Amateur Auteurs

"Democratization of production" = anyone with a keyboard can make cultural artifacts that used to be in the hands of the gatekeepers.

Do our skills lag behind what we are able to imagine?

How are knowledge and skill different?

What do our students know about peer review from their interaction with technology? Comment functions?

Utopia: Not my class

Read James Berlin for today. Again. Reminded me why I left Rhet/Comp for pure theory. If pragmatic rhetoric is a theory, that is.
They pay me a little over 12,000 per year (plus tuition) to mold young minds. No, that's not quite true. They pay me to produce students. I am a student factory. The students enter my class, use up my resources, and then use those resources to form their studentness. I am not a teacher or a coach, I am their fodder.
Berlin wants (wanted?) composition classes to "teach" resistance to ideology. This is, of course, a ridiculous concept. No one can resist ideology completely, no one can teach resistance, and even if you could, you'd have to teach them to resist your teaching, which would become problematic. But others have said this before me. I leave the circular reasoning to those Marxists (like Allen) who can think about ideology for an extended period of time without making themselves dizzy with regret and guilt.
What bothers me about any composition pedagogy, any teaching theory, is the subsequent classroom the theories imagine being created. They imagine a pocket universe, a utopia in a white walled room, student-citizens emerging bright and motivated. The "radical" pedagogies particularly still see writing and reading through the Romantic rhetoric lens, even those like Berlin who categorically reject "Expressivism." Teach a man to fish, and he eats for life. Teach a man to read and write and he can take down the structures that have him eating only fish.
I loved 1984 because of this Romantic rhetoric that flows through it and other dystopias. As a writer, I want to believe I am acting. No wonder I have taken to Burke's theory of symbolic action so much--if it's not true, I really have no hope. I can't act, not in this cultural context, not given my various limitations. At first glance I should like Berlin because he wants to create whole universities of freshmen resistance through writing/reading/rhetoric. He wants us to use the classroom as a space for protest. He wants the English department to save us all.
And there have been cases of writing as savior. And Burke is right--moving problems and responses into the symbolic realm will most likely purify war, which is very very very good.
And if my students gave a damn, I could almost believe that my silly little ENGL 106 class could change the world.
But they don't give a damn--for the most part. Those who do give a damn about ideology and capitalism and myth and hegemony are too few, and like me, too weak to make a revolutionary stand in West Lafayette. And, from one theoretical perspective, the one I've been working with for three years now, that classroom utopian rhetoric is exactly what I should not be teaching toward.
If I'm right--or rather, if Burke is right--both dystopian and utopian rhetorics are conservative. More frightening is that dystopian rhetorics might be even more conservative than utopian ones. If I teach resistance in class, if I am able to create a utopian space amid the dystopian university (and beyond) then things can't be all that bad. And I am creating that space only in a university that is, frankly, far more egalitarian than much of the corporate world. As long as my students see that I am still around to make these dystopian claims, then the exigency toward action is lessened. No one really rebels until it's too late. The American Revolution is said to start with the "shot heard round the world," not a symbolic shot in a pamphlet from Thomas Paine. Symbolic action is, for the moment, not recognized.
Remember the protests before the war? Yeah, neither does Bush. Because symbolic action is not valued. If I teach my students in my utopian classroom how to resist symbolically I may be doing more harm than good. Especially if they start to believe that resistance is the job of flaky English professors and their hippie friends in the College of Liberal Arts.
And "job" is an interesting word here the Berlin wouldn't use. I am getting paid by and institution to teach "writing"--not resistance, not ideology formation. If I pretend I have a utopia in my class, I am not only invoking my own ideologies, but I am lying -- the class is just a class, entrenched in a university which is run by the state and tax payers' dollars; their Calculus TAs get more money than I do because my knowledge has less cultural capital.
So what do I do? Make them read 1984? Show Fahrenheit 451 like I did in class today? Create assignments that force them to action? Remind myself I've only got 16 weeks per set of students?
Hide out in some little liberal arts college in New England?
And if I actually don't attempt to produce utopia, if I ignore my instincts to teach awareness of hegemony, then I am failing myself. I study the rhetoric of dystopian fiction because I believe these fictions can show us how to act and how not to act. The books tell me I should start resisting now, do all I can to avoid Big Brother or book burning or the Benefactor (so many B words in my world).
Dystopias are normative, utopias are revolutionary. Don't teach the negative, then, teach toward the possibilities. It's not that we are in a dystopia now (for that's certainly not what Plato or More were saying) but that we are not in a utopia. Plato (damn him) and More and later Bellamy saw possibility, hope, in what could be and wrote in hope that we would not, perhaps, achieve heaven on earth, but that we would do what we could to be the most human we could be, to achieve as much as we can, given our various flaws (see Burke's "Definition of Human").
Berlin, in other words, imagines not only utopia, but asks that we implement it, whereas the utopian treatises and the dystopian fictions ask only that we act in the present. There are various dangers in this rhetoric--we always run the risk that our students will still see this project as only belonging in one space, the English studies space, or that they will not see the class beyond a set of assignments--but if I am to act responsibly as a "teacher," as a pacifist, I have to do something.
So as contradictory as it seems, if I want to encourage social justice in my students, I cannot create my classroom as a utopia where ideologies are abolished and egalitarianism reigns. I also cannot create the outside world as an evil dystopian land where the government is controlling us and corporations own us. Both rhetorics seem to fail to encourage future action on the part of the students.
And none of these seem to have anything to do with creating good writing.
Which is why I'm going to go read my theory like a good little Composition studies drop out, and hope that my colleagues will find a way to reconcile the two ideas of the job of the composition classroom without me.

