Closing up the blog ...

Dear Folks:

Finish well, next week!

Closing up the blog,
-Prof. Graban

Hope(ing) for The Future: Your Essays as Interventions (Repeat Post from 11/22)

Folks, as you draft your final critical essays, I encourage you to remember one thing: your essays are part of the solution. In fact, underlying most of our in-class discussions (though, apparently, not always the first thing we tend to remember) have been various ways that scholars, teachers, writers, and activists have changed people's minds through theory-building.

About half the class has realized this, and I saw some great energy in the way you responded to TiRP 7. The other half of the class may still be struggling to see where your own ideas have actually been changed, or even where ideas could be changed in a positive way about "writing in the university." I don't see "struggle" as a bad thing or a failure, but I think it's fair for you to assume that, if you're still repeating the same old adages or binaries you came into this course with in August (mine/theirs, us/them, private/public, grammar/content, etc.), then you're probably not building theory far enough; you're probably not allowing your own thinking to be made deeper, or to be transformed, since transformation often occurs when you can transcend a binary way of thinking just long enough to suggest other ways of thinking through it.

Changing people's minds is what I invite you to do, and in fact, it's what some of you have been equipping yourselves to do all along, slowly and incrementally throughout the semester. Keep it up for the next couple of weeks, and realize that "keeping it up" will require something different from each of you:

• For some of you, it might require you to do background research into an era, a chronology, or a term (e.g., "capitalism," "activism," "public intellectualism," etc.), so that you can be certain you are taking up the theorist's definition of the term in a knowledgeable way, and not stereotypically.
• For some of you, it might require that you reread your sources to objectively extract the writer's main claims, whether or not those main claims align with what you think, perceive, or believe.
• For some of you, it might mean spending more time contextualizing your claims by showing your reader(s) where they come from, rather than just assuming they are everyone's reality (i.e., mention full names and titles of authors/pieces that have influenced you, consider your own biases and weaknesses, point to the interpretive context you are in and whether it values or de-values theory-building, etc.).
• For some of it you, it might mean remembering that you are dealing with claims, not facts (i.e., most of the statements you have made or are planning to make are not purely objective "facts," but rather critical "claims" that rely on your weaving bits of evidence together in order to make them).
• For some of you, it might mean giving evidence for those claims from what you read, rather than assuming that everyone else will agree with them because they are good.
• For some of you, it might mean realizing that language is neither innocent nor pure, and that each time you take up or forward a term, readers are relying on you to make clear how you are using it.

For our final class together, I'll offer a review of specific terms, readings, and concepts that you want to have clarified, so please bring sources that you know are specific to the argument you are trying to make in the Final Critical Essay. We will also spend most of our class session in a guided peer workshop of those essays -- there is more for us to try to understand in terms of presentation and genre, and I suspect that most of you will feel comfortable with some aspects of essay-ing, but others may want more guidance in terms of pushing the genre more towards critical work rather than only personal work. In short, we will focus on the section titled "About the Essay" on the assignment sheet.

Come prepared with drafts and questions, and send any questions my way before then!
-Prof. Graban

Cultural Crises of Identity: In and Out of Composition

In the "The Stuart Hall Project", noted Jamaican-English cultural theorist Stuart Hall discusses the progression of the ideas that define culture and identity in the modern world, across the twentieth century. The very classification of Hall as "Jamaican-English" (My designation, not his) is a testament to this complexity. "In a modern society, when I ask people where they are from, I now expect to get five answers," states Hall, who argues that identity in the modern world is built within a framework of "complex hybridity". In reference to the identity crisis of multiculturalism, Hall states that the immigrant must always grapple with the following two questions: “Who am I? Where do I belong?” The most compelling piece of Hall's argument on identity and culture -- and what makes it especially relevant in the context of composition pedagogy -- is the idea that identity is largely defined by a sense of ownership (or lack thereof) and a desire to belong. When this sense of belonging and ownership is disrupted, it creates a crisis of identity, which forms a conception of self in reaction to that issue of ownership. This disruption, the developments and complexities that emerge from it, and its relevance to composition, are what I intend to focus on in this work.

