A week ago, I was riding the Metro 372 from the U District up to my college in Bothell. It was the Monday of Spring Break. I was listening in on a gaggle of Nathan Hale High School students talk about a literature class. One was bragging that he had been a star in a recent “Socratic seminar” even though he had not read any of the material covered by the seminar. Another person said, “Well, you did read the first chapter ‘cause we read it together in class.” Another person chimed in, “Did you spark the novel?” The conversation devolved at that point to some pretty adolescent flyting until one student started talking about Mad Magazine. He offered an almost verbatim quote of a particular text in a recent volume and then an interpretation of why it was funny; his peers listened even though it wasn’t yet 8 AM. Then some one tossed in another pretty sophomoric comment and the insults flew.
Smart students with an unfortunate view of teachers: it seemed that they perceived teachers as authority figures almost completely unaware of how students thought about literature and how they read. In fact, the whole point of the literature class seemed to be fooling a teacher into believing that assignments had been read and that the student’s interpretation matched the teacher’s.
This strikes me as a tragic use of resources, of time and space. Sure there are “correct interpretations” and correct answers to math problems, but it’s not clear to me that a meaningful education can be gotten by fooling authorities into believing that one is correct. Interpretations and answers are the end result of a process that is, for most learners, more important than the end result. A professional engineer knows how to use numbers to model a situation; a writer knows how to decipher a text or situation. Neither puts a lot of weight on having gotten correct answers in school. Could be I’m taking a utopian position here. I suspect one can go a long way without knowing how to use fluently numbers and words. A Yale or Harvard MBA taken after fooling professors is still a Yale or Harvard MBA. Education is, at one level, a way to pile up social capital.
Guess that I am not really interested in the piling up of social capital in the absence of personal development. I ask students to develop their own readings and to document the process by which they came up with those readings (and rarely offer my own interpretations). Rather than asking them to be correct, I ask learners to be purposeful and conscientious; that is, I ask them to take what we do seriously and to take responsibility for doing it. No more; no less.
I find a great deal of joy and enjoyment in this practice (I expect to have “fun” in my classes this spring). But I’m the sort of person who took three degrees in “English” (and minored in math). Am I asking too much of my students? Am I failing to teach them the rules that will enable them to be “correct” and thereby accrue social capital.
Maybe, but I doubt it. On my experience, purposeful and conscientious students who enter just educational institutions end up being able to be correct enough to do what they want to do. Trying hard, of course, does not guarantee getting the correct answers. At times, learners discover that mastering one or another process or content area will cost a lot of time and energy. Confronting such a situation, a purposeful, conscientious learner makes a choice: she invests the time and energy or alters her goals. She doesn’t complain about having to make an investment.
Hmmmm, this is making me think more precisely about my obligations to this sort of learner. I have to provide access to processes and content and have to provide comprehensible feedback on performances. I’ll go after this line of thinking in another posting.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Monday, February 19, 2007
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
So I woke up early last Saturday (like 5:30 AM early) thinking about some pre-writing that I had read the day before. My mind was trying to make sense of the process that seemed to be represented in that work. The writers had gotten an assignment from me that asked them to imagine a project and outline how they would proceed and how they would use the reading and writing they had completed already. Most of them completed the assignment. (No complaints there.) But I finished the batch of pre writes uninspired. In only a few of them did I hear a writer using writing to figure out her or his path. In most cases, I heard a student fulfilling an assignment.
Maybe I’m the cause (I gave the assignment). Maybe the writers I’m working with don’t use writing to figure out what they are doing. Whatever is going on, I woke up anxious about the drafts that will come in next week. If these writers aren’t planning their work, what am I going to get? What can I offer in response to writing that is unplanned? What are the chances that a writer who doesn’t plan drafting will plan rewriting and revising? If there’s little planning and reflecting, how will the writers begin to write differently?
And when will I start sleeping better?
I guess what I’m working toward here is a concern about how my students see their work as writers and how they might. Early this term, this bunch read a piece by writing teacher Nancy Sommers; they encountered her claim that writers have to be their own sources have to “bring to bear” judgment and interpretation. The pre writes I read largely avoided that sort of commitment. I didn’t see many “connections” (another word Sommers uses) made between what writers wanted to do and what they had read.
Is it unreasonable to expect first-year college writing students to play the role of writer (and especially the role of academic research writer) with some seriousness? What is the cost of their choosing not to play? It is as if a lot of students in a first-year writing courses are willing to pay tuition and even to do the work (and concede that first-year writing courses are important): they are prepared to be student writers. But do they want to be writers and researchers, individuals who take on the obligation of making connections and offering their interpretations and judgments to others? Why might someone even want to do that?
And when will I start sleeping better?
Maybe I’m the cause (I gave the assignment). Maybe the writers I’m working with don’t use writing to figure out what they are doing. Whatever is going on, I woke up anxious about the drafts that will come in next week. If these writers aren’t planning their work, what am I going to get? What can I offer in response to writing that is unplanned? What are the chances that a writer who doesn’t plan drafting will plan rewriting and revising? If there’s little planning and reflecting, how will the writers begin to write differently?
And when will I start sleeping better?
I guess what I’m working toward here is a concern about how my students see their work as writers and how they might. Early this term, this bunch read a piece by writing teacher Nancy Sommers; they encountered her claim that writers have to be their own sources have to “bring to bear” judgment and interpretation. The pre writes I read largely avoided that sort of commitment. I didn’t see many “connections” (another word Sommers uses) made between what writers wanted to do and what they had read.
