I am Matthew Williams and You are Not

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 | Comments (0)

(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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)