Category: Writing

Learning to Play Well with Others

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Sometimes I can’t decide what kind of writer and scholar I am. I don’t mean in terms of the quality of my work (I have my own anxieties and suspicions there). No, I mean in terms of how I prefer to work. I used to think I was best on my own. I like conceiving of projects by myself, researching alone, certainly writing alone. I used to encourage students to collaborate, and admire people like Kate Ronald and Hepsi Roskelly who seemed to collaborate so productively and imaginatively, all the while thinking of how I wasn’t much in favor of it myself.

Yet, having just finished work on an edited collection – a collaborative project with my dear friend, Amy Zenger that we just sent off to the publishers this week, I realize that I’m not the moody loner I sometimes imagine myself to be in my more flamboyantly romantic moments. And when I look back over the books and articles I’ve done in the last few years – and what projects I’m contemplating in the future – I see, along with my single-authored pieces, collaborative work with a number of different people. So clearly I do enjoy working with others. Part of what I’ve realized is that, sometimes, collaborations in which I’m invited to join a friend’s project, push me into new areas of ideas and scholarship, and pull me out of any tendency toward scholarly isolation. On top of that, they often force me to follow through with work I might otherwise leave aside.

But this latest project also helped me remember that sometimes loosening my grip on an idea, actually helps it grow. I had the idea for New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders when I was writing Shimmering Literacies. I realized while researching Shimmering Literacies that the students I was talking with and observing were often engaged with popular culture and other fans from countries around the world. Clearly, then, studying how participatory popular culture expanded and shaped literacy practices needed to look at students and texts beyond the U.S. Initially I thought this would be a chapter in Shimmering Literacies, but then also realized it was too big a topic for one chapter. In addition, I knew that it was a project I could not study adequately from Louisville, Kentucky, or understand fully from my perspective as a white, male from the U.S. If any project called out for the diverse voices of an edited collection, it was this. And I also knew I needed help to think about this project from someone who could broaden my thinking about texts and about crossing cultures, and thankfully Amy agreed to go in with me on the book.

Yet even as I realized I wanted to bring in diverse perspectives around the world for the project, deep inside I can now also see that I still had a particular approach to the subject matter that I wanted to see in the book. Deep inside, I was still writing the missing chapter of Shimmering Literacies. The thing is, when you get an edited collection in which the contributors come from Australia, Nepal, Lebanon, the U.S. South Africa, Qatar, and Turkey, not only is the subject matter going to be varied, but so are the perspectives on the subject, on how to engage in research and scholarship, on theory, and on the writing itself. While I was fascinated by the material we were receiving, I realized I was becoming frustrated because it was not always conforming to my initial vision. This was not going to be the tightly focused book I had originally been thinking about.

I was fortunate that Amy helped me get over myself. She helped me realize the power in having a more creative, varied, and expansive set of views of the focus of the book. She was right, of course, because that was the whole point of doing an edited collection. When I finally embraced that expansive conception of the book and realized the power of the different writing voices, different approaches to epistemology, different cultural contexts, I became even more excited about the collection we were putting together. It was a lesson that I need to keep in mind, not only for my scholarship, but also for my teaching – but more on that in a coming post.

So what we wrote in the introduction, is very true:

The collection itself also reflects the diverse opportunities and practices within participatory popular culture. As the contributors sent us their chapters, we found that their conceptions of participatory popular culture and literacy often challenged us to expand and rethink our own. What you will not find in this book is a lock-step set of definitions or scholarly approaches to this subject matter. The contributors not only represent a number of different countries, but also several different academic fields and approaches to research and scholarship. We encouraged these authors to demonstrate how their scholarly backgrounds and local cultural contexts led them to conceive of the issues involved with participatory popular culture across borders. The result is a book that ranges widely on this subject, but around every corner provides new and provocative ways of thinking about how people in different cultures work with and respond to the affordances of new media and popular culture. The effect is a book with intriguing juxtapositions, unusual connections, and often unexpected tensions and insights, all drawn together by the idea that literacy as a social practice is being changed by participatory popular culture in a transnational world.

Letting go a bit, listening to others, and learning from them – I may need to be reminded about it now and again, but I am glad I can still learn to let it happen.

University of Louisville Writing Center Blog

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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).

The University of Louisville Writing Center

Job Opening – Associate Professor, Digital Media, University of Louisville, Fall 2012.

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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

Space, Boundaries, and Movement

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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.

