Gee, "Introduction" from Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics

(Context: the day before this reading came up, the Teaching Writing class had a fairly heated argument about the role, if any, grammar plays or should play in the teaching of writing.)

Today's readings—Gee and Shuy—are tremendously enlightening in terms of the previous class discussion/argument about the role of grammar in writing instruction. It is such a clearly important and controversial issue at once, and there are pressure and contractions from so many places—tests, administrators, other teachers, etc. Everyone in the room clearly wants to help students become better writers, but we also know that there are administrative hoops to jump through. I think if any of us had the time and the right (small) number of students, and were freed of the outside pressures I've mentioned—nearly all of us would end up modeling Gee's notion of teaching writing/literacy through apprenticeship. We all seem to agree that writing without meaning does very little other than help people pass test and seem to understand a language. Clearly, this apprentice model is similar to Shuy's notion of holism in his text. I think if the scenario were ideal, again, we would probably all agree. But it isn't, and we don't. Here comes real life, as it must. What do you do when the “tip of the iceberg” elements of writing are so very poor that you simply can't get past them as a reader in order to get to that meaning? Add to that the very real notion that after a mere 15 weeks of your class, the university—the world—will expect that these students now know how to write—and unfortunately, what it means to “write” seems to be very different from a popular stance than from what we in composition understand. So the question remains, given all these less-than-ideal circumstances, what must we actually, literally do in a classroom when teaching writing over a three-month period? I don't know...

But I think that some of Gee's more political framework speaks strongly to the idea that we must just 'suck it up' and 'teach grammar'. Aside from the, well fact, that teaching grammar does nearly nothing to improve students use of grammar, some points that Gee makes paint this instruction in an even darker light. (I can't tell if I like or hate that phrase...) Gee's notion of dominant Discourses is of great importance. Every person masters many Discourses—which consist not only of saying the right thing, but of playing the right social role as you say that thing, which entails embodying the right values and beliefs, etc. Our society has perhaps an endless number of Discourses, but some—such as school Discourse—lead to the 'goods' of society. If you master those, you are and will be better off; those are dominant Discourses. They are dominant for no inherent reason; it's more a matter of the people who are already in power already have those ones mastered, so that is what they know and expect. But, as with any type of power structure, everyone cannot be on top; some must be on the bottom. Here is where this view of grammar gets dark. Gee remarks that Discourses are constantly changing, and that you cannot be “sort of” fluent in a Discourse: you are either an insider or an outsider. If you are not born intro a Discourse very similar to the dominant one, it can be very hard, if even possible, to ever acquire that Discourse. But it gets even trickier when the rules are subject to constant change. Gee compares this endless list of endlessly changing rules to a “gate” meant to keep out outsiders. Viewed in this way, the stringent (yet random?) rules of Standard English grammar can be seen as a way to let the right people in to the Dominant Discourse, while keeping the wrong people out. The only difference between this and a gated community might be that you can't see the gates. Again, I don't claim to have an answer to the issues surrounding the teaching of grammar in the light of these ideas, but I know there is something tremendously meaningful here. There is something afoot. Is it too extreme to say that setting up our school system to require the de-contextualized memorization of these rules is akin to forcing non-mainstream students to build and maintain the very gates that keep the mainstream students safe from the former's possible entry? Is it very different from forcing them to build the very fences that keep them out of the places of opportunity? I don't know, but I am sure that this idea merits more thought before we just go with a system that might be harming the very students it is pretending to help. Because remember, the students already inside this metaphorical gate—they don't really need the help with their language and grammar; the dominant Discourse is so similar to their primary Discourses that they have essentially been learning it since birth. So all this drilling is meant not for them, but as an act of charity for the students who are in danger of being left behind. Here's a hammer, kid, get to work.

Mayher, J. "Reading II"

I often tell my students at the very beginning of the semester that we are going to be readings essays, but that we will be reading them more like poems. I ask them when they consider a poem to be read. If their eyes go over every word in the poem one time, have they read it? They usually say that if it's a poem, it has to be read several times and that some type of meaning has to be found it in. I use this idea of poetic reading to talk about the texts we'll read during the semester. I don't tend to give them a lot of readings, either by page length or by number, but we do tend to read them very, very closely, and when they use them in the essays they write, I expect a level of familiarity with the texts that only comes with multiple readings and conversations, that is, with multiple attempts to create meaning. This has just become something I like to tell them, and there are many times in the semester when a student might be struggling to make connections in an essay, and I might ask how many times he or she has read the text he or she is trying to use. Very often, the difficulty comes from a reversion to the type of reading they are most familiar with: get your eyes over the page, close the book, homework's done.

I am thinking about this in terms of some of the concepts Mayher has been laying out in this second reading. There is the notion of co-construction of meaning between speaker/writer and listener/reader. He complicates the notion that “message sent=message received,” and he—rightly, I think—calls out schooling for relying on the false idea that this is or should be possible or desirable. So much of his distinctions between common and uncommonsense notions of communication remind me of Freire's banking vs. problem-posing educations, respectively. One thing Freire, a huge influence on me personally, warns us against is the notion that teaching involves the transmission of block of information from Teacher to student, that these “deposits” are to remain whole, not to be torn apart, and that the more fully the students accept them whole and then give them back to the teacher, the better the student and the better the teacher. I say Freire warns us because behind this idea lie all types of power and oppression issues: if you can convince students that this deposit is Truth, and that it is to be left unquestioned, then you can really make them believe anything, and you can exploit them endlessly.

