The Genealogy of Communication Courses and CAC (Part 2 of 3)

November 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is a continuation of my earlier post in which I try to trace the evolution of communication courses.

As I wrote previously, the idea of the communication course first arose in the mid 1940s when WWII veterans flooded colleges on the GI Bill:

The Communication course sprang out of the demands of the armed services during World War II for faster and more practical instruction in the language arts than was being given by existing sources. Such courses in the language arts, according to the armed services, were unrealistic, ineffective, and too slow. Language, from the armed services’ point of view, should be studied as an instrument for communicating ideas in a social system. (Malmstrom 21)

In other words, college communication courses extended military training in communication even after the war was done. Thomas F. Dunn also makes this argument when he states that “During the Second World War, the term communication came into widespread use, largely from the impetus given by the special needs of war trainees whose preparation for receiving and giving military commands, making reports on activities, and directly operations both orally and in writing were not adequately provided by the traditional college training” (31).

Take a minute to look at this 1944 training video on how women can be most productive when using typewriters for the military. The first minute is hilarious, but then, if you’re really interested, you can skip past the history of typewriters to minute 5 where the instruction in how to sit begins:

Early communication courses both served the practical need for expertise in everyday “reading, writing, speaking, and listening” and the desire to ensure the spread of American democracy, or as Malmstrom puts it, “keeping democracy dominant” (23). They could be in a variety of disciplines, as long as the four modes of communication were the focus and were evaluated as ends unto themselves (Malmstrom 22). However, the idea that there should be a systematic emphasis on communication across the entire college curriculum didn’t really emerge until the 1980s.

By 1959, communication courses had diverged in a number of different directions:  “Some courses [centered] themselves around personal awareness and personality development as a means to better expression, others around the media of mass communication, others around the structure of language, and still others around semantics or general semantics” (Dean 80).

As I mentioned in my last post, articles discussing communication courses thin out in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, an interest in communication courses returned in the early and mid 1970s, although the emphases were slightly different, falling on questions about how to teach communication to students of diverse backgrounds (such as in Diana Corley’s “An Interracial Communication Course for the Community College”), how to evaluate speeches (such as in Sara Latham Stelzner’s “Selected Approaches to Speech Communication Evaluation”), and how to communicate in business (such as P.H. Hewing’s “A Practical Plan for Teaching Oral Communication in the Business Communication Course”). While the notion of business communication had been around since the early 1940s, articles on that topic really exploded in the second half of the 1970s.

In the early 1980s articles referencing communication courses continued the business communication trend and also highlighted multicultural or intercultural communication (such as in Richard Fiordo’s “The Soft-Spoken Way vs. the Outspoken Way:  A Bicultural Approach to Teaching Speech Communication to Native People in Alberta”). In 1985, an article whose title today seems a bit quaint appeared:  Leon W. Couch and Charles V. Shaffer’s “Development of a Computer Communications Course Plus Laboratory.”

Many sources claim that the Writing Across the Curriculum movement rose in the early 1980s (this includes the Purdue OWL website). This is indeed when most articles on WAC were published, but technically, the term was first used in 1965 with the Writing Across the Curriculum Project at the University of London and the earliest articles referencing the movement in America were published in the late 1970s (Steinfatt 461). But, throwing another wrench in the works, in Charles Bazerman, Joseph Little, and Lisa Bethel’s Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum the movement is traced back through the 1970s and then ever further back to 1931, when Alvin C. Enrich presented the findings of a late 1920s study conducted at the University of Minnesota:

Essays collected from 54 freshmen both before and after completing their freshman composition course at Minnesota were reviewed using one of several popular essay rating scales. The conclusions drawn from Eurich’s scholarly research report were that extended habits of written expression cannot be influenced in such a short time… (13-14)

The idea of more comprehensive writing instruction over a student’s entire time at college was proposed in 1931 but was then pushed off for another four decades.

Based on my research, however, WAC and CAC share a startling common ancestor. Both WAC and CAC in American colleges can be traced to a 1969-1970 Writing Across the Curriculum faculty seminar “led by Barbara Walvoord” at Central College (Bazerman, Little, and Bethel 26). This was the earliest WAC seminar in the US, and the philosophy of CAC grew alongside Central’s WAC program as it evolved in the 1970s. As far as I can tell, the seminal paper which discusses communication across the curriculum is Charles V. Roberts’ “Communication Education Throughout the University:  An Alternative to the One-Shot Inoculation Approach,” which was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Communication Association in April of 1983. Roberts, who is from Central College, lays the groundwork of a CAC philosophy and discusses how it emerged alongside Central’s WAC program. He claims that one or two communication courses are not enough to make students into expert communicators (3-4); rather than forcing students to take more communication courses, the “responsibility for helping students speak, listen, write, and read more effectively” should be “diffused across the academic community” (4). He then claims that Central College is the first to systematically require a communication emphasis across multiple disciplines rather than simply within the Communication Department; he discusses how this developed at Central over the 1970s, beginning with a writing “laboratory” in 1972 and evolving into faculty training in communication evaluation in 1979 (4-5).

Steinfatt mentions two reasons for the growing emphasis in the late 1970s and early 1980s for robust instruction in communication skills:  the first is the National Endowment for the Arts‘ 1983 report entitled “A Nation at Risk” which proclaims that the nation is facing an erosion of educational standards (460). WAC also arose largely in response to this report. The second reason is “the opinion of many corporate executives, expressed in university surveys, in casual conversation with university faculty and administrators, and in grants and bequests, that the number one problem of college students entering the work force, both for the organization and for students’ chances of advancement, is that college graduates ‘can’t communicate’” (460).

In summary, the ways in which communication courses were discussed and theorized shifted with the pedagogical concerns of each decade. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was an increased interest in communication for business. Both WAC and CAC in America were born in Central College. WAC evolved first, beginning in 1969, and CAC was added on during the 1970s.

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles, Joseph Little, and Lisa Bethel. Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. West Lafeyette, IN:  2005. Web. 10 November 2011.

Corley, Diana. “An Interracial Communication Course for the Community College.” Communication in Education 24.3 (1975):  237-241.

Couch, Leon W. and Charles V. Shaffer. “Development of a Computer Communications Course Plus Laboratory.” CoED 5.3 (1985):  14-19. Web. 10 November 2011.