In Baldwin’s Essay, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” Baldwin describes the crisis created when the “communal” identity robs the “private” identity of something that is fundamental to its own understanding of itself – in this case, language. What results from this is a sense of displacement, in which the private identity is told by the overarching group that it is not legitimate (in the Baldwin Essay, that “Black English” is a mere dialect). If we go even further, what we see is a politics of power at play, in the creation and separation of a “communal” and “private” identity, that renders one experience inherently superior, and relegates the other to a second class, displaced status. In the light of its rejection, the private has to define what it is and what it will be. According to the ideas and methodology of Stuart Hall, Baldwin’s essay represents a reaction against the communal identity, in which Baldwin defends and defines the relevance and legitimacy of his private identity (being Black in America), and out of that, creates something entirely new. It is an assertion of everything that makes the private community unique, and different from the larger culture. This moment is what Stuart Hall calls “the deepest crisis of identity”; when the idea is met, on the side of the private, that it will never be fully assimilated or accepted into the communal identity, nor will it be rid of what makes it separate from that larger culture, what you start to see is a culture that is built upon and defined by those differences, and whose voice is an expression of them. When Baldwin makes statements such as the following, we this definition of the Private identity take place: 

“the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle- class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing--we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of style.” 

In stating this, he is claiming the legitimacy of the Black identity in America for himself. He is not attempting to appease the communal; but rather, asserting in its face the strength and power of the private, noting its ability to influence and impact the larger, and how its power to do so is based in what makes it different from that larger group.

The implication of this for composition is that we cannot have a pedagogy that is homogenized and monocultural in its design. In our post-modern society, we should be careful not to teach composition in a way that emphasizes the commonplaces and values of one discourse community over another. If we do so, we risk declaring certain experiences to be more legitimate than others. Instead, we must educate individuals on the commonplaces and expressions of certain discourse communities, paying respect to audience and intention, in such a way that allows them to express their innate, native voice in the process.

Furthermore, we live in a time where identity is more fragmented and complex then it has ever been. As Hall says, identity is constantly evolving, and is an "endless, ever-unfinished conversation." Therefore, our pedagogy of composition should be reflective insofar that it emphasizes attention on the individual, diverse components that make up our post-modern conception of identity. As Hall states, the different "routes" and pathways that form our life experiences dictate our sense of self, and and an understanding of these particularities is crucial to a personal understanding of voice. In so doing, we pay a proper understanding to the role that individual identity plays in composition, and to the diverse, complicated ideas that Hall describes as making up our post-modern sense of self.

Hope(ing) for The Future: Your Essays as Interventions

Folks, as you draft your final critical essays, I encourage you to remember one thing: your essays are part of the solution. In fact, underlying most of our in-class discussions (though, apparently, not always the first thing we tend to remember) have been various ways that scholars, teachers, writers, and activists have changed people's minds through theory-building.

About half the class has realized this, and I saw some great energy in the way you responded to TiRP 7. The other half of the class may still be struggling to see where your own ideas have actually been changed, or even where ideas could be changed in a positive way about "writing in the university." I don't see "struggle" as a bad thing or a failure, but I think it's fair for you to assume that, if you're still repeating the same old adages or binaries you came into this course with in August (mine/theirs, us/them, private/public, grammar/content, etc.), then you're probably not building theory far enough; you're probably not allowing your own thinking to be made deeper, or to be transformed, since transformation often occurs when you can transcend a binary way of thinking just long enough to suggest other ways of thinking through it.

