Common Senses

Socrates never wrote down his ideas. And we have applauded this method as... well, it's the Socratic Method. It seems if you are the first to do something (or at least the first to be able to have someone incredibly smart take notes for you--enter Plato), we might call you eccentric, but we might also name something after you and try to replicate your style because you are revolutionary. What is it they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery? True--and having a method named after you doesn't hurt, either.

Take a look at the "Big 3: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle"

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." (At least, we think Socrates said that--we've socially agreed that he can have credit for this, so I won't push it.) Alright, I've examined. And, guess what?

I am just like Socrates! I like to ask questions! I don't like to take notes!

Wait a minute, though. That might make me a good rhetorician or a good philosopher. Buuuuut... I'm also pretty sure it makes me a very bad student. At least, I think it does. Good students pay attention, take notes, focus on writing things down. Questions are integral, but it is simply not acceptable in academic culture to think about the somatic metabolisms of knowledge and how embodied practices like physical note-taking--writing--might interfere with memory, processing, and the social construction (or deconstruction) of conceptual architectures in the classroom. In other words, a good student goes through the motions.

It never occurred to me until rather late in the academic game that my body was my learning site, as important to learning process as my mind. I am an intent listener who prefers to engage audio-visual information without the distraction of extensive note-taking. The interruption of my own writing inhibits my ability to build the memory frameworks of context and informatics that I rely upon in order to make sense of what I am learning. For someone like me, situated writing is not an accurate measure of focus. Writing "in the learning moment" is distraction--would indicate the desire for distraction. If someone did a "note check" to see if I had paid attention to a 3 hour lecture, one would be hard-pressed to find copious notes unless I had been trying to stay awake. Eek! The physical and mental act of writing is wonderfully exhausting and engaging--it competes too much for my attention. How can I run so many senses at once?

But, see, I am only one among many. I can't imagine I sense the world the same as my students, for example. Every day in my own classroom, I see students who represent very different, highly personal, intersections of what it means to embody learning. And in the same way that we have attempted to historically make sure that "attention" and "focus" aren't only taking place (it isn't enough to simply sit still and look forward) but are being physically disciplined into the bodily productions that are both expected (note taking in response to a lesson, for example) and productively normative (students must produce texts with the physical technologies that are appropriate to the scholastic environment--pencil, computer, bubble sheet, desk, etc.), we are also reacting with uncertainty and skepticism when we see our students' bodies learning in ways we cannot quite police. We aren't sure what to do when we see them learning in ways we don't know how to teach. This, I think may be at the heart of the strain of fear I hear in much of the conversation concerning digital literacy and literacy crisis--we don't understand what is happening.

Our bodies are adaptive, evolutionary. Writing is, too. And it is time we allow our classrooms to be, too. In "Distracted by Digital Writing: Unruly Bodies and the Schooling of Literacy" (2015), Stacy Pigg asks us to think about the nature of attention, the body, and digitality--the newness of it and our response to it. Pigg writes:

Discourse that identifies a contemporary attention crisis often involves implicit assumptions about literacy in at least two senses: first, it supposes that digital literacy causes distraction, and, second, it proposes that this inability to focus leads to decreased reading and writing abilities in non-digital contexts.

Pigg calls this entire assumption into question, but what fascinates me, too, is her insightful choice here of the word "senses." This word points toward the heart of what attention demands--a union of both physical sense and intellectual sense. Much of western academic history has sought to distract students from their physical senses--mostly through regimented learning schedules, feeding times, and a systematic requirement that students ignore their bodies even while the body is asked to perform and produce. But intellectual sense--cognitive learning--is rendered secondary when physical sense is not attended to. Ask yourself: how well can you compose when you are hungry or cold? Really? What digital writing has demanded is that we all--students, teachers, administrators, all of us--pay attention to the physical, embodied, sensory experience of writing and its effects on the intellectual. It has broken us out of our routine by changing the literacy medium--it has asked us to evolved. It might be easy to assume that the tool (the digital medium) is causing the distraction. But it may be that in learning the new, we are using our bodies anew to perform an all-too-familiar intellectual task--learning and writing--in a way that is asking us to sense the world with a new touch. 

