Ah the life of academia. How bizarre! I just finished up (save for some grading next week) with the semester, and now I am kind of in a daze thinking...whoa, what now?
So, to stave off boredom, I'm baking bread and thinking of a reading list to try to tackle this summer. So, with no further ado...
Last night I dreamt that I was at a conference in colorado and was sitting in a large auditorium... Suddenly, the man next to me turned to me and began to tell me that I was on the right track with Dewey and that a lot of important stuff is yet to come. He told me to keep on doing what I am doing no matter what the cost.
OK, so that was weird enough. But even weirder? The man was Al Gore.
1. We have attempted to understand and consequently teach writing from the perspective that the parts comprise the whole. What we have not done is sought to understand the whole as precedent to the parts. It is not that grammar doesn't exist, or that it isn't important. But a thorough understanding of grammar itself does not create writing. Writing exists; writing happens. From this we seek to identify the parts that comprise the whole.
2. I remember a Stanley Fish essay once concerning how to know when you've encountered a poem. Frankly, I can't remember for the life of me what he said. No matter. Dewey answers it again for me. You know you've encountered a real poem (or any real work of art for that matter) when the past, the present, and the future all meet in a singular moment in time and experience and at the conclusion of that moment all three have changed. Of course, this greatly expands the definition of "poetry" beyond anything that can be captured in a literature class.
3. I am concerned about critical pedagogy. Let me explain what I mean by "concerned about." I am concerned because I agree with the basic premise that is the core of any conception of critical pedagogy; mainly, that the classroom is a culturally (and thus politically) situated space. Further, even IF it were possible to have a valueless, context-free classroom space, we still wouldn't want such a thing. If schools are an extension of our hope for a better tomorrow, the last thing we would ever want would be to remove the concepts of struggle and creation from sites of learning and understanding.
That said, the results of the post-structuralist moment we are still living in has cautioned us and taught us to be more careful of totalizing and universalizing agents or discourses in our thought. While we've learned to be more sensitive to voices and forms of knowledge that have been swept under the rug by desires to find the "ONE ANSWER" or the "true" route to social justice free from "false consciousness," the floor we now find ourselves standing on is weak at best. In fact, there is more than a little truth to the notion that post-modernism is best understood by what it avoids than by what it stands for. Dewey may give us back something that is relatively stable enough to go back into the classrooms as empowered educators.
4. The term "tacit tradition" is often used by people who want to talk about Dewey and want to talk about composition. To me, it is much more than a "tacit" tradition. Once we jettison the idea that we can, through drills and worksheets, "teach" anything about how to write, we are left in a vacuous space in which the only reason we have for existing is that we somehow work with something that has something very important to do with democracy (or, the way we live with each other). Dewey's work is our work. We just haven't realized it fully, yet.
5. I don't believe in the term "false consciousness" and neither does Dewey. But, that also does not mean that it is impossible to have an unexamined consciousness. Problems happen when we never take the time to sort through our experiences to come to some sort of understanding of why we have mapped out our experiences the way that we have. Sometimes, it's this reflection alone that is enough to dramatically alter the way we think about how we live.
6. For Dewey, it's not that our future is not set; it's that the world itself is still forming, changing, and becoming.
7. Dewey reminds us that even in the Genesis story, it took God a full 6 days to create the world. It's not enough to have something to work with, it also needs a little time. To demand otherwise is to expect the impossible
8. The scientific method does not guarantee the "Truth." But, making sure your ideas somehow correspond with how things happen in everyday experiences is a pretty good way to make sure that those ideas will be good enough to do what you want them to do. To do otherwise is to throw some feathers on a bus and expect it to fly. I've created a few chicken buses in my day. The trick, as I see it, is to create fewer chicken buses and to just see where a regular bus will go.
9. Parents, and sometimes students, continually complain when professors have "an agenda." Of course they do. If they didn't, nothing would get done. But if what they really mean is that professors have a vision of a sort of world they want to be in and conduct their classes accordingly, then of course they do. Instructors are as much a member of a community as parents, and to pretend otherwise is to live a lie.
10. Dewey wanted to change his use of the word "experience" to "culture." I find this significant. It is too easy to say "whose experience?" and to answer with "my own private ideas." Instead, if we are to ask "whose culture?" we are left with a whole other ballgame.
11. The goal of education has traditionally been seen as a process of mere transmission of the world; the point, as I understand it, is to make the world better through active participation in it.
I noticed this poster hanging on a sign at a local area HS last fall, and it has been bothering me ever since. I suspect there are lots of posters and signs out there, all of which has lead me to a project of looking at the visual rhetoric of commodification and learning in K-12 education.
I think the image speaks for itself.
Of course, what is most interesting is that the reason to learn is tied to an ability to get money, therefore the ability to write well becomes a commodity that can later be sold and bought on the open job market.
It's little wonder why incoming university students believe with conviction that the sole reason schools exist is to prepare them to get a job that pays well. They simply cannot fathom any other reason for school.
For the past 12 hours or so, ever since I heard the news out of Northern Illinois, I've been trying to collect and somehow make sense of the feelings and thoughts swirling around in my head. I know for myself, and probably many others in my profession, the idea of any sort of harm or violence coming to our students as they sit in our classes is one of the toughest, grimmest thoughts ever. I sat staring blankly out my window last night after I heard the news, feeling some sort of unease and terror wash through me. To take solace in the idea that "this couldn't happen here" no longer works. It only seems to be a matter of time now before all the bomb and gun threats that come and go each semester cease being threats and turn real.