IRC, Mosaic, and Old School Communication

Or, /me slaps #nick with a large trout

Susan Herring, writing in 2001 (ah, the golden days!), questions the matrices of gender, power, and online communication. Something I'd like to think about: intersections of magic, the internet, and gender. Why "Wizzards"?

So here we might mention something about synchronous and diachronous textuality?
[15:06] *** driscodl has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** cdoran has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** Jen Backman has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** rlnichol has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** Allen Brizee has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** Jess has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** mgutowsk has joined the chatbox
[15:06] what is "diachronous"?
[15:07] It's much 'quieter' now....
[15:07] huh...amy...huh....what is it?
[15:07] in a standard time line
[15:07] nothing is equal - all rhetoric is political
[15:07] oh, okay
[15:08] What are we talking about?
[15:08] Here I'd say something about fanfiction and authority and gender


Conversations With Jon
Let's all be quiet and praise Robert Redford
for his contributions to Mankind. All the President's men
can't put order into chaos.
Again, I wonder: Do artists play guitar?
The answer is always Madagascar.
Where was the President when the Vietnamese died in our capitalist schemes?
Madagascar.
What is the fourth largest island on Earth?
Madagascar.
How do we reconcile pacifists and patriots?
Madagascar.
Who is our god?
Madagascar, Madagascar, Madagascar.
Let us all join hands and encircle the whole of our universe: America!
Send rice and pork.
Let them all eat cake, Jon, with Canadians while they wait for their friends to become pop stars.
But when push comes to love, a country in Africa will always be Madagascar,
so we can share inside jokes. Mix the small world's known images (Elm tree, Dog, Chair),
in the cauldron of the body until Paris is just a tower, New York was just two towers,
and Egypt is towers shaped like pyramids.
The smog we breathe is dope to the soul. But you know that.
In the baptistery, in blue costumes, in choir gowns, we will always have television. And Madagascar.
I miss being self-conscious of: bomb dropping, War Memorial Criticism, and the reporter's gaze right into our mouths;
she strings out quotes like handkerchiefs from a magician's sleeve.

Biblical language now: Thy grace befalls our plaster globes, oft colored sienna. Thou art Madagascar,
maddening allure of Madagascar drawing backward solid bodied objects.

Now you have etched yourself with frog brains and red ink. Hit play on the VCR, and wait to be overcome
with Disney and the urge to utter

Ethiopia.

Waiting for Studii

Back in the day, we used to make the plural of "Student" be "Studii." I think it had something to do with how we felt that "Biesecker-Mast" should be pluralized as "Biesecker-Masti." Both conversations were spawned (pun intended) from our concern over the plural of "penis."

None of which has anything to do with this teaching journal post.

I just finished grading 2/3 of my (remaining) class's verbal/visual portrait. While the visual portraits tend to be pretty good (at least they are talking about the person) the verbal portraits are all over the place. Some are like news articles, some like a diary. Some quote too extensively, some are all paraphrase. What did I DO?!

Because I'm pretty sure their abysmal performance is my fault. And it all boils down to how they see themselves (positioning) as part of this project.

When I said I wanted a "portrait," I initially talked about a verbal portrait putting into words those things you would capture on film. I suppose I should have been less metaphorical. I should have said, "This means a good argument in this genre includes X, Y, Z."

But how many times did I tell them that I need to "See" the person? That I need to intimately "know" the informant? To "show don't tell"? Did I only imagine that I got those things across? Did I ever look into their eyes to see if it was sinking in?

I can't remember.

And now I'm waiting for the last stragglers to email me their critical bibliographies. Some were holding out for me to push them back yet another few days, but I insisted this was it. And yet, this is a genre I know how to speak to; despite being a horrible bibliography writer myself, I know how to talk about this kind of audience, purpose and style. I'm comfortable with the language, with the expectations. I'd work with them forever on this if I could.

But, alas, I cannot. Time gusts swiftly past something about inspiration, imagination, the autumn wind and dying leaves as metaphor goes here I must not fail this class....