Changing people's minds is what I invite you to do, and in fact, it's what some of you have been equipping yourselves to do all along, slowly and incrementally throughout the semester. Keep it up for the next couple of weeks, and realize that "keeping it up" will require something different from each of you:

• For some of you, it might require you to do background research into an era, a chronology, or a term (e.g., "capitalism," "activism," "public intellectualism," etc.), so that you can be certain you are taking up the theorist's definition of the term in a knowledgeable way, and not stereotypically.
• For some of you, it might require that you reread your sources to objectively extract the writer's main claims, whether or not those main claims align with what you think, perceive, or believe.
• For some of you, it might mean spending more time contextualizing your claims by showing your reader(s) where they come from, rather than just assuming they are everyone's reality (i.e., mention full names and titles of authors/pieces that have influenced you, consider your own biases and weaknesses, point to the interpretive context you are in and whether it values or de-values theory-building, etc.).
• For some of it you, it might mean remembering that you are dealing with claims, not facts (i.e., most of the statements you have made or are planning to make are not purely objective "facts," but rather critical "claims" that rely on your weaving bits of evidence together in order to make them).
• For some of you, it might mean giving evidence for those claims from what you read, rather than assuming that everyone else will agree with them because they are good.
• For some of you, it might mean realizing that language is neither innocent nor pure, and that each time you take up or forward a term, readers are relying on you to make clear how you are using it.

For our final class together, I'll offer a review of specific terms, readings, and concepts that you want to have clarified, so please bring sources that you know are specific to the argument you are trying to make in the Final Critical Essay. We will also spend most of our class session in a guided peer workshop of those essays -- there is more for us to try to understand in terms of presentation and genre, and I suspect that most of you will feel comfortable with some aspects of essay-ing, but others may want more guidance in terms of pushing the genre more towards critical work rather than only personal work. In short, we will focus on the section titled "About the Essay" on the assignment sheet.

Come prepared with drafts and questions, and send any questions my way before then!
-Prof. Graban

(Dis)Illusionment and Higher Education

Growing up, I always expected college to be fun. I could take the classes I wanted to take. I would be on my own. I would be an adult for all intents and purposes. I did as I was told as best I could throughout my public school education in my youth. It was not until mid-high school that I started to critically examine the school system. In Spellmeyer’s “Inventing the University Student,” he addresses the use of mass education as a system to create the perfect, upstanding citizen. It helps make people nationalistic and proud of their country, which if effective for the continuation of that country. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances and a pitiful attempt of the school system at creating a comforting environment for its students, I began to see the school system as a factory churning out robotic adults that were supposedly ready for higher education.

As a writer, I did not see the potential of a college degree in writing until about halfway through my junior year of high school. Writing was just something I did and loved doing. I thought college was about getting a degree to get a good job. However, my reading material began addressing things that I had never thought of before, and writing slowly began to take over my life. Before I knew it, it was a part of my identity and what I wanted to pursue in college.

Writing in a university and for a university are two different things for me. Writing in a university is equivalent to writing in a point in my life, whereas writing for a university is the assignments that I am graded on. When I first started out in college, I tried to write what the professor was looking for specifically. In some classes even now, I do that. After my first workshop, though, I began to branch out and play with the words that spill out of my head. Writing for class did not necessarily have to be something straightforward and boring. It could and would be just as beautiful and crafted as a novel I hope to publish.

As Spellmeyer points out, “truth, facts, and knowledge are the property of specialists” (42). Facts and figures were things that I was all too comfortable with and yet not comfortable with at all. I could ace a statistics exam without studying or memorize dates for history, but what I loved was to bend the rules. I like to exist in a world that has strict rules but also the feelings, opinions and intuitions that make life interesting. For me, as both a writer and an individual, facts and knowledge make the structure while feelings and opinions color it in. The balance of those two came with my writing, and being in the Creative Writing major helped to identify that. Classes and grades provided the structure I craved while the writing itself was the creative outlet I needed to survive. My best grades are in my creative writing classes and the worst in the classes that I do not have a chance of expressing myself.

