A couple of weeks ago I showed a draft of my dissertation proposal to my advisor for the first time. I knew that the argument was not solid yet, but also felt that I needed feedback at this point of my writing process. So, I struggled to let go of my initial plan to hand in a polished and brilliant prospectus and met with him. After long reading and writing sessions in the library, I was happy to learn that the argument I had been building actually made sense. I also learned that I needed to create and discuss this working draft to be able to see the full complexity of the argument that is yet to emerge. There will be other drafts, I’m sure, and what seems to be an interesting research question now will keep evolving as I write. Yes, I’m naming one of the obvious WAC notions here — (re)writing is a way of making knowledge. All this reminded me of my mentor’s advice: show students your piece of writing in progress with all the arrows, crossings, and notes; they need to see how messy writing is for all thinkers, even those who have more authority in the classroom.
As I am proceeding to work on my prospectus, I see a need for multiple readers and interlocutors who, I selfishly admit, will help me dig out all the threads and connect them into a coherent whole. Another truism surely, but I think all writers including our students deserve a responsive audience. BLSI Fellows and Writing Center Consultants are happy to be that audience, but students who come to workshops and tutoring sessions are usually those who want to raise their grades or who are simply referred by their professors. What can we do to encourage strong writers and speakers to seek an active audience while they’re formulaing their ideas?
Parenthood is undeniably a blessing. Yet, if I were to speak honestly, I’d note that there are certain drawbacks, not the least of which is ceding control over the soundtrack to your life. My sweet soon-to-be four year old doesn’t want to listen to many of my tunes. I’m fortunate that her choices are usually pretty tolerable. While I dig Dan Zanes or Laurie Berkner in small doses, they get play in our house mostly because the munchkin wants them.
Of course, she’s allowed her own music. I know our tastes will likely diverge through her adolescence, and we’ll have less of a chance during those years to connect over common sounds. That’s part of why I’m so glad that she’s worked the Dino-5 into her rotation recently. This collection of hip-hop heads is organized by Prince Paul, who produced the landmark De La Soul albums 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul is Dead, and Buhloone Mind State, and features Ladybug Mecca (formerly of the Digable Planets), Chali 2na (Jurassic Five), Wordsworth (an underground Brooklyn MC who appeared on records by A Tribe Called Quest and Blackstar), and Scratch (the vocal turntable, formerly of the Roots). Their debut album is a storybook, narrated by the poet Ursula Rucker, about 5 dino friends at their dino school. My kid is now walking around, rapping in the deep voice of 2na’s character, T-Rex, “I may be big and scary, but I’m really pretty nice.”
What’s so striking about the Dino 5 for me is the way they capture the essence of hip-hop as it was during its golden era in the late 1980s-mid 1990s, before capital swooped in and co-opted what was once predominantly an alternative and oppositional art form. Popping off about your fly Adidas or your adversary’s nappy head and rotund relatives, rapping about dancing, music, girls, boys, friends, enemies, and the neighborhood. Most of that gave way to Big Pimpin’, bling bling, and baseless braggadacio.
Hip-hop is still a vibrant art form, always will be, but there’s a reason that the areas of the music that challenge listeners aurally, poetically, and politically moved “underground,” out of site from the casual observer who doesn’t have the time or the passion to dig for those sounds. Hip-hop ain’t dead, y’all, far from it; it’s been integrated in interesting ways into other forms, it’s been globalized, and there’s still plenty of innovation happening. Yet hip-hop’s foundational meaning has been clouded over the past generation by its loudest voices.
So I’m happy to share with my daughter a feeling similar to what I got during my adolescence, listening to De La transmit live from Mars. The Dino 5 represent the best of hip-hop: role playing, storytelling, deep danceable beats, learned references and musical quotations, wicked flow, and lyrical playfulness. Their music is both nice enough for a four year-old and “nice” enough for her purist dad. Kid tested, pops approved.
