I’m struggling some, so I’m going to try to come out here with a rough statement here of what my dissertation project (which this weblog serves) is all about.
I think the ways that people think about writing, computers, and education create problems for students, and these problems contribute to growing inequalities in American society. Many of these inequalities are economic — and I think the ways that people think about writing, computers, and education have a significant and often hidden economic component. Many people who write about writing, computers, and education write from an instrumental perspective: they believe that writing, computers, and education are neutral tools that a student can use to help herself get ahead and achieve her ends, with those ends often being described in economic terms: making money in a good job.
In order to talk about these problems, and work towards alternative ways of thinking that may offer different possibilities, I’ll need to define my terms: what do we mean when we say “instrumentalism”, when we say “economic”, when we say “value”? I’ll also talk about the ways some of these terms and ways of thinking come together in the multiple understandings of “class” and how people talk about class. However, while I’ll point to the many conflicting ways people talk about class, I’m not going to pin it down with a single decisive definition myself, because my point is to show how the discourse itself is a part of the problem. I’ll also show how economic and class discourses are often hidden, and what they mean when they’re hidden, and what the consequences are of talking about class in those many conflicting ways.
In order to demonstrate the consequences of talking about class in those ways, I’ll have to go through the literatures of composition and of computers and composition, but I’ll also have to look at how people talk about class in relation to education, and in relation to the information economy. I’ll have to do this because ideas about class operate within and across multiple contexts, in sometimes conflicting ways. If you’re a writing teacher who defines class in terms of wealth, you may throw up your hands in hopelessness at the prospect of having no class mobility without a massive redistribution of wealth in the United States. If you’re a writing teacher who defines class in terms of cultural practices, you may find yourself called an elitist when you suggest that the way towards class mobility is to adopt the cultural practices of the highest class. If you’re a writing teacher who defines class in terms of authenticity and lived experience, you may doom your so-called “working class” students who make it through college to a lifetime of guilt at having turned their backs on an “authentic” class background. In this working-through of the literature, I hope to show that, however problematic “class” is as a concept, it is always multiple and shaped by multiple influences, and I also hope to show that it always has an economic component.
I’ll then attempt to show a diverse, contradictory, and heterogeneous economic landscape in which our ideas about class function. Once I’ve shown that landscape, I’ll show how it offers room for understandings of value — economic or noneconomic — other than monetary value, and also how it offers room for non-instrumental ways of thinking about writing, computers, and education. In fact, I believe that looking at computers as material artifacts of culture that are themselves classed in complex ways can help to illuminate that diverse economic landscape, especially in the ways we might begin to associate them with non-instrumental cultural practices. In doing so, we might see how that sort of thinking can point us towards seeing values other than the economic in writing instruction, and that might in turn point us towards classroom and societal practices with computers and writing that do not reproduce class inequalities.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does. As a non-rhet/comp scholar (who teaches lots of composition anyway), this is a very important project! It strikes me, though, that you haven’t identified in this post what non-instrumental cultural practices might look or act like. You’re describing your project in this post solely in the negative (“this is what’s wrong with current ways of thinking composition and class”) and not in the positive (“this is the vision for how writing, computers, and education will be changed through my dissertation”).
I am mindful, however, that diss committees do not necessarily want vision statements as much as they want analysis….the dissertation is an odd document in that sense. I struggled with that lack of vision statement thing in writing my own. I think my diss ended up being very hopeful about social change (even as I was describing how difficult social change is in the contemporary period), and I’m glad I pursued it that way, even if it made for difficulty in the diss process. If we can articulate what, exactly, we want to create (not just what we want to dismantle and change), I wonder if we bridge that theory/activism split just a little bit (even if we can’t really bridge it completely).
You’ve asked a really sharp and helpful question: what’s the alternative? And, yeah, I really need to spell that out. Basically, I think that the values associated with computers in the open source / open access movement — not the techniques, but the way digital reproducibility (in the mode of Walter Benjamin) allows and demands for different cultural practices, perhaps even a Kuhnian paradigm shift — profoundly alters our understanding of the production, distribution, consumption, and circulation of texts. Marx’s class struggle is a struggle over scarce resources and who gets them; neoclassical economics posits, at its core, a principle of scarcity: there isn’t enough to go around. The open source movement says: with texts, yes there is. I think within 10 or 20 years, writing teachers are going to see a massive change in the ways they think about individual and collaborative work, and in the ways they think about plagiarism, and in my more goofily hopeful moments, I dream of a writing program Napster-style filesharing server, where students write, publish, rate, trade, and read one another’s writing (perhaps more like Napster meets kuro5hin.org meets Amazon); where writing has value other than the grade it gets you.
The obvious problem with this is the same problem one sees when reading Wired Magazine or First Monday: such techno-utopianism, while wonderful for those with the technological means to be included, slams the door in the face of those without the technology. One might only hope that the change in social values brought along with the technology of the open source movement extends to the rest of society. So a closing question for the dissertation might be: how can we extend open-source practices to non-wired classrooms? (Sounds like a question for a classroom study: hey, maybe that could be my second book, after this dissertation thing. . .)
I await anxiously your model of the open-source university. I think it’s precisely the type of thing higher ed needs.
