When I was writing my thesis on the torture porn sub horror genre, people would ask me “what about The Passion of the Christ? Does that count as torture porn?” My immediate response was always that while The Passion obviously involved graphic and prolonged sequences of visual torture, the film’s purpose and intentions did not align with the traditional motives of the horror genre. Then the person would generally follow up my response with this question, “Well, then what makes a horror movie a horror movie?” Genre theory is tricky. Certainly there are things that genre films, like the western or film noir films, always include. But there are also things that change in genre films. For instance, while the fact that horror films have almost always had a monster figure at the narrative center, the setting of the monster’s violent escapades have changed, especially in the last twenty five years, from isolated, gothic places to more suburban and even urban environments. Genre distinction and definition is illusive, squarely and ultimately not fixed. In other words, as Walter Kendrick has said, the process of “genrefication” is a process of some attributes sticking and a lot of attributes changing to better reflect the cultural milieu or sociohistorical moment.
But we’re not supposed to be talking about film theory or horror theory; we are supposed to be talking about discourse theory and composition pedagogy. But I think what Bizzell’s piece “The Intellectual Work of “Mixed” Forms of Academic Discourses” acknowledges is something very similar to the theory of cinematic genrefication described above. After having read a number of Bizzell’s older pieces on “hybrid” then “mixed” discourses in the academy, this piece seems to possess less polemical suggestion and a more honest diagnosis of academic discourse. However, in that honest diagnosis, Bizzell finds some support for her earlier radical pedagogical proposals. Last week in class and on the blogs we discusses a lot about “allowance”: who is allowed to use non-traditional academic discourse, how much mixed discourses should we allow students to use, how much mixed discourses should we be allowed to teach in the composition classroom, are we as young scholars allowed to use these discourse. While many of these questions seem(ed) impossible to adequately address, Bizzell, in this essay, at the very least approaches a simple answer to the fundamental underpinnings of those “allowance” questions: discourse (genre) is not fixed, it is always changing (1). Therefore, Bizzell continues, “’alternative’ discourses have always been knocking around the academy” (1). In other words, we don’t have to think of alternative discourse as new or revolutionary, but as already existent, as already a part of the discursive, or generic, process. Of course, there are pieces of academic discourse, just like with the horror genre, which remain as necessary, stable components, namely what Bizzell calls the intellectual work of the academy, but there are also parts of the discourse that change with time, rhetorical purpose and aim. It is not that we need to think about allowing students write in mixed discourses, because they, like others in the academy at large, already do and will. What we need to do is encourage and provide space for pedagogies that help students learn to use, what Bizzell says, “their own discursive resources to bear in the intellectual challenges of the academic disciplines” (9).
That student-centered approach is exactly what the second essay we read for this week discussed. Jacqueline Jones Royster, in “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” argues for a shift of focus in literacy pedagogy. Moving away from “traditional discourse” centered pedagogies, or pedagogies of “correctness,” Royster suggests that literacy instruction be a people-driven enterprise (26). Royster says that a people-centered literacy pedagogy helps people “forge connections between what they already know as language users and the more that is available to be known” (28). What Royster is talking about, in many ways, is facilitating the evolution of discourse (genre). In encouraging the use of personal language in combination with the learning of other linguistic, rhetorical, and informational tactics, Royster is describing a pedagogical technique that uses, as Bizzell described, the natural (and not in the organic or biological sense) change of discourse, in the classroom setting. Sorry, bad sentence. What I mean is, Royster describes a pedagogy that involves what Bizzell outlines as happening over time. Not sure that was any better than the other sentence. Sorry.
Despite my inability to really say what I am trying to say, these two pieces both are hopeful for and reassuring to students and teachers: Bizzell’s demystifying alternative discourse by detailing how those kinds of discourses are already being used in the academy is freeing for a student; Royster’s paradigmatic shift towards a people-centered literacy pedagogy is encouraging for a composition teacher. Ultimately, in both cases, the authors’ move away from questions of “allowance.” For me, that move is the most reassuring and hopeful thing of all.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Alt/Dis in the classroom
Many people have already done substantial summary work of Bizzell’s “Hybrid Academic Discourses: What, Why, How” and her later piece, “Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, or What to do with ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourse,” and so I am not going to. Instead I am going to try and contextualize her arguments in a few teaching. However, for the purpose of clarity let me say what I think Bizzell is ultimately claiming in her two pieces. Though a bit reductive, I think it is suffice to say that in her first piece Bizzell makes the claim that academic work can be performed using different discourses and the composition classroom should finds ways of allowing students the opportunity to practice making academic arguments using those different, or as she says, “hybrid,” discourses. In her second piece, she backs off a bit from using “hybrid” to label these new discursive pursuits, but still ultimately argues for their pedagogical place in the composition classroom.