The counter-pedagogy is what Freire calls problem-posing, and as the name suggests, it begins with the posing of problems to people, but more specifically, the problems that they encounter in their actual worlds. This clearly reflects relevance theory to some degree, if in name only. The idea is that education, or any form of communication, is only authentic if it is meaningful in the actual lives of the students. There is a whole subtext behind what we teach spoken in the way we teach. (Here is what I am adding sort of.) If our method of teaching denies true communication, then we are subtly teaching them that communication is bad, recalcitrant, punishable. Those deposits are sacred because we said so, and any attempt to subvert their authority is treasonous. For Freire, if you take away people's ability to communicate authentically, you take away their humanity. Clearly, he has much more of a political bend than Mayher, but the concepts seem so deeply interconnected, that I can't help but think of Freire frequently as I read. True communication entails what Mayher might call transaction, as opposed to interaction. If I read him right, he says that the former allows for both parties to be transformed in the communication process, whereas the latter only allows for the receiver to change. Again, for Freire, the notion of transformation is the key concept to education, to life and liberation. Mayher shows us that communication is essentially an organic process, never a static one, that both parties have a vested interest, without which, no real communication takes place.

This is why I started with my classroom. I think now that I am doing a good thing by talking to my students about reading in this way. I now have better language and theory to understand what I'm really saying though. I want them to understand that reading is an interactive process, that the goal is not just to get through it and internalize the author's main points. There is no main point on a certain level. All is interpretations. What is meaningful for them this semester is meaningful because of all types of factors going on their lives. If they read a piece again as seniors, it would have a very different effect, just as Mayher's relationship to Huck Finn changed as he read it over time. These thoughts may seems a bit rambling, but I think they point to the same idea, a main idea in Mayher's piece, which rejects the banking notion of communications and embraces an idea that interpretation is always part of communicating and that to deny this to students is to rob them of what an education is really supposed to do; it sets up a completely artificial learning environment and puts them in a world not reflective of the world we aim to equip them for.

(I will end this posting on a preposition, just for those teachers who told me not to. Fight the power.)

Bruner, J. Acts of Meaning, chapters 3 & 4

I'm going to start off on the idea of positivism again. I realize that Bruner's work is about meaning-making, not research methods per se, but I might argue that these are the same thing. What is research if not a way to make meaning out of the world we see? I keep arguing that we live in a culture that is so positivistic, it becomes unconscious and we just believe it to be the way to know things. The classic example may be medical treatments. Would you take a medicine without knowing that there had be reliable research about its effects and side-effects? Most people wouldn't. They way to be sure that only .5% of people suffered from _____. But the other side of this idea is actually important. I do in fact want to talk to some people who have tried the medicine first hand. I want to talk to a friend I trust. How bad was the dizziness? Did it go away? You know me, will I mind it? Things like that. Those are not positivistic questions; they don't rely upon certainty. They rely more upon experience, or really what Bruner might call narrative. I wonder how much more we might actually be inclined toward this more phenomenological research. How much is my claim about positivism actually untrue? Toward the end of the book, Bruner says that cultural psychology “insists that the 'methodology' of causation (read, positivism) can neither capture nor begin to plum [a culture's] historical depth. It is only through the application of interpretation that we... can do justice to the world of culture” (p. 137, my emphasis). Here we see Bruner weighing in on what positivism misses: culture. You can't test for it, weigh it, measure it. You can control for it. You can put one group in one room and give them culture, another group in another room without culture... you know, unless you're testing yogurt. This is where the Skinnerians fall short, where they paved the way for the cognitive revolution.

But I now have a different understand of that revolution and more questions as well. Yesterday I think I claimed that Bruner and Chomsky were allies in this revolution; but I now believe they are not. Yes, they both reject behaviorism strict empiricist tenets, Chomsky being much more of a rationalist. Yet, I think that Chomsky, forgive me if I'm wrong, is as much of a positivist as the behaviorists. This extends from a realization I recently had that rationalists were indeed positivist, but just got their raw material from a different place than the empiricists. I came to believe that R and E were not the major counterparts of epistemology, but that what really divided the major ways of knowing was positivism—including both R and E—and constructivism, a belief that knowledge is not a fixed commodity that exists out there but rather that it is created through the human mind and its interaction with the world and with society. This is where Bruner clearly fits in—I believe he says it himself. And this is where—again, unless I'm just wrong—Chomsky and Bruner are split. For Bruner is after meaning and Skinner and Chomsky have pretty much the same use for the concept of meaningfulness, none. Meaning, it would seem, has no place in a purely positivistic world; meaning is constructed.

