The National Conversation

December 19, 2011 By 4 Comments

One of the points frequently made about Occupy Wall Street is that it has shifted the national conversation by putting income inequality and financial deregulation back on the table. At the same time, one of the most inspiring things about the actual site of Zuccotti Park, and the other Occupy encampments, has been their creation of a forum for open conversation about issues of local and national policy.

But what is the national conversation? Where does it take place? Whose voices are involved? Today I want to ask: Could expanding the national conversation become a focal point for political mobilization? Could activists mobilize around a clear articulation of the need for a more open, engaged, diverse national conversation? Could this be a way to bridge constituencies that currently have a hard time talking to one another?

Image Credit: Ubiquitous Clip Art

As a rhetorical strategy, the idea of expanding the national conversation is double-edged. It encourages us to pull back from direct, explicitly partisan mobilization, and to look instead for more “neutral” (read: widely acceptable) ways of framing the issues. At the same time, it also takes for granted the idea that “more” conversation on such issues will ultimately mean “better” conversation.

(When OWS puts income inequality on the table, we assume that this is a push in the direction of less inequality, since current norms don’t allow an explicit argument for greater inequality. Those who want to bolster inequality have to reframe the issue, for example by shifting to a conversation about “job creation” — also something that can’t be explicitly rejected in the current political climate.)

Image Credit: HappyPlace.com

Yet I think there is a lot to be said for this kind of strategy, especially in this moment, when the national conversation in the U.S. is operating on a very shallow level, with little substantive debate and much divisive sound-biting. Is this the best we can do?

It bothers me, for example, when my political comrades describe our country as if it consisted of three constituencies: left-wing voters, left-wing leaders, and right-wing leaders. It’s as if they forget all about the right-wing voters, the people who actually vote for and support Romney and Perry and Gingrich. Then they turn around and say: The politicians are ignoring the will of the people! I don’t hear enough activists on my side of the spectrum talking about what motivates Republican voters.

2008 Electoral Map

Of course, gerry-mandering and voter suppression are real. There are all kinds of problems built into the system. To some extent, the politicians are ignoring the will of the people. But we do still hold elections, and plenty of people participate in them — and, of those people, plenty are voting for right-wing candidates. The Republican party has a strong electoral basis in social conservatism and religious fundamentalism. I don’t see how we can hope to change or understand the current situation nationally without taking that into account. And that means framing the national debate to include the issues that mobilize those communities alongside our own.

So: How do we open up the conversation?

Image Credit: Scoop NZ

Sometimes it seems as if presidential debates are just about the only time when a national conversation actually takes place. There, campaign finance reform is a central issue, and already a main focus of political activism. But I usually hear this issue framed in terms of who gets elected, as if the only purpose of presidential elections were to find out which of two parties will hold power for the next four years. Shouldn’t presidential debates be the highest level of national conversation? Shouldn’t they be supported by a layered, systemic national conversation that continues throughout all phases of the election cycle? Isn’t campaign finance reform really about trying to make the presidential contest less of what Brian Lehrer calls a “horse race” and more of a substantive conversation on national issues?

In short, I don’t think it’s enough right now to mobilize on specific issues. The bill that just passed in the Senate is a good example: It’s terrifying. But even more terrifying is the fact that we have arrived at a moment where such a bill can pass without significant national debate. There are only so many petitions that one can sign against specific bills that most people in the country have never even heard of. I am yearning for a longer-term view of politics, for a vision of the future that goes beyond slowing or preventing the slide toward authoritarianism.

Photo Credit: Cover Lay Down

And so I wonder:

  • What if expanding the national conversation became the explicit platform of a social movement or political party? What kinds of implications (for campaign finance reform, for education, for civil rights, for financial regulation) could be woven into an argument for more open and thorough debate?
  • What kind of articulate challenges could be put forth in terms of how actually to accomplish this expansion? What type of debates, conversations, forums, round tables, symposia, performances, and educational programs would support such an expansion? What kinds of institutions and media are best situated to accomplish this? What kinds of pressure could cause them to do so?
  • And finally: Is there a special role here for education and academia? (Here’s a challenge for intellectuals to support OWS. And here’s a proposal to shed light on how politicians interact with experts in relevant fields.) How can we counter the spinning of higher education as an elitist club? What are the real systems that can raise the level of public debate and get people interested in the national conversation?