Centre for the Study of New Literacies International Conference

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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.

The abstracts for the conference are here.

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.)

Now, what to read on the plane…

The Two-Way Bridge (Part 1)

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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.

Enjoying the fast water

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On the one hand, trying to sort through where the changes of digital media have left the study of literacy and rhetoric can seem daunting. The change is often so fast, occasionally so transitory, and in such volume (whether I mean the quantity of information or the level of conversation, I’m not certain) that I often feel as if I am standing hip-deep in fast water while juggling.  It seems all I can do to keep my balance, stay in one place, and keep aloft the balls I currently have in the air. As I noted when I started this blog, the press of time, work, and living a daily life as best I can, sometimes makes that balancing act all I can accomplish without diving deeper into the waters of technological and textual change.

Yet, at the same time, when I don’t focus on the speed of the water, and I take the time to get a better sense of my surroundings, I am less unsettled by what is happening around me. Of course, digital media are changing some fundamental opportunities for communicating, and those changes are, in turn, changing our conceptions of text, audience, authorship and more. Still, when it comes down to it, I don’t know that I see our essential jobs as literacy and rhetoric and writing teachers and researchers as changing. We’re still about the creation and interpretation of texts. Though it may be crass to quote myself, I’m keep coming back to the definition of literacy that I have written before:

For me literacy is connected to the way humans communicate ideas, concepts, and emotions to one another.  Humans are meaning-making creatures and we have learned to do so by creating representations of our ideas that can be interpreted by others when we are not present. I see it as important, then, to keep literacy connected to the communication of ideas through representation, whether of words, images, graphics, and so on. In this way literacy can apply to writing print on a page, arranging images and words on a webpage, or arranging images and words on film or video. Each example illustrates the arrangement of signs or symbols or images to represent ideas. For this book, my working definition of literacy, at its most basic and yet most varied, is the ability to use sign systems to compose and interpret texts that communicate ideas from one person to another.

Having this definition of literacy seems no big deal to me. Perhaps it comes from a background, academically and professional, that was not in English departments until I came back to graduate school. Or perhaps I can trace this position to having always been a movie freak and a photographer. Or maybe it is that I worked extensively with photography and audio and graphics in concert with writing during my education and (brief) professional life as a journalist. Whatever the reason, this seems to me not only to be the way literacy should be defined, now and in the past, but to point me toward what I think the purpose of literacy education (including rhetoric and writing) should be for us today. But more on that in days to come (I’m trying to learn to write shorter again, for the blog).

More to come….

Agency

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It was a fascinating conversation in class the other night, with a lot of good ideas circulating. What has continued to rattle around in my head is the question of digital media and agency. Cope and Kalantzis, in “New Media, New Learning” argue that one of the genuinely different aspects of digital media is the way in increases individual agency when it comes to creating, responding to, and publishing texts.  I don’t think anyone would argue that they are right that individuals have the opportunity and technology available now to publish and distribute their ideas that was unthinkable twenty years ago. As someone who was trying to get my short stories published back then, and had no venue for publication aside from established magazines and journals, I think there is no disputing that part of the point Cope and Kalantzis make (I say as I type on my blog).

But the question that came up in class concerned the effect of those efforts to write and publish individual texts. Does “agency” mean only the ability to publish, or does it also mean that the action achieves a sense of empowerment, change, critical or political or emotional growth on the part of the writer? If agency is more than the action, but is also the effect on the individual, then have digital media really changed that much? Is writing this blog, which may not be read, that different to my sense of agency than writing the journals that I have kept for decades? Or, how much agency is allowed in a digital world that is increasingly bound by the imperatives  of global capitalism? How much agency is provided to me if I am just doing the marketing work for corporations? What kinds of composing and communication with digital media could actually have an effect on our individual – or collective – sense of agency?

More to come…

My Thing About Blogs

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I’ve wondered, over the past decade, why I have been hesitant to start a blog. It’s not a matter of thinking that there aren’t ideas on blogs worth reading. It’s not that I don’t value the interactive nature of blogs. It’s not that I don’t value a collaborative approach to knowledge generation or that I haven’t learned from some of the blogs I have read. You know, some of my best friends write blogs.

Yet I have hesitated writing one myself and I don’t even follow as many as I should. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the course I’m teaching this spring, I wouldn’t be writing this now. But that raises for me the question of why, if I am interested in writing, in popular culture, in digital media, haven’t I joined in with a blog? And I’ve come to several tentative conclusions that this project, this blog will put to the test.

