Resistance – Bronwyn T. Williams

With another Watson conference come and gone I’m appreciating the opportunity to reflect on the good conversations I had with friends and colleagues. There were, of course, many different ways people responded to the theme of the conference – “Economies of Writing” – but I have to say that I found myself particularly drawn to the material critiques of writing in the university. It’s easy to get caught up in the daily work of teaching, administration, working on individual projects, and put aside the darker implications of the evolution of the university into an increasingly outsourced, privatized, corporate entity built on the backs of contingent labor. If that last sentence sounds familiar it’s because so many have said things like that before me. In fact, we here it so often that we stop hearing it, shrug, and slog on. It seems so relentless and inevitable, that our efforts against it feel like trying to turn back the tides.

What I liked about the conversations at the conference, at least many of them that I was involved in, was the consistent move toward thinking about action. There were critiques, sure, but people seemed less content to end at critique – and expect a pithy book or article to change the world – and instead kept trying to imagine practical, direct ways to challenge the dominant culture of efficiency and profit, to imagine ways that would make the classroom, the program, the university a tangibly different place. Tony Scott’s presentation on rethinking writing program assessment to include issues of labor or Asao Inoue’s exploration into who if “failing” composition courses and what that means, or Wendy Olson’s work on translingual students in two-year college programs all make direct connections to material conditions, and then pushed the audience to think about what this meant for practical, daily life in the university – for faculty and students. (While not as elegantly theorized as these, I was happy that my small bit on Blackboard, economies of scale, and the imposition of such systems in top-down, rigid manner also ended with the same kind of practical moves.) None of these or other of the excellent presentations will change the university in an instant. But I’m grateful to the conference for reminding us of the importance of paying attention to material conditions, and to do so in a way that avoid easy slogans and easy demonizing of others. And, I appreciate being reminded that, in terms of change, pushing the rock a bit every day, building on powerful critique, has the potential to create practical change. I can almost feel optimistic.

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.

Tag: Resistance

Watson Conference and Economies of Writing

The One-Way Bridge, Part 2