Shor: “Monday Morning Fever: Critical Literacy and the Generative Theme of ‘Work’ ”
I’m quite sympathetic to Shor’s adaptation of Freire’s generative words. I, too, have organized my 101 syllabus around a generative theme. The theme I have chosen is the theme of values. Like Shor’s thematic approach, mine is organized to be “textured, integral, and successively more demanding” and each assignment combines “composing, editing, verbalizing, conceptualizing, and reading” (106). I, too, explain my pedagogy to the class, and we discuss what my responsibilities are and what theirs are. While I aim for transparency, I do not pretend that there is no hierarchy in the classroom. But I do aim for a cooperative tone to our interactions.
I agree that students “possess more language skills than they will display in school,” and I look for ways to allow students to use the skills that they have that the academy doesn’t value to find their way into discourses that it does value.
I have mixed feelings about identifying some writing as “pre-writing,” because I think all writing is writing. I’ve said before that I am wary of giving students the impression that some composing moments are more important and should thus receive more serious attention than others. The dictation method Shor outlines interests me, but I am not sure how they will help students “develop self-confidence” (109). It seems that it might, however, foster cooperation, and it might be useful as a means to developing a sense of the class as a community of learners.
The first paper I assign is an ideal eulogy—that is, each student writes the eulogy s/he would most like to have delivered at his or her own funeral. This develops out of what Shor calls “negation” (110); the freewrite preceding the one that initiates the ideal eulogy sequence is a nightmare eulogy—the eulogies they’d be most horrified to have delivered at their own funerals. The sequence involves a lot more than just the writing, but it’s just too much to include here. Each essay sequence is connected to both the one that precedes it and the one that succeeds it, and we move to increasing levels of abstraction (114). Like Shor, I aim to get students to dig deeper and deeper.
I don’t think Shor is quite correct when he says that students “have grammar in their voices,” though (111). They’ll catch some things by reading aloud, but spoken AE is so different from written SAE, especially academic SAE, that they do need to be shown what will be expected in other classes. One way I deal with this is to model spoken academic SAE a lot of the time. The idea of paired reading aloud is intriguing; I may try it.
Hairston: “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing”
Hairston calls for teachers of composition to “establish our psychological and intellectual independence from the literary critics who are at the center of power in most English departments” (697). Part of the problem with this is, as I have said before, it implies that reading (which is what literary critics after all analyze and consider how to best understand) is not part of writing and that composition has nothing to learn from lit crit. In other words, it’s to shortchange the place of reading in writing in order to facilitate the project of constructing composition studies as an autonomous discipline. Not good.
Hairston seems to equate “putting ideology at the center” with imposing a particular “leftist” ideology on students. But that’s not necessarily the case. Putting ideology at the center could just involve dissecting ideologically charged messages such as commercials or ads, for example.
I’ve got to say that religion is one of the “chief obstacles to” critical thinking, demanding as it does belief without reason or evidence. And, those of us who are atheists get, in the US, the most “hostile reception” of all (710). (Did you know that last year 74% of Americans said they would vote for an adulterer before they’d vote for an atheist? Hmmm. Lying cheater over here . . . reasoning human being over here. I’ll take the untrustworthy cheater, please. Strange.)
As far as the Althusserian analysis of the job application letter, it’s correct
(701). But that doesn’t mean we oughtn’t to teach students how to write effective ones or that we oughtn’t to write them ourselves. Interests can conflict. The trick is to learn how to reason well enough to make decisions about how to resolve such conflicts when we must.
Hairston’s misunderstanding (or deliberate misrepresentation via straw man) of deconstruction is annoying. Although I don’t accept all of deconstruction’s conclusions, I do understand that what it tries to do is to either show the ways that texts undo themselves; while she articulates a pseudo-Foucauldian, pseudo-Marxian analysis of texts and power, she fails to mention that one of the most important things deconstruction does is to examine the tension between rhetoric and grammar, to look at the ways that rhetoric exceeds grammar in texts. Moreover, not all poststructuralists claim that there is no objective reality. Joseph Margolis, for instance, articulates a compelling case for what he calls “cultural realism.” However, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, since Margolis is a philosopher. But he first began publishing on this topic well before Hairston wrote this article. Also, Cixous writes extensively about writing and language, even though she is a feminist (703).
I would argue that “because standard English is the dialect of the dominant class, writing instruction that tries to help students master that dialect” undermines hegemony by extending the class marker beyond class, rather than “reinforc[ing] the status quo and serv[ing] the interests of the dominant class” (703). So I am a counterexample to her claim about how leftist educators view teaching SAE. But maybe that’s just me. I don’t think so, though.
What does it mean to say that the “humanities are valuable in their own right” (704)?
How can “students gain control over their lives” without at least interrogating the contexts within which those lives take shape (705)?
One can look at politics, economics, and ideologies “without sacrificing” the writing course’s integrity (705). One can be rigorous and focused even if one is looking at the context. Some people might argue that one cannot be rigorous without placing the task at hand in context. I would be one of them. How can students “examine their experiences, their assumptions, their values” if the experiences, assumptions and values are decontextualized (711)?
“Make no mistake—those on the cultural left are not in the least liberal” (706). Ad hominem, anyone? “[I]n fact, they despise liberals as compromising humanists” (706). And here’s hasty generalization. Hopefully, that will conclude our lesson on logical fallacies for the day, folks.
“The real truth about classrooms is that the teacher has all the power” (707). Nope, I was wrong. Here we have another hasty generalization. How much power do PTIs have? GAs? I guess the departmental chairs and committees who decide whether we will be rehired or refunded in part based on our retention numbers, the legislatures that decide how much funding we get, the Regents who decide who will run the school and what many of its major policies will be, and the accreditation folks who decide what content must be offered for the school to be accredited wield no power in the classroom. My mistake.
“[W]e must teach [writing] for the students’ benefit, not in the service of politics or anything else” (712). I guess she means the students’ unexamined benefit, right? A kind of one-size-fits-all benefit, right? “I think it is unprofessional for teachers to bring their ideology into the classroom” (708). So, I guess what’s she’s saying is ideology free. Must be nice to have a handle on the Truth. She’s able to be objective. I wonder how she does that. Not even scientists think they’re doing that anymore.
How is the claim that we ought not to interrogate or challenge the status quo value-free and devoid of political content and ideology again? I can never remember that. What she really means is “not in the service of leftist politics” or “not in the service of politics I disagree with” or “not in the service of the politics of those radical, atheistic, feminist, communists.” The fact is that no decisions about content or method are value-neutral, and thus they all serve some political and ideological agenda(s). The question for me is whether we’re going to admit it and examine which one(s) we’re serving or not. I vote yes. Again, examining and acknowledging is not the same as brainwashing. “Consciousness of” does not equal “imposing on.”
Freire: “The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom and Education and Conscientização”
“The analyst will discover in the methods and texts used by educators and students practical value options which betray a philosophy of man, well or poorly outlined, coherent or incoherent” (617). Well, Hairston should have read this. Because Freire is right. Philosophical underpinnings lie at the bottom of all belief systems. Making claims about what we ought to do in the classroom also involves claims about how people learn and what’s worth learning. It involves particular understandings of the relationship between teaching and learning. It involves definitions of terms like “student,” “teacher,” and “literacy.” It involves much more than I can go into here. Sometimes these claims and beliefs are left unsaid, implicit, but they’re always there. These beliefs and claims are philosophical presuppositions that lay out the parameters within which conversations take place and practice is enacted. Even practice involves these presupps. Remember Charlotte Bunch? “The personal is political”? The philosophical underpinnings that enable us to make claims about states of affairs are ideological. Always.
“Unable to grasp contemporary illiteracy as a typical manifestation of a ‘culture of silence’ . . . ” (619). This got me to thinking about the different ways authors have been using the term “illiteracy” and about the kind of literacy I’m most interested in helping students to develop. I guess it has to do with the cultural silence that surrounds our understandings of ideology. Now that doesn’t mean I want to brainwash students. It means that I want to create a space where they can develop the ability to read and write between the lines, not in the margins. I want them to be able to recognize the ways that ideology is encoded in everything they read and write. I wan them to be able to use writing as a tool for problem-solving, including the problems they are set in other classes. That involves really entering into multiple discourse communities and being able to see the ideological and philosophical foundations upon which the conversations in those communities are built. If we can’t do that, we’re just translating, which is perhaps fine. But maybe fine isn’t good enough.
Smith: “Students’ Goals, Gatekeeping, and Ethics”
I have so much to say in response to this article that I’m probably just going to quote stuff and then respond to what’s said in the quotation. This is a really long one. You may not believe it, but I did rein myself in. And if you can get past the ranting, I eventually get to where I think he makes some valuable points. I think my problems are with the way he gets there.
“[T]o resist [“corporate powers’ oppressive, elitist . . . white Euro-male”] agenda presumably includes refusing to gate-keep” (300). No. I don’t think so. But resistance does involve providing a framework in which that agenda can become visible instead of being unquestioningly accepted as the way things are. The problem isn’t that the gates lead to “the land of the powers-that-be” (300). The problem is that they don’t. They lead, for most of us, only to a kind of midpoint between the powers-that-be (for real power is wielded in this country by men and a few women whose names we don’t know, who are never in the news, and who in a kind of metaphoric incestuousness intermarry and keep real power in the hands of less than 4%of the world’s population.) To think that a middle-management position is a position of real power is naïve. To think that even CEOs wield real power is naïve. Real economic power is wielded by boards of directors, not by the CEOs they hire and fire. Power is relative. It may be that CEOs have a lot of power relative to the person behind the cash register at “World O’Bargains Discount” (303), but CEOs are hired and fired just like the rest of us. While their social class may be different from the rest of us, economically, they’re working class, just like everybody else who receives a paycheck signed by someone else. And that’s just a fact.
The idea that the gate leading to the “professional-managerial occupations” is the gate to the “overclass” is a naïve illusion (302). College might be the gate to the professional-managerial occupations, but it’s not the gate to the real overclass. It’s the gate to positions between the real ruling class and the rest of us. It’s the gate to a space where we can look out for the interests of the ruling class and perhaps be well-paid for doing so. It’s the gate to a space where we can fool ourselves into thinking we have power and wealth. But it’s not a gate to real power. It’s not a gate to real wealth. Don’t we have an obligation to pass on to our students the kind of critical thinking tools that might help them to understand the real conditions of their lives? I’m not saying that we should propagandize students. I’m not saying we should tell them this stuff. But if we do not provide spaces where they can learn to question the organization of their lives and their places in society, we’re not doing our jobs. Whether or not they choose to exercise the critical thinking skills they can acquire in our classes in order to examine these issues is up to them. But if we don’t teach them how to use writing to think critically, we aren’t preparing them to succeed in their writing assignments in other classes. All we’re doing is showing them how to enter into our discourse community.
