This fall, I taught a literature course for the first time, and at Queens College, where I’d never worked before. The class was scheduled at 3 in the afternoon on a Friday, and during this time the Queens campus seemed pretty deserted. I dragged my wheely bag around empty floors and stairwells, from my office, to tech services, to the building where I taught. One faculty member observed my class, and the meeting with her that followed was a bright, warm spot of collegiality, advice, and encouragement in an otherwise pretty isolated semester. Then, Weir’s email arrived, and I had that great moment that comes from sharing experiences in a particular profession: “That exact thing happened to me!” Weir mentions students’ tendency to open papers with broad general statements. I had just spent a day with student papers that began with some variation of “Since the dawn of time, humans have thought about the important topic of identity….” I had also spent the day writing in the margins of my students’ papers comments like, “Interesting claim, can you support and develop this with an example, or cite a source?” Weir addresses these issues in this informal email in a way I found very helpful.

Last year, Talia wrote an excellent post about how to get adjuncts (who are isolated from professionalization events because they are already “stretched thin” timewise), to participate in pedagogy workshops. She came up with three great tips for how to reach out and engage adjuncts. Below, I offer Weir’s email as an example of the sort of spirit of collegiality and engaged, attuned teaching that did not wait for a Wiki or a workshop, but just reached out—both to colleagues with whom I can assume he already has a rapport, and to strangers and fellow teachers like me.

Weir wrote:

“…..I wanted to share a “teaching moment,” if I may, and forgive me for jamming up your email at this point in the semester, when everyone has too much to read.So my undergrad students and I (ENG 395W) where talking about the first paragraph of the first drafts of their research papers -”research-,” “term-,” “analytical-,” whatever you call those papers.

And my students are of course in love with generality and with big sweeping introductory moments.  Not in a hostile way: They are convinced of the importance of big contextualizing opening remarks,and why not?  But it leads to first sentences like: “David Foster Wallace develops literature in an artistic way.”  They do think that a general introductory move is important and necessary and basically required.

And so we were trying to figure out how to write an opening sentence that was both specific and catchy, that hauled you into the essay, set a tone, and also got right down to business – just as one example of an opening-sentence-strategy.  And don’t ask me how we ended up talking about marijuana.  Um, I don’t remember?  But suddenly we were discussing all the ways in which folks get busted for carrying a tiny amount of pot on their persons; and one of my students said, “Cops like to make arrests right at the end of their shifts, because it forces them into overtime and extra pay”; and one of my students said, ”Drug busts for a small amount of marijuana are really popular because the NYPD can use those arrests to pump up statistics about how they’re
keeping down crime in NYC”; and there were like 5 students in the room who had information to add, and they mentioned various articles they had read on this topic in other classes and/or on their own.  They cited their sources, in other words.  And everyone in the room, all 17 students, were suddenly talking, with way more interest and excitement than they had shown in our discussion of, well, anything else all
semester.

And it so happens that I’ve been reading Judith Halberstam’s *The Queer Art of Failure* (Duke U Press, 2011), wherein, among other things, Halberstam has stuff to say about pedagogy and the academy, including her assertion – a propos of Jacques Ranciere’s *The Ignorant Schoolmaster* and Laurent Cantet’s 2008 documentary *The Class*(*Entre Les Murs*) – that “learning is a two-way street and you cannot teach without a dialogic relation to the learner.”

“Okay,” I thought, “here’s our dialogic relation,” and I drew my students’ attention to how instantly and fully they got engaged in a conversation in which each student entered into the argument with a specific example: Cops make drug arrests at 5 PM; the NYPD uses drug busts to brag about crime control; etc.  And I reminded them that they had cited their sources.  And I asked them if they imagined that they might begin a paper about David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” by pointing immediately to a piece of evidence, a moment from the text, an event, a compelling linguistic turn, a critical intervention made by a scholar or critic or writer, etc. Rather than, you know, ”Western Literature has long struggled with the problem of language.”

And I think they got that.

All of which is to say that I have found that the only pedagogical tool I have is ignorance and unknowing, which I perform for my students whenever possible (usually out of necessity!), and that mostly this strategy fails, but sometimes it gives students room to veer away from the topic and demonstrate their expertise in some other area of discourse.  And once in a while, I am able to point out to them that they already know how to do what we are struggling to figure out how to do.”

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.

Like one of the commenters on James’s blog post, I ask my students to keep their computers and phones in their bags or out of sight. In the same way that I don’t want someone checking their phone while we’re talking, I don’t want my students to be distracted by an open website while one of their peers is engaging in the often extremely revealing process of speaking up in class.

