PWR Profile: An Interview with Dr. Yanshuo Zhang about Cultural Rhetorics in the Classroom
By Ruth Starkman
For this issue, we had the opportunity to interview PWR Fellow, Dr. Yanshuo Zhang, about her classroom strategies for helping students engage with their own cultural rhetorics in the classroom.
Q: Tell us about your background teaching cultural rhetorics on a scholarly, pedagogical, and personal level.
Yanshuo: I am passionate about practicing cultural rhetorics in all aspects of my teaching. Particularly, how do minority groups interact with mainstream society, articulating a place for themselves in a multicultural nation? This scholarly inquiry on cultural diversity is fundamental in shaping me as a teacher. On a pedagogical level, I attend to students’ diverse linguistic and cultural traditions by inviting them to narrate their embodied experience of diversity into their learning and writing.
Perhaps because of the cross-cultural themes of my courses (“Rhetoric of Beauty across Cultures” and “Rhetoric of Self and Belonging”), I have a large percentage of multiracial, multilingual, and gender-minority students. I help students incorporate their diverse lived experience as individuals and as products of their home cultures into their RBA’s and presentations. For example, for my “Beauty” class, I have had many multiracial students who question the Eurocentric standards of beauty in American society. They ask the challenging question of how a society’s beauty standards reflect its racial hierarchy, power dynamics, and gender norms. I want to empower my students by encouraging them to make writing and rhetoric part of who they are, not just what they learn in a detached manner.
Q: Can you share some techniques or activities you do with your students to engage their own cultural rhetorics?
Yanshuo: I do a variety of class activities to stimulate students’ cross-cultural thinking. For example, for my “Beauty” class, because the ideas of beauty are so expansive, I use many cross-cultural texts to encourage my students to think beyond the confines of one culture. To inspire students to see how the rhetoric of beauty is created in a global setting, I ask students to bring in one image or song depicting beauty in a particular cultural tradition. One student brought AfricanAmerican singer India Arie’s music video of her song, “I’m Not My Hair.” By analyzing the lyrics together with the rich visuals depicting African American hairstyles, students exercised their newly learned rhetorical vocabulary by dissecting how this music video expresses both the emotional frustration and logical reasoning of African American men and women whose hairstyles are deemed as unprofessional by certain mainstream beauty standards. Likewise, some students brought images of East Asian male pop stars who exude a “softer” aura, questioning the super masculine images of Euromerican pop stars, who usually hide their emotions. Students engage in interesting and important discussions of gender, culture, and globalization when I use these provocative cross-cultural materials. Instead of pitting one culture against another, I encourage my students to see how different cultures intersect and interact. Again, here is where my own multilingual and multicultural background becomes useful. I want to equip my students with critical cross-cultural interpretive skill and help them become ethical leaders for our multicultural world.
Q: How do you bridge cultural rhetoric both inside and outside of the academy?
Yanshuo: When I teach cultural rhetoric, I inspire students to go beyond understanding how meaning is constructed culturally and cross-culturally, but to act on that understanding and push for social change. I impart an activist mindset in my students and their writing careers. An activist mindset is essential for impactful writing. It connects students’ academic endeavors with real concerns of the world.