I think it gets more interesting from that split. Is there a difference between truth and meaning? Because truth is the golden calf of positivism. Bruner, I think, argues that the two are the same. Narrative is a form of meaning, it reflects meaning, sure; but it creates meaning as it goes too. In this way, narrative truth is a concept that can be seen as just as valuable for understanding the world—made up of cultures, as it is—as the idea of proof. The positivists would scoff at this. If you want to understand something, you need the facts; you don't want fiction. Those are lies. But if you think about it, about stories—they don't need to be true on the level of detail to reflect great truths on the larger level. That is the whole point of fiction. We all find ourselves in situations just like this or that character in this or that story—the human element is true.

But to side with Bruner and his elevation of narrative, a constructionist would need to come back at the positivists with the idea that positivism in itself, as a way of knowing the world for sure, is a narrative. The doctor in the white coat performing CRT on two groups of subjects, looking to objectively find out which treatment works better. That is a narrative. If we want subplots, how about his funding? How about the pen in his hand which reads Welbutrin? The myth of objectivity seems almost funny when you view it as a narrative. From this perspective, from what I am calling a constructivist perspective, the most fantastic vision in the world of truth-seeking might have to be this pure positivist, for he alone is fantasizing that he is unbiased, objective, in pure contact with what is real in the world.

Mayher, J. "Language I" in Uncommon Sense

Mayher 1:

Starting from the end, my immediate thought is that I'm struck by how capitalistic our schooling is. I'm thinking of two passages near the end of Mayher's piece, about some pressure I have received from my chair to keep my grades down—or in fact to lower them, and from Mike's comment about a notion that I have always felt must be true: that if you design and teach a writing course well, there is no reason that anyone who chooses to engage should not be able to succeed well, earning at least a B or an A. (Deep breath.) At the end of Mayher's piece, he talks about the creation of standardized testing and how the answers that every gets right are thrown out; this is the best way for the tests to do their job, to show the differences between the students. Slightly earlier, he mentions that the 'uncommonsense' view of education is similar to what Mike had said, and that, “if all students are taught how to learn, there will be fewer differences among them in terms of their capacity to do so” (p. 133, his emphasis). This clearly demonstrates the democratic principles of education. And yet, it seems that schools right this principle tooth and nail. The don't want similarities; they want differences. How else will they know who is on top and who is on bottom? This is similar to how we assess academic rigor at least at my college. They want tougher grading. I am choosing to call this capitalistic because there seems to be a notion here that learning operates like capital, that it is a zero sum game: all students cannot learn well, it says. If some are rich, others must by definition be poor. I have never realized before how truly American our school system is. This to me is the very worst notion of capitalism, the underbelly of the American dream—those poor people who have to build your white picket fence.

I see no actual, logical reason that indicates that learning is capital. I can only imagine that the notion of capital is so structured into nearly everything we do in our society that it bleeds into our schooling as well. Why would it be the case that, if the course is taught well and if the students try, that all students can't do well? I now recall my first semester in grad school at BU when I was a TA for a 400 student first year undergraduate class. There were 20 TA, with 20 students each in a course co-taught by the two deans. One thing they told us up front was, the average grade in the class would be a B-. This was before even meeting a single student. This was very offensive to me. I can see the ways in which it does make sense; they are talking about the average, not predicting any one student's abilities. But still, this notion of capitalism remains. Somehow, if the students' average was too high, the teachers weren't doing there jobs. How backwards is that? I mean, a teacher's job, one would think, is to help students learn, and the better they do it, the better the students should perform; yet, if that happens and the students do perform well, now the teacher has done a bad job... What would it mean in this scenario for a teacher to have done a good job? It is ironic that this philosophy reflects what Mayher calls the “commonsense” view. Granted, there is more than a touch of irony in his naming, but the very Catch-22 notion of this idea makes it even better. Why, I wonder, do we need to view knowledge and learning as if there is a limited number in the room and that if some students have more, others must have less—I wonder if other, less capitalistic cultures have the same notions, or if it is a product of our deeper mind set. In my gut I imagine that this notion hold true in nearly all formal schooling, so my whole premise here is probably deeply flawed. If, of course, deeply interestingly fascinating...

As a parting idea, I will note that Mayher's uncommonsense view is clearly and deeply reflective of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and of Freire's notion of resolving the student-teacher contradiction, and in those ways follows a much more socialist/neo-Marxist perspective. This is what I noticed first. It wasn't until later that I realized that what we tend to do is treat education like capital. I think this is an important insight, at least for me and my work and interests.

