conCEPTS that challenge our preCEPTs and perCEPTions

conCEPTS that challenge our preCEPTs and perCEPTions

Wysocki's prose is not easy to read.  Yet her ideas on "Opening New Media to Writing," are compelling and the exercises that follow her argument look like they would be fun.  What I found particularly interesting, however, are her ideas on how, "new technologies do not automatically erase or overthrow or change old practices," and that, quoting Cynthia Selfe,  in a "postmodern world, new media literacies may play an important role in identity formation, the exercise of power, and the negotiation of new social codes."  Wysocki asks us, "how the visual presentation of books "fits into and reinforces our cultural practices of authority, standardization, and mass production," and that we should ask questions of our texts.  There is that wonderful section where she asks, "How might the straight lines of type we have inherited on page after page of books articulate to other kinds of lines, assembly lines and lines of canned products in supermarkets and lines of desks in classrooms?  How might these various lines work together to accustom us to standardization, repetition, and other processes that support industrial forms of production? I'd like to extend this question not just the lines on the paper but the lines in the structure of the sentence and the lines in the structure of the paragraph.  If we are to allow, exercise and encourage producing or interpreting text on paper - let's look at the very sentence itself - the linear narrative that dominates our prose.  Quoting Wysocki, "If we are serious about seeing our positions in the texts we make for each other, then we'll need strategies for generous reading, strategies that include but also help us look beyond the naturalized rules and guidelines for how we present selves in print.  And since this is a fractured world I would like to show that fissure in not just the visual manifestation of the sentence but in its very word order.

For the "Arguing Rhetorically" I have assigned one group to put together a Web blog using the deliberative approach to the argument essay.  We are both in unfamiliar territory.  I have advised them to look over the chapter in the Allyn & Bacon on "Analyzing Images," and to look at design books on color, font sizes and other ways to communicate their messages.  I have advised them to write in chunks and to talk to each other, as in a conversation - a call and response.  We'll see how it goes.

Wysocki's exercises definitely help to break down precepts and help us to see differently.  I especially appreciated the activity for the visual argument and her comment to her students, "that there are not fixed definitions of what constitutes a "visual argument," so that they will have to work with what they understand "argument" and "the visual" to be--but...that the visual argument they build has to stand on its own.  Imagine that no right answer but discovery.

Digital Humanities, anyone?

This week’s readings kept reminding me of the digital humanities panel that we had on campus a few weeks ago and also the discussions we have had about technology in the classroom. My exploratory paper was actually trying to look into some of this new media as an aid to enhance learning in a writing classroom. Also, our next assignment is also related to new media, and I have had some heated debates with some of my friends about the use of new media in the classroom, which made it a more interesting reading week for me. Some of the exercises suggested Anne Frances Wysocki looked very interesting to me, and I would really like to use them in my classroom, and see if it works like it does for Wysocki’s classroom. I really thought the article by Wysocki was really clever. I am not sure if I understand the part about decreased emphasis on content and more emphasis on the medium, but I guess, when we are working with the new media, the rhetorical purpose of the medium and the form that the content uses becomes highly influential on the message/content’s overall reception. Of course, Wysocki wants us to emphasize new media more in our composition classroom, but it only comes out as an ulterior motive. The argument makes it seems like just the integration of new media into the classroom is not what Wycoski is ultimately preaching.

hooks is right!

I have been a big proponent of bell hooks’ ideas and got really excited when I saw the reading for the week. Of course, I got so excited about it that I forgot that I had to post a blog on the reading. So here I am, a little late, but with my input on the article. I had read this article about 2 years ago, when I was teaching at a very rural community college, and the idea of a multicultural, diverse student body had seemed like a distant, utopian dream. Here at MU, I have the opportunity to make more use of hooks’ advise about “making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute to a central goal of transformative pedagogy” that is unavoidable in the 21^st century. Her idea of creating a learning environment that creates a sense of commitment and a common good that binds us is the ultimate ideal that we all should strive to achieve. The classroom for hooks’ seems to be more like a communal space where students should be open to share ideas that may not be considered non-threatening to classroom order, but this sharing of ideas, desire to learn, is what will enhance our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world. I have noted in my classrooms that the practice of making students write out their ideas and then share it with the class does help in subverting some of the racial, gender or class related inhibitions that may be there at the beginning of the semester.