In a way, writing became its own beast in college. Instead of an activity or an assignment, writing became like breathing for me. College was chaos. There are so many people that I do not know and so many cultures and backgrounds that I have never been confronted with before that the culture shock was a little rough at first. I found a community of creative people, and being around them both exited and scared me. Besides the people, new scenarios that I had never expected occurred and changed a lot of who I am as a person. The only constant thing about me became my writing. A lot of people write for catharsis, but I began to write for structure. It became a framing device that helped me focus and sort out my mentality about all of the changes that I was going through.

Spellmeyer talks about the mediators of domains in the world. Everything has someone watching over it, critiquing it, making sure that everything plays by their rules. Even writing has that.  Organizations have opinions and goals in mind, and policing writing can be a way for them to do so. They begin to decide what makes a writer “good” and throw away the rest. Colleges are one of many systems to do this. However, writing is not necessarily just a public thing. Writing, at least for me, is the baring of my soul, of who I am, onto paper. The more I write, the more I realize that. It becomes a way for me to understand myself better. Even if someone says that my writing is not “good” writing, it does not change the fact that it is who I am.

College was something different for me. It was a chance to spread my wings and become a better version of myself, and I like to think that I’ve accomplished that. As a writer, I’ve learned so much in college. I have learned to know myself better and to use my writing for my benefit, not for others. Maybe that was not the point of higher education, but it is one of many lessons that I will be taking away from it. Being a writer is synonymous to being Madelyn for me, and it is more important than anything else I think I will ever accomplish.

Postmodernish

My relationship as a writer here at Florida State University has moved in step with my evolution as a student. For me, differentiating between writing, learning, and education is a false pretense; they are the same thing, they are all connected, and they all have the same end. In my case, I came into the university with the idea that writing was going to be my education. I was an English major, and I approached writing from the perspective that to write well was a necessary part of being a well-rounded student and professional. Because I did not have a specific career in mind, I never approached higher education as a step on the way to a guaranteed job or specific career, but rather education as a means to equip the individual to approach any kind of future work.

In this vein, the English major was a path to develop 'critical thinking, communication, and writing' skills that were seemed to be applicable regardless of my career choice. However, as my time here as progressed, my relationship with writing has entirely changed. Although it is still the case that writing is a valued skill that is useful in nearly professional environment, to pigeon-hole it as simply a skill; as a means of professional advancement, is to undermine the real significance of the writer at the university. Writing, as I approach it now, is a way of creating change in myself and the environment I live in. Writing in the university for me is the pursuit of personal critical literacy, and a means of developing and cultivating myself as a better, more responsible student and citizen. The role of writing in the university is equivalent to the role of education in society, and the end of both should be to produce critically and culturally literate members of the world.

  

This idea of education is grounded in the notion expressed in James Berlin's essay, "English Studies, Work, and Politics In the New Economy". Berlin, a noted cultural theorist, makes the claim that "the work of education in a democratic society is to provide critical literacy (224)," for students both at their time at the university and afterwards. In the piece, Berlin makes the point that the American system of Higher Education has undergone a transition from a Fordist model -- where education, skills, and students, were standardized, and produced as a part of an "economy of scale" -- to a Post-Fordist model of education, where decentralization has occurred, and workers are expected to cultivate a broad skill set, which can be relevant in multiple careers. The implication of this change for education -- and for writing -- is that for a long time in the 20th Century, this Fordist system of economics and education was representative of a "social contract" that students entered into when they attended a university.

The 'deal' was, that if they went to college and got a degree in something, they would have an all but guaranteed, well-paying job in a field of their choosing. However, as we entered the post-Fordist era of flexible accumulation, and companies began to expect different things of their universities and the students they produced, this contract became seriously complicated. More and more students have enrolled in institutions of higher education, only to find that the 'deal' in place was not what their parents promised them. In this post-Fordist, modernist vision of education, skills that writing emphasizes -- such as critical thinking and written/oral communication -- are valued for their relevance in the workplace. This, Berlin states, is the basis of the Modernist curriculum for institutions of higher education -- where writing is simply a means to acquire the individual and interpersonal skills needed to succeed in the workplace.

