As we are prepare our final projects for this class and piece together our ideal literature/film/cultural studies writing course, the readings this week remind us that our students should be more than spectators in our classrooms. Throughout the semester we discussed how to make students better consumers of literary texts, how to be better critics of literature, and how to write better literary analyses.....but we have yet to talk about how to make our students more culturally critical producers. We have come close to this discussion a few times, mostly via concerns about student abilities to engage with classroom texts in a suitably critical ways (close reading, or reading at all, interpreting texts in a rigorous, theoretically sound manner, and building canonical knowledge). The practices just mentioned are those of a promising English literature student. However, we also discussed early in the semester the unlikely occurrence of an undergraduate classroom full of eager English majors (Berube's "Teaching to the Six"). Conversion, we seemed to agree, could not be our pedagogical motivation, and, also, it would be pedagogically unsound to design a course only for the six students deemed the most promising. Also pedagogically suspect is teaching students how to be critics without also teaching them socially responsible ways of doing so. Close reading is a skill, but what can it help students accomplish outside the literature classroom? Sure, you can now be that friend that everyone else will hesitate to bring to parties because they never know when you'll decide to challenge someone's reading of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. But how do we teach students that critique is more than a game of one-upmanship? How to we ensure that critique is presented as a participatory process, a process that ideally leads to change and revision?
Pope and Cardoza present some classroom strategies for aiding students in the transition from critics to producers. Pope's students revise and rewrite Emily Dickenson's poetry. Cardoza's students create literature syllabi, becoming literature professors for a day. Both authors create spaces in the classroom for production and revision of texts typically seen by students as approachable only through critique and analysis. Students experiment with being poets and teachers of literature and in doing so can become more responsible critics of those who have been in those roles before. This may sound like the 'ol "walk a mile in someone else's shoes" argument. Yes, that's an element of being a responsible cultural producer and critic. But, more importantly, teaching responsible criticism reflects "the best of humanism and the liberal arts: the belief that literacy, broadly defined, remains inextricable from our democratic engagements" (Cardoza 429).
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Johnathan Silverman and Dean Rader’s The World Is a Text: Writing, Reading and Thinking About Visual Culture is a first-year composition textbook designed to introduce college writers to semiotics and cultural studies practices. Silverman and Rader highlight the textbook’s capability to teach students to write and read better, specifically how to read pop culture texts in order to produce better writing. The opening pages of the book explain learning to read a variety of non-traditional texts as a valuable skill that will lead to better writing and thinking. Silverman and Rader confide to readers: “By now, you may also be tired of writing informational research papers and literary analysis. Looking at a fresh subject can also help you re-think your writing process” (5). Silverman and Rader demonstrate re-thinking writing processes as early as the table of contents. One version is presented traditionally, organized and numbered sequentially. The non-traditional table of contents is organized less linearly, using more literary and cultural studies friendly groupings such as: Gender/Sexuality, Race/Ethnicity, Social and Economic Class, and Images/Visual Culture.
