Shimmering Literacies – My Blog

“Time does not heal all wounds; it simply outlives them”

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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.

Can we step off this path and start anew?

I’d like to think so.

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.

The Secrets that We Keep (Or try to…)

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Virginia Heffernan, one of my favorite writers in the New York Times and on digital and pop culture issues, has a succinct and vivid analysis of the growing cultural awakening about privacy and email.  It’s not that a lot of us — including her I’m sure — haven’t known this for a long time. If the 1’s and 0’s of digital media allow us to store and send information in multiple forms, at lightning speeds, and over vast differences, they also allow for multiple was of finding and decoding that same information. What’s changing, according to Heffernan, is the growing awareness in the culture at large of the potential public nature of something as ubiquitous as email. As she writes:

It’s the rare Web-user who’d willingly submit his own e-mail archive to prosecutorial scrutiny. LDL (“Let’s Discuss Live”), for those who have the option, is an extremely good idea. Nearly everyone needs some form of communication that’s not searchable, archivable, forwardable, discoverable and permanent.

It’s not a moment to be nostalgic for the days before email, but it is another notable moment of cultural change in how we perceive our digital lives. As more people begin to have a visceral sense of the lack of security, she notes that more and more people are reverting to that unencrypted, but familiar way of passing intimate information — in director, embodied, conversation.

The One-Way Bridge, Part 2

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At a conference last week I heard several people defend the approaches to popular culture and literacy pedagogy that I define as the “One-Way Bridge.” They talked of the ways they would ask students to talk or write about popular culture texts so that material could become the content for class discussions or assignments that would help the students become more successful at school-sanctioned reading and writing. Yet at the end of their comments was often a question about why students still seemed to resist such efforts. Why, they would ask in mild frustration, shouldn’t the students be more excited about having popular culture “brought” into the classroom?

When they describe their attempt to connect to students’ interests, however, I hear descriptions similar to what I have observed in classes from middle-school to universities. There is an attempt, an exercise or discussion in which the teacher solicits material or ideas about what the students read and write outside of school. Yet what often happens is, after a few minutes, the teacher begins to drive the students over the one-way bridge to show how their work outside of school can be transformed into more valuable school work. It’s not that this is necessarily a wasted effort, but many students I talk with describe these moments as ones in which they feel as if they’ve been had. And the result of this pedagogical bait-and-switch, before too long, is that students begin develop a wariness of being asked about their out-of-school literacy practices. As one university student put it to me, in a disdainful tone of voice, “You know that if a teacher asks about movies or music you like, their just going to turn it into the lesson for the day. I’ve figured that much out.” Many students learn to regard these moments in the same way they do as a teacher-designed digital project that feels to them like a “creepy treehouse” — they learn to stay away, or perhaps play along, but keep their most interesting ideas to themselves.

Part of the allure of popular culture, including digital texts students manipulate themselves these days, is that they feel a sense of control over the interpretations, the uses, the emotions of the film, TV, games, and websites they encounter. The only assessment involved in popular culture — for them and for the rest of us — comes from our own tastes and our discussions with our friends. School work, on the other hand, is all about assessment. Now, more than ever, students have learned that the “lesson of the day” will always be graded — and that it only counts and is worth learning if the teacher grades it. It is easy to see, then, that if the students see school work as always involving the assessment of an adult, it is the antithesis of what the sense of control, pleasure, and mastery they feel when they read and compose with and about popular culture.

There are a lot of reasons this happens in the classroom and very few of them are because the teachers have nefarious motives. Instead I think that, for some teachers, there is a genuine belief that the bridge should only allow travel in one direction and that their responsibility is to bring students over that bridge to the literature and literacy practices valued in school. That’s an ethically defensible position – one that I happen to disagree with – but understandable. For other teachers, the pressure of standardized assessment and the standardized lesson plans that go with such assessment leaves them feeling they have little room for straying from traditional school-based literacy practices. For still others, there may be a sense that popular culture content may get out of control, bringing controversial work and disturbing representations into the classroom.  I believe there are answers to all of these concerns, and others, that I will continue to write about soon. But we first have to realize that a fake two-way bridge isn’t fooling anybody.

The One-Way Bridge

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For a long time there has been a lot of discussion in literacy and writing education,  at both the K-12 and college levels, about “using” popular culture as a “bridge” to the print literacy genres and forms more valued – and more certain to be assessed – in the classroom. Yet it’s clear, in this metaphor, that this is a one-way bridge. The novel, the poem, the essay, the argument-based article, the research paper, all continue to be the desired destination for students in this model. Sure, we can start with the mindless and fun pop culture stuff, but then we cross that glorious bridge to the golden fields of print texts and critical thinking.