In one of MY classes (that is, not a class I'm teaching), a few of my colleagues/fellow teachers were talking about the movie Half Nelson with Ryan Gosling. They're thinking about using the movie as a means to help get at/understand various ideas swirling around critical pedagogy and all related methodology within this tradition.
However, even though this movie has been on my netflix queue for over a year, I still have not found the strength to ever let it reach the number one spot (thus sending it to me). I guess that's a complicated way of saying I haven't seen it.
I only have a general idea what it's about. It's about an idealistic young teacher who has problems in his own personal life. At some point, he finds it hard to separate the personal from the professional, and in this some barrier between him and his student(s) breaks down.
I'm assuming, since this is Hollywood, that somehow the teacher in the film finds salvation and consequently becomes a mythic hero figure.
I think this is why I've subconsciously been avoiding this movie. I don't want to see a screen representation of the teacher as a heroic figure. It frightens me. And the reason it frightens me is that teaching, to me, is not a heroic act at all. When I walk in a classroom, I don't feel like a hero. Instead, I feel a sense of tremendous humility and frailty. I feel exposed; and, consequently, I feel human.
Freire and bell hooks, among others, talk of "love" when they talk of teaching. This seems appropriate. The risks of teaching are the risks of love. Each day you have to put the fact that you care on the line, as others (both inside and outside the classroom) sometimes try to take advantage of that, drag you through the mud, and disrespect the humanness of the teacher that is often times taken for granted. We're not machines, we're feeling beings, too.
Of course, as with other forms of love, you love in spite of the risks. You get up with the dirt and grass still in your teeth and smile and ask for more. Maybe that's masochistic. I don't know. Maybe it explains why so many teachers, professors, instructors lead horrifically tormented lives that sometimes over take them. Again, I don't know.
Rarely there are Hollywood endings. As soon as you think you've made a break through, reached some sort of pedagogical salvation, new students come in who question your abilities, your credentials, your worth as a human being. You're not a human being to many, you're simply someone sent in to follow through on the predetermined rules of the game. They roll their eyes, administration never trusts you to do as you believe, and parents never think you're doing enough. Heroes? No.
For some of us, it's enough to know that somewhere something is happening out there. Sometimes we hear of it, many times years after the fact in a coffee shop, from a letter, a chance encounter outside of a lecture hall. Sometimes we'll hear those words that makes it worth it: "that class" and "changed me." It doesn't have to be big, but enough to know that somewhere something, even a minuscule realization, changed someone for the better and you were half of the cause.
But that's not a Hollywood ending. That's love in the real world. And there are times when it sits on the cold steel of a razor.
I'm still working on a few things...but to keep this blog fresh...some random thoughts running around in my mind.
1). Style is what happens when rules are broken. If everyone used Strunk and White as their bible, then we'd all write like E.B. White. Boring. Diversity of language and composition is what makes it all interesting.
2). In elementary, junior high, and high school, we had to pass these "tests" for gym (physical education). One test in particular that I could never pass was the mile run. Most times I had trouble even completing it. However, looking back, I realized that this test consisted of going outside and running. Never ever did we spend weeks/months slowly working up to running a mile. Rather, the idea was either you could do it or you couldn't. In other words, we were never given the chance to succeed, and consequently were set up to fail. I felt hopeless to change the state of my fitness until I realized that maybe I should read up on it and educate myself. I started running 30 seconds and walking 4 minutes. Then I was running 1 minute and walking 3. After a summer, I ran my first 5k race in a time of under 24 minutes.
I felt hopeless about it because I was never given the sort of training that focused on what was possible. Instead, the only education I got was education that focused on what already was.
I find myself thinking about this when I hear young students speak of their apathy for politics and the community they live in. I think of this when I hear them say "what's the point?" and "my vote wouldn't matter anyway."
3). As of right now, I refuse to talk to anyone about our "situations" in Afghanistan and Iraq until they have read Steinbeck's The Moon is Down. Then we can have a good discussion.
4). The cost of a frozen pizza (a staple of poor grad students all over) has reached 5 dollars at many local grocery stores. Grad students in CLA haven't had a substantial raise since 2004 (and perhaps longer). Makes one wonder how much longer it'll be until they threaten to organize again. Starving your employees doesn't increase their sense of duty to their employers.
5). Liberty, equality, justice, and freedom are not privileges granted to those born out of dumb luck on American soil. They are an attitude about living; they are a duty towards one's community. Lou Dobbs, if he wasn't an idiot, might realize this.
6). Why are there shortages of teachers? Why are there even more shortages of male teachers? I don't know. I hope to get a greater perspective on this through the class I'm teaching this spring.
7). Dear Spring, I miss you.
Anyone in the blogosphere, the media, or academia who tries to apply old terms and faction names to the current political reality unfolding before us does not get it.
Just now I saw a report on MSNBC in which a commentator tried to explain how Obama pulled off the "progressive dream" of having the youth turn out and that explains his victory.
Except, it doesn't. He also got out the vote with women. Across the board. Against a woman.
Again, attempting to use old frameworks and semantics to describe what is happening is futile. We are now in a period where the lines that have hardened over the past 40 years no longer matter. Both left and right.
And one further thought on all this: I don't think Obama created this. But, in this climate, he has been anointed by a pervasive social and political climate as the leader of what is to come. The times demand something else, and no one has control of that right now.