The World Is a Text provides students and instructors with plentiful and diverse pedagogical content via which to re-think composition, and cultural studies classrooms from a bottom-up, rather than a top-down perspective. Silverman and Rader define terms such as semiotics, signifier, signified and rhetoric, but they do so in a way that encourages students to think about how they are already unconsciously performing semiotic research. Suggested classroom activities, writing prompts and discussion questions at the end of each chapter facilitate searches for meaning in texts students can readily access, such as the Native American mascot issue, bi-partisan news coverage of President Obama, Star Wars and America, graffiti art, and reality television. Similarly, writers are encouraged to take risks with content and subject using different lenses of interpretation. Silverman and Rader mention specifically queer and feminist theory, but otherwise keep the “t-word” out of things in defining these lenses. For example, they do not ask students to write a Marxist analysis of the campus based on the modes of transportation students use. Instead readers are asked to write about the different forms of transportation in the college parking lot through a social and economic lens. “What do those different forms tell you about the demographic of your school? Do we tend to associate certain types of people with specific modes of transportation? If so, why? And what are those associations? (125) A writing assignment framed as such encourages experimentation by both student and teacher since neither feels pressure to demonstrate expert knowledge of Marxist theory, simply an interest in how we make associations between things, people and society. The World Is a Text can function as a framing textbook for a composition classroom, but its lack of overt theoretical discussions might make it less effective in a cultural studies classroom where a more explicit theoretical emphasis is desired. The textbook has potential to frame an Introduction to Cultural Studies course, perhaps with a companion text such as The Theory Toolbox, or Cultural Studies:A Graphic Guide. If, however, canonical theoretical knowledge is not required of a classroom curriculum, The World Is a Text can facilitate students’ abilities to write about a variety of cultural texts, in addition to liberating instructors’ abilities to teach a variety of cultural texts. Silverman and Rader demonstrate approaches that “share the idea that these texts matter – that they reflect larger concerns in society” (57). Writing examples are coupled with author descriptions of intent and process, which aids in assessing a variety of writing about a variety of subjects. If a student contemplates whether or not they really could write a paper about “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, an instructor could provide the student with a writing example and strategy for doing so from Silverman and Rader’s chapter on Reading and Writing About Music. Students and instructors will be likewise inspired by the chapters on Reading and Writing About Visual Art, Television, Public and Private Spaces, Images, and Movies. ABSTRACT. There are a multitude of powerful cultural archetypes and images of the school teacher. These include nurturing caregiver, guardian of morality, champion of the global economy, self-sacrificing dogooder, cultural worker, intellectual, tyrant, and many more metaphors. Jim Garrison’s essay introduces another figure, a mythological persona, to the pantheon of images depicting the school teacher — the Trickster. Tricksters are masters of multiple interpretation that cross, bend, break, and redefine borders. Garrison concentrates on prophetic tricksters that create openings in closed structures to reveal hidden possibilities. In practice, many teachers are tricksters. They know how to maneuver in, around, and through rigid bureaucratic structures and standards to connect with their students and make a difference while exercising creative autonomy in the classroom. Garrison’s essay provides examples of trickster teachers drawn from literature depicting classroom practice. Intrigued by the abstract of Garrison’s article? Me too! I came across this article while researching the educational philosophy of prophetic pragmatism (Cornel West, Keith Gilyard, John Dewey), a philosophy I plan to use in crafting my teaching philosophy and future course design. Garrison’s concept of “the prophetic trickster” creates a pattern of action via which teachers can “evade rigid bureaucratic structure in order to preserve their creativity and love of teaching” (71). This pattern has four steps. A prophetic trickster shares three tasks with the traditional trickster, but is capable of a fourth that is not shared with the traditional trickster. A traditional trickster:
I know, this is heady stuff. Jim Garrison is total trickster himself, being a scholar of educational philosophy, psychology, and physics. Let’s pause and recap. The trickster is “one of the most pancultural of all mythical figures” (68). A trickster becomes prophetic in the sense that “tricksters’ antics often bring insight for others...they offer lies that tell a higher truth...they reveal the heart of things” (73). So let’s talk a little bit more about how Garrison defines a prophetic trickster teacher. Garrison says that many instructors, feeling bureaucratic and standardized testing pressures, will gravitate towards the trickster persona, but they must be careful to “evade the excesses of the treacherous trickster” (83). These excesses can lead to actions made not in the best interests of the students, or self-destructive and ostracizing behaviors. Tricksters are, after all, archetypes, not flesh and blood. A prophetic pragmatic trickster teacher, however, has the ability to “ameliorate the world when you cannot save it” (78). Prophetic trickster teachers become Robin Hoods of literacy, “steal(ing) the love of learning away from the cultural arrangements of standards, tests, and those whose will to power oppresses imagination,” (75) and returning that power to the minds of the students. Tricksters, even prophetic ones, are not without fault or mistake. But they are unmistakably motivated by ameliorative tendencies that culminate in "self-eclipsing love, compassion, and forgiveness. They do not spew forth hatred" (83). As teachers of English, and by proxy, literacy, we can benefit from reflecting upon the possibilities for co-creation we create in our classrooms. What literacies are we elevating in our classroom? Which ones are we tearing down? How do we ameliorate between the various literacies already present in our classroom? How do we preserve spaces in our classrooms where students are free to challenge "correct," "right," and "good" conceptions of literacy? Are we encouraging our students to also be tricksters, or are we reserving the right to ourselves? Garrison, Jim. “Teacher as Prophetic Trickster.” Educational Theory 59:1 (February 2009): 67-83. Wiley Online Library, Blackwell Publishing. Web. 25. Mar. 2015.