This is the clearest statement of your project I’ve read yet. For me, that means you’ve made real progress.
You may find it useful to look in on my English 1B classes this quarter, since one is using the web discussion tool and the other have individual blogs. These are, of course, community college students of very diverse backgrounds. Just read the names and you get some sense of that.
The web board group posted today in response to a passage from Robert Scholes “Textual Power”. The responses seemed quite aware for students in the second week of the second course of freshman comp. What I loved, though, is Scholes used “web” as a metaphor in a pre-Internet text and several students assumed he meant THIS web–and actually, the misreading works.
The same group posted in response to Elbow’s yogurt model concept last week. I think these discussions may hint at what the alternative to the critique of current practice could look like.
My web page is at http://faculty.deanza.fhda.edu/lovasjohn–then click on “Current Discussion” for the Scholes and Elbow threads.
And thanks for the good wishes. The first two days this week just had a lot of unexpected crap. Today went well and now no class until Tuesday!
Reading your post, Mike, made me think about how the economic landscape and the ideology of technology (as a value, as techno-utopia, let’s say) are powerful, symbiotic forces. In other words, because technological instrumentalism squeezes new water (a deceptively satiating water in a time of burdened budgets!) from the old stone of labor-exertion-production formulas, the economy and tech-utopianism seem to have merged into an ever-accelerating force, which (and I’m just playing through these ideas here) drives a widening-wedge in the tech divide and commodifies _us_ and our work in the academy.
Following 9/11 my university’s administration was alarmed about the deployment of our U.S. military students who enroll at nearly 40 sites around the U.S. The reaction was to shepherd together an ensemble of all qualified instructors to devise online courses. We already had a few, high-enrolling online courses, but the call to arms following 9/11 put our administration in scramble mode: “Develop every course in our catalog for online delivery.” So we lined up, went through training on the quirkiness of the institutionally contracted courseware provider, and started to writing accelerated, eight-week courses for online delivery. That way, our institution could keep its banner as the largest provider of distance learning credits to the U.S. Armed Forces, since our students could remain enrolled while on TDY deployments all over the world, from ships and so on, wherever mobile technology would allow.
The plot was–and remains–market driven. Whether I participated or not, the courses would have come to be. So I hunkered down, eventually developing three courses (the FY comp sequence and intro to humanities) before deciding that I had my fill. I still maintain the courses; I’m contractually bound to their maintenance if I want to profit from the high enrollments. But I’ve engaged in a dangerous, inevitable scheme–producing an eight-week curriculum that serves as a mold for other instructors (enrollments are up to 500+ for the spring I term).
This brings me around to the issue of open-sourcing. I’ve been told a time or two that I really should consider password protecting the course content rather than posting it freely on the web for others to adopt and adapt as they wish. Fortunately, the call for sealing off the work from the public hasn’t been pressed (or worse, mandated), since I contend that everything in the curriculum is borrowed from the best practices of others, anyway. But it’s the commodification of the curriculum as a dead, packaged thing that is creepy and that leaves me feeling jittery about my agency in the process–after the contract and after the huge profit margin for the university. I stand by the pace and rigor of the courses, but I have, in a sense, done a Frankenstein. Because of labor contracts and intellectual rights clauses, the monster lives rather freely, if unfinished.
Mea cupla! I’ve gone and gummed up your blog with quite a spill here. -DM
“where students write, publish, rate, trade, and read one another’s writing”
Like the fan-fiction communities that grow beta readers and bibliographies of sources?
Lots of really careful and complex stuff in there, Derek; sorry it’s taken me a while to digest it. Your point about participation is important, and well-taken: too often, academics will wring their hands and decry some system and say, “I’ll have no part of it!” and of course what happens is they wind up not having a part of it; any chance at steering goes out of their hands. Sort of another version of the Audre Lorde question about using the master’s tools. And yeah, you’re right: economy and technology are intertwined in a complicated symbiotic relationship that goes far beyond the common view of tech-as-neutral-instrument common to both Marxist and neoclassical views, to the point where I find it incredibly irritating that nobody in computers & composition can be bothered to even think about economic concerns: they’ll have no part of it. Indeed.
Clew, I don’t have any firsthand familiarity with such communities; the closest I’ve seen to such a phenomenon is kuro5hin.org. Any links to offer? I’d be most grateful for examples.
Well, the kuro5shin Fiction section is a little close, but not as passionate and peculiar and dweeby as fanfic. A search for “beta reader” on Google will get you links to many separate fandoms’ beta-reading pages, in which people usually list what their editorial competences are, and what kind of fiction they’re willing to work on. From reading the comments at the end of the few fanfics that get so widely recommended that non-fans read them, it looks as though good beta readers get serious egoboo, though not as much as writers.
I’m not a trufan, much less a fanfic or a slash fic reader/writer, so I can’t do the fifty-cent Virgil’s Link Tour. I was just charmed to notice that the absolute Pee-Chee-folder bare-id sentimental bottom of the fiction world was growing these eddies of reflection and self-analysis, is all. I wonder if it’s related to the innate non-commercialism of the result.
Also, I liked Lust over Pendle without having read the Harry Potter books.