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.
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