I am Matthew Williams and You are Not

The paradox of education is precisely this--that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it--at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

-- James Baldwin

Posted by Matthew Clark Williams at 3:32 AM | Permalink

Oh how things seem to always come back.

A report issued in 1906 detailed how many young men were caught in dead end industrial jobs and unable to advance because they lacked specific skills. However, most of them reported leaving school because they felt it had very little to offer them. We must remember that at this time, "education" was mostly an endeavor set up as a sort of "finishing school" for the elite in which they learned good manners, social graces, and in general how to make the most of being part of the elite ruling class. For anyone not born into money, education typically had very little to offer.

But, with the burgeoning industrial revolution, calls were made that education needed to be extended to not just the moneyed and the elite, but that education should directly serve the needs of those headed into the industrial working class. In a sense, it was the true beginning of the fulfillment of the Morrill Act of 1862.

It is at this time that we see the first articulation of THE question of education in an industrial, capitalistic society: Do we educate students to fit into a system as it is or do we educate students to change a system?

There were those who advocated a "dual" system of education in which the elite and moneyed would continue on as normal and a second system would educate the "working class" for their eventual role as laborers in industrial manufacturing.

John Dewey saw this as the worst possible solution. As Westbrook writes of the "dual" system in which the two are separated (vocational and liberal arts), "He (Dewey) feared, above all, that the kind of vocational education favored by businessmen and their allies was a form of class education which would make the schools a more efficient agency for the reproduction of an undemocratic society" (175).

This leads me to one of my all time favorite Dewey quotes: "The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will adapt workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that. It seems to me that the business of all who would not be educational timservers is to resist every move in this direction, and to strive for a kind of vocational education which will first alter the existing industrial system, and ultimately transform it. [...] I object to regarding as vocational education any training which does not have as its supreme regard the development of such intelligent initiative, ingenuity, and executive capacity as shall make workers, as far as they may be, the masters of their own industrial fate" (MW 8:412, my emphasis).

And yet...this is the question that I fear we often forget to ask. Every time an administration makes a claim on retention rates or job placement, this question lurks in the background. Every time a department revises curriculum to "fit the needs" of students, this question serves as the unspoken (and even unrecognized) backdrop. Every time we claim to uphold "quality" and "rigor" at the unstated expense at access, it is this question we are failing to answer.

Posted by Matthew Clark Williams at 5:04 PM | Permalink

Disclaimer: I rarely if ever post things to this blog in "rough" form, but I've been stewing over this for a few weeks now and finally want to eject it out into the world. If anyone out there in academia would like to collaborate to further aspects of this, I am completely game. These thoughts are admittedly rough, but I feel have potential somewhere.

Even though the phenomena is nothing new, recently there has been a spate of commentary concerning...well...commentary on the internet. The problem is that it isn't working. Any look at the comments section of nearly any online publication will reveal that actual discussion is not taking place. Instead, it is mostly a pit of name calling, racism, shouting, and worse. This puts a damper on many of the hopes we had for the internet. It was supposed to be democratic. It was supposed to provide space for more voices to be heard. It was supposed to increase our awareness of issues. It was supposed to, in short, make the world better. And, in some small isolated ways, these things have occurred. But on a large scale, these hopes have largely proven to be a mirage of an oasis. Increasingly, we have begun to reach the oasis promised to us only to find more sand in a desolate environment.

Where educators, journalists, web advocates, technologists, bloggers, and nearly everyone else have erred is a misunderstanding of the role of the body in discourse. In short, the body matters. To remove the body from the equation removes the possibility of communication. The body is its own powerful and absolutely necessary rhetoric. Without the body, it is not discussion or communication that occurs, but rather pure routinized performance of big "D" Discourse.