Filed Under: Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Debating, Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Media, New York, Politics, Punctuation, Scholarship, Social Media, What if . . .

Nonverbal Communication

November 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In 1957, James Vicary proclaimed that a movie theater in Fort Lee, NJ was broadcasting subliminal messages to viewers. More specifically, he claimed that ads flashing for 0.03 seconds for Coca-Cola and popcorn had led to an increase in sales for those items in the weeks following. As a result, the CIA subsequently banned anything that came remotely close to subliminal advertising. However, when challenged to replicate the results of this study, Vicary failed to do so, and had been deemed a hoax for decades.

Courtesy of featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

Although the real results of Vicary’s study remained inconclusive, more recent work has suggested that things for which we are not fully aware can indeed influence our behavior. For example, a series of studies on “nonconscious influences”  has suggested that stimuli that are too fast or otherwise weak for our sensory organs to consciously perceive may nevertheless still have a powerful effect on our thoughts and behavior. In one study in particular, researchers exposed some study participants to either an Apple logo or an IBM logo by flashing it in front of them on a screen for 2 miliseconds, below the point of conscious perception. Later, when asked to come up for uses for a brick (as a creativity assessment), the researchers found that participants who had been primed with the Apple computer logo were much more creative than those primed with the IBM logo. They reasoned that this happened because of the association between the Apple brand and creativity.

In addition to this study, there have been many other instances in which individuals’ behavior was shaped by stimuli with which they were nonconsciously primed with (and instead of providing the details of each of these studies here, googling “nonconscious influences” will lead you to find much of them). While the implications of all these findings are endless, I believe it is important to consider the consequences that nonconscious influences can have on our (and especially our students’) behavior. In a previous post, I noted how the average American is exposed to roughly 5,000 advertisements in a single day.

If the research findings in the nonconscious influence area have any merit, it’s easy to imagine the potential effects this can have. Although we try to teach our students well, we are also competing with 5,000 other stimuli they are exposed to, a majority of which they are not even aware they are perceiving. Perhaps it not our students’ fault when we get writing assignments that we deem to be “too dry” and uncreative. They may have been written on an IBM computer.

Although the issue of nonconscious influences may be a hugely complex phenomenon, I have often asked myself the question of whether there is something that I can learn from all this research, and use it to ultimately help my students in their academic endeavors. Ideally, I would love to have pictures of the Apple logo in every classroom I teach, but that doesn’t seem too reasonable or feasible, or even ethically sound. Additionally, if we educate students about the possibility of nonconscious influences on their behavior, is it even remotely likely that anything would change? And if so, what do we tell them short of cutting themselves off from all media? Thus, I invite others to provide their thoughts on this issue.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Marketing, Media, Non-verbal Communication, teaching, What if . . .

What if we only see the gorilla?

October 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

Part One:

At last year’s Symposium, during the morning roundtable discussions, my table got into a conversation about how to manage students on laptops in the classroom. Are they really writing? How do you know they aren’t on Facebook? I think I said something like, “well, some days I just have to say: ok, today let’s write with our pens.” Composing by hand in a notebook and directly onto or into a computer are distinctly different processes (for me at least), and I think a lot about how one’s attention span and outlook on the task at hand changes depending on the medium used.

In James’ recent cac.ophony post, he pointed us towards the recent New York Times articles on “education without technology.” While I certainly do use a lot of technology in my courses, I also realize that sometimes we need to unplug. So, for me, the question is not so much about the value of technology (which is more about the teacher than the tool in many cases), but rather an inquiry into how our “Net Generation” students’ brains create and process information.  I can’t help but think of  two early moments in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains:

  1. “In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself” (13).
  2. “The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing…But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it–and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became” (16).

It seems like Carr is blaming the “immediate gratification” of the web for impatience or for his own fading attention span. And, I’m not sure I agree with him. Can we really blame technology for the inability to read a book from cover to cover?

When I heard Cathy Davidson speak at the Graduate Center in September, I found myself quickly obsessed with the “invisible gorilla” video we watched (and is referred to in the opening of her newest book, Now You See it).

