The Panopticon, particularly its use as a metaphor for composition programming, is interesting, in that, for its historical, intended purpose, this type of structure was horrifying. Moxley included a rendering in his paper. This is essentially what it looked liked.
Designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s, this building was to be a prison in which one, unseen person was capable of overlooking an entire prison from a single tower. A prisoner knows they are being watched but can see nothing.
Foucault talks about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish. In it he tracks the development of prisons and argues that the Panopticon's premise of the seeing and the seen has made its way into many aspects of society: hospitals, factories, and, of course, schools.
Is this another example of Victorian Utilitarianism applied to horrible ends? I wonder if a novel like 1984 is simply a representation of a universal Panopticon, a Panopticon of the state, where there is the seeing (Big Brother) and the seen (everyone else). Britain has recently been called the most watched country on the planet, with its incredibly thorough implementation of closed-circuit cameras. And the Bush administration is trying to push through its warrantless domestic wiretapping program while the Republican Party still holds a majority.
Of course, what does this have to do with composition programs? There is an idea within the Panopticon that one person, one source is capable of curing an entire prison of criminals. In composition programs with a top-down approach, is there a similar ideology? Do they believe that one source is capable of designing a specific space (a Pedagogy of the Panopticon) that is capable of educating an entire community?
I'm not sure either way. In some ways, I see the point. The Panopticon (if we look passed its menacing prison origins) is an incredibly organized, efficient way to deal with a large number of people. In a program of thousands of students, organization and efficiency might be important. At the same time, a program of thousands of students implies that there are thousands of different needs. There is chaos, disorganization, and likely problems. But can one specific program satisfy all?
Below is the Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois.
Designed in 1925, based on the Panopticon, this image seems to me to be the best metaphor of a Pedagogy of the Panopticon. And while it is probably an exaggeration to think of composition programs in this way, I wonder if such pedagogies do, in some way, treat every student as the "seen," looked upon by an unseen "seer." If such is that case, the question becomes, is this desirable? Do we want this for students?
Moxley and Meehan’s article, particularly the section in which they discuss prevalence of collaborative sites, got me thinking about some that I may know. I’ll focus on music/sound:
One of the most interesting ones that I’ve come across is Freesound. At this site, individuals post sound clips which can then be shared, modified, commented upon, and rated. This goes far beyond music. There are clips of telephone rings, clips of nightingales singing, a train passing. I listened to one which was three Britons on holiday complaining about their bathroom flooding. There are electronically modified voices. There are recordings of Tibetan throat singers.
Another sound related site comes from the reissue of the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. They have offered the multitracks for two of their songs for free download. People are to download the tracks, remix them into a song of their own, and then post the new song on the website. The site is set up as a map of the world and individual posts are marked by their real location on the globe. What’s great about this is that, obviously, most of the posts come from Europe and America, causing there to be a glut of little dots in those two areas. This makes it difficult to pick from these. The dot, however, in Kenya, or the one in Malaysia is easily accessible.
While not a collaborative site, Pitchfork, an online music magazine makes great use of other collaborative sites. Music video stories are linked to Youtube. New bands that they review are linked to the bands MySpace site where sample songs are available. One story in particular caught my eye. Pitchfork received an email from an attendee at a concert held in a small Houston venue. Attached to the email were pictures. Apparently neighbors of the venue call the police to complain of the noise. A policeman arrived, went to the stage to stop the concert, scared one of the band members, was jumped upon by another band member, and sprayed mace into said jumpers face. Chaos, obviously, ensued. The article was posted, along with the pictures, on the website. Links to a MySpace site that focuses on the event and a forum where concertgoers discuss what they saw are provided.
I’m not even going to list all of the mp3 music blogs that are available. These sites offer blogger the opportunity, not to share there music (though those exist as well), but to share the music they like. Soul bloggers offer rare cuts from thirty-year-old funk LPs that most people would have to pay over $500 to listen to (as only three copies exist). Indie bloggers introduce readers to strange Scandinavian folk groups, Balinese rockers, Wisconsonian technophiles. What’s amazing about these is the way that trends develop and then disappear nearly instantaneously. The sharing of music, by going beyond a friend’s mixtape to a global forum, transforms musical trends into a kind of hyper-driven force that is impossible to pin down, making it possible that literally any type of music has a chance for acknowledgement. My favorite: Soul Sides.
