As Ben Wetherbee’s pointed out in his comments on my last post and on his latest blog post, surveillance is happening in any number of sites in the university, from assessment sites to course management software. It’s not caused by digital media, of course, it’s just that digital technologies have made the transfer and storage of such material so easy – and so seemingly invisible. As Manovich said in the Language of New Media, once you turn information into 1’s and 0’s you can potentially turn it into any kind of text, and now you can send it and store it just about anywhere at a moment’s notice. What’s more, the sending and storing may be hard for an individual to track or comprehend.
If you think about gathering student papers for assessment, in the days when it had to be done through hard copies, a student would have to know that she turned the paper in, or at least that she didn’t get it back, and somewhere there would have to be a physical space that would indicate the enormity of the undertaking – and just have vast the university’s reach is. Now, however, a paper uploaded to a site is just another in a potentially unending set of copies from the student’s original file, and she may never miss that it’s gone – or was copied or never came back. And all the university needs is a few hard drives that could fit in a desk drawer to keep all the material for tens of thousands of students. So the psychological and emotional result of surveillance is hidden more carefully and people shrug and figure it’s not worth worrying about. It’s hard not to get all Foucauldian here when the visibility of the panopticon has been further clouded as its reach increases. More to come on this in terms of why the “university” loves Blackboard even while individual faculty, students, and even administrators don’t.
I’ve agreed to write a chapter for a very exciting new collection being edited by Robin Goodfellow and Mary Lea, titled Literacy in the Digital University (Robin’s blog on the same subject is here). I’m grateful for the opportunity to be part of this project. My chapter is going to explore how “course management software” is shaping our pedagogy – in and out of the classroom – in ways we both understand and ways that may be more subtle. More to the point, though, is that I think the construction and use of this software (Blackboard and the like) is often antithetical to what we regard as good writing pedagogy and the effective uses of digital media.
So here’s where I’m going with this right now. Course management software, such as Blackboard, is purchased by universities and often required of faculty and students for everything from distribution of course materials to posting of grades. This software is promoted by university administrations as a set of effective pedagogical tools for use both in and out of the classroom. Yet such software is often hierarchical, rigid, and prescriptive – the antithesis of the kinds of participatory environment most conducive to creative thinking by students and faculty. It is imposed on teachers and students from the top down, difficult to modify or customize, and makes assumptions about teaching and learning that, again, tend to be rigid and hierarchical.
I see the adoption and promotion of such software as driven by material and ideological imperatives of efficiency, control, and surveillance that are increasingly central to way the institution of the university works in contemporary culture. Course management software is promoted by university administrations as an efficient and centralized method of “managing” university courses. Faculty response to the use of such software is often to complain or shrug, and acquiesce to the demands of the institution. Yet in doing so we are complicit in reproducing institutional and cultural ideologies that are as hierarchical, rigid, and prescriptive as the software. In this way dominant ideological conceptions of knowledge and literacy – tied to notions of efficiency – find their way into writing classrooms even as we may imagine a pedagogy that will encourage students to resist such conceptions.
So in the chapter I hope, at least in part, to argue that university-imposed course management software works to reinscribe particular conceptions of epistemology and pedagogy that, as a field, we have criticized in other settings. I think it is important that we think critically and act more explicitly to resist the implementation and uses of these forms of digital media. We much also teach students to approach the use of these technologies from a more critical perspective.
But all is not grim. I refuse to give up without a fight, an alternative. So I also want to talk about how alternatives to designing digital environments for writing pedagogy that allow students a range of ways to participate in literacy practices in ways that are flexible, critical, and creative. But I’ll save more of that for the next post (which won’t be so long in happening, I promise. January was just crazy on many levels.) More soon.
I was having coffee the other day with my friend and colleague Ryan Trauman and we got to talking about how we approach teaching people to compose texts using digital media. Trauman is both brilliant theoretically and proficient with technology in ways that I can’t touch. So, when he talks, I listen.
What was interesting – to me anyway – about our conversation was how it revealed our two very different ways of coming at this question. Trauman starts with a conceptual discussion of how software is constructed. He talks with people, on a conceptual level, about ideas such as “layers” and how they show up in different software. His belief is that, if people understand the underlying conceptual frameworks of the software, they can move from one program to another and, eventually, find a way to use any software to create the texts they want to create. This is particularly important for people who are inexperienced with and/or intimidated by digital media technologies. So he begins with the theory and logic underlying the media and helps people understand the tools they have at hand. (And I hope I’m portraying his approach accurately.)