Dean, Howard H. “The Communication Course:  A Ten-Year Perspective.” College Composition and Communication 10.2 (1959):  80-85. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Dunn, Thomas F. “The Principles and Practice of the Communication Course.” College Composition and Communication 6.1 (1955):  31-38. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Fiordo, Richard. “The Soft-Spoken Way vs. the Outspoken Way:  A Bicultural Approach to Teaching Speech Communication to Native People in Alberta.” Journal of American Indian Education 24.3 (1985):  35-48. Web. 10 November 2011.

Hewing, P.H. “A Practical Plan for Teaching Oral Communication in the Business Communication Course.” Business Communication Quarterly 40.4 (1977):  9-11. SAGE Communication and Media Studies backfile Collection. Web. 10 November 2011.

Malmstrom, Jean. “The Communication Course.” College Composition and Communication 7.1 (1956):  21-24. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Roberts, Charles V. Communication Education Throughout the University: an Alternative to the One-Shot Inoculation Approach. , 1983:  1-16. Web. ERIC Database. 11 November 2011.

Steinfatt, Thomas M. “Communication Across the Curriculum.” Communication Quarterly. 34.4 (1986): 460-70. Print.

Stelzner, Sara Latham. “Selected Approaches to Speech Communication Evaluation.” Speech Teacher 24.2 (1975):  127-23. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Filed Under: Language, Liberal Arts, Pedagogy, Politics, Writing Instruction

Stay, Staying, Sted? Who is Teaching these Kids Grammar?!

November 9, 2011 By 8 Comments

Note: It is somewhat hypocritical for me to complain about people’s grammar. A member of my dissertation committee has repeatedly urged me to purchase a grammar book and alludes that my unedited writing is annoying.

I’m not ready to declare the death of the English language and literature yet, but my faith has been shaken twice in the past week at my local Bay Ridge Starbucks. The first occasion involved a loud group of teenage girls trashing the novel “Catcher in the Rye.”  “Ugh…It is like the worst book ever.” Yeah. It is not even about anything.  Terrible!”  I quickly stifled my first reaction which was to curse them out for disparaging a brilliant book that ought to speak to the alienation they feel as young people.  Instead I just took a deep breath, and imagined myself as a cranky old curmudgeon in a rocking chair muttering about kids these days and just continued writing. Who am I to defend J.D Salinger anyway? I didn’t even know who he was until my mid-twenties.

Where did the ducks go?
Creative Commons License photo credit: BRNFRRR

Yesterday, it happened again. There I was sitting on the couch working on a grant proposal (edited by my girlfriend whose first language is not English, but whose technical grammar runs circles around my own, but I will get to that…) when four high school students  piled onto the large couch next to me.  The usual teen activities of passing around each others cell phones and talking about fake IDs was soon replaced by a heated debate over what the past tense of the verb “to stay” was. One girl argued at it was “obviously ‘sted’” two of the teens were unsure and didn’t offer opinions leaving only one guy arguing that it was “stayed.” I kept working on my own writing until the group had decided that an impartial arbiter was necessary so the “sted” girl asked me, “you’ll know this, “sted” is a word right? Like they left, but I sted, at his house.” I said no, that the right word was “stayed.” She looked at me surprised.  English was this girl’s first language, and probably her only one.  This wasn’t a case of an irregular form of the verb, just a simple –ed ending. So what is happening?

Could it be that my local high school is particularly awful? Technology is frequently blamed for the impending doom of proper English. I don’t think it is the problem.  There were serious worries about the telegraph ruining English prose by making it terse and choppy. That never happened. As this NPR story shows, the introduction of new communication technologies has not destroyed the English language. As evidenced by the fact that here you are reading my (mostly) proper English.

Teens are not using texting abbreviations when writing college placement exams so it appears according to researchers and I have never received student work with “OMG.” In fact, even text messages students send me often begin “Hello Professor.”  I’m convinced there is enough of a moat around formal English to protect it. Actually, this boundary is enforced by both teacher and student as I learned last semester when I  wrote “LOL” in my comments on a student’s essay. What she wrote was absurd, involving surveying people during a refugee crisis about what their favorite foods are.  I really did laugh out loud. When I handed the papers back, the students giggled at my use of such unprofessional language. I countered that, just days prior, LOL had been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, and therefore my use of it was completely acceptable, though perhaps a sign of the apocalypse. This only got me laughed at for even knowing that bit of trivia.

I still struggle with my grammar, but being in my 8th year of a PhD, my writing is much better than it used to be.  The problem is that no one ever taught me formal grammar, or at least I never learned it.  The emphasis, especially when I was in high school was on literature and creative writing. When I am feeling grammatically inadequate, I joke that I was taught grammar by hippies:

Youth Culture - Hippies 1960s
Creative Commons License photo credit: brizzle born and bred

[Flutes playing and birds tweeting in the background] “just write, just get your feelings on paper, don’t worry about the punctuation.” It is partially true. One of my favorite teachers wore Birkenstock sandals, had a ponytail and introduced me to amazing socially conscious books and how to write passionately, albeit without commas. I had a great time writing in high school, got A’s in English, but then got to college and discovered that I was clueless especially when it came to commas and semicolons, and passive vs. active voice… forget about it.

Many students are escaping formal grammar instruction or at least it is not sticking. There is quite a debate over how grammar should be taught, when and if at all.   Some students are not taught it in school or home school.  So unless the “Ellis Christian Academy” extends its K-3 program to college, this little girl may have as hard of a time as I did when I presented my passionately written run-on sentences and lack of punctuation to college professors who were not at all impressed.

So why don’t we teach grammar? And when it is taught, why aren’t students learning it? How can we explain the large numbers of college students who have poor grammar if we don’t blame the usual suspects, technology and “kids are just lazy these days?” What can we do to make sure that students as they are entering the job market can properly write a cover letter, or an email.  I think part of the problem is that no one is telling students why they need to know where a semicolon goes or the difference between “affect” and “effect” (something I learned last year finally, I think…) I explained it this way which got a few wide-eyed looks and raised eyebrows: “if you all don’t learn how to write properly, you will not get hired. Your peers are not hiring you, people like me are, and I am not impressed.”  Ugh…I have become the professors I hated in college.

