Berlin: “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories”
This article got me to thinking about my own epistemological beliefs, which don’t really conform to anything in the article. Like Aristotelians, I believe that the material world exists; unlike Aristotelian I just don’t think we can know it. I don’t think the world exists independently of human activity, nor do I think it’s wholly constructed by it. In other words, I don’t think reality is entirely socially constructed. For years, I’ve been looking for a way to ground my belief that the world and the subject are more than the sum of their parts. Lately I’ve been exploring “emergence,” an idea that philosopher Joseph Margolis appropriated from physics and systems engineering to account for the meaning of works of art and then adapted to describe the subject. Briefly, as I understand it, there emerges out of complex systems properties and abilities not attributable to any of the parts of the system. Subjectivity and meaning are emergent properties. Since new elements continually enter into dynamic systems like subjects and discourses, new properties can continually emerge. That’s why we (and our belief systems) continue to change and to grow. Now I’m trying to understand entropy as a way of understanding system stagnation and decay. Who’d have thought studying literature and composition would lead me to physics?
Although one must of course interpret to make meaning (774), it doesn’t follow that there is no truth. It just follows that we cannot get directly at it. But I believe I’ve gone off on one of my rants about this in a past blog. I’ll just say that to claim that “language embodies and generates truth” is not the same thing as to claim that there is no truth. It may be to claim that there is no Truth, but that’s a different issue. I want to be wary of confusing epistemology for ontology. It’s not so much that truth is impossible without language. Truth is impossible to express without language, but expression and existence are not the same thing. The perimeter of any plane square, for instance, will always = 2(l+w), no matter whether language exists to express its truth. It’s true even if there are no squares! Certain mathematical truths are like that (2+2=4, for example). The proposition is true, even if the sentence that expresses it is contingent. Some truths of physics are like this, too.
Why don’t people realize that assertions that there’s no such thing as truth either violate the law of non-contradiction or are self-excepting?
Anyway, I’m not entirely sure what the implications of all this for pedagogy are. I just put it out there as an alternative to what Berlin outlines because I find the Aristotelian determinism, current-traditional positivism, expressionistic Romantic individualism, and stark post-structural relativism all unsatisfying.
It's been a vivid semester. Peace to all.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Website-Building Reflection
The process of constructing my website was extremely frustrating, yet in the end, it was rewarding. There are ways in which this process reminded me of when I was designing clothes and costumes for punks, Goths, musicians, drag queens and kings, strippers, and actors. Moments of enraging frustration when a vision couldn’t be realized alternating with moments of great elation when the unrealized vision morphed into something else.
Part of the frustration was that I basically had to teach myself how to use Dreamweaver to build the site because I chose to use the site I started during a workshop I took a couple of years ago. I actually ended up spending close to 20 hours working on the site, which is way more than I should have spent, and I’m not done yet. I don’t ever feel that my writing is quite finished; I suppose I’ll feel the same way about the site. The satisfaction came in part from seeing a concrete artifact that didn’t exist before I started working. As someone who teaches writing and who studies literature and feminism, I don’t often see concrete things that I’ve created, except for texts. Certainly most of my creative work is private.
The completely public nature of the web has forced me to consider audience in a way that I haven’t had to in a long time. For years now, my audience has been limited—those reading literary journals, my professors, some academics at conferences, and a few of my peers. The appropriate boundaries have been quite clear. But I rarely have been so self-conscious about my public image since I left the business world 8 years ago.
I think working on this project helped to crystallize for me the importance of document design and white space. I became much more conscious of the way that white space and words interact on a page. I’ve read that people have negative physiological reactions when they encounter paragraphs of over 300-500 words; my experience with my first bio page confirmed that. It made me uncomfortable. I really cut it down. I started out with a personal statement I’d composed for grad school applications, but I realized that it was too long and that it disclosed more than I’d want my students to know about me. Again I come back to my consciousness of the way that a webpage open me to the public gaze.
Working with webpages is very different from working with pages. I became more conscious that I’m from a different generation than my students. The fact is, the unbroken pagination of webpages is a little disorienting to me, and I suppose that my students take that for granted. I even word process in the print view because I like to see pages. I have begun to wonder whether this technology might not change the way we interact with pages. Might our children’s children’s children not become uncomfortable with the brokenness of discrete pages in the same way I get uncomfortable when paragraphs are “too long”?
I’ve also been thinking about how different generational attitudes toward personal privacy are becoming. Young people seem to me to live very public lives—My Space, Facebook, Girls Gone Wild. I doubt very much that someone with a My Space page would feel as exposed as I do having even a professional webpage. I spoke to a much younger friend about my discomfort with the blog at the beginning of the semester. He didn’t understand it. He keeps a blog diary! I can’t imagine doing that. He can’t understand my reluctance. In a strange and roundabout way, I think that maybe the most important lesson I learned from constructing the website was that the even though my students and I live in the same country, at the same historical moment, we live in very different cultures.
Part of the frustration was that I basically had to teach myself how to use Dreamweaver to build the site because I chose to use the site I started during a workshop I took a couple of years ago. I actually ended up spending close to 20 hours working on the site, which is way more than I should have spent, and I’m not done yet. I don’t ever feel that my writing is quite finished; I suppose I’ll feel the same way about the site. The satisfaction came in part from seeing a concrete artifact that didn’t exist before I started working. As someone who teaches writing and who studies literature and feminism, I don’t often see concrete things that I’ve created, except for texts. Certainly most of my creative work is private.
The completely public nature of the web has forced me to consider audience in a way that I haven’t had to in a long time. For years now, my audience has been limited—those reading literary journals, my professors, some academics at conferences, and a few of my peers. The appropriate boundaries have been quite clear. But I rarely have been so self-conscious about my public image since I left the business world 8 years ago.
I think working on this project helped to crystallize for me the importance of document design and white space. I became much more conscious of the way that white space and words interact on a page. I’ve read that people have negative physiological reactions when they encounter paragraphs of over 300-500 words; my experience with my first bio page confirmed that. It made me uncomfortable. I really cut it down. I started out with a personal statement I’d composed for grad school applications, but I realized that it was too long and that it disclosed more than I’d want my students to know about me. Again I come back to my consciousness of the way that a webpage open me to the public gaze.
Working with webpages is very different from working with pages. I became more conscious that I’m from a different generation than my students. The fact is, the unbroken pagination of webpages is a little disorienting to me, and I suppose that my students take that for granted. I even word process in the print view because I like to see pages. I have begun to wonder whether this technology might not change the way we interact with pages. Might our children’s children’s children not become uncomfortable with the brokenness of discrete pages in the same way I get uncomfortable when paragraphs are “too long”?
I’ve also been thinking about how different generational attitudes toward personal privacy are becoming. Young people seem to me to live very public lives—My Space, Facebook, Girls Gone Wild. I doubt very much that someone with a My Space page would feel as exposed as I do having even a professional webpage. I spoke to a much younger friend about my discomfort with the blog at the beginning of the semester. He didn’t understand it. He keeps a blog diary! I can’t imagine doing that. He can’t understand my reluctance. In a strange and roundabout way, I think that maybe the most important lesson I learned from constructing the website was that the even though my students and I live in the same country, at the same historical moment, we live in very different cultures.
Week of 5/5
Fulkerson: “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”
“It’s important to emphasize that in CSS the course aim is not ‘improved writing’ but ‘liberation’ from dominant discourse” (660).