When I first started to teach freshman composition, I truly struggled with the notion of allowing, encouraging, supporting, making way for alternative discourses. It was not that I didn’t see the value of the alternative discourses, or even that I thought that traditional academic discourse was some inherently the best way to make an argument. It was simply that I wanted to make sure I was preparing my students to “succeed” in what they might encounter in other college courses. In other words, I was uneasy with teaching students how and allowing students to use alternative discourses when the moment they left my class they would be expected to write papers using much more conservative discourses. I felt, as Bizzell writes in her “Hybrid Academic Discourse” essay, that as an instructor of writing it was my job to “help them develop their language-using abilities...to succeed in college” (8). However, I also felt, responding to Rochelle Brock’s claim that higher education dehumanizes and despiritualizes students, that I needed to ultimately treat me students with a true sense of humanity (Bizzell also says this). What I could not reconcile was how to encourage students to experiment with alternative discourses when they would be required to use traditional academic discourse in other courses; and additionally, I questioned how forcing academic discourse on them also was an act of humanity. What I settled on for my first semester of teaching was having four paper assignments that required traditional academic discourse and one paper that gave students the opportunity to use alternative discourses (I was very inspired by Carmen Kynard's "'New Life in This Dormant Creature': Notes on Social Consciousness, Language and Learning in a College Classroom"). This didn’t go so well. After three papers of traditional academic discourse, freeing the students to explore different ways of writing was ultimately confusing to them They had a hard time being creative and running out-of-bounds after 10 weeks of being forced to color in the lines (sorry for the stupid child hood metaphors). Then, asking them to return to traditional discourse for the final paper just confused them even more. I tried to find a balance of giving them tools to succeed in other classes and giving them the freedom to use other discourses.
After that semester, I dropped the alt/dis paper. It was too confusing for the students. Since then, I now always preface my composition classes with a discussion on academic discourse and its use at the university. I talk about power structures, and assure students that this kind of discourse is not necessarily the best way to write, just the most appropriate way to write in this context. In my heart of hearts I totally agree with Bizzell and I understand that academic discourse that is published often does not follow the rules of academic discourse taught at the university. But I also have not yet found a way to implement what Bizzell is talking about without feeling like I am not giving students the knowledge and skills that will need to succeed in other classes (classes which are not so open to new discourses).
Though I am not totally comfortable with this final statement, it is the thing I have continually stressed in my comp. classes: writing is a rhetorical exercise, know your audience, know your purpose. Though that doesn’t solve really anything., using it in class does allow us as a class to talk about the opportunity for other discourses and do exercises (like the summary exercise I talked about in the last class) that encourage other discourses, while grounding the formal papers (because they are rhetorical exercises) in traditional academic discourse.
When I first started to teach freshman composition, I truly struggled with the notion of allowing, encouraging, supporting, making way for alternative discourses. It was not that I didn’t see the value of the alternative discourses, or even that I thought that traditional academic discourse was some inherently the best way to make an argument. It was simply that I wanted to make sure I was preparing my students to “succeed” in what they might encounter in other college courses. In other words, I was uneasy with teaching students how and allowing students to use alternative discourses when the moment they left my class they would be expected to write papers using much more conservative discourses. I felt, as Bizzell writes in her “Hybrid Academic Discourse” essay, that as an instructor of writing it was my job to “help them develop their language-using abilities...to succeed in college” (8). However, I also felt, responding to Rochelle Brock’s claim that higher education dehumanizes and despiritualizes students, that I needed to ultimately treat me students with a true sense of humanity (Bizzell also says this). What I could not reconcile was how to encourage students to experiment with alternative discourses when they would be required to use traditional academic discourse in other courses; and additionally, I questioned how forcing academic discourse on them also was an act of humanity. What I settled on for my first semester of teaching was having four paper assignments that required traditional academic discourse and one paper that gave students the opportunity to use alternative discourses (I was very inspired by Carmen Kynard's "'New Life in This Dormant Creature': Notes on Social Consciousness, Language and Learning in a College Classroom"). This didn’t go so well. After three papers of traditional academic discourse, freeing the students to explore different ways of writing was ultimately confusing to them They had a hard time being creative and running out-of-bounds after 10 weeks of being forced to color in the lines (sorry for the stupid child hood metaphors). Then, asking them to return to traditional discourse for the final paper just confused them even more. I tried to find a balance of giving them tools to succeed in other classes and giving them the freedom to use other discourses.