The Rhetorical Situation of New Media

This week’s readings have been helpful for me in conceptualizing the multimodal assignment I would like to do next semester in my possible “Arguing Differently” focused English 1000 course. Specifically, I am interested in Anne Frances Wysocki’s focus on the materiality of all texts, as it reminds me that students need to be able to study texts-as-objects before they can begin to analyze and compose “traditional” and “new media” texts. In the classroom, I am interested in some of her shorter exercises, such as the “materialities of seeing” exercise in which a stranger walks into the classroom and students are asked to recall what they can about the individual or her “justifying choices” assignment, which asks students to literally analyze and reflect on ever material choice they make concerning formatting, placement, emphasis, paper size, font choice, color, etc. in a formal piece of writing. Along these same lines, I am interested in Cynthia Selfe’s lesson plans and suggested assignments for visual essays that not only include guidelines but also templates for student responses and a  follow-up reflection that asks designers/composers to judge their own success as creating a visual literacy narrative or visual argument.

With all of this said, I still found myself bogged down in Wycsocki’s jargon. Places where Wycsocki expresses what seems to be evident and accepted in Composition and Rhetoric and could therefore be expressed in a much more abbreviated fashion include passages such as the following:

But we do understand, now, that writing, like all literate practices, only exists because it functions, circulates, shifts, and has varying value and weight within complexly articulated social, cultural, political, educational, religious, economic, familial, ecological, political, artistic, affective, and technological webs (you can name others, I am sure)…. (second page)

But why would we need to because Wycsocki has taken it upon herself to name pretty much all the ones we could think of, all in an attempt to emphasize the complex matrix of the rhetorical situation. Here is another example involving the concept of “interactivity”:

Manovich’s words can encourage us to consider the various and complex relations we can construct with readers through the ways readers are asked to move through texts we build, whether that is by turning pages, clicking links, making conceptual connections between a photograph on one screen and poem on another, or solving a puzzle that opens the gate to the next level of a gametext. (page?)

I am probably being too critical here, but it seems like the notion of the audience’s interaction with the text (even at the level of materiality) goes back far enough that we don’t really need to re-establish it – I’m thinking Bakhtin here (many of you could probably name multiple other discussions). I do see why Wysocki feels it is necessary to argue that we “define ‘New Media Texts’ in terms of their materialities,” which essentially involves foregrounding materialities and forces us to consider the how and why of “new media” in the first place. In other words, Wysocki is encouraging us to be incredibly thoughtful in understanding how we design texts in multiple media because she maintains these texts situate us in the world.

In many ways, Selfe’s “taking up the challenges of visual literacy,” as the subtitle of her chapter states, continues the task of defining “visual literacy” and attempting to suggest a composition teacher’s approach toward this type of literacy, not as a new, hip composition-classroom novelty but instead as strategic broadening of “texts” and “literacy” in the twenty-first century. My main objection to Selfe is the same objection I had the first time I read Selfe in my Teaching Writing course at SLU. She chides those in “our profession” (which, I take to mean here those in the field of Composition and Rhetoric but also in the broader studies of the English Department in general) for being suspicious of visual forms. She writes “When English composition teachers have thought to bring visual forms into their classes—a practice which they have carried on for at least forty years – they have typically presented them as second-class texts: either as ‘dumbed down’ (32) communications that serve as ‘stimuli for writing but […] no substitute for the complexity of language’ (22) or as texts related to, but certainly not on an equal footing with, the “’real’ work of the course.” Let’s face it -- I think reservations from some in the field have a point. Visual texts do communicate in different ways from the written word. This doesn’t mean they’re less valuable, it just means they are going to emphasize different things. Even more so, however, I think Selfe should allow for the fact that there are entire departments (namely Studio Art and Design and its many related fields) that precisely solely deal in “visual literacy” (though, I doubt they would refer to it as “literacy”), which begs the question of why, exactly, English composition teachers should be pushing so hard for appropriating those techniques entirely.  These questions become even clearer when I consider that for all of the “visual literacy” assignments Selfe suggests, there is always a reflective element that forces designers/composers and audience/viewer to translate into words how affective a specific visual presentation is based on categories that sound awfully close to the types of standards we apply to written texts (impact, coherence, salience, organization). Obviously, I see the benefit of focusing on “visual literacy” to some extent and plan to do so both this semester and next. But I keep kicking myself for not asking Selfe these questions in person when I met her last March at the CCCC. She’s a delightfully nice woman, by the way.