I would approach the same group of people in a different way. I begin by talking about multimodal genres with which people are already familiar – television, film, newspapers, webpages, and so on. We talk about the characteristics of those genres and how they work to communicate ideas and engage audiences. So, for example, we might begin by talking about the nature of the “shot” in film and how shots are edited together to create scenes or narratives, or how images can lead a person through a web page. My goal is to help them to articulate the kinds of texts they want to create, and the genre characteristics they will use when composing. My thinking is that, if they have a general idea of what they want we can then work through – and play with – the software as a way to make it happen.
Neither of our approaches is necessarily better than the other. (And they’re not mutually exclusive or the only ways to approach the teaching of digital writing, of course.) The conversation has had me thinking about the effect of our approaches on our students. Trauman helps people feel comfortable through the machine, and by having a good sense of the tools at hand allows them to work in ways that no doubt help them use the interfaces in more embodied and internalized ways. I can imagine that, as a student of Trauman’s, I’d be able to start using the software in less self-conscious way that would help me focus on the ideas I would trying to communicate – much as I do when I type. That’s a great result to have from teaching.
My approach, by starting with familiar texts and moving from those to rooting around in the software for ways to make genre-connected moves, I hope gives students a particular awareness of the rhetorical characteristics of genre they’re working with as well as an awareness of the deep knowledge of previous texts and genres they can bring to their composing. In this way it’s similar to the ways in which, as we read, and then write with print we begin to draw on the craft and rhetoric of what we’ve read to create our own texts. As the novelist Caryl Phillips has said, “All writers read for plunder.” In my approach, I don’t think I address a familiarity with the tools, and the anxiety about the uses of the software as well as Trauman does, and in his he may not help students connect to the genres they know well as explicitly as I do.
The point here for me, though, is not a critique or endorsement of either or our approaches, for I can see merit in both. What interests me is how we came to those approaches and the effect this will have on our students. My guess is that, like me, Trauman’s approach reflects his own patterns of work and comfort. I know that, even as I read a lot about pedagogy and teaching writing, I tend to gravitate toward the concepts and approaches that fit my ways of working and learning. It’s not that I may not see value in other ways of teaching and try to bring those to the students I work with that I think might benefit from those methods. But, truth is, I what and how I teach is inevitably flavored by my experiences, values, ideologies, and so that students who have me in the classroom are presented with ways of approaching writing – whether in digital or print – that is similar in flavor. Because I find genres and genre theory fascinating, and tend to think through writing and rhetoric often through the genres I know or the texts I’m trying to draw from, I bring that to my teaching. This is inevitably effective for some students and less so for others.
We all tend to fall back on our knowledge and our comfortable way of working and then reach out to others through the epistemologies and pedagogies that make us comfortable. In Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow he details the many and continuing instances when we allow ourselves to act in ways we perceive as “right” or “better” but in which we may be ignoring alternatives or the problems with our own approaches. So the conversation with Trauman has given me both another way to teach digital writing, as well as a reminder to be more rigorous in thinking about what is implied in my teaching and how I might find other ways to think about the classroom, even if they are harder and less comfortable for me at the beginning. No Earth-shaking conclusion here, I realize, but sometimes being reminded of what I need to know is enough.
Back in the winter of 2003-04, back before Barack Obama had been elected to the Senate or YouTube or Facebook had been launched – and when I was still an assistant professor -, I wrote an essay about Don Murray and his scholarship about the teaching of writing.
That essay was published earlier this month.
When you wait almost eight years for an essay to be published, it’s an intriguing exercise in perspective and self-reflection. But before I get into that, I want to provide a brief background to the essay and it’s long hibernation before publication.
