digital digs

Rebekah Nathan’s Freshman Year

If you haven’t read this book, in a nutshell it’s “50-something anthropology professor spends a year living in the dorms as a freshman at her university.” Yes, it was done before, about 25 years ago by Michael Moffat at Rutgers. Not surprisingly, some things have changed; some have not.

Overall, I would have to say the findings are not surprising, and yet there’s still an impact when one is confronted with them. Campus life is an intensified microcosm of the postmodern American cultural landscape: permeated with media, pop culture, and consumerism; fragmented and schizophrenic with its myriad menus of personal preferences; high speed with little or no time for reflection or rest; isolating (individualistic) with an ambivalent attitude toward any sense of community or certainly communal obligation; and ultimately orchestrated by a resolute capitalistic, marketplace logic.

What is represented here is that on some level students do want to learn. But learning is not a priority. There is significant mistrust between students and the institution (that’s a two-way street), which, as Nathan points out, goes back to the 18th century. This, in part, explains student reluctance to speak in class (especially in General Education classes). Student priorities lie with balancing social demands with academic success (the latter defined as getting the degree, GPA, and other trappings that lead to a desirable career).

Is any of this surprising? I don’t think so. It might sound a little jaded or cynical, but it also makes sense. The bottom line is that students don’t share values with faculty. And you get the sense here, and perhaps this is b/c Nathan is an anthropologist, that college is a rite of passage. It’s a ritual. And like all rituals, it’s value is more symbolic than real. That is, college is a set of gestures; it’s about going through the motions.

It’s not about learning something that actually sticks. Think back to your own undergraduate days. I can remember some moments of learning… sort of. However if I spent four years of my life in order to acquire the few random bits of information I still remember then I really was wasting my time. I mean the pieces of information I do remember—plots of novels, events from the Crusades, the plight of Native Americans, models of American Cold War foreign policy—aren’t of any use to me anyway. At least not in any direct way.

professing

A couple of thoughts on professing and professionalization:

1. The word “Profession” related originally to religious matters. A profession was a statement made before God; a professional was one who entered a religious order. This devotion to a “higher power” and a code of practice relates to my earlier remarks about modern-day professionals (e.g. doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.) and the notion of professional ethics.
2. However, it seems that the term professional has an almost equally long negative connotation. In the sense of someone who does something for gain rather than for higher reasons (e.g. a “professional politician”). Here I wonder if one might make a connection to Plato’s criticism of rhetoricians as opposed to philosophers. Rhetoricians make arguments without concern for the “Truth,” while philosophers devote themselves purely to the pursuit of Truth.
3. Once we secularize the academy to some degree with the rise of humanism, we can speak of academics who profess a devotion to Truth and a code of practice, and who eventually focus their devotion and practice into disciplines.
4. Thus we have the academic professor as a priest-class with a devotion to a higher truth looking down upon a more degraded, marketplace “professional,” who does his/her work for commercial purposes (regardless of whether or not s/he “loves” the job). This results in an obvious schism between the professor, who looks for at least a pretension to a devotion to knowledge from students, and students, who may or may not have a desire to pose as, or be, intellectual but are primarily concerned with their future.
5. It strikes me that one move is to imagine a third-space, the neglected/occluded other in this dialectic between the priest/philosopher/professor and the commercial professional (the “degraded” rhetorician). This is where I was going in my earlier post regarding the shaman/sorcerer as a professional. In my haste there, however, I hadn’t really thought about how the shaman/sorcerer relates to the priest/philosopher/professor. Though shaman/sorcerer treats his/her work as a trade, as commercial work, s/he cannot treat it strictly as a marketplace-driven professional. The shaman/sorcerer has obligations, an etiquette that must be observed in transactions with the “beyond.” However, these obligations are not like the “profession” made by the priest.

future imperfect

Two oddly paired articles on Inside HigherEd, Soltan's No Field, No Future and Jaschik's Don't Know Much About History. The former laments English's potential, post-disciplinary future; the latter reports a private, for-profit university's recent decision to eliminate its majors in English and history. In the latter, it's noted that the "problem" with liberal arts is that it does not directly prepare students for jobs. A familiar lament and one not without merit while simultaneously overlooking the potential value of an English degree.

Soltan's argument is also familiar. She essentially defines English as the study of the aesthetic qualities of literary texts. She emphasizes the importance of a "direct experience" with the text as a means for encountering "the complex truths literature discloses." Along the way, she asserts that historical and cultural analysis muddy the primary task of aesthetic investigation and weaken disciplinary identity.  She also contends that a focus on politics and materiality leads the discipline away from "great" literary works, which may not deal with such issues, to works of lesser aesthetic but more political-cultural relevance. Finally, she notes that while the discipline is willing to settle for analysis of more simplistic (even popular) culture, it settles on unnecessarily dense theory that only serves to obfuscate the direct experience she values.