Are these two aims mutually exclusive? I realize that Fulkerson says he doesn’t mean to generalize, but he is, I think. I guess what I’ve realized from reading this is that what I’m aiming at isn’t CSS education, even though I’m using Freirean pedagogy. Or maybe I’m not using Freirean pedagogy. I am suddenly completely at sea. Here’s the thing: I don’t want to teach my students to resist hegemonic discourses, but I do want to teach them how to recognize hegemony when they see it and hear it and to find a way to enter into it if that’s their goal and to find a way to articulate resistance if resistance is their goal. That involves teaching stuff about writing (rhetoric, genre) that’s necessary to improving writing.
Fulkerson says that according to the CSS approach, “[t]he central activity of the course is interpretation” (660). Well, of course it is. Isn’t interpretation the only way we have to make meaning? When scientists experiment, when compositionists implement studies, eventually they get data, which they then must interpret. When we make decisions about the ends of writing classes, we are making those decisions based on our interpretations of previous scholarship and the relationship of higher education to both the individual and the community. Whenever we make judgments, whenever we read, we are interpreting. Even when students read the syllabus, the very first act of the semester, they’re interpreting it. They interpret what the syllabus means based in part on what the words on it say, in part on what those words or words that they interpret to be reasonably like them have meant in other classes, in part on what they’ve heard about the instructor from other students, in part based on their expectations of the course, in part based on the instructor’s demeanor while they go over the syllabus, etc. The factors and discourses that enter into even the most seemingly straightforward aspect of what goes on in the classroom must be interpreted in order for students and instructors to make meaning. Making knowledge, developing skills, however one conceives of composition, one must, it seems to me, acknowledge that interpretation is central to the activities. Writing is, I think a kind of interpretation, or a working out of interpretation, isn’t it? What I’m doing right this instant certainly is.
Writing is, in large part, reading, which is, of course, interpretation. When I write, I go back, read and reread what I wrote, and try to imagine how it might be interpreted by other readers. How much interpretation (about audience as well as text) is involved in revision? Isn’t imagining an audience really about imagining how it might interpret what you’ve written? Even if others tell you explicitly how something you’ve written affects them, you must interpret what they tell you since you have no direct access to their states of mind or affective states. In order to be able to effectively understand how one is affected by discourse, one must be able to read/interpret it effectively. Interpretation is fundamental to writing, in other words, and while I think one can interpret without writing (although I’m not so sure about composing), I don’t think one can write without interpreting.
If “Berlin and others” say that the “course goal . . . is to empower or liberate students by giving them new insights into the injustices of American and transnational capitalism, politics, and complicit mass media” (661), then Berlin et al., must be wrong. I think the goal of CSS education is to help students to develop the kind of critical thinking and analytic skill that will enable them to interrogate the discourses in which they are immersed and to recognize that when they interact with those discourses they affect them even as they are affected by them. In order to affect discourse effectively, especially public discourse, one must be able to communicate effectively. I think that one of the best ways to understand how your discourse and writing are likely to affect others is to consider how other discourse/writing affects you and to investigate why you’re affected as you are. This involves looking at genre (which creates certain expectations that will influence interpretation), emotional language, traditional rhetorical devices, tacit assumptions, all kinds of stuff. I don’t give students only left-wing stuff to read. I give them far right stuff, too. I think we should ALL learn to interrogate the ways language is used to affect us in one way or another. And, I think one of the goals of the writing class ought to be to learn how to use language to affect others.
It seems to me that rejecting Cartesian certainty doesn’t entail the inability to teach about things like evidence. We just have to understand that when we offer “proof” we don’t supply Proof. So epistemological assumptions don’t necessarily “determine what sort of scholarly research is acceptable as grounding for the approach itself,” nor do they “control what students are taught regarding ‘proof’ in their own reading and writing” (662). Inductive logic doesn’t fail because deduction isn’t possible. For example, I understand that there’s no proof that the sun will rise tomorrow and there is no deductively valid argument that could prove it objectively. Nonetheless, I can deploy inductive reasoning to infer that it will rise tomorrow, and I can recognize that this is a really strong inductive argument. Furthermore, that I don’t believe that I can know anything in itself or with Cartesian certainty (except possibly mathematical truths—an ugly can of worms, and irrelevant here) doesn’t mean that deductive reasoning fails. It just means that the warrant is always conditional upon the truth of the premises (which we can never know but can reasonably infer to be true based on inductive reasoning). So, my epistemology (materialist social constructionist—not sure that’s even on the compositionist radar) doesn’t determine anything about my attitude toward doing research, because research is always induction! In other words, that I believe we can’t get at truth doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s worth shooting for! My epistemology does determine how I can interpret research, however. I think this is a crucial distinction.
Focusing on interpreting texts as part of the FYC class doesn’t neglect to “leave room for any actual teaching of writing” (665). Rhetorical reading and interpretation is, after all, interpretation, and rhetorical reading, if I understand it correctly, involves attending to how something is written, the rhetoric of the text, that is. So, it seems that interpreting texts (even the ones we’re writing) is an essential part of teaching writing!
Moreover, most of my life is devoted to “exposing [and combating] the social injustice of racism, classism, homophobia, misogyny, [and] capitalism” (665). Still, I can accept well-constructed, well-written arguments that deny that these discursive practices are inherently unjust. And one way I ensure that students don’t write to my beliefs is that on the very first day of the class, before they’ve read anything and before we go over the syllabus, I ask students to write down on a 3 X 5 card their name and “agree” or “disagree” in response to a prompt like “Anybody can get ahead as long as he or she works hard enough.” Then, the students pass those cards forward. When it comes time to write from this prompt, students have to argue the other side. Those who said “agree” have to write as though they disagree, and vice versa. It’s worked well in the workshops I’ve led at CSN. We’ll see how it translates here in the fall, I guess.
I guess that by all of this I’m trying to convey that I don’t think the approaches—CSS, rhetorical, genre-based, and expressivist are mutually exclusive. I think they all bring important insihts to the table, and I think a reflective instructor can integrate what’s useful from each. As Fulkerson says, “Axiology . . . has implications for, but doesn’t determine, processes . . . and both are involved with pedagogy” (679-680). He’d probably add, as would I, that instructors who try to integrate aspects of these different approaches to teaching writing need to exercise great care not to end up with a mish mosh of confusing, unrelated assignments or writing sequences.
Downs & Wardle: “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’ ”
Great article! I think it’s really more applicable to ENG 102 as it’s conceived here at UNLV, since 101 students aren’t supposed to do research, but what a great idea . . . I think.
The four outcomes for writing instruction offered in the WPA Outcomes Statement seem good to me. But I think Downs and Wardle make a good case that it might not be possible for FYC to do all those things. Still, one of the guiding principles of my life is the belief that some things are worth aiming at even if (or just because) they’re not possible. I’m not sure it’s necessary to focus all FYC classes as D&W suggest, and I’m sure it’s not possible, since, as they note, background in Comp Theory is necessary to do it properly. One thing I’m hearing yet again is that one year is not enough. That’s part of the reason I requested to teach 101E next semester. Because I’ve come to realize, partly through this class and partly from my experience in the Writing Center, that a semester isn’t enough time to do even half of what most students need, even to fulfill their goals of being prepared to be corporate stooges !
I hate when people say something “begs the question” when what they mean is that it raises the question (556).
The question of transfer has been bothering me since we read the article about David, and I suspect that there might be other ways of enabling it. I just don’t know what they might be. While I think transparency and demystification are the answer to a lot of classroom issues, I’m not sure they’re the answer here. And, D&W have articulated more clearly than I have yet what I want to convey to students in FYC: “the ways writing works in the world and how . . . writing [and language in general] is used to mediate various activities” and our understanding/interpretation of the world and our places in it (558). Still, demystifying writing involves disabusing students of their misconceptions about writing, and I agree with D&W that that’s crucial.
