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.