In “Datagogies, Ideologies, and the Future of Writing Programs,” Moxley enumerates the two fields of academic thinking: the Communities of Power and Learning. In the Community of Power “those who are driven by self-interest, winning, and academic prestige” are rewarded and control the discourse. In the Community of Learning, however, “those who value the pursuit of truth and understanding” and “who are commited to free culture [rather] than copyright” are the norm (¶ 9). He states, “Simply put, contrasting these communities and values gives us interesting ways to…identify the embedded underlying assumptions about teaching and learning that shape different interfaces” (¶ 10). Later in the paper, Moxley states that “the values of the Community of Power are those of…our larger society, a society that prizes individual accomplishment…that celebrates capitalism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is the ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality that fuels our world’s economies” (¶ 12).
I wonder then, if the idea of datagogies and the primacy of the Community of Learning is fighting much more than the culture of academia. To argue for an overhaul of the ideology of Composition programs seems to me to be arguing for a change of the ideology of a community in general. The products of this overhaul—the students—will possibly come out of the program ideologically altered. (There must be a better word than "products." Perhaps I should say "Those affected by this overhaul...") Will the community (the school, the families, the state, the nation) want this?
I’ve struggled with the ideologies of a Community of Learning in my own thoughts. My previous blogs have reflected this. I don’t think that I’m wholly able to give up the idea that individual accomplishment is valuable and necessary for academics and society in general and should be rewarded in its own right. I like the idea of a solitary person struggling through their own ideas, only collaborating when they have what they feel is their best work. It forces a kind of personal excellence to be present within the community. At the same time, I see the value and the necessity for the Community of Learning. I see how, as Moxley states, “if we do not assert our right to design and develop our datagogies, we will concede the central pedagogical stage of the 21st century: datagogies” (¶ 48).
So what am I to do? What are we to do? I guess my relief comes from the fact that these two communities are not incongruous, do not “rest on a continuum,” and can “intertwine to justify interpretation, reflection, and action” (¶ 10). Perhaps we should consider them as complimentary halves to a single ideology: a kind of yin and yang. One cannot have a community of learners without some type of demand for individual excellence. At the same time, the works of a solitary individual are worthless unless evaluated (and possibly altered) within a community. Perhaps for too long the community of power has dominated its other half, and what is needed is a readjustment, one which allows for a proper balance between the two ideologies.
There was another issue that Jarratt brings up that I’ve had regarding perceptions of the role of teacher. While discussing the “feminization” of the composition teacher, she states that, often, the composition teacher is seen as “a mythologized mother” who “attends to the rudimentary needs of students who are more like children than adults” (118). I can think of two words that express this better than anything: “my kids.” Time and again, I’ve heard teachers refer to students in their class as “my kids.” As if Composition becomes a massive adoption agency, we (because I occassionally do it too) take ownership of twenty or more students.
When I taught high school I absolutely hated this phrase. I erased it from my vocabulary. If a “my kids” slipped out, I would hurriedly correct it. “My kids” became “the students in my class.” Because that’s what they were, strictly speaking. And, as silly as that may seem, it did allow me to begin seeing my role more professionally. I was no longer the person responsible for the welfare of every one of the students. Instead, I became their teacher. I taught. I helped them to learn. I educated. Nothing more. Does this make me cold, uncaring, a heartless educator? Maybe. But I hope, instead, that it helps me to realize that I am not their caretaker. I am here with a specific purpose.
This subtle vocabulary shift, I think, is particularly important at the college level. Most of the students we work with are not kids. Jarrott states that “some feminists…[build] a feminist pedagogy on a maternal basis that emphasizes caring and nurturing” (118). Honestly, I don’t see a problem with developing a “caring and nurturing” environment in a classroom while at the same time maintaining a professional distance, avoiding the “my kids” connection. In fact, a professional distance would seem to actually make such an environment more effective, since students will see the teacher’s caring coming from a professional initiative rather than a personal desire.