What did you all think of the exercises in Wysocki?

Has anyone tried to do a version of any of the exercises in “Opening New Media To Writing” by Anne Frances Wysocki? The postcard one is the most familiar and seems to work the best. I was going to have students bring in their our photographs when we get to the last unit (creating a visual essay). For homework they will have previously read a chapter from Roland Barthes Camera Lucinda and we were going to talk about images and their meanings. I think there are some similarities between this activity and the one Wysocki suggests, and I think it could work well, but it's the others that I have concerns about, especially the eye-witnessing one. I don't know about students in any of your classes, but mine don't take well to classes that are structured out of the ordinary. Although the activity does seem entertaining, I'd be worried that after all was said and done, the students wouldn't be able to make the connection with the concept trying to be expressed. I mean, maybe. That's why I'm curious if anyone has done something like this? Is anyone considering doing this exercise in their own class? What do you all think?

New Media Literacy

Very clever Wysocki... To take something scary and exclusive like "new media" and to incorporate both digital and print mediums into a larger, inclusive definition is a very smart move. I find myself thinking back to a presentation I attended with Dr. Kathleen Hayle (who is a wonderful person by the way and one of the front runners of post-humanism literary theory). Hayle discussed how English departments needed to move away from the traditional demarcation of different literary periods in time periods (Renaissance, Medieval, modern, victorian etc.) and instead move to a medium based approach. Thus, instead of saying I was studying Renaissance literature, I might study the manuscript, or the early printing press media etc. I think it is a bit of a pipe dream and I am not sure what this new arrangement offers but I think it would sit well with Wysocki. It seems that Wysocki wants us to spend less time arguing over content and more time examining how the medium and form the content is displayed on effects the message within. I don't know if my summary makes sense, but I like the heart behind Wysocki's message.

Why do I have everything left justified in my paper.

Why
        does
               every
                       word
                               follow
                                       the last
                                                   ?

Nonetheless I always fall back to the form I know and am comfortable with at the end of the day, but it is interesting to think about. We think about form, style and format in poetry but rarely in composition class (as Anne rightly points out). I like that Wysocki is not just trying to get digital media infused into the composition course, although of course that is a sub-objective. Instead, she is trying to ask us to recognize the constrictive force of medium and form on our writing regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not, so we might as well acknowledge it. In that vein I thought the crayon activity was awesome (pg. 27)! Any activity that uncovers cultural pre-conditioning (crayons are childish and silly) is a favorite of mine. I am not sure how the subsequent exercises would go over in class (redesign the computer for cockroaches?). I also thought the idea of a visual argument showcase with the students rotating between pieces and guessing at the arguments was really interesting and something I might try when I transition into my unit IV multi-model argument.

Selfe seemed to be playing off of Wysocki's same arguments. I thought that her evaluation hand-outs were really interesting and would probably work really well in a peer review situation (they were visual themselves, which was interesting). I also thought her assignment that adapted a research paper and transformed it into a visual argument was very similar to what I plan on suggesting for my students multimodel essay. Overall, I thought these readings were both theoretically rigorous and very practical!

Now, I dare someone to blog on this article just using visual media!

Visual vs. Digital Learning

So before I go into what I gleaned from this week's articles, I do have a bone to pick here first. While I am completely pro-non-conventional learning in the Composition classroom, and while I agree whole-heartedly with Wysocki's proclamation that "This shift from print to the computer does not mean the end of literacy," I wonder how we can be expected to teach digital literacy to our students when the University of Missouri does not provide adequate digital technologies in our classrooms. I teach in a classroom with a chalkboard--not even a whiteboard--and in order to hook up my laptop to project YouTube clips, movies, or even Blackboard, I had to purchase a $30 Mac adapter from my own very limited funds. Although I realize that other classrooms may have a different setup, the reason why I personally am not assigning a digital component to my course this semester is because I feel that it is unfair for students to be expected to complete an assignment where they are not given the proper resources. If they created a digital presentation, for example, how could they present it to the class? They would have to bring in their own laptop, and what if it did not adapt to the projector system, or something else went awry? Without a reliable setup, there are too many variables, and I value my students' time more than that.