Furthermore, to say that “for the most part” we aren’t dealing with “ ‘those who are excluded,’ ” who are more likely to be found “in our ghettos and barrios” involves a much narrower understanding of “exclusion” than mine (302). First, the truth of this claim depends on where one teaches. Realistically, most of us can expect to end up teaching at community colleges. Community colleges increasingly are open-enrollment institutions. So, many students never encounter the pre-composition gate of admission requirements. Most of the first-year college students in the US are enrolled in community colleges. These students do encounter pre-Composition 101 gates, but I’ve never heard of anyone being kept out of an open-enrollment institution because s/he did abominably on an English Placement Test (EPT). In fact, many of these students do come from the “ghettos and barrios.” Take a trip to CSN’s Cheyenne or Charleston campuses, for goodness’ sake.
For me, being excluded means being a person whose existence and experience is largely invisible, held to be “deviant,” or marginalized in mainstream culture. Let’s see. That means the handicapped, including the blind, deaf, and wheelchair bound among others; the middle-aged; the poor; manual laborers and their offspring; the elderly; gays, lesbians, and bisexuals; first-generation immigrants; the working poor; those on welfare; the chronically ill; transsexuals and transvestites; and so on. For me, a person is excluded if s/he is a member of an identity group that is the target of institutional (not necessarily the academy, but social institutions) oppression and/or discrimination. That includes women of all races; the working poor of all sexes; Native Americans; people of Asian, Hispanic, Chicano, and Latino descent; people of Italian and Sicilian descent (Did you know that of all people of European descent, Italians and Sicilians face the highest degree of discrimination and prejudice? They have rarely been elected to public office and rarely rise to positions of economic authority unless they Anglicize their names!); and many of the groups included in my first list.
Okay, so who are we left with given that most of us will not teach in the institutions to which the ruling class sends its children? Oh. I’ve got it. Middle-class white guys who are not gay, handicapped in any way, effeminate, Italian or Sicilian, middle-aged, elderly, bisexual, immigrants, chronically ill, transvestites, or transsexual and for whom English is the first language. I wonder what percentage of our students fit that description. Especially since more than 50% of the people in college are female.
Seems to me that if we consider what “excluded” really means in America, most of our students are among them. Even if we teach at institutions few of us are likely to end up in. Like Columbia. Like Harvard. Like Wells or William and Mary or Hobart or Cornell. Get the idea? So, then, the idea that “our students . . . are not randomly chosen members of the US population at large or of their particular race, class, gender, and sexual-preference communities” is precisely the problem. What defines them is not just that they “have chosen to attend college and . . . been admitted” (302). They can also afford to pay. Since the lovely change of financial aid requirements, fewer of the poor may be able to choose to enter college (Did you see David Brancaccio yesterday?). I know two young people who weren’t romantically involved who married each other just to be able to qualify for financial aid so that they could go to school.
Now, it might be that one of the “shared goals” our students have is to join what Smith calls the “overclass,” and that I would call the “managerial/professional class.” It may be that they would rather have jobs that they believe “offer . . . some scope for creative thinking and decision-making” (303). How many managerial jobs actually offer these work dimensions? Not many, I can tell you. Has this guy ever looked at what managers do? I don’t mean CEOs, who are relatively free to engage creatively and decisively. But I mean, say, a store manager or even a district manager for Home Depot or Pizza Hut. They have virtually no freedom to be creative or to make significant decisions. Nearly everything about day-to-day operations is directed from corporate headquarters. There are manuals, forms, and policies. There are federal and state labor laws, insurance parameters, and immediate supervisors. Compliance and SOP, yes. Creativity—no. Home Depot’s district managers and store managers are unable even to override the returns counter cash register computers for goodness sake! Smith evinces a kind of naiveté that makes me doubt that he has ever worked in the business world. This position involves unquestioning acceptance of the same myth of the powerful manager that our students have.
What about the possibility of students examining WHY they “some form of ‘being successful’ ” (303)? What about examining what they mean by “being successful”? What about examining how they’ve come define “being successful” as they do? The fact is that when we ask students whether they’d rather have a job they love at which they made little money and had little prestige, or a job that confers prestige and money but that they hated going to every day, their answers demonstrate that this particular conflict never even occurs to most of them! I ask this question as part of guest lectures I do about being a woman in the business world. When I tell them that I spent a good portion of my adult life doing just that, they’re appalled. So what about providing opportunities for students to develop the critical thinking skills they need even to consider these possibilities as they try to decide what it is that they want out of classes?
I’m not one of those teachers who “deny outright that students come to college looking to join the dominant class” (304). I’m sure they do. I think nearly all of them do. I think that virtually none of them come to college for any other reason, unless it’s to remain on their parents’ health insurance. I also think that very few of them ever examine what that means and whether or not it’s possible. Nor do I believe that we ought to be “devoting our writing classes to attacking [dominant] mystifications and biases” (304). Attacking the dominant ideologies that most likely comprise their world views in order to free students “from false consciousness” neither acknowledges nor respects their autonomy. It is more likely to alienate them and make them feel belittled than to win them to a particular “replacement” ideology. No matter what one calls it, it’s not Freirean if it doesn’t respect students as subjects (305). It’s one things to provide students with opportunities to develop critical thinking through writing. It’s another thing to dictate how the tools should be used and still another thing to dictate what should be built with them. I’d like to provide those opportunities. I don’t want to brainwash.
I don’t decline to gate-keep. In fact, one can be the most dogmatic of Marxists, one who takes his word as Gospel (and I’m not one of them—by any means), and still understand that some gatekeeping has to happen. After all, Marx did say, “From each according to his ability; to each according to need.” That stuff about ability sure sounds like a form of gatekeeping to me. I’ve said in class that I think that there are people who don’t belong in college. I think there are people who don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to do the coursework. I just think that we have to understand whose gates we’re keeping and why those who are locked out are those who are locked out. That’s part of our job as instructors as I see it. Nonetheless, it’s not necessary that the students see it. It is necessary that they develop the skills necessary to critically analyze their own lives, even if they never choose to do so.
I agree that “asking students what they think” is a crucial part of doing the job, even of gatekeeping (301). But we don’t think that eighteen-year-olds have the intellectual and emotional sophistication to handle decisions about whether or not to drink. Why would we allow them to dictate what and how and why we teach as we do? Still, those of us who embrace a liberatory pedagogy are committed to student-centered teaching, aren’t we? We’re committed to taking our cues from our students, aren’t we? But as we ask students what they want, shouldn’t they develop the skills necessary to examine some foundational presuppositions?
Unless FYC either becomes technical/business writing or focuses on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills, it’s completely irrelevant to students’ “class and career aspirations” anyway (305). Because the kinds of essays usually taught in FYC are completely unrelated to any forms students will utilize anywhere except in other classes, FYC is only related to career insofar as it enables them to write for other classes so that they can complete the degrees that will facilitate their entry into the managerial/professional class. In other words, FYC is already (at least indirectly) related to “class and career aspirations.” I think that we serve students best by providing opportunities for them to develop the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that will enable them to succeed in their writing for other classes and to prep for “board and bar exams” (306). In fact, ETS hires critical thinking instructors and logicians to write those exams! As Smith says, we need to look at FYC in the larger contexts of the entire educational experience and the future career experience. And he’s exactly right about that. That doesn’t mean we have to teach students how to write as members of each and every academic discourse community. It means that we have to provide opportunities for them to see different ways into language and discourse communities, to offer them practice entering unfamiliar discursive and conceptual territory. What could be more “useful” to learn from those whose discipline centers on language (319)?
That gatekeeping is unavoidable is not a reason to avoid interrogating it, to avoid providing students the opportunity to interrogate it, to avoid developing the tools to examine what might lie on the other side of the gate, to avoid asking who we’re keeping the gates for, to avoid questioning whether one wants to move through the gate, to avoid examining for oneself what lies on both sides of the gate in order to make an informed decision about where one wants to be and whether one wants to accept or work toward transforming what lies on either side. Most people will accept it and decide to move through the gate. Others will never examine anything at all and will just do what they believe is the next thing to be done. Still others will decide that what lies on the other side of the gate is not worth its price. Many, like me, will spend time on the other side of the gate because they must eat and/or provide for families even though they find little fulfillment or challenge on the other side, even though they realize that what’s there is not what they want.
The “true learning” Smith talks about does not have to come from teachers at all (308). And the analogy between organic chemistry and composition just really doesn’t work unless someone wants to claim that there’s only one kind of “true learning” or one path by which one might truly learn. And if organic chemistry is the model we are to embrace, then it seems that memorization and experimentation may the paths to true learning. I’m pretty sure that won’t work out at all for comp. Thus, Smith’s claim that we’d have to “remove organic chemistry from consideration” of what’s truly taught expresses what logicians call a false dilemma. That is, it presents two possibilities as though they’re the only two possibilities, when in fact other possibilities (such as there being more than one route to true learning or the claim that different sorts of learning work better for different sorts of subjects) exist. The humanities might think differently about teaching than scientists because what they’re teaching is different than what scientists teach. Perhaps our goals are different, and perhaps that’s inherent to the disciplines, and not just an expression of “certain methods those in our field happen to like” (308). Maybe learning empirically verifiable stuff is different from learning stuff that’s not empirical.
Even granting Smith’s premises doesn’t necessarily mean that “ethics will differ depending on the goal” (309). As I said above, perhaps it’s the nature or content of the discipline that differs. Teleology without deontology is just math. Smith admits as much when he says that it’s “unethical in the extreme simply to collapse means into ends” (309). But I would argue that what he calls the “ ‘means-ends equivalence’ ” may enact the straw man fallacy (310), and I suggest that he read Audre Lord’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
I agree with Smith (surprise!) that we ought not to completely eliminate hierarchy from the classroom. In fact, I hold that we cannot. Ultimately, we fill out the grade sheets. Moreover, as instructors, we bear certain responsibilities toward our students. If we are to fulfill those responsibilities, we must require students to do things that they don’t want to, and we must enforce policies with which we might disagree. But it is fair to bring these realities into the light for interrogation with and by the students.
Smith is also right when he says that what happens in the classroom has ramifications that reverberate in the lives of people we will never meet. If Felicia wants to be a doctor, I do have an obligation to treat her as someone who wants to be a doctor (312). So what, then, do I do with Jeff, who wants to be a mechanic, when he and Felicia are in the same class? Do I teach to Felicia or to Jeff? Or, do I try to understand what those disciplines and vocations have in common? What could that be? Critical thinking! Problem-solving! What I’m trying to say here is that students’ aims and goals are not incompatible with a student-centered, nurturing classroom. In fact, as part of the nurturing process, my parents disciplined me. Often. Believe me, I needed it. They often structured my life in ways that I resented at the time and have come to appreciate now as well as in ways that I still think were crazy. So did many of my teachers. And I don’t think we do students any favors when we make excuses for them or allow them to avoid responsibility for the choices they make about attending class or completing assignments.