The first question is one of time. Blogs began to emerge when I had two young children at home and was also director of the university composition program. I had priorities. Family came first. After that, depending on the time and the emergencies, I could turn to research, teaching, and administration. The reality, however, was that after family and other professional obligations such as my administrative responsibilities, there was only so much time for writing. And, if there was only a limited time for writing, I was going to spend that time writing in venues that I knew would be peer-reviewed, edited, and possibly even read, such as books and journals (and count toward tenure and promotion). I had to be very disciplined about what I read and wrote in order to get that work done. Exploration and musing time was going to be taken up by my family. There just wasn’t time for any other writing. Even now, as I write this, I find myself wondering what will happen to my words. Will anyone read them or is this just wasted typing? I’m well aware of the t-‘shirt that reads, “More people have read my shirt than your blog.” Even with my sons now in college, I find myself squirming at the possibility that I am engaging in wasted type, in wasting time.

The second question is how I work as a writer. Although some people think I write quickly, thanks to an early background in journalism, the reality is that I both do and don’t. On the one hand, I can bang out words very quickly and am willing to get a piece finished and off to an editor without dithering over it forever. Yet the key to that previous statement is “off to an editor.” If I don’t have a sense that there will be someone to look over my work and offer suggestions and critique, I can still write quickly, but I publish slowly. As a journalist and when I publish in books and in journals there are editors — and now reviewers — to help me, to prod me to new ideas, to save me from sloppy thinking and writing. Without the collaborative relationship I have with editors, I get nervous about my writing. I edit and re-edit and re-edit emails to try to be sure I am communicating what I want to say. I am trying desperately to avoid rewriting this paragraph again and again. I don’t like putting writing out there that is less than my best or that others have not been able to help me improve. I’d rather not say stupid things, poorly written, in public. And, if I have to rewrite and rewrite every blog post, that brings me back to the question of time.

People with blogs, when I tell them how I work as a writer, tell me that I will get that feedback from the comments to my blog (if anyone reads it). The blog can serve as a space in which I try out my ideas and get responses that help me develop those ideas. Which brings me to the third question. Although I rely on digital media, study it, love it too much sometimes, at my core I’m a face-to-face person. As anyone who knows me can attest, I like to talk through ideas.  I would choose to meet at the local coffee shop and talk over my latest project with a trusted friend, than try to sort it out through writing (and I always prefer to talk over dissertation chapters with graduate students than provide written comments).  I also scribble lots of notes and write ideas down and I keep private journals that are informal and rambling, but in terms of working through ideas with other people, I would always choose to talk in person.  Why? Upbringing perhaps, I was raised in a family of talkers (my former sister-in-law said we were an “oral culture”). Or maybe it is that I need the body language and non-verbal communication involved in the conversation, or perhaps the speed with which I can modify and respond to ideas.  Or maybe I just like the companionship of corporeal beings. For whatever reasons, I like to talk through ideas.  I love teaching in a face-to-face classroom so much and dread the idea of online teaching, not because I think the latter can never be effective, but because of the joys I get from the former. It also explains why my teaching always involves conferences with students.  And, as I noted above,  when I write for publication of any kind, from books to email, I compose carefully to try to be as precise as possible. (I just rewrote the previous pedestrian sentence about four times. I’m not saying it always makes my writing precise or elegant, just that I try.)

Finally there are the connected questions of permanence and impermanence. On the one hand, I know that any blog post may have a long life online, even if I choose to delete it next week. As someone who has already talked about being careful in what he writes, the idea that the uninspiring blathering of this post will exist out there, attached to my name, for decades, doesn’t comfort me. If I’m going to create texts that will exist for a long time, then I want to be careful of how I write, and that gets me back to problems of how I spend my time as a writer and scholar.  The flip side of this coin in impermanence, or the possibility that my writing in this venue may disappear just as easily as I’ve written it, and that the work will have been wasted. And this last point will be the focus of my next post.

So what’s the point? That blogging is not for everyone? Or at least not for me? Or that I need to loosen up and give it a try? I certainly have felt somewhat defensive when talking (face to face, by the way) to friends with blogs. Given my interest in digital media and writing, it has seemed like a weakness in my background. Now, however, as I prepare to teach a graduate seminar in New Media and Composition Pedagogy, it seemed as good a moment as any to try it out for a semester and see if my resistance to the endeavor changes through practice, or if this is a just a one-time experiment.

More later.