Filed Under: Language, Technology, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction

Supertitles

November 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This past week, David Henry Hwang’s new comedy Chinglish opened on Broadway. The play, as all of the advertising for the production will tell you, is “the hilarious story” of cross-cultural communication and misunderstandings. (Whether it is in fact hilarious or not, I will leave to critics and audiences to decide). The title takes its name from the derogatory term for mistranslations that occur when going from Mandarin to English. Hwang attempts to expand and possibly redeem the term from its implied pejorative Sinophobic bias by including the mistranslations of English into Mandarin under the umbrella of “Chinglish.” Particularly skewered in this play are the random Chinese characters that US teenagers get tattooed on their backs without knowing how to read the words, a prostitution advertisement taken for “Classical Chinese poetry” on the cover of an academic journal, and the American businessman who thinks he can order in a restaurant—or really do anything in China—without speaking the language.

 

Example of a “Chinglish” sign

Example of a “Chinglish” sign

Creative Commons License photo credit: Jonas in China

When purchasing tickets, would-be audience members are warned that this production is in “English and Mandarin (with English surtitles),” in much the same way they would be warned of profanity, violent content, or seizure-inducing strobe lights. My first thought was, “Why do we need a warning? Is bilingualism dangerous?” But my second less flippant thought was, “Why no Mandarin surtitles?” If this is supposed to be about the American misunderstanding of Chinese culture, just as much as the other way around, then why do we only read the English words, while hearing both English and Mandarin? Is this exemplifying the exact linguistic bias that Hwang is attempting to undermine in the play?

The purpose of supertitles (or as they are called in the warning listed above, “surtitles,” a term which I just discovered is a Canadian trademark) is ostensibly comprehension. Unlike on the dramatic stages of Broadway, supertitles are common in opera companies. New York City’s own Metropolitan Opera developed seat-back versions (the also-trademarked “Met Titles”) that resemble multi-lingual pager displays, sending lyrics to audience members in calming amber LEDs. The aria may be sung in a language that the audience member does not understand or using diction that is unintelligible to the listener. The words projected above the stage (or on the tiny screen mounted on the seat in front of the audience member) are supposed to make it easier to understand what is happening during the opera.

 

Supertitles before an opera

 Creative Commons License photo credit: testastretta-999

I would be lying if I didn’t say that I use this technology when I attend operas. I tried turning it off once during a performance of Nixon in China (an opera sung in English), but there was the constant gnawing that I was missing something if I didn’t have the glowing amber lights translating the words that I supposedly understood. Does this technology in fact detract from the experience of the performance? I am watching and listening to the performance, but when my eyes flicker to the screen, I am no longer relying on the performer’s interpretation. I merely listen, while reading the text. The physical body of the actor is no longer important to me, and I just listen to the singer’s voice. Does this make me a lazy audience member? Or merely someone who privileges reading a translated meaning over the actor’s interpretation?

 

David Henry Hwang's Chinglish on Broadway

David Henry Hwang's Chinglish on Broadway

 Creative Commons License photo credit: Mark Runyon

Back to Broadway and Hwang’s Chinglish. In this case, we are talking about a non-musical—something very different from the world of opera up at Lincoln Center—and, therefore, the use of supertitles differs from the operatic trope. Rather than projecting every word, only Mandarin words translated into English are supertitled. When an actor speaks in Mandarin, my eyes immediately go to the words which are projected onto the walls of the set. I am not reading the actor’s body language, only the meaning of the words. However, when actors speaks in English, no translation is provided and my focus remained on the actors—fully taking in their posture, gestures, eye-contact, and facial expressions.

This feeling of always being behind the action is described by an occurrence late in the second act. Next to me in the balcony, was a group of spectators who spoke fluent Chinese. At one point, Jennifer Lim (playing the role of Deputy Minister Xi Yan) was delivering a monologue. Before the words could be translated into English, a single guffaw of recognition came from a woman in the group. This single laugh seemed to encompass the production’s feeling of cross-cultural disconnect more than anything Hwang could have scripted. I knew that something humorous had occurred, and I was about to find out what. But perhaps it would not be laugh-out-loud funny to me in translation. When the English words were finally revealed a second later and I caught up with the meaning of what had been said, the actor had already moved on to the more poignant part of the speech. At this point a more demure English chuckle was all that could be elicited from the non-Chinese speakers in the audience, who were left wondering how the line must have been heard in its original language. That single laugh is something that could not be translated into a supertitle.

Filed Under: Audience, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Language, New York, Non-verbal Communication, Oral Communication

Being versus becoming bi/multilingual

October 21, 2011 By 2 Comments

In my today’s post I will return to the topic already discussed here: growing up multilingual, the topic personally close to my heart (and to several other fellows e.g. see Agnieszka’s past post Ciao! Bye! Do widzenia! Tschüss!) as I have a daughter who is becoming trilingual.

Yes, the word becoming is focus of my post.

Besides the fact that I ‘live’ the trilingualism of my daughter daily I came across an article Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Languageby Perri Klass , in NYT last week that mentions some of the bonuses of growing up bilingual, and reports on research that further confirms that kids learn language in social interactions rather than from audiotape or TV programs, and an interesting talk at the GC last September by Erika Hoff, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University. I think both of these references are worthwhile of attention.

I am one of those parents of bi/trilingual kids who are “hungry for more information” as Perri Klass, the author of the mentioned NYT article puts it. Given the fact that I am a developmental psychologist (also in becoming) makes the topic even more interesting to me. If one, as a parent of bilingual child is not satisfied with what is known about development of bilingual children, well, try trilingualism. Conducting research with children who grow up as trilingual is quite complicated given the possible combination of languages and the ways how languages at home and outside of home are used and acquired. For instance, questions like: do both parents speak all three languages; what languages do individual parents speak to child and to each other; what are the linguistic and other cultural contexts of the child outside of the family; what three languages is child learning; etc. make any research design complex and complicated even in case if researched children learn the same three languages, because children usually grow up in quite different contexts that makes any comparisons problematic.