Is it unreasonable to expect first-year college writing students to play the role of writer (and especially the role of academic research writer) with some seriousness? What is the cost of their choosing not to play? It is as if a lot of students in a first-year writing courses are willing to pay tuition and even to do the work (and concede that first-year writing courses are important): they are prepared to be student writers. But do they want to be writers and researchers, individuals who take on the obligation of making connections and offering their interpretations and judgments to others? Why might someone even want to do that?
And when will I start sleeping better?
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Some Thoughts about Collaboration and Reflection
I’ve been doing a good bit of collaborative writing as of late (have to for a couple projects). Can’t say that I am enjoying it entirely. The give and take is fun, but waiting for other folks to “give” is not. Maybe I need to chill out, but I think I am seeing one reason, at least, why the student writers I work with groan a bit when I announce a group project. I’m a pretty good collaborator (at least I like to think so), but I am seeing the limit of my ability to work and play well with others.
My thinking goes something like this. I seem to take a farmer’s approach: I stay engaged as long as I see that a group is building meaningful capacity of one sort or another. That capacity need not, of course, be related to completing a particular task. My grandfather and I used to bullshit about any number of topics that had little to do with getting cows milked or hay bailed. We were building a relationship, taking joy in being together. That’s meaningful human capacity and was meaningful for us. It was worth the time. My grandfather had no interest in, say, knowing which clothes were fashionable (and I follow him here) or writing complex essays (he and I differ here). Investing time in such do involve building capacity but not, for Norm, meaningful capacity. Likewise, my grandfather refused to buy an all-wheel drive tractor with a cab and air conditioner. Such a piece of machinery offered tremendous capacity, but such capacity seemed to him not worth the cost.
Hmmm, so I begin to check out of a group if it has interests that seem not worthwhile or seem too costly. That makes sense to me, but brings me to ask for details. What is worthwhile and how do I know. This seems to me a question my students and I wrestle with. Take, for example, a roundtable assignment some just completed (quite nicely, I might add) or a proposal some just wrote (not quite as smashing). I’m not sure that all of them felt that these activities were worthwhile. I think what they were unsure of was the effort involved in synthesizing ideas, speculating about possible outcomes, and reviewing past effort. What I noticed was folks speaking extemporaneously or free writing. It felt like few had worked up notes (there were some exceptions) or paged through what they had done and free wrote about it before setting to the published project they were submitting or performing. The result were quite nice individual performances and sentences, but roundtables and proposals that were incompletely integrated and that did not really reveal what the performers/writers knew. The roundtables rarely named a central theme and stuck to it; members acknowledged each other but didn’t often get involved with what others said.
So I wonder why. Do I need to spell out even more clearly the value of synthesis, speculation, and reflection? Maybe. Is it unreasonable to ask U.S. students to value these intellectual disciplines? Maybe. If the later is the issue, I’m in trouble. I feel that these disciplines are central to being human (oddly, my farmer grandfather did too). I join groups to pursue these disciplines. I'm not sure that I work well with learners who are uninterested in making connections, imagining alternatives, and listening to others and themselves.
Do I need to?
My thinking goes something like this. I seem to take a farmer’s approach: I stay engaged as long as I see that a group is building meaningful capacity of one sort or another. That capacity need not, of course, be related to completing a particular task. My grandfather and I used to bullshit about any number of topics that had little to do with getting cows milked or hay bailed. We were building a relationship, taking joy in being together. That’s meaningful human capacity and was meaningful for us. It was worth the time. My grandfather had no interest in, say, knowing which clothes were fashionable (and I follow him here) or writing complex essays (he and I differ here). Investing time in such do involve building capacity but not, for Norm, meaningful capacity. Likewise, my grandfather refused to buy an all-wheel drive tractor with a cab and air conditioner. Such a piece of machinery offered tremendous capacity, but such capacity seemed to him not worth the cost.
Hmmm, so I begin to check out of a group if it has interests that seem not worthwhile or seem too costly. That makes sense to me, but brings me to ask for details. What is worthwhile and how do I know. This seems to me a question my students and I wrestle with. Take, for example, a roundtable assignment some just completed (quite nicely, I might add) or a proposal some just wrote (not quite as smashing). I’m not sure that all of them felt that these activities were worthwhile. I think what they were unsure of was the effort involved in synthesizing ideas, speculating about possible outcomes, and reviewing past effort. What I noticed was folks speaking extemporaneously or free writing. It felt like few had worked up notes (there were some exceptions) or paged through what they had done and free wrote about it before setting to the published project they were submitting or performing. The result were quite nice individual performances and sentences, but roundtables and proposals that were incompletely integrated and that did not really reveal what the performers/writers knew. The roundtables rarely named a central theme and stuck to it; members acknowledged each other but didn’t often get involved with what others said.
So I wonder why. Do I need to spell out even more clearly the value of synthesis, speculation, and reflection? Maybe. Is it unreasonable to ask U.S. students to value these intellectual disciplines? Maybe. If the later is the issue, I’m in trouble. I feel that these disciplines are central to being human (oddly, my farmer grandfather did too). I join groups to pursue these disciplines. I'm not sure that I work well with learners who are uninterested in making connections, imagining alternatives, and listening to others and themselves.
Do I need to?
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Some Thoughts on Reading a Bunch of "Exploratory Essays"
So I just read a batch of “exploratory essays” that came in in my “Writing from Research” course. I’m popping quotation marks around some phrases here because I am interested in the exchange these students and I are having. I think that the exchange tells me something about school and something about the complexity of the ethics of rhetoric. I asked for “essays” within a genre that we defined in class at some length. The process is straightforward: develop a complex question, one for which you don’t have an answer. Then go and find sources and explore them in an attempt to see if you can find an answer. Here’s the way the “exploratory essay” we all talked about develops: you summarize (in a generous way that respects the context of the source) what is new in a new source of information; you do some analysis of what you summarized to try to understand what the source offers; you reflect on how the source has expanded your thinking and brought forward your exploration of that initial question.
