Sep 24, 2015

Politics of Literacy & Social Justice (Part II)

Dear All,

I sent you away from yesterday's class with a question about "aim," and I think that will be a useful discussion for us to take up next week. You may remember our filling in this timeline so as to fully understand the context for our readings:

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Kinneavy -- writing from a point on our timeline that was pretty well contextualized within public and civic activism -- argued that we didn't have a developed enough theory of aim, especially to account for the kinds of genres he assumed students needed to (or desired to) write.

From another vantage point on our timeline, Royster argued that we didn't have a developed enough theory of voice -- we didn't have a "symphonic" enough paradigm -- to fully account for "hybrid" writers and scholars like herself.
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From their vantage point on the timeline, Kirsch and Ritchie argued that we didn't have a developed enough research ethic for observing the unobservable, for writing the unwrite-able subjects, and for ensuring that oppressive or dominant views don't overtake the act of observing. Flynn argued like Kirsch and Ritchie, and in fact her piece was one of the catalysts for theirs.

All three of these arguments are at the heart of our considering Literacy and Social Justice as a "politics" of writing. But for Kinneavy, aim remained the principal question around which other questions revolved, such as "Who can write?" "Who has the right to write?" and "What can/should writing be able to achieve?"

For that reason, we'll tackle it again next week, paying attention to whether and how social justice literacy has more to do with available voices, genres, readers, or paradigms. What, according to our theorists, seems most to determine its success?

Here are some related questions we may take up:
  • How do we deal with notions of authority and belonging (i.e., who has the right to write)?
  • How do we deal with boundaries (e.g., racial, gendered, ethnic, classed, etc.) -- what are their limitations or possibilities?
  • What is the usefulness of concepts like "resistance," "marginalization," and "community" in determining who has the right to write?

Last week's terms will still be relevant (please be sure to capture them on your syllabus):
  • community
  • cross-boundary discourse
  • feminist/feminism
  • identity/identification
  • ideology
  • literacy
  • marginalized/marginalization
  • resistance
  • voice

Finally, a note on the readings:
  • We'll read Cushman's and Enoch's essays in their entirety.
  • I am excerpting Prendergast's "Race: The Absent Presence" (pp. 36-46), although you are always welcome to read the entire piece.
  • I am also excerpting Keating's "Interrogating Whiteness" (pp. 901-2, 910-16), but feel free to read it all the way through if you desire. 

Have a great week,
-Prof. Graban

Sep 17, 2015

Politics of Literacy & Social Justice: Guiding Concepts & Questions

Dear Folks,

Last evening's class ended on an extremely compelling note: that the idea of "amassing available resources with an audience in mind" applies both to writers and to readers; that authorship and readership are both enabling and constraining. There's much mental work that goes into fictionalization of one another, and this is the intellectual activity of writing that -- from decade to decade -- is either believed or disbelieved, popular or not popular, heralded or doubted. If "audience" is actually an abstraction, then how should we abstract writer, writing, or text?

[photo credit: ZSmith]
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[photo credit: ZSmith] 
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In Doug Hesse's argument for getting "imagination" back into the curriculum, it seems there's quite a lot at stake for him, and so one possible way for us to bring closure to the "Politics of Self vs. Other" is to realize how this issue is intrinsic to epistemological debates (which, in turn, lead to debates about whether we should even be teaching writing in colleges at all) and how complicated these labels become: Does cognitivism best explain how writers write? Is it even possible/useful anymore to try to distinguish between expressivist and constructivist approaches to writing? Is all writing essentially pragmatic, given that it attends to the needs of individuals within communities?

This seems even more relevant to me, now, in the age of "The Common Core," which has some critics appreciating the language used to articulate these educational standards, but skeptical that the methods for delivering these standards are effective, imaginative, or even based on a liberal arts paradigm. Where is invention as a valued epistemology in The Common Core?

*   *   *   *

Next week, we venture into "Politics" of Literacy & Social Justice. As before, here are some key concepts for you to think about in advance, also assigned for TIRP #3:
  • community
  • cross-boundary discourse
  • feminist/feminism
  • identity/identification
  • ideology
  • literacy
  • marginalized/marginalization
  • resistance
  • voice

Here are some guiding questions for us over the next two weeks -- questions posed by Kirsch, Ritchie, Royster, Kinneavy, and Flynn:
  • How are literacy and access related (i.e., how does one depend on the other, or stem from the other, or ensure the other)?
  • What is the theoretical or practical reach of concepts like "resistance," "marginalization," and "community"? What can they achieve individually, or together?
  • How do we deal with boundaries (e.g., racial, gendered, ethnic, classed, etc.) -- what are their limitations or possibilities?
  • How do we deal with notions of authority and belonging (i.e., who has the right to write)?
  • If writing achieves civic aims, what guarantees those aims?

