Blog Response #10: Of Students and Authors and What the Heck Do I Assign?

I really appreciate what the author is trying to say. In a way, I agree completely. Recently—I’ve discussed this with a few people—I have been trying to get my students to see their education as empowering. I want them to take control of their educations, to see themselves as agents unto themselves, not just to be acted upon. I want them to use their education here not to merely float on by and get a degree (although, if the statistics hold true, most of the “floaters” probably won’t get a degree). I want them to, in the language of the article, become authors, those people who are active.

Of course, this is harder than it sounds. I have great sympathy for students who, having spent most of their formative years in classes—junior high classes, high school classes, etc.—that simply tell them the “correct” thing to do (rather than teaching them how to think), now struggle to think for themselves. They are so concerned with what’s correct that they don’t stop to think about what’s right, if that makes any sense at all. I know that, in high school, our teachers just wanted us to take the proper steps to get into good colleges so that we could make lots of money. It got really old.

And, for me, I know that my life got much better once I became an author, once I started determining—for myself—what was best, what constructs applied to me. That’s what I want my students to do.

However, the author brings up an excellent point:

Paradoxically, if pursued, such strategies can lead to the same “hypocrisy or despair” as the others, since a failure to acknowledge the social pressures on writers precludes any resistance to them. As Bartholomae has argued in his long debate with Elbow, expressivism (which Bartholomae describes as “part of a much larger project to preserve and reproduce the figure of the author as an independent, selfcreative, self-expressive subjectivity” [“Writing” 651) is wrong both because it is inaccurate and because it makes students “suckers and […] powerless, at least to the degree that it makes them blind to tradition, power and authority as they are present in language and culture” (“Reply” 128-29). When students ultimately come to recognize the degree to which they have thus been made “blind,” they may well rage not at “tradition, power, and authority” as present in culture but at the teachers who have failed to equip them to confront those forces. The problem of the “process” or expressivist pedagogies thus lies in their denial of the material, social, and historical operating not only within and outside the classroom, but also, and more significantly, within as well as outside student consciousness. (10)

I also understand this argument—boy, do I ever. Even though many of my teachers were trying to get me to the “correct” thing (to keep my vocabulary choices rolling), there were some who tried to broaden my horizons with very, very, very creative assignments—assignments, I felt, that had no bearing on the so-called real world. Indeed, these assignments were often introduced as “the kind of thing that universities love,” and so I persevered.

However, after reaching—and graduating from—a university, upon reaching the real world, guess what? Those assignments hadn’t done squat for me. (I remember one assignment in high school where, after reading a novel, we had to draw a giant head on a large piece of butcher paper and then draw pictures inside the head to represent what was going on in the protagonist’s mind throughout the novel. One group didn’t draw anything—they were being lazy, really—but they got credit, because—even though the teacher kinda saw through it—it looked like they were being creative. Now, tell me where in the real world that would happen. “Uh, sir, I didn’t design the logo for the client because the best, uh, logo is, uh, no logo.” No, it wouldn’t happen.) Thus, I can imagine my students raging, just like I raged, if their assignments aren’t in some way relevant.

How do we walk this thin line? I don’t know. I confess that I’ve seen many students in the Writing Center with the “discuss how you acquired literacy” assignment that’s popular in Eng 099—which, incidentally, is also mentioned in the article—and, while I applaud what that assignment is trying to do, I don’t know if it’s really doing anything for the students. By and large, I think they see it as just another busy-work assignment. Of course, I’m seeing the students that come in to the Writing Center; maybe there are many more students who value the assignment; I really, really hope so, because I think that the assignment can be beneficial. However, I do worry.

Thus, I am still where I began: how do I empower my students? How do I make them authors? Much is still up in the air. One thing, though, is clear: they must want it.

Blog Response #9: Eddie and Me and Mullets

Cool stuff, this week’s article. I like the idea of a multi-genre research paper. Again, as I alluded to in my last post, that’s the kind of stuff that I grew up doing in my primary, secondary, and higher education. I like it.

Let’s suppose, for instance, that I was doing a report on one of my life’s passions, guitar-playing. (This’ll be fun.)

It started out innocuously enough, of course. My first guitar teacher was a really nice guy--so much so, in fact, that he'd auditioned to be Donny Osmond's guitarist. Too bad he never taught me this one:



...or, on second thought, it's probably better that he didn't teach me that...

But no discussion of guitar-playing would be complete, of course, without mention of Eddie Van Halen, of whom my first teacher was a devotee. Here's one of Eddie's most interesting moments, playing a Steinberger TransTrem guitar, which allows the whole guitar to be transposed up or down and remain in tune. Thus, because of his equipment, I can NEVER play this song, because one of these guitars costs thousands and thousands of dollars--if you can find one, because they're not made anymore.