However, Berlin's extends this Post-Fordist model into a new Post-Modernist look that complicates the Modernist view of Higher Education even further. In this new delineation, the acquiring of soft skills, such as communication and teamwork, is not the whole purpose of higher education nor is it required for success in the workplace. In fact, to limit the intention of a Post-Modernist education to simply the workplace is to miss the point entirely. Instead, in Berlin's Post-Modernist framework, universities should, in addition to those aforementioned skills, teach the following: 

"The abstract and systematic teaching needed for the dispersed conditions of post modern economic, linear, and narrowly empirical mode of the modern. Students need a conception of the abstract organizational patterns that affect their work lives, indeed, comprehensive conceptions of the patterns that influence all of their experiences. In addition, students deserve an education that prepares them to be critical citizens of the nation that now stands as one of the oldest democracies in history."

In this definition, I have found my place as a writer in the university. Just as Berlin later says in his piece, the great worth of the English degree -- and by extension, the practice of writing -- is that it trains you in this mode of critical literacy whose outright objective is not necessarily to secure skills which align with a job, but rather, to give you the ability to be an effective agent and participant in the world we live in. Writing in the university to me should be a form of action. No matter the subject, it shouldn't be relegated as a means of assessment, but should be treated as means of cultivating a mindset that advances that person as a critically and culturally literate member of society, no matter what their chosen field is. Writing should be an arena of cultural contact zones and liminality; a place where norms are challenged and individuals are given the means to articulate their own experiences. In this way, rhetoric, identity, pedagogy, and community are all given a new breath: they are the arenas in which critical literacy occurs and derives meaning, and writing is the means of arrival at this new state.

As Berlin states in the following passage: "Education exists to provide intelligent, articulate, and responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social, and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community as a whole." In light of this, my role as a writer and a student in the 21st Century Post-Modern university has been, and will continue to be, a striving towards an ideal of character and thought that will enable me to apply my skills in the most effective way possible, no matter the task, arena, or circumstance.

The Goals of Writing in a University

I would in all measures consider myself a writer. To be specific my genre of writing is fiction, however the role of writer changes when I am put in the university setting. Here I have no genre, I am being taught various methods and forms of writing.

From this perspective it seems as if I am garnering multiple skills, but in reality I am given surface level instruction. I am taught enough to get me in the door and even that isn’t fully from my level of skill. The university I go to is highly recognized and the name alone can get you a meeting. Sad, but true. Spellmeyer in Inventing the University student mentions how public schools are seen as the  “inoculation of normative values and behaviors rather than the dispersal of knowledge”(40). Which in part holds some truth, students move on to college with not all the aspects or techniques needed and professors in college do not take the time to elaborate on these methods. So in turn students’ dirty little secret is that they are technically half-baked. I for one had a really good AP English teacher, but I did suffer and still do with misplaced commas and comma splices. Entering college I was red flagged on this, but never actually taught how to better myself.

As aforementioned a writer in university differs from one’s self-acknowledgment as a writer. In the world of academia, writing changes to suit the needs of the teacher and the environment that we are in. Many students write in a way that is needed to pass their classes. To create in the university one must go through an “untiring labor of ascetic self-suppression and refashioning” (Spellmeyer 41). At a university you do not become a university student but a student of the university. And in this formation we are bombarded with specific desires as Teresa Redd in “Tryin to make a dolla outa fifteen cent”: Teaching composition with the Internet at an HBCU points out, technology is overwhelmingly “western, and white-[as seen] from the Standard English grammar” (365). The university student is given one idea and role as right, diminishing any other within in them.

For the university I am but another students paying my dues for an ‘education’ that may or may not get me a job. Graduating with a degree no longer holds power over the workforce. We are in the same boats as others struggling upstream towards a dream of a job.