Audience, Ethos, and Agency

School seems to exist to give us all what Flower calls the "illusion of incompetence." Students, all people, in fact, have certain competencies, valuable competencies, that are simply not valued in academia or the workplace or by "us." In fact, many of what Gee would call dominant Discourses are designed to make outsiders feel like... well, outsiders. And while outsiders are trying to learn or operate within a foreign Discourse, they feel like pretenders. There are various ways authors try to suggest giving agency to student writers in order to give purpose to their writing, since it's pretty well established that writers write better when their writing has purpose. I feel like purpose is pretty well tied to audience. In fact, I think that a combination of Gee's and Flower's theories could come up with some sort of theory that emphasizes writing, agency, and ethos as social phenomenon.

I was recently struck by the phrase "Sometimes the most adult thing you can do is... ask for help when you need it." I'm ashamed to admit it's from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which may negate some of its impact, but I think it still rings true. If agency is truly a social thing, if agency only exists because someone is sponsoring it or as part of the ethos of a community then agency is being able to ask for help when you need it. And good agency sponsors can help with that. But the role of the student in this is learning to ask for help. Like Buffy, the supernatural demon slayer. Like Megan, the ambitious but uncertain Master's student.

(more after the jump)

Toyota

As I sit here on the bus I'm listening to a podcast about NUMMI, a GM car plant that was shut down then reopened under a completely different style of managment: the Japanese Tiyota company style management that emphasized team work and collaboration between management and workers. It's interesting that this concept of teamwork, which worked for NUMMI and could be considered an ideograph with unexamined assumptions, became part of the problem when it was attempted in a different plant that was on the brink of failure. Teamwork and collaboration between management and workers actually produced competition. I need to listen to this again to outline the specifics of this, but ultimately it produced snitching and undermined the seniority that many workers had been working decades to achieve. What was welcomed (eventually, after training and team building prior to implementation) was wildly unpopular at the second plant. And when workers tried to Make suggestions and implement changes as production happened, part of the Japanese ideal of continuous improvement, the second plant found that GM lacked the company support and infrastructure to actually improve and make changes. NUMMI was able to rely on Toyota to support the team/ continuous improvement ideal. And Toyota knew this, which is why they were so open to letting GM see its processes. They knew without infrastructure these ideas would never work. It makes me wonder how we as writers and students can work for change, knowing we may not have the support of our meritocracy society. It gives me more sympathy for Coogan's desire to work within academic structures to do student centered service learning.

Edgeworkers

This is the story of my exploration of the Health Care Reform Bill and the discourse surrounding it, the eventual creation of the YouTube video I made to explain some of the key points of the bill, and my analysis of how through this journey I became a Hope-full edgeworker crafting a public, rhetorical space in which to talk about the Health Care Reform Bill and related issues.



I have been following the health care reform bill for months. I have been using google reader to share and read stories on it, usually from a very liberal (although I'm not sure what that word means anymore) perspective with my brother.

I also went on an internet search to find out what is in the bill straight from the source (but failed, not being able to read the bill's dense language, and ended up using summary documents provided by the government and the Congressional Budget Office online) which culminated in me creating a YouTube video that asserted provisions as stated by the government, financial results/consequences as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, and also engaged a little with divergent opinions on interpreting certain aspects of the bill, once aligning myself with the Wall Street Journal's assesment of the impact the health care bill would have on large companies as being overstated, and once merely mentioning in passing that some politicians intend to challenge the constitutionality of the bill based on the 10th ammendment which asserts states rights.

I have used facebook's share feature twice: once to share an article, and once to share the YouTube video I made that was the culmination of months of following and many hours researching the topic. Interestingly, I have no way of knowing who is actually receiving my links, as with facebook, anyone who disagrees with me or dislikes all my sharing could have blocked me ages ago. I don't know who I'm reaching. Here are the links and a summary of the responses I received on facebook:

Literacy and Looting

Since the earthquake in Chile, the semantic argument about what to call "looting" has been revisited. Recently in Haiti the same problem arose, and both instances have brought hurricane Katrina back to American consciousness. This article addresses the question "should we call it looting," and this thread of comments from gawker shows a pretty good debate over the same thing between people completely unaffected by this disaster.

I tend to have a reaction to questions about what is literacy that is similar to how some people feel about calling it looting: as one commenter puts it, it's an empty semantics argument. I have struggled in my reader-response writing assignments for Peter Goggin's Theories of Literacy class. Some telling quotes coming from these assignments include "if we stopped calling it literacy and started calling it oxygen, there would still be people who don't have it, it would just sound weirder" and "the problem becomes the (possibly inescapable) one of simply living in a culture that is constantly divided between the haves and the have-nots," therefore the problem is with culture, not the definition. I had been assuming the term "literacy" was being used similarly to the way the word "tool" has been used: "my dictionary describes a tool as an implement used to carry out a specific function, which sounds physical and mechanical, but many people would say that meditation is a tool to help deal with stress or similar, using the understood function of a physical 'tool' to infer its properties to something more difficult to understand."

Expanded Scholars and Jargon Pages

I just wanted to make a note that I have begun to make the Scholars and Jargon pages a bit more dynamic and complete. I've begun making links in my posts when I mention some terms and scholars, and in addition to that, I have begun to add more information to the pages themselves. And, even better, I've actually created some links in the pages themselves for when I mention scholars and jargon in an attempt to define jargon or a scholar. Because a lot of my attempts to make people and concepts more clear are self-referential and of course come from the books we've been reading, I've added a "back" button to the popup window to make navigating easier. As always, comments are welcome.

"America Ruined by Personal Essays"

Recently while browsing the web, I stumbled across this article by faux online news agency (or is it more a news-ish blog?) wonkette.com. The conservative and the delicate should reconsider simply browsing through this site mentally unprepared. It's called "America Ruined by Personal Essays." I briefly considered typing a response in the comments, but any serious response would have been most unwelcome; it simply isn't in the spirit of wonkette. So I chose to write out a brief response here instead.

Gul: February 22 Informal Writing Project 2

Gul was kind enough to email me his informal writing project! I've uploaded it to my google docs so you can view it. Unfortunately the arrows didn't transfer, so I'm still thinking of a way to make that work. I welcome ideas. Here's the link; at least we have the body of the text available!
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUt8lTLn3nu_ZGM1M2ttM3NfMmcybTZmcnRu&hl=en