Both the Dean and Ritter articles prompt me to think about discussing antiacademic behaviors with my students, and also how to make a classroom plagiarism discussion more pluralistic than "Don't do it, mmmkay?" The main ideas I am left with after the readings this week are: 1. Students are disconnected from their role as authors of texts. 2. The basis for this disconnection is dualistic thinking patterns. 3. This disconnection stems from a disconnection to their coursework and assignments, pedagogical elements that the instructor ultimately controls. Kelly Ritter explains that student use of online paper mills reveals a disconnect between academic writing and authorship. Buying a paper online is consuming the "antiacademic (and proeconomic) discourse" (604) the paper mills use to convince students to plagiarize. Time management issues become logical grounds for purchasing a paper. Ideas and knowledge become easily consumable and reproducible. How does an instructor create a pro-academic, rather than a pro-economic, rhetoric in a course? The distinction made between pro-academic and pro-economic rhetoric relates to the distinction James Lang makes between dualistic and pluralistic thinking. Ann Dean's article tells the story of an instructor attempting to push back against dualistic thinking in the literature classroom. Within her literary studies pedagogy, Cliff Notes are pro-economic, and antiacademic, and do not fit into her vision of literary studies. Dean wants to differentiate her literary learning style from an AP English style that encourages economic consumption of literature. So she has the class analyze the rhetoric of Cliff's Notes. Smart move. I particularly like how she compares the limited Cliff Notes reading of Jane Eyre with the pluralistic reading the class has been engaging in. In doing so, she instructs her students that Cliff Notes is only one resource upon which to look for interpretations of the text. Most importantly, Cliff Notes become only a starting point used to draw upon what is being discussed and debated in class. Encouraging discussion of differing interpretations of the text encourages students to think outside the dualistic concept of only one correct way to read a text. Take a listen to a classic Hip-Hop song by Wu-Tang Clan, "C.R.E.A.M." The famous acronym is often interpreted as it is in the song's chorus: "cash rules everything around me." However, when you listen to the tales of hustling and struggle told in the song, it can also be interpreted as "cash ruins everything around me." Always best to stay, in the words of Inspectah Deck, "awake to the ways of the world."
This week the readings focused on the burning question related to digital pedagogy: But how do we grade and assess multimodal/digital compositions? And the answer seems to be that traditional methods of grading and assessing need to progress alongside digital pedagogical practices. Based on the blog comments and Twitter conversations we read on the HASTAC blog and Digital Pedagogy website, instructors are in varying stages of the digital pedagogy innovation curve. Let me explain what I mean by innovation curve. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a business major, studying marketing. The innovation curve was a tool we used to theorize marketing strategies for products.
Here’s a picture:
Basically, people who pre-order the latest version of the iphone and always have to have the latest and greatest version of anything are the innovators and visionaries. They are willing to pay a high price tag to stay ahead of the innovation curve. These are the consumers that you ideally want to target to maximize profit. The majority of consumers, however, are looking for a balance of practicality and affordability. These pragmatists and conservatives require a lower product price point, but can stabilize brand value over time. The laggards and skeptics, of course, will need the most convincing. But the question becomes: How much, if any, marketing dollars should be spent on the converting the luddites? Marketing dollars are considered more wisely spent on promoting consumers to bridge the “chasm” and convert from early adopters to early majority pragmatists. I relate this chasm to the jump many English teachers feel they have to make when incorporating technology in the classroom. What seems to keep instructors dangling at the edge, scared to make the leap, is grading and assessment. Davidson describes grades as “a compromise in our pedagogical lives.” Specifically in relation to multimodal/digital composition, this compromise manifests as such: pedagogical innovation is sacrificed at the expense of streamlined, efficient grading and vice versa. Grading and assessing processes can validate learning quality, or limit it, but fear of grading can also limit pedagogical innovation. Instructors say: "I'll use technology in the classroom when it is convenient for me."