In short, this is the New Critical argument redux and fifty years later. It is interesting though for the basic argument here. In order for English to have a future, it must have a clearly defined field. What has followed on New Criticism in English has been the emergence of theories and methods that do not come distincly and solely from literary studies: "theory," cultural studies, rhetoric and composition, etc. In the anxiety of a disappearing discipline, heightened by news such as that in the paired article, Soltan turns to the only available existing model for a strictly disciplinary literary identity, New Criticism.
 

web 2.0 in the high school classroom

Recently a student e-mailed me saying that she was doing research on Technorati, del.icio.us, and Flickr and wanted my opinion on what use such things could be in the English classroom. I thought I would answer her here, though certainly I am no expert on such matters. <a href="http://www.weblogg-ed.com/">Will Richardson</a>, for one, would be a far better resource for such a question. Not being, and having never been, a high school teacher, I can only imagine what such technologies might offer.

With that caveat... Basically the power of Web 2.0 applications is their ability to produce, disseminate, and tap into customizable feeds of regularly-updated information.  Thus, to use the ubiquitous English example, you could tap into the latest bookmarks, blog entries, and photos on Shakespeare using these technologies. In addition, if you or your students were doing your own blogging, bookmarking, or photography, you could use these technologies as a way of sharing your work.

So why would you want to do this? Well... part of the argument, a big part, for studying Shakespeare and other canonical authors is that they are still relevant today--people are still interested in their work, find that it connects to their lives, and want to reference it to make sense of the world around them. What better evidence of such things then looking in these places. Googling Shakesepare won't give you the same kind of response.

However, to venture a little further into the realm of new media, these technologies help us to experience and organize the flow of information across the web. Perhaps an English class should help us to be literate in the world of information in which we find ourselves (and maybe the particular brand of print literacy the discipline traditionally offers has lost some of its value in helping us to engage with the contemporary demands of literacy--see my previous post on this).

Anyway, I don't want to get into that debate right now. But I think the general question you have to ask is how is the activity of the English classroom relevant to the contemporary moment? These technologies give us a unique mechanism for tapping into that moment. If you can't answer that question about relevancy (and I figure that you can), then I would suggest there's a deeper problem afoot than how to use new technologies.

Technorati Tags: academics, new media, literacy

New media literacy and English education

In a “collegial” conversation, a question is raised:

“Do our majors really need a course in new media? Many of the students who took the course said they didn’t think they would ever use what they learned.”

A provocative question … it provokes me at least. Obviously the question is insulting, as when you would insinuate that any of your colleague’s areas is unnecessary. (E.g. do you really need a PhD to teach writing? Heard that one too, but haven’t we all.) I suppose one must “consider the source,” as they say. However, it is a rhetorical opportunity for investigating some of the premises that permit such a question to be offered.

One response is to look at the question of need. Do our students need to be able to translate a line from Chaucer into modern English? To identify themes in Donne’s sonnets? To understand Keats’ negative capability? To explain the difference between naturalism and realism? To explicate the references to the Bhagavad-Gita in Eliot?

When are they ever going to use that information?

The answer to those questions is the belief that a disciplinary education in English creates a general ability and understanding of literacy, as well as a “humanistic” knowledge of ethical, moral, social, and political issues.

On the other hand, new media is “just a technical skill,” just so much clacking away on a keyboard. Much like writing instruction is “just practical training,” window-washing as one of my colleagues once termed it, a chore.

What our larger discipline cannot see and probably will never understand is that its traditional education cannot and does not produce this illusory “general literacy” and that its faith in this illusion is part of the ideological work it performs for the state, along with its “humanistic” indoctrination.

Quite clearly new media is not free of ideology. However, no one is making claims for the universality of new media literacy. To the contrary, the whole point is to ground investigations into literacy practices in material and technological contexts. In its critique of our faith in literacy, new media opens questions about humanistic values and knowledge. From its perspective beyond the limits of print, it offers a new opportunity to investigate critically our past literacy practices.

The illusion of the universality of print literacy is quite visible in the new media classroom. English majors and graduate students struggle to comprehend new media composition. Indeed English professors struggle to understand these texts: “if I can read ______ (fill-in some notoriously difficult author of your choice), how come I can’t understand Web Designing for Dummies?” Of course, if you think about it, there are plenty of texts and literacy practices an education in English does not prepare one to read. However, such texts and practices are not part of the discipline…right?

Well… it’s an interesting point. If there’s a body of knowledge that is basically alien to nearly everyone in an English department, that confounds the literacy skills English provides, and that seems counter to the traditional values of the discipline, then it is probably not part of the discipline.

Wait a second… I forget. Are we talking about new media, critical theory, or professional writing?