“If writing cannot be separated from content, then scholarly writing cannot be separated from reading” (561). Even if writing can be separated from content, no writing can be separated from reading. I’ll just keep repeating that.
Breuch: “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise
I’ve said a bunch of what Breuch says in earlier blogs. And I thought I was being insightful and original. I guess Derrida is right: There’s only citation! (Another joke)
Philosophers and physicists recognize a difference between “indeterminate” and “indeterminacy,” and while I don’t understand it well enough to be able to put my finger on how, I suspect the distinction will illuminate this discussion once I understand it better. See Joseph Margolis’ Selves and Other Texts and Historied Thought, Constructed World (the latter is available online for free). Also, the article on “emergence” in Wikipedia (I know) is actually kind of helpful.
Really rigorous philosophical discussion of what people are really saying when they make different claims about writing. Thus she is able to recognize the distinction between the inability to teach writing and the inability to teach writing “as a system” (101). And she’s right. There is something to teach. I don’t think it’s a systematic something, though.
When we ask people to “change what they know” we are already asking them to “change who they are” (103). Where’s the disjunctunction?
I understand the “rejection of mastery” as an essential part of understanding that human beings are never finished until they die. I can’t master anything because there’s always room for innovation and improvement. Of course not all innovation is improvement; Ben Franklin cautions us not to mistake motion for progress…
Just to clarify: “having a codified body of knowledge that can be transmitted” is not identical to “being” a body of knowledge as Ewald’s criticism of Kent implies (qtd. p. 105).
Distinction between “how-centeredness” and “what-centeredness” really, really, really important. Writing is how-centered because it’s activity. It’s just important to remember that there may be more than one “how.”
Davidson’s understanding of meaning as language-in-use is fundamentally Wittgensteinian (111). He said, “Don’t ask for the meaning; ask for the use.” That seems to me more a claim about meaning being contextual than about writing being public, though. Still, Davidson’s triangulation thing is intriguing.
I’m also interested in exploring the pedagogical possibilities of post-process theory. It seems to me that pedagogy is in large part pragmatic. That is, whatever works is the right thing to do. That means that the right thing to do can (and probably will) change from class to class, and maybe from person to person in class. Once again, theory takes me to a place where the institutional parameters that require that I teach everyone in a given class the same things in the same way strike me as counterproductive. Even harmful. I do, however, fully embrace the idea of teaching as mentoring. It’s what I did in the Writing Center, and I loved it, and the students I run into who have transferred here tell me that they benefited from our interactions. I did, too. can you imagine if we each had, say, five students with whom we worked individually for a year? How different would teaching writing be then? Damn, that would be fine!
Berlin: Still to come
Peace to all.
“It’s important to emphasize that in CSS the course aim is not ‘improved writing’ but ‘liberation’ from dominant discourse” (660).
Are these two aims mutually exclusive? I realize that Fulkerson says he doesn’t mean to generalize, but he is, I think. I guess what I’ve realized from reading this is that what I’m aiming at isn’t CSS education, even though I’m using Freirean pedagogy. Or maybe I’m not using Freirean pedagogy. I am suddenly completely at sea. Here’s the thing: I don’t want to teach my students to resist hegemonic discourses, but I do want to teach them how to recognize hegemony when they see it and hear it and to find a way to enter into it if that’s their goal and to find a way to articulate resistance if resistance is their goal. That involves teaching stuff about writing (rhetoric, genre) that’s necessary to improving writing.
Fulkerson says that according to the CSS approach, “[t]he central activity of the course is interpretation” (660). Well, of course it is. Isn’t interpretation the only way we have to make meaning? When scientists experiment, when compositionists implement studies, eventually they get data, which they then must interpret. When we make decisions about the ends of writing classes, we are making those decisions based on our interpretations of previous scholarship and the relationship of higher education to both the individual and the community. Whenever we make judgments, whenever we read, we are interpreting. Even when students read the syllabus, the very first act of the semester, they’re interpreting it. They interpret what the syllabus means based in part on what the words on it say, in part on what those words or words that they interpret to be reasonably like them have meant in other classes, in part on what they’ve heard about the instructor from other students, in part based on their expectations of the course, in part based on the instructor’s demeanor while they go over the syllabus, etc. The factors and discourses that enter into even the most seemingly straightforward aspect of what goes on in the classroom must be interpreted in order for students and instructors to make meaning. Making knowledge, developing skills, however one conceives of composition, one must, it seems to me, acknowledge that interpretation is central to the activities. Writing is, I think a kind of interpretation, or a working out of interpretation, isn’t it? What I’m doing right this instant certainly is.
Writing is, in large part, reading, which is, of course, interpretation. When I write, I go back, read and reread what I wrote, and try to imagine how it might be interpreted by other readers. How much interpretation (about audience as well as text) is involved in revision? Isn’t imagining an audience really about imagining how it might interpret what you’ve written? Even if others tell you explicitly how something you’ve written affects them, you must interpret what they tell you since you have no direct access to their states of mind or affective states. In order to be able to effectively understand how one is affected by discourse, one must be able to read/interpret it effectively. Interpretation is fundamental to writing, in other words, and while I think one can interpret without writing (although I’m not so sure about composing), I don’t think one can write without interpreting.
If “Berlin and others” say that the “course goal . . . is to empower or liberate students by giving them new insights into the injustices of American and transnational capitalism, politics, and complicit mass media” (661), then Berlin et al., must be wrong. I think the goal of CSS education is to help students to develop the kind of critical thinking and analytic skill that will enable them to interrogate the discourses in which they are immersed and to recognize that when they interact with those discourses they affect them even as they are affected by them. In order to affect discourse effectively, especially public discourse, one must be able to communicate effectively. I think that one of the best ways to understand how your discourse and writing are likely to affect others is to consider how other discourse/writing affects you and to investigate why you’re affected as you are. This involves looking at genre (which creates certain expectations that will influence interpretation), emotional language, traditional rhetorical devices, tacit assumptions, all kinds of stuff. I don’t give students only left-wing stuff to read. I give them far right stuff, too. I think we should ALL learn to interrogate the ways language is used to affect us in one way or another. And, I think one of the goals of the writing class ought to be to learn how to use language to affect others.
It seems to me that rejecting Cartesian certainty doesn’t entail the inability to teach about things like evidence. We just have to understand that when we offer “proof” we don’t supply Proof. So epistemological assumptions don’t necessarily “determine what sort of scholarly research is acceptable as grounding for the approach itself,” nor do they “control what students are taught regarding ‘proof’ in their own reading and writing” (662). Inductive logic doesn’t fail because deduction isn’t possible. For example, I understand that there’s no proof that the sun will rise tomorrow and there is no deductively valid argument that could prove it objectively. Nonetheless, I can deploy inductive reasoning to infer that it will rise tomorrow, and I can recognize that this is a really strong inductive argument. Furthermore, that I don’t believe that I can know anything in itself or with Cartesian certainty (except possibly mathematical truths—an ugly can of worms, and irrelevant here) doesn’t mean that deductive reasoning fails. It just means that the warrant is always conditional upon the truth of the premises (which we can never know but can reasonably infer to be true based on inductive reasoning). So, my epistemology (materialist social constructionist—not sure that’s even on the compositionist radar) doesn’t determine anything about my attitude toward doing research, because research is always induction! In other words, that I believe we can’t get at truth doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s worth shooting for! My epistemology does determine how I can interpret research, however. I think this is a crucial distinction.
Focusing on interpreting texts as part of the FYC class doesn’t neglect to “leave room for any actual teaching of writing” (665). Rhetorical reading and interpretation is, after all, interpretation, and rhetorical reading, if I understand it correctly, involves attending to how something is written, the rhetoric of the text, that is. So, it seems that interpreting texts (even the ones we’re writing) is an essential part of teaching writing!