\”The Invisible Gorilla\”

The video is an experiment made to test “selective attention”–viewers are supposed to count balls being tossed and focus on the act of counting so thoroughly that many viewers fail to see the charming person in the gorilla suit frolicking about. Davidson writes, “By concentrating so hard on the confusing counting task, we had managed to miss the main event: the gorilla in the midst” (2). Some people do see the gorilla, however. Davidson saw it, and I only really noticed the gorilla. Davidson continues, “without focus, the world is chaos…Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them” (2). Davidson sees potential in the fact that technology enables us to play with and against distractions and to really discover where our own focus can be most productive.

I began to really think about the classroom and technology, the page and the keyboard, and the student(s). If we all pay attention differently, is there any way to know who sees the gorilla at any moment in the classroom? And, if technology does indeed empower our different “forms of attention,” what does this tell us about the writing process? Do we uniformly move from page to screen?

Part Two:

This semester I’ve been playing around with something that I loosely call “The Artifact Project.” When I bring technology + writing by hand into the classroom, it is often the sort of thing where we watch something (music video, short film, feature film, etc.) and write while watching. The writing can come in a number of different forms–but what I am interested in is what happens when we write (by hand in a notebook) while engaged in paying attention to something else. Initially, I had a number of videos I wanted to show–mostly hip hop videos where there is a combination of narration, word play, and persuasive/jarring images. But, after the first week of classes, I decided it might be more productive to see what the students do. So, every class period we begin with 2 “artifacts”. These things need to be multimedia, class appropriate, and the student/presenter/ researcher needs to come to class with a writing prompt/activity that he or she will guide us through.

What I’ve noticed (some preliminary observations):

  1. My students pay attention/focus/observe in a very different way than I do. They notice more.
  2. I thought that when given the freedom to have a sort of show & tell (ultimately youtube dependent), the majority of students would automatically go to the music video. They didn’t or haven’t. The students do a lot more research–they’ve found a variety of different relics (or “real” artifacts) from the past to explore–they are really interested in unpacking commercials, in particular–comparing advertising from the past with that of the present.
  3. They do understand that technology is not all good. Many of my students prefer to write by hand–they use e-readers and notebooks.
  4. When given the opportunity to create their own writing-based activities, students really seem to come up with very analytical tasks–they want to think about what they see specifically versus sweeping assumptions (which populate their formal papers).

So, what does any of this have to do with the gorilla?

I’ve intentionally focused on focus and attention and the role of technology in how I see my students pay attention. I’ve stayed away from cost and privilege. But, the question still lingers…how much equipment belongs in the room? Who should ultimately decide?

I know that I only see the gorilla, but my students see everything at once, it seems, what are the implications of that for a writing classroom? How quickly can we challenge them to move from medium to medium, even if I (as teacher) lag behind?

 

Filed Under: EdTech, Higher Education, Internet, Media, Pedagogy, Writing, Writing Instruction

The Politics of Specialized Knowledge

October 17, 2011 By 1 Comment

What are the possible relations between knowledge and power?

On the one hand, it is obvious how specialized knowledges frequently become intertwined with social hierarchies and used to prop up unjust divisions of class, race, and gender, among others. On the other hand, as someone dedicated to the preservation and development of certain fields of knowledge both academic and artistic, I cannot accept any simple equation between power and knowledge.

The idea that power and knowledge are two sides of the same coin has been powerfully articulated by Michel Foucault. Another way to say this, using the language of Pierre Bourdieu, would be that specialized knowledge is a kind of cultural capital, a form of power distinct from but analogous to money. Many of the contributors of Hacking the Academy seem to subscribe to this idea: Understand the political uses of knowledge, and you’ve understood knowledge itself.

Cartoon by Mark Stivers

I don’t agree with this.

Knowledge is political, but it is more than an incarnation of politics. This goes not only for dominant fields of knowledge but also for subjugated knowledge of every kind: neither can be reduced to the power relations that surround them. What then is knowledge, besides power? What is the internal structure of subjugated knowledge? Can such knowledge also be highly specialized and refined? And, on the other hand, can institutionally supported knowledges be extricated from the power that supports them?

