Gonzo Academicus

Justine Bateman—actress, entrepreneur, mother of two, and media consultant—enrolled as an undergraduate at UCLA in the fall of 2012, at the age of 46.

She maintains a Tumblr about the ups and downs of her experience called Get a College Life, and she has inspired many others who have enrolled in college at “nontraditional” ages. The blog is continually engaging, and I love when she posts the hand written cheat sheets created by her and her peers.

About a month ago, she posted about one of the most bewildering aspects of navigating a typical undergraduate curriculum: general education requirements. I vividly recall my confusion at the need to map compulsory subject areas to the many course options available when I was an undergrad at Oregon. And one of the compulsory general education courses over which students typically have little choice is first-year writing.

Bateman’s argument makes sense. She wrote:

“Also, just found out that I have to take these ridiculous GEs I was trying to get out of. I petitioned to substitute these very topic-similar upper division classes I’d already taken for these basic, lower division classes and they refused. I really don’t see the academic logic. If I’ve taken the more advanced versions of the classes they want me to take and I received A’s in those classes, doesn’t that give weight to the argument to use them as replacements?”

Many schools will substitute courses, but many schools also have a general education credit hour requirement that must be fulfilled in order to graduate (and the logics are often rooted in accreditation and administrative concerns). More important, where it might not matter if one took Anthropology 212 instead of Sociology 103 in order to check off the “social sciences” box of the general ed. curriculum, there’s typically little leeway when it comes to the writing requirement.

After a couple weeks, Bateman once again expressed her frustration with general ed, and with the writing requirement in particular:

“Already set for next quarter. Italian, Business Law, and Computer Organization (CS33 - Machine Language). (And a required english composition class they’re forcing me to take. Really?)”

I admit, I had three nearly simultaneous reactions when I read this post: (a) a defensive response rooted in my own attachment to writing as a worthwhile academic pursuit; (b) a sympathetic response rooted in my own desire to navigate both undergraduate and graduate curricula as quickly as possible while minimizing time and effort spent on subjects for which I had no investment; and (c) a thought experiment response rooted in a desire to push back against (a) and (b): what if taking the class improved one’s writing, regardless of their circumstances?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot in the last six months or so. Like many of my peers in academe, I’ve always been “good at” writing. But then again, I mostly write for academic audiences, and academic writing is regularly critiqued for being obtuse, jargon-filled, overly hedged, and generally esoteric.

Picture a continuum where, on one end is the argumentative acumen of a gifted third grader and on the other is Susan Sontag and John McPhee (or whomever you’d like to substitute for these masterful non-fiction writers). If I’m being honest, my prose is much, much closer to the gifted third grader than it is Sontag and McPhee.

The reality is that I still have so much to learn about writing, and about being a better writer. And I get paid to study writing. As I thought more about Bateman’s predicament within the context of my own ability as a writer, I started to think about my own need to continually learn and improve.

A few months ago I re-read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and realized that I’d gotten into lots of bad habits. I also read William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say (a common FYC text). I learned much from all three books, but my overriding realization was that I still have a long way to go as a writer.

Let me put this another way: I am a writing professor, but I bet I’d learn quite a lot about writing if I enrolled in a first-year writing course with an open and earnest comportment to learn and improve.

Revisiting core concepts and diligently practicing my chops would surely contribute to my learning. But I’d argue that some of the most innovative teaching in our field occurs in the first year course, where bright graduate students and non-tenured faculty are continually reimagining what the course can and should do. As professors, we often learn from our graduate students in the seminars we lead; I bet we’d learn much from them as our teachers, too.

So I started to think about a kind of gonzo academicism (for lack of better term). What if we know-it-all types (the finger is squarely pointed at myself) took an FYC course?

Better yet, what if 10 writing professors at various stages in their careers and at various kinds of institutions enrolled in FYC courses for one semester at their schools and then contributed to a group blog about their experiences?

I can’t imagine that this would be a bad thing for our understanding of pedagogy and curricula in our respective institutions. And I’m willing to bet that our prose would improve. Wouldn’t we learn to be better writers, and to sympathize with our students and FYC instructors? How could we not?

A writing professor taking a first year writing course may well be different than an anthropology professor taking Anthro 101. I see this as a strength of our field. We can always improve our writing. We can learn from people along the continuum. We never stop learning how to write.

(Bateman, meanwhile, seems to be liking her writing instructor so far.)

Scaffolding

Last week, I attended a one day forum exploring intercultural education.