Moreover, most of my life is devoted to “exposing [and combating] the social injustice of racism, classism, homophobia, misogyny, [and] capitalism” (665). Still, I can accept well-constructed, well-written arguments that deny that these discursive practices are inherently unjust. And one way I ensure that students don’t write to my beliefs is that on the very first day of the class, before they’ve read anything and before we go over the syllabus, I ask students to write down on a 3 X 5 card their name and “agree” or “disagree” in response to a prompt like “Anybody can get ahead as long as he or she works hard enough.” Then, the students pass those cards forward. When it comes time to write from this prompt, students have to argue the other side. Those who said “agree” have to write as though they disagree, and vice versa. It’s worked well in the workshops I’ve led at CSN. We’ll see how it translates here in the fall, I guess.
I guess that by all of this I’m trying to convey that I don’t think the approaches—CSS, rhetorical, genre-based, and expressivist are mutually exclusive. I think they all bring important insihts to the table, and I think a reflective instructor can integrate what’s useful from each. As Fulkerson says, “Axiology . . . has implications for, but doesn’t determine, processes . . . and both are involved with pedagogy” (679-680). He’d probably add, as would I, that instructors who try to integrate aspects of these different approaches to teaching writing need to exercise great care not to end up with a mish mosh of confusing, unrelated assignments or writing sequences.
Downs & Wardle: “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’ ”
Great article! I think it’s really more applicable to ENG 102 as it’s conceived here at UNLV, since 101 students aren’t supposed to do research, but what a great idea . . . I think.
The four outcomes for writing instruction offered in the WPA Outcomes Statement seem good to me. But I think Downs and Wardle make a good case that it might not be possible for FYC to do all those things. Still, one of the guiding principles of my life is the belief that some things are worth aiming at even if (or just because) they’re not possible. I’m not sure it’s necessary to focus all FYC classes as D&W suggest, and I’m sure it’s not possible, since, as they note, background in Comp Theory is necessary to do it properly. One thing I’m hearing yet again is that one year is not enough. That’s part of the reason I requested to teach 101E next semester. Because I’ve come to realize, partly through this class and partly from my experience in the Writing Center, that a semester isn’t enough time to do even half of what most students need, even to fulfill their goals of being prepared to be corporate stooges !
I hate when people say something “begs the question” when what they mean is that it raises the question (556).
The question of transfer has been bothering me since we read the article about David, and I suspect that there might be other ways of enabling it. I just don’t know what they might be. While I think transparency and demystification are the answer to a lot of classroom issues, I’m not sure they’re the answer here. And, D&W have articulated more clearly than I have yet what I want to convey to students in FYC: “the ways writing works in the world and how . . . writing [and language in general] is used to mediate various activities” and our understanding/interpretation of the world and our places in it (558). Still, demystifying writing involves disabusing students of their misconceptions about writing, and I agree with D&W that that’s crucial.
“If writing cannot be separated from content, then scholarly writing cannot be separated from reading” (561). Even if writing can be separated from content, no writing can be separated from reading. I’ll just keep repeating that.
Breuch: “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise
I’ve said a bunch of what Breuch says in earlier blogs. And I thought I was being insightful and original. I guess Derrida is right: There’s only citation! (Another joke)
Philosophers and physicists recognize a difference between “indeterminate” and “indeterminacy,” and while I don’t understand it well enough to be able to put my finger on how, I suspect the distinction will illuminate this discussion once I understand it better. See Joseph Margolis’ Selves and Other Texts and Historied Thought, Constructed World (the latter is available online for free). Also, the article on “emergence” in Wikipedia (I know) is actually kind of helpful.
Really rigorous philosophical discussion of what people are really saying when they make different claims about writing. Thus she is able to recognize the distinction between the inability to teach writing and the inability to teach writing “as a system” (101). And she’s right. There is something to teach. I don’t think it’s a systematic something, though.
When we ask people to “change what they know” we are already asking them to “change who they are” (103). Where’s the disjunctunction?
I understand the “rejection of mastery” as an essential part of understanding that human beings are never finished until they die. I can’t master anything because there’s always room for innovation and improvement. Of course not all innovation is improvement; Ben Franklin cautions us not to mistake motion for progress…
Just to clarify: “having a codified body of knowledge that can be transmitted” is not identical to “being” a body of knowledge as Ewald’s criticism of Kent implies (qtd. p. 105).
Distinction between “how-centeredness” and “what-centeredness” really, really, really important. Writing is how-centered because it’s activity. It’s just important to remember that there may be more than one “how.”
Davidson’s understanding of meaning as language-in-use is fundamentally Wittgensteinian (111). He said, “Don’t ask for the meaning; ask for the use.” That seems to me more a claim about meaning being contextual than about writing being public, though. Still, Davidson’s triangulation thing is intriguing.
I’m also interested in exploring the pedagogical possibilities of post-process theory. It seems to me that pedagogy is in large part pragmatic. That is, whatever works is the right thing to do. That means that the right thing to do can (and probably will) change from class to class, and maybe from person to person in class. Once again, theory takes me to a place where the institutional parameters that require that I teach everyone in a given class the same things in the same way strike me as counterproductive. Even harmful. I do, however, fully embrace the idea of teaching as mentoring. It’s what I did in the Writing Center, and I loved it, and the students I run into who have transferred here tell me that they benefited from our interactions. I did, too. can you imagine if we each had, say, five students with whom we worked individually for a year? How different would teaching writing be then? Damn, that would be fine!
Berlin: Still to come
Peace to all.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Week of 4/28
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.
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 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.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Week of 3/31
Ong: “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought”
Summary:
Ong begins by claiming that viewing writing as a purely mechanical skill “distorts our understanding of what is human” (19). For Ong, writing is a technology we “interiorize” and whose influence on us is largely unconsciously experienced (19). Ong begins by comparing orality and literacy and the cultures that emerge from them, characterizing oral culture as primarily conservative and writing as an “intrusion” into the oral cultures that preceded it. He says that Plato’s criticisms of writing elide the fact that “his philosophically analytic thought . . . was possible only because of the effects writing was having on mental processes” (22).
For Ong, writing initiated more “drastic” changes in human consciousness than print and electronics. Ong next outlines two paradoxes of written text. First, although written text seems inert and lifeless, it may be resurrected and deployed in countless contexts. Second, the meaning of written text depends on the priority of spoken language. And, writing is, on Ong’s view, “completely artificial” in the sense that it must be learned (23). It is transformative in the sense that it can be used to express what could not otherwise be expressed.
Next, Ong says that one of the effects of writing is the way it divides many things in many ways. A significant effect is that it can separate the known from the knower, eventually leading to the idea that knowledge is an object that is separate from the knower, but it is not itself knowledge. Another characteristic is that writing requires interpretation. Writing changes the context of communication and requires a sort of “precision” that oral communication does not. It “separates the past from the present” (26), the writer from the reader, administration from other social practices, logic from rhetoric, academic learning from wisdom, grapholects from one another, “high” from “low” language, and being from time. Its divisive effects become more pronounced as “its form becomes more abstract” (28). Print and electronic forms intensify the transformative potentials of writing, and computers impose another consciousness—that of the programmer—between subjects and objects.
Finally, Ong asserts that the increasing distancing entailed by writing, print, and electronics enables recuperation of “empathetic identification . . . at the level of conscious reflectivity” (31).
Musings:
I love articles that send me to the dictionary. “Noetic: of or relating to mental activity or the intellect” (OAD). Yay! A new word!