The interesting thing is that, after learning to play that crazy stuff (well, I could never play it very WELL), I kinda had to unlearn that in order to get some real emotion going. (And, seeing as how I was, in many regards, every bit the angst-ridden teenager of yore...) Consider this band, Unbroken, a hardcore band from the San Diego area, whose concert (not this particular concert) once almost cost me my life (you can see why) (ah, the foibles of youth.) In another one of their songs, "Razor," they actually subvert the whole punk genre and throw in some Morrissey riffs. This one's a bit more illustrative, though.



I still want to have a Les Paul Custom, thanks to that band. Black Les Paul Customs just look BAD.

Another band that broke that mold was Texas is the Reason, one of the best band names ever:



Those guys were big proponents that the Kennedy Assassination was a conspiracy theory--on their concert sweatshirts, they printed diagrams of the so-called "magic bullet theory," proving (in their minds, at least) that the accepted version of Kennedy's death is physically impossible.

Lately, though, I've been getting back to my roots--which, in my case, means Brian May. Brian May was the guitarist for Queen, and his solos still rank among some of the most melodic in rock. His unique tone was created by his fingers (duh) and his "Red Special," a homemade guitar that used, among other things, pieces of an old fireplace, a knitting needle, and motorcycle parts. (Of course, it didn't hurt that Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest vocalists of all time--and, by, all time, I mean since Adam ate a transgressive lunch.)



See, my teachers always wanted me to play the blues, and I understand why, since the blues formed the basis of all our modern pop music. However, I prefer Rush:



...which, of course, features a riff based on basic pentatonic scale movement. So, in a way, it IS the blues. Ha! I win!

While I realize that I haven't done much in this post aside from show a bunch of pirated videos (although, they're being used for educational purposes, so that makes it okay, right?), I can easily see how someone could fill in the blanks between these videos and make a convincing argument about something. Thus, I'm fine with the idea of the multimodal personal report. I think it'd be fun. I mean, I certainly had fun with all of these clips...

...wait, we need another mullet...and good guitar...

Blog Response #8: Why Are We Having This Argument?

Well, perhaps that title isn’t fair, because we’re obviously having this argument because somebody out there is against their students using technology. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with new technologies in the classroom. Back in high school, I was the kid who was always trying to figure out how to make a video to fulfill an assignment. (Well, not always, but enough to where it got a little old, all the editing and filming and costuming and wondering if Eric Yeh, who had the editing equipment, would get the freaking thing done on time.) Technology—that is, producing new multimodal texts—really enhanced my learning experience. I want my students to have the same opportunities.

That isn’t to say, of course, that I have been very accepting of text messaging—and here is why. By and large, the technologies mentioned in the introduction help students convey their thoughts to their audience(s). However, text messaging is, I feel, still a nascent technology. There have been many, many instances where miscommunication has resulted from a bad text message. Even if a text message gets its point across, the message usually has to be so abbreviated that the intrinsic pathos is lost. For example, I once had a friend announce via a mass-mailed text message that he and his wife had lost a child—it was stillborn. I didn’t have his phone number programmed into my cell phone, so, when the message arrived, I had a random phone number telling me a heartbreakingly tragic story. (It wasn’t until months later that I found out who it was, since I didn’t see the friend for a while.)

And I don’t think that this is a case of “old man Tucker doesn’t get texting lingo.” I’ve heard similar things from other people. However, if the time arrives when texting can actually help people get their point across, I’m all for it. In the meantime, I think even students are struggling with it, as evidenced by their use of funky abbreviations that even they don’t understand sometimes.

Okay, time for a quote:

The more channels students (and writers generally) have to select from when composing and exchanging meaning, the more resources they have at their disposal for being successful communicators. Aural and video compositions sometimes reveal and articulate meanings students struggle to articulate with words; audio and visual compositions carry different kinds of meanings that words are not good at capturing. It is the thinking, decision making, and creative problem solving involved in creating meaning through any modality that provide the long-lasting and useful lessons students can carry into multiple communicative situations. (3-4)

Amen to that, I say. Let’s use the freaking (that’s two freakings in the same paper!) computer already. And video. And cell-phone video. And text-messaging, as soon as that catches up with what we want it to do.

Blogger...

...really gave me heck for that last post...I hope the formatting is legible...kinda ironic, given the subject...

Blog Response #7: Hyper! Texts!

I have to hand it to Sheldon: last week’s classroom discussion really dovetailed into the reading we were assigned. The article was interesting—for its content, yes, but also for its decidedly hypertextual design. Hypertext fiction—and hypertext documents, in general—is one of my pet research subjects. I just wrote a paper on hypertextuality in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, for example. (No, I don’t know what grade I got on it yet. Maybe hypertext fiction won’t be one of my research interests for very long, if the paper falls on its hypertextual face.)