I will spend time tomorrow working on "issue identfication" with them. Although that seems more fit for conferences.

I love conferences. I don't know what people are complaining about. I feel they learn far more in small groups with me as facilitator than they do any other time. So much gets accomplished! And yet I was the only one in the conference room this morning. My kiddos sent me meaningful looks: "We could be in bed like these other classes."

They'll appreciate it later. I've built in lots of "Peer editing from your bed" in the last two weeks. They'll love it.

Twenty-four minutes to go.

My Prophetic Vision (for teaching)

Teaching is about being continually frustrated, about defering the resolution to a problem.
While I may be able to resolve Student X's difficulties with research, Student Y has different difficulties. For example, Student X doesn't know how to use online databases. Student Y doesn't have the ability to search those databases because she can't think critically about her overall goals, about her project as a type that can be categorized with terms. Student Z pulls up multitudes of information, but can't sort it. Student F sorts it, but can't synthesize.
By the end of the critical bibliography, I'd like them to be at Student Z's level, at least. I want them to be "wordlings" (Burke!) who see language and even objects as "entitled," belonging to categories. How critical they are of those categories doesn't really matter to me; first they need to see that there are ways of terming (ways of seeing, terministic screenings). And other than saying, with flashing lights and fireworks "Hey! Human language is categorical!" I don't know what to do.
As for argument. Oh geez. Today I said the term "rhetoric" and was met with absolute blankness. I talk about it all the time, but some students still don't know what I mean when I say argument. Case in point: One student's critical bibliography stated that the article "didn't have any arguments" because there was "nothing to fight about."
Did I miss something? Did I make some fatal assumption in some warrant somewhere? Do I have to go back again? Have they already forgotten the elements of persuasion and argumentation we did back in September?
I suppose I could point out the rhetoricality of the critical bibliography. Of course it's rhetorical in nature: it's addressed (Burke), it's strategic, it's "sly" in its formulations and organization. It is arranged to make sense of the world for a reader.
Guess I should have said that. Guess I'll have to say it soon.
They laughed at me for calling it "The Big Ethnography of Doom" at the beginning of the semester. Today they asked why I hadn't called it that on the assignmnet sheet. I guess I don't want to freak them out. Too late.
When it comes to style, I always think in terms of rhetoric as identficiation. This is one of my problems with Romantic Rhetoric and Shelley's Defence of Poetry, as you can see from my post a few days ago. But when it comes to Postmodern understandings of rhetoric and writing (is there a difference between rhetoric and writing? Should it be Rhetoric while Writing?), style is obviously one rhetorical method. I want my students to understand that.
Actually, I want to understand that, too. Just more theoretically.
Oh, Papa KB. Help.

Late night: Theory and Teaching?

By theory in the title, I mean Rhetorical theory, or even Critical theory, but especially theories of science and philosophy. And teaching? Well, given how much attention I've given the kiddos lately (maybe two percent of my time....) it seems strange that I'd have a late night revelation about teaching while reading Bruno Latour's "We've never been Modern."
Oh, Bruno. You'd think he was a pro-wrestler, not a theorist. Weenie theory nerds don't have names like "Bruno."
We (I like Burke's use of "we" because I don't feel so alone in this venture of theory) first encountered Latour way back in the Fall of 04, when I felt pretty damn good, was losing weight rapidly and could lift more weight than my male students. So Bruno has some positive associations with me. Bruno gave us (me) the idea of "Immutable mobiles" as tools for "inscription"--that is, every document is immutable (unchangeable) but can be moved around. Within that document (text, whatever) the Scene (damn, I'm mixing Burke in) that the document was created in is implicitly inscribed. That inscription is immutable, which makes documentation an act of stabilization. Particularly, we said in the class, of identities of organizations. Memos, as immutable mobiles, inscribe the company, its beliefs and practices, the people, etc, and provide a blueprint of sorts for the future. Meaning is made static within the document.
The benefit of immutable mobiles is that they can be put side by side for comparison. Or, they can be laid atop one another hierarchicaly (both physically, with pieces of paper to the ceiling, or metaphorically). We can see through the layers to create depth of the inscription.
What the hell does this have to do with teaching?
Well, my students don't seem to be getting (so say their emails) what this whole "portrait" thing is about. Oh, they get the visual part. They really get that part because stupid amylea is so fascinated by visual rhetoric (and, apparently, so good at explaining it) that she devoted the whole class time to the visual part of the "Verbal/Visual Portrait."
Oh, and now the kiddos are trying to write outlines for tomorrow (Amy style outlines--I'm perpetuating the Amylea Method of Composition. Because Lester Faigley--THE Lester Faigley--describes a similiar process in the newest edition of the Penguin Handbook. So it's not only valid, but one of the top rhetoricians recoomends it. HA, Jeff Gundy!). And it's not going well. They don't know how to verbally create a "dominant image."
And, I think, without Latour's understanding of the job of ethnography, I wouldn't have managed much beyond a "Dateline" sounding drabble myself. Because the theory is there, however, I can see the scope of the project. What it does. And the dangers of inscription.
So, do I teach them about immutable mobiles? I guess not. But I can let that idea inform (ugh, I hate that word) how I teach them about the dominant impression.
That doesn't help me with conferences tomorrow. I guess the theory/practice divide is a useful (i.e. pragmatic?) one; even if we are going to go all PoMo and say that the center of that binary does not hold, we in practice (ugh! it's so circular!) do divide our minds that way. See. I just did it. Theoretically, there is no difference between theory and practice. Wow.
Practically, or pragmatically, I know that the theory is beyond my students (at least 90% of it is beyond 90% of them--whee, empiricism!) but that the practices of inscription and their end results are quite obvious. What can I do to present that to them?
I already discussed the use of the Chinese in early anthropology; how they were used in museum displays. If I bring in more evidence of that, then have the students generate some ways in which those stereotypes have remained (because they're so darned immutable and mobile), we might get at the point--that we can write (create...image-ine) a person or group of people in a way that is not just a re-presentation, but a definition. You are re-creating that person. And your re-creation is the one that's immutable and mobile.
That might help. Now. Where were all those articles I used last year?
Oh yeah. In Bonnie Tu Smith's office. In Holmes Hall. On Leon Street. In Boston, Mass.
Damn.