After that semester, I dropped the alt/dis paper. It was too confusing for the students. Since then, I now always preface my composition classes with a discussion on academic discourse and its use at the university. I talk about power structures, and assure students that this kind of discourse is not necessarily the best way to write, just the most appropriate way to write in this context. In my heart of hearts I totally agree with Bizzell and I understand that academic discourse that is published often does not follow the rules of academic discourse taught at the university. But I also have not yet found a way to implement what Bizzell is talking about without feeling like I am not giving students the knowledge and skills that will need to succeed in other classes (classes which are not so open to new discourses).
Though I am not totally comfortable with this final statement, it is the thing I have continually stressed in my comp. classes: writing is a rhetorical exercise, know your audience, know your purpose. Though that doesn’t solve really anything., using it in class does allow us as a class to talk about the opportunity for other discourses and do exercises (like the summary exercise I talked about in the last class) that encourage other discourses, while grounding the formal papers (because they are rhetorical exercises) in traditional academic discourse.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Rethinking Literacy as a Pedagogical Art of the Contact Zone
Mary Louise Pratt begins her seminal article, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” by detailing the way her young adolescent son used baseball trading cards as a kind of pedagogical device, first by aiding in his literacy development and then in informing his mathematical, historical, geographic and various other topical education. Pratt ends the rather long introduction by explaining how his baseball-card led education was far more different and far deeper than the formal education he was receiving at his school (1). In other words, baseball cards and the socialization around the baseball cards allowed Pratt’s son a more contextualized and meaningful educational experience than the instruction going on in his conventional classroom. Though Pratt’s son’s educational development narrative does not necessarily highlight explicit issues of the contact zone, it nonetheless functions as important context for the remainder of her essay: it questions, without overtly questioning, traditional conceptions and understandings of literacy.
As Pratt moves away from her son’s own baseball card education and into the history, translation and understanding of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s 1613 eight-hundred page treatise entitled, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, she maintains her focus on literacy, albeit literacy produced and understood at the place of the contact zone, the contact zone being, as she describes, a “social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in high asymmetrical relations of power...” (1). Through detailed analysis, Pratt highlights how autoethnographic work, like Guaman Poma’s, often uses the official discourse, genres and rules of the oppressor in subversive and challenging ways. Noting how Guaman Poma’s work both follows and subverts prevailing contemporaneous linguistic methodologies, Pratt writes, “Guaman Poma constructs his text by appropriating and adapting pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders. He does not simply imitate or reproduce it; he selects and adapts it along Andean lines to express (bilingually, mind you) Andean interests and aspirations” (2). Pratt argues that this sophisticated techniques, along with “transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression” are all literate arts of the contact zone (4). She ends her essay by challenging American teachers and instructors to begin developing pedagogical arts of the contact zone that might better create spaces “where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, [and] temporary protection from legacies of oppression” (6). But what about her son? And literacy? What about those damn baseball cards?
I think maybe one of the pedagogical arts of the contact zone, as suggested in Pratt’s introduction, and argued elsewhere by James Paul Gee, is re-thinking how we understand literacy. In Gee’s What Video Games can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, he sets out to redefine literacy. He moves beyond the traditional understanding of literacy, the ability to read and write, and says we must think about literacy as one’s ability to understand and make meaning in a specific group (or, as he puts it, semiotic domain) (20). This conception of literacy allows for people in various groups and with various associations to actually be “literate” in unconventional and nontraditional ways, permitting a break from homogeneous discourse histories and traditions. Pratt’s son learned how to make meaning and understand meaning in his specific semiotic domain (collectors of baseball cards) and as she suggested, that literacy was rich and deep and meaningful, and ultimately led to more learning. When we can see literacy as something not so rigid and necessarily situated in prevailing white middle class ideologies, we can see the and (maybe) better understand the work produced in the contact zone.
Two years ago, I sat in on a panel that was supposed to be discussing new technologies and platforms (such as wikis, texting, instant messaging, MySpace, etc) and the composition classroom. I was just into my second semester teaching and I was using MySpace in the classroom as a way to facilitate discussion and free exchange. During my use of MySpace in the freshman composition classroom, I was interested in how the social environment might enable students to use their own discourses in academic discussions. The experiment had varied results, but nonetheless I was still optimistic that social sites could be used to provide students spaces where alternative discourses were encouraged. As the panelists each discussed their own pedagogical approach to new technologies and programs I was struck with their underlying intentions. It was clear that these tenured professors teaching at smaller universities intended on co-opting these new technologies and programs and imposing traditional academic discourse on them. In other words, each of the presenters discussed how we needed to correct the “illiteracy” that these technologies and programs facilitated and teach students how to write traditional academic discourse in the technologies and programs. Horrified, I asked the panel, “How can the discourses encouraged by these new technologies and programs instead be used to make academic arguments?” The panelists, obviously not in my same boat (actually there was only one other person in the room that I could tell was having a hard time chewing on what the paneling was feeding us), scoffed at the absurdity of my question. The panelists, working from a traditional and conservative conception of literacy had no regard for the possibilities of alternative discourses in these technologies and programs and were simply not interested in seeing how these new democratic platforms could be used as the pedagogical arts of the contact zone.