To give you an idea of complexity of trilingualism let me briefly describe our family situation. My five and half year old daughter is learning Slovak from me, Portuguese from her Brazilian dad, and English in school, from both of us and in most other cultural contexts. As parents we talk to her in our mother languages, however we speak predominantly in English to each other. Her exposure to English was somewhat limited and indirect before she started school because most of the time we addressed our daughter in either Slovak or Portuguese. Until this month, when my daughter started two and half hour program in Slovak, I was pretty much the only person who talked to her in Slovak on everyday basis. Importantly, she does not hear me speaking Slovak to anybody else, so most of her Slovak vocabulary she acquired is almost exclusively learned from our interactions. (Sometimes I feel that Slovak is our secret language or that I am conducting a real-life experiment on the role of social environment in language development).

On the other hand, her opportunities communicating in Portuguese have been much more frequent (she has a bilingual cousin and aunt who both speak Portuguese, more frequent visits from family from Brazil, and several friends who are also bilingual, and it is quite easy to run into Portuguese speaking kid in the playground in NYC), in sum she has had much more exposure to Portuguese in various context than to Slovak language and culture. Once she started school, English was quickly becoming her focus and dominant language. When she started school her limited English was an issue, after a few months in pre-K maintaining the other two languages became a concern. All these are extremely important and constitutive factors of her language development.

So what is my point about becoming?

Whenever I am to describe my daughter, especially for more formal and institutional audiences such as any educational setting, her ‘trilinguilism’ is one of the first characteristics and “identity descriptors” I refer to because it is such an integral part of who she is. The usual reaction is admiration and praise for her and us as parents, and the vision of her bright future as a person proficient in three (very different) languages. I often try to add something about the fact that she is not quite yet trilingual, rather that she is learning all three languages, which by the way turned out to be quite complicated, complex and not as easy process for her and us as a) we expected it to be; b) is commonly believed, and c) is practiced and approached by educational and many other institutions.

The reaction to any of my references to complexity and difficulty I express regarding the whole process is often quickly and optimistically dismissed by people stating something like “ah, children are like sponges, they learn quickly”.

I am fully aware that my daughter will quite possibly not, and simply cannot, master all three languages equally (regardless her cognitive and any other individual abilities) unless she has an opportunity to engage with each of three languages and cultures with the same intensity, e.g. the most probably she will not learn all school subjects in all three languages and most of her instructions will be limited to one or two languages.

However hard it may be to accept the fact that my daughter might never speak her mother’s mother tongue well enough, I am struggling much more with the myths around multilingualism, or what I call the “linear sponge understanding of human development”.

Despite quite extensive and progressive research on bilingualism, language and identity development of bilingual kids, the common beliefs and practices of educational institutions, and the way they approach bilingualism is as a cumulative process of learning two separate languages, i.e. the language development of these kids simply equals development of monolingual child plus learning another language. This is fully reflected in the way a bi/multilingual child’s language development is assessed, the kid is tested in every language separately and the test results are compared against typical monolingual child language development. The earlier the child is tested in his or her development the more ‘delays’ can be detected. (Commonly, based on parents experience multilingual kids catch up in their language proficiency to monolingual kids by the age of seven or eight.)

This practice might come as a surprise given the fact that researchers do know that bi/multilingual children often start speaking later and this fact is now commonly known, and that learning three or more languages is even more complex and actually represents a different process that learning two languages. Unfortunately, the way things work, the different developmental trajectory of bi- and multilingual children is approached and referred to not simply as different but often as delayed, abnormal and pathological. In case child is to receive any support, e.g. speech therapy, the child has to be diagnosed as disabled, only such diagnosis enables him or her to receive the services and support.

What I consistently find amusing is a disconnect between the general societal admiration and recognition of the benefits (which by the way some are also myths) of being bilingual, and at the same time no or minimal recognition and acknowledgement of the complexity of the process of becoming bilingual. I consistently experience all kinds of judgements, dire lack of openness and flexibility among professionals and institutions, and lack of embracement of the complexity of the process of our (or any other) child becoming multilingual.

No child is simply born bilingual, not even every bilingual child is born and growing up in a bilingual family and their bilingualism is closely tied to their environment outside of the family. The kids can only become bi/multilingual, which takes time and effort and often taking developmental detours or shortcuts, mostly depending on the tools available to them and to their families.

Therefore I was glad to hear from Prof. Erika Hoff, presenting the findings of her research that contradict some common views “that exposure to two languages confuses children and the view children as magical language learners who can acquire two languages as quickly as one”, in another words no sponge kids that follow a blueprint of linear development, (well not even the monolingual ones develop along some linear blueprint). Instead, a complex developmental trajectory that might be quite messy and different from any other kid.

So for now in my discussions about our experience of bringing up a child in trilingual environment I try to explain how being different is quite normal, (mostly through talking about all anomalies).

Filed Under: Language

Occupation Communication

October 12, 2011 By 1 Comment

The Occupy Wall Street protests (which my colleagues have written about here and here) started to gain traction as a national news story this past week. Coverage of the protests increased as more sensational stories surfaced of police beating protesters with night sticks, protesters rushing barricades, and the old-left stalwart labor unions joining in by holding a rally that filled Foley Square to over capacity. While the protesters began their occupation complaining about the lack of “mainstream media” coverage, they now have an abundance of coverage, but are having trouble controlling the narrative. Perhaps this is because the protests do not fit into a nice, clean-cut, two-party view of politics.

 

How do these self-avowed leaderless protesters communicate to the world and to each other? To answer that, we must start by looking at the founding of the protests. Three groups with very different approaches to spreading their messages of social change sounded the initial call: Adbusters, Anonymous, and the NYC General Assembly.

Adbusters is an anti-consumerism group probably most well-known for its annual protest Buy Nothing Day (held on Black Friday). Its modes of mass media include many forms of culture jamming: an advertising-less magazine, “open source” shoes, and anti-advertising commercials. Art, message, content, and form blend together to create striking works of protest, whose purpose is to disrupt the viewer’s experience in order to begin a longer, more complex discussion about the effects of advertising on culture.

One of Adbusters's "classic" culture jamming anti-ad

 

Anonymous is most famous—infamous?—for two ongoing protests related to uninhibited free speech: one against the Church of Scientology and the other in support of WikiLeaks. Both of these protests included web videos declaring their stance, coordinated hacking and denial of service attacks, and protests in Guy Fawkes masks. While the masked protests have become the photographs associated with the group, they mostly organize online in “leaderless” internet forums.