Further, Obama himself might not actually, in reality, be what people want. He might be just as much of a sneaky politician as anyone in the campaign. In substance, there might not be much difference. But this is not about the "reality" of Obama that makes this interesting. Rather, and I cannot stress this enough, it is what the caucus goers in Iowa committed themselves to believing what is true.
That is, what voters have decided to believe is what matters the most. Whether or not Obama truly represents this is a secondary concern.
The question remains, how will this affect liberal arts education, which for better or worse, have become the safe haven for critical theorists and post-structuralists in America. There will be those in denial, but it seems this era is starting to fall apart.
I'm working on a longer entry concerning the state of technology and education, but have a few other random notes/ideas that I want to get down.
1). While I generally find the concept of agonistic pluralism in various forms of "radical democracy" (as especially theorized by Mouffe and Laclau in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy) to be especially interesting and promising, the difficult jump from theory to practice is one that I find most fascinating in that it exposes a strange anti-Americanism rift in academia. If in an agonistic pluralist culture we are to embrace difference as our main mode of civic interaction, then we have to concede that the only way we can do this is to rely on an a priori set of "ground rules" or standards by which we can express our differences in ways that make our differences visible, understandable, and meaningful.
Why this exposes an anti-American rift in academia is that this is a really confusing way of re-inventing what the framers of the United States constitution set out to do by setting up a federal republic. Fearing a direct democracy in which minority rights could be trampled by majority decisions, the framers sought to ensure that all citizens were equal and subject to the laws of the country. Therefore, certain rights were deemed to be unalienable, or above discussion. It is these rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that consequently served as the tools of commensurability in which competing or divergent needs, desires, and wants of different groups in society could be understood, evaluated, and discussed.
Yet, to get there, we don't look to Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, etc etc. We instead attempt to re-invent the wheel by going through Marx and a whole slew of other, non-American theorists to arrive at what our country, in many regards, was originally founded on. (And don't even get me started on Marx. John Adams was warning people about merchants and businessmen as early as 1776...some 42 years before Marx was even born).
This leads me to my second winter break thought:
2). Post 1960s/1970s, we've replaced Abe Lincoln with Foucault, John Quincy Adams with Derrida, and Henry Clay with Adorno. What this leads to is a situation in which young students feel no reason to participate in the politics and democracy of their own country. Why should they when every day the message they get is one of relentless criticism of America, even though many of the issues our founders sought to confront and solve are not so different than the ones critical theorists from other countries have commented on. The real danger of this sort of bias in education is that students honestly believe there is no way for them to achieve liberty and equality through the democratic participation in politics, and consequently don't bother. This allows a small minority of those who already are within power to further strengthen their grip on the political mechanisms that drive our country.
During the presentation E. S. gave to our class during the first historiography issue, he presented us with three statements of "fact." These statements were: John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the sophists represent a unified theory of rhetoric in ancient Greece. The idea, according to Schiappa, is that these statements of "fact" or "truth" have consequences, and consequently matter. Therefore, we should be very careful in claiming historical "fact" when really, we are creating historical facts to serve our contemporary needs. In C. Glenn's Rhetoric Retold, this is precisely what is happening. This idea of the "usefulness" of history for our contemporary needs and desires unleashes several troublesome questions that, at the least, force us to reconsider what is "fact," what counts as scholarship, and how disciplinary institutions serve as gatekeepers to resist resistant scholarship. Perhaps even more important, what is at stake here is a site of disagreement as to how new knowledge is created and by what means it becomes validated.
I found this quote in his Wikipedia entry...and it reminds me why there's something honest and sincere about Rorty that I can't help but admire. (and a funny anecdote about Rorty after the jump)
It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.
Take THAT critical pedagogues!
Continue reading "Rorty being Rorty, and why I like him (sometimes)" »
I'm back in Iowa and re-reading parts of Thandeka's Learning to Be White to try to figure out how this book fits into next spring's class.
I ordered the book before really planning lessons around it as a symbol of my own personal commitment to doing something with the book. As T. L. and I talked about last year, even though neither of us are really sure what to think of it, there is some inherent value in putting a book like this in a group of adults and letting them mull it over.
I do know, however, what I do not want this book to do in the class.
These things are:
* To teach white people how "bad" they are
* To enforce racial "political correctness"
* To make the class a class about race
* To incite feelings of shame and serve as a confessor for racial sins
* To attempt to get students to articulate well worn "code words" for denying culpability when it comes to race.
However, trying to plan ahead to how the book DOES fit into the class is not so easy. It's not directly about writing. It's not even necessarily a "scholarly" work.
But what I do find fascinating is how it delves into the politics of racial representation. That is, Thandeka's notion of "non-white zones" as being a defining factor in how white people end up representing themselves and living their daily lives is, much more than superficially, very closely related to how many critical theorists view the dynamics of power at play in forms of discourse.
To me, trying to figure out just how it is that institutional power is internalized and consequently individualized in our own personal writing is one and the same with Thandeka's search to figure out just how it is that "whiteness" has disappeared from our vocabulary but instead turned into our secret mode of being that defines who "we," think, act, and dream.
The only thing I don't know is how students will react to it, and what they will get out of it. But, as always, that is always the big question that is never answered until it is brought up in class.
I've been looking over some late 70's, early 80's "research" on the composing process, and several things are becoming painfully clear to me.