Fun with (U)/(dys)topia

Reading this thing by Ira Shor, a Comp guy, (not the comp tests, the Comp studies), who gives an overview of his "frontloaded" student response class whose subject was, surprisingly, Utopia. And I saw myself teaching the class, editing his ideas, referencing works he's missing...instead of looking at what he's saying about pedagogy itself. Oops. It's interesting that he only referenced works in English...
          Of course, part of the issue is that his students are all 10 years older than me. His students didn't grow up during the grunge rock phenomenon, they weren't affected toward Marxism by the neo-Punk revolution started by Green Day in 1994, and they certainly hadn't gone through the Clinton scandal or 9/11. Teaching Utopia is different now; the questions have changed as the socio-economic atmosphere shifts further toward right wing capitalism.
          Damn, I'd love to teach a class on Utopia.
          And, every time I imagine myself teaching it, it is at Bluffton College. I mean, University.
          Shh. Don't tell. Especially Jeff, because he predicted it. He said that all my cynicism would one day turn back on itself and make me into a sentimental sap.
          That was during Modern Poetry, the class that probably meant more to me than any other class at BC. Again, shh. Don't tell. That class taught me how to handle graduate level work, before I even knew I was going to do this whole mess. That class gave me an in for Rotella's Modernism class, and wouldn't you know it. Guy Rotella stopped me in the hall Thursday to tell me that he wants to sit down and discuss my paper from last semester--in a good way! That it was a very nice paper.
          Confidence. How do you instill confidence in students? How did I get my confidence back, after I lost it my first year in grad school? Was it the summer alone with Kenneth Burke, M Keith Booker and a million other social and linguistic theories? Was it the anime? Is it that I now talk to Kari every day of the week, for at least 5 minutes? When did it shift?
          I once told Jeff that improvement for me doesn't happen like it does to other people. Most people gradually work toward a goal. For me, however, it's like electrons. You know. Electrons can only have certain energies, and there is no y=mx + b line to show how they increase in energy. Instead, it's sections of long plateaus followed by giant, sudden leaps, with white space in between. The shells around a nucleus are levels, not sloping lines; there is no connection. And when an electron shifts levels, it happens in a burst of light. Not that I also create bursts of light, but that the movement is sudden, and I rarely notice the change until much later in the plateau (I am sure electrons also do not notice their changes in location).
          What does this have to do with Utopia? My thinking on it has shifted again; I realize, reading Shor's article, that I must rethink the rhetorical situation of U/dys-topian lit. That in many ways, I am correct that it is written to be received by all audiences, and that the general public is aware enough of the conditions of Utopia and the problems it could pose. In many other ways, however, I have forgotten that although anyone can understand the literature, few actually pick up the books to engage in that relationship I outlined. I need to add one more factor, one more causality, into my neat little equation, one which will complicate the hell out of things, but will clean up the ultimate problem I have with rhetorical criticisms in general: How is it actually received? What are the conditions that are behind any one reading of the text? Other than shoving the book in their hands and holding a gun to their heads, how do publicists convince readers to read? Who else, other than publicists, do this job? What other conditions surround the reading of dystopian texts? Utopian texts? Don't they necessarily assume an engaged reader? What happens when the reader is forced to read ( F451 in high schools, for example)? What about the physical presence of the book?
          Silly Amy. How could I have overlooked such simple things? The theory, Oh, the theory....