We can explain this phenomena in even simpler terms. Any look over the un-moderated comments of a newspaper online will reveal little to no listening. In place of that, we have pure replication of "talking-points" that are often appropriated wholesale from other sources from media outlets to community values to racist, sexist, and classist convictions. Additionally, these comments are not employed in order to interact. Instead, these comments are employed and exist simply to be seen, hence their monologic character. The danger of this is extreme. Instead of discussion and hence public opinion rapidly modifying itself to adapt to current situations, we have static opinions and beliefs that prevent adaptation to new situations. Instead of entering into conversation and discussion so that we may change our own ideas as well as those of others, we simply seek to shut out all competing ideas. We become trapped by the past in a radically different present.

Continue reading "Disembodied Discourse and the Failure of Internet Discussion" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 5:04 PM | Permalink

Our civilization is taking on the structure and properties of a machine...This machine will not tolerate less than world-wide rule; it will not allow a single human being to survive outside its control, uninvolved in its functioning. Furthermore, it cannot put up with ill-defined lives within its sphere of operation. Its precision, which is its essence, cannot endure vagueness or social caprice; irregular situations are incompatible with good running order. It cannot put up with anyone whose duties and circumstances are not precisely specified. It tends to eliminate those individuals who from its own point of view do not exactly fit, and to reclassify the rest without regard to the past or even the future of the species...It has already begun to attack the ill-organized populations of the earth...decreeing that the highly organized must invariably take the offensive against the poorly organized...The machine--that is, the Western World--could not help turning, one day, against those ill-defined and sometimes incommensurable men inside it...So we are witnessing an attack on indefinable mass by the will or the necessity for definition. Fiscal laws, economic laws, the regulation of labor, and, above all, the profound changes in general technology...everything is used for counting, assimilating, leveling, bracketing, and arranging that group of indefinables, those natural solitaries who constitute a part of the intellectual population...It was never more than indirectly that society could afford the life of a poet, a thinker, an artist, whose works were unhurried and profound.

--Paul Valery, 1925.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:12 AM | Permalink

(A few thoughts on assessment inspired by Henry Higgins)

In its best formulation, "assessment" represents a genre of communication. It communicates the effects of pedagogic practice to interested parties. In the most common scenario, assessment is a channel of communication between instructor and student, informing the student of how they are "living up to" the expectations of the instructor. But assessment also communicates in other, very interesting ways. For instance, instructors often rely on technologies of assessment to understand themselves as educators, using data generated by assessment (whether it be numbers, narratives, grades, or even moods and emotions) to construct an identity or notion of self (for example, an effective instructor, a challenging instructor, or perhaps even, a bad instructor.)

Continue reading "Poor Professor Higgins Indeed" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 6:28 PM | Permalink

1. The commonly held belief among many instructors of writing at the post-secondary level is that the texts produced by students in classrooms are primarily a product of an individual, autonomous student mind and as such is able to be assessed according to concepts such as "proficiency," "achievement," "ability," "success / failure," "competency," and so forth. In short, this view on the production of student texts assures us that when we apply a grade to student writing, we are talking about the capabilities of the actual, biological students themselves detached and divorced from environmental (including social) factors. However, the "linguistic turn" in the social sciences threatens to deeply problematize these assumptions. If we are to grant that nothing exists outside of discourse, then we have to grant that student writing itself is a product of various discourses and as such, when we apply a grade, it is not that a grading of the biological student occurs, but rather various discourses position the student-as-subject into socially identifiable roles and positions. These various discourses not only determine what texts can be produced and who can produce them and in what manner they are produced, but also which texts are valued as social goods and which are not.

Continue reading "Notes on the search for the student text" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 2:28 AM | Permalink

One might look, for example, at Ken Macrorie's books, or Elbow's Writing with Power or Brannon, Knight, and Neverow-Turk's Writers Writing. Here, in more intimate, self-conscious personas, the monolith of correctness is recast in a less important form, and attention shifts to the act of writing. But of course the result is no less propaganda. The only difference is that an alternative set of political values is at work. To frame it in somewhat oversimplified terms, the "traditional" texts present writing as a matter of learning to conform, with an emphasis on decorum as a means of identify- ing individual with group; whereas the "non-traditional" books present it as a liberating activity, a means of defining individual as separate from group. The point here is that writing is necessarily more complex, and more variable, than either position can depict-encompasses both of them, and more. In either case, then, the users of such books are presented with proselytizers who differ only in their particular doctrinal allegiance: in short, with propaganda. (31)

--Stephen North in The Making of Knowledge in Composition

* Writing manuals and how-to textbooks devalue the role and integrity of the composition instructor. They follow in a long and storied tradition of seeing the act of teaching as a non-academic or non-intellectual activity. In short, it turns the instructor from a practicing academic into a mere clerk or technician that carries out predetermined activities and routines. A writing manual allows instructors to think less about teaching and consequently prevents them from engaging in self-reflexive pedagogy.