In this post, I want to ask about the relationship between areas of knowledge and categories of political identity. In other words, I want to bring together some thoughts on democracy and social justice with some thoughts on epistemology. In doing so, it seems to me that there is an immediate problem: The structure inherently leads to specialization. This is a fundamental characteristic of knowledge and one that works against any easy integration between the impulse to research and the impulse to democratize.

What I mean by specialization is that knowledge is differentially accessible. Knowledge is structured in branching pathways because it is a confrontation with a reality that is not purely invented. Whether this reality is the abstract patterning of mathematics, the detailed records of historical archives, or the physiology of human anatomy, knowledge is exploration and discovery as well as creativity and invention. If you go down one path, you cannot go as far down another.

Drawing by Laura Lee

This means that fields of knowledge have depth. In order to understand advanced algebra, one should know how to count from zero to ten. In order to grasp advanced theoretical arguments, one must learn the vocabulary used in that field. Knowledge makes possible further, more specific, more specialized knowledge. While all knowledge is potentially available, it is not all equally accessible. Knowledge is not like a menu from which you can order any item. It is rather like a territory in which some places are easier to get to than others, given any particular starting point.

If this is true, then we cannot hope to make knowledge democratic in the same way that a society can be democratic. Even as we fight to make education available to everyone, the structure of education entails some degree of specialization. A society can argue in the public sphere over which areas of knowledge should constitute its basic curriculum. But in doing so, it presupposes a “public” built on certain knowledges rather than others. There will always remain areas of specialized knowledge that are not common. Some will be aligned with the powerful and others with the powerless. So the relationship between power and knowledge will always be complex.

At a time when social protest and democracy are receiving new energy and attention through the chain of events that now extends from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, I want to ask about the intersection of political categories and specialized knowledges. A lot of excellent work has been done on intersectionality in politics, for example at the difficult but crucial intersection of feminist and anti-racist mobilization. It seems to me that specialized knowledge is another important piece of this puzzle.

Marya Wethers at Movement Research (photo: Ian Douglas)

This issue came up for me recently when Iele Paloumpis wrote about an evening of Movement Research at Judson Church. Paloumpis writes of being moved by Marya Wethers piece then goes on to criticize the rest of the evening (and the organization in general) for its apparent whiteness. I was reminded of this again when I sat at a meeting of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute and found myself internally critiquing its whiteness along the same vein. Yet I also found that could not put the Schwartz Institute and Movement Research into quite the same category when it came to this politicized critique.

Failure to diversify is a serious charge that can be applied to countless institutions ranging from Hollywood to the United States Senate. My goal here is not to interrogate either the Schwartz Institute or Movement Research on their particular successes, failures, or histories, but to draw attention to the politics of knowledge as it plays out in certain contexts of which these are two examples close to me personally. To begin with, I want to acknowledge that every successful contemporary institution has its own unique history necessarily tied to institutional power and that none can escape being more or less imbricated in the racist history of the United States.

What interests me here is that these two institutions are explicitly defined by their support of a particular field of knowledge: “movement” in one case and “communications” in the other. The Schwartz Institute draws its fellows from the CUNY doctoral pool, which means it reflects the demographics of doctoral students rather than undergraduates. And Movement Research, with its unique and in many ways politically radical history linked to avant-garde dance, likewise represents a specific community. Both communities tend strongly towards leftist politics while also depending on a significant degree of economic privilege to sustain themselves.

Ben Spatz at Movement Research (photo by Ian Douglas)

I am part of both communities and both organizations. I was one of the artists included in what Paloumpis called the “list of white choreographers” that made up the rest of that evening of Movement Research. And while I don’t mind being pointed to as an example of racial privilege, what was missing for me in Paloumpis’s analysis was the mission of Movement Research and what exactly it successfully represents. This is what brings me to the question of specialized knowledge.

At this point I can only offer a series of questions:

  • How should we think about the intersectionality between what are commonly called “identity” categories (race, gender, class — but also size, age, religion…) and what are more often thought of as fields of knowledge or craft (dance, movement, writing, communications — but also math, science, literature…)?
  • Is it possible to bring something to the ongoing and always controversial discussion of curriculum and pedagogy by approaching areas of knowledge as political (or politicizable) communities that intersect with those of “identity”?
  • For example, could the conversation about English literature — how to define the field coherently while working against the legacies of imperialism — benefit from some of the critical tools put forth by the analysis of political intersectionality?

