Thanks For a Great Semester! I Will Miss Everyone! :)

Response to Technology and the Teaching of Writing

Clearly since the publishing of this article technology has progressed. Charles Moran talks of computers in school as “home computers- large, clunky piece[s] of machinery, obtrusively the staple of our computer equipped writing classrooms” (204). But they are not so obtrusive anymore. While our writing classrooms- now termed “labs-” are still hampered by large, immobile computers, the majority of students are not, for their personal computers are relatively small and can be (and are ) carried everywhere. In fact, it seems the smaller our computers get, the more intimate and “personal” they feel. Take our cell phones, for instance, we/students carry them as an extension of us. We install individualized ringtones, pick the color, style, carrying case, jewels, glitter, screen wallpaper, etc. for these tiny computerized devices.The trend hasn’t stopped there. You know those “clunky pieces of machinery” that Moran talks of? Well they are now just as individualized as our ringtones.

I remember a time when there was only a small selection of laptop/desktop computers, and even as the selection grew we/I had to purchase the computer as is. Sure, we could select our “personal” desktop from a list of images, but almost nothing else was open for adjustment. Now, like cell phones, we can choose different colors/prints to cover the outside of our PCs and can literally make our own desktops with the help of the internet. Yes, the computer is now truly “personal,” for in many ways it is its owner. But this presents a new problem when we talk about technology in the writing classroom.

Moran theorized that as computers got smaller and more powerful, teachers would teach, and students would learn, assisted by technology that worked “unobtrusively” in the classroom (204). Well, not quite. The presence of the laptop-the “small computer” is obtrusive. Frequently, instead of being used as tool to engage with class work, it is used as a distraction from it. I have watched my classmates spend entire semesters, in every single lecture, playing video games that simulate some kind of otherworldly war; I have seen students pull out blackberrys and palm pilots after they were asked by a professor to put their computer away and focus on the lesson; I have watched peers read emails, chat online, and yes, even shop for and purchase lingerie for their girlfriends in history. The computer is there; it’s small, but in no way is it facilitating learning- at least not the kind of learning I think Moran had in mind.

What, then, is the role of the computer in classroom? How does a teacher structure a class to ensure that students are engaging with technology in ways that support the given lesson? I don’t know if they can. Because the size of the computer (and its name -“personal”) makes us/the student the sole owner of it and of its contents, we are often reluctant to let others tell us what we should do and how we should work with our computer, because, after all, it’s not theirs! True, there are times when computers in the classroom are important, not taking away from the ways they enhance the lesson through adding audio/visual material, demonstrating tasks, performing calculations, etc., but should the pros be weighed against the cons? I believe so. There needs to be, for the sake of my ADD and my sanity, some kind of regulation regarding the use of computers in class, that is, computers should only be present if they are part of the course or lesson and are required by the instructor. If they are primarily used as a distraction, than perhaps it’s better if teachers teach in school and students learn at home how to use the technology in a setting where the pc can be as unobtrusive or as obtrusive as desired.

Response to The Pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum

I now know I have experienced the pedagogy of WAC, in that “WAC focuses not on writing skills per se, but on teaching both the content of the discipline and the particular discourse features used in writing about that content.” Before this course, I have never noted- beyond likes and dislikes- the pedagogies favored by my professors. I have gone through school with blinders on, completlting the assignments, learning the material, but possibly missing the goal/deeper purpose of the instructors’ tasks or classroom structures. This article, specifically, has allowed me to see the presence of WAC in my undergraduate coursework and how it has helped me.

Reading the latest arguments in the field and responding to them either through journals, blogs, or study questions is very much in keeping with WAC and is the foundation of many of my English classes. The reading tasks, which are continuous from the start to finish of the semester, serve to initiate me into the field of discourse by immersing me in the language of the discipline. In formulating a response, I must take on that language (in some cases/at best) or at the very least, must actively engage with it. I am learning how to speak/write in the field through the practice and presence of a particular discourse. For example, one of my courses requires that I complete “Fieldwork” for each unit. Here, I must employ similar research methods, ask similar questions, and summarize my findings in a similar manner as the academe’s work I have read. Clearly such an exercise is meant to help me “try on” the discourse of the field in an engaging way; for in these assignments I become the expert and the teacher becomes the guide. The work I produce is evaluated on what it communicates; given the structure of the assignment, I am forced to adopt the features of the discourse to communicate effectively.