Let’s return to the innovation curve briefly. The curve should also repeat cyclically, so that new innovations can be tested, practiced and improved. The curve implies impending transformation. Laggards and skeptics can be future innovators and early adopters. Scholarly communities like HASTAC and journals such as Digital Pedagogy are where pedagogical innovators and visionaries test theories and practices in collaboration with other teachers. The conservative late adopters mingle with the innovators and early adopters while discussing ideas and learning from the successes and failures of the learning community. If we do not make pedagogical leaps, and reflect upon and transform habitual classroom practices, how do we, and our profession, progress? Below is a song from my friend and emcee Andy "Wake Self" Martinez. In this song he asks emcees to wake themselves up and reflect on their own practices. The beginning of the song features a quote from Eyedea, an inspiring emcee gone too soon. In homage to Eyedea's contributions to Hip Hop culture, Wake Self raps: "Different points of view of what we call success/ I want to uplift the people we are all oppressed/ you did the same thing that he did/ and he is just a remixed version of all the rest" Give a listen to some Southwest Hip Hop and wake yo self up! This week our readings focused on multicultural and queer expansion of the literary canon, as well as what queer and multicultural pedagogies might look like, both in practice and in performance. Even though the readings differentiate between multicultural, racial, and class issues, I think that the variety of literacies and performances discussed can be described as the overall queering of the university. Luhman’s article discusses a definition of queer pedagogy that moves beyond binaries of gender and sex, such as hetero/homosexuality and male/female. According to Luhman, “a queer pedagogy aims at the infinite proliferation of identities” (11). From the variety of readings this week, we can see an increase in the diversity of identities participating in knowledge creation at the university. A variety of gender, ethnic and cultural studies programs and classes proliferate the course schedule at large public universities. Within the university itself, a variety of programs exist that preserve various alternative literacies and ways of knowing born as responses to what is considered big Canonical academic knowledge. The little canons begin to proliferate, privileging different authors and texts as makers of meaning via programs in Women’s Studies, Africana, Chican@, Asian, Native American Studies, or other cultural and ethnic studies. These little canon programs (programs, not departments) often occupy corresponding places on the cultural capital/funding totem pole, but their presence is considered a statement regarding what is valued as higher learning. However, as the definition of higher learning continues to be expanded, or queered, to allow a proliferation of alternative perspectives and literacies, is the institution of higher learning really being transformed? Luhman cautions that a truly queer pedagogy will remain reflective of its own practices. Has academia really reflected on the ways in which canonical gate-keeping still occurs via budget and funding disbursements? Does academia practice weak multiculturalism in the construction of departments and programs? Edelstein differentiates between weak and critical multiculturalism, warning readers that diversity for the sake of diversity can perpetuate power systems that created the imbalance in the first place. As programs, ethnic/cultural/women’s studies are placed in the position to assimilate to academic norms; assimilating just enough to retain funding, but not being so radical that funding is lost; settling for low course enrollment because funding and prestige go to other departments, and settling for program status because class enrollments are low. It’s a bit of a paradox, indeed. But engaging with this paradox, reflecting upon its manifestations administratively, and in our classrooms and scholarship, is what gives queer or multicultural pedagogies the possibility for transformation. In relation to our own classroom practices, we can engage with and reflect upon this paradox by asking ourselves why we choose to teach certain texts above others. Who are we deferring to in these choices? Our students? Ourselves? The university panopticon? What power balances do we seek to restore, unbalance, or preserve through our choices in the classroom? What spaces do we make available in our classrooms for the “infinite proliferation of identities?" Last week I skipped posting a Hip Hop video, so you get two additions to the blog playlist this time! Below are some examples of the different identities and voices that are proliferating around the expression of Hip Hop. The first is Calle 13, a Puerto Rican Hip Hop group. The second video is a Muslim femcee duo, Poetic Pilgramage. Enjoy!
