In many cases, it is taught as both. Examples of the attitude of "English as tool" are rampant in China now. When I asked taxi drivers of people on the street or in a bus, "Do you think it is important to study English in China now? Why?," most of the responses I received were of indignation, which to me implied the stupidity of such a question. "Of course it is! It will help me get a job and make more money." When I asked many people if the study of English had influenced their way of thinking or their way of understanding the world, they often said, "No." This doesn't mean that the study of English had no cultural impact, rather, it means that the attitude towards it is instrumental.
There are many examples of English as a cultural activity. The following quote is from a March 1924 issue of The English Student, a pamphlet I found in a small, used book store in Beijing:
What do Foreigners Think and Say and Do? The China Press which is the principal foreign newspaper in China, will enable you to understand the foreigner and his ways, will give you all interesting, up-to-date news and pictures, and help you to Improve your Knowledge of English. Special Rates granted to Students, Missionaries and Teachers. . .
Such a call to readers reflects the cultural dimensions of English language education, even in 1924.
I encountered an example of English language study as inseparable from the study of Western culture in November of 1991 when I worked as an English teacher to young People's Liberation Army soldiers in Northern Beijing. Contrary to my expectations of "post-Tiananmen" China, the military leaders of the school put no restrictions on my classes. To my own confusion, leaders and students alike urged me to openly, "Discuss anything!"
This is in contrast to my teaching experience in Hefei in 1986- 87, which can be described as an uneasy combination of the tool vs. cultural activity dichotomy: There I was strictly monitored. When we arrived, we were asked not to discuss religion in the classroom. After the student demonstrations of December 9, 1986, the school administrators called a meeting of foreign teachers and emphatically asked that we not discuss politics in the classroom. There is no denying, however, that my students were exposed to controversial Western ideas and values when I taught contemporary American literature.
As Bakhtin asserts, the society and the individual are transformed through the introduction of a new language and inevitably the tacit introduction of a new culture. Bakhtin calls this transformation a "verbal-ideological de-centering." In order to explore such de- centerings, I asked 30 Chinese individuals from diverse backgrounds, ages, gender, class, intellectual orientations and experiences to tell me the story of their learning of English. Over tea and with my little tape-recorder rolling, these people recounted their stories, sharing their perceptions of the role of English in their lives. The experience of recounting their stories was novel for them and elicited unexpected emotions. They laughed, they cried, they expressed old angers and they told secrets. They were open and animated, often more animated talking about this topic than any other we discussed. They had never thought about their study of English as special, but as they spoke, many of them acknowledge the "special-ness" of their memories.
One woman sang a song in English, which she remembered from the early 1970's when she was a middle school student. Her English teacher was much loved by the students. By training he had been a musician and a music teacher. Because of his family history and because classical music was not "necessary" for the Revolution, he had been sent to the countryside for re-education during the Cultural Revolution. Later, he was assigned by the government to be an English teacher, a job for which he had no training. This job was a humiliation for this man. My friend remembers his suffering with tears in her eyes. Mixing his love for music and his teaching of English, he wrote songs, both the music and the words to help his young students remember English grammar. My 35 year-old friend, who is now a Linguistics professor at Beijing University, learned the song over twenty years before. She had not sung it since. She sang it in its entirety for me with enormous gusto and without embarrassment as a tribute to her old teacher.
This memory poses at least one problem for the tool/cultural activity dichotomy. The teaching of English during the early 1970's was acceptable under Mao's government with the rationale that English was not only a tool but a weapon and that in order to combat one's enemies, it was essential to be able to speak their language. Other rationales included English as an international language, especially important for access to Western science and technology. So English was considered a tool. The content of English language lessons was primarily grammar and vocabulary development. The words they learned were words like, "worker," "peasant," "hoe," "potatoes," "The Great Proletarian Revolution," "Capitalist Roader," and "bourgeois decadence." Chinese young people were not learning about Western culture. They were learning Communist ideals through English. In fact, the words to the songs their English teacher wrote were carefully inspected by the government officials and contained only party- line language. However, because these young people learned with this cultured man, they were exposed to international culture culture through music.
This one example points to the richness of these people's stories. Through the interviews, these Chinese people revealed their understandings of the world. Mysteries unfolded as they spoke. Although they began by recounting stories of their learning English, along the way they revealed their complex and often changing attitudes toward China, the West, themselves and their futures.
Jennifer Troutner is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication.