I note some difficulty when am forced to write in new discourse communities that do not apply the principles of WAC outlined above- do not immerse me in the language of the discourse through reading or writing exercises and, instead, assume that through a lecture based pedagogy I can formulate a paper in the discourse required. I can, but certainly not without doing research/fact-finding and paying careful attention to verbs. If, on the other hand, a reading or written introduction to the discourse accompanied the lecture, as WAC suggests, it would be possible to produce papers in the correct “tongue” with more ease and clarity.

Considering the issue of producing non-graded work, which WAC advocates and I have also experienced, I find this helpful but not essential to student success. In life and certainly in the classroom, everything one produces is evaluated. We never exist in a space void of judgment, nor will such a space occur in the professional world. While I understand the freedom such a system affords, and enjoy that freedom myself (in some instances), when I write for school I am never divorced from the reality that my work will be judged, graded, or evaluated in some fashion. But such an acknowledgement is not bad; it doesn’t hinder my performance, if anything, it makes me aware of an audience and more likely to use the desired discourse.

Response to Feminist Pedagogy and Service Learning Pedagogy in the Teaching of Composition

As Jarratt notes “it wasn’t until the 1980’s that feminists began to make contributions to composition pedagogy with broad impact,” and in stating that such arose as an “alternative institutional site –one responsive to student needs and working against the grain of an elitist literary culture that had dominated English departments” and focused on egalitarian politics, I am certain that my writing and education has been influenced by feminist pedagogy. I now have something new to add to my cultural quilt.

While completing Kassandra’s quilt, I noted my gender is a primary influence on my writing, seen in my use of dialogue, favoring of female heroines and “feminist pronouncements,” but what I failed to see-what this essay helps illuminate- is that those feminist pronouncements have likely been nurtured by the larger culture of education, of composition pedagogy in which I have been raised. Their presence is subtle, so subtle I did not notice it until now.

In my writing, I often raise issues of racial and social inequities and question in whose interest do my texts-do those texts I am responding to- serve? Such approaches are common in feminist pedagogy. Jarrat states: “Questions guiding this pedagogy ask of composition: …In whose interests do they operate? Who gets to learn it?” In this way, before I even begin to put words to the page, having been conditioned by a number of courses which employ this pedagogy- some overt, some covert (reflectively)- my culture dictates my stance- my quilt forms the thoughts, the lenses that contextualize my words.

I must then ask: How much of writing is a reflection of gender? Can one tell my sex through my text, even if the topic is “generic”? What does this mean? What are the ramifications (inside and outside of academia) when one can be identified by their gender through writing? Considering the mergence of essentialism into composition and the scholars who argue in favor of “rhetorical approaches to identify categories such as woman” when analyzing texts, I think these are very real questions to ponder. What is “woman’s writing,” and how will it be received or judged accordingly?

Society’s stereotypes/ ideals of womanhood certainly impact composition, and in so being, they impact the composition classroom, for not only is “gendered writing” subject to them, but female professors are as well: Many teachers of feminist composition and other models, Jarrat points out, struggle to define themselves as more than stereotypes. In discussion based classrooms where personal anecdotes are used to engage students, teachers become type cast as “motherly figures,” providing nurturing and collaborating with students with their best interests at heart.

But as many question : Why does such instruction imply “mothering” and furthermore, is this image of teacher as mother used to strip away power and intellect in order to construct a more socially acceptable and less-threatening role for the female instructor? Possibly. Pop culture certainly loves to paint the effective female teacher as the affectionate one. Just look at movies like “Dangerous Minds” and “Freedom Writers,” where the heroines are more emotionally involved than "instructionally" involved with their students, implying females are effective in matters of the heart, not of “the academy.” On the flip side, if instructors of this pedagogy aren’t mothers, they are “feminazis” who seek male dominance or submission.