Bruner, J. Acts of Meaning, chapters 1&2

Wow, there is so much in here that I could respond to, I'm not sure how this will turn out. I may just jump from point to point and make very little overall sense, or I might just zero in on one idea and forget all the others. We'll all know in about five minutes. I have recently become interested in the notion that positivism is one type of epistemology, that it is the dominant epistemology of our society but by all means not the only way of knowing something. This was starting to become clear to me this spring in a course I took at Boston College on teacher research. The very notion of teacher research equally rejects and is rejected by those looking for 'the answers' in a positivistic sense. It took months, I must confess, to begin seeing the value in this type of research. But it was when I realized—no, I was told, I'll admit—that the goal of teacher research was “insight, not proof,” that I started to see the type of hold a positivistic mindset had had on me—and I considered myself to be pretty contrarian. Guess not. In light of this type of reconsidering of how we know what we know (aka epistemology) over the past few months, it is interesting to read more about the “cognitive revolution” in Bruner's book. I had known some of the pieces and major players, but I don't think I ever realized the historical context. Last semester, I had been pontificating about how the ten psychology experiments we read about in Opening Skinner's Box had reflected a notion that our 1960's collective ethic was essentially utilitarian—in that it seemed much more tolerable then for the few to suffer if it could benefit the many—whereas since then, it seems that we have taken a much more phenomenological or humanistic turn—we generally consider the individual's experience much more in deciding what is right and wrong, and we tend to think that no human suffering is permissible no matter who benefits from the outcome. I call this pontificating, but I still think it's true. After reading more specifically about the cognitive revolution, this idea makes more sense to me. I had used the language that the 'revolutions' of the sixties had paved the way for this new communal ethics, but I had been thinking of the social revolutions, not a scientific one. But it makes more sense now, and it is interesting to think about how such abstract, esoteric branches of knowledge can indeed have major societal impacts, even if unconscious ones.

I also appreciate how Bruner rejects the claim that this post-revolution way of thinking—this phenomenology as I call it—is overly relativistic. I too think that this is a deeply troubling claim. The idea of pure relativism opens the door for brutal dehumanization—the very opposite of what the phenomenologists wants. But how do you know 'when to say when'? Bruner takes this question head-on, and if I could only remember what he said, this would be a great response! Hold on... Okay, he talks about how, first, this notion of relativism—that anything goes if you believe it—is probably not a notion that anyone seriously holds, but that it is more of a criticism made from the more positivist camp toward the more constructivist camp. He points out that the construtivist/pragmatics/phenomenological camp simply asks the question, “How does this view affect my view of the world or my commitments to it” and that that questions does not need to lead to an anything-goes type of mentality. (I realize that I have yet to make sense...). What it does lead to is an “unpacking of assumptions,” and this is where I think Bruner does a nice job of countering the accusation of relativism. Along with the notion positivism, as with any blanket epistemological claim, comes a whole knapsack full of assumptions. And part of breaking free from this mindset entails tirelessly examining these assumptions... and the ones left over after that examination... and the ones left over after that examination, etc. So what I see Bruner doing here is countering this claim of relativism with the insight that all the constructivst camp does is ask questions about the certainty of positivism, of itself, etc., but it does not simply accept any notion of truth as just as valid as any other (say, Caligula's notion of truth compared to Gandhi's). That would be relativism.

So an important theme that I see emerging so far is this idea that in the post-cognitive-revolution, there has been a backlash against the more constructivist perspective that it is too easy on any old system of truth, but that this is merely an accusations. There deeper theme seems to be this last notion of unpacking assumptions as the true answer to blind positivism, no matter what you call it. When you proceed with unquestioned assumptions, you are bound to find the answers laced with bias and prejudice, no matter how pure you deem your process to be, no matter how lily white the lab coat. Only by a rigor process of unpacking assumptions can any genuine type of reality be reveal that is not a pure reflections of the very hypothesis you had hoped to find in the first place.

Godley, Carpenter, Werner, (2006). "I'll Speak Proper Slang"

Subtitle: "Language ideologies in a daily editing activity"

These researchers did a year long study of Werner's three 10th grade classrooms to study the effects of certain grammar instruction on students whose primary dialect was African American English. Daily Language Practice (DLP) was the main activity, where Werner would have students come up to the board and correct the grammar of a bad sentence. There were no significant improvements in the students' grammar by the end of the year.

This study brings up some amazing issues about language, power, and identity. It criticized tests that assume Standard English to be instrinsically better than stigmatized dialects (a term they chose). The raise issues proposed by the likes of Gee and Lisa Delpit about the power structures behind language and how school Discourse may contradict some of the ideas behind their primary dialects.

Ultimately, the researchers argue that there must be a way to teach nonmainstream students Standard English grammar without devaluing their primary dialects. They found that students were entirely capable of speaking both their home dialects and SE, but, I think, not well educated about why to learn the rules of SE. English in not monolithic, as they tell us, and the notion that it is and that SE is more "correct" than other dialects is harmful to students, not only grammatically but socially and politically as well. SE is surely important to master for the situations where it is preferred-- school, work, media, etc. But it is no more grammatically consistent than AAE. And when you put down a person's language, you put down the person and their culture.

The authors argue for methods of grammar instruction that contextualize grammar, rather than forcing students to memorized the rules of SE dialect. They too bring up Bakhtin and his idea of a dialogic classroom where students would learn language through conversations with teachers, learning that grammar is more a set of rhetorical choices than a list of rights and wrongs; this they feel would empower students whose primary discourses are stigmatized dialects, and it would help them learn the rules of SE more effectively and without forcing them to renounce their home dialects. Word.

Gee, J. “The New Literacy Studies and the 'Social Turn'”

Here Gee discusses the idea of the 'social turn' and how it is central to NLS. The social turn in a turn away from looking at individuals outside of their social contexts, toward looking at systemic dynamics I might say. He says that NLS see “reading and writing only make sense when studied in the context of social and cultural.” He then makes a list of 13 related movements, a GREAT place for tons of references.