Near the end of the forum, during an informal panel discussion, an audience member asked a question about scaffolding—how might we better scaffold intercultural learning experiences in order to effect outcomes?

As the panel member began his answer, my mind drifted…

Specifically, I began to think about this particular pedagogical metaphor—scaffolding. It’s something I first heard about in graduate school, and it’s actually something that became a part of my dissertation and eventual job talk (the first time I was on the market).

It’s a metaphor that’s commonsensical; teachers create scaffolds for student learning in a variety of ways, from the readings they choose through the pacing of lesson plans and the presentation/discussion of appropriate models. Scaffolding helps students reach higher (metaphorically) than they could without them.

I started to wonder—what if we approached the metaphor a little more literally?

Let’s say that I’m painting a two story house. I’ll definitely need scaffolding of some kind to help me reach second story eves and trim and walls.

Eventually.

My point is this: scaffolding is not necessarily where I’ll start. Indeed, I’ll probably jump in and start prepping the first story. I might power wash the exterior walls, scrape peeling paint, take a wire brush to window trim badly in need of a thorough cleaning.

And then the taping! So much taping is involved in this job. Much of this necessary (really, crucial) prep work will be done without scaffolding (but maybe a step ladder at times).

There’s something to be said for not having scaffolding—or not putting such an emphasis on scaffolding right away—but valuing some immersive work at the ground level. How much can we do without scaffolds?

It’s been a good six or seven years since I was introduced to the metaphor of scaffolding, and it has shaped (and even clouded) my pedagogical practices. It’s seems healthy to think through our dominant metaphors from time to time, even if only during a daydream.

The #1000genres Project

“Genres are not simply text types; they are culturally and historically grounded ways of ‘seeing and conceptualizing reality.’” — Spinuzzi, 2003

This semester, in my Composition and Communication course, freshman at the University of Kentucky will be exploring genres in detailed and meaningful ways, seeing genres as forms of social practice and action (Wenger, 1998; Miller, 1984), as stable-for-now sites and instantiations of ideology (Schryer, 1993), as carriers of provisional knowledge (Shirky, 2008), and as culturally and historically grounded ways of knowing and being in the world (Spinuzzi, 2003).

That’s a mouthful, so let me say this another way: we’re going to be investigating genre all semester, and we’ll be documenting instances of genre in everyday life via Instagram and Twitter.

More importantly, we want you to help!

Where are the genres of your everyday life? What kinds of genres are the norm in your profession, discipline, or vocation? What genres are unique to your city, town, or region? What genres are important to you, and why?

Through the #1000genres project, we’ll be documenting the genres that surround us here in Lexington, at UK, and in local academic and professional contexts. In the process, the collected images and descriptions of genres will become source material for student projects near the end of the semester.

Why are we focusing on genre in this way? Because of David Russell, of course!

People do not “learn to write, period,” notes Russell (1995). Instead, he argues, “one acquires the genres (typified semiotic means) used by some activity field as one interacts with people involved in the activity field and the material objects and signs those people use” (p. 56). For Russell, “writing does not exist apart from its uses, for it is a tool for accomplishing object(ive)s beyond itself. The tool is continually transformed by its use into myriad and always changing genres” (p. 57). Stated another way, he notes that “Learning to write means learning to write in the ways (genres) those in an activity system write” (p. 57).

The #1000genres project is largely about learning how to learn genres—to recognize different genres in the world, the ways those genres arise from and operate within given social contexts, and the ways we might adapt our communication strategies to better match the norms and expectations carried through specific genres. But in doing so, we’ll also consider the ways that people not only adapt but in fact change genres over time.

Participating is easy! Take a picture of a genre that interests you (for whatever reason); write a brief description of the genre or how it operates; tag that photo #1000genres and post it to Instagram, Twitter, or both. That’s it!

Here’s an example of a branding genre at UK, and an example of a spatial genre on campus. Here are several genres layered and considered.

We probably won’t always nail it—sometimes things that seem like genres might be something else. But that’s ok. The point is to be looking, thinking about genres, and documenting what we see.

We can learn even more about genre by seeing the things you post. What kinds of genres are ubiquitous in your world? Show them, and show others!

GEMs

As we near the end of the Spring semester, the weather around Muncie has been steadily improving—the birds are out, singing their songs, the trees are budding, and flowers are blooming all over campus. This week, in both my grad and undergrad classes, we've spent some time outside, working on techniques for analyzing qualitative data.