* Textbooks remove the most important element of learning from the equation: the student. It relegates authority to entities external to the localized, specific classroom (e.g., publishing companies, textbook authors, etc).

* The yearly cost of tuition at the University of Minnesota is now over five figures. For many students, it is much more once living expenses are added in. The average student debt upon leaving the University of Minnesota is in excess of $20,000; one of the highest figures in the mid-west for a public university. Government funded aid is lessening and state support is drying up. A 60 dollar textbook represents a small fraction of the total expense of going to college. Yet, a lot of 60 dollar textbooks add up over the course of 4 years.

* Most (if not all) writing manuals are geared towards writing correctly to fill out mythical standard forms of writing with out considering that these forms are constantly changing as they are composed. Research of professional and technical writers has time and time again noted that "correctness" in writing is one small part of many factors that go into being able to "write well."

* The prevalence of writing manuals is a reflection of the state of the discipline and not a reason to use such texts in the classroom. Educators who specialize in composition are actually a tiny minority of people who actually teach composition. The majority of composition instructors are specialists in other areas or graduate students from other fields. For these instructors, the belief is that writing manuals and text books are necessary as the information and knowledge contained within them is too important to let a non-specialist handle on their own. Simply put, it "teacher-proofs" a classroom.

* Textbooks introduce corporations and their marketing into the classroom, whereby decisions of how to teach are guided by successful marketing of publishing company representatives and not necessarily academic or scholarly research/theory. Consequently, the available set of "teaching methods" becomes constrained by what the market makes available to instructors. Further, new theories of writing are constrained by what could be used in a textbook.

* Textbook publishers are typically for-profit endeavors who make a profit from first year writing classes, creating troublesome conflicts of interest for both instructors as well as departments.

* It is unavoidable that textbooks create an environment where students "discover" or "locate" the correct answers, principles, or theories instead of creating them.

* Local, community, individual, and inter-generational forms of knowledge are devalued while institutional, non-localized forms of knowledge via experts contained within writing guides are privileged.

* Writing manuals and textbooks perpetuate a specific ideology of what the classroom should look like and how it should operate. Reliance on textbooks makes it difficult (if not impossible) to envision other, alternative, and potentially viable/valuable ways of understanding the mechanics of the classroom space. An inability to even conceive of how a class might work with out a textbook at the center of it demonstrates how narrow our conceptions of how learning happens really are.

* Textbooks and writing manuals run the risk of being the educational equivalent of setting a child down in front of a TV in order to socialize it.

* When we select a textbook, not only are we supporting the ideologies contained within the book, but we are also perpetuating the system and the network (in all of its socio-political facets) that created and consequently ensure the hegemony of the textbook as the primary source of instruction. In short, the purpose of the textbook ideology is the preservation of the textbook ideology, especially when we consider that much of the information contained within various writing guides and manuals can be found for free in other places (e.g., the internet, libraries, and most importantly, communicative communities).

Posted by Matthew Williams at 10:42 AM | Permalink

1. A revision of "core curricula." In the next 50 years, attention will have to be paid to what exactly constitutes the core of what is "taught" in schools. The 4 traditional categories of "english," "science," "social studies," and "history" will need to undergo extensive criticism and reconstruction if schools are to remain viable in terms of helping students come into society as productive members. Areas such as sustainability as a subject, consumer education, critical literacy, and energy politics must be taken seriously and written into part of the overarching goals of schooling, even if it means supplanting "traditional" subjects.