The readings this week offered plenty of pedagogical advice regarding day to day classroom activities for teaching poetry, drama and fiction, and also some readings regarding the theories that inform them (deconstruction and textual/intertextual theory). Overall, the practices we read about align more with the idea that "students must begin with the familiar and emotionally relevant, and move from there to more complex and historically-distant works" (Showalter 64). Several pedagogical examples for interacting with historically-distant materials were performative in nature.I particularly liked the idea of having students read an 18th century novel by candlelight, and then also write about it by candlelight. In literature classes that I have taken, acting out scenes is also a fun and memorable way for interacting with difficult to access literature/drama. Performing literature, especially for more historically situated forms of literature, is useful for translating historical meanings that may be lost on contemporary audiences.Memorizing and speaking a poem reminds the student that silently reading a poem is a somewhat inauthentic performance. Similarly, reading Shakespeare is a contemporary endeavor because we cannot go the Globe to see it performed. I was drawn to the teaching poetry chapter because poetry pedagogy was one of the first methods via which Hip Hop could be incorporated into the English classroom. English and African American/Africana Studies departments were often the entry points into academia for Hip Hop studies. Rhyme schemes, rhythms and flow were analyzed using literary terms, language not often used by the producers of the lyrics to describe authorial intent. Using traditional literary language/terms was, however, a gateway for progressive instructors to incorporate Hip Hop into their classrooms. Now that Hip Hop studies has cred within academia, even among the Ivy Leagues (Harvard and Princeton have the largest Hip Hop archives in the US), Hip Hop is being taught using its own language and cultural elements. 9th Wonder, the current Harvard Hip Hop Fellow, teaches students not only how to analyze elements of Hip Hop culture, but how to be critical consumers and producers of those elements. His students actually get to use turntables and grab a mic in his classes, rather than just listen and watch Hip hop.
Creating actual producers of the texts we study in class might not be the most feasible goal in a literature class, but many of the readings this week suggest that literature classes can be taught from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. Theories of deconstruction and textual interpretation offer ways to make seemingly unapproachable, traditionally top-down taught texts accessible to students. The critical editing exercises discussed in Erick Keleman's article works to help students identify what they might already be looking for subconsciously, those formulaic narrative rules that guide their reading. When students edit, they are revealing what they find surprising or out of place, implying that they were expecting something else. Critical editing asks the question: What else was I expecting? Kelemen's critical editing strategy is connected to Sheridan Blau's idea that confusion is a good thing. Similarly, studying formulaic fiction can help students understand genre conventions, close reading can identify eloquent uses of those conventions, or expose the meaning behind deliberate breaks with formulaic conventions. Why are you confused? What were you expecting instead? The lingering question I have after the readings this week is how do we make literature pedagogy less top-down? How do you build some allowance for play/deconstruction into your course? I would like students to pick at least one book they want to read together, but I feel like even that would involve me pre-selecting a few titles from which they could choose to read. What would happen if I just asked the class: What do you want to read with me? Would I have to read Twilight? Would that really be so bad? This week is part two of thinking about technology and teaching. The reading last week was a brief introduction to larger trends in the digital humanities and pedagogy. This week we got a little more specific in relation to how those trends might affect our classrooms and teaching communities. The title of the blog from which we read, Hybrid Pedagogy, is a fairly accurate description of the types of pedagogues we might become. Biologically speaking, a hybrid is the offspring of two different species. Online/digital/multimodal pedagogies are examples of hybrids that have sprung from the relationship between teaching and technology. Hybridized digital humanities scholars, practitioners and theories spring forth from the sharing of ideas and scholarship. The Hybrid Pedagogy posts, as well as the more traditional reading from Lang's On Course, provide examples of teachers incorporating new technologies and practices into their classrooms and scholarship. The authors provided examples of how technology hybridizes communication with other teachers and our students via MOOCs and social networking, and also what types of skills and literacies might be needed to negotiate digital divides. According to Lee Bissette's post, digital divides exist at the student and the teacher