Here’s where I think Smith makes an important contribution to Freirean pedagogy: Structure, discipline, and hierarchy are not antithetical to liberatory teaching. In fact, they are crucial parts of the development of the critical thinking that liberatory pedagogy aims toward. Critical thinking is itself structured, disciplined, and involves imposing hierarchy on concepts. And, I think he’s right—students who earn Fs or Ds ought to receive Fs or Ds. Respecting students as subjects involves respecting their bad decisions as well, allowing them to face the consequences of those decisions as learning experiences. Smith is correct in saying that students have the right not to be there, not to do the work, and to decide for themselves whether to accept or reject what’s offered to them in classrooms, including the FYC classroom. And we have the obligation to ensure that they face the consequences of those choices. To do any less is to patronize them, to behave paternalistically toward them. It is not to treat them as subjects in the way that Freire advocates.
We cannot simply replace students’ “false consciousness” with our own interpretation of reality, for to do so is to treat them as objects to be transformed by us. That’s not at all liberatory. What we can do is to provide writing opportunities that encourage the development of critical thinking, writing opportunities that encourage students to critically examine the society into which they are born, within which they exist, and out of which they emerge as subjects. Critical examination sometimes leads to a desire to transform; it more often leads to an assessment of how best to achieve one’s ends within the given context. In a truly liberatory education, the choice is theirs and can be based on a critical assessment of available relevant information. The choice, in other words, can be an informed decision rather than a knee-jerk reaction. Isn’t that at least part of what education is about?
I guess I’ll stop here. I could go on, but I do have three papers to work on, and another article to read for this class, and other classes to read for, and a blog to post, and a website to fix and an exam to study for, and . . . Well, you get the idea.
Berlin: “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class”
Even though the dialectic is “grounded in language,” it is not identical with language (731). For me, this is an important distinction that too often gets glossed over by critical theorists. I don’t have a whole lot to say about Berlin because I agree so strongly with so much of what he says. I do think, however, that like most social constructionists, he needs to be very careful about the way he expresses himself and to watch the tendency to equivocate with certain key terms. I very much like that he acknowledges that language mediates reality, for instance, although he at points seems to move from that perspective and to embrace the more radical Derrididean notion that language constructs reality. I wish these guys would get that straight. I’m so tired. You’re just gonna have to trust me. I read it. I’ll show you my annotations.
Good night. Peace to all.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Week of 4/21 Cont'd
Hull: “Hearing Other Voices: A Critical Assessment of Popular Views on Literacy and Work”
Hull effectively lambastes those who would blame working class for the ills of the American economy by articulating some of the problems with a monolithic understanding of literacy and by showing that American workers do not lack literacy, even when they do lack school literacy. She points out the equivocation around terms like “literacy” and “basic skills.” Some of the articles and studies she quotes are amazingly vague and badly reasoned. One of my personal favorites is on page 664—the one that says that mechanics have to navigate so many more pages of text now to be able to fix any automobile on the road. I mean, how many mechanics can fix any car on the road? Since when does an increase in quantity equal an increase in complexity?
The “trend . . . to break complex work into a multitude of simpler repetitive jobs” in the workplace is analogous to the way that process composition methods break down writing into the smaller tasks like prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing (668). Perhaps the ideology of Taylorism still affects our thought about aspects of life other than the organization of the factory. The economic goal of efficiency has perhaps permeated composition theory. I’m having difficulty finding the words to convey what I’m trying to get at, but here’s my best shot: Maybe one reason we have broken writing down the way we have is because Taylorist values have become commonplaces in American ideology. The American vision of higher education has shifted focus from turning out liberally educated people (men) to turning out professionals, so it makes sense that an economic ideology like Taylorism would permeate our thinking to the degree that breaking down complex processes into “component tasks” seems perfectly natural.
Hull says that researchers have begun to investigate actual work situations” rather than “assuming that poor performance in school subjects necessarily dictates poor performance on related tasks at work” (671). To this I would add that perhaps we should attribute high percentages of “poor performance” at schools as signs that something’s wrong with the system of education rather than with teachers and/or students.
I could go on and on about this article. I really liked it. I think Hull makes a lot of sensible observations, and there are a lot of analogues between what goes on in the classroom and what goes on in business. I think that the stuff I said about Taylorism is relevant to the similarities. I know that this week’s articles are probably supposed to get us thinking about workplace writing, but I just find myself relating everything to teaching. I guess I’m just so immersed in my paper that I’m having a hard time getting out of the classroom this week!
Peace to all.
Hull effectively lambastes those who would blame working class for the ills of the American economy by articulating some of the problems with a monolithic understanding of literacy and by showing that American workers do not lack literacy, even when they do lack school literacy. She points out the equivocation around terms like “literacy” and “basic skills.” Some of the articles and studies she quotes are amazingly vague and badly reasoned. One of my personal favorites is on page 664—the one that says that mechanics have to navigate so many more pages of text now to be able to fix any automobile on the road. I mean, how many mechanics can fix any car on the road? Since when does an increase in quantity equal an increase in complexity?
The “trend . . . to break complex work into a multitude of simpler repetitive jobs” in the workplace is analogous to the way that process composition methods break down writing into the smaller tasks like prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing (668). Perhaps the ideology of Taylorism still affects our thought about aspects of life other than the organization of the factory. The economic goal of efficiency has perhaps permeated composition theory. I’m having difficulty finding the words to convey what I’m trying to get at, but here’s my best shot: Maybe one reason we have broken writing down the way we have is because Taylorist values have become commonplaces in American ideology. The American vision of higher education has shifted focus from turning out liberally educated people (men) to turning out professionals, so it makes sense that an economic ideology like Taylorism would permeate our thinking to the degree that breaking down complex processes into “component tasks” seems perfectly natural.
Hull says that researchers have begun to investigate actual work situations” rather than “assuming that poor performance in school subjects necessarily dictates poor performance on related tasks at work” (671). To this I would add that perhaps we should attribute high percentages of “poor performance” at schools as signs that something’s wrong with the system of education rather than with teachers and/or students.
I could go on and on about this article. I really liked it. I think Hull makes a lot of sensible observations, and there are a lot of analogues between what goes on in the classroom and what goes on in business. I think that the stuff I said about Taylorism is relevant to the similarities. I know that this week’s articles are probably supposed to get us thinking about workplace writing, but I just find myself relating everything to teaching. I guess I’m just so immersed in my paper that I’m having a hard time getting out of the classroom this week!
Peace to all.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Week of 4/21
Heath: “Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions”
I agree with Heath’s claim that the universalist and positivist assumptions of the scholarship that was current in 1982 needed to be interrogated. But some of the questions she asks surely were being addressed by scholars in other fields at the time (Marxist cultural critique, for instance). The answers to others seem (and would have seemed at the time) pretty damned obvious to me. Of course “modern society contain[s] certain conditions which restrict literacy just as some traditional societies do”! Even in 1982 we were aware that economic inequalities (and injustices) affected literacy development. We knew that schools were differentially funded, that kids came to school more or less well-nourished, etc.
After I could see beyond my fury at those who refused to allow people to negotiate documents themselves, I realized that that particular episode revealed to me the biggest difficulty I had with Heath’s article: The way her attempt to be non-judgmental and objective prevented her from drawing all of the conclusions she might have, especially given that she set out to discern whether “modern society contain[s] certain conditions which restrict literacy just as some traditional societies do” (445). Just the way American society is characterized—“modern,” rather than capitalist, industrial, or a host of other conceptualizations that would have more accurately reflected the economic context—obfuscates the link between economic regulation of the worker and the ways literacy was restricted in Trackton. It made the limiting seem a merely local. Like it was just some people who work in a particular factory who patronized the workers in this way because it was more convenient. Instead, I read this interaction as characteristic of capital’s regulation, discipline, and control of the working class. In fact, it represents working-class self-regulation and control, the manifestation of what Habermas calls “false consciousness.” And that’s pretty disturbing to me.
The paucity of written materials produced in this working-class community reinforces what I said a few weeks ago about the Dias et al. article: Most people don’t have jobs that require that they produce documents. They may have to write, but writing and producing documents are not the same thing.
I was intrigued by the idea that solitary reading can carry connotations of anti-sociality. It makes sense of my mother’s oft-repeated admonition that I should put the book down and go out and play with somebody. Her observations about group reading and meaning-making could have significant implications for the way we teach writing, because they imply that working together can invest the meaning-makers with authority—and McCarthy’s observations of David certainly bear that out.
I am quite sympathetic, however, to the idea that literacy and orality overlap. I’ve long thought that the distinction between orality and literacy was too strongly drawn, that the relationship between them is dialectical. Aren’t orality and literacy mutually constitutive? This insight is, I think an important contribution to both composition and literary scholarship, and Heath’s observations provide good evidence that this is the case.
Brandt: “Sponsors of Literacy”
Brandt’s Bourdieuvian contextual analysis satisfied me a lot more than did Heath’s. Probably not surprising given how much more recent the article is. I’ve been working for years with one of the biggest literacy sponsors in the US: Literacy Volunteers. Still, I’d never considered that LVA (Literacy Volunteers of America) might “gain advantage . . . in some way” by sponsoring literacy (166). So, I started doing some research about the LVA group I worked with in Buffalo. What I found was that those who serve on its Board of Directors also serve on the boards of other, less benign institutions. I began to consider the kind of cultural capital that accrues to those who do volunteer work and those who we perceive as enabling those who do volunteer work to do it. I suspect that many of the people who sit on the LVA Buffalo board are aware of the enhancement that accrues to their reputations because they sit on the boards of benevolent/philanthropic institutions. Even though I don’t have time right now, I want to do some research into who funds LVA. I bet the funding comes from major corporations at the national level and from local corporations at the local level. Better, more efficient workers, anyone? Even as a reading instructor, I was trained to emphasize the advantages that would accrue to those I tutor—these are the incentives Brandt talks about—well, some of them, anyway. Advantages like being able to fill out a job application and to read the notices around the break room. Being me, I talk about other stuff, but that’s kind of irrelevant here, I think.
I’m questioning the kinds of “ideological freight” that the methods we’re trained to use carry. For instance, we’re trained to use only whole language approaches to teaching reading and writing. But I’ve found that it doesn’t work as well as a combination of phonetics and whole language, so I depart from the standard and do what seems to work. But I wonder who benefits from the limited literacy that students acquire through whole-language approaches and whether any of the beneficiaries are represented by the board’s membership.