2. The local production of knowledge. With the decline of petroleum as a cheap and abundant source of energy, much of society that has been built on the assumption of the availability of plentiful energy will begin to change. Suburban life and all of its ideologies will be forced to undergo a painful and potentially violent rapid decline. Distribution networks that depended on cheap oil to be centralized and non-regional will no longer be economically feasible, and this will include informational networks. For instance, the internet and the ways in which we utilize and rely on it are heavily dependent on ideologies that issue from unsustainable distribution networks (information on the internet does not necessarily hold true to all geographic locales, so growing methods of one area may not match other areas). Part of our ability to survive this transition will be our ability to rebuild local distribution networks of goods, services, as well as information. Schools will have to attend to enabling students to produce knowledge that comes from a functional awareness of local interdependencies of land, people, intergenerational relationships, and local business. This stands in stark contrast to our current "wal-mart" model in which resources are pooled by large, non-regional agents that transport things over long distances and are widely available in places that things should not be. Further, educational researchers will have to take seriously the notion that -- like race, gender, and class -- housing and regional design (i.e., suburban/urban, high density/low density, cul-de-sac/grid, etc) are sources of knowledge and information that colors how we make meaning of the world.

3. A de-emphasis on a static oriented mindset when it comes to conceiving of sustainable pedagogy. Part of the implicit assumption concerning "standardized skills" education is that the world is, in large part, static and stable. Further, skills training is adequate because the questions we face do not change. Obviously this is false and severely diminishes our chance of success in transitioning from a globalized culture and economy built on oil dependency to a local, regionally based eco-sustainable economy. In short, it won't be the ability to retain facts and figures but rather our ability to re-conceive of their meaning that will enable us to face unforeseen challenges.

4. An educational model that rejects isolationistic and individualistic models of learning. As economies becomes smaller and more regional due to increases in energy expenses, the need for members of society to be able to productively interact, work, and live with those immediately around them will become increasingly important. The goal will become finding ways to help students learn to live with those around them as opposed to students learning to live against those around them as we see now in our hyper-competitive economic culture.

5. A vision of social, cultural, economic and political problems as educational problems. As it is now, the problems we face are seen as separate, isolated, disciplinary problems to be solved by specialists in various areas. This model of informational growth is not sustainable. For society to be responsive to a world in which change increases at an exponential pace, schools must be employed as responsive institutions themselves to address these very problems. This includes de-coupling the goals and methods of education from "universal standards" and their accordant ideologies. Pedagogy itself must be realized as social, cultural, economic, and political. To think it can ever be neutral is itself a learned ideology. Schools must be able to seek new avenues of understanding, even when they directly confront and challenge status quo modes of living. Schools must become a source of critical questioning and not merely a repository of value-free information.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 6:36 PM | Permalink

The economy is often times like a large body of water. Here in the mid-west, we've been reminded lately that bodies of water do indeed rise and fall. We know this. We have historical records reminding us. We have stories to tell of '93, '99, and now 2008. And yet, for all that, we always seem to forget that bodies of water are not static. We always seem to live our normal, daily lives as if bodies of water are stable. We go about business assuming that where the water line was yesterday is where it will be today.

The problem with that, of course, is that it is simply not true. But what is more interesting is when these water levels shift a great amount in a short span of time we often times realize the fallacy of our static-oriented mindset.

Take for example Lake Delton in the Wisconsin Dells. It is a man-made lake, and for years stood as the cornerstone of a small economic machine that drove the local tourist economy. And then, during the floods, the man-made dam that held the water in broke open, and drained the entire lake.

What followed is what I'm trying to get at. For the first time in a long time, sans water, residents of the area saw the bed of Lake Delton. It was these startling images that reminded us that many assumptions people had about the way things work were simply wrong.

In that same vein, with the deepening of the recession we're in, the draining of our national economic lake is revealing for the first time in a long time several misconceptions and false assumptions/assertions we've been making for far too long. One of the biggest false assumptions we've been making here in higher-education that is now finally being exposed as the economy worsens concerns our relationship to preparing students for the job market.