A note on the readings:
  • Please read Kirsch and Ritchie's "Beyond the Personal" and Royster's "When the First Voice Your Hear ..." in their entirety
  • I am excerpting Kinneavy's "Basic Aims of Discourse" (pp. 129-30, 134-38), although it is not very long, so you're absolutely encouraged to read the entire thing.
  • I'd like us to read Flynn's "Composing as a Woman" (pp. 581-84, 586-91) instead of Ritchie and Boardman's "Feminism in Composition," because I think Flynn's piece follows Royster's quite well.


Have a great week,
-Prof. Graban

Sep 10, 2015

Politics of Self vs. Other (Part II)

Dear All:

Here is the link to our Google Drive space where we started working with key terms during yesterday's class. After next week's class, I'll capture this document, turn it into a handout, and upload it to Canvas for our continued use.

The following concepts will still be relevant for us next week, and we will have a chance to discuss some of the terms we didn't get to discuss today, such as "critical pedagogy," "Current-Traditional," and "heteroglossia."
  • audience
  • cognitivism
  • critical pedagogy
  • Current-Traditional
  • discourse
  • expressivism
  • heteroglossia
  • pragmatism
  • social constructivism

Our guiding questions remain the same:
  • What role can cognitivism play in helping writers process ideas? In helping writers know what to write about?
  • How much can expressivism determine how writers craft their public ethos -- whether on the page, or in the world?
  • In crafting that public ethos, what identities or whose identities are being expressed?
  • What becomes of the role of reader, writer, audience, or text when we begin to consider writing in these terms: expressive and cognitive vs. constructivist?

And here is how I'll excerpt our essays by Doug Hesse and Marguerite Helmers:
  • For Hesse's "The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies," please read pp. 31-35, 45-50. 
  • For Helmers' "Media, Discourse, and Public Sphere," please read pp. 437-39, 448-54

You are absolutely welcome and encouraged to read these two essays in their entirety, but I will only expect you to have read these segments. We'll read Walter Ong's essay and Ede and Lunsford's essay (both in Cross-Talk) in their entirety.

Have a great week,
-Prof. Graban


TIRP 2



Positively Relative


In Patricia Bizzell’s essay, “William Perry and Liberal Education,” she examines and analyzes Perry’s view of cognitive development of young adults going through a liberal arts education. She first discusses the three stages Perry outlines in his model: Dualism, Relativism, and Commitment in Relativism. Each is a particular mindset that Perry believes undergraduates go through in their college career, beginning with the idea of absolutes and authority and ending with a recognition of the lack of absolutes in the world, but “knowing the world means understanding what has been rendered important”. Bizzell continues to argue that, though the model Perry presents is important for the academic community, it is not value-neutral, meaning it would not occur without being prompted by higher education and instructors. Value-neutral occurrences would be things such as Piaget’s childhood model, stages that arguably take place due to genetics and consistently occur across culture barriers. Bizzell states that the instructor’s role in leading young adults through the three stages of Perry’s model is a value-positive experience.

One of the first papers I wrote when coming to Florida State was for LIT 2230, Introduction to Global Literature. We were expected to come up with a theoretical term based on the readings we had completed in class and use the novels read throughout the semester to support the term. I remember being introduced to the idea for our final paper on syllabus day. It was my first semester in college, and the thought of trying to create a theoretical term to be used to analyze texts terrified me. I was still in the stage Perry considers to be Dualism. Even with being a Creative Writing major and favoring essays over exams, I still thought of questions having a right answer and a wrong answer. During that first semester, I began my transition into Relativism, realizing that there are not only two sides to an issue. I still viewed my professor in a Dualistic mindset in that he was the “Authority,” as Perry puts it. I did as I was told and did not consider going to my professor for guidance outside of class hours.

I remember procrastinating to the last possible moment before trying to come up with a theoretical term that would work with the literature we had covered in class. The terms I remembered studying were Ideological State Apparatuses, which are structures that hold together the idea of community and culture in people’s minds, and used examples such as the media and school systems. The other term I focused on was Imagined Communities, which are groups people think they belong to but do not really have a way of quantifying. I came up with the term imagined values to tie together the two terms I focused on and the East versus West literature that we had studied. As a freshman, I did not give enough thought to the assignment that I would give now. It was too difficult, in my opinion, for me to have put so much energy into trying to understand. As a result, my essay fell back onto repeating the same ideas with different wording. My main focus was achieving the word count that my professor required of us.