As my daughter takes her first tentative steps towards reading, it heartens me to be able to introduce her to the poetry and artistry of hip-hop with something that’s her speed. Soon enough, she’ll be barraged with beats and words and sounds. The Dino 5’s album gives her hip-hop that’s more sophisticated than the corny rapping on Sesame Street. Hopefully, it will help her sort through the cacophony that she’ll meet as she grows, and find something that’s as meaningful to her as the music of my youth is to me.
Here’s a couple of brief clips to tack sound onto my words.
T-Rex struggles with how other kids see him, and hopes that they can think twice about how nice he may be:
Tracy Triceratops has a tough time keeping her voice down:
The CUNY League of Active Speech Professors (CLASP) is an association of the speech professors at CUNY. Every year CLASP organizes a colloquium to discuss and investigate all levels of teaching and initiating speech and oral communication across the curriculum at CUNY. This year’s theme was Teaching and Learning, and Community.
A tradition at the CLASP gatherings is intensive discussion on the most innovative and creative ways to teach and influence different disciplines with Speech theory and practice. There were two panels that dealt with the creative use of technology in the classroom where faculty from Communication Studies, History, Theater and English presented their different ways of using technologies in the classroom.
Professor Thomas Regan took a camera on class field trips for his intercultural communication course. He had the students take pictures or film themselves, the theaters and neighborhoods they were visiting and whatever else interested them. He then put the pictures or films on blackboard and the students would then use that visual input and memory as a starting point for their research papers on New York experimental theater and intercultural theory.
Urban Studies professor Hugo Fernandez and English professor Ellen Quish demonstrated how they had the students make urban folktales using all kinds of free software such as Audacity, and I-movie or Moviemaker, both embedded in any PC or Mac computer. Many of the LAGCC faculty is working with digital story telling and experimenting with final projects being team written, edited and fully produced digital stories.
Or, once again, the projects were used as a process to get the students to do more advanced research and writing and were not counted as the final project but a step on the way to a term paper. The work and the projects were all very creative and done with extremely low-tech materials and seemingly very easy to use technology, almost everything the faculty used was free or very low budget. The highest cost cited was $25 for a web cam. There was a constant free exchange of websites where free software, free images, music and even short films are available. And for the technologically challenged a professor presented G-cast, a free service, where you call into a toll free number which records your speech and then emails it to you as an MP3 file! Apparently you can even sign up your class to this free service.
What struck me the most was the use of this technology as a process to get the students into deeper work and research. And how at the end of a semester there is visual knowledge as well as written knowledge from each student. How many members of the faculty just jumped into this technology also impressed me and though they all said they were not tech-savvy they all produced relatively sophisticated and interesting student work. The pedagogy and the outcomes were clear and well substantiated from each panel member but I really walked away with a sense of how much fun they were all having.
In BLSCI’s application for the TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award, we made use of the writing diagnostic assessment data to demonstrate the many ways the Institute has grown over the past 10 years.
As Figure 1 and 2 below show, BLSCI fellows support faculty teaching a number of distinct Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) across a variety of disciplines. As Figure 2 shows, the largest representation of faculty teaching CICs is in departments that have traditionally placed a heavy emphasis on both written and oral communication, such as English, Modern Languages, Marketing, Management, Performing Arts, Sociology and Anthropology. However, the institute has also supported CICs in departments that have not traditionally incorporated communication intensive elements into their curricula, such as Accountancy, Natural Sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and environmental sciences), and Computer Information Systems.
When we look at these data and hear about all of the great work going on at the Institute during our staff meetings, what we often don’t take into consideration is the amount of expansion that has taken place over the past ten years. As Figure 3 demonstrates, the number of faculty supported by BLSCI has steadily increased, reaching a peak of 144 last year. The number of faculty currently teaching CICs is nearly three times what it was ten years ago. Despite some minor fluctuations, the number of sections of CICs has also increased dramatically. Specifically, as shown in Figure 4, the number of sections of CICs offered last year is nearly five times as many as there were in 1997.