My students are smart; they read well and write with clarity. All in all, this was a pretty successful batch of drafts. What interested me in this batch of papers (notice the shift in terms here) was a kind of resistance to a new genre. I don’t want to rant here but I might a little. Just trying to figure this college composition thing out.
About half of the papers did what came naturally to the writer: they argued a thesis with now apparent intent to open the writer up the information from sources. Others offered a report, sort of repeating what Wikipedia or some other (sometimes more focused) sources offered. A few tried out the exploratory form but made pretty uneven use of paragraphs. Rather than using blocks of text to make the moves of summary, analysis, and reflection cohere, they sort of just wrote (I read several two-page paragraphs). It was as though the tool on offer (the “exploratory essay”) was either too foreign or too much labor or not adequately understood or something. Maybe it is that in an academic world dominated by the five-paragraph essays, it’s hard for a school writer to imagine paragraphs serving other purposes, hard for them to see the paragraph as a tool for thinking rather than a teacher’s metric.
This resistance showed in two other ways as well. First, writers struggled to link the sources they were working with. I kept scribbling the same idea in the margins: “maybe in a revision use a content-based transition.” As I read, I could see, “oh, this source got you thinking about this and the logic you are not naming is that knowing this, you next need to know that.” What I wondered is why that was visible to me and not to the writer. Hmmm, the answer to that is kind of obvious to me now. I had the opportunity of reading a complete draft; many of the writers may not have taken up that opportunity.
The second resistance is more interesting to me. As a writing teacher, I have begun to use over and over the phrase “frame this source reference.” My meaning is not especially novel at one level. I mean use what Diana Hacker calls a signal phrase that announces the source; I mean integrate some thoughtful paraphrase or summary and quote selectively; I mean “connect” (a verb Nancy Sommers plays with) the ideas you draw from a source to the purpose you are achieving within your paragraph and bring your judgment and interpretation to bear on what you’ve borrowed. Nothing new here. Writers’ resistance to “framing” is, I think, also not especially novel. To “frame” naturally, I have to be comfortable in open conversations, conversations where my assumption is that others have as much (or more likely more) to say than I do. I have to be ready to be generous as a listener/reader and also as a speaker/writer. U.S. citizens, on my observation, are not comfortable in such conversations. So many of us are puzzled by the humility that “framing” requires. It’s not natural; we don’t do it.
One final resistance that leaps to mind. Wikipedia. I’m inclined to include the acronym WTF here. I know about Wikipedia; I use it when I don’t have enough time to find a better treatment of a topic or when I just need some dates. It’s a beautiful tool, but it’s an ENCYCLOPEDIA. Actually, it’s likely closer to either a dictionary or a blog. It’s not, finally, a researchers conversation partner. The papers I read had some intense conversations with Wikipedia entries. Cool. Not enough. I want conversations with the sources that Wikipedia authors read. This resistance is driven, I think, by time. If a writer hasn’t given herself enough time to read, reflect on, make notes on, and then work with a 15-page essay or article, she goes to Wikipedia. It makes sense. Sadly, it probably also terminates serious exploration, at the least it leads her to write in generalities that make exploration less likely.
So I had a fun read, wrote lots of comments. But I’m talking with my friends about why U.S. citizens are so resistant to intellectual exploration. Is it in the water? I suppose Mark Edmundson’s grouchy 1997 critique of consumer students offers some limited insight. Makes me sad, makes me think many of my students will miss out on the joy of a college education, makes me really really worried about my fellow voters.
My students are smart; they read well and write with clarity. All in all, this was a pretty successful batch of drafts. What interested me in this batch of papers (notice the shift in terms here) was a kind of resistance to a new genre. I don’t want to rant here but I might a little. Just trying to figure this college composition thing out.
About half of the papers did what came naturally to the writer: they argued a thesis with now apparent intent to open the writer up the information from sources. Others offered a report, sort of repeating what Wikipedia or some other (sometimes more focused) sources offered. A few tried out the exploratory form but made pretty uneven use of paragraphs. Rather than using blocks of text to make the moves of summary, analysis, and reflection cohere, they sort of just wrote (I read several two-page paragraphs). It was as though the tool on offer (the “exploratory essay”) was either too foreign or too much labor or not adequately understood or something. Maybe it is that in an academic world dominated by the five-paragraph essays, it’s hard for a school writer to imagine paragraphs serving other purposes, hard for them to see the paragraph as a tool for thinking rather than a teacher’s metric.
This resistance showed in two other ways as well. First, writers struggled to link the sources they were working with. I kept scribbling the same idea in the margins: “maybe in a revision use a content-based transition.” As I read, I could see, “oh, this source got you thinking about this and the logic you are not naming is that knowing this, you next need to know that.” What I wondered is why that was visible to me and not to the writer. Hmmm, the answer to that is kind of obvious to me now. I had the opportunity of reading a complete draft; many of the writers may not have taken up that opportunity.
The second resistance is more interesting to me. As a writing teacher, I have begun to use over and over the phrase “frame this source reference.” My meaning is not especially novel at one level. I mean use what Diana Hacker calls a signal phrase that announces the source; I mean integrate some thoughtful paraphrase or summary and quote selectively; I mean “connect” (a verb Nancy Sommers plays with) the ideas you draw from a source to the purpose you are achieving within your paragraph and bring your judgment and interpretation to bear on what you’ve borrowed. Nothing new here. Writers’ resistance to “framing” is, I think, also not especially novel. To “frame” naturally, I have to be comfortable in open conversations, conversations where my assumption is that others have as much (or more likely more) to say than I do. I have to be ready to be generous as a listener/reader and also as a speaker/writer. U.S. citizens, on my observation, are not comfortable in such conversations. So many of us are puzzled by the humility that “framing” requires. It’s not natural; we don’t do it.