In Writing Technologies, my grad class this semester, we're currently reading Spinuzzi's Tracing Genres Through Organizations along with Kaptelinin and Nardi's Acting with Technology. We're far enough along in Spinuzzi's book, with a solid enough grounding in Activity Theory, that creating Genre Ecology Models was a major goal for this week.

Spinuzzi notes that genre ecology diagrams "are drawn from data at all three levels [of research scope—macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic] and portray how genres interact as they jointly mediate an activity" (p. 54). Spinuzzi also mentions that genre ecology diagrams "solely attempt to show direct mediational relationships among genres" (p. 54), where the lines between genres and implements are indicators of that mediation in dynamic systems (p. 120).

But this post is as much about the nice weather as it is genre ecologies. One of my students, Emily, indicated that she had sidewalk chalk in the event that we held even a part of class outside. I figured, why not draw genre ecology models in sidewalk chalk? The extra space alone would be worth the effort, as it would allow us to map more—and more complex—relationships...


So, I asked students, in two groups, to diagram the genre ecology of a typical FYC student tasked with completing their final, second semester research paper, from start to finish. They maybe included some things that are maybe more suited to activity diagrams than genre ecology models (like "embodied practices," for example), but check out what they came up with! These are the first GEMs I've seen that take on three-dimensional properties...

Spring 2011 Courses

A quick post—mainly for potential students (but possibly of interest to others)—with the brief course descriptions for my two Spring 2011 courses.

At the undergraduate level, I'll be teaching ENG 431 :: Rhetoric, Writing, and Emerging Media. This is a brand new course that I designed in conjunction with Ball State's new Minor in Professional Writing, and it is, in fact, the capstone experience for that program.

This course has as prerequisites our Introduction to Digital Literacies (ENG 213) and Professional Writing courses (ENG 231). It builds on the ideas introduced in those courses, including writing for the web and qualitative research practices introduced in 213 and 231, respectively. Since this is the first time running 431, however, it may be possible to take the course without having already taken 213 + 231—talk to your advisor (or me!).

At the graduate level, I'll be teaching ENG 692 :: Writing Technologies. I'm particularly excited for this course, since we'll be starting with Haas (1996) and moving through germinal work in Activity Theory and Professional/Technical Communication, leading toward small-scale qualitative studies of writing technologies.

If you have questions about either course, please feel free to ask away!

Jumping Into Epistemic Rhetoric

I've now taught Barry Brummett's 1979 conference talk "Three Meanings of Epistemic Rhetoric" to 10 sections of undergraduate students—either in professional writing or my introduction to digital literacies course.

I teach the piece for several reasons: it's fairly brief (at about 7 pages); it's incredibly complex; it offers breadth in perspective; it suggests important implications for the study of rhetoric; and it deals with fundamental human problems concerning the relationships among truth, reality, and language.

I realize the piece is difficult for students who are overwhelmingly unfamiliar with the insider discourse that permeates Brummett's argument.

But what continually amazes me is how much students actually get out of the article. Literally every time I've taught it, regardless of the institution or course, I've been shocked by how many students "get it."

My dissertation director, Helen Foster, once suggested to me that undergraduate students were often able to deal with the really big problems in rhetoric better than graduate students—that they might perhaps be more willing to weigh contradictory ideas simultaneously. Though it's anecdotal, I've found that, despite the difficulties of the article, my undergraduate students consistently display a willingness to explore what it means to be, how we come to know, and how language plays a significant role in both.

One of the key components of Brummett's article is his discussion of the implications for rhetoric associated with each of the three meanings he details. So, for example, if we subscribe the methodological perspective that he lays out, our notions of a posteriori knowledge are seriously limited, and rhetoric's role in the shaping of truth and knowledge is virtually nil. In this view, rhetoric is simply a means of communicating an a priori reality and has no significant role in shaping that reality. It's a conduit, a dumb pipe.

But the implications of studying rhetoric and literacy change drastically when we consider the other two meanings he details. And once students begin to thoughtfully consider how human knowledge gets made and communicated, and what rhetoric's role is in doing so, the importance of studying rhetoric—regardless of one's discipline or professional domain—becomes not just significant, but crucial.

I typically provide a little bit of background before they jump in to the article, letting students know that he's not arguing for all three perspectives, that he's doing some lit review in each instance, and that he's using a very specific disciplinary discourse. By the time they encounter it, they've also had a basic primer on terms like epistemology, ontology, rhetoric, and discourse.

But other than that, I don't provide much detail. I encourage them to simply dive in and work hard to make sense of the ideas.

It's continually amazing to see what they generate.