(1)., The actual process of composing writing is so incredibly complex and contingent on so many circumstances that it is not just virtually impossible, but flat out impossible to say anything with any certainty on what the "composing process" really is. Not only is the "researcher" facing an impossible situation of the "research" itself affecting the composing process, but the act of composing itself is affected by things including, but not limited to, the writer's mood, the writer's task, the writer's feelings toward the task, the writer's idea of audience, the writer's own changing ideas, the time of day, the time since the writer last ate, the weather outside, the financial situation of the writer's bank accounts, the amount of time since the writer last had sex, the amount of time until the writer feels they might have sex again, the sharpness of the writer's pencil, whether the writer even uses a pencil, the relationship of the father/mother/sibling to the writer, the relationship of a writer to his father/mother/sibling, the political party the writer last voted for, the political party the writer is intending to vote for the next time they get a chance, the odds of a writer not voting at all the next time they get a chance, the wattage of the light bulb nearest the writer, the quality of the coffee the writer last drank, the extent to which the writer can remember their first kiss, and the ability of the writer to remain conscious when it is 5am and a conference proposal is due in a few hours.
This list illustrates just a few limitations "research" into the composing process entail.
In short, what research about the composing process has told us is simply that research about the composing process can tell us nothing that is ultimately useful or practical in any manner about the composing process.
(2)., With out any access to statistics, empirically derived research, charts, graphs, and percentages that say anything about what it means to "write," the field of "writing studies" is and rightfully should be a primarily philosophical field.
(3)., The composing process itself is so irreducibly complex that, other than posing the problem of understanding the process itself as a question or inquiry, the study of writing must turn to questions such as the function of writing, the politics of writing, the cultural significance of writing, and the dynamics of power inherent within writing.
I've been toying with the idea of an undergraduate class...maybe even a freshman seminar...that concerns itself with the state of education. I haven't really talked much about it because I've been keeping it mostly as random thoughts here and there during my day. But, now I figure it's about time to start getting ideas down and out there.
So...here are a few course titles I've been playing with.
The Struggle for Education and Democracy
Education: Struggles for Democracy in Contemporary America
Contemporary Education and the Struggle for Democracy
Education and Democracy: Critical Perspectives on How we Teach and Learn in America
Teaching and Learning in America: Critical Perspectives
The Struggle for Meaning in Life: Democracy and Education in America
A few hypothetical thought experiments...
#1. You are standing at a bus stop along a fairly busy street near campus. Beside you are a husband and wife and their two young children. As you are waiting for the bus, one of the children misbehaves, and the father swiftly and violently disciplines the child by striking them on the side of the head repeatedly while yelling at the child. What do you, as a bystander, do?
Qualification A) The family is Native American. Does this change your response? Does this change your thoughts on why you would or would not respond?
#2. You are standing at a bus stop along a fairly busy street near campus. Beside you are a husband and wife and their two young children. As you are waiting for the bus, one of the children waves at a homeless man sitting on a near-by bus bench. The father gently, but firmly admonishes the child for initiating contact with the homeless man, saying "people like that are dirty, and choose to be that way because they are lazy. We shouldn't make contact with them. Just pretend as though they are not there." What do you, as a bystander, do?
#3. You are standing at a bus stop along a fairly busy street near campus. Beside you are a husband and wife and their two young children. As you are waiting for the bus, one of the children waves at a homeless man sitting on a near-by bus bench. The father gently, but firmly admonishes the child for initiating contact with the homeless man, saying "our God has a special place for everyone in this world, and that man's place is not our own, so do not draw attention to this man and shame him for being something he is blessed to be." What do you, as a bystander, do?
#4. You have assigned a paper to students with a topic of "something that annoys you." One student writes in her essay that she is annoyed when poor people ask her for money when she is downtown. She then goes on to say that poor people are poor because they deserve to be, and if they'd just get a job, they wouldn't have to panhandle. What, as an instructor, is your response?
#5. You have assigned a paper to students with a topic of "something that annoys you." One student writes in her essay that she is annoyed when poor people ask her for money when she is downtown. She then goes on to state her belief that poor people are poor because they are destined to be poor by a higher power, one that they cannot change. So asking for money is attempting to circumvent their divine role in life. What, as an instructor, is your response?
How we respond to each of these prompts says something not only of our own values, but how we believe our values to exist in relation to values that may not be our own. There is something here that has something to do with teaching as a means to acculturate students to a specific set of morals and values, but I don't quite know what it all means yet.
Act I, Scene 1
The dingy yellow radiator occasionally clunks, a poster hangs precariously on its last thumbtack off of a overflowing cork board, and every where the air is filled with the dry powdery scent of chalk that has been collecting in the carpet, the wood trim, the areas above shelves that are skipped when dusting, and even in the clothes of children that hang in washrooms toward the back. No one really notices this, though…except one person. He sits in the back wearing a plaid shirt and tennis shoes that are only laced halfway up. The jeans he wears jeans are from WalMart and his sandy blonde hair is matted down on one side of his head. Most of the time he is quiet, silently observing everything else going on around him. He watches two girls get up to go talk to another girl. He catches a friend of his out of the corner of his eye go to sharpen a pencil at the grey crank sharpener bolted to the door frame. In front of him is a mess of paper; mostly torn from a green spiral notebook he keeps stashed inside his pop-up desk. His handwriting is awkward and nearly illegible, something his sixth grade teacher had reminded him about earlier in the year. In a bit he is going to go share what he has written on it with the teacher. For the moment, however, he is lost to his senses taking in the swirling hustle and bustle of a class humming with activity.