Usually, when discussing hypertext writing, I like to focus on the form itself and the options that it opens up for the reader. For example, in Absalom, Absalom! (and you’ll forgive me if a crib a bit from what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately), the different strands of narratorial perspective give the reader different—and differing—options: which way does the reader want the story to go? Who do they want to emerge as the hero? The villain? Do they even want to have a hero or a villain? I like the control that hypertext gives the reader. It’s a little scary for a writer, sure, to think that the reader isn’t going to interpret your story the way that you want. However, I think that’s inevitable, hypertext or no hypertext.

Anyway, what this all made me think about was our discussion on Monday, wherein we were talking about the academic bias against text-messaging and other forms of communication embraced by the young whippersnappers these days. If anybody understands the notion of hypertext—without knowing what the word hypertext means, of course—it’s those young whippersnappers. For example, when they choose to send a text message, there is a lot of cultural capital required to 1) write a text message, and 2) know how to interpret the text message when it arrives. They need to know who they’re writing to; they need to know the technological limitations—or abilities—of their cellphone (and the cellphone of the person they’re texting); they need to make sure that the person they’re trying to contact can put all the disparate bits and pieces of words that constitute text message language together into a coherent thought. Putting all these ideas together—all while trying to communicate an actual message—could be considered a kind of hypertextuality.

There’s an interesting point that the article brings up, and that’s that the ancient rhetorical canon of delivery has re-emerged into modern discourse with the addition of today’s technology. The author notes:

Richard Lanham, of course, has argued that with the addition of the digital to the set of media in which we compose, delivery takes on a critical role, and I think that’s so. But much more specifically, what a shift in the means of delivery does is bring invention and arrangement into a new relationship with each other. The writer of the page has fundamentally different opportunities than the creator of a hypertext […]. In other words, you can only invent inside what an arrangement permits—and different media permit different arrangements. By contrast, the creator of a hypertext can create a text that, like the page, moves forward. In addition, however, hypertext composers can create other arrangements, almost as in three rather than two dimensions. You can move horizontally, right branching; you can then left branch. The writer invented in a medium permitting these arrangements is quite different—a difference of kind, not degree. (317)

Technology, then, enables delivery to be raised (although many teachers would probably say lowered) into the realm of hypertext because of all the arrangements that the aforementioned technology makes possible. I think that’s pretty darn nifty, myself. Never really thought of it that way.

Of course, the author hints at the future of writing, as well:

The third source-what Leu calls “envisionments of new literacy potentials within new technologies”—is provocative. Here is what he is referring to: the ability of someone to take a given technology and find a use for it that may be at odds with its design (319).

I’ll just have to think about that one for a while.

Blog Response #6: I Read! I'm GOOD!

More than any article we have read thus far, I think that our sixth foray into the world of pedagogical/composition theory this semester addresses the connection between literacy and perceived morality. It’s an interesting idea, to be sure, one that I’d like to explore further.

So I will.

Growing up in Southern California (and, yes, I do capitalize “Southern,” as it is another country—nay, world—altogether), I was thrust into a unique situation upon entering my primary education at Esplanade Elementary School. It was my first and, in many ways, my favorite elementary school. (Later I was sent to a so-called “magnet” school, La Veta Elementary School, which was pretty good, but I always had a soft spot in my heart for good ol’ Esplanade.) Esplanade was unique for its demographic—its school boundaries encompassed neighborhoods both wealthy and modest. In Orange County, modest often means Latino.

I had no problem with it. Really, I thought it was great, the way we celebrated Latino—particularly Mexican—culture in school. However, it gives me shame to think that, at the same time that I was celebrating Latino culture in school, I shared many of the prejudices common to Southern California. For example, as my mother would drive me to Esplanade, we would pass a street corner where many Latino immigrants stood around, waiting to work as day-laborers. I remember it offending me; I would comment on it later, to friends.

Again, I remember this with shame. Now, the years having gone by and my experience broadened, I feel bad for those day-laborers—it’s a tough road to walk, indeed. I remember when, living in Costa Rica, I saw day-laborers from Nicaragua driven around by the dozen in the beds of open-back trucks; their work was long, sweaty, dangerous. I imagine that, in California, the situation couldn’t have been much better. I remember once that an acquaintance of mine laughingly recalled a prank he pulled on a friend; he had hired a day-laborer to dig a hole in the lawn of his friend. When the friend arrived home to find his lawn replaced by a giant hole, the day-laborer was told—in no uncertain words, I’m sure—to get lost. It was, for that poor man, a day lost.