But this is a limited understanding of the “sponsorship” concept. The contrast between Raymond and Dora makes the social, political, and economic layers of sponsorship clearer. Even access to sponsorship positions is mediated and regulated by other, more powerful sponsors. And what we have to read can be formative of political positions and ideological presuppositions we embrace (174). And Brandt demonstrates well the ways in which literacy becomes a means by which corporate practices (and thus the ideologies that undergird them) enter the home and individual consciousness.
When Brandt began to discuss appropriating other people’s literacies to adapt to new contexts, I began to consider what literacies we can adapt to the FYC class, and how we can best introduce them. Brandt’s descriptions of Carol and Sarah indicate, I think, that modeling is useful, even though other research we read earlier in the semester seemed to indicate that it was not. It seems to me that the difference lies between providing belletristic essays as models for students expected to engage academic discourse, and providing models whose structures can be adapted for relevantly similar contexts. The success of the latter (McCarthy saw some success with this, too) and lack of success of the former, combined with Heath’s findings that students come to think of themselves as writers when we take their writing seriously indicates to me that the best models for our students are their own writing.
McCarthy: A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing across the Curriculum”
I think that there are some other factors that should probably be considered before any generalizations are made about male students in general on the basis of this observation. First, as my first sentence should make clear, I’m not sure we can extrapolate anything about how women learn from observing how a man does. Although McCarthy mentions that David took the Composition class with male friends who were also in his group, she doesn’t mention whether he had male friends in the Poetry class. David took Poetry with his girlfriend, we know, but we do not know if she (or whomever he was involved with romantically) was in the Composition class. Here’s the thing: Sedgwick and others have shown that one primary way American males establish public masculinity and homosocially bond is through competition with other males. That could have been a factor in a class in which David worked so closely with other males, especially males with whom David had already bonded. Regarding the Poetry class, I wonder how much internalized ideologies of masculinity and gender set David up for failure in a class in which he had no male competitors. Moreover, we do not know how his girlfriend did in that class. If she did better than he, I think we should ask how much his failure to perform as he would have liked had to do with the idea that men aren’t good at poetry, with the fear of feminization. Now, I’m not saying that these are conscious processes. I don’t claim to know how the unconscious works in these situations. I’m just trying to point out social factors that also have fingured into David’s (un)successful performances in different contexts. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I think researchers all too often try to apply findings from data collected from observing one sex to the other, and that might not always be legitimate, whether for social or neurophysiological reasons.
McCarthy does provide some useful information for those of us who want to teach. For instance, that “Dave’s characteristic approach across courses was to focus so fully on the particular new ways of thinking and writing in each setting that commonalities with previous writing were obscured for him” (245) tells us that we may need to point out explicitly the connections and commonalities between different writing situations. It seems that having students write summaries might be a useful way to get students to stick their toes into new discourse communities. That Dave relied so on material texts as he wrote ought to tell us something—I’m just not sure what it is. Dr. Forson’s admission that his responses to student papers were designed to allow him to justify grades tells us one way we might want to avoid commenting on papers. And it seems that we also learn something really obvious from him: give the students a chance to respond to your comments; not doing so is to deny the dialogic dimension of writing.
Peace to all.
I agree with Heath’s claim that the universalist and positivist assumptions of the scholarship that was current in 1982 needed to be interrogated. But some of the questions she asks surely were being addressed by scholars in other fields at the time (Marxist cultural critique, for instance). The answers to others seem (and would have seemed at the time) pretty damned obvious to me. Of course “modern society contain[s] certain conditions which restrict literacy just as some traditional societies do”! Even in 1982 we were aware that economic inequalities (and injustices) affected literacy development. We knew that schools were differentially funded, that kids came to school more or less well-nourished, etc.
After I could see beyond my fury at those who refused to allow people to negotiate documents themselves, I realized that that particular episode revealed to me the biggest difficulty I had with Heath’s article: The way her attempt to be non-judgmental and objective prevented her from drawing all of the conclusions she might have, especially given that she set out to discern whether “modern society contain[s] certain conditions which restrict literacy just as some traditional societies do” (445). Just the way American society is characterized—“modern,” rather than capitalist, industrial, or a host of other conceptualizations that would have more accurately reflected the economic context—obfuscates the link between economic regulation of the worker and the ways literacy was restricted in Trackton. It made the limiting seem a merely local. Like it was just some people who work in a particular factory who patronized the workers in this way because it was more convenient. Instead, I read this interaction as characteristic of capital’s regulation, discipline, and control of the working class. In fact, it represents working-class self-regulation and control, the manifestation of what Habermas calls “false consciousness.” And that’s pretty disturbing to me.
The paucity of written materials produced in this working-class community reinforces what I said a few weeks ago about the Dias et al. article: Most people don’t have jobs that require that they produce documents. They may have to write, but writing and producing documents are not the same thing.
I was intrigued by the idea that solitary reading can carry connotations of anti-sociality. It makes sense of my mother’s oft-repeated admonition that I should put the book down and go out and play with somebody. Her observations about group reading and meaning-making could have significant implications for the way we teach writing, because they imply that working together can invest the meaning-makers with authority—and McCarthy’s observations of David certainly bear that out.
I am quite sympathetic, however, to the idea that literacy and orality overlap. I’ve long thought that the distinction between orality and literacy was too strongly drawn, that the relationship between them is dialectical. Aren’t orality and literacy mutually constitutive? This insight is, I think an important contribution to both composition and literary scholarship, and Heath’s observations provide good evidence that this is the case.
Brandt: “Sponsors of Literacy”
Brandt’s Bourdieuvian contextual analysis satisfied me a lot more than did Heath’s. Probably not surprising given how much more recent the article is. I’ve been working for years with one of the biggest literacy sponsors in the US: Literacy Volunteers. Still, I’d never considered that LVA (Literacy Volunteers of America) might “gain advantage . . . in some way” by sponsoring literacy (166). So, I started doing some research about the LVA group I worked with in Buffalo. What I found was that those who serve on its Board of Directors also serve on the boards of other, less benign institutions. I began to consider the kind of cultural capital that accrues to those who do volunteer work and those who we perceive as enabling those who do volunteer work to do it. I suspect that many of the people who sit on the LVA Buffalo board are aware of the enhancement that accrues to their reputations because they sit on the boards of benevolent/philanthropic institutions. Even though I don’t have time right now, I want to do some research into who funds LVA. I bet the funding comes from major corporations at the national level and from local corporations at the local level. Better, more efficient workers, anyone? Even as a reading instructor, I was trained to emphasize the advantages that would accrue to those I tutor—these are the incentives Brandt talks about—well, some of them, anyway. Advantages like being able to fill out a job application and to read the notices around the break room. Being me, I talk about other stuff, but that’s kind of irrelevant here, I think.
I’m questioning the kinds of “ideological freight” that the methods we’re trained to use carry. For instance, we’re trained to use only whole language approaches to teaching reading and writing. But I’ve found that it doesn’t work as well as a combination of phonetics and whole language, so I depart from the standard and do what seems to work. But I wonder who benefits from the limited literacy that students acquire through whole-language approaches and whether any of the beneficiaries are represented by the board’s membership.
But this is a limited understanding of the “sponsorship” concept. The contrast between Raymond and Dora makes the social, political, and economic layers of sponsorship clearer. Even access to sponsorship positions is mediated and regulated by other, more powerful sponsors. And what we have to read can be formative of political positions and ideological presuppositions we embrace (174). And Brandt demonstrates well the ways in which literacy becomes a means by which corporate practices (and thus the ideologies that undergird them) enter the home and individual consciousness.
When Brandt began to discuss appropriating other people’s literacies to adapt to new contexts, I began to consider what literacies we can adapt to the FYC class, and how we can best introduce them. Brandt’s descriptions of Carol and Sarah indicate, I think, that modeling is useful, even though other research we read earlier in the semester seemed to indicate that it was not. It seems to me that the difference lies between providing belletristic essays as models for students expected to engage academic discourse, and providing models whose structures can be adapted for relevantly similar contexts. The success of the latter (McCarthy saw some success with this, too) and lack of success of the former, combined with Heath’s findings that students come to think of themselves as writers when we take their writing seriously indicates to me that the best models for our students are their own writing.
McCarthy: A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing across the Curriculum”
I think that there are some other factors that should probably be considered before any generalizations are made about male students in general on the basis of this observation. First, as my first sentence should make clear, I’m not sure we can extrapolate anything about how women learn from observing how a man does. Although McCarthy mentions that David took the Composition class with male friends who were also in his group, she doesn’t mention whether he had male friends in the Poetry class. David took Poetry with his girlfriend, we know, but we do not know if she (or whomever he was involved with romantically) was in the Composition class. Here’s the thing: Sedgwick and others have shown that one primary way American males establish public masculinity and homosocially bond is through competition with other males. That could have been a factor in a class in which David worked so closely with other males, especially males with whom David had already bonded. Regarding the Poetry class, I wonder how much internalized ideologies of masculinity and gender set David up for failure in a class in which he had no male competitors. Moreover, we do not know how his girlfriend did in that class. If she did better than he, I think we should ask how much his failure to perform as he would have liked had to do with the idea that men aren’t good at poetry, with the fear of feminization. Now, I’m not saying that these are conscious processes. I don’t claim to know how the unconscious works in these situations. I’m just trying to point out social factors that also have fingured into David’s (un)successful performances in different contexts. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I think researchers all too often try to apply findings from data collected from observing one sex to the other, and that might not always be legitimate, whether for social or neurophysiological reasons.
McCarthy does provide some useful information for those of us who want to teach. For instance, that “Dave’s characteristic approach across courses was to focus so fully on the particular new ways of thinking and writing in each setting that commonalities with previous writing were obscured for him” (245) tells us that we may need to point out explicitly the connections and commonalities between different writing situations. It seems that having students write summaries might be a useful way to get students to stick their toes into new discourse communities. That Dave relied so on material texts as he wrote ought to tell us something—I’m just not sure what it is. Dr. Forson’s admission that his responses to student papers were designed to allow him to justify grades tells us one way we might want to avoid commenting on papers. And it seems that we also learn something really obvious from him: give the students a chance to respond to your comments; not doing so is to deny the dialogic dimension of writing.
Peace to all.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Proposal
I decided to post my proposal becasue I'm hoping you folks in my class will comment on it and let me know if I'm being clear about my aims. I'm also considering posting parts of my arguments as I construct them. But that's a little scary. Proposal below.