Act I, Scene II
It is early fall and the stuffiness left over from the hot afternoon has not yet left the building, despite every window in the cramped room being opened. Inside, eleven adults sit around four uneven tables pushed together to make one very large square. There are papers strewn all over the table, some in neat piles, others arranged as though they were playing cards being set down on a blackjack table. There is a seriousness that is accentuated by the amplified sound of papers being shuffled and thoughtful murmurs being exchanged. There is a young man sitting at the corner of the large square. He is wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and sits in total silence as others pour over the typed manuscript in front of them. These are the rules of the workshop: the author may not speak. Next to him sits a teacher who dresses as though she were a thoughtful senator's wife. She has just flown back from giving a reading in New York. Later that week she will fly to Los Angeles to give another reading. Across from her sits a retired preacher who lives in a retirement community. Next to him sits a blonde, waife-like twenty something graduate student who is wearing a low cut t-shirt and metallic bracelets. The rest of the class is just as uniform. Before them is a fragmented piece about this particular young man's mentally disabled older sister. No one dares refer to her as "his" sister. Instead, any reference to this young man is replaced by the term "the author's." As the discussion goes on, the young man finds himself looking out the window into a courtyard as a chilly breeze pulls red leaves off a mushroom shaped Serviceberry tree.
Act II, Scene I
The reason I have written about the above scenes is that they are both about me. Not only are they both about writing, but also they are both about writing in a community. And while there are other similarities I'm sure (mostly revolving around my interaction in the community), the differences between the two scenes are the ones that I find most illuminating. Here we have a contrast between production and analysis, between children and adults, between the act of writing and the act of reading, and, most importantly, between the metaphors of voice and narrative. While notion of community is requisite for both scenes, how community is employed and for what purpose could not be any more different. The rest of this play is about how two different theorists, Donald Graves and Barbara Kamler, depict a writing community and the implications this has on a larger theoretical scale. I want to re-read the function of community through the lens of a larger democratic project and to ultimately argue that the loss of voice as a metaphor impoverishes notions of democracy.
Continue reading "Story And Voice: Meditations on Community" »
Growing up in Iowa, where a cornfield was never more than 10 blocks away, summers always meant humidity, thunderstorms, and baseball. Usually all three at the same time where dusty diamonds were filled with kids trying to get as many innings played as possible before the approaching rumbles from the sky made the act of holding aluminum bats over your head somewhat foolish. This is where we (and by we, I mean everyone I knew) spent our evenings. And our days were spent watching the Cubs lose on WGN as Harry Cary would call the game, and afterwards going outside into the green grass with pockets filled with baseball cards rubber-banded together, making shrewd trades over players like Frank "Sweet Music" Viola and Will Clark. Any time we'd go to the local corner market, I'd pick up a pack of Topps or the new Upper Deck baseball cards, hoping for something special…a favorite player of mine (Kirby Puckett! Andre Dawson!) or at least a "top prospect" rookie card that might be valuable someday. Baseball wasn't just something a person did, baseball was a part of the landscape. I can't think about the summers I grew up in with their deep blue skies and waving rows of corn in the distance with out thinking about the soft leather baseball glove on my left hand and my spot in left field where I really learned how to notice the sky, the earth.
I played on all the summer leagues through the local rec-center. I started in T-ball and eventually graduated to the real deal, where other kids would pitch to us. But the most fun I had playing baseball came when my childhood friend Chris would come over to my house before school was to start. When we played baseball, it was more a combination of baseball, dodge ball, kickball, and softball than anything. We used a large inflated ball, and would whack the living daylights out of it when the other person pitched it to us. Once the ball was hit, it was off to first (the redbud) then 2nd (the middle block of cement on the pathway to the garage) and then 3rd (the corner of the back porch) and finally to home (the worn out spot in the grass). But while you were running the bases, the other person was getting the ball, and if he threw it at you and hit you, you were out. An elaborate system of baserunning utilizing the concept of "Ghosties" was also created. In this system, a "ghostie" was put in place on the last base you got to as you went back to bat. If two ghosties were on and you hit a homerun, you just got three RBIs, something that is very helpful in a one on one baseball match. Strike-outs were so rare that a "tick foul out" rule was instated after awhile, just to keep us challenged. I guess we didn't have to play by the rules to have fun, nor did we need fancy equipment. My crappy bat and some imagination were all we needed to turn ourselves into Ozzie Smith or Ryne Sandburg. There were homeruns, and on rare occasions when the wind was just right it was possible to hit it out of the back yard over the white fence that enclosed our ball park. The feeling that accompanied such a feat—to watch the ball sail gently over the fence enclosing the backyard—is indescribable. No grade, no promotion, no acceptance, no award I have received has ever come close to the feeling that accompanies a well-hit homerun. To this day, remembering what it is like to be in the final inning of a close game (and that final inning was always dangerously close to making us late for school) and knowing that with one swing of the bat, you could go to school knowing you won the game still sends shivers down my spine and sets a grin across my face.
My own baseball career ended quietly after the summer between 9th and 10th grade, where the split between high-school sports and city recreation leagues happened. After batting a pitiful .127 (yes! I remember…) that summer, it became apparent to me that when the ball was going so fast that it would create its own noise, that I had no business being anywhere near it. Rather than face the embarrassment of having to try out for a spot on the high school team, I ended my baseball playing games there. It's been ten years since I've taken a field as a player, but I still remember the feeling of grass tugging against my cleats and the satisfying snap of catching the ball.
Continue reading "My thoughts on cultural elitism and post-structuralism in the classroom." »
....that still need a lot of development.
But, at 4am here in St. Paul, what do you expect.
Anyway....