I wrote the essay – titled “Dancing with Don: Or, Waltzing with ‘Expressivism'” – in response to a call for a special issue of the journal Enculturation. The special issue was to focus on the concept of “neo-expressivism” – a term I don’t particularly like (and one that, for my non-US readers, reflects a rather odd, parochial turf war in the field of rhetoric and composition). But I did see the focus of the issue as offering me the chance to reflect on the evolution of my intellectual relationship with Don Murray’s work, as well as my argument that he has not only been misread over the years, but in fact has largely gone unread and, consequently, been misrepresented by others citing his work. I also saw the piece as an opportunity to pay my respect to Don who, while not a close friend, had been a kind mentor to me and to others.
Donald Murray
So I wrote the piece, sent it to friends from my UNH days for comments, sent it to Don for his comments – which were generous and incisive – and sent it off to the editor of the special issue, where I was told it would be published by the next autumn. A long time ago I worked in daily journalism and was spoiled me in terms of how quickly I expected turnaround in terms of publishing. Still, I have learned to work within the pace of academic publishing and do not get bothered in the least by the one- or two- or even three-year wait to get something published. But I never imagined this length of time.
In the eight years that passed between the writing of the essay and its publication, a lot happened in my life. I had three books published, ended up a full professor, spent a term as first-year comp director, and watched my sons graduate from high school year.
Also, Don Murray died. In terms of this essay, that last fact is certainly the saddest. I had hoped it would come out before his death in winter 2006, not so much because it mattered whether he knew that the piece was published, but because I wanted the essay to be read as a conversation with a living scholar and not as a memorial. Now nobody else was going to get a chance to talk with him except through his writing.
Things moved on. The publication date got posted each year, and then that date passed. The special issue concept passed through another editor before falling apart completely. But at least the folks at Enculturation finally decided to just publish it on its own. It’s sort of out of place in terms of subject matter and tone as a stand-alone article in that journal and I wonder if anyone will ever read it. But, if they do, maybe it will be a different audience than I expected to reach. I am grateful that it didn’t disappear completely and that they saw fit to publish it at all.
When the editors contacted me and said they were going to publish the essay, they gave me the option of revising and updating it. I read it over again and decided that, with the exception of an explanatory footnote about when it was written, not to change it. I like the passion of it from that time, and decided that the way I framed the argument when Don was still alive is the way I wanted to leave it.
Even so, the publication of this piece has encouraged me to stop and look at what I wrote eight years ago and notice a few things about the distance between the writer I was then and the one I am now. First of all, I was a little surprised to see that there wasn’t more that I wanted to revise. Essentially I think I was still right about my appraisal of Don’s work and that he had often been misrepresented because he had not actually been read in any depth by most rhet/comp scholars. And I think I was right in that his most radical stance, of making student writing and student experience the core of a writing course is an attempt at making teaching truly “student-centered” in a way that most writing teachers are not comfortable taking on. I think this vision of where knowledge is generated is substantially more like the work of Freire than most people realize. But, rather than repeat the whole argument here I should just let people read it.
What I also find intriguing in the in the essay though, is my writing voice. There is a tentativeness about it that reflects where I felt I was as an assistant professor without many publications. Were I writing today about writing from experience, about using the “personal” (whatever that is) in writing I think I’d be less tentative, maybe a bit less passionate. Less defensive, more confident. Maybe it’s the difference between my writing/teaching self that has not changed as much as my “professional” self that is situated by institutions and disciplines. I wouldn’t change a lot in the essay, but the tone in places would shift enough that, while it would still be me it would be a different “me” than eight years ago. As it should be, I suppose. And I suppose that’s a comfort as well.
The consultants here at the University of Louisville Writing Center (where I am the director) have started a blog. They’ll be writing about their work with writers, their thoughts about writing and writing pedagogy, and just life around the Writing Center. It’s definitely worth a visit! Thanks to Barrie Meadows for making this happen. Come see what’s up with the Writing Center. (You can also visit our website – soon to undergo major renovations – or visit us on Facebook).
We have a great job opening here at UofL. I’m on the search committee, so if you have questions about the position, please let me know.
Associate Professor, Digital Media, University of Louisville, Fall 2012.
The Department of English invites applications for an Associate Professor in Digital Media, to begin Fall 2012. Ph.D. and teaching experience required. Candidates should have a demonstrated commitment to pedagogy and the ability to do successful research. We are particularly interested in candidates with experience teaching digital production and expertise in one or more of the following areas of specialization: digital media and composition, new media studies, new literacies, digital humanities. Teaching load appropriate to a research institution; salary competitive. Course assignments range from
undergraduate writing, which all professorial faculty teach, to seminars in an established, successful doctoral program in Rhetoric and Composition.