My point in all this (if I have one) is that culture certainly influences writing, academia, pedagogy, etc. In this case, one cannot help but see the impact of gender (and society’s conception of it) on education and personal development. Taking a step back and in reading this essay, I realize that my cultural quilt is even bigger, even more expansive than I ever imagined. There are so my nuances, so many subversive ways in which our culture becomes the defining factor in who we are and what we write and why it is almost immeasurable. Feminist Pedagogy and how it is taken up or rejected in our schools and in our writing is one small example of how larger social movements impact the individual in ways the individual may never be aware of- never covering themselves in the reverse side of the quilt.

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Service Learning Pedagogy has much in common with its "brother/sister" pedagogies of feminism and cultural studies, in that , its goal is to produce better citizens who "take responsibility for communal welfare." At the heart of each model is this desire for equality, democracy, awareness. The discipline seems almost as driven to effect "social transformation" as it to seeking transformation in/through writing. Obviously, classical thought and literature is still quite influential, still the model of education today. Julier makes this comparison possible in many ways, the following quote is one example: "[We] see in service learning the appropriate pedagogical complement to educating for civic virtue and democratic citizenship." While I am totally in love with this field for advocating such principles, I can't help but think of the Washington/ DuBois debate: Which is more effective, intellectual pondering or action? Does composition, when taught in the aforementioned models, lead to action? I would say according Julier, Jarrat, and George, absolutely. In some ways, English provides a forum for those, who like me, lack the ruthlessness to play at politics but want to be a player on the stage nonetheless.

"The effort to reach into the composition class with a curriculum aimed at democracy ans social justice is an attempt to make schools function...as radically democratic institutions, with the goal not only of making individual students more successful, but also of making better citizens, citizens in the strongest sense of those who take responsibility for communal welfare. These efforts belong in the composition class because of the rhetorical as well as the practical nature of citizenship and social transformation" (Community Service and Critical Teaching 317). RIGHT ON! But I'm sure others would disagree with me :)

Response to Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming Democracy and Cultural Studies and Composition

"If all of this is not political in purpose and result, if it is all a matter of "defective methods," of "inadequate technique," it is remarkable with what sustained coincidence we have assigned the worst techniques, the least efficient methods, to the poorest people in our nation. It isn't coincidence. It isn't technique. It isn't the wrong method. It is...precisely the right method. It is a method that assures perpetuation of disparities in power and of inequities in every form of day-to-day existence" (Kozol 93 qtd. in Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy).

"In a sense, the cultural studies approach to writing in the classroom addressed the question of what constitutes the content of a composition course with the idea that content is right under our noses, in the culture of everyday life, while shifting the emphasis from the personal experience of the individual to the lived experience of participants in the larger culture" (Cultural Studies and Composition 82).

Response to "Rhetorical Pedagogy" and "Collaborative Pedagogy"

Rhetorical Pedagogy

“Committed to a model of the composing imagination that includes rhetorical invention as a potentially radial associative process, I have, along with others, seized upon the rise of science as a correspondent to the disappearance of rhetorical pedagogy, arguing for the failure of objectivity, Cartesian rationality, and the detachment to account for our complicated perception of a world in flux where matters are never settled….The beginning of a decisive shift to a more objective rhetoric and to connections of rhetoric and composition that eliminated invention…thus enfranchising a pedagogy focused on clarity and correctness judged apart from intention, audience, and purpose. The idea that language is transparent and capable of expressing truth and the instance that its use should be governed by rules of logic…bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can (Covino, 44).”

{While this response may be a little off topic it is what came to mind when reading the above passage.} I am currently taking “Language in Society” and our topic of study, as of now, is Folklore. I would argue, and I sure I am not alone, that a good Folktale is dependent on delivery. It spans generations, traveling from mouth to ear to mouth, surviving on the imaginations of those who receive it and carried by the intentions of those who repeat it. It is its audience- made up of their voices and hearts.

One can’t deny the rhetoric of Folkore, yet judged in the classical sense, one might venture to say it had none- or a weak rhetorical structure at that. For folklore is not governed by rules of logic, doesn’t express a “mathematical” truth. It’s clarity and correctness can only be judged only in association with intention and audience, inverting the entire structure outlined in the above quote and proving Covino’s point- that a wealth of compositions are lost when truth, math, science, logic, and transparency become the optimal values for composing.