With that being said, I did feel that the articles provided alternative ways of thinking about visual learning in a non-digital sense that could be used in classrooms with limited resources. The Selfe article, for instance, defines visual literacy as "the ability to read, understand, value, and learn from visual materials (still photographs, videos, films, animations, still images, pictures, drawings, graphics)--especially as these are combined to create a text--as well as the ability to create, combine, and use visual elements (e.g. colors, forms, lines, images) and messages for the purposes of communicating." This definition seems like a much more open-ended assessment of visual learning that even a classroom with limited resources could handle. I also found that some of the exercises provided by the Wysocki article-- such as the one suggesting students write with crayons and other types of writing tools--to be interesting activities in that they offer students a way to think about the visual element of writing, which often gets left behind.

I find that this translates directly to my idea of integrating poetry into the Composition classroom. Poetry is an extremely visual form of writing, and unlike prose, the shape and form of how a poem looks on the page is very important. In my multimodel project, I created a Pinterest board with ideas. Some of them deal with the visual literacy that reading and writing poetry can provide. One of them shows how you can "cut up" the words of long poems to create other ones. Another suggests thinking of a sonnet in terms of the visual structure of an envelope. I don't know what kind of classroom I will be teaching in next semester, but I appreciate articles and ideas that can teach students visual literacy without having to necessarily rely on digital technology.

hooks' "Contact Zone" of Transformative Pedagogy

Bell hooks’ argument for a critical pedagogy that creates a democratic classroom among an increasingly multicultural or diverse student body is, as she notes repeatedly, clearly influenced by Paulo Freire. Freire has cropped up in many of the theorists we have studied, which demonstrates how persuasive his negative description of the “banking system of education” and the class barriers that divided the bourgeoisie academy of those who have power from students who do not have power or a voice. From Freire, hooks develops what she calls a “transformative pedagogy rooted in a respect for multiculturalism” (40).  The term “multiculturalism,” which was thrown around anywhere and everywhere especially during the 1990s when hooks wrote this collection of essays, is not a label we tend to use in today’s discourse. For hooks, rather than being essentializing or divisive, the term “multiculturalism” appears to denote a certain kind of democratization that was rapidly happening within the university at the end of the twentieth century. In addition, hooks assumes that democratization of the classroom is a key goal for universities as a whole and a common good we should be working toward. She perhaps defends this goal in other portions of Teaching to Transgress since the chapters we have somewhat jump into the nuts and bolts of transformative pedagogy. Hooks writes, “Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy” (39).

Importantly for hooks, this responsibility to contribute does not imply that the classroom has to be established as the ultimate “safe zone.” Contribution can be contentious and messy.  Wanting to create a classroom of “openness and intellectual rigor,” hooks writes, “Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared commitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn – to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world” (40). I believe her use of the word “ideally” here is very important, since we all might be able to imagine particularly difficult classmates or students who make us really question why that student is even at the university to begin with. We also get better sense of how hooks envisions this democratization practice which may be full of confrontation and disagreement in her chapter on “Confronting Class.” Hooks argues against the notion that a teacher’s primary concern should be to “maintain order” within the classroom, as this reinforces the bourgeois values that have been established in the university. From the perspective of the students, hooks argues that these same social pressures often silence “marginal” voices.  She writes,

Even though students enter the ‘democratic’ classroom believe they have the right to ‘free speech,’ most students are not comfortable exercising this right to ‘free speech.’ Most students are not comfortable exercising this right – especially if it means they must give voice to thoughts, ideas, feelings that go against the grain, that are unpopular. (179)

In practical terms, the exercises she suggests to move toward a transformative pedagogy of democratization in the multicultural classroom are relatively tame. Hooks has every student write short paragraphs throughout the class and then makes each student share these paragraphs at some point in order for their unique voice to be heard. She sees this practice as a way to subvert class, race, and gender structures in the classroom.