Send letter, c.v., writing sample of no more than 25 pages, and teaching statement to Professor Debra Journet, Chair, Search Committee, Department of English, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292. Review of applications will begin November 15, 2011 and continue until position is filled.
All applicants must also apply online and attach a current version of their vita at http://www.louisville.edu/jobs. Please reference Job ID 27598. If you have trouble with the online application, please e-mail Steven Gonzales at: sbgonz01@louisville.edu, or phone 502-852-0504. The University of Louisville is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity, and Americans with Disabilities Employer.
The person taking up this appointment will join a department of over 35 professorial faculty. We support a strong English major and M.A. We also offer the Ph.D. in Rhetoric in Composition, one of the oldest such programs in the country. We admit a cohort of about 6-7 new Ph.D. students a year; recent graduates of our program have taken up professorial positions at universities such as Ohio State, University of Oklahoma, and Syracuse University. We have an active group of faculty in rhetoric and composition, in British and American literature, and in creative writing. There is enthusiastic interest both in the department and across the university in digital media. As part of this position,
the administration has pledged substantial start-up funds to allow the new hire to design a new technology classroom.
Through the Thomas R. Watson endowment, the UofL English Department offers a biennial international conference in a topic related to rhetoric and composition. (Recent conferences have focused on Narrative and Composition, Digital Media and Composition, Working English in Composition, and (in 2012) Economies of Writing. In alternate years, we host a visiting distinguished professor of rhetoric and composition; recent Watson Professors include Cynthia Selfe, Deborah Brandt, Keith Gilyard, Marilyn Cooper, Suresh Canagarajah, Brian Street, and Ralph Cintron. We also support the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, and the Anne and William Axton Creative Writing Reading Series.
Louisville is a vibrant city with a lively arts scene, beautiful neighborhoods, affordable housing and great restaurants. We welcome your interest in the department and would be happy to answer any questions about the position.
Digital Media Search Committee
Debra Journet, Chair
Bronwyn Williams
Alan Golding
Ryan Trauman
I like marking anniversaries. I’m the kind of person who likes to hear what happened fifty years ago today, or five, or ten. I’m always the one in the family who says, “Ten years ago today we were…..” when I remember a day in which we had a notable event as a family, or maybe just a great hike I recall. So I wouldn’t have needed all the hype to remember the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. While I haven’t wallowed in the news coverage, I did take a moment to remember the time, recall the uncertainty and my concern for family members living in New York and for how this might affect my young sons. But it was an abstract reflection today. It was an event I witnessed, like most people, through television and, as such, it still has that slightly detached sense of two-dimensionality for me. I have experienced my share of grief, but my noting of the day was more reflective than visceral.
Then I read Richard Miller’s post today “The Great Wall: A Remembrance.” Richard, in the kind of elegant and insightful writing he can master and I cannot, captures many of my thoughts about seeing and grief and time. He was writing both about 9/11, and about a trip to a literacy conference in China that we were both a part of. He was a keynote speaker and I, well I did what I do. But it was a trip that was fascinating and fun. One friend said it felt like “summer camp for academics.” It was also transformative, intellectually and emotionally. Richard captures this more fully in his post. In his post Richard writes about his hike on the Great Wall with Jennifer Wilson, one of the others on the trip. I remember Jen. She was not long out of grad school in 2007 and she was already a force. She was incisive, sharp, and confident. We had several great conversations over meals or a beer during the trip and, after we got back to the States we kept in touch of and on for a couple of years in the way academics do. And then, we stopped keeping in touch off and on, in the way that academics do.
Brooke Hessler, Amy Rupiper Taggart, Marc Spooner, Richard Miller, and Jennifer Wilson in Beijing, July 2007
I hadn’t thought about Jen in quite a while when I started reading about her today. And, as I was reading about her and thinking I should drop her a line I came across this line in Richard’s essay: ” And then six years later, last week, the news that Jen had died. Violently. In her own home. At the hands of another.”