While Ong is in a sense correct that orality is antecedent to literacy, things aren’t that simple (I’m not sure Ong would say they are either). I’ve been wondering how oral and literate discursive traditions exist alongside each other and interact within, between, and among cultures. I’m thinking about African American folk traditions and the consciousness-raising tradition of the early second-wave feminist movement. But I’m also thinking about songs, nursery rhymes, jump rope jingles, and modernist poetry, which absorbs and adapts transnational oral traditions to its own purposes.
Ong’s statement that “any understanding of a text involves interpretation” confirms a point I tried to make in class on Monday: that the text-based interactions between students and teachers involves interpretation on both parts, and thus composition theory would benefit from attention to the interpretive theories of literary criticism, rather than viewing itself as separate from them as I have gotten the impression it often does.
Grading and commenting always involve reading, and reading always involves interpretation. Reading instructor comments always involves interpretation. Acts of composition involve going back to what one has already written, and that involves reading and interpretation. In other words, writing always involves reading, and reading always involves interpretation
Instructors must understand what they are doing when they read/interpret student writing; they must understand the way(s) they construct meaning out of students’ texts. And students ought to have some inkling that part of what they’re doing as they write is going back to what they’ve written and interpreting it and hopefully revising it on the basis of those interpretive acts. And, Ong makes a really significant point on this issue when he says that “writing distances the source of the communication (the writer) from the recipient (the reader), both in time and in space” (26). This, of course, implies that writers are constructing more than one identity as they write: they construct themselves as writers, and they construct themselves as readers. I think that it’s only by constructing oneself as both that one can truly enter into language and construct oneself as a member of a particular discourse community. Thus, as we try to teach writing, we must consider the role(s) reading and interpretive practices play in composing and in grading.
Since I’ve already written so much, I’ll refrain from talking at length about my suspicions of oversimplification when one speaks of a separation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object. I’ll just say that subject/object is always a mediated (and mutually constitutive?) relationship and that separations between them strike me as illusions at best.
Flower and Hayes: “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”
Summary:
Flower and Hayes discuss some of the complications that arise when composing is characterized as a “series of decisions and choices” (273). They begin by articulating some of the questions this characterization raises, and they note that the answers to the questions change depending on other presuppositions. They opt to begin by examining the writing process to see what really happens when people write. They introduce a theory based on the cognitive processes involved in writing. This theory focuses on four “key points” (274). They next move to address each of these points in turn.
Flower and Hayes first address the idea that writing is “best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” (275), an idea that they contrast with stage models of writing. They show that while the stage model focuses on the progress of the product, the process model focuses on the writer, thus enabling us to compare the practices and strategies of different writers by studying actual writers as they write using “thinking aloud protocols” (277). This model identifies three elements that correspond to three processes, yet unlike stage models, this model does not posit any particular order in which the processes are enacted. Processes can overlap and writers can return to any process at any time. They examine the ways each element contributes to the overall process of composition.
The authors next turn to the implications of their model as a tool for researchers. They say that writers “simply embed individual processes as needed . . . to help carry out the task at hand” (284). Writers often embed processes unconsciously. Nevertheless, Flower and Hayes say, merely identifying embedding practices does not explain “what guides the writers’ decisions and choices and gives an overall purposeful structure to composing” (286).
Turning to the third point, which focuses on writers’ networks of content goals, Flower and Hayes show how discovery and goal-directed writing are connected. They acknowledge that knowledge, text, and goals both compete and collaborate during the writing process. They demonstrate that their model is not incompatible with the idea of writing as a means to knowledge development by showing how “writers create their own goals” in part by revising their goals in light of what they have learned while writing (290). Finally, they discuss the three goal patterns they’ve identified —“Explore and Consolidate,” “State and Develop,” and “Write and Regenerate.”
Musings:
I continue to remain wary of models based on psychological universalism. Perhaps most importantly for me, this model does not accurately reflect how I write, so I wonder how many other students do not write this way either. And, if language constrains and shapes thought, I wonder whether reliance on this model might not introduce new difficulties to those who whose first language—the language in which they think—is neither SAE nor academic English. Do they write and then translate? I know that many of them do. I know that many students whose first language is English approach academic discourse as one might approach a foreign language in which one is not proficient. Well, if one must translate everything, one doesn’t really come to feel competent, does one? And I, for one, hate doing things at which I never come to feel more competent. So, it seems to me that this model might just encourage our students to fear and hate writing even more than they already do when they walk into the room.
Moreover, this model is hierarchical, so it seems to me that teaching practices based on it might encourage students to continue to view writing as a series of discrete steps that must be moved through linearly. Then, as I’ve said before, what we produce are writers who continue to view writing as a series of little sub-products, each of which must be completed (and might be graded) before they can move on to the next step. Even though they say that their model acknowledges writing’s recursiveness, I don’t think they really capture it.
In fact, I’m growing increasingly wary about having students hand in “drafts” because I’m concerned about fostering the idea of writing as a series of linear steps that culiminate in the “presentation copy.” I’ve started going back over my old essays to see how I wrote in 101 (I keep everything!). I don’t think I ever wrote this way, and because I knew I’d be handing drafts in, I think I spent an awful lot of time polishing early on in the writing process, time that might have been better spent on developing ideas.
Bizzell: “Cognition, Convention, Clarity: What We Need to Know about Writing”
Summary:
Bizzell notes that the ways we have come to see writing problems as thinking problems largely because we have tended to pay no attention to students’ thinking. Now, she says, for various reasons, we have come to recognize that we must attend in new ways to the relationship between thinking and writing. She says that while compositionists agree about some fundamentals about language and language acquisition, they disagree about which of them apply to composition. She divides compositionists into camps based on whether they see writing as fundamentally inner- or outer-directed.
Inner-directed theorists see writing as one possible end of a linear process, each stage of which depends on the “same basic logical structures” (389). Thus, this structuralist model presumes that if teachers guide students through the stages, students will arrive at a point where they internalize the patterns that will enable them to approach specific writing situations, with audience analysis playing a primary role in revising and shaping writing.
Outer-directed theorists hold that the universal structures of language and thought cannot be taught and that the structures are always embedded in a social context that “conditions them” (390). One is always already embedded in at least one discourse community, and one cannot think what one has no word for. For these theorists, the primary goal is to teach students the conventions of academic discourse, to “ease” them into the academic discourse community by illuminating conventions and patterns that it has in common with discourse communities of which students are already members.
According to Bizzell, we need to consider the insights of both inner- and outer-directed theories. She provides an example of how inner-directed models can be enriched by outer-directed critique. She begins by summarizing Flower and Hayes’ model. Then she analyzes its shortcomings by turning to Vygotsky and sociolinguistics to fill in the gaps in the “translating box” (396). She shows that meaning is partly established by the conventions of discourse and thus the phrase “putting meaning into words” cannot adequately describe what occurs when we write and for the situatedness of writing. For Bizzell, discourse communities are akin to Fish’s interpretive communities.
Bizzell offers a nuanced understanding of writing as problem-solving that accounts for its situatedness and its function of “doing (intellectual) work in the world” (403). Bizzell also incorporates an interrogation of the quest for certainty that the use of a scientific model of writing evokes, pointing out the shortcomings with the protocol method and the underlying (and problematic) presupposition that certainty is achievable through the scientific method
Musings:
Well, I hadn’t read this when I wrote about Flower and Hayes. Since I made some of her criticisms myself, it should be clear that I think this model has lots more to offer. And thank goodness someone has finally said that we can have ideas for which we don’t have words! Those are, I think, the most creative, risky, and interesting ideas we have.
