my pedagogy

When I was in high school, I taught a Sunday school class for a year. I sat on the back of a pew and a half dozen junior high students sat in the pew behind. We had a text, but none of us were all that eager to look at it. We began each class by talking about whatever and sometimes we never got out of the mode. One Sunday, we talked about drug use. In our small Iowa town in 1972, the topic was pretty much a hypothetical one, gleaned from TV. To put it in context, we compared drug use to booze. Which was worse? How did addiction happen? How did a person become a victim?

One of the parishioners was listening to our conversation. Bruce Lee was an alcoholic. He was an usher who didn’t drink anymore, but he still attended AA meetings. He invited us to one. A few nights later, my class and I sat in folding chairs in front of a group of adults. The group talk was followed by a question and answer session. The only thing I remember about what was said that night was Mr. Lee’s comment—“Good question”—when I asked my mine. I have no clue what the question was that I asked or the particular story that prompted it. No, I do remember one other thing--the bodily sensation of being nervous as hell.

That year of teaching Sunday school constitutes my formal teaching experience. On the surface, not much would seem relevant to teaching freshman composition in an academic setting. We were a largely homogonous group—white, mostly farm kids. Ethics was a fairly cut and dry matter of getting good grades and doing your chores. We all had a sense of the benevolent old man sitting on a cloud looking down even if we didn’t know exactly what He wanted of us. However, at least in the world of comp theory, I do see some parallels.

Maybe it was Dr. Souder’s syllabus, but I gleaned a definite sense of “mission” from the early readings about Hopkins running himself into the ground with his concern for student writing. Wendy Bishop’s “burnout” sounded like something from Kierkegaard—“Sickness Unto Current-Tradition.” Even that apparent apostate Bartholomae had a sense of some mysterious power taking over his charges, filling them with dark misunderstandings from which they need to be enlightened.

I few weeks into the semester, the deity changed genders. She seemed to be behind the talk of “world views” and questions of authorship. She informed her ministers to encourage collaboration and the creation of “social artifacts” that would be pleasing to her sight.

I don’t have a problem imagining god as female. It still makes me nervous, of course. I mean, She can get as pissed off as He ever could. Maybe, it’s the monotheism involved. But then, I feel just as a nervous when I contemplate a pagan’s two deities and a Hindu’s hermaphroditic one gives me the willies, too.

I think the problem lies in the word “god” and whatever reality is constituted by it. The word was never mentioned in class, but I heard echoes of it in the theory/practice dichotomy that was a very central issue to our discussions. Listening to the disparity between the experience of teachers and pedagogical theory, between what went on in the classroom and the ideals it was supposed to uphold, I heard something that reminded of nothing so much as the talk heaven and earth.

In that respect, maybe I can take something from my early experience as a teacher and have it mean something in relation to modern theory. The goal of my pedagogy would be to enable my students to ask a good question when they are outside the classroom.

The body of knowledge

A long time ago, man learned to write stuff down. Of course, he’d always doodled on cave walls, but that was just art. He didn’t get serious about his symbolic ability until about 8000 BCE when the Sumerians started scratching clay. They didn’t begin by recording great speeches or how-to manuals. The earliest writing was done on clay tokens, a sort of e pluribus unum that turned otherwise worthless shards into valuable coinage. From there, the scribbling of symbols developed into commercial documentation of who owed who and how much.

It paid to be literate in this new technology. If you knew what token to hand the dude who placed your date beer on the oasis table, you didn’t just have to spread them all out and trust the bartender to pick the right one—or ones. Certain unscrupulous people began to notice how the people who couldn’t read got taken. They decided to use the confusion surrounding signs for their own nefarious purposes. They started inscribing clay tablets like hell and thus, out of deception and debt, was born law and religion. If you got in with the right circle and were fluent in the newest arcanum, your span on the planet was going to be a whole lot easier.

This pattern of introducing new technologies so that a man or a group could put one over on his fellow man has proven very effective through the centuries. Some have argued that first the pen and later the printing press were advancements in communication technology that have lead to greater understanding among the populace. What a crock. Wars have only gotten bigger and a guy who couldn’t pronoun “nuclear” took over the world.

From sundial to atomic clock, technology has had only one purpose: to enslave the befuddled.

Just look at the latest promise to unify the global village. On the surface, the World Wide Web now instantly connects bloggers around the world. My Space and Facebook are touted as a revolution in social networking. But even though a person can now post word of his conversion to Scientology with the click of a button to three hundred friends, what kind of intimacy is that? What are we really communicating?

Any medium which was developed by the defense department and made popular by pornographers is not a medium to be trusted. I can’t shake the suspicion that we’re all just insects caught in semi-invisible threads, waiting for a giant spider named Bill to come and finish us off.