I have a growing sense that somehow, in some way, the culture of education is inextricably tied to modernism in some way. Yet, in a very strange twist, it is a distinctly anti-modernistic stance that, in an even stranger twist, seems to be more Aristotelian than anything.
To boil it down very briefly...
One framework of thinking about politics and democracy is to chart the primacy of the good and of rights. Do "rights" come before the common good of a society, or do we sacrifice "rights" in the name of the "common good?"
Enlightenment theorists and some contemporary political theorists (Mouffe, Laclau, et al) assert the primacy of individual rights. Others, such as Habermas and Novick, look more towards notions of civic republicanism as they seek to assert the primacy of the common good over individual rights.
But what does any of this have anything to do with what I do?
Education in our culture seems to be obsessed with the common good over individual rights. Our grading systems, our curricula, even our pedagogy stresses "good, democratic citizenry" as a result of "good" education. Yet...it is assumed that what a "good, democratic citizen" is...is universal. Hello Aristotle!
Writing, interestingly, is one of the few areas where this all starts to fall apart. Even in the most strict assignments, students are still creating things with language. And the language they use to craft things carries with it so many things that it cannot be said to be the same thing for everyone. In short, writing asserts (or at least suggests) the primacy of individual rights (that is, the individual self as opposed to a collective conscious).
Anyway, it's now 4:40 AM. It made so much more sense to me when I was running yesterday. More thoughts...later.
I rarely teach with textbooks. In fact, I can't imagine any circumstances that I'd ever use a textbook for teaching a writing class again.
Mostly, I just haven't ever needed a textbook. The way I like to set up my class structure uses student writing as the text to study. I think it is invaluable to be able to have students learn not only from a critical examination of their peer's writing, but to also have them explore and analyze their own writing.
The problem I've always had with using textbooks is the use of a textbook in class (whether it be just a simple reader or a full blown writing guide) hearkens back to the old master-apprentice hierarchy in education. Even though instructors might step out of their role as the all encompassing source of information, textbooks do a rather nice job of stepping into that role.
The purpose of a textbook is to serve as a source of institutional knowledge and, consequently, a symbol and source of institutional power. Textbooks in writing classes threaten to suggest that the source of knowledge and empowerment is always something outside of the student. We turn to textbooks to show us what good writing is, how to properly construct an idea, and how to even go about the process of writing.
The textbooks that do not simply tell students how to write are still just as dangerous, if only because they are much more subtle about how they serve as institutional authority. Textbooks such as "Remix," while sexy and friendly to multi-modal composition gurus, is really no different than old time "write this way" books. While "Remix" avoids simple "this is what you do" sort of writing prescriptions, it STILL advocates and demonstrates an academic friendly way of exploring culture.
In a sense, the crime textbooks like these commit is to attempt to show students how to think about the world and culture around them. Whether you tell them how to think, or what to think, the result is always the same. It just moves the manipulation of the student's perceptions a little further up the river.
Personally, I like to think that every person holds a unique and infinitely valuable way of looking at the world. The more perspectives we allow into how we perceive the world around us, the greater our understanding will be.
Textbooks like "remix" aim at achieving hegemony and consensus. I'm more concerned with producing a polyphony of perceptions and ideas about the world, and celebrating those different voices.
And besides, college is expensive enough. Do students really need to buy another fifty dollar textbook?
Today the Star Tribune ran an article about Hmong support for General Vang Pao, leader of the Laotian army in the CIA's "secret war" during the United State's involvement in Viet Nam.
While I have little to say about Vang Pao and his current situation, the article did make me think about Hmong culture and just what Hmong culture might provide in terms of insight into what we do as teachers. This is especially pertinent here in Minneapolis/St. Paul, as we have the 2nd largest Hmong community in the United States (the other being in California). I have had several Hmong students in my classes who were, for the most part, brilliant.
But what is interesting about Hmong culture is that, until very recently, it existed as a purely oral tradition. There was no written Hmong language. Everything was passed from generation to generation through art and spoken language. Even today, with a westernized alphabet and written language, there are still many aspects of Hmong culture that do not exist in print as we know it.
My thoughts on this are, of course, undeveloped (this is a blog, after all), but I've been thinking alot about how the University of Minnesota envisions its new writing program. One of the cornerstones of the new writing initiative is a massive focus on "research" and "academic writing."
However, this becomes problematic when we start considering communities such as the Hmong community. Academic research, as is commonly taught in undergraduate education, is woefully inadequate to tackle communities such as the Hmong, where community history, traditions, customs, and values exist largely with no paper trail that can be found in libraries. Simple "research" and "citing sources" on Hmong culture falls apart rather quickly. Ethnographers have noted this difficulty in the past and it continues to be source of debate among people who do ethnography.
Simply put, I worry that western conceptions of "research" fail to account for cultures outside of the western mindset, such as the Hmong. In these instances, where a culture has not been westernized, the culture is largely ignored or swept under the rug. For a student of this culture in a classroom, learning the ins and outs of westernized academic research potentially creates a situation where the student has no outlet to investigate their own culture and values. These must be abandoned for more western cultures and values that can easily be described using conventional academic research.
No where is this more apparent than the revulsion many in academia have towards the personal experience in academic writing. The "personal I" has all but been banished from "good writing" due to an existential crisis in theory over just what this "I" entails. But while western academic theorists fret over the nature of the personal "I," writers of cultures like the Hmong have no way to express their own lives within the walls of academia. Their loss results in the ever hegemonization (is that even a word?) of professional middle class values and norms.