Title: Identity, Community, and the Tyranny of the Syllabus: Resistance Is Not Futile
Proposal: Educators concerned with the development of critical consciousness must listen to what students say matters to them and try to shape classes around students’ interests and concerns. How, then, do we reconcile these aims with the imposition of an instructor-generated syllabus on students? Doesn’t a syllabus tell students what must matter to them in a particular class? Doesn’t it deny students the opportunity to tell the instructor what they want and need? Doesn’t the syllabus interpellate ideal students, thus demanding that actual students erase their own identities and reconstruct themselves as the ideal student hailed by the syllabus? Do we, when we hand out pre-constructed syllabi, deny student agency by limiting their access to potential identities such that dialogue between subjects is impossible? In this paper, I suggest some preliminary answers to these questions through an exploration of the nature of the relationships between the teacher as writer, the syllabus as text, and the students as an audience.
I begin by offering a definition of the syllabus that establishes it as a hybrid document embodying an instructor’s efforts to negotiate the often-conflicting ends of multiple audiences: the institution, the students, and the instructor him- or herself. I posit that the syllabus, as a text, defines the parameters of what happens in a composition classroom. Moving to the issue of identity, I contemplate whether imposing the same requirements on every student erases constitutive identity differences and whether providing identical learning/writing situations for each student forces them all to adopt the identity of an ideal student. I also address how a syllabus can create a public instructor persona that undermines community in the composition classroom.
I conclude that while students and teacher(s) always forge a more or less successful discourse community during the time that they spend together, liberatory pedagogy affords an occasion for analysis and critique of the community that emerges out of their interactions. Uniquely suited to the task, emancipatory pedagogy allows an emergent community of scholars to examine the syllabus as a text and to communally discuss and critique its attempts to impose identity upon them. This paper will appeal primarily to those who see composition instruction as a singular opportunity to claim academic discourse as a site of resistance to cultural and intellectual hegemony and who believe that writing “is a local act of self-construction within discourse,” in the words of Robert P. Yagelski.
Title: Identity, Community, and the Tyranny of the Syllabus: Resistance Is Not Futile
Proposal: Educators concerned with the development of critical consciousness must listen to what students say matters to them and try to shape classes around students’ interests and concerns. How, then, do we reconcile these aims with the imposition of an instructor-generated syllabus on students? Doesn’t a syllabus tell students what must matter to them in a particular class? Doesn’t it deny students the opportunity to tell the instructor what they want and need? Doesn’t the syllabus interpellate ideal students, thus demanding that actual students erase their own identities and reconstruct themselves as the ideal student hailed by the syllabus? Do we, when we hand out pre-constructed syllabi, deny student agency by limiting their access to potential identities such that dialogue between subjects is impossible? In this paper, I suggest some preliminary answers to these questions through an exploration of the nature of the relationships between the teacher as writer, the syllabus as text, and the students as an audience.
I begin by offering a definition of the syllabus that establishes it as a hybrid document embodying an instructor’s efforts to negotiate the often-conflicting ends of multiple audiences: the institution, the students, and the instructor him- or herself. I posit that the syllabus, as a text, defines the parameters of what happens in a composition classroom. Moving to the issue of identity, I contemplate whether imposing the same requirements on every student erases constitutive identity differences and whether providing identical learning/writing situations for each student forces them all to adopt the identity of an ideal student. I also address how a syllabus can create a public instructor persona that undermines community in the composition classroom.
I conclude that while students and teacher(s) always forge a more or less successful discourse community during the time that they spend together, liberatory pedagogy affords an occasion for analysis and critique of the community that emerges out of their interactions. Uniquely suited to the task, emancipatory pedagogy allows an emergent community of scholars to examine the syllabus as a text and to communally discuss and critique its attempts to impose identity upon them. This paper will appeal primarily to those who see composition instruction as a singular opportunity to claim academic discourse as a site of resistance to cultural and intellectual hegemony and who believe that writing “is a local act of self-construction within discourse,” in the words of Robert P. Yagelski.
More Comments on Comments
Well, Dr. J., I'd have to say that I disagree with you when you say that we can really only "know" through knowledge. I don't think we can "know" at all! But I do think that we can arrive at rationally/socially justified belief, and that's what counts for me. I want to add the crucial point (for me) that it really doesn't matter that we can't know with Cartesian certainty. It's still worth aiming at. That means that we don't have to abandon the criteria by which we search for truth, the good, justice, beauty, or any other ideals; it just means that we aim at them because we've decided that they're worth aiming at. That's precisely why I feel that a liberatory pedagogy is worthwhile. I don't think I'll change the world. I doubt that what happens in my class will involve significant change for anyone but me. But in trying, I construct myself as the kind of person I've decided I weant to be--the kind of person who rages against the injustice inherent in capitalism's construction of us as good little worker bees who unflinchingly swallow everything that spews out of Rupert Murdoch's ideology machine.
Thanks for pointing me toward Giddens. I'm not familiar with his work, but it sounds like it's right up my alley. I've been reading Yagelski's Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self, and he's pointed toward a fellow named Paul Smith. I've got my reading around the issues of identity and subjectivity cut out for me for a while!
Thank you, too, for letting me know that you found our conversation and my posting productive (destructive?). It's not often that professors let students know that their thought has had an effect. Lets keep this dialogue thing going everyone!
I've deleted the hiccup.
Peace to all.
Thanks for pointing me toward Giddens. I'm not familiar with his work, but it sounds like it's right up my alley. I've been reading Yagelski's Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self, and he's pointed toward a fellow named Paul Smith. I've got my reading around the issues of identity and subjectivity cut out for me for a while!
Thank you, too, for letting me know that you found our conversation and my posting productive (destructive?). It's not often that professors let students know that their thought has had an effect. Lets keep this dialogue thing going everyone!
I've deleted the hiccup.
Peace to all.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Week of 4/14
Sullivan: “Taking Control of the Page”
I think that Sullivan was a little optimistic about how much control writers would have over the appearance of their pages. What’s happened, in my experience, is that some academic publishers now expect authors to format books and articles according to publishers’ very rigid guidelines. Thus, they’ve been able to cut expenses by cutting staff and shifting responsibility for what was formerly done by layout technicians to authors. Sullivan is prescient in this regard: “more and more frequently a company envisions word publishing equipment as a way to make the writers take on the job of designers and publication producers” (50). For instance, I copy edited a book that was published by Cambridge Scholars Press last year. It was the third book I had copy edited for an academic press (the first was for Humanities and the second for Pearson). It was the first time that my duties included layout. I had to insert page and chapter headings, the title page, the table of contents, the index, and the bibliography. The publisher specified which fonts were to be used for different parts of the book, margin size, spacing after punctuation, where images could be placed and how they were to be captioned. The author had no input into how these things. He was just given a list of formatting requirements that had to be met and a deadline.
I also think that Sullivan’s assertion that writers didn’t have to “think carefully about how the look of the page will affect the meaning of the text” (43) is only true on a limited basis because attending to the effect on meaning of white space and shape of text is a large part of what poets do, isn’t it? And it has been for a very long time. Moreover, Sullivan is not quite correct in saying that textbooks haven’t “embraced the computer and woven it into their conceptions of writing and its teaching” (45), but this article was published so long ago. I sat on the 101 Textbook Committee at CSN for a couple of years, and a lot of the books we considered did address the issue of computers in the classroom, but it’s usually limited to ways of using the computer for revision. Perhaps this is another example of what we’ve been calling the “generational divide” when it comes to technology. Because we older folks haven’t grown up with computers, we seem more comfortable finding ways to use computers to make what we’re already doing easier, less messy, and less time-consuming. But it seems to me that you younger folks are using computers in ways that never occur to me, but that I’m grateful to you for sharing. Last week we read that writing as a technology structures thinking—I think the same is true of computers as well.
Harris and Wambeam: “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy”
Every time I sign up for a class, I hope my world view will be shaken up and my way of thinking about some issue will be transformed. It happened as I read this article. You all may recall that at the beginning of the semester, I was really pretty resistant to computer-mediated communication. But Harris and Wambeam’s description of the ways they’ve used computer-mediated communication to get students to develop ideas through writing is pretty exciting, as is the prospect of being able to expand the opportunities for “participating in dialogic situations that had not been possible previously” (354).
One thing that occurred to me as I read their list of objectives on page 355 was how inaccurate and misleading it is to talk about the writing process. I don’t find that I use the same process for every paper I write, and I’m not just talking about techniques. The fact is that not everyone engages the same process, and individuals don’t even always engage the same processes. Maybe it’s time we stopped speaking and writing of “the” writing process and began speaking and writing about writing processes.
Their idea of “play” is intriguing as well, but I do have a couple of questions. First, is there evidence that play performs the same functions for adults as it does for children? Second, I’m not sure that all play is social. But, be that all as it may, the idea of bringing a sense of fun and playfulness into the classroom has always been one of my aims, not just because I hope my students will enjoy our time together, but also because I think people are more likely to take advantage of learning opportunities if they aren’t anxious to escape! Perhaps only then can they begin to see all of the ways that writing can be relevant to them their goals for themselves.
A couple of other technical questions: I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a MOO situation. Could someone point me towards one so that I could explore it? I LOVE the idea of having guests come in and giving students the opportunity to interact with people with whom they otherwise would not.
Do we have access to MOO environments and a LISTSERV for our comp classes? If UNLV doesn’t provide them, are there commercial sites that do? Given the delays the authors say were consequent upon the way the listserv email worked, is there another option available through which we can carry on these kinds of conversations without requiring that our students all be online at the same time? Do the email or discussion boards in WebCampus work so that threads can be traced and replied to as the authors indicate their students were able to do? I really like the idea of written back-and-forth, and I suspect that they are correct in suspecting that if students were made explicitly aware of the fact that their online interactions really do involve idea development, they might more clearly see the connection between writing and thinking.
Really good stuff.
McGee and Ericsson: “The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian”
Well. I was unaware that one could go in and turn the grammar check off. I usually turn off my screen if I can in order to escape the tyranny of the (usually incorrect) wavy lines. I used to tell the students at the Writing Center to turn their screens off for their drafts. I had this standard speech that I’d go around to classes and give at the beginning of each semester. In the spiel, as we called it, I’d tell the students that their first free tip from the Writing Center was to ignore their grammar check, that it was written by computer geeks and if they had questions about grammar, they should come to me, the grammar geek. They’d laugh, but they did come to us at the Writing Center. They came to my grammar workshops, too.
Even though I’d considered how badly MSGC worked, I hadn’t seriously considered the politics behind and embedded into its functioning. I’m not unaware of the ways standardized grammar and usage function politically in American culture. Another part of my standard spiel is about how the rules of grammar were designed by a group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ruling class white guys who wanted to make the rest of us think that they were smarter and better than we are. I also talk to them about how the ways we use language can make people think we are what we’re not or that we are not what we are. In other words, I talk to students about how usage marks us as certain sorts of people. I also talk to them about tone (level of informality/formality) and how stuff we say isn’t always acceptable when we write. Still, I hadn’t extended my analysis of the political uses and functions of grammar to the technologies that are reshaping grammar, usage, and style. Well, DUH! This article has changed the way I will approach and use technology in the future.