Her idea that students can “go native” in academic discourse communities and still maintain other aspects of their identities is one that I share, as is the notion that academic discourse communities can never be free of ideology. Brava! I’ll almost certainly be using this for my paper.
“Distributed Cognition at Work”
Summary:
Distributed cognition is the idea that intellectual interactions with others are not merely guides and stimulants, but “actually vehicles of thought” (136). It is dynamic “cognitive partnership” (136).
The author prefaces his/her account of distributed cognition at work in the BOC by discussing how it applies to a university setting in order to compare the university and the workplace as sites of writing. S/he distinguishes between distributed cognition and socially shared knowledge. The former takes place in the classroom and the latter in the overall institution.
Moving to the BOC, the author makes use of Hutchins’ ship analogy to explain distributed cognition in the workplace. S/he shows the ways that a ship is organized as the workplace is and some ways in which it differs. The main idea here is that the activities of an organization are “shaped by” their “primary goals” (140).
Decision-making at BOC is a complicated process, dependent on conventional genres, conventional lexicons, conventional approaches to data, conventional experiential categories, conventional logical warrants, and a standardized analytical instrument. The model generated by the interactions of these component parts is monitored and revised depending of changes in circumstances. Each genre entails its own characteristic narrative style, level of generalization, and goals. Policy decisions are based on analysis and interpretation of the input from different levels. Additionally, public and institutionally private genres play a part in the framing of problems and solutions.
Finally, the author notes that there are significant differences between the interactions of workers “in even hierarchical structures” and the interactions between teachers and students, because “until the highest levels of schooling, and in most classes, there is little expectation that students will contribute to the ongoing activity of the classroom in the way that fellow workers do” (148-149).
Musings:
While I think that the notion of “distributed cognition” is an interesting one, it seems odd to think about either academic or workplace writing and reasoning as universalizable situations. For instance, not all workplaces (in fact most peoples’ workplaces) are not corporations whose activities have national and/or international ramifications, nor are they all ordered as vertically as is BOC. Nor are all postsecondary academic settings organized as major research universities are. I’m not convinced that these two forms of social organization are analogous enough for a comparison of them to offer the insights that the author thinks s/he has established. For one thing, the author equivocates between the university and the classroom when s/he talks about educational activity. More importantly, the author focuses on the goals and activities of the overall institution when talking about BOC and those of the classroom when discussing education. This shifting focus undermines the analogy, even for comparative purposes. Most importantly, classrooms and corporate workplaces are not hierarchical in the same ways, and the author needs that for the analogy to hold in the way that s/he needs it to.
I’m even less convinced of the characterization of postsecondary education offered in this article than I am of the aptness of the analogy. I don’t think of “the university’s primary purpose as to accredit or to rank students” (136). If that’s the primary purpose of the university, why do we bother to offer classes? This reminds me of Linda Howard’s (one of the Regents) statement during a forum at CSN, when she said that “The only job of teachers is to boost students’ self-esteem.” I asked why schools didn’t, if that was the case, give us all A’s and send us home with degrees. I’ll ask the same question here. Can’t schools just charge a fee, rank students, and send us off? Why don’t schools just test us and issue degrees? Why don’t they just sell degrees? (I know, some do.) It may seem strange to others, but I no more think of the primary business of postsecondary education as issuing degrees than I think of students as customers.
Assessment and number of degrees granted might be administrators’ primary concern, but they aren’t mine. As both a student and as an instructor, I think of assessment as an onerous distraction from the things we’re trying to do together in the classroom. As both a student and as an instructor, I think of those who join me in the classroom as fellow workers in the activity of trying to make sense of the world and to construct new spaces within it for ourselves and for the activities we find worthwhile and engaging. In a very important sense, that means that we are fellow travelers. That is, what students need largely conditions my activity.
I do understand that hierarchy is built in to the classroom in ways that cannot be eradicated, but by making the constraints upon our activities as transparent as I can, I acknowledge the power relations inherent in the organization of the classroom. And, I try to engage student input into both content and process in every way I can think of. Students have a voice in what we read and in what topics we cover, and they have an opportunity at the end of every class to talk about the process of that particular class and how it went so that we can work together to improve our collective experience in future classes. Furthermore, for students afraid to voice their concerns in a face-to-face setting, I provide two other mechanisms for students to evaluate classes and our collective performance: They can drop a note into an envelope left in my mailbox for that purpose, or they can use an email account I have set up with a free service to send me a note. I will provide both the login and the password to every student in the class so that it can be easily accessed and feedback can remain anonymous. The only constraint I insist upon in feedback is that it may not involve ad hominem attacks.
Strangely, I think that the primary concern of the university is learning (notice I didn’t say “teaching”). I think that every other activity that goes on at a university ought to facilitate learning on some level and about some aspect of the experience of being human. Even research. Students are the most important people at the institution, and their needs ought to guide the rest of the activity tat takes place there.
Furthermore, the conception of education endorsed in this article presupposes that students are all the same, that they all learn in the same way, that they all have the same goals in mind, and that understanding knowledge as an object doesn’t involve reification. As far as I’m concerned, this is all crazy talk! Not really an expression usually associated with academic discourse, but this is, after all, a web log, which is a form of journal, and journals are, at least sometimes, free of the constraints of more formal academic writing. Perhaps it’s too emotional of me, but I’m finding it very difficult to think in any color other than red. In fact, I found it very difficult to keep reading through the scarlet veil that dropped over that sentence.
Here’s another one that really set me off: “A student who does not hand in his [sic] work does not impede the operation of the university. (In fact, he [sic] eases the instructor’s task of grading.) (148). Now that could only have been written by someone who has tenure, by someone whose job and/or funding is not in some way contingent upon good retention figures. Because for those of us who face pressure (implicit or explicit) to ensure that students neither drop nor fail our classes, students who do not hand in work DO impede our abilities to do our jobs. And that, my friends, impedes the operation of the university, however it is conceived. Grading is more difficult, not easier, if one knows that too many low grades or withdrawals can mean the loss of a job or of funding to continue with one’s own education. I know of at least one instructor who never gives students less than a C if they finish the semester; no matter what kind of or how much work a particular student has done, s/he will receive a C if s/he remains enrolled in this instructor’s class until the end of the semester. Appalling, don’t you think? And, if the university is conceived as primarily a degree-granting (ranking) business, undermining ranking, as this instructor’s practice does, impedes the primary activity of the institution. There’s no way around that.
This article’s idea of what goes on in the classroom is so much like what Freire calls the “banking concept of education,” what I call the “scarf and barf” method of education, that I cannot see what premises its author and I could possibly have in common regarding what goes on in educational settings. Since it is a commonplace in logic that if participants in a conversation share no premises, the conversation cannot continue in any meaningful way, I guess I’ll close here.
Peace all around.
Summary:
Ong begins by claiming that viewing writing as a purely mechanical skill “distorts our understanding of what is human” (19). For Ong, writing is a technology we “interiorize” and whose influence on us is largely unconsciously experienced (19). Ong begins by comparing orality and literacy and the cultures that emerge from them, characterizing oral culture as primarily conservative and writing as an “intrusion” into the oral cultures that preceded it. He says that Plato’s criticisms of writing elide the fact that “his philosophically analytic thought . . . was possible only because of the effects writing was having on mental processes” (22).
For Ong, writing initiated more “drastic” changes in human consciousness than print and electronics. Ong next outlines two paradoxes of written text. First, although written text seems inert and lifeless, it may be resurrected and deployed in countless contexts. Second, the meaning of written text depends on the priority of spoken language. And, writing is, on Ong’s view, “completely artificial” in the sense that it must be learned (23). It is transformative in the sense that it can be used to express what could not otherwise be expressed.