The way I saw it (and see it) was/is that new technologies and programs possess a huge amount of possibility in allowing a space for alternative discourses and, what Robert Kaplan calls, contrastive rhetoric, in the traditional classroom. As Kaplan explains, contrastive rhetoric has had little to no impact on the traditional classroom (vii). One of the reasons for this, he goes on to say, is that composition instructors have assumed their audience (students) as monolingual and monocultural (viii). However, not only have instructors assumed a homogeneity amongst their students, they have, as shown in the attitude of the panelists described above, been comfortable with teaching and expecting their students to learn traditional academic discourses. But, as many of us know, the classroom is not as conventional and traditional as the discourse it commonly espouses. It is varied and diverse. And it is in need of alternative discourses and contrastive rhetorics. I think the new technologies and programs explored in the panel I listened to can work to approach some of the challenges that Pratt leaves her audience with. The panelists saw on-line popular mediums/spaces as needing corrected, as needing realigned with traditional and conservative notions of literacy and discourse; but, they missed an opportunity. The mediums/spaces can be used, I think, in the classroom, especially the composition classroom, as opportunities for students to get the chance and make arguments/statements in their own creative and historical discourses. Students, outside of the classroom cross, engage and explore the contact zone everyday through their interactions through/in these mediums/spaces. Students should not be asked to change the way they engage in those spaces, but instead, academics should be asked how those spaces could help to rethink understandings of discourse and literacy.
Works Cited
Pratt, M. L. (1991). "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession 91: 33-40.
Kaplan, R. B. Forward: What in the World is Contrastive Rhetoric?: vii-xx.
Peeples, Tim. Professional Writing and Rhetoric: Reading from the Field. New York: Longman, 2003. Print.
As Pratt moves away from her son’s own baseball card education and into the history, translation and understanding of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s 1613 eight-hundred page treatise entitled, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, she maintains her focus on literacy, albeit literacy produced and understood at the place of the contact zone, the contact zone being, as she describes, a “social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in high asymmetrical relations of power...” (1). Through detailed analysis, Pratt highlights how autoethnographic work, like Guaman Poma’s, often uses the official discourse, genres and rules of the oppressor in subversive and challenging ways. Noting how Guaman Poma’s work both follows and subverts prevailing contemporaneous linguistic methodologies, Pratt writes, “Guaman Poma constructs his text by appropriating and adapting pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders. He does not simply imitate or reproduce it; he selects and adapts it along Andean lines to express (bilingually, mind you) Andean interests and aspirations” (2). Pratt argues that this sophisticated techniques, along with “transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression” are all literate arts of the contact zone (4). She ends her essay by challenging American teachers and instructors to begin developing pedagogical arts of the contact zone that might better create spaces “where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, [and] temporary protection from legacies of oppression” (6). But what about her son? And literacy? What about those damn baseball cards?
I think maybe one of the pedagogical arts of the contact zone, as suggested in Pratt’s introduction, and argued elsewhere by James Paul Gee, is re-thinking how we understand literacy. In Gee’s What Video Games can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, he sets out to redefine literacy. He moves beyond the traditional understanding of literacy, the ability to read and write, and says we must think about literacy as one’s ability to understand and make meaning in a specific group (or, as he puts it, semiotic domain) (20). This conception of literacy allows for people in various groups and with various associations to actually be “literate” in unconventional and nontraditional ways, permitting a break from homogeneous discourse histories and traditions. Pratt’s son learned how to make meaning and understand meaning in his specific semiotic domain (collectors of baseball cards) and as she suggested, that literacy was rich and deep and meaningful, and ultimately led to more learning. When we can see literacy as something not so rigid and necessarily situated in prevailing white middle class ideologies, we can see the and (maybe) better understand the work produced in the contact zone.