* I have always felt uneasy about teaching Dominant Discourse in the classroom. This unease stems from my own disillusionment with white, upper middle class values and norms and my desire to see a more inclusive and diverse society. Basically, I shy away from Dominant Discourse simply because I don't want to be a part in perpetuating that discourse. That being said, I am beginning to understand the need for me to return to actual "teaching" after taking a couple years off while I dabbled in radical and progressive teaching pedagogies. The only thing more radical and progressive than not shoving the ins and outs of Dominant Discourse down the throats of my students is to actually help students get a grip on how to manipulate Dominant Discourse for their own libratory needs. This can be summed up with the following statement: "School sucks, I should know. Now, let me show you how to beat the man at his own game."
* Everyone seems to be talking about "themes" in composition classrooms. I think I have decided on a "theme" as well. My theme will be something called "writing." Why shouldn't students engage in discussions about what writing is, what it does, how it is controlled, and particularly, how writing does and does not work in academic settings. I keep feeling like we, as composition instructors, are engaging in a classically oppressive theater operation. We put on a show for our students, knowing the scripts (comp theory) and knowing how to act (grades, evaluation, etc), all while the students are not allowed to "look behind the curtains." They are, in a very Boal-esque sense, oppressed audience members who have no control over what they see on the stage. I think it'd be interesting to invite them backstage...to see what really goes on after a paper is written and handed in.
* The most important line I think I will be straddling this next year will be the line between every student's "native" discourse (i.e., the discourse that exists between their own friends, family, community members, etc) and other discourses (mostly academic discourse). It will be tricky because I need to teach one (professional discourses) while not suggesting or implying that each student's "native discourse" is a "lesser" discourse. I think a lot of parody/satire/mockery will be used.
* It's never fair to ask someone something as a way to figure something else out. It is even worse to assign something as a means to grade students on something else. When we assign a paper, what are we really looking for? And, are students aware of these things? Students should always be aware what standards they are being judged against, and be involved in a discussion about those standards.
* I still can't figure out what book I am going to use this fall. I thought about using Tom Newkirk's "Misreading Masculinity," but I think this book might be a little too specialized for freshman (not that it would be over their head, but it uses a lot of theory that students will have no background in).
* Even though I'm doing new things this fall, there is one thing that will remain unchanged...my commitment to finding ways for students to engage in meaningful interaction with each other. In most classes, due to the politics of grading, when students talk to each other, they do not talk with each other. Instead, they talk at each other. The reason for this is that, in most current-traditional classrooms, student discussion is employed as a means to "check up" on students to make sure they are doing their work. What then occurs is each student must "perform" for an audience of one: the grader. Everything they do or say is geared towards proving that the student has done the work required of them. This is not student-student interaction. This is student-instructor interaction via feigned student-student "chatter." I want to avoid this and employ student discussion not as a means of evaluating students, but rather as a genuine means of acquiring new knowledge and insight.
Next fall, as those of you who know me know, I will be returning to teaching freshman composition...my "native" area of instruction, if you will.
As I begin to think ahead to next fall, I am starting to compile a list of goals that I have for this semester of teaching. (actually, who am I kidding, I've been theorizing this class since last october...anyway).
As I move through the summer, I am hoping to take these somewhat lofty/abstract goals and mould them into actual teaching and learning strategies I can use in the classroom. This is just the first step in that process.
Goals:
#1. Engage a critical awareness of "self" and "voice" in each student's writing as well as a critical awareness of how "self" and "voice" conflict with the demands of academic discourse.
#2. Explore the function of writing in the academic space in a critical manner.
#3. Employ various forms of writing that help teach academic conventions with out implying or perpetuating the myth that "academic writing" is the best way to write.
#4. Use drama, parody, satire, cultural criticism, multimodal composition, and collaborative work (on occasion) to help crack open "ivory walls."
#5. Provide a space for individuality as well as a collective social awareness.
#6. Create in-class dynamics and situations that point towards meaningful peer-peer interaction (i.e., students talking with students instead of students talking at students).
#7. Employ grades and grading as a means to incite discussion on meaning, value, and worth.
#8. Re-connect the mental with the body whenever possible in whatever way possible.
#9. Empower students by employing writing as a tool of social justice and personal liberation.
#10. Have as much fun as possible.
Even though I'm about a year and a half to two years away from entering my dissertation phase, I've been doing quite a lot of thinking about where I want to end up and what coursework I want to do to get there.
So, if my dissertation were a webpage, these would be the keywords I would use on it.
Theories of Voice
Theories of the Body
Bodies and Art
Aristotle
Middle-Class Values
Hegemony
Communities
Online Communities
Theater of the Oppressed
High / Low Culture
Cultural Elitism
Critical Pedagogy
Race
Writing Workshop
Creative Writing
Ana Mendieta
And others, I'm sure.
Hm, I think this entry could be helped by a Llama. Maybe later.
It is early spring; the snow outside is beginning to melt into damp earth and just inside the basement window of my parent's modest house in Cedar Falls, Iowa I am about to have an experience that will forever change the direction of my life. A year earlier, plagued by wrist injuries and frustration, I had thrown in the towel on my career as a musician. I was lost. For twelve years I had done nothing but study music, play music, listen to music, write music, and live music. Now? I found myself starting all over again. I knew a lot about music, but not much else. I found myself sitting in classes with titles like "Eastern Humanities," "Phenomenology and Foucault," "Origins of Western Thought." I didn't know what I was looking for; I didn't really even know how to find it.