Next, Ong says that one of the effects of writing is the way it divides many things in many ways. A significant effect is that it can separate the known from the knower, eventually leading to the idea that knowledge is an object that is separate from the knower, but it is not itself knowledge. Another characteristic is that writing requires interpretation. Writing changes the context of communication and requires a sort of “precision” that oral communication does not. It “separates the past from the present” (26), the writer from the reader, administration from other social practices, logic from rhetoric, academic learning from wisdom, grapholects from one another, “high” from “low” language, and being from time. Its divisive effects become more pronounced as “its form becomes more abstract” (28). Print and electronic forms intensify the transformative potentials of writing, and computers impose another consciousness—that of the programmer—between subjects and objects.
Finally, Ong asserts that the increasing distancing entailed by writing, print, and electronics enables recuperation of “empathetic identification . . . at the level of conscious reflectivity” (31).
Musings:
I love articles that send me to the dictionary. “Noetic: of or relating to mental activity or the intellect” (OAD). Yay! A new word!
While Ong is in a sense correct that orality is antecedent to literacy, things aren’t that simple (I’m not sure Ong would say they are either). I’ve been wondering how oral and literate discursive traditions exist alongside each other and interact within, between, and among cultures. I’m thinking about African American folk traditions and the consciousness-raising tradition of the early second-wave feminist movement. But I’m also thinking about songs, nursery rhymes, jump rope jingles, and modernist poetry, which absorbs and adapts transnational oral traditions to its own purposes.
Ong’s statement that “any understanding of a text involves interpretation” confirms a point I tried to make in class on Monday: that the text-based interactions between students and teachers involves interpretation on both parts, and thus composition theory would benefit from attention to the interpretive theories of literary criticism, rather than viewing itself as separate from them as I have gotten the impression it often does.
Grading and commenting always involve reading, and reading always involves interpretation. Reading instructor comments always involves interpretation. Acts of composition involve going back to what one has already written, and that involves reading and interpretation. In other words, writing always involves reading, and reading always involves interpretation
Instructors must understand what they are doing when they read/interpret student writing; they must understand the way(s) they construct meaning out of students’ texts. And students ought to have some inkling that part of what they’re doing as they write is going back to what they’ve written and interpreting it and hopefully revising it on the basis of those interpretive acts. And, Ong makes a really significant point on this issue when he says that “writing distances the source of the communication (the writer) from the recipient (the reader), both in time and in space” (26). This, of course, implies that writers are constructing more than one identity as they write: they construct themselves as writers, and they construct themselves as readers. I think that it’s only by constructing oneself as both that one can truly enter into language and construct oneself as a member of a particular discourse community. Thus, as we try to teach writing, we must consider the role(s) reading and interpretive practices play in composing and in grading.
Since I’ve already written so much, I’ll refrain from talking at length about my suspicions of oversimplification when one speaks of a separation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object. I’ll just say that subject/object is always a mediated (and mutually constitutive?) relationship and that separations between them strike me as illusions at best.
Flower and Hayes: “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”
Summary:
Flower and Hayes discuss some of the complications that arise when composing is characterized as a “series of decisions and choices” (273). They begin by articulating some of the questions this characterization raises, and they note that the answers to the questions change depending on other presuppositions. They opt to begin by examining the writing process to see what really happens when people write. They introduce a theory based on the cognitive processes involved in writing. This theory focuses on four “key points” (274). They next move to address each of these points in turn.
Flower and Hayes first address the idea that writing is “best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” (275), an idea that they contrast with stage models of writing. They show that while the stage model focuses on the progress of the product, the process model focuses on the writer, thus enabling us to compare the practices and strategies of different writers by studying actual writers as they write using “thinking aloud protocols” (277). This model identifies three elements that correspond to three processes, yet unlike stage models, this model does not posit any particular order in which the processes are enacted. Processes can overlap and writers can return to any process at any time. They examine the ways each element contributes to the overall process of composition.
The authors next turn to the implications of their model as a tool for researchers. They say that writers “simply embed individual processes as needed . . . to help carry out the task at hand” (284). Writers often embed processes unconsciously. Nevertheless, Flower and Hayes say, merely identifying embedding practices does not explain “what guides the writers’ decisions and choices and gives an overall purposeful structure to composing” (286).
Turning to the third point, which focuses on writers’ networks of content goals, Flower and Hayes show how discovery and goal-directed writing are connected. They acknowledge that knowledge, text, and goals both compete and collaborate during the writing process. They demonstrate that their model is not incompatible with the idea of writing as a means to knowledge development by showing how “writers create their own goals” in part by revising their goals in light of what they have learned while writing (290). Finally, they discuss the three goal patterns they’ve identified —“Explore and Consolidate,” “State and Develop,” and “Write and Regenerate.”
Musings:
I continue to remain wary of models based on psychological universalism. Perhaps most importantly for me, this model does not accurately reflect how I write, so I wonder how many other students do not write this way either. And, if language constrains and shapes thought, I wonder whether reliance on this model might not introduce new difficulties to those who whose first language—the language in which they think—is neither SAE nor academic English. Do they write and then translate? I know that many of them do. I know that many students whose first language is English approach academic discourse as one might approach a foreign language in which one is not proficient. Well, if one must translate everything, one doesn’t really come to feel competent, does one? And I, for one, hate doing things at which I never come to feel more competent. So, it seems to me that this model might just encourage our students to fear and hate writing even more than they already do when they walk into the room.
Moreover, this model is hierarchical, so it seems to me that teaching practices based on it might encourage students to continue to view writing as a series of discrete steps that must be moved through linearly. Then, as I’ve said before, what we produce are writers who continue to view writing as a series of little sub-products, each of which must be completed (and might be graded) before they can move on to the next step. Even though they say that their model acknowledges writing’s recursiveness, I don’t think they really capture it.
In fact, I’m growing increasingly wary about having students hand in “drafts” because I’m concerned about fostering the idea of writing as a series of linear steps that culiminate in the “presentation copy.” I’ve started going back over my old essays to see how I wrote in 101 (I keep everything!). I don’t think I ever wrote this way, and because I knew I’d be handing drafts in, I think I spent an awful lot of time polishing early on in the writing process, time that might have been better spent on developing ideas.
Bizzell: “Cognition, Convention, Clarity: What We Need to Know about Writing”
Summary:
Bizzell notes that the ways we have come to see writing problems as thinking problems largely because we have tended to pay no attention to students’ thinking. Now, she says, for various reasons, we have come to recognize that we must attend in new ways to the relationship between thinking and writing. She says that while compositionists agree about some fundamentals about language and language acquisition, they disagree about which of them apply to composition. She divides compositionists into camps based on whether they see writing as fundamentally inner- or outer-directed.
Inner-directed theorists see writing as one possible end of a linear process, each stage of which depends on the “same basic logical structures” (389). Thus, this structuralist model presumes that if teachers guide students through the stages, students will arrive at a point where they internalize the patterns that will enable them to approach specific writing situations, with audience analysis playing a primary role in revising and shaping writing.
Outer-directed theorists hold that the universal structures of language and thought cannot be taught and that the structures are always embedded in a social context that “conditions them” (390). One is always already embedded in at least one discourse community, and one cannot think what one has no word for. For these theorists, the primary goal is to teach students the conventions of academic discourse, to “ease” them into the academic discourse community by illuminating conventions and patterns that it has in common with discourse communities of which students are already members.
According to Bizzell, we need to consider the insights of both inner- and outer-directed theories. She provides an example of how inner-directed models can be enriched by outer-directed critique. She begins by summarizing Flower and Hayes’ model. Then she analyzes its shortcomings by turning to Vygotsky and sociolinguistics to fill in the gaps in the “translating box” (396). She shows that meaning is partly established by the conventions of discourse and thus the phrase “putting meaning into words” cannot adequately describe what occurs when we write and for the situatedness of writing. For Bizzell, discourse communities are akin to Fish’s interpretive communities.