Okay, so paranoia is one of my personality traits and, yes, I did write “we” are caught. Right now I’m sitting in front of my computer writing this on Microsoft Word.

In spite of the fears which I know are not just grounded in illusion, I like Word. I know how to use about five of its ten thousand functions, but the cut and paste feature alone has seduced me. I used to write on yellow legal pads. By the time I was done, the page was so filled with blacked-out lines and arrows crossing each other, pointing bracketed phrases to different places on the page, that even I couldn’t read it. Those pages often ended up balled and bouncing off the wall.

How neat the page on this screen looks by comparison. It seems to tell me that have a neat and orderly mind, that the path I took to get to this point was a straight line instead of the curving, back and forth thing that it was. And just where is this point that I’ve gotten to?

Well, I guess it’s pretty much the same one I started out with—that the relationship between people and technology is ambiguous. Technology both reflects and changes the way people think about themselves and the world. But let me start over and make my point a little clearer.

Before the people learned to write, knowledge had a human face. Science and religion came out the mouth of a storyteller around the campfire and medicine was a crazy loner who danced outside the village. People had an unusual capacity to remember things because all were conscious that knowledge had a tendency to disappear when she or he who held it did. Time traveled in circles.

But when the technology of writing things down came along, knowledge and time changed. Symbols on a page could outlive the writer by centuries. Knowledge came to be regarded as outside the person, something contained in a body of texts. All one had to remember was how to open a book and interpret the signs.

Certain types of knowledge recorded in these texts began to outpace others in their ability to affect the very human matters of life and death. Those types of knowledge which progressed were called science and given priority over those that just kept going in circles like religion. Science progressed along a line that easily documented by the ever increasing size of explosions.

Which brings me again to where I sit in front of the computer. I’m sure that just behind the screen that holds my words are the words of others. Thousands of texts have be transcribed or freshly composed by people around the world. Right now, they lie in servers and quite a few are available to me through typing a few keys.

In one sense, that knowledge is still outside a human body. It is contained in something I nostalgically imagine to be a text, but I know that’s not true. Today’s texts aren’t like a book that exists in a specific place, can be held in hand and smelled—in a word, owned.

Today’s texts exist in space as virtual as consciousness itself, suspended in a gray matter of chips as small as cells. Recovering knowledge is a process of sending tiny electric signals through a body that is sprawled across the globe.

I have a decapitated head of the body of knowledge resting on my desk. It talks and sings and occassionally answers me when I ask it something. It displays those answers in images as ephemeral as the expression on a storyteller’s face.

It is not an illusion to see a human face on technology—and that’s the thing that truly frightens me.

Thomas on Bruffee

The first point to prick me in Thomas’s presentation of Bruffee was Bruffee’s assertion of an influx of nontraditional students in the 70’s and 80’s. Other articles have made that same observation of a university overwhelmed by students who weren’t prepared for academic work—but those articles put a different date to this event which signals a need for a different type of pedagogy. Some of the articles we’ve read for this class locate the event in the late teens and twenties after WWI, some in the late forties after WWII, others now identifying the shift from tradition to the advent of modern information systems. If I couple these observations with one from the other class I’m taking (research methods and theories)—that the designation of scholarship as “recent” now means that which is less than five years old—I’m stuck with trying to define exactly what this “tradition” is that each pedagogical theory is rebelling against.

In one sense, this changing notion of tradition might prove Bruffee’s point that knowledge is part of a social context—each generation defines itself in opposition to the one that preceded it. But from my perspective, the hypothetical time span between knowledge and its decay into irrelevance is showing an ever decreasing half-life. It begs a question to Bruffee’s assertion that knowledge is “common property” within the social context—common to whom? I might ask.

Feminists posit a gendered tradition, ethnology defines a multitude of cultural traditions, Marxists have a conception of tradition as the hegemonic power of economic control. For Bruffee, rewriting and interpreting the past into the present is a function of some larger process than is modeled on the interaction of peers within a tutorial, a social transaction that is as much a generation as it is an analysis of traditional knowledge and means of expression.

But I would just like to have a little more perspective on what exactly Bruffee meant by “tradition.” Maybe some elaboration on “ontogenic cognitive development” might have helped—but probably not.

essay question--pedagogical influences

Several years ago, I started writing again. I had written stories throughout a couple decades following my undergraduate degree, but without the kind of success that felt satisfying. When I moved to Pueblo in ’96, I just wanted to start a carpentry business and lead a simple life free from the issues I’d wrestled with a writer. For awhile, I worked hard and kept things simple. But no matter how simple and unidirectional life appears on the surface, there is a level to it in which time is not linear. Events occurred which demonstrated its circular nature and I was back in that state of mind where I had to write.