 While this practice seems less than revolutionary, I saw connections between hooks’ view of the classroom as a communal space filled with unique voices that will often be in opposition to one another to notion of the “Contact Zone” that Mary Louise Pratt first introduced in her 1991 essay “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In that initial essay, Pratt makes the statement that in the contact zone, “No one [is] excluded, and no one [is] safe.”  In a 1994 article published in CCC, Min-Zhan Lu uses Pratt’s original article as a touchstone to argue for a multicultural approach to style that re-envisions the way we think of “errors” in composition. Instead of teaching students a standardized set of conventions and stylistic formulas that reinforce the hegemonic language of privileged, white native speakers, Lu borrows Pratt’s original terminology to cast rhetoric and writing as a “contact zone” for students. This “contact zone” allows each writer to carefully inspect his or her classmate’s writing and the writing of professionals within the academy on an even plane that acknowledges English heteroglossia (differences within the linguistic code). This difference in language can be viewed as a point of resistance that helps students find their own voice among a variety of syntactic choices. Thus, I see hooks’ notion of transformative pedagogy in which students are actually forced to share their own perspective at least once being translated into the composition classroom in particular with the work of people like Lu in “Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone.” 

Still thinking...

I wish I'd read this kind of stuff before I started teaching. I may have structured my first classes differently.

Once again, we see a new intent for the composition classroom. As this is usually one of the first college courses a student will take, we use comp to introduce them to ideas that question their preconceived worldview, giving voice and credit to those that, in the middle-class white patriarchy, may not have it. Making students see how pervasive their biases are could be relevant, in some cases pivotal, to the rest of their college careers. I too, after all, am guilty of assigned reading "tokenism" when it comes to minority writers.

But this still raises questions. I have a poor-man's understanding of feminist theory, even less so about race and class theory. How would I acquire the confidence to teach these concepts to Eng 1000 students, some of which might be adamantly resistant to them? If I encourage discussion of minority  or working-class experiences, how would I acquire the skills to participate in the discussion without coming across as clinical, pretentious, or naive? In other words, how would we, as instructors, begin to unlearn our own bourgeois biases and values?

I was especially intrigued by this statement: "As silence and obedience to authority were most rewarded, students learned that this was the appropriate demeanor in the classroom. Loudness, anger, emotional outbursts, and even something as seemingly innocent as unrestrained laughter were deemed unacceptable, vulgar disruptions of classroom social order" (178).

I totally see the point being made here--what is "appropriate demeanor"? What does this mean? If your students are mad, encourage them to be mad. If they thinks something's funny, let them laugh. Honesty is a good thing.

But where do we draw the line? Are there instances in which authority is needed to curb an excessively volatile or disrespectful student?

Consider this situation: my very first semester teaching lit at a community college, I had a very opinionated white male student. Discussions about race or gender would put him on the defensive immediately, and his talk so dominated the classroom that I could sense he was intimidating other students. There came a point when he basically said racial discrimination wasn't an issue because "everyone gets picked on"; after all, he'd  faced discrimination when he was hazed during his first few months in the military. When nobody else in the class challenged this view, I tried to explain that I didn't think this was an accurate comparison. Following this, the student became openly hostile toward me, spending class time snickering under his breath to a boy sitting next to him. At one point he put his sunglasses over his eyes and announced that he felt "safer" with them on. This was clearly rebellion, it was clearly disrespectful, and it damaged the atmosphere for free discussion I'd managed to build in the classroom.

What I ended up doing was keeping the guy after class to tell him he couldn't act like that, though the very thought of going in to face him the next class day filled me with dread. I didn't want to see him, and I certainly didn't want to have a sit-down talk with him to ask him what his problem was, nor did I feel qualified to do so. What should we do in instances like this, where students are deliberately making it hard for us to teach? At what point does this ultra-tolerance break down and become an obstacle, not just for us, but for the students that are trying to learn from us? Do I have a right to tell a student no when he asks if he can write a paper that denies the Holocaust happened? Can I tell a student that she can't call homosexual couples "perverts" when arguing against gay adoption? In the instance in which free speech becomes disruptive, can it interfere with learning?
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Also, since we're posting cats, here's an unrelated pic of my animal, Crookshanks:

How serious are we about Teaching to Transgress

How Serious are we about Teaching to Transgress -

Writing this now, I wonder when did bell hooks write this article?  A quick google search revealed the book was published in 1994.  How little has changed since then.  One of the first things I noticed in all of my class is the minimal diversity.  I've also noticed that we have only had one article that did not ignore there could be some differences based on race, gender or class.  It has been my experience that class is often left out of the discussion.  Even who is teaching to pay for their PhD is a class (and sometimes race) paradigm.  I have often struggled with many of the issues Hooks relates in the chapter, "Confronting Class in the Classroom."  Not as the teacher but as the student.  I am usually outspoken so no one would believe that I feel silenced but I often feel that my behavior is experienced as "inappropriate," and that as Hooks writes, "silence and obedience to authority were most rewarded."  I agree, as she writes, "It is still necessary for students to assimilate bourgeois values in order to be deemed acceptable; and students who enter the academy unwilling to accept without question the assumptions and values held by privileged classes tend to be silenced, deemed troublemakers."  What she skirts is the power/class divide between faculty and doctoral students.  I have known that class as Hooks states, "is more than just a question of money, that is shaped values, attitudes, social relations, and the biases that informed the way knowledge would be given and received.  For this to have benefited us in the classroom, did we need to talk about this sooner?  If our classrooms, the one's we teach and the one's we take ignore this issue, what is our responsibility?  How do we really address it when the issues are often invisible or we risk being not just silenced but sanctioned (formally and informally?)

hooks

I've been in a lot of the situations that hooks talks about in these articles. For my BFA and my MFA, I went to a predominantly white, upper-class liberal arts college. I can count on my hand the other minorities that have been in my classes during my time there, and not until my very last semester was there another African-American person. I've been the “native informant” many times (once very vivid memory of this is during a literature course talking about W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk. A student didn't understand the idea of double-consciousness, and argued that because she had black friends and didn't see their color, then the concept of double-consciousness didn't exist now in today's world. The teacher then asked me my opinion), I've been asked on numerous occasions (more so in undergrad) if I was there on scholarship, and I've been in classes where the reading was all homogenous. Once the instructor was called upon because his reading list was all canonical white male writers, he replied by saying how he “didn't feel the need to include anyone else.”

All of these experiences led me to feel as if I didn't have a voice. They contributed to my own sense of self-hate over being a minority, of being different (both from a class and race standpoint) and so I never spoke in class. I cringe when the inevitable ethnic class comes up in the semester, the time when the instructor throws in a token minority story/novel to discuss in workshop/literature courses, but like hooks, I feel that on the other hand, it is important to include diverse voices, to get students to see other sides and hear other stories. The point I believe hooks is trying to make is that instructors should be cognizant of their students and in bringing diverse materials into the classroom, but at the same time, to not let whatever reading (or video, or article or whatever) become defined by the race, or gender, or class upbringing of its author.

Trampires and Teaching Strategies

Similar to Kacy's post, today I actually had a direct experience with bringing some of the issues that hooks discusses into the classroom. A little over a month ago, I read this fantastic article in the Huffington Post Chicago on the public slut-shaming of actress Kristen Stewart--most notably of Twilight fame--after her alleged affair with her married Snow White and the Huntsman director. The article brings up some excellent, though disturbing, points about how even this celebrity buff can affect the social outlook of young women, and so I wanted to share it with my class. Here is the article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nico-lang/trampires-why-the-slut-sh_b_1850940.html

I have to admit that I was a bit nervous before today's discussion. Although my students in this class have proven to be intelligent and sensitive when discussing touchy social and cultural issues, I still knew full well that this lesson could blow up in my face. In those brief moments of nervousness, I could definitely understand what hooks was talking about when she says, "The unwillingness to approach teaching from a standpoint that includes awareness of race, sex, and class is often rooted in the fear that classrooms will become uncontrollable, that emotions and passions will not be contained" (39). What if someone said something offensive? What if the discussion became immediately political (the article certainly is)? Or what if, worst of all, I can't seem to get them to care?

Before we read the article, I had them watch the hilarious YouTube video, mentioned in the article, where Will Ferrell stages a fake emotional breakdown over the whole scandal on the Conan show. If you haven't seen it, you should for a good laugh:

There are few things in this world greater than Will Ferrell screaming. Anyway, after we watched that, we read the article together. I then had them respond specifically to the last sentence, asking what we are teaching young women with the public slut-shaming of K-Stew, and also for them to identify two things that surprised them about the article. They wrote for a bit, then broke up into groups and talked, then we regrouped as a class. 