Why all this hostility toward the day-laborers, many of whom worked harder than the people in the cars who passed them? There was, I believe, a perception that they lacked morality due to their lack of education, of literacy: they didn’t speak English, first of all, and they were poor, which was something of a transgression in Southern California.

In other words, since my youth, I have been aware of the connection between education and perceived morality, and I appreciate that this article explores reasons why that connection exists. One passage particularly caught my eye; describing the connecting between morality and education, the author says:

In The Literacy Myth, Harvey Graff, for instance, exposes a subtle transformation in the ideological basis of nineteenth-century literacy in Canada. In a church-dominated society, reading was used as a medium for moral training; one read in order to learn right behavior. Eventually economic and state interests eclipsed religious ones, yet moral connotations continued to cling to literacy. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ability to read was no longer regarded as an avenue to morality but rather as an indication of moral behavior itself (just as illiteracy became-in and of itself an indication of antisocial or immoral behavior). (654)

While I can see the logic of this explanation—that is, the gradual progression from literacy-as-pathway to literacy-as-righteousness—I confess that, at least in my experience, the bias against the illiterate went deeper. I never consciously thought to myself, “They are illiterate; they are evil.” The bias had become entrenched in my society to the point that nothing needed to be said (although, believe me, plenty was).

The question, then, is how to remove this bias from society. I don’t know. Perhaps a more manageable question would be How do we stop the illiterate from thinking they’re evil? Time and time again, I run into people while teaching whose self-esteem is next to nothing. “I’m terrible at writing,” they say, apologizing profusely before we even begin reading their essays, and I wonder if it goes beyond the typical students’ nervousness. I wonder if, throughout their lives, they have been treated as morally deficient because of their lack of skills.

I have tutored students who, for their Eng 099 class, had to write papers about how their acquired literacy. I the time, I admit that I found the assignment somewhat pointless. Now, however, I see its worth: it convinces students of their worth.

All the, uh, Essay’s a Stage

This article is, for me, perhaps the most revolutionary of the articles we’ve read, if only for its progression-through-unlearning attitude. No, that’s not quite correct—the article certainly isn’t asking us to unlearn anything; rather, it’s asking us to consider that, as we progress into a society increasingly dominated by hypertextuality and technology-based discourse, our methods of composition may return to those advocated by rhetors from antiquity. This is stated most clearly when the authors suggest that “[c]ertainly, we will need to pay more attention to the fifth canon of rhetoric, delivery” (246). For years, composition assignments doled out to students have focused on the first three canons of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style (by which they meant something akin to our English words grammar or punctuation or correctness)—at the cost of the last two canons, memory and delivery. Thus, the vast majority (I’d say) of composition assignments in many high school (and even university) English classes are situated in a stylistic vacuum, with instructors focusing on the arrangement of the paragraphs, the correctness of the grammar and punctuation, and whether the students follow the “proper” steps for constructing introductions (do they have a three-part thesis, do they set up the arrangement of the essay) and conclusions (do they restate the thesis). Thus, when many students come to us, we get the standard five-paragraph essay: easy to follow, easy to grade, easy to forget.

By incorporating the sense of performance which the authors advocate, the students may gain perspective on their writing; that is, what is the rhetorical situation demanded by their audience, not necessarily the course instructor? What appeals will best work? What is the timely thing to say? As the authors insist, quoting a student:

In Todd’s words: “The substance is the difference.” Important, too, is students’ sense of a rhetorical situation and the presence of an audience for their writing. As Paolo puts it, “[P]ersonal writing has more of my style and is more liberal with grammar, though not because it is writing without conventions or rules. Instead, Paolo makes choices that are deliberate and planned, with a clear sense of audience and rhetorical purpose. “I’m willing to break rules more often in order to get a specific effect I desire,” Paolo explains […]. (231)

Thus, while students still learn the rules of effective writing, they also learn when it is appropriate to unlearn those rules, or ignore them—or, yes, use them to the letter of the law. By letting the students perform—and, by perform, I mean that the students can write in a variety of media in a variety of genres in a variety of situations—they can experiment and gain a better sense of what each individual situation demands. They gain, to use the word that my students toss around so casually, a sense of writing’s flow.

Ultimately, by allowing students the freedom to participate in and out of class in a variety of rhetorical modes, they will become, as the authors note, “rhetors in both a classical and a distinctly modern—even postmodern—sense: individuals who, singly and in groups, participate in numerous communication situations that involve a dazzling, sometimes staggering, array of literate practices” (245). And, really, what more could we want for our students? While we would love to think that many of our students will go on to careers in humanistic studies that allow them to think large thoughts steeped in theory, many have no desire—but, with this training, they will be able to perform whatever they want to be.

(Credit to T.A. Noonan for suggesting the use of “perform” in that last sentence.)