After that list, Gee discusses how the social turn was a way to react against the individualistic tendencies of capitalism, but then goes on to say how that was the old capitalism, and the new capitalism actually benefits from the social turn. Oh shit! I'm not entirely sure I get it. The new capitalism needs workers to work together, not as individuals like in the industrialized world.
They forms systems that are bigger than the individual but all serve the company; people themselves become replaceable and the knowledge formed as a construction stays with the company should any individual leave. Again, I don't know if I quite got it right. But it's scary.

Gee suggests that the social turn may have gone too far, as with the tendencies of postmodernism, away from the individual, to ignore him or her in favor of the importance of the social factors at work. He reminds us that just as context makes words make sense, so words create context; they endlessly mirror one another. The social turn was important in bringing the social context to the fore, but it may have left the person too far behind, for just as there is no individual without a social context, there is of course no social context without individuals.

He also make the point that meaning is the product of “work” on both ends; in other words, to get people to recognize your act/word as meaningful takes work, and the act of recognizing others' actions/words as having meaning takes work. Not sure I get this yet either. Also, he says that it takes work to sustain these meanings. This seems important because we are so entrenched in our systems of meaning that we can think of them as stable and “real” not as constructed and fluid-- needing to be maintained.

There's another part to the piece about the differences in thinking between a university researcher and a K-12 teacher: the former viewing things more socially, the latter more individualistically; but I'm not sure how it all fits in, so I'll save myself from recapping in a wrong-type fashion.

Weinstein, S. "Pregnancy, Pimps and Cliched Love Things"

Subtitle: Writing through Gender and Sexuality.

This is a study of a group of young black and latino/a people in Chicago who all write poetry and/or rap. Weinstein opens with a discussion about literacy and gender stereotypes that is interesting: the idea that literacy, or at least School Literacy, is associated with being feminine, and how this is a problem with young boys, and even more so with African American boys. She cites the work of Tom Newkirk, but cites other work too that shows the correlation may not be quite so neat.

Most of her study consists of the writing these youths do out of school. She focuses on ways in which the males tend to either treat women as sexual objects or glorify them a visions of love; sometimes both; sometimes in contradictory way. Also, males tend to use rap and poetry aggressively, perhaps to counter the notion that creative writing makes them feminine.

Women have contradictions to deal with too. They both tend to challenge notions of femininity and reinforce them. Weinstein points out the modern women rappers tend to write more exclusivily about sex than their male counterparts, whose subject matter more often includes social issues, etc. Weinstein shows us the writing of the only female wrapper in the study, who belongs to an otherwise all male rap group, and whose lyrics are highly sexual, but still contain contrary notions of sexuality and virginity. One of her major points is that we need to not be afraid of this type of work; we need to see it and not ingore it. The writers are working through important gender and identity issues, and these texts provide valuable insight into understanding these phenomena.

Hull, G. & Schultz, K. "Literacy and Learning Out of School"

Subtitle: A review of theory and research. 2001

This is a sweeping review of three major theories and their histories: ethnography of communication (Dell Hymes, 1964--second time that's come up), Vygotsky and activity theory (second for that one too, but each time it seems different), and New Literacy Studies, frontiered by Gee and Street. I'm really drawn to NLS. I think that's the tradition I'm naturally inclined toward. It ties in the ideas of literacy as social activity, as an idealogical practice--never just a neutral set of skills (Street), and draws on the issues of power relations in terms of who benefits from their primary Discourse, what hierarchies are set in place that are perpetuated by language.

"Hymes's conception of the ethnography of communication gave researchers and educators a framework for noticing the resources that students bring to school and provided teachers with a way to imagine changing their pedagogy and curriculum instead of assuming that only students needed to change." (p.581)

NLS lines (p. 585): "NLS is noteworthy for its emphasis on studying literacy in out-of-school contexts. "NlS also often makes central an analysis of the interplay between the meanings of local events and a structural analysis of broader cultural and political institutions and practices."
NLS "investigate(s) literacy and discourse and [places] a special emphasi on revealing, understanding, and addressing power relations." On Street: "schooling and pedagogy constrain our conceptions of literacy practices. Street defines literacy as an ideological practice rather than a set of neutral or technical skills."

Cushman: "activist methodology."

A ton of valuable references in this article. After the history, they go into four newer case studies. I needed to stop reading before the end because I was starting to skim wickid bad, so I'll continue this after I finish the article in the morning. I'm curious to see what Hull and Schultz go on to ask of future research; maybe I can use something from that section as a springboard.

New London School brought up here. Szwed too.

Stovall, D. "We Can Relate"

subtitle, Hip-Hop Culture, Critical Pedagogy, and the Secondary Classroom.

Some really interesting references here. The title looks a lot like what I'm thinking about pursuing, but the actual article was a little more practical and less theoretical than I plan to go. Stovall participates/lead workshops with high school students and they use rap lyrics to bring up social issues. In the article, he brings up many Critical Pedagogy heavy hitters, but he doesn't go into all that much depth about how the theories or Shor or Freire, for example, were played out in the classroom. I think the most interesting part is when they talk about places in everyday life where they feel deceived, and many of the students responded, "school." That's more like what I"m talking about. Stovall brings in Howard Zinn and (a personal fav) James Baldwin, who adds a lovely quote about literacy to the mix: "A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience." I don't think that could be much more similar to Gee's discussion of how often times school discourse run counter to students' primary discourses: same idea; different language. Leave it to Baldwin, though, to just hit it on the head.