When grief comes, the timeline can be so varied. Sometimes, after death ends a long illness, the grief has accumulated over time and comes in slowly like a tide. Yet, on this day, the news caught me unaware. Like on 9/11, people who no one expected to be gone had died. Jen was murdered a few weeks ago, but somehow I had missed the news. And today the news left me shaken. She was so forceful and optimistic that it was again news that seemed inconceivable. I won’t pretend that Jen and I were close friends or associates. We were slightly more than “conference friends”; acquaintances who meet every so often, hug, and ask about each others’ children and writing projects. I knew her slightly more than I knew any of the people who died on September 11. Still, there was the clear pain of loss, of sorrow, that cannot be willed or denied.
It’s often common at such moments – when loss comes close, but not too close – to say that we will use such moments as reminders to stay in better contact with people, to be better friends, better humans. (When loss hits us directly we have no need, and no time, for such reminders.) But we rarely keep such promises for all the obvious reasons. I’m in no mood for such pretending at such reminders today. I will think about Jennifer Wilson and feel sorrow for her friends and family, as I think about families that have had deep and immediate losses in the past ten years and feel sorrow as well. Yet that leaves me with another question at the end of this sunny, warm day. What do we do with sorrow, with remembrances of grief? How do we best raise ourselves off the ground, shoulder the load of life again, and keep moving? Rather than risk trying to answer such questions with my own writing, I leave Richard’s words to close out these thoughts.
Time does not heal all wounds; it simply outlives them and then doesn’t even take note when the wounds are gone. When did we stop feeling the raw pain of December 7th? When did those who survived the bombings on August 6th and August 9th let go the memories of those days? When will those targeted by drones, those driving the wrong mountain road, those attending the wrong wedding, those shopping in the wrong crowded bazaar, the nameless ones congregating at places without names: when will they forget being present at the very moment the business of the everyday turned to tallying the day’s casualties?
The first step down the path towards peace comes by way of trying to see the world through the eyes of another. Ten years ago, the nation’s leaders, democrat and republican, liberal and hawk, united in committing us to a future of fear, with the blind and unrealizable goal of exacting revenge on the unnamed, unformless forces arrayed against modernity.
It’s been wonderful to have a couple of weeks of travel after the conference was over — great times in Ireland and Scotland with family and friends. But I don’t want to miss the chance to talk over the next few posts about some of the ideas that are still turning over in my head from the Sheffield conference on Study of New Literacies.
(First, a side note just to thank Julia Davies and Kate Pahl for a wonderful conference. Not too big, great presentations, and thoughtful and smart conversations, both formal and informal. It did energize my thinking and give me new directions to think about and people to read. I may not mention everyone I spoke to or heard present, but there was much to learn from.)
The set of ideas that I seemed to me to keep coming around in the conference – and that have kept me pondering since – has to do with space, movement, and boundaries. Although they came at the question from several different directions, I was intrigued by the ongoing discussion of the how our literacy practices are shaped by and shaping the spaces in which they take place. And space here is something that we are inhabiting and creating both on and offline. In fact, one things I was particularly pleased about was the work everyone was doing at troubling the binary divide between online and offline. Instead there was much more recognition about how we not only move on and offline quickly – and all the more so with smart phones and tablets becoming more common – but how difficult it becomes to separate cause and effect, or place and space, between the digital and the embodied. A number of presentations and conversations raised questions of how digital technologies connect us, yet also how they can establish barriers and obstacles that can cause us either to give up, or try to find away around. At the same time, we respond to these digital spaces not just with our minds, but also with our bodies and emotions and bring those back, in turn, to the online places we inhabit.
Cathy Burnett, of Sheffield Hallam University, raised a serious of questions about space, mobility, and boundaries in her presentation on classrooms she is observing. I was fascinated by her descriptions and analysis of the kinds of boundaries teachers often try to create in the classroom – both online and off — in terms of students’ practices (and teachers’ as well). She noted moments when students disrupt such boundaries and how that both brings them into sudden focus, and also challenges us as teachers to define the nature and purpose of the boundary. Her discussion of the ways in which such boundaries shift, open, and close almost moment by moment had me thinking about the courses I had most recently been teaching, as well as what I have observed doing at their computers outside the classroom. There is an image of students deeply focused on computer screens, oblivious to all around them, is rarely true. Instead, as Burnett’s presentation pointed out, students move away from the screen, use their bodies to shape their interactions with the technology, get up and wander the room, make side comments, even as they continue to post comments on a forum or engage in a class assignment. While there are connections here to ideas like Robert Brooke’s discussion of underlife in the classroom, I like the way she theorizes this not simply as a set of behavior’s, but also as practices located in specific texts and contexts. Her challenge to think of “siting as a productive practice” in which we engage with the mobility and shifting boundaries of our teaching and of literacy practices resonated with me. I can’t wait to read more of her work on this.