Bizzell points out that Perry’s model shows the instructors as rhetors, teachers of rhetoric. She states that professors “persuade students to [their] values through [their] use of language” and the assignments they use. She also says that this view of instructors is a positive one, but in no way a neutral one. Each instructor leaves a particular impact on their students, especially when dealing with writing. Though my essay was not the best at theorizing or analyzing what we had learned that semester, I did learn how to look at an assignment and realize that more than one answer was freeing, not hindering. Introduction to Global Literature led me to the next stage in higher education, one absent of the absolutes of Dualism, and to a better understanding of rhetoric.
TIRP #2


Three semesters ago, in the fall of 2014, I enrolled in my first poetry workshop. By nature I am quiet and prone to being an introvert so I reasoned with myself that, since workshops essentially require the student to both speak and receive constructive criticism, that it would be a good class to take. The fact that I hadn’t really tried my hand at poetry before didn’t bother me so much. My instructor was Christopher Mink, and he was incredibly passionate about poetry and this translated into me being inspired to do well in the class, since I have a theory that if the teacher is passionate then the students will follow suit. As it turned out, my classmates, even the self-professed total strangers to poetry, were all invested in the course. Our workshops were productive; we shared our thoughts and read one another’s poetry and that of some pretty great authors as well. I enjoyed this the most because it afforded me the opportunity to speak. Throughout the course, my classmates and I composed five poems. For myself, the most personal and emotional poem was my third. The assignment was to write a poem from another’s point of view. As I thought on this assignment, I was called back again to the Patricia Bizzell article William Perry and Liberal Education. In her article, she writes about William Perry’s three world views: Dualism, where there is only right and wrong; Relativism, where selfish interest motivates decisions; and Commitment in Relativism, where priorities from social surroundings take precedence. It was this third world view that I was operating under when I chose the speaker for my poem, and it just so happened that turned out to be my mother. According to Bizzell’s article, a committed relativist wants to work productively in their chosen field. By this stage in the semester, I had become aware that I wanted to write poetry well after the course had ended and as I progressed in the course, I wanted to write something that pushed me out of my comfort zone and reveal something about my families past. When I was in high school, my mother revealed to me that her father had been physically abusive to her and her 9 other siblings, mother and aunt. From the stories I heard, and then heard again from my grandmother years later, the man had a monster living inside of him. The most difficult part of the assignment was trying to enter the mindset of a person who had to live with a parent behaving in that way. It was hard, and I had to let my imagination go a little bit when writing the poem, told from the point of view of my nine year old mother after she had drawn watch duty for my grandfather’s arrival home. For my part, I had already been convinced that writing was an excellent way to express myself creatively but this assignment allowed me to connect writing to my family’s history, no matter how dark. This poem, which I titled “The Afternoon Watch” was the first poem that I submitted to be published. It didn’t happen, but with the fact that (according to my mother and a few aunts and uncles) I was able to have the confidence in my writing to make that move. 

Sep 9, 2015

TIRP 2 - Daniel Bell

 The Inculcation of Purpose

I took my first college composition course in the Fall of 2013. It was an ENC 1145 class, taught by a creative writing Ph.D candidate named Jake Kelly. The special topic of the course was "writing about the rhetorically taboo." The material was centered around an examination of taboo subjects in American culture -- what designated them as 'taboo' -- and then learning to write about them in a thoughtful, critical way. In this course, the study of the 'taboo' was used as a vehicle for learning how to write. However, it was my first encounter with college level, academic writing, complete with it's own terms and conventions that I had never interacted with before. It was a process of instruction that caused me to consider the question, 'why do I write?', for the first time, and prompted me to explore and consider what writing is, what it can accomplish, and what is the process by which it is created.

According to David Bartholomae, Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, our writing is dictated by the standards of the community we are writing for. The idea at the heart of his widely circulated essay, Inventing the University, is that we live in a world of individual "discourse communities"; each with their own unique and specific set of standards. In order for us to be successful writers, we must adopt the unique rhetoric of the audience we are writing for -- appropriating the terms and language of an environment we are not originally a part of. In short, we must 'invent the university' every time we write. This process of adoption can pose a great challenge to new writers, who are not even aware that there is a code of discourse they have to adopt -- let alone address an expert audience with any semblance of ownership or authority. He summarizes this idea in the following passage:

"What our beginning students need to learn is to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into to the commonplaces, set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine the "what might be said" and constitute knowledge within the various branches of our academic community."
 