One final resistance that leaps to mind. Wikipedia. I’m inclined to include the acronym WTF here. I know about Wikipedia; I use it when I don’t have enough time to find a better treatment of a topic or when I just need some dates. It’s a beautiful tool, but it’s an ENCYCLOPEDIA. Actually, it’s likely closer to either a dictionary or a blog. It’s not, finally, a researchers conversation partner. The papers I read had some intense conversations with Wikipedia entries. Cool. Not enough. I want conversations with the sources that Wikipedia authors read. This resistance is driven, I think, by time. If a writer hasn’t given herself enough time to read, reflect on, make notes on, and then work with a 15-page essay or article, she goes to Wikipedia. It makes sense. Sadly, it probably also terminates serious exploration, at the least it leads her to write in generalities that make exploration less likely.
So I had a fun read, wrote lots of comments. But I’m talking with my friends about why U.S. citizens are so resistant to intellectual exploration. Is it in the water? I suppose Mark Edmundson’s grouchy 1997 critique of consumer students offers some limited insight. Makes me sad, makes me think many of my students will miss out on the joy of a college education, makes me really really worried about my fellow voters.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Midterm Reflections
So I'm rereading this stuff and noticing that I'm not writing very concretely about class. Look for that in the coming posts. I'm also going to try to get visual and hypertextual. These are big aims for me. I have several degrees in English and all of them were done before 1995. I get into books, books without pictures largely. Not saying this taste of mine is somehow superior, but it is mine:)
Teaching and Learning
I was recently at a retreat with a bunch of community college faculty from around the state of Washington. I find these sorts of meetings both exhilarating and exhausting. We stay up too late but have conversations about what learning might involve. As I listened to others, spoke my own mind, made a presentation, I saw something about learning that I don’t attend to often enough. Tom Drummond over at North Seattle Community College has been riffing on this theme for a while (maybe 20 years); I’ve been scribbling it in the margins of student papers for at least 10 years: SLOW DOWN!
I think that we all hope that teachers will come up with some magic strategy that makes learners see what they will need to know and do and how to comprehend and act. Anyone who has taught a while knows that the magic happens from time to time but rarely because a teacher “knows,” at least consciously. It happens because the teacher has slowed down a setting at a moment when a learner is ready to look again at what she or he is up to and to say, “Oh!” The knowledge is always already out there (the teacher learned it somewhere, and the Net makes what the teacher knows as close as a Tully’s). The skills are a matter of practicing substeps even if they are boring and hard. What is magic is the opportunity to look at what’s been said or tried and to own that look. Such an act requires the normal time-space flow to SLOW DOWN so that a learner can still see what’s happening but doesn’t have to do or learn the next thing just yet.
Why is such an act so rare, I wonder? As a writer, I can dig a poem out of my journal almost every time if I take time. Why don’t I do this very often? Other things to do? Not sure that this sort of reflection earns me much money (indeed, it may be costly)? Lack of confidence? Perhaps if we stop and look at what we have done in an effort to understand and complete that action or thought, we will discover that more effort is needed, that we will have to stop watching TV if we hope to achieve what we value. Were we to slow down, we might wonder whether we need an iPod or a mobile phone or whether we can really afford them.
Seem to be sounding a bit Wendell Berryish here. Not sure that’s a bad thing.
I think that we all hope that teachers will come up with some magic strategy that makes learners see what they will need to know and do and how to comprehend and act. Anyone who has taught a while knows that the magic happens from time to time but rarely because a teacher “knows,” at least consciously. It happens because the teacher has slowed down a setting at a moment when a learner is ready to look again at what she or he is up to and to say, “Oh!” The knowledge is always already out there (the teacher learned it somewhere, and the Net makes what the teacher knows as close as a Tully’s). The skills are a matter of practicing substeps even if they are boring and hard. What is magic is the opportunity to look at what’s been said or tried and to own that look. Such an act requires the normal time-space flow to SLOW DOWN so that a learner can still see what’s happening but doesn’t have to do or learn the next thing just yet.
Why is such an act so rare, I wonder? As a writer, I can dig a poem out of my journal almost every time if I take time. Why don’t I do this very often? Other things to do? Not sure that this sort of reflection earns me much money (indeed, it may be costly)? Lack of confidence? Perhaps if we stop and look at what we have done in an effort to understand and complete that action or thought, we will discover that more effort is needed, that we will have to stop watching TV if we hope to achieve what we value. Were we to slow down, we might wonder whether we need an iPod or a mobile phone or whether we can really afford them.
Seem to be sounding a bit Wendell Berryish here. Not sure that’s a bad thing.
Reflection on Some Stray Rhetoric
Last month, I heard a story on the radio this morning about a raid on the Iranian consulate in the mainly Kurdish city of Erbil in northern Iraq. As I followed up this piece in the New York Times, I found this:
Today, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said in a news conference in Washington that the United States would act to defend American troops from attackers in Iraq, regardless of the nationality of the attackers.
He said that “with regard to those who are physically present trying to do harm to our troops, regardless of nationality, we will go after them and defend ourselves.”
