Composition Pedagogy

CW05: The Politics of Digital Literacy

preterite Class (Economic), Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics, Politics

Casey and I got our presentations out of the way (the bare-bones version of mine is here: I had the rather stressful experience of a kernel panic and hard crash the night before while I was trying to put together some accompanying PowerPoint slides), and we’re happy to have that done. We got lots of insightful comments from generous respondents, and I hope our presentations have enough in common that we’ll be able to smush them together into something publishable.

Anyway: what I want to talk about here is the really impressive first panel I went to, on “The Politics of Digital Literacy: Cases for Institutional Critique,” since Kris Blair, Mary Hocks, and Michelle Comstock all gave enviably smart and well-put-together talks that intersected in productive and provocative ways, especially in that — while sharing a common theme and associations with large, diverse urban or state universities — Mary’s focused on institutional concerns, Michelle’s on community concerns, and Kris’s on personal concerns.

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CW 2005: Drupal Workshop

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

This isn’t a review of the excellent all-day session on using Drupal as a writing course community content management system, but just a way to say thanks to Charlie Lowe, Jim Kalmbach, Bradley Bleck, and Tim Lindgren (as well as some helpful long-distance commentary from Samantha Blackmon and Clancy Ratliff) for a great workshop. Kieran Lal assisted as well with some tutoring and a short and impressive presentation on CivicSpace, the reincarnation (?) of the DeanSpace distributed open source content management system designed specifically for the needs of a grassroots political campaign. I learned lots and lots and lots today — my brain hurts — and I’m looking forward to trying out some of Drupal’s way-beyond-just-blogging capabilities with my students in the fall.

My presentation’s tomorrow morning. (And, uh, I could still really use some help with a title.)

Planning a Course

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Recently, John Lovas asked teachers to “to identify the five most important issues or concerns you face when planning a writing course.” It’s a helpful question, especially since I’m starting to think about what I’ll do in the fall. Here are the five concerns I sent to John in my reply; the five things that are most important to me in planning a first year composition course.

  1. Figuring out what writing skills, methods, values, and practices my assignments serve. (Vague but true.)
  2. Encouraging multiple motivations for writing, and helping students formulate their own clear and specific purposes for their writing projects.
  3. Helping students understand and inhabit the perspectives of their multiple audiences.
  4. Helping students become better readers of and responders to texts –including texts produced outside the class, their own texts, and their classmates’ texts.
  5. Encouraging self-directed radical revision.

I’ll be curious to see what other responses John receives. And, in an interesting bit of sychronicity, I just took a look over at Steve Krause’s blog for the link to the NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, and saw that he’s also chosen to write about John’s question today. It looks like Steve’s take is a little more meta than my own, but I wouldn’t argue with any of his priorities — and, like Steve (#5), I also have a habit of trying to cram too much into a syllabus, which results in the course moving rather quickly.

My own list — well, items 2 through 5 are essentially a checklist for me; a way for me to ask, “How does assignment X help my course achieve this goal for the student?” Looking at things that way, I guess item 1 is sort of my overarching principle, my sine qua non. Item 2 is a bit of a cheat, since it incorporates two different ideas — motivations aren’t the same thing as purposes — but they felt close enough to one another to compress into one item. And item 5, I never feel like I do it well enough, so I’m thinking I might go back to my old practice of assigning several more essays to be written than I assign revisions, so students will be required to make the choice of which essays to revise and which to leave behind. The way I teach now, students revise every essay they write — which, at times, can lead to rather lame or half-hearted attempts at revision.

So what have I left out, ignored, or failed to understand in my above list?

Personal Branding

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics, Metadissertating, Writing

I’ve had this idea I’ve been working at from different angles for a few weeks; an idea that feels like the germ of the idea that’s at the heart of my dissertation’s final chapter. In Chapter 1, I argue that the discipline of composition has a really difficult time talking explicitly about economic issues, and that teaching writing with computers is one of the big places in composition that makes economic inequality really, really visible. So I go through chapters on class and economics, and come back to the economics of computers and composition at the end, where I talk about how open source perspectives can help to de-fang the effects of economic commodification in the writing classroom. But I haven’t been able to connect those issues all that well to class, until lately, especially with some prodding from a colleague over dinner tonight.