I do not mean to suggest that we should simply equate having specialized knowledge with being part of an identity group or social class. That would be as wrong-headed as trying to develop equivalencies between different axes of oppression. The value of intersectionality is that it views such axes as a distinct dimension, each adding an irreducible layer of complexity to any given issue. It is difficult enough to analyze any given event (or book, or advertisement) in terms of its intersecting politics of gender, race, and class. What happens if we add the question of specialized knowledges to this analysis?

Map of intersecting identities from CALCASA

If I feel that Movement Research deserves less censure than the Schwartz Institute for its visible whiteness, this is because I believe the field of dance/movement (and especially experimental dance/movement) is far more marginal and endangered in our society than that of communications, especially when the latter is tied to business education. In fact, there is some common ground between them, as both focus on embodiment as a medium of communication. But there is also a difference between the two fields: one that has much to do with power but which is not simply reducible to any other political category. In this case, the axis of power I am talking about is not one of gender, race, class, or any conventional category of politicized identity. It is about different kinds of knowledge and which knowledges are considered important or unimportant in a given society.

Again, this is not to deny the importance of bringing to bear on such organizations a critique that examines injustice across the categories of political identity. Obviously, the question of which fields of knowledge are subsidized is profoundly linked to the question of which communities hold power. But the two questions are not identical.

It is difficult to speak about knowledge and politics in the same breath. From the perspective of politics, specialized knowledge can look like an elitist ruse; while from the perspective of research, politics can look like a distraction. This is the case not only for established academic disciplines of specialized knowledges, like particle physics or medieval history, but also for marginalized knowledges of all kinds. Even if one has no institutional support to pursue one’s research, by framing it as research one already takes a step away from a purely political mobilization that would demand more resources for reasons of social justice. Indeed, this may be one way to complicate the dilemma faced by political movements in defining their constituencies without relying on an essentialism that is ultimately counter-productive.

Boondocks cartoon by Aaron McGruder

To conclude: Although institutions that support fields of knowledge should be called out on their social politics, it seems to me that such critiques might also benefit from a more complex politics of knowledge, one that understands knowledge and power as interwoven but distinct. After all, even an utterly tyrannical power structure can harbor valuable knowledge, including some that may one day prove essential precisely to those people who are mobilized against the tyrannical or unjust institutions that helped to develop it. An obvious example is the use of social media and cellphones to organize democratic protests — but can’t the same thing be said about knowledge in other areas, including movement and communication?

If nothing else, I hope that I have shown here that knowledge is not equivalent to power, even if the question of which knowledges receive institutional support is always a political one. It seems to me that working on this paradox is a crucial and defining task for many institutions both within and beyond academia.

Filed Under: Art, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Education, edupunk, Gender, Higher Education, New York, Non-verbal Communication, Pedagogy, Politics, Social Media, To Ponder

Conformity in the Classroom

September 19, 2011 By 2 Comments

This past summer marked the 50th anniversary of Stanley Milgram’s famous Milgram obedience experiment conducted at Yale.

Considered to be one of the most notable experiments in the field of social psychology in particular, and perhaps even the research world in general, Milgram originally set out to examine the question of why people obey authority, even when doing so contradicts some of their fundamental morals and conscience. In this research, an innocent participant was given the role of a “teacher” who had to punish the confederate “student” with an alleged electric shock of increasing intensity every time the student would make an error on a memory task. The teachers were constantly prodded by the experiment to continue, despite some of their blatant resistance and genuine concern whenever the student would receive a shock. Milgram’s question: how much would people follow the command of the authority, or in this case, the experimenter, even when it meant “harming” another human being?

Although the methodology used was questionably ethical by today’s standards, Milgram’s conclusions were a shock to many: about 65% of the participants in his experiment went as far as administering the strongest voltage available.

While 50 years have passed since Milgram’s original experiment, we, as a society, would like to think that we have moved on, and that what Milgram found in his laboratory doesn’t pertain to the way we think and behave. After all, we are a society in which individualism is a value, and doing our own thing and going against authority is key. If put into that same experiment room, we would surely act much differently.