What fascinates and saddens me is a violation of citizenship that will likely spawn more violence. The “we” Pace refers to are U.S. nationals (mostly) in Iraq (another nation) after an invasion prompted by the defense of U.S. national interests. The U.S. forces have become taken on a role that is interestingly nationless. The raid was done without informing local leaders and with U.S. hardware. The U.S. forces are acting in their own interest of survival, but their interest, in this instance, seems not to support the interests of the groups who have to live long-term in the space (at least the physical space) in which they are acting. The men and women serving the U.S. in this space cannot act as citizens, cannot come into conversation, cannot win (unless winning is defined as enslavement or genocide). Condoleezza Rice and General Pace may decide that this is the only way to respond to the situation; they may be accurate in this judgment. But they are surely promoting a sort of agency that can guarantee no one’s security, particularly not that of the world’s vulnerable. Moments like this make talk about a U.S. “victory” in Iraq more and more out of alignment with any notion of the success of a democratic people.
What does this have to do with writing students? Guess the sort of writer that I want to be and to work with makes note of these sorts of contradictions and tries to make them productive.
Today, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said in a news conference in Washington that the United States would act to defend American troops from attackers in Iraq, regardless of the nationality of the attackers.
He said that “with regard to those who are physically present trying to do harm to our troops, regardless of nationality, we will go after them and defend ourselves.”
What fascinates and saddens me is a violation of citizenship that will likely spawn more violence. The “we” Pace refers to are U.S. nationals (mostly) in Iraq (another nation) after an invasion prompted by the defense of U.S. national interests. The U.S. forces have become taken on a role that is interestingly nationless. The raid was done without informing local leaders and with U.S. hardware. The U.S. forces are acting in their own interest of survival, but their interest, in this instance, seems not to support the interests of the groups who have to live long-term in the space (at least the physical space) in which they are acting. The men and women serving the U.S. in this space cannot act as citizens, cannot come into conversation, cannot win (unless winning is defined as enslavement or genocide). Condoleezza Rice and General Pace may decide that this is the only way to respond to the situation; they may be accurate in this judgment. But they are surely promoting a sort of agency that can guarantee no one’s security, particularly not that of the world’s vulnerable. Moments like this make talk about a U.S. “victory” in Iraq more and more out of alignment with any notion of the success of a democratic people.
What does this have to do with writing students? Guess the sort of writer that I want to be and to work with makes note of these sorts of contradictions and tries to make them productive.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
On the Right (and Responsibility) to Learn
So I was at a lecture this past Monday. Bill Talbott (a University of Washington philosophy professor) was addressing the question “Which Rights Should Be Universal?” (his title was “The Discovery of Universal Human Rights: How to believe in universal human rights without being a moral imperialist”). While Talbott was only indirectly concerned with citizens and active learners, he spoke rather directly to what I’m blogging about here these days. He noted that the topic of human rights is a topic “made for under-grad education.” At the center of his talk was an argument about how humans arrive at an understanding of moral issues. He senses, rightly I think, that in his tradition (one that finds its roots in Greek and Roman thinking), people have attempted to start from universal principles. The problem with this approach is that it is almost always possible to find exceptions to moral principles (he offered some spiffy examples), and so the tradition finds itself in a bind: I might want to argue that genocide is wrong, but I may not be able to defend that principle from all challenges, so I am left unable to defend my moral belief, I find myself at risk of holding a contradictory position or deciding that I can’t hold moral positions. Talbott argues that the problem isn’t that we have identified the wrong principles but that we are using the wrong method: we don’t start from principles; instead, we make moral judgments and then try to discover the principles that explain our judgements.
What does this have to do with facilitating the growth of citizens? A lot. If we take Talbott at his word, then citizens are obligated to develop and exercise their own judgment. They have to engage in conversations about what is good for them without resorting to some sort of “paternalistic justification” (you just have to do this because it’s for your own good). Every human has a right to this kind of development and, I would add, an obligation to engage in and protect this kind of development. Learners who are fully human can’t enter a class and say, “Just tell me what I need to know for my own good” or “Entertain me!!” Rather, they have to enter a class and wonder, “how do I need to develop in order to be more able to make judgments.” If a teacher isn’t ready to help learners understand what development is on offer and how to go about developing, it’s a bad class. But the teacher cannot do the development for the learner.
I’d like to live in these sorts of classrooms.
What does this have to do with facilitating the growth of citizens? A lot. If we take Talbott at his word, then citizens are obligated to develop and exercise their own judgment. They have to engage in conversations about what is good for them without resorting to some sort of “paternalistic justification” (you just have to do this because it’s for your own good). Every human has a right to this kind of development and, I would add, an obligation to engage in and protect this kind of development. Learners who are fully human can’t enter a class and say, “Just tell me what I need to know for my own good” or “Entertain me!!” Rather, they have to enter a class and wonder, “how do I need to develop in order to be more able to make judgments.” If a teacher isn’t ready to help learners understand what development is on offer and how to go about developing, it’s a bad class. But the teacher cannot do the development for the learner.
I’d like to live in these sorts of classrooms.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Winter Term, 2007: Introductory Thoughts
So I’m going to use this tool to keep a sort of running response to class, but I’ll keep it here out in the open. I’m teaching a 101 (college composition) and a 102 (writing from research) this term, but I think I’ll invite students from both classes to read and respond. On one level, my goal is some sort of meta-commentary about what is going down in class. But at a deeper level, I am trying to do some writing about how school (especially college English at a community college) can or might facilitate the growth of citizens. As I was reflecting on my experience in fall 2006, I came to see the act of teaching rhetoric as closely related to the act of creating spaces wherein folks get to practice being citizens and to become better at being citizens. In coming weeks, I’ll try to tease out what I might mean by “citizen” (I’m reading an interesting book on that topic just now).