At Wealth Bondage, CEO Candidia Cruikshanks rages that The Happy Tutor is trying to steal her “brand equity” — said equity, of course, embodied in all that attitude and oh my those boots. Naomi Klein recently argued elsewhere (can’t find the link now — help me out?) that personal identity is itself an act of branding. And I’ve argued that class is the point of articulation between economics and identity. What I’ve neglected to investigate, in my considerations of the (economic?) use value of personal writing, are the ways in which identity/self/persona in and of itself, as enacted in writing, takes on both commodified and non-commodified (market and non-market; monetized and non-monetized) economic value. At Wealth Bondage — perhaps as nowhere else — we see personae qua personae ventured, offered, exchanged, and rejected in market, feudal, slave, and gift transactions. So — rhetoricians, compositionists, bloggers — what are the values of the personal selves you compose and enact on your weblogs? Some of those values are easily commodified: technorati, blogshares, comments; promotion, hiring, tenure. So, too, for students: my professor tells me this weblog entry is worth a C minus. But what about those other types of economic transactions; the non-commodified ones?

And how might those non-commodified values shift when we move from considering the various blog personae of teachers to considering the various blog personae of students?

Two Takes

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers

Doc Searls’ closing keynote at Les Blogs says some interesting things about weblogs and the production of writing — things that for me intersect in curious ways with an essay by John Udell on “The New Freshman Comp” that Collin recently had a lot of smart things to say about. One concern with Udell’s piece, though: Udell argues convincingly that good programmers need to be good writers. (This actually is hardly as suprising as Udell makes it out to be: that’s why we call it writing code.) However, Udell concludes by proposing a non sequitur: the “methods” he describes as being used by programmers — i.e, “screencasting” — should therefore “be a part of the new freshman comp.”

No. Logically, that simply does not follow. I’m much more inclined to buy Jeff Rice’s argument that shifts in technology are producing shifts in consciousness, and that we need to take these shifts into account in our teaching, than I am to buy Udell’s conclusion. (Although I’ll say that Jeff’s argument still feels, for me, uncomfortably close to the technology-is-destiny position of a substantive theory of technology that Andrew Feenberg traces in the work of Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger.) Still, Collin’s essay (much more than Udell’s) has got me thinking about the points Doc Searls makes about producing texts, and Doc Searls’ Paris keynote has got me wishing that more of the jet-setting tech folks like Searls would pay attention to arguments like Collin’s and start working on understanding and engaging with the work my discipline’s doing — rather than merely invoking it, as Udell does.

Personal Writing: Theory and Method

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

Theory

A lot of what I’ll say here concerning personal writing circles back not only to yesterday’s post, but also (as Clancy points out) to what I was thinking last year, and also to the recent excellent posts (and the subsequent discussions they spurred) by Sharon Gerald and John Lovas. So, first, some givens: I agree with Sharon that “personal writing is academic writing,” and with John that “all writing is personal. All good writing conveys a sense of the person who produced it, including good academic writing.” No surprises there. And I think the insights offered by John’s answer to his rhetorical question are extremely useful, and also interesting in the way they anticipate the title of Thomas De Zengotita’s new book (referenced in yesterday’s post): “How does the personal intersect with knowledge-building? It means finding in each subject a personal connection, a dimension of the topic that connects to or illuminates one’s lived experience, including previous reading and mediated experience.” But what I’m talking about here is different from Sharon’s “personal” essays that “are all about something other than the student”: this is writing that is, in fact, about the student (more on this in the Method section), because I think such writing can work against those assignments that — as I said before — “rely upon a vague rhetoric of individualism and positioning, while actually ignoring individual and institutional context: they are simultaneously solipsistic, generalized, and abstracted from any concrete and particular context.” Personal writing is worthwhile in its groundedness, in its connectedness, in its being located in its done-for-its-own-sake non-exchangeable non-equivalent value: in its Use Value.

Which is why I’m puzzled when Clancy asks to what ends personal writing might be put; when she asks what it’s for; when she wonders about transforming experience into evidence. It’s not for anything other than itself-as-writing, I want to answer. Its value is in its doing. This weblog — even as I’m writing about composition theory, about politics, about the Romans who I love for their sheer cussed weirdness, about rhetoric, about material that may seem largely academic — is personal writing. But then I follow Clancy’s link to Joan W. Scott’s work on experience, and I start to understand a little.

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4Cs: Final Thoughts

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers

I had a fine time in San Francisco, and I’ll share John’s sentiment that CCCC is much more than the sessions. While I didn’t get a chance to chat with Steve Krause, and I missed Jenny Edbauer’s presentation, I was glad to finally meet Derek Mueller (whose presentation, it doesn’t hurt to say again, totally rocked), Daisy Pignetti (who is absolutely charming), and Joanna Howard (whose Montgomery College t-shirt John was wearing at the Thursday night meet-up in South Beach; I spent a semester at MC as an undergrad). And it was good to see Brad, Charlie, Clancy, Collin, and Dennis again, as well as many other colleagues and instructors past and present.