I wish this article had either been a full on study of the classroom and what they did, or been a more theoretical piece about the effects of a school system that essentially lies to non-mainstream students and/or tries to make them believe that the only way to succeed is to "repudiate their experiences."

A lot of great references here, though. Notably, Black Star and Reflection Eternal.

Hass, "The Technology Question" and "Technology Studies" (Class Reading)

These are the first two chapters of Writing Technology. One of Hass' major points is that writing is material, that it takes words--which themselves have no spatial existence--and turns them into material objects. Even if the object is as small as a pixel, it still exists in space. This is the premise over which she links writing with technology.

She tells us about Derrida's critique of Plato's Phaedrus, which is where Socrates/Plato express their mistrust of the written word. It makes sense: everything is Plato's philosophy that takes place in the physical world is merely a crappy representation of the reality of that thing, which only exist in a perfect realm of ideas. The body and all material things are fallible, dead, and dying. Derrida rejects Plato's notion that speech and writing are separate things. (I think)

The Technology Question is, “What does it mean for writing to become material? That is, what is the effect of writing and other material literacy technologies on human thinking and human culture?” (p.3)

She later brings up my boy Vygotsky and his ideas about psychological processes always being social processes as well. (I don't recall exactly how she uses him, but it seems to make sense as a connection.)

Her major point seems to be that every act of literacy is an act of technology and that it is dangerous to ignore this. This means that all disciplines much see that both technology and literacy are indeed their problem, that a “division of labor” between the fields is dangerous. She relates this idea to the danger in believing that language is autonomous. Here is where she seems to invoke critical pedagogy reminding us of all the power structures that benefit from people seeing language as immutable and unquestionable, how we can be duped and misled when we have these beliefs. I think she's saying it's the same thing with technologies. She must be, since for her there is no separation between the two.

In the next chapters, she spends a lot more time explaining why technology studies must be interdisciplinary. And she brings up two myths about tech that she believes keep us from a deep, critical understadning of both tech and literacy: a- that tech is invisible or transparent, and b- that it's all powerful. For Hass, we need to see through these myths to see what powers, dagners, and possiblities technology has for society. I think.

Carr, Nicholas "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Class Reading)

From the Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008

It's strange to reading this after reading articles by so many major technology/literacy theorists. I realize that Carr is writing this for a popular audience, and I realize that I am very new to this field, but still... in the company of Hass, Coyne, Radder, Selfe, Postman, Baron, and others, Carr comes off as little more than a dilettante here. I see that he's written a couple of books on technology, so maybe it's more a product of his audience here, but I see some major flaws in his claims and reasoning.

Overall, his answer seems to be yes. If Google's not making us stupid, it's at least changing the way our minds work, going from minds that can linger over large textual passages and think slowly and deeply about their significance—to minds that skim over the top of tons of info without time or care to really consider deeper truths. He reaches this conclusion in some weird ways too. He starts off with his own story and then anecdotes from others, which is cool. But then he acknowledges that “Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition.” This seems like a weird concession, and it paves the way for what I see—and again, it may be because of the intended audience—as a poor mixing of methodologies, one where he shifts from each one just as he's about to lose his argument. When the empirical science doesn't back him up, he goes to stories, etc.

In the light of other theorist, Carr comes off here as a reactionary, and golden-age-afier. He even acknowledges this, but then keeps going almost as if he hadn't. He argues that the changes in the way we think are bad, but never really says why. Why aren't they just changes? This is the biggest weakness I see. He even mentions how people always react to changes in tech—which always bring about changes in thinking—negatively and how many times they are proven wrong... but then he still keeps saying that this time it really is a bad thing...

For example, and I think this is the biggest weakness in his argument, he has two historical examples that can be seen as completely contradictory. He mentions how Nietzsche used a typewriter for his later work, and that this changed his writing, as Friedrich A. Kittler says, “from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” But as a reader, I'm asking if this is necessarily bad. In fact, after reading people like McLuhan, who talks about how the technology of writing itself served to take primal peoples away from their immediate experience with each other and with the world, I could almost argue that Nietzsche’s newer style creeped back toward that immediacy. Right? His later work takes you right to this thought, less mediated by prose. I'm not saying that's good, but I'm rejecting Carr's claim that it's definitely bad.

Then he goes on to talk about how the invention of the clock changed the way people thought too—it turned their thinking into a more mechanical system, which soon led to something that I think Carr would like: the scientific mind. Isn't that kind of what Carr says we're losing? Those abilities to thinking deeply and analytically? Here's where I think he loses it: he only gives a little acknowledgment of that achievement before he goes on to lament the downside of this new way of thinking: “we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.” Wait, isn't that a lot like how McLuhan said preliterate peoples lost immediacy with the world with the advent of the written word? So which way does Carr want to have it? Is it BAD that Nietzsche’s later style brought readers to a more immediate experience with his ideas, but took away the pleasure of drifting through long passages of his prose to get there, or is it good because it may in a sense return us to that state of immediacy? Or am I missing something? Maybe.