Overall the discussion went well. No one got overly heated or expressed comments that were out of hand. I was a little dismayed, though, because for the most part, only the young women talked. They actually had a lot to say and felt pretty passionate about the issues raised in the article. However, only two young men talked, and mostly agreed with them. I felt a little like I was preaching to the choir with the discussion, but hey, at least they were exposed to the issues presented and will maybe think a little bit next time something similar happens in Hollywood.

"Don't you think we're reading too much into this?"

On Friday I did an activity in both of my classes were we attempted to analyze the song "Gangnam Style" by a Korean pop artist.  The lyrics are mainly in Korean, so we spent the first half of the class looking specifically at the imagery and surface connotations of the music video, and then re-examined our original interpretations after watching the video again with English subtitles.  I even had an article to go along with it, but my students generally got the underlying messages of class commentary without it.  (For anyone interested, here is the link.)  Both classes had really good conversations and made really good observations about the video's message.  But I also got the comment, "I think that maybe it's just a song and we're reading too much into it."  I remember hearing this sentiment from classmates as an undergraduate and even in high school English courses.  Someone inevitably felt that sometimes "a cigar is just a cigar."

A more interesting comment came from another student in the following class meeting.  He told me he had come home from class and his friends were watching the "Gangnam Style" video and attempting the dance and then he felt the need to extend our class discussion into his dorm room.  Obviously I loved this.  But he followed his anecdote with a relatively deflated, "I don't think I'll ever be able to just listen to and enjoy that song again."  This seemed reminiscent to Hook's remembrance of a student saying "We take your class.  We learn to look at the world from a critical standpoint, one that considers race, sex, and class.  And we can't enjoy life anymore" (42).  Hooks "respect[s] the pain" and acknowledges "that new ways of knowing may create estrangement where there was none" (43).  Obviously I am all for opening our students' eyes to new perspectives and potentially harmful obliviousness (is that a word?).  But part of me also feels for the student who just wants to do a goofy dance to a song he can't understand.

Classroom Taboos

Discussing class and race in the classroom is the equivalent to talking about the race and politics at the dinner table. Never do it, and if you do prepare for a firestorm of controversy.

And yet isn't that why we do what we do, to force ourselves and our students to walk through the fire so that they might get to the other-side and gain perspective about where they first were. I loved the example from Hooks about the student returning home and being bothered by the things they overheard from family members. I remember when I first had those feelings getting back from college, and I think it is important to pass that discomfort alone. But how do we do that?

This is my issue with Hooks. Preach on my man, but what can I do about it when my goal is teaching composition?

When I taught at SIUC, class and race rested on top of everything in my classroom. There I was, one of usually three white people in my class, teaching a multi-racial, lower-income student body about Standard American English. I was a walking cliche and it made me pretty uncomfortable at times: the white gatekeeper manning the gates at the entrance to the ivory tower of academia.

I would like to say I adapted my pedagogy to directly confront this controversial image, but I don't really think I did. All I really did was try to demystify my role as teacher and open myself up to my students. If they were comfortable with me and knew that my purpose was to help them succeed then I hoped I at least did not perpetuate the racial and class segregation that still happens at the university. 

When I first heard about teaching at MU I often heard about the homogenous student body, and to my relief it seems that my classrooms, while certainly no where near as diverse as SIUC, still maintains a high level of diversity. And it is funny to me that many of the students that are most engaged in my classroom are the non-white non-suburban students. Perhaps I am just more comfortable with the "unconventional" student.

I will admit though, I don't think I did enough with race or class at SIUC and I still do not do enough with it today. I appreciate that Hooks discusses the importance of the subject, and I echo his declaration that these issues need to be addressed on both the personal and the institutional level. I utilize many of the techniques he recommends in order to get my students talking regardless of race or class. Doing freewrites and creating open discussion are central my classes, but I still feel like I could do more. I rarely openly broach the subject of race and class, and mostly when I do I comment on my own white, bourgeois experience usually for satirical purposes (white boy problems, first world problems are cliches but they can also make us recognize both our racial and class position). The uncomfortable feeling that settles on a class that touches upon race or class rarely permeates my classroom, and I am not sure that is a good thing.

Nonetheless, these classroom taboos are crucial to think about and I appreciate that Hooks is there to remind us of that fact.