Having never studied the ideas of feminism beyond basic notions of gender equality and inequality, I went into Jarratt’s piece unsure of its relevance to my own pedagogy. How does a male relate to feminism? From that, how does a male implement a feminist pedagogy in his classroom? And then she states:
just as many women in the feminist movement are deeply committed to antiracism, and straight people work toward the eradication of homophobia and raising consciousness about discrimination toward gay and [watch for the stars] *** people, men have a deep stake in the goals of feminism (116).
Okay, question one answered. In the following sentence, Jarratt then goes on to say that “the male teacher who adopts feminist pedagogical strategies can sometimes be more effective than a female teacher because his students won’t be as tempted to read his pedagogy as self-interested choice based on membership in a ‘special interest’ group” (116) Question two answered.
Seeing feminist pedagogy in this way, as an awareness of the relationship between politics (of any kind), language, and gender, makes the possibility of applying feminist ideas within my own classroom not only possible but, hopefully, probable.
My effectiveness (and the effectiveness of most male teachers) seems to be most obvious in our possible influence upon the male students within a classroom. I see a lot of the “backlash” among male students manifesting itself in a unique type of homophobia. Essentially, the logic (actually illogic) flows like this: to be a male feminist is to be feminine which is to be gay which is bad. Does this mean that I need to smoke a cigar, scratch myself, and belch while talking about the inherent gender inequalities in our society?
Hardly. Instead, what it means is that, as Tobin states “[by] studying the ways that masculinity is constructed for me in the larger culture, [male teachers] could begin to understand the ways that male students struggle to construct themselves in our classrooms” (124). Male teacher possibly have an understanding of the formation of these masculine definitions. We also have the capability of challenging them, of questioning them. Male students may not change because of this, but they may begin looking at their own definitions of masculinity and femininity. And that seems like a start.
I'm convinced that I'm becoming a grumpy old man. I imagine myself ten years from now, in my office, grumbling about nothing in particular, hunched over an letter to the editor of a local newspaper in which I'm complaining about their constant grammar errors in their articles.Case in point:
I came across this really old article from the Atlantic by Hugo Münsterberg (a great name, by the way) entitled "The Standing of Scholarship in America." This thing was published in 1909. And look at some of these quotes.
- “Those who had never trained their attention by forcing their will toward that which is unattractive had to learn by severe disappointments later that a large part of every life’s work must be drudgery.”
- “Our public life reflects this lack everywhere. The newspapers and magazines, the theatres and the social-reform movements, are more and more made for a public which looks only to be entertained, and which has lost the power of sustained attention to that which is not attractive in itself.”
Should I remind everyone that this was written in 1909? I was worried that he was going to start talking about the fact that American Idol attracts more viewers that people who vote and Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour attracts fourteen (okay, both are exaggerations). Is this a trend that has been building for almost a century? Has American culture (which is evolving to global culture) been heading down the path of material self-gratification for this long, if not longer?
Or are these just parts of human nature? By “these” I mean both the desire for pleasure and the tendency for people like Münsterberg to complain about “kids these days.” Münsterberg calls for a return to rigor, for a return to the hard grind of academics for all students. He bemoans the status of athletics in college. (1909! We’re talking about leather football helmets and stiff team pictures of guys in funny striped uniforms. No BCS. No Sweet Sixteen. No D i c k [censored...] Vital. None of that.) He says, “As soon as the nation feels that the meaning of life lies…in the realization of eternal ideals, then, as a matter of course…scholarship and athletics will no longer be rivals which stand on the same level: athletics will be the joyful play which gives pleasure and recreation to individuals, and serves its purpose well if it makes happy boys more able to live for their real life-tasks.” Happy what?
This is the point where I get frustrated, where my pedagogical bipolarism starts to twist me into knots. Münsterberg’s ideas of rigor, of a call for an elevation of academic discipline completely ignore fifty percent of the population. And I’m sure they ignore more than that. I can’t imagine this call for rigor to include anyone whose grandparents didn’t come from Europe.