And now, as Collin points out, it’s time to start thinking about next year. I’ll share Collin’s sentiment that the “trend […] towards increasingly arbitrary and unclear categories” on the CCCC Call for Proposals is problematic, and I’ll add a question: do the proposal form’s “area clusters” perhaps actually hinder our disciplinary conversations? I noticed that a lot of bloggers went to a lot of the technology-focused panels, which of course is to be expected (it’s become axiomatic that the thing bloggers most like to blog about is blogging) — but I didn’t see any panels that had only one or two tech presenters; the tech panels were all tech, all the time (somebody, please, correct me if I’m wrong), which I think makes for a sort of echo chamber effect. It can also lead to attitudes like the one I (perhaps mistakenly) perceived in Anne Jones’s troubling “dark ages” comment; attitudes that pedagogies associated with digital technologies are somehow beyond rather than a part of composition’s body of knowledge. I wonder what might happen when composition reaches the disciplinary point that the New York Times reached on March 24, when it eliminated the Circuits section because of the way technology concerns had begun “migrating into the mainstream.”

4Cs: Teacher as Cultural Broker

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

My UMass colleague (and 2005 Scholar for the Dream Award winner) Linh Dich began her excellent one-woman panel presentation “Cultural Broker: Beyond the Teacher Role” by expressing a familiar desire: to be that accomplished and authoritative teacher who seemingly effortlessly cultivates a utopian classroom of universally eager and engaged learners. But the utopian classroom, Dich concedes, is precisely that: a utopia, not a real or possible space. Her desire for that ideal teacherly identity, Dich suggests, reveals a belief that in some ways we see students as static in relation to ourselves, with the teacherly persona always needing to change, to become more noble, more committed, in order to better serve the students — and yet that ideal teacher into whom we continually attempt to transform ourselves is a teacher who is herself ideal largely because of the ways in which she is able to transform students’ selves.

Here, Dich shifts gears, and points to the increasingly diverse population of higher education, an increase curiously paralleled by a growth in white male authority. In our increasingly diverse classrooms, however, the idealized teacher as traditional white male authority figure (think Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society) simply doesn’t work. As a remedy, Dich invokes and connects two possible alternative figures: that of Henry Giroux’s border crosser and that of Anne Fadiman’s cultural broker.

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4Cs: Political Pedagogies, Public Citizens

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Politics, Rhetoric

I was interested in this panel primarily because of the interrogation of the privileging of alleged civic discourse in the composition classroom that its description promised: recall Doug Hesse’s contention that we’ve tamed civic rhetoric into a school genre by having students write about the public sphere rather than in it, and my concern from the Weblogs as Social Action panel that teacherly delight at the possibilities offered by weblogs for political deliberative rhetoric should be tempered by the apparent predominance of dialectical — rather than deliberative — classroom ends to which many teachers are applying weblogs. But it certainly didn’t hurt that my friend and former University of Pittsburgh colleague Chris Warnick was presenting, and that I’ve really come to enjoy the “literary” style (as another former Pitt colleague put it last year) of Pitt CCCC presentations. It’s an interesting split: every panel I’ve seen from Pitt people involves paper handouts for the audience and the presenters reading from a highly eloquent pre-written paper, whereas most panels I’ve seen from the CCCC computer folk have involved presenters talking through bullet points and using a video projector for PowerPoint slides or Web pages. In some ways, it’s almost a split between hypotaxis and parataxis — which is perhaps appropriate, since Pitt’s program carries a deep cultural studies and critical theory influence, and such an influence necessarily lends itself to the careful subordination of hypotaxis and deductive reasoning rather than the and/and/and of parataxis and inductive connections. And I gotta say, when I’m trying to follow along and take notes at the same time, sometimes the rich and complexly subordinated discourse Pitt folks are so good at comes too fast and too smart for me to be able to adequately follow: in between listening, thinking it through, and attempting to quickly render it into my own words, I found I sometimes lost the thread.

Still, I hope the brief summaries and thoughts I offer here might begin to offer at least a thin hint of the panel’s quality. All four presentations more than lived up to the promise of their program description, firmly grounding their formidable theoretical sophistication in careful considerations of the realities of classroom practice.

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