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)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

Instead of a full blown "article" that I usually write in here, this glorious rainy day here in St. Paul has inspired me to just post some random thoughts and musings for your whatever.

The first is this famous quote from Jerome Bruner...

"What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise (1996: ix-x)."

I can't help but feel there is an ever growing and dangerous rift between how faculty and the educational institutions themselves at the postsecondary level view culture and its aims and how those young adults populating its classes view culture and its aims. What seems to be more realistic is that how faculty tend to conceive of education is a function of how they wish culture and its aims were, and this wish is more often than not modeled via a nostalgic interpretation of the past and the system that produced the current faculty. This is problematic in that this view is more often than not only effective when it is pushed upon students through authoritarian classroom power structures. The question that arises is just what value does education have to students when the faculty's conception of culture and its aims do not mirror the conception within the students?

Continue reading "Jerome Bruner, Other rainy day thoughts..." »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I first want to apologize for the atrocious title to this article. Both to you the reader and to Gil Scott-Heron. Really, I should know better. But...I couldn't resist. But really, there is a reason for this title. Today, as I was sitting in a pre-semester professional development workshop on campus on teaching first year students, David Langley mentioned a few "assumptions" about the new generation of students coming into college. Nearly all of these rang true to me. So, as soon as I could, I got a copy of this report (authored by Diana Oblinger) and these ideas have been on my mind ever since. (as an aside, if you work at the U and don't know David, you should. In fact, you should know everyone at CTL, as they have proven to be some of the most valuable contacts I have found at the U of MN.)

These come from the Texas Association of Community College's "Educating the NetGen: Strategies that Work." In it, Diana Oblinger provides Jason Frand's description of ten attributes that people of an information have as a mind-set. Basically, I'll quote a few ideas and then give my thoughts on them. And, as I think you'll agree, thinking about these assumptions may help to drastically change what assumptions you have of students entering your classes as well as might help you to understand what practices can really help them.

* Computers aren't technology. Students have never known life with out computers and the Internet. To them the computer is not a technology - it is an assumed part of life.

A lot of times when I sit in on workshops, a lot of instructors (even some who are within a couple years or so of this generation) speak of "adding technology" to their class as if it is a dash of pepper or a pinch of salt. A little technology here, a little technology there. Little islands of controlled technology. To a student of the millennial generation, this is a very odd concept indeed. They are used to technology being seamless, integrated, and holistic. I asked a couple of my colleagues who work out in the "real world" in corporate jobs if their boss would only let them use the internet while at work every other week for a couple hours. They gave me very justified dumb looks. If this is how you treat technology in your classes, as an "object" that you just "add" to your class, your students will not recognize this landscape and will probably see less of a connection to what you are doing in class to their own personal lives.

Continue reading "The Revolution Will Not be Televised (It will be podcasted!)" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I have committed the cardinal sin of blogging: I have not updated as often as I would like. As anyone who does this blogging thing knows, once you stop having regular updates...people stop coming. Kind of like website design..if it doesn't work once, most people are not going to give you a second chance. It's tough out there.

But I promise I have a good excuse. School is starting (very) soon, and I have been knee deep preparing for that. But in the midst of all that, thinking about my inability to update every 2-3 days (my goal that I'm sure I won't be able to keep) has led to some ides about blogs and their role in the classroom. I know that many others in the 'blogosphere' are very interested in this, and some very interesting ideas have been floated around. Even on the U of MN host that this blog is brought to you from, there are numerous classes and other instructors who talk about assignments on blogs and so forth. But, once again, a lot of times technology is being used in the wrong place under the wrong circumstances. For instance, yeah it is great to have students post assignments on a blog. But by doing this, you really aren't "blogging." It is no different than a student posting something on WebCT, or...in all honesty, just handing it to you. The only difference is everyone has to go through the hassle of doing all of this online. Really…and I mean this sincerely…why bother?

Continue reading "Blogs in the classroom" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you know that in 1901 President Abraham Lincoln was exhumed at the request of his son to prevent would be criminals from digging up the body and holding it for ransom? Further, did you know that on this occasion 20 something people looked into Lincoln's coffin and saw his body, 36 years after John Wilkes Booth shot the 16th president in the back of the head while Lincoln was watching a play? (interestingly, his body was so well embalmed that people claimed he was still "recognizable")

If you're anything like me and learning is not just something you do for a living, but something you live for, Wikipedia is like purified caffeine that you directly inject into your bloodstream. Personally, I can't get enough. One subject will link to another and all of the sudden you've gone from reading about cheese making processes to salt domes and energy policy over the years. There have been more than one occasion where much "important" work was set aside as I pulled one of my all night Wiki binges. (what can I say, some people do drugs and booze...I just look up obscure facts)

As with most things I encounter in life, one of my first reactions is always, "neat! now how do I use this in the classroom?" But instructors beware: Wikis are a wily beast that will truly turn a mirror to your own known or unknown beliefs about education. Wikis can be a powerful learning tool in the classroom, but only if you're prepared to spend the time to really understand what is going on.