But then I think that the ideas, while created in a time of sexism and racism, can still stand on their own. Why can’t there be a cultural shift? Why can’t there be a universal, unbiased shift that demands more of the students? And I don’t mean more tests, more standards, more legislation. I mean just the idea that, to understand the world and oneself better requires a hell of a lot of work, and a lot of that work is going to be stuff that is thoroughly unenjoyable. But in the end, once a student slogs through it, that student is a better person for it.
And they’ll have the patience to sit through NewsHour with the other fourteen of us.
Someone tell me: is this the point where I adjust my monocle and button my tweed waistcoat? Am I really this much of a curmudgeon?
After reading Lina’s annotated bibliography on Ann Del Principe’s “Paradigm Clashes Among Basic Writing Teachers: Sources of Conflict and a Call for Change,” I have decided to create a hypothetical classroom in my daydreams (though even those are getting pretty busy lately…I need to actually see if there’s a slot available in my daydreams where I can squeeze this in). In this hypothetical class, students are assumed to know the basics of writing. If they don’t, it is assumed that they will access the appropriate sources to gain that knowledge. It will be called Deep End Writing.
I will treat this class much like an intensive language program or, perhaps, a semester studying abroad. Instead of French, however, it will be the language of writing that the students become immersed in. At first they barely tread water. Then, slowly, they are able to get by. By the end of the semester, they are dreaming in the language of writing. Their dreams have theses. They have conclusions that don’t simply restate the main idea. They are connecting their dreams to higher ideas, to other dreams, to the concept of dreaming.
Can such a class exist (outside of my daydreaming)? I’m not sure. It seems to me that such a class requires far too much risk on both the student’s and the teacher’s part. For the teacher, they are forced to demand from their students high quality, in-depth analyses and a solid grasp of written English. For the student, they are forced into a position where failure (not grade failure) is likely if not inevitable. Only if grades were not an issue could such a class exist. And in the grade-obsessed culture infecting colleges, I doubt this is possible. So, unfortunately, I have to agree with Lina that, while Del Principe’s idea is “admirable,” I could hardly call it practical.
My first attempt at wikifying my classroom has crashed and burned. My team teacher is teaching literary terms in preparation for our second project (which was the third project but has been reordered). And, after day one, I noticed a lot of students frustrated. Chances are, they have no intention of majoring in English and may be interested in fields as far from Cooper as possible. I wanted to find a way to connect the lesson to larger ideas of rhetoric. So I created a wiki page on writingwiki that would be our Lexicon Dictionary. We talked about how each field (whether it’s literature, engineering, plumbing, surfing, etc.) has a specific “language” that needs to be learned before a person can effectively communicate in that field. For example, the word “set” has a very different meaning in math than it does in surfing. Students had to add at least five definitions, specifying the field of focus, with a definition and example sentence. By Wednesday, things were looking great. Only a few students had submitted, but the fields were very diverse: chemistry, surfing, military, interior design. The entries were great. By this Wednesday, we were going to have this crazy collection of definitions. An experiment in chaos theory as applied to rhetoric. Maybe patterns would develop. Certain terms might repeat in certain patterns. If one focuses on a single letter in the dictionary, maybe new patterns develop. I was curious what was going to develop.
And then (I think it was Thursday morning) I got into USF and went to check the dictionary, when what to my wondering eyes should appear: the website destroyed, replaced by something else. At first I just thought it was stupid. Then I wondered what this does to the whole idea of collective knowledge, particularly on a wiki. If websites are easily destroyed by a single person (or, in this case, a team) is the idea of wikis, the internet, and hypertext in general as a safe, maintainable rhetorical foundation sound? Does an online community require a certain level of maturity in too many people? Can even one person with access to the site (which includes, theoretically, everyone with access to the internet) be immature, self-absorbed and so bored with life that they take it upon themselves to ruin the community? Obviously not.
