Dear Jonathan Alexander, Is it still all about text-based writing?

I kept wanting to really like Alexander’s piece on video games and the composition classroom because the idea, for me at least, fundamentally possess what I see as a lot of potential in the process of redefining what literacy really means. And further, that redefinition seems crucial in the ongoing democratization of the classroom. So, when I read the abstract to Alexander’s work and began the essay, I was excited by the initial promise: to use video games as primary texts in composition classrooms “as a way to explore with our students transformations in what literacy means” (35, Abstract). I guess I thought that by exploring what literacy means, Alexander would also challenge how literacy is practiced. It should be no surprise, based on the sheer number of times that I have cited Gee and his What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy that I see great value in the epistemologically grounded rethinking of “literacy.” And as I have said, Gee argues that literacy could be defined as one’s ability to understand meaning and to make meaning within a certain sign system (or semiotic domain). Literacy for Gee is a two-part process. My disappointment with Alexander’s piece is that for all his progressive work looking at how video games might influence and benefit re-conceptualizations of the understanding-meaning part of literacy, he seems to fall back to far more traditional methods of the making-meaning part of literacy. He examines how video games encourage players to interact with literacy skills like reflection, collaboration, multiculturalism, trans-literacy, and critical literacy, yet in almost all recommendations for how these “literacies” can be articulated in the composition classroom are in the form of alphabetic discourse. In other words, Alexander shows how game players develop new understanding-meaning type literacies through video games, but then recommends that they discuss those new literacies in very traditional written style assignments. This seems to me to be both liberating and confining. It’s a step forward in the assertion of using “new media” in the traditional classroom, but it feels a step backwards in that there is nothing new about how to use that new media, or how to express ideas, meanings, thoughts about that new media. Table 2, which shows how to use the literacy skills practiced in video games in the composition classroom, is all about writing: making meaning is still, in the article, a highly alphabetic practice.

And this is exactly what Selfe is arguing against in both the online discussion and her response to Hesse in CCCs. She advocates a change in the idea of “writing.” Similar to Gee, who says that the making meaning part of his concept of literacy is the “written” part of literacy, Selfe supports a shift in thinking about composition moving it beyond alphabetic expression. And while Hesse, especially in the CCC’s textual discussion, seems to take up some issue with the institutional possibilities and liabilities of such a definitional change, he for the most part seems to see the benefit in moving away from an alphabetic preference to a more multimodal idea of “composing.” And that is, I think, what Alexander misses. He sees the potential for using multimodal texts for reflection, but doesn’t give any room to actual multimodal reflection. In this way traditional notions of literacy are not necessarily challenged. Alexander does good work to see the potential of non-traditional texts in the composition classroom, but fails to see how those texts, and the new literacy skills that they promote, can actually inspire new modes of composition.

Okay, a few more issues/questions with Alexander’s piece:

1. Alexander recommends using on-line games like World of Warcraft and in fact all of his information is based on that game. What about other games? Is this an argument to using mmorpgs, or video games in genera?
2. What are the logistical considerations for playing games in/for class? How much time is given to playing? Do you bring in video game systems? Do you only play computer games?
3. Are Mike and Matt really a representative sample group of which facts can be derived? Does it change things that these are two people? Educated? Males? Etc.
4. Does using the video game and the literacy skills it creates as a metaphor open up the discussion to other non-compositional focused courses?