The keyboard, the smartphone screen, the ________(who knows what that blank will be filled with tomorrow that we will get to learn)--they are all new. The new takes time and focus to learn. Communicating our ideas authentically and efficiency is no longer simply a matter of "know thyself": it is also a matter of "know thy technology" and how to let it be an extension of both body and brain. And as our technology evolves with us, the barrier between brain/body/technological platform is (arguably) becoming ever-reduced, presenting us with exciting questions not about distraction but about the possibility of growing symbiotically with these technologies and presenting our attentions (our identities?) in emergently coherent ways.  

Perhaps what I am advocating for is tolerance of the learning curve as we all adapt both body and brain to the new tools of our trade. The old rigid methods don't work anymore. The old rigid methods have never worked. I think harmony of body and mind are necessary to adaptation of any kind. (Consider this fantastic, modern, and forward-thinking article by Fleckenstein, Spinuzzi, Rickly, and Papper (2008): The Importance of Harmony: An Ecological Metaphor for Writing Research.) So as we all learn how to think about literacy--how to simply use the new literacies and tools of literacy as they emerge--I would say, yes, let us be kind to one another. And kind to ourselves. Revolution may happen quickly, but evolution takes a bit more time.

We're all in this together,

Rachael

Makin' Paper

A few classes ago, my students and I began talking about grades and how we thought we should change "the system." This, in and of itself, was not unusual conversation. If anything, this was another simple exercise in self-affirming Us vs. Them rhetoric where our community college classroom was somehow attempting to pretend (at least momentarily) that we could escape the overarching design and demands of higher academia. There wasn't much danger of any illusory utopia being established for long, because anytime one of us began railing against "The MAN" with much fervor, the jackhammer (that has to be what it was--I'm not sure what else is that loud) of the ongoing construction next door reminded us of the material realities of our condition. A blocky, beige, decidedly uninspiring room in a building under repair. Those standardized and ugly desks that keep students "focused" through the ergonomic miracle of encouraging the most uncomfortable position possible. Fluorescent lighting, inevitably flickering.

So, I asked, "What do you think we should change about English classes?" (a vague question if ever there were one...)

"I think students should get paid for making good grades," she said. 

"Like, if you earn an A, maybe reduce tuition, or give a voucher for books or something."

"Yeah," he said. "Books and school are expensive. 

I'd be able to work a lot harder if I were getting paid."

"How much would it take?" I asked. "How much is an A worth to you?"

"How much is our book? $48? That's fair. Maybe $100. I need the money, so I would work for it."

This conversation didn't exactly surprise me--we all know college and books are expensive. But... $100? That's it? For A-level work. This was the student suggestion for improving their own situation, their own educational experience--get paid for good work. Reduce the economic burden of their condition so they can continue effectively producing. That doesn't seem crazy to me. It seems...fair.

Students are frequently labeled as many things--unmotivated, misguided, "adrift." Institutionally, we ask ourselves why students fail to write the "right way" or "enough" or "situationally" or with "rhetorical awareness." But it is hard to find the time, tools, and, yes, motivation to write when material and economic concerns mean composing (and paying for the composition class) simply becomes more work, unpaid at that. Our students are aware (very aware) of their stresses and the need to overcome them, with or without our help. I do think we, as teachers, generally want to be--should be--a helpful part of our students' push toward economic empowerment while many of us struggle with our own material positionalities within the academic landscape as well. 

a bit on Positioning Theory...

If this talk of money and materialism smacks of a somewhat socialist approach to higher education and how students and teachers are commodified as producers and consumers of product, maybe it should--I think it would be fair to say I believe we need to redistribute the workloads and wealth, fiscally, manually, and intellectually in order to have a fairer education system. A major reason I would argue this is that any education system that sees people--students and teachers, especially--only in "terms of work" fails to see people in "terms of relationship." What I mean by this most specifically, most tragically as far as the composition classroom is concerned, is that when we only focus on the work our students produce and what it offers institutionally (does it offer us, as institutional representatives of institutional values anything, well, valuable?), and when we only present ourselves to our students as institutional workers, the only value the person-to-person (human) relationship in the classroom retains is one of a labor exchange. The humanities and composition's place inside the humanities, becomes little more than a sad intellectual marketplace, devoid of personal care, warmth, and ethical commitment to the human being who has just composed their thoughts with/for you. 