Within Rebecca Moore Howard’s article “Collaborative Pedagogy,” there is a quote from Anne Ruggles Gere that, I think raises a point seems to have been too easily accepted recently. Gere states, “A fixed and hierarchical view of knowledge, in contrast, assumes that learning can occur only when a designated ‘knower’ imparts wisdom to those less well informed" (56). The few (very few) education courses that I took while teaching high school tended to reinforce this idea. Teachers are not the bearers of knowledge. They are, instead, guides, leading students to their own acquisition of knowledge.
Are there not times in classroom instruction where the teacher needs to “impart wisdom to those less well informed?” I don’t mean to say that the teacher is the sole source of knowledge, but aren’t they at least one source of knowledge available to the students? Describing a classroom as “fixed and hierarchical” does not seem to do justice to the value of a knowledgeable teacher. As with many of the readings, I see a type of middle ground between collaboration and hierarchy. There is a need to student collaboration in the classroom, just as there is a need for a knowledgeable source for those students.
Another point mentioned in the article is the effect of collaborative pedagogy on competition within the classroom. Howard states, “Collaborative pedagogy reduces competition between students” (57). Am I old-fashioned to think that a little competition (fair, healthy, non-aggressive competition) is actually good for students? I don’t mean that grades should be posted on the board and the person with the highest grade gets a prize. I mean that ideas should be evaluated, just as they are outside the class, for their merit and compared to the ideas of others within the class. This, I guess, is a form of collaboration, but it is one where ideas are introduced, evaluated and, if deemed by the class to be unnecessary, are discarded. In this way, it is a competition of ideas rather than of people.
Brian is being pulled in two directions, and it’s starting to hurt. Taylor’s annotation on Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key” triggered this tug, so I’m blaming Taylor. Here are the two sides to my pain. On the one side, we have Yancey's ideas: students are writing outside the classroom as never before, they are communicating at an almost unbelievable rate outside of the classroom, English (and I think she means the language, not the subject) is shifting in radical ways.
And then I feel a yank on the other side: the shorthand text messaging, the emails, the very glut of writing that is taking place and its poor quality are taking away meaning from words. English is shifting because we’re watching it dissolve. The inherent lack of sophistication in much of contemporary writing and the idea that all words are worthy of public view has made those words that are effective just as meaningless as everything else. It is drowning public discourse in a sea of ambiguity.
And from the other side: but that’s Yancey’s point. We are at a moment in rhetorical history where, if we don’t alter our methods of composition instruction, we will be (and maybe already are) left in the dust. Rather than reacting to shifts in English, we need to shape them. We need to find ways to incorporate these changing lexical and rhetorical frameworks into the classroom or composition will become irrelevant.
And then, as my arms are becoming sorer and sorer: Sixty years ago, it was more difficult to get your words into print. Therefore, the rhetorical weight of every word mattered all that much more. Words had value. Today, a word is as valuable as a click of the mouse. The contemporary onslaught of words have turned them (and, from them, ideas) into a white noise. Ideas are becoming meaningless, being replaced by things, fueling a rampant materialism in this country.
And then: And who determined the value of words sixty years ago? Chances are those who had access to the floodgates were white and male and upper class. This contemporary “glut” (as you call it) is really an opening up of those floodgates to all people. Ideas can come from anywhere. And that is why there needs to be a shift in composition studies so that we can allow this open access to thrive and keep the value of words (and ideas) from disappearing.
Somebody tell them to stop. I’m starting to lose feeling in my arms…
I found Caitlin’s annotation of Shukiang Lu’s “Let Wen Shine Forth: The Chinese Poetic Tradition and the English Composition Course” very interesting, particularly her paragraphs on perception and language in writing. Ideas of first and third person and there location within writing seem imbedded in the framework of writing if you were to consider Western composition. However, a look at a literal translation of a Chinese Wen poem by Wang wei proves otherwise:
Empty/mountain/not/see/people
Only/hear/people/talk/sound
Reflected/light/enter/upon/deep/forest
Again/shine/green/moss/upon. (Lu, Paragraph 12)
There is no person, no subject within the poem. We, as English speakers, must alter the translation and insert person into the poem. What does this do to the poem? I can’t help but think that, by inserting a type of Western perception into the poem, we essential alter the meaning and effect of the writing. Read it as it is. The way it strips language down to practically nothing is amazing.