It also make me think of how, when students are outside of school they find that they are still navigating these spaces and boundaries, sometimes created in the home, sometimes by those who control online environments, and adapting their reading and writing to the spaces they can find and work within. It made me think of how, in my own research, I see young people working within and around the online popular culture spaces they encounter. As I’ve said other places, while Gee’s idea of online “affinity spaces” as places were people are drawn by interest first, regardless of identity are true to a point, it is also the case that offline identity shapes not only the affinity spaces we are drawn to, but how we react and respond to the interactions once we get there. What’s more, the negotiations of language and culture we have to engage in online affinity spaces seep back into our embodied lives and are not left behind with the computer.
It also connected with comments and presentations by David Barton, Keri Facer, Margaret Mackey, Karin Tusting, Eve Stirling, and others at the conference, and got me thinking more about where my thoughts about my research are taking me next. But that will have to wait for the next entry or two.
I leave in a few days for the Centre for the Study of New Literacies conference at the University of Sheffield. I’m eager to go and spend a couple of days in conversation with a number of people whose work I’ve admired for a quite a while (Julia Davies, Kate Pahl, David Barton, Eve Gregory, and others) and other people whose work I don’t know yet, but looks fascinating. My talk is titled “The World on Your Screen: Literacy and Popular Culture in a Networked World” and comes from the work Amy Zenger and I have been doing for our new book project. I’m grateful to have been invited to talk at the conference and eager to get revitalized with the conversations there.
I’ll try to blog from the conference itself, though I’ll admit that when I get caught up in the conference I stay connected into the people there more than I do online. But I’m sure I’ll have much to say when the conference is over (well, and we’re done taking a holiday after the conference to Dublin and Scotland.)
If I have problems with the metaphor of popular culture being conceived of as a “bridge” from less worthy literacy practices to more valuable and acceptable academic literacies (see below), how do I imagine we can think about creating our pedagogical bridges to carry rhetorical and semiotic traffic in both directions? Or, to avoid driving the metaphor too far, how do approach teaching reading and writing in ways that actually help young people be more creative and effective interpreters and composers of texts in and out of school?
We have to begin with a sincere appreciation of and interest in what students are doing outside of school. Sounds simple enough, right? But so many times I see teachers from middle school through college unable to bring themselves to the point of genuine interest and appreciation for what their students are engaged in outside of school. The reasons I’ve heard given for this reluctance are many, from questions about the legitimacy of popular culture as a subject to be addressed in school to concerns about whether explicitly opening the door to popular culture might bring offensive material into the classroom to fear that the teacher’s lack of knowledge of what is popular with students will undermine authority in the classroom. And the reasons – and there are many more – sometimes make sense to me, but more often do not.
Rather than kvetch about the problems, though, I’d rather think about how we can engage students in work with digital media and popular culture in ways that enriches their literacy practices in every aspect of their lives. So I’ll be working, over the coming months, on playing with some of those ideas toward a project Dan Keller and I are thinking about, tentatively titled Teaching Convergence Culture.
One place to start is to think about what actually characterizes more participatory learning? Vanessa Vartabedian and the people at Project NML (New Media Literacies) are is doing very exciting work with this. What I want to highlight today, though, is their list of five characteristics of participatory learning:
Heightened motivation and new forms of engagement through meaningful play and experimentation;
Learning that feels relevant to students’ identities and interests;
Opportunities for creating using a variety media, tools and practices;
Co-configured expertise where educators and students pool their skills and knowledge and share in the tasks of teaching and learning;
An integrated system of learning where connections between home, school, community and world are enabled and encouraged.
I like the succinct and yet expansive nature of these characteristics and the way that they focus on different aspects crucial to learning, such as motivation, location, and role of the teacher. I’ll have more to say about this soon.
Bronwyn T. Williams 