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

Tick Marks

When I started this class, I started making little tick marks next to all the names that were being "name-dropped" in the books and articles we were reading. My thought was that I obviously need to develop a conception of which scholars make important contributions, and that I could make a list of them after I did the reading. Of course now I realise that would mean just creating a huge, decontextualized list. But even as I continued to do the reading and making the tick marks, I find that I am not in fact making a tick mark by every name the author drops. I'm constantly evaluating the names I come across to see if they fit into this idea I have of a discourse between scholars about the topic at hand. This strikes me as largely a good thing, because it means that even when I don't feel like I'm able to engage with the text because it's so new to me, I am in fact developing an idea of what "belongs" in my understanding of the text, even when doing a most cursory reading. So, yay?

Counterpublics in Public Housing: Reframing the Politics of Service Learning

Definitions:

• Subaltern Counterpublics
• service learning
• public sphere
• community development
• mythoform
• love ethic
• public homeplace
• rhetorical space
• personal growth
• public writing

Distinctions:

• point is not that one form of rhetorical work is better than the other, but that we need to stay grounded in the rhetorical practices of the communities we wish to serve if we are to have any hope of successfully partnering with these communities.
• christian love forms the basis of moral and intellecual development
• The term"public homeplace" blurs the boundary between the private sphere of personal development and the public sphere of argument and advocacy
• The mythoform's power is its heuristic capacity to enable leaders to model preferred behavior and values
• The concern about personal growth in the service-learning literature has been that
  it may encourage a detachment from social analysis of injustice and naïve identification with the other
•  the students experienced what they experienced primarily because they were embraced by a Christian love ethic that takes the individual (and individual development) as the primary unit of analysis. They were encouraged to grow into a much broader conception of themselves as members of the human family.*
• Critics would likely say that the making of a new public sphere ought to make room for advocacy, not just cross-cultural understanding [but] we may not be lucky enough to see deeper structural changes in society take place on the academic calendar.

How this pedagogy supports student's public literate actions:
What they ask of teachers who desire to support such actions:

texts:

• Nancy Fraser
• Welch
• Linda Flower

*this seems totally contradictory to me. I didn't really get what this article was trying to do with the "love ethic" and the "public homeplace"

The Rhetoric of Social Action: College Mentors Inventing a Discipline

Definitions:

• literacy
• social action
• mentors
• writers
• interpretive lens
• a priori
• negotiation
• intercultural inquiry*
• homogeneity*
• productive friction*
• social equality*

Distinctions:

• mentors actively create the discipline for themselves
• four views of priorities for someone wanting to support literate social action:

1. Emphasize grammatical correctness
2. Support emancipation
3. Invite Free Expression
4. Support action-oriented problem solving

• Three ways to approach the disciplinary debate over literate social action:

1. read to uncover universal principles
2. text-based view to discern most convincing argument
3. take a cognitive rhetorical view to negotiate competing voices

• role of mentor-as-supporter is not to offer good advice, but to help writer-as-planner consider rhetorical strategy
• coming to understand a discipline as a site of contested knowledge is/ can be valuable learning
• mentoring is a site of mutual learning

How this pedagogy supports student's public literate actions:

•  Student's are mentors, supporters. 
• Mutual learning: mentors have something to teach writers, and writers have something to teach mentors

What they ask of teachers who desire to support such actions:

texts:

• Paulo Friere: 
• Graff:

*I'm not sure how to fit in the case studies, but these terms come from that section

Van Rides in the Dark: Literacy as Involvement

Definitions:

• literacy
• noblesse oblige
• service courses
• intersubjectivity
• power parity

Distinctions:

• writing and reading are pure acts of human involvement
• failures of literacy are failures of involvement
• include institutional influences as part of involvement
• literacy names socially empowered knowledge
• to teach literacy means to teach a mode of interaction
• involvement cannot show itself as a major dynamic in reading and writing as long as our institutions encourage only the text-like virtues of objective points of view

How this pedagogy supports student's public literate actions
What they ask of teachers who desire to support such actions

texts:

• Mike Rose: Lives on the Boundary
• Brandt: A Strong Text Theory of Literacy

*one thing these stories show us is words have no meaning without experience or context behind them. Now they have prison literacy and empathy literacy, and I guess by default I don't.