And since we’re talking about the political ramifications of technology, I have to go off on my anti-Google, anti-Yahoo rant. Google and Yahoo have designed search engines for use in China at the behest of the oppressive Chinese government. If a person runs a search and the search turns up pages that contain the phrases “human rights,” “freedom,” or “democracy,” those sites do not show up in the search results. In other words, websites that contain those phrases do not enter China thanks to Google and Yahoo. Please join me (and thousands of people around the world) in boycotting those search engines. AltaVista is a good search engine to use instead.
Slattery: “Undistributing Work through Writing: How Technical Writers Manage Texts in Complex Environments”
Okay, this article was really difficult to slog through. The idea that “informational technology is not a driver of organizational change per se, but part of a complex shift in the social division of labor” (313) seems to be only half the picture, though. As I mentioned in my comments about Sullivan’s article, it seems to me that IT has driven some changes within the context of capital’s need to increase profits by cutting labor costs. The “hierarchies and divisions” (315) these writers negotiate provide an institutional framework that carries with it particular goals, ideologies, and modes of authority and authorization—they are Foucauldian disciplinary discourses, in other words.
What was most striking to me about this article is how much the writers’ practices mirror my own when writing a complex or lengthy argument. I move between many different texts, some of which I’ve written in the past, some of which have been written by others, and some of which are assemblages of texts I’ve written and others have written. Sometimes I’m moving between 4 or 5 texts. I have negotiated up to 10 or 15 different documents during one writing session for a particular paper. As I begin working on my dissertation and assembling it out of papers I’ve already written, primary theoretical texts, secondary critical texts, and primary literary texts, the processes I engage get more and more complex, and I rely more and more on my ability to “shift . . . attention from one artifact to the next” (317). I “reuse” texts, “move . . . information across IT environments, and manage “near-simultaneous viewing of multiple texts” (318).
As I think about this article and last week’s article about assemblage together, I’ve come to realize that it’s really kind of weird that we’re not allowed to use parts of papers we’ve written for one class for papers we write for another class without asking permission from the instructors. I’m not sure what the point of that refusal is; I do know that because of it, I’ve had to scrap projects because I started working on them in one class and wanted to continue pursuing them in another. Weird way for an emphasis on orginiality to play out, considering that the work is my own original work…
Peace to all.
I think that Sullivan was a little optimistic about how much control writers would have over the appearance of their pages. What’s happened, in my experience, is that some academic publishers now expect authors to format books and articles according to publishers’ very rigid guidelines. Thus, they’ve been able to cut expenses by cutting staff and shifting responsibility for what was formerly done by layout technicians to authors. Sullivan is prescient in this regard: “more and more frequently a company envisions word publishing equipment as a way to make the writers take on the job of designers and publication producers” (50). For instance, I copy edited a book that was published by Cambridge Scholars Press last year. It was the third book I had copy edited for an academic press (the first was for Humanities and the second for Pearson). It was the first time that my duties included layout. I had to insert page and chapter headings, the title page, the table of contents, the index, and the bibliography. The publisher specified which fonts were to be used for different parts of the book, margin size, spacing after punctuation, where images could be placed and how they were to be captioned. The author had no input into how these things. He was just given a list of formatting requirements that had to be met and a deadline.
I also think that Sullivan’s assertion that writers didn’t have to “think carefully about how the look of the page will affect the meaning of the text” (43) is only true on a limited basis because attending to the effect on meaning of white space and shape of text is a large part of what poets do, isn’t it? And it has been for a very long time. Moreover, Sullivan is not quite correct in saying that textbooks haven’t “embraced the computer and woven it into their conceptions of writing and its teaching” (45), but this article was published so long ago. I sat on the 101 Textbook Committee at CSN for a couple of years, and a lot of the books we considered did address the issue of computers in the classroom, but it’s usually limited to ways of using the computer for revision. Perhaps this is another example of what we’ve been calling the “generational divide” when it comes to technology. Because we older folks haven’t grown up with computers, we seem more comfortable finding ways to use computers to make what we’re already doing easier, less messy, and less time-consuming. But it seems to me that you younger folks are using computers in ways that never occur to me, but that I’m grateful to you for sharing. Last week we read that writing as a technology structures thinking—I think the same is true of computers as well.
Harris and Wambeam: “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy”
Every time I sign up for a class, I hope my world view will be shaken up and my way of thinking about some issue will be transformed. It happened as I read this article. You all may recall that at the beginning of the semester, I was really pretty resistant to computer-mediated communication. But Harris and Wambeam’s description of the ways they’ve used computer-mediated communication to get students to develop ideas through writing is pretty exciting, as is the prospect of being able to expand the opportunities for “participating in dialogic situations that had not been possible previously” (354).
One thing that occurred to me as I read their list of objectives on page 355 was how inaccurate and misleading it is to talk about the writing process. I don’t find that I use the same process for every paper I write, and I’m not just talking about techniques. The fact is that not everyone engages the same process, and individuals don’t even always engage the same processes. Maybe it’s time we stopped speaking and writing of “the” writing process and began speaking and writing about writing processes.
Their idea of “play” is intriguing as well, but I do have a couple of questions. First, is there evidence that play performs the same functions for adults as it does for children? Second, I’m not sure that all play is social. But, be that all as it may, the idea of bringing a sense of fun and playfulness into the classroom has always been one of my aims, not just because I hope my students will enjoy our time together, but also because I think people are more likely to take advantage of learning opportunities if they aren’t anxious to escape! Perhaps only then can they begin to see all of the ways that writing can be relevant to them their goals for themselves.
A couple of other technical questions: I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a MOO situation. Could someone point me towards one so that I could explore it? I LOVE the idea of having guests come in and giving students the opportunity to interact with people with whom they otherwise would not.
Do we have access to MOO environments and a LISTSERV for our comp classes? If UNLV doesn’t provide them, are there commercial sites that do? Given the delays the authors say were consequent upon the way the listserv email worked, is there another option available through which we can carry on these kinds of conversations without requiring that our students all be online at the same time? Do the email or discussion boards in WebCampus work so that threads can be traced and replied to as the authors indicate their students were able to do? I really like the idea of written back-and-forth, and I suspect that they are correct in suspecting that if students were made explicitly aware of the fact that their online interactions really do involve idea development, they might more clearly see the connection between writing and thinking.
Really good stuff.
McGee and Ericsson: “The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian”
Well. I was unaware that one could go in and turn the grammar check off. I usually turn off my screen if I can in order to escape the tyranny of the (usually incorrect) wavy lines. I used to tell the students at the Writing Center to turn their screens off for their drafts. I had this standard speech that I’d go around to classes and give at the beginning of each semester. In the spiel, as we called it, I’d tell the students that their first free tip from the Writing Center was to ignore their grammar check, that it was written by computer geeks and if they had questions about grammar, they should come to me, the grammar geek. They’d laugh, but they did come to us at the Writing Center. They came to my grammar workshops, too.
Even though I’d considered how badly MSGC worked, I hadn’t seriously considered the politics behind and embedded into its functioning. I’m not unaware of the ways standardized grammar and usage function politically in American culture. Another part of my standard spiel is about how the rules of grammar were designed by a group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ruling class white guys who wanted to make the rest of us think that they were smarter and better than we are. I also talk to them about how the ways we use language can make people think we are what we’re not or that we are not what we are. In other words, I talk to students about how usage marks us as certain sorts of people. I also talk to them about tone (level of informality/formality) and how stuff we say isn’t always acceptable when we write. Still, I hadn’t extended my analysis of the political uses and functions of grammar to the technologies that are reshaping grammar, usage, and style. Well, DUH! This article has changed the way I will approach and use technology in the future.
And since we’re talking about the political ramifications of technology, I have to go off on my anti-Google, anti-Yahoo rant. Google and Yahoo have designed search engines for use in China at the behest of the oppressive Chinese government. If a person runs a search and the search turns up pages that contain the phrases “human rights,” “freedom,” or “democracy,” those sites do not show up in the search results. In other words, websites that contain those phrases do not enter China thanks to Google and Yahoo. Please join me (and thousands of people around the world) in boycotting those search engines. AltaVista is a good search engine to use instead.
Slattery: “Undistributing Work through Writing: How Technical Writers Manage Texts in Complex Environments”
Okay, this article was really difficult to slog through. The idea that “informational technology is not a driver of organizational change per se, but part of a complex shift in the social division of labor” (313) seems to be only half the picture, though. As I mentioned in my comments about Sullivan’s article, it seems to me that IT has driven some changes within the context of capital’s need to increase profits by cutting labor costs. The “hierarchies and divisions” (315) these writers negotiate provide an institutional framework that carries with it particular goals, ideologies, and modes of authority and authorization—they are Foucauldian disciplinary discourses, in other words.
What was most striking to me about this article is how much the writers’ practices mirror my own when writing a complex or lengthy argument. I move between many different texts, some of which I’ve written in the past, some of which have been written by others, and some of which are assemblages of texts I’ve written and others have written. Sometimes I’m moving between 4 or 5 texts. I have negotiated up to 10 or 15 different documents during one writing session for a particular paper. As I begin working on my dissertation and assembling it out of papers I’ve already written, primary theoretical texts, secondary critical texts, and primary literary texts, the processes I engage get more and more complex, and I rely more and more on my ability to “shift . . . attention from one artifact to the next” (317). I “reuse” texts, “move . . . information across IT environments, and manage “near-simultaneous viewing of multiple texts” (318).
As I think about this article and last week’s article about assemblage together, I’ve come to realize that it’s really kind of weird that we’re not allowed to use parts of papers we’ve written for one class for papers we write for another class without asking permission from the instructors. I’m not sure what the point of that refusal is; I do know that because of it, I’ve had to scrap projects because I started working on them in one class and wanted to continue pursuing them in another. Weird way for an emphasis on orginiality to play out, considering that the work is my own original work…
Peace to all.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Week of 4/7
Ong: “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction”
While I have some sympathy for what Ong has to say, I don’t think he has things quite right. First, it seems to me that not all writing is commensurate with narrative fiction. For instance, in my paper for this class, I’m arguing that the students constitute an audience, and the syllabus is a text we write for them. If it’s correct that the syllabus is a contract between the instructor and the students (as it’s increasingly being defined in the courts), then I don’t see how the audience is completely a fiction. And what about the audience for such venues as women’s magazines? That audience isn’t completely fictional either. I know Ong doesn’t deny that there are real people who fill the role of audience, but I don’t think he adequately attends to the role of agency—after all, writers may provide clues as to how they’d like the audience to relate to the text, but as agents, the audience members can reject the role(s) being constructed for them, can’t they?