Simply put: what goes on in the classroom is a small, insignificant part of very large and complex equation that results in gainful employment upon leaving college. Take for example the thousands upon thousands of incredibly qualified, highly intelligent college graduates who are unable to find any work simply because the economic situation shies away from hiring new employees. For these unfortunate individuals, the ability to thoughtfully draft a cogent argument has absolutely no effect on their ability to secure employment in any area that would require such a skill. In fact, it might make these individuals too expensive to hire in this economic climate.

This, of course, completely shoots a very large hole in the argument that we should be preparing students, through batteries of testable skills, for the job market. Frankly, it's not the skills that results in a student getting a job. Once a student has passed all but the most fundamental levels of "skills" in various areas (which most do well before they reach college), then whether they got an A or a C in a first year writing classroom is ultimately of absolutely no importance what-so-ever. The "skills" most employers need out of employees are usually the sorts of "skills" that are learned on the job, and simply cannot be provided for in college classrooms, especially college writing classrooms.

What lands a student a job? An expanding economy and luck. Not much else, as we're finding out. Take out the expanding economy part and NO student, regardless of how well they did in school, will fare well on the job market. "Job market skills training" helps only the ones who actually get jobs, and this number is falling sharply as the economy worsens. What of the ones who get squeezed out and cannot find a job that, while they may be highly qualified for, just does not exist? These are the ones I stay up at night worrying about.

In my mind, the question now turns to: what sorts of classrooms might make a student's life more worthy as they realize the job market doesn't care who they are when they are standing in the unemployment line with a college degree in one hand and an inside-out empty pocket in the next. We can't stake our role in society as an institution that gives people "skills" that ultimately are only worthwhile for the select few who wind up using them on the job market. We have to be about something else. Somehow I doubt any textbook is up to this task.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 11:05 PM | Permalink

I get asked a lot about what exactly it is I do. Often times people don't quite know what "composition" really is beyond handing out worksheets filled with "drills 'n skills" to students. While a lot of fields in academia are poorly understood by those outside of the fields, composition seems to be towards the top were we to rank "the most misunderstood fields" today. But that's OK. Part of what we are as a field is an attempt to investigate these misunderstandings and to untangle where they may have come from.

But every now and then, I get asked why I do what I do. The first question of what it is I do is hard to answer, but answering why I do what I do is actually really easy.

For many people, "writing" is something they usually take for granted. The simplistic understanding of writing is that it is a set of skills and techniques one masters and then employs. Sadly, even for many people who earn a living "teaching writing," this is as far as their understanding of writing goes. To people like this, the "key figures" in the field of composition are the authors of textbooks, handbooks, and style guides. People like James McCrimmon, Diana Hacker, and countless publishing houses that peddle exorbitantly expensive writing manuals to hapless freshman (e.g., the Longman's Writers Companion, The Bedford Writers Handbook, etc).

For me, one of the key documents in my work is Michel Foucault's "What is an author?" This essay describes the field of inquiry in composition studies as I understand it. That is, what is important are questions concerning the role and function of writing, authorship, creativity, and so forth within culture, not prior or external to it.

Ultimately, the most important thing about using Foucault's essay as the starting point in any composition setting is that it forces us to understand not only the rules of writing as being a product of culture, but writing itself to be a wholly cultural phenomena. Using this as the basis for any work in the field (be it in a classroom or through research), what we're talking about when we talk about writing is ourselves, not some eternal, external set of rules that exist prior to culture. When we talk about communication what we're talking about are the ways in which we extend our biological boundaries to include others in our environment. Or, to put it bluntly, anytime we talk about how we communicate, what we're really talking about is how we negotiate the ways we live together within a society; or, in other words, Dewey's definition of "culture." In essence, to talk of communication or writing is simply to talk about who we are as a culture and how our culture works. Thus, writing IS culture.

