Today, Min-Zhan Lu is a widely successful, published Writing & Composition professor in the United States. She has made so many accomplishments within her field that she has even created her own pedagogy. Within it, she advocates for a blending of students’ individual and educational discourses. To elaborate, in her teaching, she practices negotiating between what students are being taught in the classroom and what they know from home by applying them to each other. She invites her students to interpret what she’s presented to them in reflection of their personal upbringings, regardless if they’re conflicting or not. This opens the door for discussion and genuine understanding as opposed to promoting memorization and conformation amongst students. This is a very significant pedagogy. Not only because of its effectiveness as it pushes for educators to be more open-minded overall (even to the possibility of learning something from their students,) but also because it’s a reflection of Lu’s personal, educational upbringing.
Lu has not always been this successful professor in the United States and she certainly did not have a typical upbringing of one. She was born and grew up in China throughout the later 1900’s. Throughout this time, China was undergoing many revolutionary changes such as the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution and the Anti-Rightist Movement. The main idea behind all these changes was switching to a socialist country, with an emphasis on the working class. As wide-scale as these changes were – they personally effected everyone in China because of the way society was structured as a result of them. One particular area of society that was effected by these changes significantly was the students that were subject to the Chinese school system. The material in which Lu was being taught throughout her educational career was a product of the new Chinese society’s political values. For example, Lu was only able to speak Standard Chinese at school. This was just a small example of the collective identity that the new Chinese school system was trying to create amongst its students. With characteristics of this collective identity being an appreciation of communism and a celebration of the working class, Lu’s home values were completely discouraged. This is because this collective identity was not something the school system simply suggested but, a conformation to it was forced amongst the students.
In growing up in this kind of society with its oppressive school system, Lu began to develop this sort of “double-identity.” One side of her identity was the one she put on when she went to school, writing formulaic essays about how the collective taught the individual a lesson. However, the other side of her identity stemmed from her home life, which idealized the opposing Western world. To elaborate, English was the language spoken at Lu’s household, as her parents emphasized their belief in knowing it to be important. Her parents also valued capitalism as opposed to communism and individualism as opposed to this “collective identity,” explaining to young Lu that they wanted her to write honestly like Dickens and Hawthorne, not these formulaic essays. They also taught her that economic success was something to celebrate, not something to be ashamed of because it makes you different than the working class. As encouraging as her parents’ ideologies were, the fact that both of her identities directly conflicted one another made Lu seriously struggle internally in developing her own identity.
In later becoming an educator herself, Lu set out for no student to have to struggle with a double identity between their home and school discourses ever again – forming this pedagogy surrounded around blending these two worlds.
In the spirit of Lu’s pedagogy, when reflecting on my own educational upbringing – I definitely see a sort of connection between Lu and I. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, because of my Italian grandmother’s heavy role in my early childhood (around when I was beginning to speak,) her accent as well as her inaccurate way of structuring her sentences rubbed off on me. So, when I did enter school, I immediately knew I was a little different and my teacher did change something about me that I had walked in with. I definitely was a little insecure that I was different from the other kids in the very beginning but, the problem I had was easily fixed and to be honest, I was pretty young so I really didn’t think much into it. As an adult now in higher education, looking back on it, although I had similar feelings of being an outsider and that I had a problem that needed to be fixed – it truly wasn’t at the level in which Lu’s situation was. I relate this observation to the fact that Lu and I grew up in completely different political environments. I grew up in America which is not communist like China and actually embodies all the Western, individualist ideologies that Lu’s family idealized (most of the time.) So, a conforming to my classmates and communal language definitely occurred but, nowhere in my experience was it oppressive or forceful. To me, it was giving me the tools to get my points across clearly to those around me, opening up the door for further, individualist conversation. Unfortunately, for Lu, the opposite was the case. However, she turned this oppressive experience of hers into the root of all the significant, individualist work she has done. With it, she has hopefully set a precedent for all educators with her efficient pedagogy in educating our youth.
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