But here's where I really lose faith in Carr and any notion that he might be right; and yes, I realize that it's probably Atlantic and not him, but still, this is really messed up. Before he goes on to acknowledge that he may be acting just like I'm accusing him of acting, he says that this new way of thinking that we're developing falls right into the hands of marketers and advertisers who use our inclination to quickly jump from page to page to sell us their stuff. Okay, probably right. But then this guy goes on to mention Plato's Phaedrus, and it is a hot link. To what? To Amazon, the page where you can buy the book. Come fucking on. I looked it up on Google books, and I found a FREE version of the entire text in about six seconds. So who's selling who, and who is disseminating information democratically? That's bullshit.

It's really hard to get past that. Yes, Carr does suggest that he may be a “worrywart,” but I don't think he actually considers it enough. Things are changing, times change, the way we think changes; things change. Change can be bad; it can fall into the advantage of the oppressive caste who want to keep others down; but it doesn't have to. I think that was Radder's point. But resisting change for its own sake just seems fearful and stubborn, and I don't think Carr has really brought up any reason to react against the way that the Net is changing our thinking other than that fact that the way we think is indeed changing. But has it ever been a stable thing? Should it be? Those are questions he seems to just take for granted as given truths.

Coyne, from Technoramanticism (Class Reading)

This was the introduction and first chapter of the book. Some very interesting themes emerge. (In no actual order) First, he counters the ideologies of romanticism with those of both rationalism and empiricism, which is interesting because I generally think of the latter two as so different in approach that they encompass pretty much all ways of knowing. But Coyne presents the romanticist notion that both R and E (especially R) are way too convinced that the world is knowable through reason. They have no heart, no imagination. The romantics view is that the world is truly knowable only in these ways. He mentions that empiricist consider to be reality as "what we represent through language" but "for Lacan the real is what resists symbolization" (p. 14). I've always aligned myself with the rationalist, but Coyne has given me some things to think about here.

He relates this to cyberculture (narratives, spaces) in several ways. Some conflicting ideas arise regarding cyberspace: unity and multiplicity, reason and imagination. Clearly, without logical empiricism and highly developed reasoning skills, we would not have been able to invent computers and all those crazy codes that allow people like me to post things like this. So on one level, the whole cyber thing can be viewed from the perspective of reason alone; however, the narratives created and the communities that aggregate defy reason alone on many levels, and resonate more with the romantic imagination. This is where he brings up contrasting notions of the term medieval, the period that precedes and contradicts the Enlightenment, with its pured dedication to reason as humans' ultimate faculty. Medieval has many negative meanings-- I just think of Marsallis Wallace saying, "I'm gonna get Medieval on your ass" in Pulp Fiction. But Coyne cites many people who bring up the more magical side of those times, with carnivals and magicians and locality and stuff like that. Again, we see a synthesis in cyberculture.

He goes on in the first chapter to discuss cyber utopias in narratives. There are a lot of ideas in here, but what sticks out to me are the contradictions again of reason, oppression, hegemony, etc. and imagination, democracy, a return to primal living--what McLuhan says that technology ended. Coyne opens with McLuhan's idea that the written word served to take preliterate cultures out of this tribal state when they were at one with themselves and with nature. Technology (the written word) exiled them from this place. Cyber utopias have this desire it seems almost to return to this pre-technological state, but in the form of a post-technological age. Coyne references Freud and oedipal themes played out in cyber utopian narratives, and makes a nice connection between McLuhan's notion of tribal unity and Freud's notion of the child's desire to return to a state of oneness with the mother.

The contradictions are what stand out to me in this piece: technology as the thing that cast humankind out off the primal garden, but as the thing with potential to bring us back--the global village. The hard reasoning that led to the cyber age, and the imagination and romanticism glorified by the uses of such developments.

Oh, and Coyne brings up Bakhtin, which is interesting. Let's see how much I continue to come across this guy.

Matusov, "Applying Bakhtin Scholarship on Discourse in Education"

Subtitle: A Critical Review Essay

This was interesting in that I'd never heard of Bakhtin before, and I think I learned a lot about him. I say "I think" because part of the issue here is that for some reason, in order to get what this Russian lit critic was saying, you need the help of philologists-- another new term-- to help translate it. In other words, it's not just the words that you need, but the context, stuff like that. The catch is, philologists seem to be convinced that comp people simply don't get it, and that's what this review is about. Matusov takes on some philologists and their criticisms of English scholars who try to use Bakhtin's work when they don't understand it well enough.

Some of Bakthin's big terms seem to bee Authoritative Discourse and Internally Persuasive Discourse. I think these are like the difference between a student getting the answer right (or believing that it's right) because the teacher said so (AD) versus a student coming to fully understand a concept for his- or herself (IPD). Now, Bakhtin was applying this to Russian lit, so it may be that educators are using his ideas in more of an analogous way than a direct way, and that might be what's pissing off these philologists so bad. Who knows. Oh wait, I do; I read the article. That's my argument anyway.

Matusov goes on to ask whether or not Bakhtin is valuable for our field or not, whether educators indeed misinterpret him, how ed can actually help deepen B's points, and if they are compatible.