Obviously, I’ve got some problems with this model. To begin with, I’m less-than-convinced that no critical thinking goes on in the composing and interpretation of popular culture texts (and let’s remember that, today, students may very well be composing or commenting on pop culture online as well as reading it). And I’m also not the first to point out that the medium does not determine the quality of a text. There are plenty of bad novels, great films, excellent television series, and so on. Yet, while those points are worth making again (since they still seem to have not reached a lot of people), my problem with the model today is its single direction. Why must we assume that the only learning worth happening in school takes place when the base influences encountered outside the classroom are turned into the gold of academic literacy and texts? Why not, instead, approach all of the literacy practices, in the classroom and out, as connected? Why not engage students in ways of thinking about audience, detail, style, emotion, analysis, or anything else we want to teach them about reading and writing, as important ideas to consider regardless of the text and the context? Rather than approach popular culture as something to be left on one side of the bridge as students move on to more “important” work, why not help them see how the literacy and rhetorical practices we are teaching them will bring them knowledge and pleasure in all the part of their lives?

I know this is a difficult case to make, as the Core Common standards are not only generally hostile to this concept, but even more try to separate reading and writing into distinct, rather than connected, activities (more on that soon). I do take some heart in what Leslie Burns pointed out at IRA in terms of the language in the Common Core Standards that leaves some room for teaching about multimodal and digital and popular culture literacy practices. But even with that, it’s going to be an argument.

What would it take to convince literacy and writing educators and scholars to imagine a two-way bridge?

Teaching Literacies with Digital and Pop Culture Media for Grades 4-12

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I’m off to Orlando and IRA (the International Reading Association) tomorrow to be part of an all-day workshop with some wonderful scholars and teachers. The workshop, “Teaching Literacies with Digital and Pop Culture Media for Grades 4-12,” includes Margaret Hagood, Donna Alvermann, Barbara Guzzetti, and many others whose work I have admired for a while now but have never had the chance to work with.

I’ll be talking about “Rethinking Reading and Writing with Participatory Popular Culture,” which continues the research from Shimmering Literacies. I’m focusing on how digital media are not only changing students conceptions of interpreting and composing texts, but blur the line between the practices of reading and writing in ways that have implications for how we teach reading and writing in a multimodal culture.

So I am grateful to be included in this workshop and looking forward to the presentations and conversations. I plan to learn a lot.

More to come next week, both about the workshop and end-of-semester reflections on the “New Media and Composition Pedagogy” seminar.

New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders

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The edited collection Amy Zenger and I have been working on, New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders, has been accepted for publication by Routledge Press.  The book will include contributors from South Africa, Nepal, Lebanon, Qatar, Turkey, Australia, and the U.S.  We’ve got some great and eclectic chapters and are excited about this project (and grateful for Routledge for agreeing to publish it).

The book has two central areas of focus. First, the book explores the ways in which new media and online technologies are shaped by, and influence, the connections and tensions between transnational popular culture and local cultural practices. Participatory popular culture raises new questions about the interplay between the mass popular culture and local audience members. This collection will explore the role of new media in the economic and cultural debates about “globalization” and how those are complicated by the local uses of popular culture texts. Technologies that allow an individual to not only access popular culture texts from around the world in an instant, but also share, comment on, appropriate, and remix those same texts alter the way the way the individual perceives popular culture, and alter his or her sense of agency in regard to the texts. New media technologies have changed the relationship between mass popular culture text and individual users, and they engage individuals in new ways of negotiating language and culture.

Those negotiations of language and culture define the second focus of the collection: the influence of participatory popular culture on the literacy practices of young people. Through cross-cultural participatory popular culture, young people are engaging with and responding to global audiences in ways and to an extent simply not available to previous generations. Though we should, of course, be wary of being naively celebratory in our approach to studying these practices, there is no denying that many young people are in contact with texts and people around the world through the lenses of popular culture: Popular culture provides the rhetorical, linguistic, and semiotic building blocks through which they engage in cross-cultural discourse. They encounter these texts on a global stage, deal with issues of difference and unfamiliarity, and then rebuild them in local contexts. While their practices and ideas are certainly shaped by the popular culture content that corporations produce and distribute around the world, it is also the case that young people are appropriating and reusing these same texts to perform identities and make meaning in their own lives.

The chapters in this book, then, analyze how young people are interpreting, creating, and distributing popular culture texts across cultures, and study how young people are thinking about the role of culture in defining the nature of texts, the negotiations of language use, the employment of rhetoric, and the construction and performance of identity.  The individual chapters offer many different perspectives about local responses to these global forces from scholars working in a wide range of international contexts.  How do young people access transnational texts online, but then respond and rework them according to their local contexts and concerns about identity? How do these online practices influence their approaches to reading and writing, both with print as well as with images, sound, and video?

It’s a very different world we live in now, and exciting to be around.