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)



Flower seems to advocate along with Dewey that the best way to bridge both in school and out of school literacies (and here I should note that in my musings I tend to see school literacies as a metaphor for having to learn all of the rules placed on people by social forces in general, not limited to schools) is to bring people on the outside of dominant discourses to the inside--let marginalized groups have a seat at the table. Of course some people, like Mark Bauerlein of The Dumbest Generation would say what needs to happen is that out of school literacies need to be more closely aligned with what students are supposed to learn in school. It's easy to dismiss that as a unilaterally dismissive approach, but I’m still need some convincing it works well to do it the other way around.

Flower points out that agency has been considered the act of taking independent action. This is what the young men at the CLC felt when they wanted to respond to Shirley's (and their) problem with racist cops by arming the neighborhood with legal guns. According to Flower, kind of agency means influencing material conditions and other people, by which she seems to indicate that her definition of agency would not require that. She seems to think, based on what I understand her idea of rhetorical agency to be (similar to Hull and Katz's idea of agency in the DUSTY project is), that their having a sense of self-initiated and sponsored action in space outside of where one typically thinks of agency being needed or useful (i.e. school and work) is actually agency. Shirley's act of agency, says Flower, isn't a counter-assertion of her own will. She witnesses the racist cops. She states her complex problem space to a group of people willing to listen and potentially in a position to help.

Flower is careful to point out that Shirley’s action is not just mute resistance or self-expressive speaking up. Rhetorical agency is a move that lies at the heart of community literacy. Shirley’s interpretive act essentially redefines the problem in a way that shapes the discussion and sparks the next level of inquiry. She draws us into discussion. She poses a problem that actually exists for someone--for her. Her act of probing and asking "what if" is what guides the discussion. She has gone public, starting with the CLC, by becoming a rhetorical agent in that space. Flower says that Shirley's act of going public helped map out the future of the entire project. Her rhetorical action was to act as "witness to what she values and in a way that poses problems, redefines assumptions and opens a path for further inquiry" (Community Literacy 53-54).

Thus, Flower tells us (and by us, I don't mean me, as I don't assume I have the power to give anyone agency at this point; I think she means teachers and community literacy supporters) we need to learn how to affirm the agency and capability of the powerless. I’ve noticed that I feel better, write better and more creatively, when I’m sponsored and encouraged. I imagine better things for myself when I have someone telling me it's a worthwhile idea. This, to me, is sponsored agency.

Still, there are many things that can counteract this. I have had multiple problems this semester getting the help I need to do my work. First, in my Theories of Literacy course a very odd thing happened when I turned in my first assignment to the professor: I got no comments on it. I, for various reasons including fear of failure, criticism, and talking to authority figures (as well as numerous reasons I'm sure I don't understand) built up a narrative in my head that reasoned my paper was so awful that he had nothing to say about it and there was literally no way to improve it. Because I had developed that ultra-negative feedback for myself from a complete lack of feedback, I chose to spend the rest of the semester avoiding talking to the professor about the problem at all. All I needed was for the right person to give me feedback, or maybe the right kind of feedback. But more importantly I needed the ability to ask for help.

Asking for help means, to me, asking for sponsorship. Sponsorship sounds better than "help" because when you think of it like DUSTY or the CLC, you realise it involves more negotiation and less "to-the-rescue." When I initially think of a sponsor, I think of UPS giving Lance Armstrong a bunch of money to wear its logo when he rides his bike in famous races. But it can be more complex than that. It can be a complex negotiation of image and value, ethos and audience.

Gatorade dropped Tiger Woods when his marital troubles went public. Lisa Kudrow in a recent interview with Talk of the Nation reinforced how we tend to think of sponsorship as a mostly retail transaction while unconsciously highlighting that sponsorship is in fact more of an ongoing interaction when she talks about Lexus underwriting (which I read as virtually the same as sponsoring) her new show when she claims that they don't have a hand in the writing, saying "there were no demands at all, other than, you know, because we're Lexus, we don't want anything too vulgar ... but we weren't planning on doing that anyway." What may seem like a simple answer to a normal listener to me stood out as an example of the (perhaps unwritten) ways that negotiations take place in a sponsorship.