Two years ago, I sat in on a panel that was supposed to be discussing new technologies and platforms (such as wikis, texting, instant messaging, MySpace, etc) and the composition classroom. I was just into my second semester teaching and I was using MySpace in the classroom as a way to facilitate discussion and free exchange. During my use of MySpace in the freshman composition classroom, I was interested in how the social environment might enable students to use their own discourses in academic discussions. The experiment had varied results, but nonetheless I was still optimistic that social sites could be used to provide students spaces where alternative discourses were encouraged. As the panelists each discussed their own pedagogical approach to new technologies and programs I was struck with their underlying intentions. It was clear that these tenured professors teaching at smaller universities intended on co-opting these new technologies and programs and imposing traditional academic discourse on them. In other words, each of the presenters discussed how we needed to correct the “illiteracy” that these technologies and programs facilitated and teach students how to write traditional academic discourse in the technologies and programs. Horrified, I asked the panel, “How can the discourses encouraged by these new technologies and programs instead be used to make academic arguments?” The panelists, obviously not in my same boat (actually there was only one other person in the room that I could tell was having a hard time chewing on what the paneling was feeding us), scoffed at the absurdity of my question. The panelists, working from a traditional and conservative conception of literacy had no regard for the possibilities of alternative discourses in these technologies and programs and were simply not interested in seeing how these new democratic platforms could be used as the pedagogical arts of the contact zone.
The way I saw it (and see it) was/is that new technologies and programs possess a huge amount of possibility in allowing a space for alternative discourses and, what Robert Kaplan calls, contrastive rhetoric, in the traditional classroom. As Kaplan explains, contrastive rhetoric has had little to no impact on the traditional classroom (vii). One of the reasons for this, he goes on to say, is that composition instructors have assumed their audience (students) as monolingual and monocultural (viii). However, not only have instructors assumed a homogeneity amongst their students, they have, as shown in the attitude of the panelists described above, been comfortable with teaching and expecting their students to learn traditional academic discourses. But, as many of us know, the classroom is not as conventional and traditional as the discourse it commonly espouses. It is varied and diverse. And it is in need of alternative discourses and contrastive rhetorics. I think the new technologies and programs explored in the panel I listened to can work to approach some of the challenges that Pratt leaves her audience with. The panelists saw on-line popular mediums/spaces as needing corrected, as needing realigned with traditional and conservative notions of literacy and discourse; but, they missed an opportunity. The mediums/spaces can be used, I think, in the classroom, especially the composition classroom, as opportunities for students to get the chance and make arguments/statements in their own creative and historical discourses. Students, outside of the classroom cross, engage and explore the contact zone everyday through their interactions through/in these mediums/spaces. Students should not be asked to change the way they engage in those spaces, but instead, academics should be asked how those spaces could help to rethink understandings of discourse and literacy.
Works Cited
Pratt, M. L. (1991). "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession 91: 33-40.
Kaplan, R. B. Forward: What in the World is Contrastive Rhetoric?: vii-xx.
Peeples, Tim. Professional Writing and Rhetoric: Reading from the Field. New York: Longman, 2003. Print.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Stepping off the Bus
The title of this blog comes from my first exposure to the concept of the "contact zone": an article by Min-Zhan Lu entitled, "Representing and Negotiating Differences in the Contact Zone." The article, though overwhelming to my freshman sentimentalities, was jarring to me. It rattled my understanding of cross-cultural interaction and really challenged me (at least that of which I could at the time understand) to think about how I viewed people that were not like me. Though I had never been uneasy around other cultures (and I understand this is probably the same position that most white middle class people like to assume about themselves) I had never really gone out of my way to actually and purposefully engage with other cultures. I can remember feeling so disappointed in myself and in my history of practicing, as Lu says, cultural tourism, or calling it cultural interaction when it is really cultural observation, and from a safe distance. The article, using a tourist bus metaphor (and a very handy narrative) suggests that we stop looking at other cultures through safe partitions and step off of the bus and start to really engage with the culture.
Out of all the things I have read as an undergraduate and graduate student, Lu's article has continued to stay close to my intellectual surface, feeling oddly fresh in my mind and constantly convicting. Though as a freshman I did not understand everything Lu was arguing, the power of her metaphorical narrative resonated with me and still does to this day. It is a simple request of humanity and yet it so challenging, though ultimately rewarding: to step off of the bus.
Out of all the things I have read as an undergraduate and graduate student, Lu's article has continued to stay close to my intellectual surface, feeling oddly fresh in my mind and constantly convicting. Though as a freshman I did not understand everything Lu was arguing, the power of her metaphorical narrative resonated with me and still does to this day. It is a simple request of humanity and yet it so challenging, though ultimately rewarding: to step off of the bus.
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