I’ll start here by thinking a bit about the first day. I’m typically impressed the first time I meet students by how aware they are and by how they are trying to negotiate a productive space in the classroom. I think that too many teachers (myself included) forget that for many students, being a student is not a primary role or interest. Teachers put a great deal of effort into preparing classes and see the work of their classes as serious. Students see the classroom from . . ., well lots of other perspectives. I almost always like the vibe that develops the first day, as I try to convince students to take over the classroom and find their place. Still, there are always a few students who, for reasons as diverse as they are, find ridiculous the notion of making the classroom their own space. I am particularly interested this term in allowing and enabling learners to be “active” (my College’s word). We’ll see how this evolves.
I’ll start here by thinking a bit about the first day. I’m typically impressed the first time I meet students by how aware they are and by how they are trying to negotiate a productive space in the classroom. I think that too many teachers (myself included) forget that for many students, being a student is not a primary role or interest. Teachers put a great deal of effort into preparing classes and see the work of their classes as serious. Students see the classroom from . . ., well lots of other perspectives. I almost always like the vibe that develops the first day, as I try to convince students to take over the classroom and find their place. Still, there are always a few students who, for reasons as diverse as they are, find ridiculous the notion of making the classroom their own space. I am particularly interested this term in allowing and enabling learners to be “active” (my College’s word). We’ll see how this evolves.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
The Educational Project
I was just this past week at a retreat with other community college faculty and administrators. We were talking about “assessment,” that is about how we might discover what is going on in our classrooms and how we might use what we discover to achieve more perfectly our goals for those classrooms (whatever those goals are). The day or so of conversation was useful for me. My participation in these conversations focused the new term, at least in part, on learning rather than on classes and reports about teaching. It’s interesting to me that this focus on learning came from talking with a bunch of teachers and researchers rather than from learners more traditionally defined. What refreshed me, perhaps, was our unabashed interest in sustaining institutions that see learning as their focus. We want to create and maintain spaces where in learners add value to their lives and we, in collaboration with these learners, add value to communities, local and global.
At several points we realized what a strikingly counter-cultural urge this one we have is. We did not, I think, name why this is so, and I want to try to do this here. Education involves a simultaneous release and pursuit of a learner’s interest. To lead oneself (or to be lead) out from one state to another entails desiring a new state but also relinquishing control over the state one is in and the state one is moving toward and both to desire and to relinquish in a serious way. To learn, one has to allow new networks and connections and relations to form; one must meet the other and become other than one was.
This is inherently dangerous, education. We can’t control where we will end up even though we must try to shape a path, to take responsibility for steering our own development. If we are unable simultaneously to aspire and relinquish, we may more completely inhabit our entitlements, but we will not add value beyond protecting the capital we already hold. A learner who refuses to aspire or to relinquish may even gain value by interest. As a child of educated small business people, I could have gotten an education by simply attending classes, but that education would largely have been an extension of my parents labor. They had put me in a position to acknowledge authority and carry out tasks on time (that is at least part of my entitlement). But had I not myself desired a new affect and awareness and skill set, I would have finished college as the child of small business people ready to replicate and add to that existence but unable to wonder much about it. And had I been unwilling to plug into a new network of people and ideas, new ecosystems, little that I learned, even had I desired new knowledge and perspective, would have been integrated into who I became. No one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1981 would have predicted that I would be blogging from the Pacific Northwest or that I would have studied English literature and then rhetoric. Such is, I think, the outcome of education.
Is this sort of open-ended journey desirable? That is an open question. I suspect that without such an avenue, societies become reactionary arrangements that protect this or that array of resources. Jefferson and Dewey have argued that this sort of education is essential to meaningful democracy; Putnam (Bowling Alone) and others suggest that the U.S. democracy has largely lost track of this sense of education. I wonder where my students are at, whether they are willing to aspire but also to relinquish. This act seems to involves much more than paying tuition and getting credentials. Is it too much to ask? Can only some students afford this sort of venture?
Here's an alternate question: Can anyone afford not to pursue this sort of education, whether they have access to educational institutions or not? I am deeply aware that I write this question from a very privileged position. I have had access to institutions and am that sort of learner that my culture expects to be able to learn. Still I ask this question in a general way. Can humans afford not to aspire to grow and to be willing to forge new relationships in ways that do not reduce the other to property of some sort?
At several points we realized what a strikingly counter-cultural urge this one we have is. We did not, I think, name why this is so, and I want to try to do this here. Education involves a simultaneous release and pursuit of a learner’s interest. To lead oneself (or to be lead) out from one state to another entails desiring a new state but also relinquishing control over the state one is in and the state one is moving toward and both to desire and to relinquish in a serious way. To learn, one has to allow new networks and connections and relations to form; one must meet the other and become other than one was.
This is inherently dangerous, education. We can’t control where we will end up even though we must try to shape a path, to take responsibility for steering our own development. If we are unable simultaneously to aspire and relinquish, we may more completely inhabit our entitlements, but we will not add value beyond protecting the capital we already hold. A learner who refuses to aspire or to relinquish may even gain value by interest. As a child of educated small business people, I could have gotten an education by simply attending classes, but that education would largely have been an extension of my parents labor. They had put me in a position to acknowledge authority and carry out tasks on time (that is at least part of my entitlement). But had I not myself desired a new affect and awareness and skill set, I would have finished college as the child of small business people ready to replicate and add to that existence but unable to wonder much about it. And had I been unwilling to plug into a new network of people and ideas, new ecosystems, little that I learned, even had I desired new knowledge and perspective, would have been integrated into who I became. No one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1981 would have predicted that I would be blogging from the Pacific Northwest or that I would have studied English literature and then rhetoric. Such is, I think, the outcome of education.