Sabrina-Feminsim

I have been thinking a lot about Helmbrecht and Love’s article on feminist zines and third wave feminism over this spring break. After spending time at each zine, I was continually struck with what the author’s affirm in their article, that the zines (or at least the parts of the zines I read) worked to absorb feminist history and tradition at the same time as reconfigure that history (151). Most blatantly, in Bust I saw that reconfiguration take shape in how the magazine balanced the presentation of mainstream femininity with progressive feminism. But I’m not a good gage of this kind of thing: admittedly male, reared in a family that placed total credence in the patriarch, I have lived most of my adult life trying to reverse my past. So, in order to try and understand 3^rd wave feminism and/or postfeminism, and to try and make sense of what I was seeing in the zines, I asked my wife a couple questions. Now my wife, Sabrina, is an educated, extremely smart young woman, but she doesn’t care much for “complicated ‘smart’ academic talk.” Which makes her the perfect person to ask complicated academic questions. Our conversation:

Setting: Sunday Afternoon, drinking coffee and eating a pastry, Basketball is playing on TV (though it is muted)

Tim: So, if someone randomly asked you what feminism was, what would you tell them?

Sabrina (looking up from her Facebook page): It’s just standing up for the dignity of women. (Goes back to the computer screen).

Tim: So, would you consider yourself a feminist then?

Sabrina (not looking up from her Facebook page): Sometimes.

Tim: What does that even mean? So feminism is situational?

Sabrina: Well, I don’t know. I guess not. I’m always for the dignity of women. I just don’t always actively do things, like protest and stuff.

Tim: Well you should check out these feminist zines called Bitch and Bust.

Sabrina: Okay, I will.

(Ten minutes goes by)

Sabrina: It’s cool.

Tim: What’s cool?

Sabrina: The Bust zine. It’s pretty sweet.

Tim: Well, what did you like about it?

Sabrina: I liked they had projects.

Tim: Projects? What do you mean?

Sabrina: They had craft projects on the site, things to do, crafts to make.

Tim: Oh.

(Sabrina leaves the room)

Sabrina (from down the hall): Ughhh, we’ve got to do laundry today.

Tim: I know I gotta get ready to go back to Pullman tomorrow.

Sabrina (laughing): Well you can do your own damn laundry.

Tim: That’s not what I meant.

The conversation does not define third wave feminism, nor would Sabrina ever want to be the voice of a movement, but it does highlight some of the paradoxical playfulness that I see in third wave feminism (at least through the lens of Bust). In Sabrina’s case, her initial satisfaction with Bust was located in its “domestic” offerings, its craft section. And yet to Sabrina, her pleasure in and desire to participate in the domestic activity of making crafts, does not dissociate her with the larger notion of feminism. For her, they don’t have to be separate. And though Helmbrecht and Love seemed to slightly criticize this oscillation between domestic tradition and feminist theory, for Bust, as well as for Sabrina, it doesn’t seem to register a theoretical disconnect or a even a problem. Now, I don’t know if this good or bad, beneficial or harmful (though I suspect a mixture of both extemes) but it is interesting that contemporary feminism can even exist in that paradoxical middle. And, further, it seems to be conscious of its dwelling place. This is only highlighted in the above conversation when Sabrina asserts domestic independence by suggesting I clean my own clothes. Now, I was going to clean my own clothes anyway, and Sabrina knew that, her comment therefore was not an intentional command, but self-conscious parody, it was political playfulness; it was her way of saying, through humor, that she understands her power, and though she may like crafts and other domestic activities, she is not going to stand for or allow traditional gender roles. That may not be third wave feminism or postfeminism, but it is Sabrina-feminism. And if feminism encourages personal agency and empowerment than that seems good enough.

A quick story on rural literacy:

My father-in-law (sorry this is turning out to be a family posting) loves the now discontinued TV show My Name is Earl. If you haven’t ever seen the show, here is a clip (link). The show is about stereotypically low income, rural people. I never got the humor of the show, but whenever I asked my father-in-law what he found so funny he would reply, “they’re (the characters) just so stupid.” Now the show is a kind of comedy of errors and does include a lot of rather stupid or low level humor. But my father-in-law was not just talking about the humor, he was also talking about the people doing the humor: everyone in the show is just dumb, according to him. And yet, there have been countless times where we have been doing something together and my father-in-law will relate the situation to a situation from Earl, then using the example from the show to explain how we should proceed with our own situation. And then I would sarcastically say, but Rick, they’re all so dumb, how can what they do make any sense?” And he would wryly respond, “they may be stupid, but there is a weird logic to them.”