Arguing Differently and Perhaps Out of Context

The original "theme" for my writing course at Boston College was argumentation.  My mentor eventually talked me out of this theme suggesting it might come across with a kind of negative connotation; he spoke as if I would be setting myself up for a hostile classroom environment.  As a result, I appreciated reading Kroll's article about attempting a course of "arguing differently" and I especially appreciated his discussion about the misconceptions his course title raised.  Perhaps my mentor had the right idea guiding me, as a first year instructor, away from attempting to combat the established understandings of what it means to make an argument.  

As I continued reading, however, I became more interested in Kroll's expressed tendency to justify his teaching methods against his students' resistance to attempting unfamiliar techniques.  This is definitely something to which I can relate, and it was nice to read about an established writing instructor's seeming struggle in this area.  I feel like I am constantly attempting to validate assignments or grades, perhaps more so to myself than to my students.  I find it is easier to put effort and energy into an assignment when I truly believe there is some merit behind it's existence.  I always detested busy work as an undergraduate and so I try to make sure that the work I give my students will always at least connect to something they need to do for my course.  Ideally I want to provide them with tools that will help them throughout college (and dare I say, even throughout life) and I like to be totally transparent with that attempt.  So I'll constantly attempt to explain why it is useful for them to write a review or work with peer editing groups or attempt an exploratory research form.  I know this is not exactly what Kroll was attempting with his article, but I found it a little reassuring.

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Speaking of non-traditional forms, here's something a former student produced. His argument, ill-conceived and poorly supported, but entirely bump-able, is that people should vote me into the House.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHnDwr4IkGs

Diction does make a difference

As much as I wanted to love Elbow's "The Music of Form," it was difficult to follow his form.  I do appreciate his concern that "traditional techniques" for organizing a paper are not always the most useful way and that writing from "perplexity" is a viable alternative to compositional organization.  He confounded this discussion with the force of his "music metaphor."  I also agree with him that it is a good idea to read your drafts aloud so that you can hear if our writing will "pull the reader through and where our words sit limp and boring." (p656) But he uses such elevated diction to say this, with words like "temporal" and "aural" he risks loosing me as a reader and I wondered if he had followed his own advice (read it aloud.)

It made a difference for me that Barry M. Kroll, in "Arguing Differently." used a more conversational writing style and simpler diction.  I am probably going to assign his essay to my students as a first reading as we enter the "Argumentative Paper" unit.  Most of them already know the thesis structure, and even in working on their "Exploratory" essay they default to an adversarial tone.  Even though I don't have enough time to give as much attention to arguing differently as Kroll explains, it would be valuable for them to at least survey other approaches to arguing: conciliatory, integrative, or deliberate.  Since I am re-grouping students based on the "themes" of their exploratory questions, and having each team collaborate on their final project, I may also ask that each team take a different approach to the argument.  Of course this means I will need more information than is in this article.

Narratives and Arguments...

      This week’s reading came at a good time, as I am just getting reading to start teaching argumentation in my classes. Elbow’s article, albeit being long, was an interesting read. Elbow emphasizes the importance of innovative writing order and emphasizes the importance of not getting too caught up in things like thesis statements and logic. He also emphasizes the importance of narrative in writing. I have noticed that in my classes, students enjoy writing narrative essays so much better as they feel less inclined to get too caught up in what they call “formal” writing, which sometimes makes papers too redundant. I have stressed the importance of narrative in the exploratory paper that they are working on, and I hope that by providing sample papers for them to look at, I have made it clear what I expect when I say narrative. It is also amazing to see how students don’t think that narrative based papers are academic. They are so used to writing the same types of five paragraph papers with thesis statement in the beginning, no use of “I’s”, three supporting paragraphs and a short conclusion, that when a paper that requires narration on their part is assigned, they get bewildered. They are not sure how to go about it, and a paper that should otherwise be an easy task or at least a fun task becomes this behemoth mission. Elbow’s article gives a huge importance to voice in writing, and I feel when I wrote the first draft of my own exploratory paper, I was missing that. I had to considerably revise my paper in the next week, and one of the things I did was included a lot more narrative. Kroll’s piece “Arguing Differently” caught my attention, because I am looking for different ways to teach arguments and I thought the reading had some good practical examples. I do think I can use some of the examples that he gives in my classes, when I teach argumentation.