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)

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 | 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)

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 | 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)

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)