Ong’s example of Hemingway’s idiosyncratic use of demonstrative pronouns, for instance, doesn’t strike me as relevant to all writing. What about writing that doesn’t have a narrator, for example. While Ong’s reading of the way Hemingway sets up the possibility of “camaraderie” with his use of deictic language is elegant, it’s not the case that the audience must enter into the narrator:audience relationship in the way the language offers.
This points to another problem with Ong’s analysis of the writer’s construction of the audience: the audience doesn’t always perform as collectively as he holds it does. Audiences don’t always interact the way he seems to think they do. And finally, Ong’s claim that all writing is relevantly similar to narrative fiction privileges fiction and literature, replicating the relegation of composition to the position of the least important, least interesting aspect of English studies. This article will be useful for my paper, but as I said, I think he only has part of the picture.
Porter: “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community”
The idea of “presupposition” is something I was trying to get at in my critique of “Distibuted Cognition at Work.” The unstated things they seemed to assume that everyone would agree with that I didn’t agree with. And I see now that I placed my focus in the wrong place. I don’t really deny that the goal of the university is in some sense to rank students. I deny that it ought to be, though, and that’s the presupposition that the authors made that I disagreed with. That’s what I was trying so emphatically and insistently to get at.
Just a point of information: Jefferson’s original phrase was not “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”; it was “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” Quite a difference, huh?
It’s not the same thing to assert that “the audience . . . is as responsible for . . . production as the writer” (38) and to assert that “in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse” (38). The first clause assigns equal responsibility to writers and readers in the production of meaning, the Barthesian capital-T Text. The second eliminates writers from meaning production altogether. That’s a problem. While I’m not sure meaning production is always a fifty-fifty relationship between writers and readers, it does always involve both terms, even if the only reader is the writer. That’s what Foucault tries to get at in his essay “What Is an Author?” which is a response to Barthes’ idea, developed in “The Death of the Author,” that the author plays no part in the production of meaning.
A philosopher named Joseph Margolis has a useful understanding of the subject as emergent that resolves, I think, many of the issues of constraint and (lack of) possibility of subjectivity/agency raised by postmodern theorists that are raised in this article (at least by implication), and Porter does a pretty good job himself. I think that what we do affects the very systems that “constrain” us and out of which we emerge as agents, and Porter provides a concise articulation of this belief. In other words, we needn’t be as fatalistic (or as nihilistic) regarding human freedom as postmodern theory often is. I like this guy. I’ll be reading more of him.
Bruffee: “Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of (Hu)Mankind”
First off, this article was published in 1984, and there’s no excuse for using “mankind” as a gender-neutral noun. Or is Bruffee talking about only males here?
Having read Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions several times, I’ve got to say that I don’t think that the Kuhnian concept of “normal science” is simply transferable to language use as Bruffee indicates Rorty does. If it is, Bruffee and Rorty need to contrast “normal language” with a “crisis”—not with “abnormal language.” And they need to explain, as Kuhn does, what causes the crises that lead to paradigm shifts. Moreover, Kuhn explicitly rejects the notion of paradigm as model, even though that’s how the word “paradigm” has come to be used. Yet, that’s how Bruffee seems to be using it. No, I don’t think this works very well at all.
Nor do I completely accept the idea that “we can think because we can talk” (420). We can do a certain kind of thinking (i.e., so-called logical, rational reasoning) because we can talk, but it’s clear that we can think things for which we don’t have words, and not all thinking is reasoning—we do call some kind of thinking “intuition,” after all. Are we to understand that Helen Keller was incapable of thought before Annie Sullivan signed “water” into her palm? Or is it more accurate to say that Helen Keller couldn’t communicate her thoughts before she acquired language? Moreover, to say that “[t]he way they talk with each other determines the way they will think and the way they will write” (422) strikes me as too strong a claim—influence, strongly influence, yes. Determine? I’m not so sure. I know that this is inconsistent with the postmodern/poststructuralist neo-Nietzschean understanding of language. But I think that this particular understanding of language may be based on a fundamental confusion between ontology and epistemology. In other words, just because we can’t understand something without language’s mediation doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist outside of language. Mediation is not existence.
Finally, I think Bruffee approaches (albeit unquestioningly) the Foucauldian conception of authority and authorized speech when he says “The product of normal discourse is ‘the sort of statement that can be agreed to be true by all participants whom the other participants count as rational’ ” (423). However, on Bruffee’s model, resistance is futile—all we can do is replicate the power relations that inhere in discourses. Resistance would, on this understanding of normal discourse, be counted as irrationality, and thus dismissed. As you may guess, I’m not down with that at all. And his appropriation of Rorty’s notion of “abnormal discourse” doesn’t rid him of this problem. On that view, rationality rests on “gaining one’s point” with a particular community. Again, if rationality rests on acceptance by the authorized community, resistance to the authorizing community remains futile. Clearly, it’s not. Revolutions happen.
Part of Bruffee’s argument rests on a false dichotomy. He asks what would happen if we assumed that people write in order to be accepted, to join, rather than assuming that people write to persuade, to distinguish themselves. But these goals are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we often do one to do the other, with the movement going either way. Sometimes we write in order to persuade that we should be accepted, thus doing both at once.
Finally, the biggest problem I have with Bruffee is also the problem I have with anyone who claims that there is no such thing as knowledge. That statement is a claim to certain knowledge, and thus it is a self-defeating statement. So, “to say that there is no fixed and certain point of reference” (427) is to claim that utterance as a fixed and certain point of reference. And this brings me back to my original point. What Kuhn says about knowledge of things in the world (science) is not necessarily true of knowledge itself. Thus, even though scientific knowledge may be indeterminate without being completely relative, it’s not at all clear to me that the same is true of epistemological claims about the nature of knowledge itself.
Trimbur: “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning”
I really liked this article. Trimbur’s description of left-wing discomfort and the desire “to interrupt the conversation, to denaturalize its workings, and to talk about the way conversation legitimizes itself by its very performance” almost captures the way I feel about life in general and teaching in particular. Almost, but not quite. The problem is Trimbur’s reification of the conversation, the way the agents who participate in the conversation disappear into conversation’s self-legitimizing self-performance.
Trimbur’s critique of Bruffee and Rorty echoes some of the things I said about it myself, so I won’t go so much into that, but the idea of focusing on the disagreement/conflict inherent in consensus is a revelation for me. Back in the 70s and 80s, I worked with several political and educational collectives that sought consensus, and we focused on reaching agreement, so compromise became our focus. I even worked with a professor in the Philosophy department at SUNY Buffalo and trained his medical ethics students in the art of consensus decision-making. But I didn’t know how to deal with certain problems that repeatedly arose. For instance, women often capitulate to men in order to keep the peace. We often let social dynamics other than our common goals keep us from achieving true consensus, in other words. Those of us who worked within these consensus-focused communities knew that we belonged to “ ‘many overlapping, mutually inclusive communities’ ” (469), but we didn’t know how to find the language that would allow difference to work for us instead of against us. Of course, I hadn’t read (or even heard of) Bakhtin at that time; if I had, I might have been able to find the words to explain the problem other than by saying that men were babies who had to be right or their ________s shriveled. Sorry guys.
I guess what I like most about Trimbur’s article is that it points out the ways in which resistance needn’t be futile, the ways in which revolution (or even just change from below) might be possible. Trimbur’s notion of a “utopian” ideal is similar to what I think about universal moral goods: They may not exist, but the idea of them sure can provide a goal/aim for living one’s life. Let me explain. I don’t struggle against injustice because I think justice exists and is recoverable by revolutionary struggle. I struggle against injustice because I think it’s worthwhile to do so, because I think that in doing so, I can participate in the social construction of me as a subject and as an agent. That’s my life’s work, you know—to construct myself, as far as I am able, as the kind of person I have decided it’s worthwhile to be. Part of that involves aiming toward things I don’t believe I can actually achieve simply because those things are worth aiming for. I don’t think that’s naïve. It would be naïve if I actually thought I were going to change the world. I don’t. I think the only thing in this world I can change is me. And I can’t completely control that change. Nonetheless, I think the struggle is itself worthwhile, and it is what gives my life meaning.
Please keep in mind that while I do not reject the notion of the subject/agent like a good postmodernist, I do not conceive of it in Cartesian terms, as the center of knowledge and thus everything else. Nor do I think of the individual as the be-all and end-all of action. I think Emerson and Descartes ruined everything…Well, maybe not everything, but a lot of things.
Back to what all this means for composition pedagogy. Trimbur’s way of looking at consensus is useful precisely as he says it is, I think. It can provide a “critical measure to help students [and others] identify the structures of power that inhibit communication . . . by authorizing certain styles of reading while excluding others” (475). This way of using consensus, in addition to being useful as a “critical instrument to open gaps in the conversation through which differences may emerge” (476), can also introduce the idea of utopian aspirations as worthwhile without the idea that what is worth aiming at must be achievable. The idea that complete consensus might be unachievable yet still worth aiming for is useful for me in this way, too.
Johnson-Eilola & Selber: “Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage”
What a challenging article! I’ve thought for a long time that “intellectual property” is a strange kind of capitalist entity, predicated on individualism and competition. I still think that, only now I’m not so sure I’m completely alone in my “How Can We Own Ideas?” universe, with the additional insight, gained from this article, that the individualism presupposed by the notion of plagiarism is a Romantic individualism.
I have some sympathy for this point of view, if only because I have a sense of how little there is that’s truly original about my own writing and how few original ideas I have. Most everything I write and think involves synthesizing stuff I’ve read and heard elsewhere. Yet I’ve found in working with students that they consistently and across the board find synthesis the most difficult thing to consciously do while writing—often because they cannot understand how it’s different from plagiarism.
I wondered as I was reading how allowing students to remix and assemble papers would help to prepare them for what they’ll be expected to do in other classes, and while the authors address this issue, their explanation indicates to me once again something that has come up in class after class, article after article: One or two semesters of writing instruction is not nearly enough.
One thing I started to think about while reading this article, although I’m not quite sure what triggered it, is that entrance into a discourse community is also entrance into an activity community. I’m not sure what all of the implications of this are, but I do think that one of the important ones is that authorization to speak is also authorization to act, and that seems significant to me.
Peace to all.
