Metadissertating

Met with the dissertation group today, among other duties and appointments. Comments on the penultimate draft of the prospectus were mostly positive and really helpful, so tonight I’m busy toiling away making last changes before sending it to the committee. Once it’s been signed, I’ll post it here, but no long post tonight. Thanks to everybody who offered helpful comments on previous drafts and portions. More soon.

I’ve been procrastinating long enough, and really need to get down to business here. Basically, I’ve got the penultimate draft of a prospectus ready to go and waiting on comments from a few peers before I make final edits and send it to the committee for signatures; after that, it’s into, well, actual dissertation work. Which is pretty scary, and why I’ve been dawdling: the dissertation will be the biggest thing I’ve ever done (with the still-incomplete management of my mom’s estate a close second), and I’ve got all sorts of anxieties about not being able to do it properly, which is why you haven’t seen much lately about class or economics or computers.

Obviously, that’s gotta change.
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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.
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Comments and criticisms greatly welcomed. This chapter structure sets out to prove the arguments I make (in very rough form) here and here. But it’s pretty dry stuff, and probably of little interest to anyone not on my committee.

Yes, I’m a big geek for doing this on a Friday night. But it’s been snowing for a while, and we’re supposed to get eight to ten inches — our first real New England snow of the year — and I rented the first Alien movie, which I’m fixin to go watch.

And I gotta say, I’ve lately preferred Profokiev or Sibelius for listening to while I put these entries together, but tonight, the Clash’s 3-disc Clash on Broadway is pretty dang excellent for doing academic work.
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I’m beat. I had grand plans, during today’s drive up here from DC, to put together a post about the methodology section of my prospectus, basically trying to reason out the question: how am I selecting my texts? But it’s late, and it was a long drive, even with the relatively unclogged roads and smoothly-moving traffic. (Aside: my most frequent mental grumble to other drivers on the freeway is, “Maybe if you weren’t tailgating that person in front of you, you wouldn’t have to ride your brakes all the time.” I’m a fairly aggressive driver myself, but I don’t tailgate. I mean, religiously: I drove big trucks, and I know stopping distances. And I figure the fact that I still hold a Class A CDL entitles me to pontificate some — but of course, on the interstate, that’s a mindset different from no other.) The girls are happy to be back home, with Tink nestled in my leather jacket after suffering the trauma of confronting my dad’s 18-year-old foul-tempered and very heavy feline grande dame, yclept Gertie (Tink held her own and hissed; Gertie made noises very much like Gollum’s in the new LOTR movies), and Zeugma is now sunning herself in the kitchen under my jade plants’ grow lights after two days ago being so terrified by my dad that she found a way to climb up his closet wall and into the slim gap between the ductwork and the ceiling that let her escape into the tunnel between two ceiling joists.

Yeah, it was one of those holidays.
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So I’ve finished the first draft of the prospectus. I’m setting it on the shelf, giving it a few days to cool, before I make any further tweaks and send it to the committee.

My reading’s bogged down. I’m tired of Derek Bok’s relentlessly mild perspective; Murray Sperber seems so spiteful and knee-jerk conservative as to call the Blooms liberal, and despises his students. And I know that’s an epithet Cindy and I have tossed around, but it’s there — both in Sperber and in not-that-Chris. (Not-that-Chris, I know I’m being unfair by not unpacking this fully, but by the same token, I’d be interested to hear what your impressions of Sperber’s Beer and Circus might be, especially in terms of pedagogy.) This gradually accretive sense of the meanings and mismeanings of class feels like it’s dissipating even as I look at the pile of library books and try to order their perspectives into some scheme.

At the same time, recent pieces in the New York Times and elsewhere make me demand: why do people refuse to see inequality? What about our culture invests us so in denying that some of us have it easier than others? Why is it acceptable to see wealth as its own justification, and unacceptable to admit that John Doe who prepped at Choate and took a Kaplan course got into Brown as easy as Sunday morning while Jane Smith who grew up in Anacostia and worked a counter clerk job had to struggle for Prince Georges Community College? Is it really that easy to say, “Oh, but my school’s SAT prep course pushed me really hard: I didn’t have it that easy”?

Anyway. The girls are still being rotten — Zeugma has this whole underneathness obsession, where she has to make sure that her toy (a binder clip: don’t ask) isn’t underneath anything else, so there go stacks of papers and readings, my keyboard, bills, whatever; thing is, when she finally remembers where she left it, she wants me to play with her, so she comes and spits out the binder clip into my glass of water. Thanks, babe.

I’m working on stylistic revision with my students, and focusing on concision — doing library research for an essay often seems to introduce all sorts of awkwardly passive circumlocutions into students’ prose, as if putting other authors’ quotations into their writing means taking their own perspectives out — so I’ll see if I can practice tonight what I’ll preach tomorrow, and avoid those big words and fancy constructions I like so much.

(A confession: as a Sergeant in the 24th Infantry Division, I took what must have seemed to my peers and soldiers an unholy glee in learning the occasional big new multi-syllable esoteric word to throw into my NCO vocabulary. Solipsistic. Epistemology. Hermeneutic. Schadenfreude. But “hegemony” never sprang from my tongue until graduate school. Go figure.)

Anyway: the toughest issue I see with my research is how to put it into a classroom context. I know it’s a theory-heavy dissertation, looking at how disciplines think and talk about the relationships between class, computers, and the economy. But “disciplines” for composition means teachers, since the discipline of composition is so bound up in thinking about teaching, and in applying theory to teaching. And in that case what ultimately matters is the students.
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Charlie Lowe was gracious enough to send me something that he’s working on about the intellectual property debate, and my initial read has already led me to re-think portions of my prospectus, especially in my conclusions regarding the implications of the work of Bruce Horner and John Trimbur for the economics of the composition classroom. Now I don’t have it all thought out, and I’m not going to write anything about what Charlie’s got in draft, which puts me in a weird situation here: I’ve got a few pages’ worth of ruminations that I don’t want to post here, because they’re based on work that’s under revision, both others’ and my own.

And that’s kind of the problem of this weblog: yes, I’ve licensed it via Creative Commons.
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What I posted the other day was the first third of the prospectus; the place where I say, “Here’s why this is necessary.” The second third, the middle part, is basically a nod towards the review of the literature (here’s how class shows up in x, y, and z) I’m going to have to do, plus methodology: why am I choosing these texts? (I’ll probably have to say something a little more sophisticated than, “Well, my disciplines barely talk about class at all, so I’m pretty much covering the whole shebang. You’re lookin at it, baby.” Because part of what I’m doing is showing that even when it’s not explicitly present, class is still implicit in so many of the theoretical discussions writing teachers engage in.)

Where I’m stymied is the third third; the final part. I figure I can put together a pretty solid rationale for what I’m doing. I can summarize a dash through the literature for class seen and unseen, no problem. I’ve even got the beginnings of some conclusions: I like Bourdieu’s relational infinitude of classes; the instrumental view of technology can only further marginalize any progressive agenda in composition — but how do I look forward to a conclusion that I haven’t yet arrived at myself?

One possibility: a common rhetorical concluding move is the call for more research. Perhaps I should ask, particularly given my recent “D’oh!” moments concerning the expanded economy, what forms such additional classroom research might take. How do the intersections of Bourdieu’s notions of class, the diverse or heterogeneous economy, and an alternative to technological instrumentality shape the questions one might ask about the classroom?