level. These divides can be relevant issues of access to resources (student's can't afford a laptop, or underpaid and overworked teachers don't have experience with the most up-to-date pedagogical theories/practices), but the digital divide can also be represented as as a tech-phobia or mental resistance. To overcome the physical and mental divides, Bissette states that "(b)oth students and teachers need the support and encouragement to play, to have the time and fearlessness to use and 'misuse' tech." Lang also cautions, however, that a teacher needs to decide whether to use technology in the classroom well before the second week of class, if not during the planning of the syllabus (59). Lang cautions that "dipping a toe in," especially in the first semester of teaching, may be better than jumping into experimenting with the latest technological/online trends. I agree that first semester teachers should be cautious in most things, but even the most experienced instructors should not get too comfortable with the same methods and practices for too long. Hybridization requires experimentation and recombination, use and misuse. Just because you do not build technology into your syllabus does mean that you can't change your mind if a teaching moment arises. What if current events translate to a reason to help your student compose tweets regarding a trending news feed? What if a student says that last night's reading made her think of a particularly relevant YouTube video or Buzzfeed article? Should that student be able to share that video instantly via classroom technology? What if I have relevant online material to share? Can I Tweet it to my students, or should I send the link via the school sanctioned Blackboard system? Classroom social media use can be planned and discussed in the syllabus, but in practice may produce more questions than certainties. Fifteen weeks provide opportunities to make many mistakes, but also many opportunities to transform. Click on the link below to see one of my favorite hybrid improvisational performances. The performance is from my hometown of Albuquerque, and features a talented lady beatboxex and bass clarinet player. This performance was not only risky because if was improvisational. The audience at this particular event were used to hearing only classical music and perhaps some poetry on Sunday mornings. That morning they got something a little different, and a slightly different crowd. I'd say the audience was rewarded with those risks. Our reading this week focused on how technology and digital learning influence our pedagogical practices and our learning institutions. The overall message from The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age was that the internet has changed the way we, our students, and our institutions produce and share knowledge. The challenge is not how to ban laptops and smartphones from the classroom, but how to make them tools (or at least to make what happens in your classroom more interesting than the the laptop or smartphone screen). Meeting this challenge will require institutional change as reading and communication practices evolve with the increasing rate of cultural technology saturation. The authors disclose that the book "does not advocate change for the sake of change," but rather "advocates institutional change because our current formal educational institutions are not taking enough advantage of the modes of digital and participatory learning available to students today" (49). So don't just jump on the digital and collaborative learning bandwagon, but figure out how to get comfy for the long ride... because of the internet! Over the course of my four semesters as a teaching assistant at the University of New Mexico I progressed from assigning and collecting traditional paper portfolios (binders containing a first-year composition student's writing assignments) to collecting digital portfolios. The digital portfolio assignment changed from a collection of Word documents turned in via the university's online learning platform to a collection of words, images and videos collected on individual student webpages. During the process of learning how to use technology in the creation, teaching, grading and management of my courses, I had to learn several new skills. I learned to use Weebly (http//:education.weebly.com), a free and very easy to use webpage builder, and how to teach my students to use Weebly. I learned to use Jing and Camtasia to make tutorial videos for my students. I experimented with multimodal practices and assessment, and learned how to freestyle when classroom technology let me down. Through communication with my mentors and administrators we also began to finetune the process via which the digital portfolios would we assessed, and revised the UNM writing program learning outcomes to accommodate instructors wishing to assign digital portfolios instead of traditional paper ones. These changes were not made for the sake of making changes, but to take advantage of our new computer labs and classroom computers, and also to help students realize that because of the internet they are fluent in a variety of literacies that might not appear directly related to producing academic knowledge, but that remain relevant and effective means of communication. I like to stay informed regarding