This is more than just the Pygmalion effect: the better expectations, the better they perform. The CLC folks publicly represented their writers as rhetorical agents, so at least some of the teachers took them seriously. But not always. Raymond’s teacher (says Flower glibly, hardly seriously) thought it had puffed Raymond up and made her job of telling him how he fails as a writer harder. Despite this, Flower shows convincingly that Raymond has rhetorical agency in this instance, although maybe not of the academic kind.

This is why Gee’s notion of Discourse theory is troubling when viewed through the lens of agency. He values some discourses as dominant and non-dominant. Dominant Discourses, like the academic Discourse Raymond is supposed to be mastering in school, are secondary Discourses (in other words discourses you aren’t born into), the mastery of which potentially brings us social goods. Nondominant Discourses are Secondary Discourses, the mastery of which brings us solidarity with a social network, but not wider social goods or status. I worry that if Gee is right, this is all that wonderful programs like DUSTY and the CLC are: non-dominant Discourses that do not bring the participants the social goods they need to lead more fulfilled lives.

He also says that grammar is a gatekeeping device, and that those who don’t know the grammar can’t be part of the discourse. The superficialities of the discourse can only be picked up by apprenticing: like a sponsorship. But the different thing with apprenticing is that it is a means to an end: what Paula Mattieu, borrowing from Michel de Certeau, would call a strategy, not a tactic. That way of negotiating the world seems so clinical. And I would say that there is evidence that sponsored literacy, and sponsored agency, can be a tactical counterattack against rigid Dominant discourses that set students like Raymond or students like me on a path we'd rather not be on. While Gee claims that meta-knowledge of an unfamiliar discourse can make 'maladapted' students smarter than 'adapted' ones, his assertion that classrooms that avoid overt talk of “form” and “superficialities”, as well of their socio-cultural-political basis, is no help at all.

Matteau makes a point that we must take advantage of opportunities as they are presented to us. Where Gee claims that students qualify as rhetorical agents only when they can control the elite discourse of academic writing, I think its possible that a student being able to ask for help could be a first, baby, theoretical step towards getting out of the loops that Gee and Flower and Hull and Katz have written for themselves and their students. Being able to ask for help is more than just saying "I need help." It's doing like Shirley did and identifying the problem and mapping out its complexities and offering possibilities and asking "what if?"

Agency is a social thing. It's not about individual identity. The problem of the American individualistic hero “taking” agency is that no person is a lone actor. A person, even the "lone rhetor" gets her agency from the ethos of the communities she's in. Ethos feels like a much more flexible thing to me than identity. I think that the only reason this sort of iconic defiance and resistance works well for white males and not for kids, women, minorities, etc., is because society sees what white male heros do as agency. Society gives the lone rhetor that agency. It’s all about perception. It’s not about independence at all, even though that’s the idea. It’s the illusion of independence as given by society.

Agency is a social thing. It's about having an audience, a real audience, not a constructed or contrived audience -- like when a professor tells her English 101 students their audience for their writing is their "peers." Who are those peers? What value do they get from being an audience? What value do the students get from writing to the audience? Agency must be negotiated within a community, just like sponsorship.

And asking for sponsorship is a social thing. There is more to it than just asking for help. It's learning what to ask for and how to negotiate for the student. For the sponsor, I imagine it's something quite similar. For Hull and Katz, just mapping out a complex problem space seems to be agency, as long as it is sponsored by others who know how to see and support agency in others. When they describe Debbie’s attempts get Jamaal to say what’s on his mind, it’s clear that Jamaal needs open-minded and flexible direction. That all sounds great. But I know in my own personal experience that even when I’m held by the hand most of the way, if I’m left to my own devices I torpedo my life. This is because (I hope) that to learn to become a part of all the Discourses I will need and want to navagate in the course of my life, I will need to learn how to be, socially. And this, I think, could be true of any person struggling to go public in a meaningful way. And this could also be achieved, I Hope, by a social understanding of audience, ethos, and agency.