Continue reading "Theory into Practice: Wikis as collaborative learning tools" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a reason that I chose to do one of my undergraduate degrees in Humanities, an interdisciplinary liberal arts degree (my other is in Philosophy, if you couldn't tell). That reason is because of one professor: James (Jim) HiDuke. Don't worry about me using his name; he's dead. But before he died, I, like so many other students, were so appalled at his teaching ability and overall attitude in the classroom that I told him how I felt. He promptly told me that he didn't care.

This was one of those professors who truly seemed to love telling students they just weren't good enough to pass his class. He would swear at students, tell them they were idiots when they would be unable to answer a question correctly, even go so far as to tell the class I was in that in all of his years teaching he had never seen such a "stupid" bunch of students. He was truly a classroom tyrant in every sense of the word. But, despite his sheer lack of respect for anyone in his classroom, he had tenure. He was, to nearly everyone, untouchable.

Continue reading "Ratemyprofessor.com and the Role of Students in Evaluating Education" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 9:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Psst. You. Yeah, you…the person reading this. Want to know a secret? Of course you do. I have a Facebook account. Yep, in the summer of 2004, a mere 4 months or so after Facebook was started at Harvard, I had myself an account. Want to know another one? In 2003 I came across a tiny site run by man named Tom. I signed up for that one, too. I have been a member on Myspace ever since, for better or worse.

While admitting you were a member of such sites in public was once as taboo as admitting to placing a personal ad in a newspaper, it is near impossible now to walk into a coffee shop near any campus and not hear the words "facebook" or "myspace." The meteoric rise of such websites have earned them a near permanent place in contemporary culture. The have also helped to expose an astonishingly rapid increase of the size of the "digital divide" between instructors in Universities and the students that are in their classes.

Continue reading "Myspace and Facebook: What higher-ed can learn from social computing." »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (3)

Ahh, fall time in Minnesota. Fall is truly one of those times where I really get dreamy. The cool breezes in the morning that lift orange and yellow leaves off the ground for short distances while others wait to fall beneath stunningly crisp blue skies. The afternoons where you can lay in soft green grass under partly cloudy skies feeling the warmth of the sun on your skin. The evenings and the inevitable smell of burning leaves mixed with roasted coffee, pumpkin pies, and an occasional whiff of impending rain. And the nights where the sounds of gentle rain fall on soggy leaves creep through cracked windows and somewhere in the distance is an error message that reads something like "WebCT is currently experiencing technical difficulty, please try again" that is followed by an anguished scream.

If you, or someone you love, has used or will be using WebCT, the above scenario is one that you are probably familiar with (in particular, the last part). If the statistics at the U of MN are correct, somewhere around 2,000 classes use WebCT in some form or another. That's a lot of classes. And, I should mention this to you now, for the last two years my own classes have been a part of that number. For my part, I have exposed at least 100+ students to that thing we all call WebCT. Yep. I had students take quizzes over WebCT, submit papers, engage in discussion. And, not to brag, but I'd say my ventures in WebCT-land were moderately successful. There are things I wished had gone better, but for the most part, WebCT did what it was designed to do. And that is why I am never using it again.

Continue reading "The case against WebCT" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1995, Robert B. Barr and John Tagg described what they felt was a paradigm shift happening in universities; a shift from what they called the instruction paradigm to the learning paradigm (Change Magazine. Vol. 27. No. 6). However, in the 11 years since that article, the learning paradigm still seems to be forever "stuck on the horizon." Postsecondary instructors who buy into student centered learning are still "radicals" on campus in many locations. Were Barr and Tagg wrong?

Continue reading "Mapping the educational paradigm shift..." »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just some bullet points I found in a notebook that I had forgotten about...

• Up until now the theory laden field of composition has merely been trying to reinvent the wheel so to speak…trying to feign innovation that merely serves to mask a continuation of the old paradigm of writing instruction.
• Regardless of how you package it, the majority of writing instruction still boils down to the singular act of the instructor commenting on the students writing and handing it back to them. This is nothing more than a different version of content transmission from instructor to student.

Continue reading "Creative Writing, Comp, and the New Paradigm of University Education" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(from Mind and Society, p. 57)

"An interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one. Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applied equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals."

It seems to me that if we are to grant one purpose of creative writing classes to unlock higher order thinking in students, then traditionally we have been going about it completely backwards. The effort in the workshop always goes in at the front end, and the comments we recieve afterward are looked at amusingly but with little weight. The point, traditionally, has been to protect the "autonomy" of the individual creativity.

Continue reading "L.S. Vygotskii and Higher Psychological Functions" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 2:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The question of "can writing be taught," and "should writing be taught" used to be the two biggest questions in my mind.

But now, as I think more and more about Freire...I wonder...are these questions valid questions to begin with?

The idea that writing will be "taught" to someone implies some sort of transfer of knowledge, not a creation of knowledge.

And the transfer of knowledge involves a power dynamic...a power dynamic that is oppressive in nature. Oppressive because it is built upon the idea that instructors hold the correct, or true version of knowledge and it is their task to implant it into the minds of the students. But this is not asking the students to think for themselves. It is forcing them to rely on the information of others...a learned helplessness if you will. All too often I have heard the phrase "i want to learn what to do when I write..." even from graduate students. What about students thinking for themselves.

and I wonder...

Is that what we really wish to do to our artists?

Perhaps this means the question goes back to the idea that writing cannot be taught, but must be learned. But how?

Posted by Matthew Williams at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)