In Bruce Horner's Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique, Horner argues that this way of thinking (or perhaps a semblance of it) is part of what leads some teachers to see the work of students as reductivist--less than work (not productive)--"evidence embodying the identified essential characteristics of their students" with many beginner students being represented "in terms of cognitive lack" (pg. 33). Furthermore, the overall culture of commodification that demands that both teachers and students write/work to be valuable (or, should I say, be valuable beings) has led to a disconnect in which teachers and students are "mapped" as "operating outside the material social processes" of the composition classroom they share, thus leaving the ethics of this exploitative and this alienating dynamic frequently "unchallenged" (pg. 34). Horner argues that the way out, as it were, would be "representing students as above all else workers, working on themselves, Composition, the academy, and the social generally" (pg. 35). I would agree, and I think our students would, too.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about my students' suggestion--its implications and greater effects. But I do think people generally need to feel valued, and this includes receiving fair pay and treatment for hard and valuable work. To not feel that for too long is just disheartening. 

We're all in this together,

Rachael

What's in a name?

I'm a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to honorifics.

I remember being in my M.A. program at a small, liberal arts college in Georgia, and it was perfectly acceptable to call the vast majority of professors by their first name. I couldn't bring myself to do it. My thesis advisor possessed a comforting traditionalist streak that made it seem completely appropriate (if not cool... I don't think he wanted to be cool, so that helped) to call him Doctor. But it wasn't just him: they were all "Doctor" or "Professor" to me, partly because they seemed to have--I don't know--earned it.

There was a single exception to this. Dan. Well, I think I called him "Dan" twice, if even that. But he was a compositionist and rhetorical theorist. Later, he would move to the university's Department of Education. There are many things I remember about Dan, all of them wonderful and vital to my education. But I, too, remember being confused about why it was that someone as hardworking, erudite, and professionally developed would be so comfortably carry a first name moniker. He didn't seem to mind, but I wasn't sure if his students (or his literary peers) knew that Dan was kindly allowing them to call him Dan. It was his professional philosophy to be approachable, not some downgraded version of a professional title that comp teachers use.

I think it was because of Dan--because I liked the pedagogy he represented--that I've was always allowed students to call me by whatever title suits them. Typically, they begin more honorifically--Professor or Ms. Burke--but then some of them will move to "Rachael." And in a way, I suppose I am allowing them to define my professional identity, aren't I? I used to get a bit uncomfortable when the title "Professor" was thrust in front of my name. Or when, somehow more impersonally, but more formally, my name was dropped altogether, and I became, simply, "Professor." For the most part, I try to maintain approachability, and wearing that title seemed too aloof. Maybe, though, I've been missing the point. See, done right--with kindness and respect and intellectual ethics--a professor professes...ideas, love, guidance. And I have been thinking lately about why it might be as important to embrace this title as much as I have applied it.

In Response to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching, Margaret Marshall discusses the way in which the professionalization of teaching and professorship has been somewhat a muddied concept. Marshall asserts that the composition teacher faces many pitfalls of identity crises when latching onto a firm position in professionalized academia. Among the forces that have made a professional teaching identity so difficult to firmly establish seems to have been the "normalization/feminization" of the professoriate, in general. As women increasingly gained access to education and increasingly became educators at higher rates, the professional status of professorship/teaching declined--it seems women weakened the profession of teaching (at least in terms of social clout) and this was most damning to the teaching of literacy. Marshall writes: "The tensions inherent in women doing work that was in many ways professional (and therefore inappropriate for women) created contradictions that had no easy resolutions, but that often led to teaching being seen as nonprofessional, merely "women's work" (pg. 14). I wish I thought Marshall were wrong, but I don't think she is. And I don't think this confusion of identity has stopped, nor do I think it is limited to my field.