These instances, along with the rural literacy piece from this week’s reading, seem to highlight the fact that it can be easy to credit the sophistication of one’s epistemology at the same time as seeing them as highly unsophisticated. I’m not saying that My Name is Earl actually deployed rural discourse or even rural epistemologies, but it did at least show that “dumb” people make interesting and valuable decisions. My father-in-law, through all the stereotype, understood that. What he didn’t understand was that those “dumb” people were not necessarily dumb, they were just different.

Written thoughts on Orality

Though I don’t have an overwhelmingly strong argument in response to the readings this week, I did find a number of things interesting. So, in true blogosphere style, I am just going to go through some of these thoughts, knowing that they probably will not amount to a total thought.

One: On page 323 of Barbara’s article (which, without sounding like a suck-up, was quite beautiful at the same time as being highly informative and challenging) she writes, “In brief, Plateau discourse speaks to one overriding value in Plateau Indian life: the primacy of experience-based knowledge.” In many ways, this felt to me like a statement that suggested a phenomenological epistemology, or a way to make sense of the world through the perceptive interaction with it. This seemed to call back to Barbara’s storytime on the reservation piece, in which she showed how perceptive activities in the home (i.e...watching TV, film, etc.) shaped literacy abilities in the classroom. Though Barbara’s two pieces are working towards different goals through different means, this little statement, admittedly worded completely different in each piece, is a solid reminder of what new media theorists like Mark Hansen and Katherine Hayles argue: that perceptive experience often times shapes/forms/informs epistemological practices. Now, I know that Barbara is talking about a specific history and a specific group of people and that the epistemologies of other people groups are most certainly shaped differently and appear differently, but it is nonetheless challenging to be reminded that 1) people do not make sense of things in the same way and 2) that changing environmental factors can have great impact on epistemological practices (as seen in the case of the students Barbara cited in her “story time” piece who were effected by the presence of the television). However, I want to be clear, because in many ways I am conflating two discourses: where phenomenologists might argue that everyone’s understanding of the world is shaped by their perceptive interactions with it, I understand that everyone does not use that phenomenological information in their discursive practices.

Two: Is understanding visuality, or understanding how a culture understands visuality, an important precursor to trying to understand oral culture? In other words, if oral cultures are among other things, as Ong suggests situational (49), reliant upon formulas (35), aggregative (38), etc. does not understanding how they “view” the situational, view the symbols in the formulas, view the pieces of the aggregate collections become necessary to truly understanding their underlying discursive patterns?

Three: We have spoken about the black church and its influence on African American discourse, but what about the predominately white evangelical church? Our classrooms probably have a large constituency of white evangelical, either practicing or not, students. And though the rich oral tradition of the black church is not necessarily seen in the white evangelical church there are certainly still strong oral traditions that must have strong epistemological shaping impacts on the congregations. What can we gather from the expository methods of preaching, the highly structure of traditional hymns, the sit-and-listen methodology of the actual services practiced at evangelical churches in America? Though the students, coming from these churches, also are invariably influenced by western rhetorical traditions, which also invariably have influenced the actual practices of the churches themselves, the epistemological influences of these orally discursive patterns are undoubtedly strong.

Four: Driving across the state twice a week for a couple months now, I have been opened up to the incredible world of podcasts. Radio stations like Chicago Public Radio, Public Radio New York have produced these incredibly rich, probing pieces of storytelling and argumentation. And what has amazed me more than anything is that the podcasts are not simply stories that are read, or films played on the radio, but they are their own unique genre. I wonder how using podcasts in a composition classroom could 1) allow people with strong oral epistemological traditions to use some of the oral discursive patterns in academic settings and 2) allow people without strong oral epistemological traditions to explore a new genre and a new set of discursive patterns.