Members of Anonymous at an in-person protest

Creative Commons License photo credit: Anonymous9000

 

Blending the cooperative leaderless mentality of Anonymous with the organized critique of mass media of Adbusters, the third group, the NYC General Assembly, has become the core of the protests. More of a process than an actual group, NYC General Assemblies use both high- and low-tech solutions in order to reach consensus among the various (and there are many) fractions of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Certainly no one will deny the impact of Facebook and Twitter to organize the disparate individuals currently residing in Zuccotti Liberty Square—after all, the protesters like to compare their occupation to the “Arab Spring/Facebook Revolution” in Tahrir Square. There are other network technologies at play in the Wall Street protests: websites (of the pre-”Web 2.0” variety), Kickstarter campaigns (to fund specific projects of the occupation), Livestream (to broadcast live video from cellphones, laptops, and other internet-connected cameras), WePay (to accept micro-donations to buy food, although the fund was later moved to the Aliance for global Justice for 501c3 status), and even GitHub (a social media technology that allows to access to the technology that the protesters are using).

IMG_7594

Some low-tech social networking?

Creative Commons License photo credit: Brennan Cavanaugh

 

The means by which the protesters communicate, however, are not solely highly technological. As Sara Ruth Jacobs mentioned last week when discussing Navid Hassanpour’s paper on the Egyptian Revolution, the loss of online social media can increase active participation and connections between individuals in a shared location. And even though the protesters set up generator-powered charging stations in the privately-owned (but by law publicly-accessible 24-hours a day) park, computer technology doesn’t solve every communication issue. This is where low-tech social media help to keep the Occupy Wall Street protesters connected. While marches, chants, and hand-painted signs are the means of communication most often shown in news coverage, there are other less visible communication tools employed by the protesters.

General Assemblies and working groups use consensus building to determine the actions of the participants. Without consensus (defined by the NYC General Assembly in the organizing leaflet for the occupation as “no outright opposition”), no group action will take place and proposals must be revised for the next assembly. The means of achieving consensus with such a large group relies on two low-tech social media technologies: hand signals and a “mic check.”

 

Hand signals:

A manual version of the clickers familiar to those of us who have taught or taken classes in large lecture halls in recent years, hand signals quickly allow the group poll on a particular proposal. Four major hand signals mean yes or agree, no or disagree, point of process (similar to a “point of order,” meaning someone is not following the process), and block the proposal from passing in its present form (used only in extreme circumstances when you can’t remain a part of the group if the current proposal passes).

Hand signals from NYC General Assembly manual

While these are useful in measuring interest and passing proposals, the basic four hand signals are only a form of selection and not intended to engage the group in open-ended dialogue. This hole in the process of group communication has been partially addressed as protesters develop new hand signals specific to the situation. The yes/agree signal evolved into a related, “enthusiastic yes/agree” with the addition of “jazz hands” (or one of the American Sign Language signs for “applause”). One of these new signals, “I can’t hear,” would be a welcome addition to any event—how many times do I have to hear that annoying shout at a conference when a presenter isn’t speaking directly into the microphone? Another collaboratively developed signal, “loud noise coming down the block,” is useful in lower Manhattan’s labyrinth of twisting streets where cavernous skyscrapers play fun acoustic tricks with traffic sounds.

 

Mic Check:

A “mic check” is a method to allow anyone to address the crowd, as well as a means of disseminating information to the crowd. The effect sounds like a call-and-response chant that protesters use to get their message across to audiences standing on the sidelines during a march. However, the purpose of this call-and-response is internal, rather than external, communication. When an individual wishes to make a proposal to the group, that person shouts “mic check.” The crowd around the person replies “mic check.” This is repeated until the speaker is certain that everyone understands what a mic check has started ( once or twice is usually sufficient). The original speaker then starts the message he or she wished to communicate to the group. Broken up into short phrases of a few words each, this message is relayed through the same call-and-response chant that started the mic check. This serves as a way to not only amplify and transmit the message to listeners far away from the speaker, but it also reinforces the message in the listener-repeater’s mind. If someone hears the person next to them repeating a different phrase than she or he did, a mini-discussion can help clarify what was actually said.

Even famous philosophers can use the mic check to amplify their lectures (although more complex sentences can be difficult to transmit).

 

As the Occupy Wall Street protests solidify into a movement—with affiliated protests in DC, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tampa, Boise, and many more towns coming soon—the ability to achieve consensus will become more difficult. Hopefully these protests will not become merely the liberal version of the Tea Party protests—that is to say, a hierarchically controlled sub-set of one existing political party or the other. This narrative is already attempting to be applied to the Occupy Wall Street movement. To avoid falling into this trap, it will be necessary to continue the radical multi-tiered approaches to communication and social media in order to ensure that a plethora of voices can be heard.

Filed Under: Internet, Language, Media, New York, Non-verbal Communication, Oral Communication, Politics, Social Media, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0

The War on Cliché

September 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

Throughout history, student writers have used generalizations. In society today, everybody likes to make broad, sweeping statements and to repeat clichés. As the saying goes, great writing is timeless. At the end of the day, avoiding cliché is easier said than done.

In nearly a decade of teaching college writing, I have encountered thousands of variations on the above statements.  I might even go so far as to say that the vast majority of students I have worked with rely heavily on generalization and cliché when writing essays, or at least when composing first drafts. When I first began to notice this pehnimenon, I was baffled, and, honestly, a little angry. Why were students subjecting me to essays that said nothing new about anything?

When I talk to other faculty, they often express the same confusion: why do undergraduates feel the pressing need to talk about what has been going on since the dawn of time? And, more importantly, how can we stop them?