However, getting a hold of this "what might be said" can be a very difficult process for students. My first introduction to the demands of this process came with the first essay that I had to write for ENC 1145. Our first assignment was to look at stand-up comedians, and analyze how they operated as rhetoricians within the context of the 'taboo'. I chose to focus on the use of the 'N-word' in modern, popular stand-up comedy; namely, how certain white comedians get away with using it on stage, while others do not. With that, I focused on a set that American comic Bill Hicks performed in the early nineties about the role of the LAPD in the Rodney King trials.

Mr. Kelly, being a, well-intentioned man, attempted to ground our discussion of the taboo within the context of certain terms -- ethos, logos, pathos; rhetoric; exaggeration (as a rhetorical device). In retrospect, this was a very elementary introduction to discourse analysis, but he wanted us to be able to think in these terms, and moreover, to let these thoughts take hold in our writing in a way that allowed us to be a part of a conversation. Immediately, my attempt to enter into this 'world' created by my instructor is evident in my thesis statement:


"The intention of this essay is to examine how Bill Hicks intertwines his persona, exaggeration, and rhetorical methods, in order to justify using one of the most culturally taboo words in the English Language in a way that does not embarrass himself or alienate his audience." 
 

Persona. Exaggeration. Rhetorical methods. Later in the essay I mention how Hicks uses logical appeal, to get the audience on his side. My use of these terms was an attempt to appropriate a language that my instructor designated to be native to the "discourse community" of the composition course that he was teaching. I approached the essay through the lens of the values and schemata that he expressed as important. This is not how I naturally write. This may not even have been an essay I would have written otherwise. However, I wrote it on the basis that I was entering into a conversation, and inherent in that conversation were certain commonplaces, rhetorical expectations, and ideas that Mr. Kelly (the audience) set forth for the class to follow -- a sense of  "what might be said".

Bartholomae's discussion of why and how we write, however, is only half of a conversation (if that). The other half lies implicit in a phrase that I used earlier in this essay: "This is not how I naturally write". According the Bartholomaeic ideal of discourse, there is no such thing as a 'natural writing' -- or rather, that since writing is done on the basis of "discourse communities" and rhetorical appropriation, the idea that one could 'write naturally', or that writers have an innate voice that they express, is illogical and counterproductive. According to Bartholomae, writing is simply about the representation of discourse, and your level of success as a writer is contingent on how well and authoritatively you can enter into that conversation.

However, that is not how it feels when I write. It does not feel like I am simply "appropriating discourse", but rather, speaking my personal voice through the lens of a subject -- in this case, Bill Hicks. There is a sense of creation -- of birth -- that comes with writing. There is an elegance and an art to it that I find to be enormously fulfilling. There is a sense of personal aesthetic that, regardless of audience, is innately present in everything I try and write. It is not something I can isolate and explicate; it is style as a goal -- as a means of rhetoric, and it is present in the Hicks piece as it is in everything I have written since.
  
This contrast between writing as a means of personal expression, and writing as a representation of a certain dialogue, is evocative of the debate John Dewey addresses in Nathan Crick's Essay, Composition as Experience. The position Dewey takes approximates very closely the way that I approached writing the Hicks essay, and my approach to writing in general. In it, Crick examines Dewey's Pragmatic philosophy of composition through the lens of the dualist debate on writing between David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow; an expressivist who believes that writing is primarily the product of inner mental processes, and that language is a goal unto itself. In the essay, Crick describes how Dewey refutes the dogmatic, dualist assertion that writing is either wholly representational or cognitive. Rather, Dewey describes it as being a combination of both. Crick summarizes the crux of Dewey's argument in the following passage:

"The vision of composition that emerges from Dewey is grounded on a relationship of experience and communication that is mediated by the practice of mind. In other words, this means that we must pay equal attention to the craftsmanship of language and the emotions that drive our acts of self-expression and self-creation."

We see here an emphasis placed on the importance of experience in order to relate to certain discourses. Meaning, that in order to meaningfully interact with "discourse communities", and properly relate to your audience, communication requires an adequate transaction of the experiences that define you as an individual, to your writing. You must actively apply your mind to the discourse. In my writing of the Hicks essay, I had always loved and admired Hicks as a comedian. Out of this, I applied my knowledge of why I liked Bill Hicks' work -- and my experience as his admirer --  within the confines of the discourse that Mr. Kelly was fostering through the class. When applied in such a way, writing becomes full and dynamic; alive, and in the hands of a better master, art.