There is no doubt this kind of institutional growth contributed to BLSCI’s being awarded the Hesburgh award. However, the most interesting growth going on at the institute is arguably what happens on a more micro level among students, faculty, and fellows throughout continued mentorship and collaboration. Although we all get to observe this in our individual work, it’s often hard to demonstrate this kind of growth across the institute. As we keep on thinking about and celebrating growth at BLSCI we continue to think about ways to assess it. It’s my hope that this post will spark some ideas among readers on how we might approach this kind of assessment next semester.
I go back to visit Japan quite often lately (2-3 times/year), and yet every time I am back I am just amused by how the cellphone technology is rapidly advancing there. Now you can watch TV in those cellphones, which even don’t cost much to get.
As text messaging is also very common there and even my own mother (60+) now sends her friends long messages full of emoticons (serious), I wondered whether educators over there talk about the side effects of those advancements on people’s language (especially writing) skills as people here do. And what I noticed is, whereas I do hear about people blaming computers (Internet and e-mail) affecting people’s abilities to write well, they don’t necessarily blame cell phone messaging. Why is that?
As I communicated with my friends using my father’s cellphone while I was there, I noticed something. No one abbreviates common words (e.g. from the ‘where r u?’ type to ‘LOL’ and all that) like people here do to save on typing effort, not because Japanese people are more consciencious but because of a feature with the input software common with any phone. Very roughly speaking, basically what it does is when you type the first letter of a word (say ‘b’) the phone provides a list of possible continuations automatically (is that ‘be’, ‘best’, ‘blue’…?) and all you have to do is to choose what you need from there. Of course if what you want is not there, you can choose to ignore the list and keep typing letters. Even better, the phone remembers what you wanted from a certain beginning and offers those first when you type the same letter the next time (’You wanted ‘beautiful’ the other time. Do you want to say it again?’). This way, there is no need to make much effort to compose a nice long text message in Japanese. I don’t think I had to type a word in full when I was there the last time.
Of course, I am simplifying the story and this is not a unique feature with the cellphone technology (this tool has a long history going back to the days of word processors because of the characteristics of the Japanese writing system), but I was amused by this little realization. If more cellphones here had this function, would it have prevented some students from forgetting to spell out what ‘r’ or ‘u’ stand for in their essays?
In the past several months I’ve been a volunteer tutor for an eighth grader whose homework assignments often involve looking up terms and concepts on Wikipedia or Dictionary.com. For her most recent project she needs to provide visual images to illustrate her points; these images are also found online. While working on her project, my student often has an IM window open on her screen; she clicks on it every time I turn away. The computer screen thus becomes a single entity containing the private chat and information resources.
Why am I surprised when she is reluctant to reference her sources then? And, how do you reference 50 images from Google that are glued to index cards?
How do academic blogs reflect the disciplines of their authors?
I’ve become interested in this question while following our Anthropology/Sociology working group, and also through my own surfing. A relatively new blog–The Edge of the American West–run by historians Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman from U.C. Davis, has quickly become one of the better U.S. history blogs. What makes it good is a steady flow of mixed content: scholarship and book reviews, “This Day in History” posts, pick-ups on contemporary political issues and reporting, and some discussion of teaching. Mix in the authors’ fine senses of humor and an occasional reference to sports and, voila, you get pretty good insight into just what it is historians do.
Early in The Edge’s life, Rauchway answered the question, “Why Blog?” I was particularly struck by his fourth reason:
To change the profession: be the academic discourse you want to see in the world. You want historiography to move quickly, have relevance, be sharper? You can’t make it that way book review by book review: but you can if you blog.
This argument supports the notion of a blog as a personal publishing platform, as an opportunity to get your name and voice out there, and to contribute to the shaping of the discourse in your field.
So, how about it, BLSCI fellows? Your very own blog, and all the opportunity that comes with it, is now just a click away.
About
CAC.OPHONY is a weblog on communication-intensive instruction at the college level and its implications for students about to face the challenges of writing and speaking publicly in professional settings. CAC.OPHONY is written and edited by the Fellows of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY
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