My early attempts to battle this kind of language failed miserably. I would mark papers with vague terms like “vague” or highlight a passage and write a general phrase like “general.” I might even circle a cliché and write, “Avoid cliché.” None of this had any effect, so I began devoting class and conference time to more specific explanations along the lines of “your essays should be specific.” Yet still I received papers that began as does this sample essay on The Great Gatsby: Many Americans long for a big house and lots of money. This is the American Dream. The American Dream is what Americans quest for.

what's left to draft
Creative Commons License photo credit: remediate.this

Lately I have changed tactics. I am waging war on cliché, and my first strategy is frankness. Confronting students honestly about how awful this kind of writing has yielded surprisingly frank response form students: many admit they know exactly what they’re doing, they just don’t know how to fix it. Consider the following conversation with the author of the above “American Dream” author.

Me: (underlining every sentences) None of this is necessary, because you aren’t saying anything new or interesting about America, and you repeat yourself over and over. It’s all just….
Me in my head: Be Nice! Don’t say bullshit filler nonsense. Don’t say bullshit filler nonsense.
Student: It’s just bullshit filler nonsense.

When a student comes out and admits to writing filler, I feel elated, because admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Another oft-copped-to issue is not having anything to say.  Here is another sample conversation with a student author who constructed her essay around the thesis “The Great Gatsby teaches us that money doesn’t buy happiness.”

Me: Did you really have to read Gatsby to learn that money doesn’t buy happiness? Had you never heard that before encountering this novel?
Student: (sheepishly) No.
Me: Do you think Fitzgerald wrote the great American novel just to prove an old saying?
Student: Not really
Me: So why do you want to write a whole paper around this idea?
Student: I didn’t know what else to say.

So why do students feel like they have nothing else to say, and why do they continue to write bullshit filler nonsense even when they recognize it as such? The reasons are, of course, complex; below are possible explanations–starting points to help understand why it is so difficult to move beyond trite language.

1. Students are told to generalize.
When I was in sixth grade, I learned that essays should look like an hourglass: the introduction and conclusion should be general, whereas the body of the essay is where I give specific examples.  My students often repeat this lesson: an intro needs to generalize, because you can’t just launch straight into your evidence. And this is quite true. Problems arise , however when students interpret “general” to mean “the whole wide world,” rather than “this paper in general.” An introduction needs to tell the reader what a paper is going to say in a general way. For example, “This essay explores the problems professors face in communicating why cliché is an ineffective rhetorical strategy” is a general statement at about the right scale for an introduction.  However, when we tell students to make their introduction general as a way of easing the reader in, they turn to the entire world, which is a difficult entity to sum up in a few words.

I like to tell a class, “I release you from the burden of having to talk about everybody in the universe! Don’t worry about the whole of history, just worry about your paper!”  I think this should come as a relief, but nobody ever looks comforted by these words. Instead they seem confused. Which leads us the my second point:

2. Professional writers and scholars generalize all the time, so why can’t students?
I recently asked my students to read a Michael Pollen essay that claims certain farming practices have shaped the American diet and led to the obesity epidemic. Pollan stakes a large-scale claim about American food culture, but he does so within an accepted rhetorical framework.  Students asked to make similar claims about food culture might simply say it differently, noting that “People eat too much fast food,” or “Farming is important to society.”

The difference between the students’ claims and Pollan’s lies in a very particular manipulation of language: Pollan generalizes about specific society (America in 2011) and specific farm practices (i.e. the overproduction of certain crops like corn). Recognizing the difference between these types of generalities comes with experience reading criticism. Writing in a way that recognizes that difference requires even more experience with cultural studies. Pollan is just such an experienced author, and so he deploys generalization to construct an actual argument about agricultural corporate organization and its effect on how consumer attitudes towards food. I trust that his statements will be backed up with actual evidence, including studies and writing, and that he has spent hours analyzing data to come to this conclusion. Of course, an undergraduate writer has not put in the labor reflected in such nuanced generalization, and so cannot manipulate language quite as deftly. Which brings me to a final observation.

3. Constructing an original argument is a skill.
Differentiating between pointed and pointless statements means having a point of view.  Assignments frequently ask students to state a claim—articulate a thesis—and argue in support of that claim. Coming up with a good claim is daunting, but if the claim is something we pretty much accept is true—that, say, food is important to society or that Americans want to achieve the American dream—then a student can’t “do it wrong.”

Again, releasing students from burden might not be helpful: if I say go ahead, do it wrong, say whatever you want to say about this topic, I get a surprised reaction. “You want to hear MY opinion?” And of course, I’m not interested in opinion, I’m interested in argument. Tell me your analysis, tell me your interpretation, tell my your reading of the material. And here is the crux of the problem: not knowing the difference between fact, opinion, and analysis/interpretation makes it difficult to have an original point of view. First-, second-, and even third-year undergraduates might not yet have a firm grasp on exactly what it means to analyze as opposed to repeat facts or give opinions; that’s in part what they are in college to learn. It takes time and effort to develop these skills. And so those of us who teach writing have no quick fix. In some ways, we have to take a step back from the educational process, be active witnesses, let young writers figure out for themselves what is cliché and what is innovative, what is summary and what is interpretation. Yet all the while we can encourage original thought. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but hard work pays off. And as they say, slow and steady wins the race.

Filed Under: Education, Faculty Development, Language, Pedagogy, teaching, Writing, Writing Instruction

“Got to celebrate it!”

April 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Over the past six months or so, what amounts to a thin, loose thread of comedy-citing musings has wound its way into Cacophony.  Credit Alessandro for leading the way, in posts on Reggie Watts, Saturday Night Live, and Patton Oswalt; and David brought attention to some devastatingly hilarious riffs from Louis C.K. a few weeks back.  In that spirit, here’s my own small contribution: several months ago, Seth Myers, the “Weekend Update” guy on Saturday Night Live, gave a surprisingly trenchant mini-lecture on language in a sidebar called “Come On, Dictionary.”  The piece takes up the case of “refudiate,” a non-word Sarah Palin uttered on TV last summer, then tweeted, and that was later chosen as Word-of-the-Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary (a tongue-in-cheek selection, one assumes, but still…).  Here below is a re-aired and slightly cropped version of his one-and-a-half minute rant on the matter (pardon the other stand-up montage stuff that follows; or better, link over here for a cleaner, unedited, NBC-hosted version of the clip):