After a year of writing, I found that the time off hadn’t helped. Although school hadn’t taught me to write the first time around, I decided to take a class if only because I wanted someone to read what I’d written. If I had to pay them to do it, so be it. Chas Clifton encouraged me and I took more classes. I enrolled in the graduate program only because I had to in order to get into the writing workshops. I took the required theory course thinking that that might help with an overall structure for what I was writing and because I felt that a philosophical perspective, whether overt or not, is a part of any writing. And now, I find myself in this pedagogy course . . .

Initially, I was attracted to the expressivism of Elbow and Murray. Critics have often linked their work more to creative writing than academic. Another coincidence was that both had trouble with school. I don’t know if it’s a statement about the educational system in the “old days” or just similar temperaments, but I identified with their trouble. Elbow wrote the notes for his first book on writing as he was doing his doctoral thesis concerning double and triple irony in Chaucer’s work. He was writing what amounted to autobiography alongside his scholarly work. Going back and forth between the two, he was attempting to write himself into the university. It was a sort of dialectical process: school, me, school, me—ultimately aimed at a synthesis of the two. In one way, it happened. Elbow did become a recognized figure in composition. But in another way, it didn’t. Elbow never lost the feeling that a great divide existed between the academic world and “true” writing.

I liked their acknowledgement of a “resistance” factor when it came to the process of writing. I liked their theories of freewriting and focused writing followed by periods of critique and looking for what was really being said, of multiple drafts and being open to surprise and changes of direction. I liked their concern with voice and students as individuals. Although that latter point has drawn some criticism for its sentimentally romantic and isolationist connotations, I don’t think those critics fully acknowledge what Elbow and Murray were really proposing.

Murray especially desired passionate writing. Love, hate, joy, fear—emotion is often seen as private to an individual. But I think writing that has those qualities is aimed at more than individual expression. The aim of an emotion is to connect with others in some fundamental understanding. The individual that loves and the individual that fears are the same individual. Elbow has written that though he is concerned with the individual, that individual in neither unitary nor unchanging. Writing in the expressivist vein is an attempt to integrate to those disparate selves, to achieve some sort of wholeness.
Which brings me to one of my own divisions. On the one hand, I am a student of writing. But on the other, I am learning to be a teacher. I suspect that not all the students who would attend a class I might teach would have 54 years of experience in need of consolidation. If fact, their needs might be just that opposite. In light of that consideration, I would try to incorporate something from the guy who opposed Elbow so often.

America has a long history of pragmatic thinking which runs something like ‘society is a collection of people pursuing their own self interest and, in line with the laws of evolution, the most energetic in that pursuit are justly deserving of their rewards.’ I agree with Bartholomae in his suspicion of this philosophy. Bartholomae’s concern was to educated students into how their culture had sought to define them in ways which upheld that status quo. He did it through reading difficult academic texts in class.

Lindsay Aegerter describes teaching Jamaican born, English educated Michelle Cliff’s novels in her class. Cliff’s novels are filled with rage at now only how the colonial system has ravaged her country, but rage at herself for how she has incorporated the language and ways of thinking that colonialism inspired. Aegerter talks about her student’s resistance to identifying with Cliff’s sentiments because they resist looking at people and issues which have those same implications in our own country.

Although this is a comp theory class, I think this is getting a little too theoretical. These are my major influences to this point, but they influence me as much towards hermitage in a cave as they do towards teaching a classroom full of students. I need an influence that can synthesize the social and the individual perspectives, theory with practice. Bizzell comes to mind.

Bizzell writes about the inner and outer approaches to pedagogy in terms of home culture and academic culture. She finds that the two have come to be regarded more as concepts in an argument rather than as useful descriptions of a changing world. She also says that the two are not as mutually exclusive as would appear from the debate. She calls for more research into the “world view” of students entering the university, a broader understanding of rhetoric as a way to bridge the gap in the classroom between the individual student and the academic world, and a move from “cognitive models to discouse communities”—all things which I recognize as things as theoretically important to me as I approach a classroom. Exactly how to implement those theoretical influences in actual pedagogical practices remains the question, though.

Nick on Lanham

The part of Nick’s presentation on Lanham that stuck with me the most is the diagram that he used to demonstrate a theory of reader attention in relation to style. The reader’s attention is described by a line that hits the horizontal line of stylistic surface at an angle. At the point of intersection, the attention line is refracted into two—one line bounces off the horizontal line at an angle equal to the one that the attention approached and the other continuing through the point of intersection without any degree of deflection. The diagram reminds me of one of those diagrams that describe the process of subatomic particle formation. I like it because it seems to render an invisible, baffling, complex process in a simple way to my grasping mind.