Yet has much changed? Have we really moved on and learned from research such as Milgram’? Or, is it simply human behavior to act as Milgram’s subjects did? One can hardly imagine that in today’s day and age anyone would conform to authority to such an extent that his or her own conscience would suffer. After all, we are much “smarter” today than we were back then…

In thinking about these questions, I’d like to bring attention to world of street art. Many street artists have often found their inspiration creating art that represents society’s dire dependence to authority and conformity. In their eyes, as in those of many similar skeptics, we continue to act like Milgram’s subjects, albeit in a more disguised way. We continue to obey like authority, act like everyone else, and believe it is the right way to exist. Commercialization, they argue, is simply a means to this end. We are constantly being bombarded of how we should think, feel, and act, and indeed we follow.

 

Well, there may not be anything necessarily wrong with “fitting in” to the molds society has carved out for us. In fact, sometimes it’s required. For example, take the world of business, a place near and dear to my heart as an instructor of several business classes. To be able to succeed in a place like corporate America, individuals must think, feel, and act like all others who have gotten ahead in times prior. Put in another way, individuals need to conform and obey the rules that have been set forth, leaving little room for creative expressions of individuality.

So I ask the question of how can we, educators of undergraduate students (and business students in particular) who are at the brink of entering worlds like Corporate America, properly educate students how to communicate and express themselves with their own voice, while still fitting into this mold? How can we encourage them to be their own people, but not appearing too different that they won’t be able to succeed?

As a crucial part of college education (and as other writers have noted), it is necessary to teach students the basics and have them conform the rules until some comfort is reached and students can feel confident in expressing themselves uniquely. However, based on my own experiences, it appears that students never fully disengage from this generic mold, but rather learn it and stick to it without really exploring their own selves and style. The reasons why this occurs can be plenty, ranging from specific educational experiences and instruction that has encouraged this type of communication, to fear of not landing a good job if doesn’t do exactly as told, to the external pressures of a society which (implicitly) values conformity.

Thus, despite it being over 50 years since Milgram’s original experiments, it is easy to see that perhaps very little has changed about the ways in which we, as individuals, fundamentally behave. While that research may have taught us to be more knowledgeable and stop to think before following fascist regimes, we might also want to think about the implications the research still has for other areas of our lives. As educators, it is our job to ensure that students do receive a quality education like everyone else, yet also free themselves of the confines of our instruction.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction

The Academic Crisis of Audience

September 12, 2011 By 3 Comments

When a tenure-track faculty member in English at George Mason publically remarks that “The student essay is a twitch in a void. A compressed outpouring of energy (if we’re lucky) that means nothing to no one,” we as educators get a sense that we are in trouble.

In “What’s Wrong with Writing Essays,” from the open-access Hacking the Academy, Mark Sample goes on to advocate for more public forms of writing as well as for repurposed essays–that is, assignments which involve critical thinking in the form of different, often mingled media.  Sample envisions his students not as “miniature scholars” but as “aspiring Rauschenbergs, assembling mixed media combines, all the while through their engagement with seemingly incongruous materials, developing a critical thinking practice about the process and the product.”

My immediate response to his derision of the essay form is ambivalent.  On the one hand, I agree that the traditional academic essay often feels alienated from audience and from author–it has a sense of being projected into the void.  On the other hand, I have written and read many well crafted essays which made me ecstatic, proud, even joyful.  There can be some great moments of discovery in the void.  However, thinking back on these, I wouldn’t call them authorless, audienceless, or monotonous.  Rather, they were all written by a student deeply engaged with the material, and they were directed to a caring faculty mentor.  The question that I would like to pose, then, is whether this is a real crisis, and if so, what are its parameters and pressures.

First of all, I would like to point out that we, at CUNY and nationwide, are in an atmosphere where higher education is increasingly being looked at in terms of its value in the job market.  Part of the reason for this is that, despite adjunctification, the price of higher education has risen quite dramatically while average wages have stagnated.  When students must break the bank to fund their education, the life of the mind begins to look like this:

In this environment, departments which don’t offer a high real world value struggle to stay “relevant.”  This has played out in particularly ugly ways as foreign language programs have been shut down and the graduate Fulbright-Hays program has been defunded.  However, it has also played out in rather positive ways as humanities scholars have woken up and realized that it is no longer enough to ventriloquize one another’s arguments in closed-access journals.