...And talk we did. If ever a class had a heart and soul, the heart of this one was interaction and the soul was e-mail. Never before have three consecutive hours in a classroom, nor the numerous mandatory office visits passed so quickly. I was fortunate to have been a student in this class. I've earned more than two hundred units from five colleges, and this is the first communications course I've taken that addressed possible futures for the college graduate.
Michael Cole's Communication/General 150 Integrative Senior Seminar on Mind and Media is designed to examine the mental and emotional experiences afforded by different forms of Mediation. Each medium was addressed from both a participant and an outside analytic perspective.
Students were expected to read a newspaper daily, and switch newspapers every two weeks, for comparison. In addition, each pupil was provided with an e-mail account on the Internet, and showed how to use it by Bruce Jones. Texts included a one hundred-eighty page booklet containing ten articles by different authors, and three novels.
As seniors, we all knew the story but few of us had actually read Daniel De Foe's Robinson Crusoe. Our discussions in class and on e-mail considered the story's implications for a better understanding of capitalism, imperialism, and individualism.
On Photography explored Susan Sontag's ideas about the many faces and meanings of surrealism found in photography, spawning a "show and tell" session where everyone brought in family photos to depict certain meaningful subjective and objective memories. I think that the Visual Arts and Communications departments may have grown too far apart. Sharing photographs and analyzing their possible meanings helped to unify this class.
When each member read a part of Sophocles', Oedipus the King, and Antigone aloud in class we experienced the performance aspects of communications.
We enjoyed several guest speakers. One visitor manages the L.A. desk at the San Diego "Union Tribune," and gave us a straight- forward talk about the prospects of being hired by the newspaper: Job hunters should have computer skills, and a working knowledge of a second language, preferably Spanish. The "Union" is a little behind the Times but will soon have an all Spanish section and more female employees.
The second speaker was the director of communications at UCSD, who spoke about public relations in the non profit sector of communications. Perhaps the most important message of the day was "no matter how bad the situation has become, or how tough the pressures, never lose your credibility with the public through a cover-up."
Our third speaker was the program manager of KCLX, 102.9. In a one hour high powered talk, the students were shown the various positions at a radio station, ranging from engineer to D.J. to marketing, with a detailed account of what sort of person might best match each responsibility.
Helene Keyssar, a UCSD professor and authority on Robert Altmann films, helped the class to read movies and decipher some of the codes in Nashville.
Other films included The Graduate, which helped us to verbalize our collective uncertainties about life after graduation, and The Power of Ten, where we saw how our experience of structure depends on our depth of focus.
We listened to the "Goldberg Variations" by Bach, the "Eroica Symphony" and "Eroica Variations" by Beethoven and Mozart, and finally began to recognize the themes inside the variations. Then many of us played our favorite tunes, from rock to reggae to country, and studied the message in the melody and the importance of the lyrics. We heard Don Maclean's American Pie, and sang along with Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, to see how the principles of montage and narrative work in music.
One student took this idea a little further. Heidi brought in her own video dealing with the problem of discrimination against lesbians and gays, and demonstrated the effect of video without a soundtrack, and vice versa. She had us explore the problems of selectivity in the process of meaning construction. Peter augmented our assigned readings with a presentation on Duke Ellington that included photographs and music. Several of my classmates read poetry in class, and others posted their favorite works on e-mail for group discussion.
The reader will notice that I've used names in my descriptions. This is a little misleading. We were a relatively tight-knit group, and in the beginning wore stick-on name tags twice, but we didn't really have clear identities. Few of us can attach proper names to all the faces we now know. But we have recognizable voices. Through the solidarity of this course and our often daily participation in E-mail we had a clear opportunity to share our thoughts and identities about a variety of subjects with a forum of our peers.
E-mail gave us our forum for unity. We used an electronic mailing list called "access," to which we posted letters to the entire class. Until now I've been taught that integration had something to do with race. This class helped me to understand what an integrated approach to education might mean. The participants of this class interacted as equals in a society, communicated, and achieved genuine integration through diversity. They posted nearly five hundred messages to "access" in ten weeks. How many private communiques were sent, one can only guess.
Surprisingly, e-mail was a new experience for most of the soon-to-face-the-real-world seniors of this class. We quickly adapted to this new medium and unanimously endorse it. E-mail is a marvelous tool.
The integrative senior seminar did have one draw-back. It lasted only ten weeks but it left a footprint in the sand that will last a lifetime. George Dose is a Senior in Communication
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