I liked the diagram for what it implied more than the lesson I was supposed to derive from it, though. When the reader’s attention struck the stylistic surface, we were supposed to pay attention to the line that deflected off the surface. That line held the significance of style, the “how” of writing rather than the “what.” That line runs parallel to other lines we’ve studied like “the medium is the message” or “discourse is socially constructed.” Of course, in order for that attention line in the diagram to truly be representative, it should have bounced back to the reader. As it is diagrammed, the attention line just shoots off into empty space. Unless the reader’s attention to style line is returned to him somehow . . .

I know any diagram is a representation and simplification of reality and I shouldn’t be so picky. If the reader had squarely faced his text, the “at” line would have returned at a ninety degree angle and would have been indistinguishable from the “reader” line and Lanham’s point would have been lost. But I’m not really bothered by that—at least, not too much.

The thing that I really like about the diagram was that the reader’s attention line passed through the stylistic surface at all. That language can pass “through” at all that it has a referential function seemed the major point. To me, the world of theory is one where the influence of postmodernism is so strong that any theorist who even hints at a shared world instantly becomes a hero—just implying an “objective” reality made me more comfortable with his focus on style.

Much of Lanham’s work seems to fall under the social constructivist rubric. Like postmodernists, the social constructivists says that language is a series of signs. Meaning is constructed of language so that so that discourse communities are ones that share understanding by agreeing on the meaning of certain words. But where the social contructivists differ from the postmodernists is in the real of referentiality. Beyond that system of signs, the social constructivist assumes an objective world we all share. It is an assumption that isn’t always apparent in the complexity of their focus on the constructed nature of humans and reality, but it is there, thank goodness.

the rhetoric of computers and all

The part of Mr. Burns discussion I enjoyed most was his retelling of his discovery of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. He had left the Air Force, gone to college, taught for awhile. He looked at his student’s papers and didn’t feel like they were any better at the end of class than they were at the beginning. He was having his doubts about what composition was, what he was trying to teach. I felt some real sympathy for his position at that point—confusion about where one fits between theory and practice, an existential moment between one’s personal past and future. It was like we were both sitting on the same branch in the tree of knowledge—high enough up that a fall was going to be painful, but absolutely no confidence about how to proceed through the tangle of branches overhead.

And then somebody gave him Aristotle and it was a revelation, everything was made clear. The roots of the educational system with its division between arts and sciences had been growing in Greece and they still supported the tree of knowledge. Aristotle’s Rhetoric broke down language into its component parts and that analysis was still valid. The world was arranged in words and those words were arranged by logic. All the disparate facts of the world, all the disparate facts of Burn's life began to make sense. The world was an atomistic arrangement of meme’s that were held together by logic. The memes were like brain cells in the universal mind of man that was still thinking the world into being.

Of course, what I heard Burns say and what Mr. Burns thought he was saying are almost assuredly two different things. But in that moment, sitting on the same branch with him looking down, I did share his assurance that the tree wasn’t simply a trunk balancing on the hard ground. That it did have roots and that it had organically developed to this height. It was “of a piece” with the past.
But then Mr. Burns extrapolated that past into the future and computers and I was suddenly on the branch alone. The rest of the lecture, he was like a squirrel rustling in the leaves, jumping from branch to branch, teasing the old dog I’d become, suddenly wondering all over again what the hell I was doing sitting in a tree.

Okay, time to abandon this metaphor. They say confession is good for the soul, so here goes: I have an old dude’s fear of computers. No matter how many times I hear that hear that computers are simply a tool to dig through a pile of facts, I always feel like I’m digging with an ice pick instead of a shovel.

Okay, back to the tree metaphor. I don’t want to encourage this steak of self pity. In fairness, I did catch a few phrases from those rustling leaves that did orient me a bit to my place in the tree. It was reassuring to listen to someone who understood the relationship of people to computers. I was reassured to learn that a human being (who seemed like a nice guy) was actually doing the programming, telling the computer how to behave. I also like the thought that the reasoning he used to tell this computer how to think was in some fundamental of a piece with the reasoning that Aristotle used.

I’m sorry I missed you all at the restaurant. I walked through at about eight thirty and the place was so crowded I thought you’d probably gone somewhere else. I should have known they’d stick English majors in back room, I guess. I would definitely have liked to put an even more human face on these machines.

Response to Rebecca's Tug of War

That quote from Gearhart reminds me of one from Cixous--that a female language be one that comes from the body more than logic. Others have argued that the structure of language with its rules of syntax and grammar are inherently masculine and, therefore, unable to express a truly female point of view. It is hard to know what to make of that. Maybe an expressive sigh is about all. (I couldn't figure out how to post this in the comments section--it refused to give me a word to copy. I trying not to see this as a technological bias against female language.)