What I love most about the piece—and, I think, what lends it such a gratifying comic zing—is its reversal of the usual poles: here, uber-right-wing Palin is the one invoking and asserting (albeit disingenuously) the liberal openness of language, and Myers, taking her to task, ends up espousing what might be called a conservative position, linguistically-speaking.  That is, even if Meyers, on the surface, just seems to be aping Jon Stewart’s shtick, he also comes off sounding a bit like Dr. Johnson or at least, more modestly, William Safire (the late writer best known for his running “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine).  Here, the voice of reason, because it isn’t fastidiously trying to be all things to all people—I’m gesturing to Linell’s previous post on David Brooks—sounds  bracingly funny rather than irritating.   Instead of coming across as a dour grammarian, Myers-on-language sounds winsome and sharp.  I think he manages this rhetorical jag precisely because the boundaries he draws are so explicit and concise and more so, underneath that, because  he implicitly posits some pretty sound, pragmatic principles:  1) that language is indeed pliable, but that our exploiting of that pliability ought to be governed by attentive craft and by a keen sense of  words’ distinctive uses and effects; 2) that creating new words or bending the meanings of old ones is legitimate when the practice is conscientious and efficacious, but illegitimate when it is careless and feckless; and 3) that one ought to humbly own up to verbal bungles, not excuse and dismiss them by flippantly, spuriously appealing to those aforementioned pliabilities of language.

Language might be a game of sorts, but it’s not quite a free-for-all or a pure play of interchangeable bits and surfaces. Neologisms, cannily tweaked usages, and slang, for instance, are most powerful when they give language not just curious texture but greater dynamism; when they ramify and multiply our actual means of communication.  The English language, in particular, has shown incredible capacities to splinter and slip and swell in these ways, becoming more multifarious by the minute—a summary feature of English I confess to loving.  So yes, Madame Palin, I agree that our common tongue is indeed, as you glibly tweeted, “a living language.”  And I also feel—quite strongly, in fact—that we’ve “got to celebrate it!”  But the it you mean in that phrase is, in the end, profoundly different from the it I mean.

Filed Under: Language

Horror-Movie Capitalism?

March 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As Tina’s post earlier this week attests, the ideas of Karl Marx live on, in ever clever guises. Her anonymous student vociferously wished to avoid intellectual contact with the thinker/giant bronze head (eww, commodity fetishism!), but once he got to know Uncle Karl a bit better, he could, at least for present purposes, better satisfy the stern critical eye of his anthropology professor. But wait, there’s more, so listen up:

Kids of the world, you have nothing to lose but your student debt, dire job prospects, and terribly overpriced cell phone plans!

Karl Marx would be a huge Twilight fan, at least if we consider the following quip:

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

Greenspan hunnngrrry for morrrtgages rrrrawwwrrr

Yes, I believe that is as close as we get to actually claiming that Marx said, effectively, “Capitalism sucks.” But what draws my attention is the personification move. Marx was always making this rhetorical maneuver, giving Capital its own agency so that he could identify how it behaves and thinks. Many times, actual human capitalists are rendered “capital embodied.” It walks among us… Beware!

I won’t deny that I am pointing to a hint of paranoia, even behind the (attempt at) humor here. I think that is one of the main modes of popular resistance to Marxism today. McCarthyism and red-baiting as an American Tradition™ may have not completely faded as effective ideological tools, but in classroom and colloquial settings there is a common reliance on articles of faith still associated with our dominant economic system: “Capital is no vampire; just look at how He fosters creativity, drives innovation, defines property and individual identity, acts as a fair arbiter of the value of goods and labor,” one might argue. Well, if you put it that way, Capital sounds like a whole different kind of bloke.

Let’s concede that Marx was paranoid. As Marx also said: “If things appeared exactly as they are, there would be no need for science.” Marx considered himself a scientist, interested in getting past the surface appearances of the world toward an underlying reality. That is the mentality of a paranoiac, to be sure, but it is the foundation of any critical enterprise to doubt things are as they seem. Freud did the same with human behavior, for example, by positing that we must be at least partially governed by something we can’t see or touch, an unconscious. That idea is now commonsense and lies at the heart of, say, all advertising and politics in consumer societies, if you follow the argument in this documentary, “The Century of the Self” (below is just Part 3: “There is Policeman Inside all our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed”):

One recent attempt, by actual comedian and voice of animated rodent gourmet Remy, to define the world through dominant social figures is Patton Oswalt. But he doesn’t see vampires. The eponymous chapter of his new book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland seems an attempt at popular sociology. It’s kind of beautiful in its daring but laid-back tone. The essay is part bong-hit musing, part exercise in bringing clarifying order to a confusing human universe. In Oswalt’s formulation, if we can call it that, everyone from adolescence on conforms to one of three social types: you’re either a Zombie, a Spaceship, or a Wasteland. Let’s let Patton summarize these figures:

“Zombies simplify… Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure intact… Zombies can’t believe the energy we waste on nonfood pursuits.” (pp. 96-98)

“Spaceships leave. No surviving infrastructure for them. No Earth, period… Spaceships figure it’s easier for them to build a world and know its history or, better yet, choose the limited customs and rituals that fit the story.” (p. 98)

“Wastelands destroy. They’re confused but fascinated by the world. The wasteland is inhabited by people or, for variety, mutants… Variations of the human species grown amok–isn’t that how some teenage outcasts already feel? Mutants bring comfort.” (p. 100)

Behind the archetypes, however, is a more interesting insight. The world of zombies, spaceships, and wastelands is something created, somehow. He locates these categories’ origins “as aspects of a shared teen experience,” but, in a typical academic move, I want to make a bigger, lamer deal out of something that was meant mainly as a joke and a memoir of a science-fiction nerdom upbringing.

For Oswalt, until misfit teens grow into adults, “anything we create has to involve simplifying, leaving, or destroying the world we’re living in.”

The more I look at these musings, the more they sound like Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling. What I enjoy about Oswalt’s way of writing here is that these social types are not altogether models fabricated in any conscious kind of way. They are skins people inhabit but can’t quite get out of. They are not only found in movie tropes and protagonists (“Darth Vader is, essentially, a Zombie, born in a Wasteland, who works on a Spaceship,” p. 99) but are also spaces and ways of being. They are inside and outside of us, in living practices and landscapes.