At the same time as higher education is being questioned from a financial standpoint, the ways in which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and disseminated have undergone revolutionary changes, at least for those highly fortunate ones who are literate and who have free access to the World Wide Web.  The question then becomes why people should bother going to school when they might design their own curriculum and test it out in life’s laboratory.  I would thus read Mark Sample’s provocation as a symptom of this rather painful moment–as a move to regain cultural relevance.

Communication across the Curriculum presents opportunities for students to master, interrogate, and modulate between different literacies and modes of communication.  Low and middle stakes writing in the form of private reflections or public blog posts give students the chance to situate themselves in relation to a number of different, often overlapping, networks.  Unfortunately, in academia and in life, not every task can be completed in the form of a Rauschenberg combine, a pastiche of different elements.

Yet, I would like to suggest that behind every polished product is a smoothed-over assemblage of seemingly disparate elements.  In a strong sense I agree with Sample.  As educators, one of the most valuable gifts that we can give students is the space to work through some of the tensions they feel between their own intellectual expression and the different communicative forms imposed upon it.  For example, I believe that if I am teaching a basic composition course, I do my students a disservice if I don’t teach them the standards of the college essay.  I also do a disservice to them if I reify the college essay, if I fail to discuss and critique some of the reasoning behind said standards.  In the end, though, I disagree with Sample’s final assertion that text, or specifically the college essay, cannot be ambiguous or woven from different elements.  By rejecting the essay Sample risks imposing his own hierarchy of modal value, his own idea of multimodal form, on student expression.  Although he is staging the conflict as a drama between forms, what is really at play is a drama of audience, the dramatic question being “Who will read my boring old essay?”  Behind that question lie insecurities about who is paying attention to scholars in the humanities.

The crisis of audience with regards to faculty publication is expressed in John Unsworth’s “The Crisis of Audience and the Open Access Solution” in the same Hacking the Academy collection.  Unsworth states that the “humanities scholar…has an imaginary audience” and offers hope that this imagined audience might materialize through open access publishing.  Our urge to publicize and “make relevant” our own work to wider audiences has been catalyzed by the demands and skepticism of students; as a result, many faculty members have begun to craft lesson plans and assignments involving analyses of popular culture and appeals to non-academic audiences.

Are public, repurposed, or popular culture assignments a solution to the ennui of academic writing?  Yes, inasmuch as they guide students in the development of their intellectual identity and in their comfort with different modes of communication.  Ideally, such assignments would help students develop their voice and situate themselves in various forms of communication so that they might forge their own purpose, their own message.  Only when that work has been done can the traditional essay form be fruitful for both faculty members and students.

One final thought:  as educators, we should strive to at least be conscious of and explicit about what pressures we are transferring onto our students, lest our own anxieties fall upon them too heavily or without explanation.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department conference room.

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

  • A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
  • The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
  • Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
  • The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
  • Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
  • A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Baruch College, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Internet, Literacy, Media, Plagiarism, Politics, Scholarship, Search Engines, teaching, Technology, To Ponder, What if . . .

The terrible secret of space

March 29, 2011 By 3 Comments

Soldiers and civilians mingle in a Vietnam War-era "GI coffeehouse." Photo credit: http://www.sirnosir.com

In this sometimes laughably cynical polemic, which employs far too many zombie metaphors for my tastes, German philosopher Alexander García Düttmann nevertheless makes a point that resonated with me after many years of teaching at Baruch:

Where [the university] survives, its life will be transformed radically: it will survive only as a simulacrum of life, a death worse than death, a life of zombies, with students no longer being students but clients and consumers, and with academics no longer being academics but replaceable entities in a service industry designed to satisfy the desires of clients and consumers who pay a high price for such satisfaction.

Again, while I think Düttmann’s hyperbole could be toned down, I share his concern about students and teachers increasingly assuming roles more appropriate to the marketplace than the academy.  Students that pay a ridiculous amount of money to attend classes at a university obviously should have some right to determine the quality of education they receive.  But if a university education evolves into just another consumer product, both students and teachers will have to dramatically shift their expectations of what constitutes teaching and learning.  I’ve witnessed this shift in my classroom on a few different occasions, when students have (sometimes, rather bluntly) addressed me as if I were an employer with whom they could negotiate terms (e.g. “I’m not going to be here for the last 3 weeks of class, but I’ll write an extra paper to make up for it”; or, a personal favorite, “I need to leave 20 minutes early every day.  Can you email me notes if I miss anything?”)  Several students have, on the first day of class, asked for my business card and “contact info.”