Consider Jodi Kantor's 2013 New York Times article "Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity" in which Kantor reviews the academic/social practices that informed the curricular redesign of Harvard School of Business in an effort to address abysmally gender-biased admissions, hiring, and performance/review practices. This effort to address the norms of professionalization in a beacon school that often defines professional standards, too, "created contradictions that had no easy resolutions" (Marshall, pg. 14) when efforts were made to educate and professionalize toward gender equality. But, "the experiment ... brought unintended consequences and brand new issues" (Kantor, 2013). Maybe it was unexpected in a school of business where the standards of professionalization are presented as more culturally absolute; however, even a casual look beneath the surface reveals the way in which women's professional identity in business has been much less clearly defined (and not just approximal of the patriarchy--more complicated than that, as professional lives of all kinds tend to be.)  I think this article and the issues behind it should remind us that many of the forces that have shaped our department (language/composition) are present elsewhere. Many of us share the same professional concerns and struggles, though we may share a different title, and opening the dialogue across curricula and strata of education/professional tiers might not de-professionalize identities so much as help us refine borders for certain conversational contexts.

I think this is perhaps what it means to wear the identity of "professional" and even more so, "professor"--you bear the values of your avocation's culture, and when those values reflect upheaval or contradiction, you, too, must bear that as part of your identity. In composition studies and in education, we are, as Marshall points out, held responsible for the values of community and how those values are articulated, even if some of those values are unsavory or unclear--ideologies we push to change. Some of us get in the trenches--first name first. Some of us wear the names of our family. Some of us are Professors, Capital "P." Whatever we go with, it should represent respect.

So with that, I think I will leave you with this (the best professional advice I ever received from Dr. Bruce Gentry, Editor of the Flannery O'Connor Review, mentor, advocate, and friend):

"People might try to wipe their feet on your soul, but don't let them."

We're all in this together,

Rachael

Adrift

Let me tell you a story.

When I was in third grade, there was a rough and beautiful little girl in my small, underfunded class who was very hurt and who hurt others. She was being sexually abused at home. We would learn that a year later, but at the time—in third grade time—we didn’t know her hurt for what it was yet. All we saw was anger, that superficial emotion that makes it so hard to respond with clarity and care.

Her rage was uncontainable. And to us (we were small, too, remember), we weren’t sure what we were seeing. I suppose, with all of her hitting and belittling and intimidation, she could have been called a bully or a bitch, but…no. It would be so easy to be unkind to a girl like her. To let her boil in her own unkindness. But, then, what lesson have we learned?

One day, my third-grade teacher asked us all to sit in a circle on the floor, and she sat with us. She asked the hurt and angry little girl to sit with us, too. And my teacher said something that was bigger and kinder than any of us: 

“WE have a problem. She gets angry sometimes, and it makes US hurt. How can WE fix this, TOGETHER?”  

 

            With that, our relationships changed. We became responsible for helping fix what we did not break, and the angry and hurt little girl stopped seeming so…other. Hurt and anger was no longer a problem to be solved by her. It was our job to help and to use our hearts and minds—in a classroom—to figure out how we were going to solve the human damage that is the result of a very big, very adult, very messy world.

Did we solve the problem completely? No. But we learned how to talk about hard problems, and we learned that our solutions should be part of trying to solve hard problems, and we learned that there are teachable strategies for dealing with even overwhelmingly hard problems.

Most importantly, though, we learned that we all mattered.

Every Kid Needs A Champion 

My teachers cared. So I cared. The reason I always wanted to be a teacher was because I felt valued as a student. And it is difficult to overestimate how much this instillation of expectations and ethical values has been able to set my sails aright. This is my avocation, one I have maintained despite inconvenient moves, a ridiculously low paycheck, and an inability to succinctly describe my industry label in higher academia. It’s not that these things don’t matter or don’t inform the material, social, and emotional realities of what my life as a teacher is. It’s just that I know very clearly why I do what I do, and the why is rooted very deeply in my experiences as a student. And, of course, these experiences and relationships inform my unabashed love now for my students. Because here’s the thing: I am oh-so-aware that all it ever really would have taken along the way would have been one truly unethical, dismissive, oppressive, or low-balling teacher (or a series of uninterested, indifferent, and uninvolved teachers) to have utterly destroyed not only my student-hood and the possibilities, therein—but the joy, resilience, and purpose that would be part of my future trajectory.