My window is slightly open and I can feel the chill of cold air sinking onto the rough blue carpet and moving through the room. The rich and earthy smell of decaying leaves left over from fall carried in off the outside breezes mixes with the stale air of a house closed up for the long Iowa winter. I am sitting on a wooden chair that creaks and moans when I shift my weight to prevent my leg from falling asleep. In front of me is the aggressive glare of a computer screen. Right here in this moment is where everything changed for me.
For reasons that have something to do with a woman with pale white freckled skin, nearly black curly hair, a waif-like figure, delicate pale lips, and the brightest green eyes I have ever seen, I am searching for "poetry" on the internet. The only thing I know of poetry is what little I remember from one literature class I took many years ago in high school. And somewhere, through the billions of miles of copper, fiber optical cables, and the unfathomable number of electrons moving from atom to atom in stops and starts, I find a link to a poem by Gary Snyder. Sitting there on the other side of a glowing phosphor-coated screen lit up by beams of electrons like a movie theater in reverse, I experience something familiar and yet, new; something I hadn't felt since my days as a performing musician. I begin to read "Riprap."
"Lay down these words / Before your mind like rocks. / Placed solid, by hands / in choice of place, set / Before the body of the mind / in space and time:" The feeling I get in my chest, in my gut, is like the feeling of a string on a cello as the bow is pulled slowly across it. It starts out weak, and as the cellist gently presses harder, pulls faster, the string begins to come alive, vibrating faster and wider as a sullen and somber note arises from the contact of horsehair, rosin, metal, wood, and skin.
"Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall / riprap of things: / Cobble of milky way, / straying planets, / These poems, people, / lost ponies with / Dragging saddles / and rocky sure-foot trails." I have forgotten why I have come to this poem, forgotten my reasons for searching. I am thinking of my own experiences, my own images of trails and rocks, boulders besides trees, granite next to grass.
"The worlds like an endless / four-dimensional / Game of Go. / ants and pebbles / In the thin loam, each rock a word / a creek-washed stone" There is an excitement in my reading, I'm sure my mouth is open. I read faster, wanting to get to the end, to take it all in as deeply as I can as though it were the smell of the first real rain of spring. I am greedy and gluttonous; I am impatient and indulging.
"Granite: ingrained / with torment of fire and weight / Crystal and sediment linked hot / all change, in thoughts, / as well as things." It is here at the end, beyond the last period, the last fleeting taste on my palette that I realize something has changed inside of me. All I can think is, "I want to do that." I want to place words so carefully, so perfectly, so confidently. I want to place ants and the galaxy together on paper. I want create this. I want to know how to do this. And then, I read it again.
~~~~~
This was the first moment when I truly understood what it meant to read as a writer. The transition I made at the end of reading his poem was a transition from simply reading to reading as a way to think about producing. I knew Snyder's poetry had done something to me, and now I wanted to know why and how. I wanted to know this because I wanted to write poetry myself. I wanted to demystify the magic. I wanted to understand why this word and not that word, why this idea and not that idea.
While I feel there are differences between how I read as a writer and how Toni Morrison claims to read as a writer (I see her reading more as an academic using critical methods who also happens to be a writer), there is one very important thing I feel we both have in common, and something that may be useful when thinking about the teaching of writing. This connection is a conception of voice.
For me, and I believe for Morrison as well, there is an underlying understanding of how things are created that is acquired through creating itself. This is the simple understanding that when writing, there are choices or decisions that are made, consciously or unconsciously. Why does a writer choose to use this word over that word? Why does a plot go in this direction rather than that direction? In every instance, reading from the mindset of a writer means reading while understanding that what is written is deliberative in some sense. Or, to put it more plainly, what is written is the final assembly of an infinite amount of choices.
Of course, what Morrison is concerned with is what unconscious, social conditions help form these choices. But even here, she still recognizes that when a writer writes something, it could be something else. This choice of one thing over another is part of what helps define style or voice. I think reading in this manner, knowing that everything that is written is somehow deliberative, is important in reading student writing. When reading as a fellow writer, it is easy to move away from thinking that students make "mistakes" that must be corrected. Instead, when reading as a fellow writer, the instructor engages the student as another thinking, acting human. Helping students to understand why they have written this word over a different word, why they have included certain devices and not others, helps to not only situate themselves as individuals who are in control of how they write, but to also foster a general awareness of the larger social sphere they are knowingly or unknowingly a part of.
Author: Walzer AE
From: Rhetoric review
Date: 1991
Volume: 10
Issue: 1
ISSN: 0735-0198
Pages: 118-
Overview: Art Walzer explores two opposing views of "purpose" in the teaching of writing, while suggesting that the mere question over what "purpose" means to the writer illuminates many interesting facets of those who teach writing.
Is Expressivism Dead? Reconsidering Its Romantic Roots and Its Relation to Social Constructionism
Author: Fishman SM
From: College English
Date: 1992
Volume: 54
Issue: 6
ISSN: 0010-0994
Pages: 647-
Overview: Stephen M. Fishman takes a new look at Peter Elbow's work and expressivism in general by re-defining the era of romanticism as an era seeking social unity through diversity instead of a narrow view of isolation and naivity to argue that expressivism in writing has recieved an unfair treatment from theorists such as Bartholomae, Bizzell, and Berlin.
I tried something new not that long ago (which some of my readers know about), and that was using a blog to develop a class. I would post thoughts, ideas, and whatever else was included in the general formation of a class.
It was such a helpful experiment that I am going to start doing it in this blog, which is my main "professional" outlet.
The things I found useful about it was it led to a more coh