Is this sort of open-ended journey desirable? That is an open question. I suspect that without such an avenue, societies become reactionary arrangements that protect this or that array of resources. Jefferson and Dewey have argued that this sort of education is essential to meaningful democracy; Putnam (Bowling Alone) and others suggest that the U.S. democracy has largely lost track of this sense of education. I wonder where my students are at, whether they are willing to aspire but also to relinquish. This act seems to involves much more than paying tuition and getting credentials. Is it too much to ask? Can only some students afford this sort of venture?
Here's an alternate question: Can anyone afford not to pursue this sort of education, whether they have access to educational institutions or not? I am deeply aware that I write this question from a very privileged position. I have had access to institutions and am that sort of learner that my culture expects to be able to learn. Still I ask this question in a general way. Can humans afford not to aspire to grow and to be willing to forge new relationships in ways that do not reduce the other to property of some sort?
Monday, September 25, 2006
Some thoughts on rhetoric
What do I mean by the phrase "rhetoric"?
This is itself not a rhetorical question. In their review of what rhetoric might mean for postmodern humans, John Bender and David Wellberry arrive at a fairly neutral definition: rhetoric is “an art of positionality in address” (7). Rhetoric is an art of managing the relationships between audience, speaker/writer, and topic. But rhetoric is not, at least according to Aristotle himself, “persuasion”; rather, rhetoric involves the “the detection of the persuasive aspects of each matter.” Lots to study here. How does one relate to an audience or a topic? How does a specific audience relate to a topic? How is the topic composed and what are the links between data and assertions about the topic? How might those assertions become more compelling for a specific audience?
Bender and Wellberry connect rhetoric not with some school topic (go to class and master some content and skills) but rather as part of all of our “attempts to know,” from biology to art to My Space. The trick for me is grounding rhetoric in material and ethical situations. To grow as a rhetorician (on this definition) is to think about what new knowledge one can build from one’s own position in relationship to a real audience and real data. What’s more, rhetoricians have to take responsibility for the down-stream results of the knowledge that they build.
This is itself not a rhetorical question. In their review of what rhetoric might mean for postmodern humans, John Bender and David Wellberry arrive at a fairly neutral definition: rhetoric is “an art of positionality in address” (7). Rhetoric is an art of managing the relationships between audience, speaker/writer, and topic. But rhetoric is not, at least according to Aristotle himself, “persuasion”; rather, rhetoric involves the “the detection of the persuasive aspects of each matter.” Lots to study here. How does one relate to an audience or a topic? How does a specific audience relate to a topic? How is the topic composed and what are the links between data and assertions about the topic? How might those assertions become more compelling for a specific audience?
Bender and Wellberry connect rhetoric not with some school topic (go to class and master some content and skills) but rather as part of all of our “attempts to know,” from biology to art to My Space. The trick for me is grounding rhetoric in material and ethical situations. To grow as a rhetorician (on this definition) is to think about what new knowledge one can build from one’s own position in relationship to a real audience and real data. What’s more, rhetoricians have to take responsibility for the down-stream results of the knowledge that they build.
Monday, August 14, 2006
On the results of arguing
I think that serious arguing will lead us pretty quickly to talk about discourse, about how we talk and act and even think and how others do and what alternative approaches we are. Arguing with others leads humans to start thinking about how truth is created and passed around (or to insist blindly on the common-sensical obviousness of one's own truth), I suspect, because of the nature of human language and identity. Linguists talk about discourses as more than a language: a discourse involves a set of things, conditions, and states that allow a human to interact with others and with her or himself. As we interact, we rely on words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, gestures, glances, body positions, clothes, and other symbols. The logic, rituals, and habits that integrate these characteristics comprise a discourse. Conceived this way, a discourse is an "identity kit" (Gee); every human works with multiple Discourses. We know how to use the discourse of a teacher or a skateboarder or a citizen of Monroe, Washington because we understand the role that each of these people play in their community. Here is a more detailed definition of discourse developed by linguist and education researcher James Paul Gee:
A Discourse is a sort of “identity kit” which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize. Being “trained” as a linguist meant that I learned to speak, think, and act like a linguist, and to recognize others when they do so. Some other examples of Discourses: (enacting) being an American or a Russian, a man or a woman, a member of a certain socioeconomic class, a factory worker or a boardroom executive, a doctor or a hospital patient, a teacher, an administrator, or a student, a student of physics or a student of literature, a member of a sewing circle, a club, a street gang, a lunchtime social gathering, or a regular at a local bar. We all have many discourses.
How does one acquire a Discourse? It turns out that much that is claimed, controversially, to be true of second language acquisition . . . is, in fact, more obviously true of the acquisition of Discourses. Discourses are not mastered by overt instruction (even less so than languages, and hardly anyone ever fluently acquired a second language sitting in a classroom), but by enculturation ("apprenticeship") into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse (Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1983). This is how we all acquired our native languages and our home-based Discourse. It is how we acquire all later, more public-oriented Discourses. If you have no access to the social practice, you don't get in the Discourse, you don't have it. You cannot overtly teach anyone a Discourse, in a classroom or anywhere else. Discourse are not bodies of knowledge like physics or archeology or linguistics. Therefore, ironically, while you can overtly teach someone linguistics, a body of knowledge, you can't teach them to be a linguist, that is, to use a Discourse. The most you can do is to let them practice being a linguist with you. (7)
No arguer, on this line of thinking, learns a new discourse (like the one that this section of English 101 focuses on) by memorizing and using a set of rules. Instead, humans learn to take up new discourses through supported and intentional practice. This means that picking up a discourse involves more work (and more risk) than learning how to place commas correctly. I think this is why we argue. To see better what sorts of ways truths can be related and to add new tools to our personal bags of tricks.
Gee, James Paul. "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics," Journal of Education 171 (1989): 5-25.