All I would do here is to expand Oswalt’s concepts with the question, “what kind of world produces Zombies, Spaceships, and Wastelands, makes those imaginable, workable worlds?” What is it that makes practices of simplifying, leaving, or destroying viable and even creative? In Oswalt’s examples you can discern all kinds of things and people: suburbia, punk rock, hipsters, Star Wars, excess, fast food, college. It’s as if he’s trying to think, on the widest possible level, how all these things come together. All three are alienated types, to be sure, and this is what may connect them to Marx.

What Uncle Karl would have to say about zombies, spaceships, and wastelands might be a way of defining what most of contemporary critical theory is grappling with today. The villains, the scenes have changed, and we don’t yet have a language to understand it–critically, at least. These days it might not be only about sucking dry the blood of the laborer, but also about after-lives of the dead, utopian launches, and broken ruins?

Oswalt, to close: “Weirdly, Wastelands are the most hopeful and sentimental of the bunch. Because even though they’ve destroyed the world as we know it, they conceive of stories in which the core of humanity–either in actual numbers of survivors or in the conscience of a lone hero–survives and endures. Wastelands, in college, love Beckett.” (p. 101)

Patton is apparently guarded about his writing

Filed Under: Asides, edupunk, Language, literature, Politics, To Ponder

Stitch and Ink

March 3, 2011 By 1 Comment

Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, talk focused on strategies for teaching close reading. Unanimous nodding broke out when John H. mentioned the importance of asking students to write out, on paper, the very lines of literary text they’re grappling with. Something about the intimacy of bringing one’s hand, mind and ink into sync with a given stretch of words–so that inscription belongs as much to the student as to the Great Works anthology–seemed essential. Hours later and a few blocks away, I found myself cramped into the 5th Avenue window display at the Graduate Center, arranging small, hand-made books to draw attention to the the Third Annual Chapbook Festival (www.chapbookfestival.org) — taking place March 2-5 both at the GC and at other locations throughout the city. The Festival celebrates, per its name, chapbooks–small publications, usually of poetry, ranging from the simplest construction of sewn sheets to elaborate, collectible editions–produced outside the machinery of commercial publishing. The colorful, beautiful little books in the window–etched, embossed, embroidered, delicately made–seemed to belong to the same universe as the practice of writing out lines of text — both not-so-lost arts.

Filed Under: Art, Language, literature, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction

The Imitation Game

February 17, 2011 By 4 Comments

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. –Alan Turing, 1950

In 1950, Alan Turing theorized a test of computer intelligence.  The experiment he imagined, soon after coined the “Turing test,” asks a subject to blindly converse with a machine and another human.  If the machine can fool the questioner into thinking it is a machine, than it has achieved true intelligence.  Because we judge the intelligence of other humans based on external indicators, it was only fair that we hold machines to the same standard. (For a more complex analysis of the test, its philosophical implications, and the prolific career of Alan Turing see this page).

On Tuesday, in round 2 in the Jeopardy! IBM Challenge, past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter got crushed by room-size IBM supercomputer, Watson.  Here is the second half of that show, including the Jeopardy round and lots of IBM material advertising for the greatness of the artificial intelligence software that is Watson:

At times, the human contestants sound more like the computer than the other way around, as they rattle off humorless knee-jerk responses to trivial questions (at least when they could get a word in edgewise against Watson). Yet, there have been plenty of situations in which the “computerness” of Watson shines through.  It (he?) has generally been struggling with art-related clues, and sometimes repeats incorrect answers (IBM needs to work on his group listening skills!).  In Final Jeopardy on Tuesday, it made a common-sense mistake handling this question: Its largest is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle?  It gave “What is Toronto?????,” which is obviously wrong because it is not in the U.S.  At least it seemed to recognize the answer was a long shot, wagering only a small portion of its winnings on the answer (the closest thing I’ve seen to a computer acknowledging that it is pushing its luck).  The two humans correctly identified Chicago.

Last night, Watson took home the $1 million prize for IBM by racking up a final score of $77,147, vs. Jennings’ $24,000 and Rutter’s $21,600.  I just discoverd an interactive game on nyt.com that allows you to play against Watson and see a bit how the processing works.  Check it out!  Sometime today, IBM is expected to announce a collaboration with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to develop a “physician’s assistant service.”

Of course a computer beating human competitors at Jeopardy does not mean it has passed a Turing Test.  So, let’s turn to another case where machine is mimicking human.  Last fall, the New York Times covered the story of Statsheet.com in an article titled, “When the Software is the Sportswriter.” What is unique about Statsheet.com is that it allows college basketball and football fans to call up not just stats on their favorite team, but also a write-up describing past performance and predictions for upcoming games.  If I want to get the latest on Michigan State’s basketball team, I can either go to this page with stats, schedules, etc., or I can go read The Spartan Ball and see the latest headlines.  The catch is that those headlines, and the short blurbs that run beneath them, are entirely computer generated.  In most cases, the algorithm that the site uses is fairly transparent: “Michigan State Drops One To #2 Ranked Ohio State, 71-61. / Following the Penn State win with a loss, Michigan State is struggling. In Columbus on February 15th the Spartans were beaten by the Buckeyes, 71-61, in Big Ten play.”  If you click a level deeper, you tend to get bullet lists of stat-heavy commentary; e.g., “Prior to this game, MSU played 62 Top 25 opponents in the last 5 seasons with a record of 30-32.”  One clever twist on the site is that descriptions of results are phrased in more positive terms when you are on the home page for that team.  For instance, when I switch over to the (Ohio State) Buckeye Beat, I see this headline for yesterday’s game: “Ohio State Gets the Win Over Michigan State, 71-61.”  By my judgment, Statsheet.com passes the Turing test only if compared to the worst kind of sports writer, one who communicates solely with statistics strung together between cliches.

That’s Turing test failure number two.  Where does that leave us?  I propose that the next frontier is a robo-stand-up-comedian.  I read statsheet.com for over 20 minutes and didn’t laugh a single time.  Only a human statistician could come up with this one: “A historian, an engineer and a statistician are duck hunting. a duck rises from the lake. The historian fires first, and shoots 10′ over the duck. Then the engineer shoulders the shotgun and shoots 10′ under the duck. The statistician exclaims ‘got him!’”

Filed Under: Language, Technology Tagged With:
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