Writing, as a form of communication, is distinct and unique from other forms in that it exists within a temporal realm. Unlike vocal speech, writing persists through time. It is because of this that when we talk about writing in specific, not only are we talking about the ways we currently live together, but we are also in a position to talk about ways we want to live together. Learning to write is consequently learning to take the stuffs of the environment we find ourselves in and using those things to create something new. Writing is democracy as Whitman understood it. Writing is art as Dewey understood it.

So, to answer the question of why I do what I do is rather simple. In my understanding of the task, the teaching of writing is ultimately engaging in an act and a process that is directly related to purposefully seeking out new and better ways to live both individually and as a society. I joke that I would rename the department of "writing studies" to "the department of democracy and hope." Cheesy, but not that far off the mark from how I understand what it is we should do as teachers of writing.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 3:51 PM | Permalink

One of the animated segments on Saturday Night Live that I always enjoyed was the "Fun with Real Audio" segment in which they would take the audio track of something, usually an interview, and then animate something else while the audio went on. The effect was to de-contextualize the audio and to turn it into something else. It was always comedic because the words, depending on the animation going on, took on drastically different meanings. Of course, on SNL, the goal was comedy, as many animations quickly evolved in to hilarious juxtapositions of serious interviews and bizarre and surreal animations. But there's an important process going on here that I was reminded of today. During our first year writing instruction symposium I was reminded several times that similar things could be brought upon our own teaching practices. For instance, for those who don't know, the current description of our FYC (first year composition) class reads as follows:

WRIT 1301 fulfills the first-year writing requirement. It involves critical reading, writing, and thinking as students practice some of the types of writing they may expect in their college career such as summaries, essays, academic arguments, bibliographies, and papers built on research. The course helps students develop, at a minimum, an approach to writing that relies on clear statement of a thesis and support of that thesis with appropriate sources and documentation. Time is spent discussing rhetorical elements of writing such as audience, purpose, and argumentative structure. Students also practice steps in the writing process such as invention, research, organization of ideas, paper drafting, revision, and editing. Students report, synthesize, and draw conclusions regarding the significance of what they read. Students become more aware of the rhetorical choices available to them and learn to make appropriate choices. Some sections may be taught in computer classroom. Some sections are offered online. Some sections may include a service-learning component.

As I see it, there are 5 key "terms" that the whole endeavor is built on. These are the 5 "Rs:" Reading, Research, Revision, Rhetoric, and Writing. I've highlighted them in the description. But returning to the idea of "Fun With Real Audio," one thing that struck me as I was listening to my colleagues at a FYW (first year writing) symposium today was that when we use these terms, we all assume we know that we all agree on what the terms mean, but in actuality we don't. For instance, during a panel discussion on teaching with "research," in my notes I had the question "what IS research" and "what is the function of research" written down several times. I also noted that with research, we all "know how to do it" but don't really know what "it" is when we teach it. The question of "well, what IS research anyway" seems so simple that we just neglect to ask it, let alone attempt to answer it. But returning to these terms themselves is fruitful and important if we're concerned with not just replicating the errors we've made in the past. So, this got me thinking: what happens to the writing class (real audio) when we change the definition of these terms that we use to describe it (the animation)? That is, what happens when we de-familiarize the familiar when we approach designing a writing class? As such, I offer "alternative" definitions to the 5 "Rs" (and yes, I know "writing" isn't an R word, but it sounds like one, so just play along, ok?).

Continue reading "Teaching Composition as Fun with Real Audio" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 1:45 AM | Permalink

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...

Continue reading "Summer Reading List" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 3:20 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:36 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:10 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 11:26 AM | Permalink

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.

Continue reading "Another day, another school shooting." »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:48 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 1:54 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 2:29 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 2:41 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 7:50 PM | Permalink

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.

Continue reading "Thoughts on Feminism and Rhetoric..." »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 1:42 AM | Permalink

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)" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 5:49 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 9:09 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:39 AM | Permalink

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

Posted by Matthew Williams at 1:14 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 10:49 PM | Permalink

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" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 11:11 PM | Permalink

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." »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 10:44 PM | Permalink

....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.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 4:30 AM | Permalink

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?

Posted by Matthew Williams at 5:22 PM | Permalink