This method of storytelling was nearly forgotten by the public until the 1970’s when scholars rediscovered its value. Interesting enough, this occurred around the same period as the academes quoted in this text (and others) began to expand the definition of rhetoric. Folklore is just one example (of many) of “the composing imagination” that almost disappeared because its rhetorical imagination was overlooked by “objective rhetoric.”

Our shift to “objective” rhetoric not only nearly caused the death of Folklore and, moreover, the death of the rhetorical imagination, it is nearly causing the death of composition in the classroom. That is, in (some of) academia’s attention to clarity and correctness and plainness and truth, students are left composing in stale rhetorical forms, not offered a chance to realize rhetoric in a larger more inclusive sense that responds to an audience in forms other than linear- in the circular, non-“sensical,” uncertain, an ever-evolving patterns of life. With a broader conception of rhetoric, students may view their audience, not just as thinking and rational beings to fill with information, but as feeling and playful beings who find the value in manufactured realties, which have lived long enough to know that “truth” is elusive, and who can find pleasure in stories told outside of prescribed structures. Thus, they can find new and effective ways of communicating, persuading, and composing. (We lose ourselves when we confine rhetoric to rules and, arguably, limit its power.)



Collaborative Pedagogy

It seems only natural that an individualist society such as ours would be suspect of collaborative writing. Perhaps we shy away from another writer’s touch as we do a stranger’s handshake. But by turning the other cheek to collaboration our writing may be robbed of the possibilities of revisions/ extensions the way a foreigner is robbed of human touch when entering a society that wants to do everything alone (but shop).

I can only speak to my personal frustration of having been turned away when I attempted to collaborate at our school’s writing center. Like Howard addresses, the writing center has responded to the inference of plagiarism in collaboration by embracing a “pedagogy of noninterventionalism that precludes both appropriation of student texts and any challenge to teachers’ authority occasioned by questioning their judgment of a writer’s work;” leaving me sitting at a table in the library opposite a person whose face may as well be my paper and whose speech is limited to the words on its page. Nothing is more frustrating than reaching out to collaborate with myself.

Response to
“The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”

“The Sticky Embrace of Beauty” provided me with ways to analyze visuals- introduced me to theories of visual communication. I intend to play with some of those theories/concepts in the Cultural Quilt; specifically, those involving the inherent messages in vertical shapes, curves and central figures. In this way, my quilt could play with movement/energy, permanence/power, security/comfort, as I select each cultural element (and its location on the quilt) based on feelings I wish to evoke in the reader, or reveal of my own.

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In the English classroom, as in advertisements, picture and text are very rarely independent of each other and, thus, frequently work together to maximize their rhetorical power reciprocally. I enjoy Wysoki’s piece partly because her arguments are applicable to written composition as well as visual composition. Although this is arguably a more subtle point, the essay does not privilege one form of communication over another, but values the effectiveness of both. I will list one instance where I find her critique of visuals so linked to principles of good writing ( as outlined by essayists in our course readings, including those of my textbook analysis) that I feel compelled to comment.

Wysocki notes: “When form is treated as though it is abstract-unconnected to time and place-… then bodies and history are not called into sight or question. And what is most valued is form.”
Form, for written compositions, in many English classes, is taught as void of time and place; as a standard void of value judgments and creation; as a timeless and fixed abstraction. It is not to be questioned. Like Wysocki notes of visual composition and as I apply it to written ones, such a definition of form does not allow students to see how form operates- how their texts are shaped by “the standard” and what it could mean to their texts if they altered that space. In this way, the body of the text, the history of text is not seen outside of the static form and can easily become lifeless. Like visual composers, written composers should be introduced to the “histories” and possibilities of form, so that they may value form for what it adds or subtracts from their works, as opposed to valuing it as a fixed template for production. I say this, because time and again educators ask students to contextualize their work- they must show how “history” contributes to their present argument; they must connect their compositions to space and time. But time and again many students fail to present or see a link between the larger ideologies/constraints of society and those that accompany their work (in form and more). This is because they focus on form- the five paragraph essay, the thesis statement, the creative journal entry- to the detriment of content and context. That is, the standard format of the essay, the length, etc. become the focal points and the reason/purpose for the words on the page is lost- bodies and history remain unaddressed. Consequently, when form is valued as though it is abstract, questioning, seeing, re-contextualizing is absent in writings (and photos alike).