But rather than ramble on about the effects of translation on literature, I wanted to think about this in context with composition. I wanted to think about the effects of perception (both cultural and individual) on writing. And the first thing that came to mind was the novel Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. I’ve never read it all the way through, but I do recall at least one section of the book where it is written (or at least translated) entirely in the second person.
It’s our job as composition teachers to impart to students the proper tools and understanding in order to write well. But what “well” is seems defined by a cultural perception. We (western students of English) don’t write essays in second person. I believe this. I’ve believed this for quite a while. But why do I believe this? What would a second person essay sound like? Have I ever read a well-written essay in the second person (and “well-written” is key)? I can’t think of any. What effect would it have on me to have someone telling me “you believe this?” Imagine how jarring that would be, how unsettling.
While I understand that this issue of second person wasn’t the point of Lu’s article, ideas of perception that Lu addresses are, I think, some of the greatest problems students struggle with while writing. It’s interesting to see an article that addresses this in a way that doesn’t seem to delegitimize alternate modes of perception.
[I just figured out the hyperlink option]
Quentin’s Annotated Bibliography on Jim Ridolfo’s “Comprehensive Online Document Evaluation" got me thinking about the importance of hypertext in an article. I was really curious about what he had to say about it, especially how it effects, not only the format of a text, but the way in which a reader responds to that format. Quentin mentions that Ridolfo "raises the bar" in his imaginative ideas for composition teaching. I browsed through the article and found that, as Quentin said, there really was no focus in the traditional, thesis-driven sense. But the material that Ridolfo covers in his survey does shift the focus of composition in a way that seems incredibly revolutionary, even when considered beside the blogging and wiki-ing that happens here at USF.
Through the topics he mentions on each page (Google, traceroute, arin, etc.), Ridolfo attempts to move students beyond basic computer literacy toward an understanding of the rhetoric of online communication. The mutability of online text and the ability to trace that change seems a key focus of Ridolfo's strategies. As I've said in previous blogs, I often see this ever-shifting rhetorical landscape as dangerous. But an ability to not only understand this possibility but also to monitor and critique it reveals to the students the underlying (and often concealed) rhetoric of online text.
So, while not focusing entirely on the role of hypertext in, say, a student memoir, Ridolfo's article does seem to introduce the foundations on which such a discussion may be held. I would be interested in reading about such a discussion, especially in relation to how hyperlinks alter the role of organization and development within a paper or a topic.
Marisa’s annotated bibliography on Ray Kytle’s “Slaves, Serfs, or Colleagues. Who Shall Teach Composition?” initially seemed a bit offensive (well, not the annotation, but the ideas in the article itself) and a bit impractical. To summarily summarize her summary, the article basically says that graduate students and untenurable faculty constitute the “slaves” and the “serfs” of composition programs. Kytle’s claim is that neither of these “classes” commands respect. As a consequence, the course that they teach (composition) does not command respect. The only way for composition to command respect within the university is by hiring tenured faculty to teach the classes.
There were two stages to my reaction. At first, I was hurt. I’m not even one of those serfs you see in medieval epics groveling in boggy fields or running from rampaging Vikings. I’m a slave. And not Spartacus. No, Spartacus commanded respect. But not me. I’m just a lowly graduate slave, skulking in the corner of the office, grading papers, whimpering softly. There’ll be no slave armies for me to command.
I understand the metaphors and, on a certain level, they do work. But I wonder if it’s extreme. Perhaps that’s his intention.
Then I thought, “Let’s see USF hire the required number of doctored professors to fill all the spots needed to teach composition.” Is this just an instance were practicality trumps idealism? Can a school of any significant size hire the number of professors needed? And then what do we do with all us graduate students? There isn’t nearly enough storage space to fit us all. They’ll have an army of graduate students roaming the campus. And we all know what happens when a bunch of graduate students get together and form an army…