While I have some sympathy for what Ong has to say, I don’t think he has things quite right. First, it seems to me that not all writing is commensurate with narrative fiction. For instance, in my paper for this class, I’m arguing that the students constitute an audience, and the syllabus is a text we write for them. If it’s correct that the syllabus is a contract between the instructor and the students (as it’s increasingly being defined in the courts), then I don’t see how the audience is completely a fiction. And what about the audience for such venues as women’s magazines? That audience isn’t completely fictional either. I know Ong doesn’t deny that there are real people who fill the role of audience, but I don’t think he adequately attends to the role of agency—after all, writers may provide clues as to how they’d like the audience to relate to the text, but as agents, the audience members can reject the role(s) being constructed for them, can’t they?
Ong’s example of Hemingway’s idiosyncratic use of demonstrative pronouns, for instance, doesn’t strike me as relevant to all writing. What about writing that doesn’t have a narrator, for example. While Ong’s reading of the way Hemingway sets up the possibility of “camaraderie” with his use of deictic language is elegant, it’s not the case that the audience must enter into the narrator:audience relationship in the way the language offers.
This points to another problem with Ong’s analysis of the writer’s construction of the audience: the audience doesn’t always perform as collectively as he holds it does. Audiences don’t always interact the way he seems to think they do. And finally, Ong’s claim that all writing is relevantly similar to narrative fiction privileges fiction and literature, replicating the relegation of composition to the position of the least important, least interesting aspect of English studies. This article will be useful for my paper, but as I said, I think he only has part of the picture.
Porter: “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community”
The idea of “presupposition” is something I was trying to get at in my critique of “Distibuted Cognition at Work.” The unstated things they seemed to assume that everyone would agree with that I didn’t agree with. And I see now that I placed my focus in the wrong place. I don’t really deny that the goal of the university is in some sense to rank students. I deny that it ought to be, though, and that’s the presupposition that the authors made that I disagreed with. That’s what I was trying so emphatically and insistently to get at.
Just a point of information: Jefferson’s original phrase was not “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”; it was “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” Quite a difference, huh?
It’s not the same thing to assert that “the audience . . . is as responsible for . . . production as the writer” (38) and to assert that “in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse” (38). The first clause assigns equal responsibility to writers and readers in the production of meaning, the Barthesian capital-T Text. The second eliminates writers from meaning production altogether. That’s a problem. While I’m not sure meaning production is always a fifty-fifty relationship between writers and readers, it does always involve both terms, even if the only reader is the writer. That’s what Foucault tries to get at in his essay “What Is an Author?” which is a response to Barthes’ idea, developed in “The Death of the Author,” that the author plays no part in the production of meaning.
A philosopher named Joseph Margolis has a useful understanding of the subject as emergent that resolves, I think, many of the issues of constraint and (lack of) possibility of subjectivity/agency raised by postmodern theorists that are raised in this article (at least by implication), and Porter does a pretty good job himself. I think that what we do affects the very systems that “constrain” us and out of which we emerge as agents, and Porter provides a concise articulation of this belief. In other words, we needn’t be as fatalistic (or as nihilistic) regarding human freedom as postmodern theory often is. I like this guy. I’ll be reading more of him.
Bruffee: “Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of (Hu)Mankind”
First off, this article was published in 1984, and there’s no excuse for using “mankind” as a gender-neutral noun. Or is Bruffee talking about only males here?
Having read Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions several times, I’ve got to say that I don’t think that the Kuhnian concept of “normal science” is simply transferable to language use as Bruffee indicates Rorty does. If it is, Bruffee and Rorty need to contrast “normal language” with a “crisis”—not with “abnormal language.” And they need to explain, as Kuhn does, what causes the crises that lead to paradigm shifts. Moreover, Kuhn explicitly rejects the notion of paradigm as model, even though that’s how the word “paradigm” has come to be used. Yet, that’s how Bruffee seems to be using it. No, I don’t think this works very well at all.
Nor do I completely accept the idea that “we can think because we can talk” (420). We can do a certain kind of thinking (i.e., so-called logical, rational reasoning) because we can talk, but it’s clear that we can think things for which we don’t have words, and not all thinking is reasoning—we do call some kind of thinking “intuition,” after all. Are we to understand that Helen Keller was incapable of thought before Annie Sullivan signed “water” into her palm? Or is it more accurate to say that Helen Keller couldn’t communicate her thoughts before she acquired language? Moreover, to say that “[t]he way they talk with each other determines the way they will think and the way they will write” (422) strikes me as too strong a claim—influence, strongly influence, yes. Determine? I’m not so sure. I know that this is inconsistent with the postmodern/poststructuralist neo-Nietzschean understanding of language. But I think that this particular understanding of language may be based on a fundamental confusion between ontology and epistemology. In other words, just because we can’t understand something without language’s mediation doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist outside of language. Mediation is not existence.
Finally, I think Bruffee approaches (albeit unquestioningly) the Foucauldian conception of authority and authorized speech when he says “The product of normal discourse is ‘the sort of statement that can be agreed to be true by all participants whom the other participants count as rational’ ” (423). However, on Bruffee’s model, resistance is futile—all we can do is replicate the power relations that inhere in discourses. Resistance would, on this understanding of normal discourse, be counted as irrationality, and thus dismissed. As you may guess, I’m not down with that at all. And his appropriation of Rorty’s notion of “abnormal discourse” doesn’t rid him of this problem. On that view, rationality rests on “gaining one’s point” with a particular community. Again, if rationality rests on acceptance by the authorized community, resistance to the authorizing community remains futile. Clearly, it’s not. Revolutions happen.
Part of Bruffee’s argument rests on a false dichotomy. He asks what would happen if we assumed that people write in order to be accepted, to join, rather than assuming that people write to persuade, to distinguish themselves. But these goals are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we often do one to do the other, with the movement going either way. Sometimes we write in order to persuade that we should be accepted, thus doing both at once.
Finally, the biggest problem I have with Bruffee is also the problem I have with anyone who claims that there is no such thing as knowledge. That statement is a claim to certain knowledge, and thus it is a self-defeating statement. So, “to say that there is no fixed and certain point of reference” (427) is to claim that utterance as a fixed and certain point of reference. And this brings me back to my original point. What Kuhn says about knowledge of things in the world (science) is not necessarily true of knowledge itself. Thus, even though scientific knowledge may be indeterminate without being completely relative, it’s not at all clear to me that the same is true of epistemological claims about the nature of knowledge itself.
Trimbur: “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning”
I really liked this article. Trimbur’s description of left-wing discomfort and the desire “to interrupt the conversation, to denaturalize its workings, and to talk about the way conversation legitimizes itself by its very performance” almost captures the way I feel about life in general and teaching in particular. Almost, but not quite. The problem is Trimbur’s reification of the conversation, the way the agents who participate in the conversation disappear into conversation’s self-legitimizing self-performance.
Trimbur’s critique of Bruffee and Rorty echoes some of the things I said about it myself, so I won’t go so much into that, but the idea of focusing on the disagreement/conflict inherent in consensus is a revelation for me. Back in the 70s and 80s, I worked with several political and educational collectives that sought consensus, and we focused on reaching agreement, so compromise became our focus. I even worked with a professor in the Philosophy department at SUNY Buffalo and trained his medical ethics students in the art of consensus decision-making. But I didn’t know how to deal with certain problems that repeatedly arose. For instance, women often capitulate to men in order to keep the peace. We often let social dynamics other than our common goals keep us from achieving true consensus, in other words. Those of us who worked within these consensus-focused communities knew that we belonged to “ ‘many overlapping, mutually inclusive communities’ ” (469), but we didn’t know how to find the language that would allow difference to work for us instead of against us. Of course, I hadn’t read (or even heard of) Bakhtin at that time; if I had, I might have been able to find the words to explain the problem other than by saying that men were babies who had to be right or their ________s shriveled. Sorry guys.
I guess what I like most about Trimbur’s article is that it points out the ways in which resistance needn’t be futile, the ways in which revolution (or even just change from below) might be possible. Trimbur’s notion of a “utopian” ideal is similar to what I think about universal moral goods: They may not exist, but the idea of them sure can provide a goal/aim for living one’s life. Let me explain. I don’t struggle against injustice because I think justice exists and is recoverable by revolutionary struggle. I struggle against injustice because I think it’s worthwhile to do so, because I think that in doing so, I can participate in the social construction of me as a subject and as an agent. That’s my life’s work, you know—to construct myself, as far as I am able, as the kind of person I have decided it’s worthwhile to be. Part of that involves aiming toward things I don’t believe I can actually achieve simply because those things are worth aiming for. I don’t think that’s naïve. It would be naïve if I actually thought I were going to change the world. I don’t. I think the only thing in this world I can change is me. And I can’t completely control that change. Nonetheless, I think the struggle is itself worthwhile, and it is what gives my life meaning.
Please keep in mind that while I do not reject the notion of the subject/agent like a good postmodernist, I do not conceive of it in Cartesian terms, as the center of knowledge and thus everything else. Nor do I think of the individual as the be-all and end-all of action. I think Emerson and Descartes ruined everything…Well, maybe not everything, but a lot of things.
Back to what all this means for composition pedagogy. Trimbur’s way of looking at consensus is useful precisely as he says it is, I think. It can provide a “critical measure to help students [and others] identify the structures of power that inhibit communication . . . by authorizing certain styles of reading while excluding others” (475). This way of using consensus, in addition to being useful as a “critical instrument to open gaps in the conversation through which differences may emerge” (476), can also introduce the idea of utopian aspirations as worthwhile without the idea that what is worth aiming at must be achievable. The idea that complete consensus might be unachievable yet still worth aiming for is useful for me in this way, too.
Johnson-Eilola & Selber: “Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage”
What a challenging article! I’ve thought for a long time that “intellectual property” is a strange kind of capitalist entity, predicated on individualism and competition. I still think that, only now I’m not so sure I’m completely alone in my “How Can We Own Ideas?” universe, with the additional insight, gained from this article, that the individualism presupposed by the notion of plagiarism is a Romantic individualism.
I have some sympathy for this point of view, if only because I have a sense of how little there is that’s truly original about my own writing and how few original ideas I have. Most everything I write and think involves synthesizing stuff I’ve read and heard elsewhere. Yet I’ve found in working with students that they consistently and across the board find synthesis the most difficult thing to consciously do while writing—often because they cannot understand how it’s different from plagiarism.
I wondered as I was reading how allowing students to remix and assemble papers would help to prepare them for what they’ll be expected to do in other classes, and while the authors address this issue, their explanation indicates to me once again something that has come up in class after class, article after article: One or two semesters of writing instruction is not nearly enough.
One thing I started to think about while reading this article, although I’m not quite sure what triggered it, is that entrance into a discourse community is also entrance into an activity community. I’m not sure what all of the implications of this are, but I do think that one of the important ones is that authorization to speak is also authorization to act, and that seems significant to me.
Peace to all.
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