what internet resources my students find useful in their lives because it can fuel lesson plan ideas and our class' digital literacy. One excellent pedagogical resource was revealed by a student in my Hip Hop themed composition course. We were reading Jay-Z's book Decoded, in which he annotates the lyrics to his songs, all while telling a larger story about his career and the culture of Hip Hop. One student said that Jay Z was doing what users on the website RapGenius (http://rap.genius.com) did. I had never heard of the site before and was excited to discover that it was a library of Hip Hop lyrics annotated by a community of Hip Hop lovers, including the artists themselves! It was like a Hip Hop Wikipedia, and a great starting point to begin looking for background information, artist bios, and different ways to interpret Hip Hop lyrics. The Genius community also includes LitGenius (http://lit.genius.com), which includes annotated versions of classic and contemporary literature. The mix of contributors ensures a balance of peer-reviewed viewpoints and interpretations, and makes great content for a lesson on internet source credibility and citation. If I teach my Hip Hop course in the future, I would like to make the final assignment format similar to that of RapGenius. Students would create a webpage in which they would annotate several songs. Each student would present his/her interpretation of the song using commentary and links to outside sources such as artist interviews, articles and performances. I have my students to thank for inspiring that idea, and I hope that knowledge of LitGenius can inspire similar assignments in your own courses! Below is a link to an example of the RapGenius format featuring one of my favorite songs, "A Tribe Called Red," by one of my favorite femcees, Angel Haze. Via the annotations you can learn the meaning of the title, biographical information about Angel, and decode her use of language and metaphor. I also included the video for your viewing pleasure. Our reading this week,Sheridan Blau's The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers, is an explication of the implicit contract between teachers and students of literature. As such, it is also a great example of pedagogical research and theory. Blau begins with a research problem/question about how to engage literature students in making sense of texts independently, rather than taking notes on the meaning of a text as determined by the instructor. Blau states in the introduction that he has spent most of his professional life trying to solve the fundamental paradox of teaching; the paradox via which "the experience of being taught was merely an experience of witnessing and possibly recording the teacher's learning, and not an experience of learning for oneself" (3). Rather than looking first for pedagogical theories that might address the teacherly paradox, Blau began by analyzing his teaching practices and values first, and then making connections to theorists and literature in the field. Blau credits this "anti-theoretical theory of practice" with the National Writing Project model of professional development. The term anti-theoretical theory is itself paradoxical, representing the timeless "chicken or the egg" debate between classroom practice and theory. The research strategies explicated in Blau's book establish the interdependent relationship between teaching practice and theory. The chapters of the book are scaffolded, culminating in a set of learning outcomes (what I like to think of as theoretical enactments) that provide direction in what literature students should learn. The theoretical enactments are distilled from the chapters before it, which contain transcribed classroom discussions and detailed lesson plans (the practices) meant to foster performative literacy (the theory). Blau says that the theory of performative literacy, presented as seven traits to model and demonstrate in the literature classroom, can accommodate a variety of instructional methods, thereby implying that explication need not translate to methodological rigidity (215). Theory can, it seems, be a little anti-theoretical, especially in classroom practice! It is important to look closely at Blau's research process so that we might follow similar steps in explicating what is implicit in our own practices. That process is a foundation for individual professional development, as well as the development of our professional community of practice. Most important for fostering a community of practice is Blau's advice to forgive ourselves and other teachers for intentionally, or unintentionally, teaching badly; in other words, to forgive ourselves for our "pedagogically insensitive" (27) moments. Navigating the paradox of teaching is complicated, but together we can help each other reflect upon the best practices and theories for navigating it, and build a personal theoretical narrative, as well as a larger one for our profession. In the words of Prometheus Brown, emcee of Blue Scholars: In time we'd find ways to refine the mind/ at the same time/ the heart articulating mind |
Clare J. RussellI am a first-year English PhD student focusing on Rhetoric and Composition at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. Archives
April 2015
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