Yet… I often wonder how I got so lucky. I know the greater state of systemic academia. And I am hurt. Angry.

This week I have been reading Richard Arum and JosipaRoksa’s Academically Adrift: LimitedLearning on College Campuses (2011). My first reaction to much of the book is, “Please tell me this isn’t true….” Sadly, I fear much of it is. Arum and Roksa’s discussion presents the landscape of academic “adriftness” primarily through a matrix of contrast:

1) Institutions place mission-statement and labor-market value on “critical thinking”: “But what if increased educational attainment is not equivalent to enhanced individual capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning?” (p. 2).

2) “The commercialization of university-based knowledge signals the university’s role as a driver of the economy” (p. 10).

3) “U.S. higher education does not have an adequate basis for establishing a consensus of moral values…” (p. 14), often leading to an ambiguously defined role of the university as a moral educator/partner.

4) “Patterns of Inequality in CLA Performance” (p. 37) suggesting a “pattern of persistent class [and racial/ethnic] inequality” (p. 39): “When students enter higher education academically disadvantaged, they remain unequal, or in some instances grow even further apart. […] This pattern suggests that higher education in general reproduces social inequality” (40).

With such a depressing “state of affairs,” it is easy to begin pointing fingers. The major claim seems to be that students don’t care about the “right things” because teachers, administrators, and the entire academic system doesn’t care about the “right things” in the right way. While Arum and Roksa are careful to note distinct variations on this general theme (for example, ways in which some sociodemographics are more/less likely to succeed on standardized tests and, therefore, be granted tiered access to specific colleges), the overarching theme is one of disconnect and missed opportunities.  

Let me be clear, Academically Adrift is insightful, if brutally so. But… adrift? This word seems hopeless, almost as if everyone has just given up because the problem is too big. I must ask (if only in my small way): can we try solving this problem together? Not to oversimplify, but I think my third grade teacher might have had it right.

*****

Think "Adrift" has to be a BAD thing? Oh, no...

Creative and Smart: "ADRIFT: Create your own Interactive Fiction" 

Beautiful and Nature-Wonderful: "Adrift"

*****

In their discussion of student-centered learning, Arum and Roksa note:

While students may view peers as virtually all-important, social activities do not constitute the totality of college experiences. […] It is faculty, within classrooms and beyond, who shape not only students’ overall development but also their commitment to continuing their education…. What faculty members do, and in particular whether they facilitate academic integration of students, is crucial for student development and persistence. (p.60)

I have long been a proponent of student-teacher integrated solutions, especially in higher academia. These students are old enough to vote and go to war? Why aren't we trusting them to help inform their own education? Our students have needs, problems, and minds of their own, and, if we fail to include them in designing the pedagogical framework that structures their own education, how can we ever expect them to feel fully invested in their academic success?

It’s time to stop asking them to work with us: let’s try working with them. Together. Tell them they matter. Tell them we can’t do this without them. Because we can’t. Let’s get on the floor if we have to, take responsibility, and try to fix some of this mess. Stop looking for a perfect solution for our students' problems and start letting our students know WE have a problem, and they are part of the solution.

We're all in this together,

Rachael

P.S. An afterthought on the word "adrift." It implies a loss at sea. Why would any student do this to him or herself--float away and drown with carelessness? Isn't it more likely that we struggle to breathe, to find land, and to survive? Struggle to find our way? Here is the more important question to me: if we lost a fellow shipmate at sea, wouldn't we search and rescue? If we cared for his/her body and soul, wouldn't we do our absolute best to find him/her? Wouldn't we expect him/her to be engaging in self-rescue at the same time? And wouldn't something have gone terribly, terribly wrong if either searcher or soul-adrift failed to fight to be found? What sadness and loss.

Why do we resign ourselves to calling students academically "adrift" when they are within our reach?