The most interesting point was in regard the the third questions. He sites Morson, who argues for a third discourse in between AD and IPD. He calls for Authoritarian D, Authoritative Dialogical D, and then IPD. The diff between the two As? I don't know. But the middle terms involves the notion that a student can believe a teacher as an authority figure in a less bleak way than simply because he or she has no choice. They may want to believe the teacher, they may have a special trust in their authority; authority indeed doesn't have to always be evil, even if it usually is. Interesting.


Matusov goes on to think more about if a Freirian type of classroom, consisting of teacher-students and students-teacher, who "critically co-investigate the world" is even possible or desirable. Here he loses me a little, just because of my love for all things Freire. But he raises some issues by pointing out that a teacher really may not learn or co-learn as much from semester to semester using the same material, even if he or she has a new group of students every time. I'm not sold on this yet, or at least I don't want to be. But I think he's probably right. There are certainly times when I need to use my trust-me-for-now approach just to get a student to think about the importance of a concept I'm introducing. If they never trusted anything I said, that would be rough. But I also think, in fact, even more so, that I would hope they trust me NOT because I'm the guy in front of the class, but because I have earned that trust through showing them that I have some insights that are valuable, NOT because I say so. I want to not agree with Matusov.

He seems to end with that open question about whether a true critical classroom is really possible and to what extent Bakhtin ideas really hold weight for education. A good article with a lot to think about.

Stovall, D. "Urban Poetics"

Subtitle: Poetry, Social Justice, and Critical Pedagogy in Education.

I read this last night, before I decided to make this blog, so my memory of this article might not be spot on. Overall, it wasn't that hot; not nearly as hot as the title, which I love. The article was sort of a case study of four poets/poetry educators, some who teach in schools, some in less formal settings. All of them (including the author) perform poetry and coach slam teams, but they also all put out criticism of the slam thing. It's not really a case study I guess; maybe more of an ethnography. It just describes each person's deal regarding poetry, expression, learning, etc. They all seem like cool people, perhapps very very serious people though; the kind you might stereotypically imagine populating a poetry reading. I found myself longing for humor. I mean, I love all the shit they're talking about, but like, does anybody remember laughter??

They talk a lot about using creativity and expression as ways of developing a critical eye toward one's experience of the world-- I would say that's where Freire/Crit Ped come in. But it's all a bit vague. Somewhat inspiring, but just not new. It felt very heavy on describing each poet and light on digging deep into greater implications on education. But there certainly was some. I mean, we're talking about people who value the phenomenological experience of the students, especially those marginalized by the mainstream American ed system, and so clearly, we are very against NCLB, etc.

Awakening the inner mind, something like that, through creative express, that seems to be the emphasis here. A great one indeed. It just felt a little light. Not sure why. I'm new at this.

Selfe & Hawisher, "Becoming Literate in the Information Age"

Subtitle: Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology


This article uses the case studies of two women and traces their developing technological literacies. They represent different generations-- one born in 1966, one in 1986-- races, and areas of the country; both were raised in "middle class" families.

Some interesting ideas: Cultural ecology: the idea that the culture in which you are educated in an eco-system, not a stable, static thing; it is composed of many social factors, etc. I like that.

The article also lets us see how much of their technological literacies were learned outside of school. It doesn't quite say it, but you can see here that school's almost hamper the development of tech lit's. The authors discuss the field of English comp and how it is still generally "alphabetic" (new word) and traditional, using only very basic technology. They suggest that this is because of the ways in which most of us were taught; and perhaps reflects hiring practices of institutions who are slow to see the value in people who teach in new ways.

A theme I really like here is the notion that teachers need to use the literacies that students bring into the classroom; we need to build on them, not negate them. I see this all the time, all around me. Even in the way teachers talk about students. They have so many strengths that don't fit into what we consider academic abilities, and our response is usually to have them leave these elements at the door. What a tragic mistake.

Smaller but interesting points: The authors mention research about young black women being less bound by certain gender roles than their white counterparts, and how can be less discouraged from developing interests in computers. ("exempt from some racially dominant expectations of white female behavior, behavior that excluded, for instance, expertise with machinery." citing Hortense Spillers from Cornell.)

Another salient point is about the family learning process flowing "upstream" as well as "downstream," citing that in 1999 33% of parents asked their kids for tech help, while 55% of kids asked their parents. I wonder what the numbers would be today.

Oh, and, the idea that literacies have lives, that they don't compile, but that they live and die, newer ones replacing older ones. the example used was about how email is the dominant means for people to keep in touch over long distances, not the handwritten letter, and how schools in former times used to emphasize penmanship because that was the primary means of comm. But no more, alas...

All in all, some interesting stuff here; nothing mind blowing or super exciting. Nothing too surprising: kids learn more about tech outside of school than in it. Teachers are blind to students' strengths because they may not appear in forms that _used_ to be considered proper or academic; hence, we need to be more open to these issues. There are tons of race, gender, and class issues involved when it comes to tech literacies, mainly in terms of access. But the article didn't do too much with that. In fact, I might argue that while the two participants were of different races, the artilce might not be much different if they weren't.