A Discourse is a sort of “identity kit” which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize. Being “trained” as a linguist meant that I learned to speak, think, and act like a linguist, and to recognize others when they do so. Some other examples of Discourses: (enacting) being an American or a Russian, a man or a woman, a member of a certain socioeconomic class, a factory worker or a boardroom executive, a doctor or a hospital patient, a teacher, an administrator, or a student, a student of physics or a student of literature, a member of a sewing circle, a club, a street gang, a lunchtime social gathering, or a regular at a local bar. We all have many discourses.
How does one acquire a Discourse? It turns out that much that is claimed, controversially, to be true of second language acquisition . . . is, in fact, more obviously true of the acquisition of Discourses. Discourses are not mastered by overt instruction (even less so than languages, and hardly anyone ever fluently acquired a second language sitting in a classroom), but by enculturation ("apprenticeship") into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse (Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1983). This is how we all acquired our native languages and our home-based Discourse. It is how we acquire all later, more public-oriented Discourses. If you have no access to the social practice, you don't get in the Discourse, you don't have it. You cannot overtly teach anyone a Discourse, in a classroom or anywhere else. Discourse are not bodies of knowledge like physics or archeology or linguistics. Therefore, ironically, while you can overtly teach someone linguistics, a body of knowledge, you can't teach them to be a linguist, that is, to use a Discourse. The most you can do is to let them practice being a linguist with you. (7)
No arguer, on this line of thinking, learns a new discourse (like the one that this section of English 101 focuses on) by memorizing and using a set of rules. Instead, humans learn to take up new discourses through supported and intentional practice. This means that picking up a discourse involves more work (and more risk) than learning how to place commas correctly. I think this is why we argue. To see better what sorts of ways truths can be related and to add new tools to our personal bags of tricks.
Works Cited
Gee, James Paul. "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics," Journal of Education 171 (1989): 5-25.
Argumentation
My approach to this sort of work is wrapped up in my understanding of practical language use (argumentation) and the nature of language (discourse). Argumentation involves being interested in finding "contested validity claims" and "problematic expression"; it is not about clearly stating what everyone or the writer herself already believes. In "Lost Art of Argument," a chapter in his final book, The Revolt of the Elite, Christopher Lasch tried to flesh out a notion of argument that has less to do with personality and more to do with a collaborative process of inquiry. When he died in 1994, Lasch was celebrated as an important, if prickly, analyst of American culture. Lasch comes to a discussion of argument by considering the role that "debate" plays in a democracy, arguing that we know what our interests are (and what our questions are as thinkers but also as citizens) only as we engage in interested, public debate. As he sums up his thoughts about a mass media that increasingly tries to give us expert information but keeps us from any real debate, Lasch clarifies his own notion of argument:
Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in [a] pejorative sense—half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of "opinions," gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.
The attempt to bring others around to our own point of view carries the risk, of course, that we may adopt their point of view instead. We have to enter imaginatively into our opponents' arguments, if only for the purpose of refuting them, and we may end up being persuaded by those we sought to persuade. Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational. Most of us tend to think of it . . . as a clash of rival dogmas, a shouting match in which neither side gives any ground. But arguments are not won by shouting down opponents. They are won by changing opponents' minds—something that can happen only if we give opposing arguments a respectful hearing and still persuade their advocates that there is something wrong with those arguments. In the course of this activity we may well decide that there is something wrong with our own.
Arguments, as Lasch understands them, are not battles to win or avoid. The issue is not "agreeing" or "disagreeing" but involving oneself in the contest and letting the contest move us, in the company of others, to new conclusions.
Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elite.
Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in [a] pejorative sense—half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of "opinions," gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.
The attempt to bring others around to our own point of view carries the risk, of course, that we may adopt their point of view instead. We have to enter imaginatively into our opponents' arguments, if only for the purpose of refuting them, and we may end up being persuaded by those we sought to persuade. Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational. Most of us tend to think of it . . . as a clash of rival dogmas, a shouting match in which neither side gives any ground. But arguments are not won by shouting down opponents. They are won by changing opponents' minds—something that can happen only if we give opposing arguments a respectful hearing and still persuade their advocates that there is something wrong with those arguments. In the course of this activity we may well decide that there is something wrong with our own.
Arguments, as Lasch understands them, are not battles to win or avoid. The issue is not "agreeing" or "disagreeing" but involving oneself in the contest and letting the contest move us, in the company of others, to new conclusions.
Works Cited
Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elite.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
The Mission of this Blog
I have two reasons for hosting this blog. The first is a bit ideal, I suppose. I’m holding out for a kind of salon that has its roots in a college class but quickly becomes a public sphere where folk come to build and try out ideas. My second is more practical. I want writing students to come into this space and act like composers (or rhetors) rather than college students. I’m taking my ENG 101 and 102 courses out of school. These classes are composition course, that is, formal situations in which students (and teachers) practice composing. Our topic of study, then, is "college composition" and not English. The second word in the phrase “college composition” is, for me, an interesting one because it describes an activity that many students don’t connect with “English” classes. The English word composition has its roots in the Latin verb componere, “to put with or together.” The first word in the course title, college, is also one I think most of us misunderstand, for we mistake “college” with “degree.” College is, at least etymologically, about relationships (the Latin word here is collegium, association). Relationships with whom? With other members of the immediate learning community, but as importantly, relationships with folks who have thought and composed across time. So, the course will give us practice putting together words and ideas in relationship to what we are reading and what other writers are telling us (these days, the theme I’m engaging is higher education).
I’ll follow this post with I want to offer some additional context for what I hope to happen here by adding discussions of three phrases, argumentation, discourse, and reflective practice.
I’ll follow this post with I want to offer some additional context for what I hope to happen here by adding discussions of three phrases, argumentation, discourse, and reflective practice.
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