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)

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)

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)

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 | Comments (0)