I’m not exactly sure how to combat the business-ification of my classroom, but since my dissertation is on the subject of coffeehouses, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the conscious creation of space.  While most teachers engage, to some degree, in a kind of pedagogical feng shui, probably most commonly by arranging the desks in a circle, I’d like to suggest that more radical adjustments to the physical environment of the classroom might induce both students and teachers to take on more productive academic roles.  Students are very accustomed to a certain sensory experience in the classroom, and I wonder if those expectations can be intervened upon in the same way that artists subvert aesthetic conventions in order to create a space for interrogation.

For me, carefully selected music has been the primary method through which I try to create a more focused atmosphere.  By playing music at the beginning of class, the slowly lowering it until I begin speaking, I have been attempting to recreate a kind of cinematic experience, in which attention is engaged through sensory cues.  But music is only one tool in the arsenal.  Have you ever been to a meditation center, yoga studio, or church?  All of these spaces very consciously create an atmosphere conducive to the specific form of concentration they hope to experience.  More and more, I’m thinking about ways to create the same kind of reverent feeling in my classroom through my own intentional creation of space.

Are beanbag chairs and Led Zeppelin posters totally out of the question?

Filed Under: Higher Education, teaching

on asking “should they be in school at all?”

March 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A few days ago I read this piece in Salon.com, and have found myself reflecting on it and wondering what other educators think of the questions the author is posing.

She writes “… the majority of students who start classes in any given academic year will drop out, either temporarily or permanently, for reasons that are far, far beyond our control.”

And later in the article she continues: “If I didn’t think that community colleges could save plenty of people, I could not do my job. But I don’t think they can save everyone, and I don’t think that everyone is in need of salvation. They are expected to fill an enormous void in our culture and in our educational system, to bridge a gap that in many cases seems unbridgeable, to break down barriers of race and class. And at their best, they do every bit of that.”

Some of the comments on this article are intriguing as well. Some people tell stories of how much their community college education meant to them. Others, educators, point to the problem of trying to keep students enrolled simply for the sake of tuition. And some argue that completion should not be the only measure of success, that educational experiences may have value even if they don’t contribute to the institution’s five year completion statistic.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education

Barefoot academics

March 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In his essay Teaching Ambiguity Robert M. Eisinge, dean of the school of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design, reflects on the importance of ambiguity as a pedagogical teaching tool and sees Liberal Arts as the best discipline in which to learn it. Whereas clarity and actuality are important, Eisinge believes that students are not enough aware of the fluid and ambiguous context they are a part of. Whereas they can learn all the criteria for identifying poverty, they can’t solve it or understand the actual experience of being poor.

This reminded me of an interview of Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef who coined the word barefoot economics in his book Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics. Max-Neef describes how he realized, while studying poverty in Latin America, that his outside Berkeley-grown academic knowledge didn’t give him any insight into the economy of poor people. He decided to spend several months living with the poor in order to understand what it was like, after which he advocated that they have an incredibly rich sense of economic survival that is overlooked by our sophisticated models.

Academic teaching is very often about achieving clear understanding and applying it to a particular problem. It was refreshing to read that Eisinge was advocating ambiguity, sometimes at the expense of clarity, in order to better understand the world that we are in. When the problems we face are growing in complexity, it is not a matter of finding the solutions, but of navigating information that is contradictory. This is an exercise that he sees lacking in the academic world today, too focused on providing specific skills while ignoring the context they are going to be applied to.

Liberal arts have a role to play in that they are by their very nature ambiguous, interpretive, abstract, owing perhaps to the field itself. Literature, art, photography, are all about gray zones that are representative of human experience, which is by its very nature contradictory.  The questions are how to apply that approach to teaching itself and to other fields of knowledge, and how to avoid the perception for example that literature deals mostly with writing, or photography with image. The distinction that Max-Neef raises, between knowledge and understanding, should be part of what liberal arts can contribute to the academic world. Being barefoot is a great metaphor for that.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Liberal Arts
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