Community Service and Critical Teaching

Definitions:

• individualism
• meritocracy
• equal opportunity
• tutoring
• democracy
• social justice

Distinctions:

• questions about social structures, ideology, and social justice are not automatically raised by community service
• If students regard social problems as chiefly or only personal, then they will not search beyond the person for a systemic explanation. 
• the composition course is not devoted to literacy tutoring, but rather to the study of literacy and schooling
• a sense of life as a communal project, an understanding of the way that social institutions affect our lives, and a sense that our responsibility for social justice includes but also carries beyond personal acts of charity

How this pedagogy supports student's public literate actions
What they ask of teachers who desire to support such actions

texts:

• Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary
• Perspectives on Literacy, anthology edited by Kintgen, Kroll, and Rose
• Kozol's Savage Inequalities

Community Service and Critical Teaching

When I first started this class, my expectations were that I would be learning how better to teach students how to write through making their writing relevant by making student writing public. My hope was that I could find some strands of an argument to support what I have always felt, which is that academia should not be so self contained, and that what we learn here should be transferable to the outside world to make it a better place. My concern was that I would be learning only about pedagogy. I say this now, looking back, and it is possible my ideas about what the class is have changed my memories of this, but this is true as best as I can put it. (more after the jump!)

Jargon

I've made another page that acts the same way as the Scholars page for key terms. Every time I use a key term I will be able to make a link that when clicked will open a popup that will list a definition of the key term.

List of Jargon after the jump!

Table Questions

Amanda and I are at the Library, considering using these 4 questions in place of the questions Dr. Long suggested.

1) Outline the author's historical account of the Public Turn.

2) Why is the author writing about The Public Turn? What do they want, practically, from a better understanding of the Public Turn?

3) List Key Terms the author uses to argue the importance or value of the public turn.

4) List scholars the author focuses on, noting how the author uses their work to develop his/her account of the public sphere.

Notable Scholars list

Last night I worked with my husband to develop a hidden page* that contains basic information about some of the many notable scholars and authors we have been reading about this semseter. I am having trouble keeping all the names straight and remembering what theoretical camp they are in, so I created this page and Andrew wrote the javascript so that in the future whenever I refer to a scholar by name, (for example: I disagree with Jürgen Habermas' claim that there is only one public sphere) I can add a link that when clicked will open a popup window that contains some of the basic information about that author. The list is based on what I have written in my notes, contains many scholars names that I probably only saw once, and is not very complete at the moment. So, I will post the list below, and welcome any suggestions and additional information about these scholars or the page. If you use a scholar's name in a comment or in a post on this blog in the future, I can either show you how to add the html tag to your post (it's not that hard), or I will do it automatically when I notice it. This way, I will always know who I'm talking about!

List of scholars after the jump!
*I decided to un-hide the list so that people can access it any time, not just by clicking a link. Also, if anyone wants to become an author on this blog, they may then edit the Scholars and Jargon pages easily.

Defining the Public Turn

During class today I jotted down two questions to ponder. I may need to come up with some key terms that Weisser and Flower use and define them. This will help me keep track of what they are talking about and can possibly add them to the tag cloud on the posts. However, the question I would like to answer for my own purposes is what ideas can I take from the authors' theory of the public turn to apply outside of academia? I need to think about that one more. Another one to address in another post is how to define consensus, and what to do about reaching it (spoiler alert: probably nothing)? This one I am obviously supposed to have an answer for: How does each author define/construct the public turn? Here's what I think so far:

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement: Chapter 2 notes

Click this link to view my notes for this chapter in google docs. You may view and print but not edit. You may also read the notes after the jump. Please feel free to leave comments.

Moving Beyond Academic Disourse: Chapter 5 notes

Click this link to view my notes for this chapter in google docs. You may view and print but not edit. You may also view my notes after the jump. Please feel free to leave comments.

The Public Turn

This semester I'm taking a class about the public turn in composition. It's tying in well with the other courses I'm taking in that they are all heavily based in theories of literacy (my "Theories of Literacy" course especially so). But I'm having some trouble with the concepts and terminology, so I thought I would try to create a blog about the class to help me work through it and give me a place where I can post my notes and things about it.