Bizzell offers a nuanced understanding of writing as problem-solving that accounts for its situatedness and its function of “doing (intellectual) work in the world” (403). Bizzell also incorporates an interrogation of the quest for certainty that the use of a scientific model of writing evokes, pointing out the shortcomings with the protocol method and the underlying (and problematic) presupposition that certainty is achievable through the scientific method
Musings:
Well, I hadn’t read this when I wrote about Flower and Hayes. Since I made some of her criticisms myself, it should be clear that I think this model has lots more to offer. And thank goodness someone has finally said that we can have ideas for which we don’t have words! Those are, I think, the most creative, risky, and interesting ideas we have.
Her idea that students can “go native” in academic discourse communities and still maintain other aspects of their identities is one that I share, as is the notion that academic discourse communities can never be free of ideology. Brava! I’ll almost certainly be using this for my paper.
“Distributed Cognition at Work”
Summary:
Distributed cognition is the idea that intellectual interactions with others are not merely guides and stimulants, but “actually vehicles of thought” (136). It is dynamic “cognitive partnership” (136).
The author prefaces his/her account of distributed cognition at work in the BOC by discussing how it applies to a university setting in order to compare the university and the workplace as sites of writing. S/he distinguishes between distributed cognition and socially shared knowledge. The former takes place in the classroom and the latter in the overall institution.
Moving to the BOC, the author makes use of Hutchins’ ship analogy to explain distributed cognition in the workplace. S/he shows the ways that a ship is organized as the workplace is and some ways in which it differs. The main idea here is that the activities of an organization are “shaped by” their “primary goals” (140).
Decision-making at BOC is a complicated process, dependent on conventional genres, conventional lexicons, conventional approaches to data, conventional experiential categories, conventional logical warrants, and a standardized analytical instrument. The model generated by the interactions of these component parts is monitored and revised depending of changes in circumstances. Each genre entails its own characteristic narrative style, level of generalization, and goals. Policy decisions are based on analysis and interpretation of the input from different levels. Additionally, public and institutionally private genres play a part in the framing of problems and solutions.
Finally, the author notes that there are significant differences between the interactions of workers “in even hierarchical structures” and the interactions between teachers and students, because “until the highest levels of schooling, and in most classes, there is little expectation that students will contribute to the ongoing activity of the classroom in the way that fellow workers do” (148-149).
Musings:
While I think that the notion of “distributed cognition” is an interesting one, it seems odd to think about either academic or workplace writing and reasoning as universalizable situations. For instance, not all workplaces (in fact most peoples’ workplaces) are not corporations whose activities have national and/or international ramifications, nor are they all ordered as vertically as is BOC. Nor are all postsecondary academic settings organized as major research universities are. I’m not convinced that these two forms of social organization are analogous enough for a comparison of them to offer the insights that the author thinks s/he has established. For one thing, the author equivocates between the university and the classroom when s/he talks about educational activity. More importantly, the author focuses on the goals and activities of the overall institution when talking about BOC and those of the classroom when discussing education. This shifting focus undermines the analogy, even for comparative purposes. Most importantly, classrooms and corporate workplaces are not hierarchical in the same ways, and the author needs that for the analogy to hold in the way that s/he needs it to.
I’m even less convinced of the characterization of postsecondary education offered in this article than I am of the aptness of the analogy. I don’t think of “the university’s primary purpose as to accredit or to rank students” (136). If that’s the primary purpose of the university, why do we bother to offer classes? This reminds me of Linda Howard’s (one of the Regents) statement during a forum at CSN, when she said that “The only job of teachers is to boost students’ self-esteem.” I asked why schools didn’t, if that was the case, give us all A’s and send us home with degrees. I’ll ask the same question here. Can’t schools just charge a fee, rank students, and send us off? Why don’t schools just test us and issue degrees? Why don’t they just sell degrees? (I know, some do.) It may seem strange to others, but I no more think of the primary business of postsecondary education as issuing degrees than I think of students as customers.
Assessment and number of degrees granted might be administrators’ primary concern, but they aren’t mine. As both a student and as an instructor, I think of assessment as an onerous distraction from the things we’re trying to do together in the classroom. As both a student and as an instructor, I think of those who join me in the classroom as fellow workers in the activity of trying to make sense of the world and to construct new spaces within it for ourselves and for the activities we find worthwhile and engaging. In a very important sense, that means that we are fellow travelers. That is, what students need largely conditions my activity.
I do understand that hierarchy is built in to the classroom in ways that cannot be eradicated, but by making the constraints upon our activities as transparent as I can, I acknowledge the power relations inherent in the organization of the classroom. And, I try to engage student input into both content and process in every way I can think of. Students have a voice in what we read and in what topics we cover, and they have an opportunity at the end of every class to talk about the process of that particular class and how it went so that we can work together to improve our collective experience in future classes. Furthermore, for students afraid to voice their concerns in a face-to-face setting, I provide two other mechanisms for students to evaluate classes and our collective performance: They can drop a note into an envelope left in my mailbox for that purpose, or they can use an email account I have set up with a free service to send me a note. I will provide both the login and the password to every student in the class so that it can be easily accessed and feedback can remain anonymous. The only constraint I insist upon in feedback is that it may not involve ad hominem attacks.
Strangely, I think that the primary concern of the university is learning (notice I didn’t say “teaching”). I think that every other activity that goes on at a university ought to facilitate learning on some level and about some aspect of the experience of being human. Even research. Students are the most important people at the institution, and their needs ought to guide the rest of the activity tat takes place there.
Furthermore, the conception of education endorsed in this article presupposes that students are all the same, that they all learn in the same way, that they all have the same goals in mind, and that understanding knowledge as an object doesn’t involve reification. As far as I’m concerned, this is all crazy talk! Not really an expression usually associated with academic discourse, but this is, after all, a web log, which is a form of journal, and journals are, at least sometimes, free of the constraints of more formal academic writing. Perhaps it’s too emotional of me, but I’m finding it very difficult to think in any color other than red. In fact, I found it very difficult to keep reading through the scarlet veil that dropped over that sentence.
Here’s another one that really set me off: “A student who does not hand in his [sic] work does not impede the operation of the university. (In fact, he [sic] eases the instructor’s task of grading.) (148). Now that could only have been written by someone who has tenure, by someone whose job and/or funding is not in some way contingent upon good retention figures. Because for those of us who face pressure (implicit or explicit) to ensure that students neither drop nor fail our classes, students who do not hand in work DO impede our abilities to do our jobs. And that, my friends, impedes the operation of the university, however it is conceived. Grading is more difficult, not easier, if one knows that too many low grades or withdrawals can mean the loss of a job or of funding to continue with one’s own education. I know of at least one instructor who never gives students less than a C if they finish the semester; no matter what kind of or how much work a particular student has done, s/he will receive a C if s/he remains enrolled in this instructor’s class until the end of the semester. Appalling, don’t you think? And, if the university is conceived as primarily a degree-granting (ranking) business, undermining ranking, as this instructor’s practice does, impedes the primary activity of the institution. There’s no way around that.
This article’s idea of what goes on in the classroom is so much like what Freire calls the “banking concept of education,” what I call the “scarf and barf” method of education, that I cannot see what premises its author and I could possibly have in common regarding what goes on in educational settings. Since it is a commonplace in logic that if participants in a conversation share no premises, the conversation cannot continue in any meaningful way, I guess I’ll close here.
Peace all around.
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