Think about it from the perspective of students preparing to be high school English teachers (the majority of our students). They might ask:

What does understanding Web 2.0 practices have to do with teaching English?
What does building a web page have to do with teaching English?
What does Derrida’s deconstruction of Plato have to do with teaching English?
What does learning to write for multiple audiences with different needs have to do with teaching English?
What does a Marxist critique of the culture industry have to do with teaching English?

And it’s difficult to answer these questions when you think that understanding English means being able to identify a line from Shakespeare by play, scene, and character (which is the type of thing that defined English where I was an undergraduate).

Of course our students are going to have difficulty seeing the value of such an education. Of course they will when 90% of the faculty teaching in their major can’t see the value of it either.

In short, such a question, if posed, must be posed in a context and from a perspective that makes seeing the value of new media almost impossible. Some might believe they have some missionary task to explain and teach such things. Obviously this is our job with students, but with colleagues, I don’t think so. The question is rhetorical, unanswerable as it is framed, a statement of conviction.

It’s not worth answering.

Technorati Tags: academics, new media, literacy

Directing Professional Writing

I'm taking on the role of director of professional writing, following on my colleague David who's done the job since I've been here. Our program is in the midst of some changes. This is our fourth year and we're steady at 25-30 majors. However, we will be getting an influx of Elementary Education students taking our courses (70-80 a semester), which is going to top out our ability to offer classes. There have also been some changes in our department's graduate courses that will make it easier for those students to take writing classes.

In any case, we continue to think about our program's direction:

1. Our main "selling point" is that the degree will give you a competitive advantage over liberal arts majors for pursuing careers in writing, editing, and publishing because the curriculum gives you direct study and practice of a broad range of professional practices while also leaving students enough room to gain a well-rounded liberal arts education as well.

2. Most of our students come in with a primary interest in creative writing. We want to support that interest, but we also want to introduce them to some other writing possibilities, including some more "realistic" career options. That said, we view developing creative abilities as a key part of professional writing.

3. Cortland is a rural NY state college. Most of our students come from rural upstate NY, small upstate cities (like Syracuse or Buffalo), or suburban Long Island. Those from Long Island may be able to commute to NYC for a job, but the others would have to look beyond their homes if they want to pursue a career in writing. This has been some concern for us, as many students express reticence about moving to a "big city."

So we sit at a crossroads. We've spent a few years serving multiple masters, working at cross-purposes to some degree.

Technorati Tags: academics, writing

the "professional" in professional writing

Typically, the adjective "professional" in Professional Writing is read as job preparation. For some (especially parents of students) this is a positive; for others, like many faculty in the humanities, not so much. For the latter, job preparation comes at the curriculuar expense of the humanistic/liberal arts education they value. I've written about this before.

However, I was thinking the other day how this reaction points to the way in which the term professional has been degraded, and perhaps not without good reason. Traditional professionals, like doctors, teachers, and lawyers, certainly no longer garner the respect they once did. Each of these professions, like my own academic profession, has been enveloped in the capitalist, marketplace logic that holds sway over nearly all of our culture. It used to be that a professional didn't perform his/her duties "for the money." That instead, professionals operated by a different ethical code and motivation.  Maybe that's pollyanna and was never really the case, but certainly the contemporary professional environment is far more defined by monetary concerns than it ever was in the past.

So while I would not want to ignore the current material-ideological context, at least in terms of the title of our program, I'm thinking of a more idealistic notion of the "professional writer." The professional writer, then, does not write "for the money" (though obviously he/she makes a living by writing). Maybe I just don't have what it takes, but I've never been very good at writing something that I didn't believe in. It doesn't feel good, and I don't think I could sustain a career doing such work.

Now one could think about this in terms of a "higher calling" that suggests some ethical and political commitments (whatever they may be). That's not quite my style. I prefer something a little darker, monstrous, material: a commitment to writing "itself," as the material unfolding of thought. I suppose one could Romanticize this as a profession of "Dark Arts." Deleuze and Guattari write of writing as sorcery. That works ok for me. However, I think of Derrida recognizing that writing technologies predate the development of history, science, and philosophy and plays an integral role in their development. Writing is both inside and outside human civilization; inside and outside of consciousness.

What does it mean to profess writing then? To commit oneself to an unnameable, prehistoric, uncivilized process? I suppose it has largely meant to attempt to domesticate writing, though for some it has certainly meant to follow it into the wild. Like the shaman/sorcerer, the recluse writer lurks at the edge of society, a broker with an external force; normal folk approach the door with trepidation: "Please, work your magic for me." The writer accepts payment but ultimately is not beholden to the dictates of the marketplace but rather the covenants that bind him/her to outside. There are rules... an etiquette to be observed.

Ok, maybe that sounds over the top, some obfuscating mumbo jumbo, but think about Ulmer's approach to this in Internet Invention: the writer is the donor, the tester, who in turn faces his/her own test.

Technorati Tags: academics, writing