That said, I do use technology in my classroom. For the past two semesters, I’ve created a blog for a survey course I teach called Great Works of Literature I (which ranges from the beginning of time to around 1600 CE). Over the course of the semester, each student is responsible for writing three 2-page posts (so on any given class day, four or five students have written and posted a short but complex argument on the text we’re reading for that day) and they are also expected to comment on each other’s posts. The work on the blog counts for a fifth of their final grade (5% per post, 5% for commenting) so it is a hefty part of what I am asking them to do for the class.

A snapshot of my course blog this semester

Above I said that I do use technology in the classroom. However, the blogging I ask students to do takes place outside the actual classroom.

Part of me really likes the fact that it’s done outside of class. It allows shy students to speak up in the comments section. It exponentially multiplies class-time (something they probably have mixed feelings about!). It puts the students at the center of a large part of the production of the class, since they’re the ones who write on the blog, not me. (I write prompts in a special “prompts” section of the blog and occasionally make an announcement using the blog, but they do all the posting and commenting otherwise.)

But I do want to find ways to better incorporate what they do at home into what we do in class. I’ve been feeling lately that the blog sometimes feels irrelevant to the students during class. Sometimes, depending on how the conversation goes, the blog goes unmentioned and all the work that went into the posts and comments for that day might seem unnoticed or unimportant to the writers or to the readers of the posts. While I’m reading and commenting on everything (I email the students my responses to their posts, partially in order to keep the comments section strictly for the students) I sometimes wonder how often the other students are actually reading all of the posts. Reading four or five posts in addition to the day’s reading is a lot of work, and unless I find ways to bring the blog posts into the classroom in a more comprehensive and integrated way, I fear they’ll be writing just for me, not for each other.

So how can I keep laptops from popping up on every desk while still honoring the work they’ve done on the blog and keeping student responses at the center of the class’s production of ideas and knowledge?

Some brief ideas in response to my own questions:

1.    Use the overhead projector more to simply display blog posts and address specific points raised in them. Plan before class which parts of each blog post might be relevant and referenced.
2.    Prompt students to include video or music or other media that relates to the reading in their blog posts. Play these found connections in class on the overhead projector and solicit responses from the rest of the students.
3.    Ask students to come to class with questions for the authors of the posts. Split the “commenting” requirement into comments on the blog and comments in class. Maybe also do in-class writing that involves the text and the blog posts in response to that text, thus reinforcing the idea that they have to come prepared having read their peers’ posts.
4.    Make games/role-plays using the blog. For example, ask a student who didn’t blog to “be” one of the bloggers and explain “her” position. Then have the real blogger respond with a counter-argument, thus asking the blogger to rethink or elaborate on or qualify his original claims.

And some more ideas about generally using technology in the classroom, aside from using the course blog:
1.    Intersperse class discussion, group activities, in-class writing, and mini-lectures (or anything else one does in class) with clips from youtube and elsewhere. I’m currently thinking up ways to use these two videos to communicate to students what I mean when I talk about tone:

2.     Digital story-telling, DIY radio. Lots to learn here from colleagues here at cac.ophony.
3.     Videos. Students can make videos with their phones, or borrow video cameras from their schools if possible (n.b. like Erica, I’m not going to get into questions of cost and privilege here). I’m envisioning students filming the process of memorizing a short poem (and including some of the bloopers), putting on scenes from plays we read and then proving surrounding material as if the video is a Criterion Collection edition, and  filming interactions with texts in non-classroom environments (filming a staged reading of Antigone at Occupy Wall Street, for example, or filming an interview with some yoga instructors  and practitioners about the Bhagavad Gita). We could then watch these videos together in class and discuss the results.

This has become essentially a long riff so I’ll stop here. I’d love ideas from cac.ophony readers. How do you use technology in or around your college classroom?

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?

Yet, when I came to the Schwartz Communication Institute, I wondered about the origins of Communication Across the Curriculum as a movement and Communication Intensive Courses. I’d like to spend two to three posts looking at how the theory behind communication courses emerged and changed over a number of decades.

Using the chart feature of JSTOR’s Data for Research, I first took a look at how many articles have been published each year which contain the term “communication courses.” This does not include all articles ever published, but rather the articles published within publications archived by JSTOR.

The above graph shows the raw number of articles published containing that term. Clearly, most articles that reference communication courses were published in the mid 1940s to mid 1960s.

The second graph above shows the number of articles published that reference “communication courses” relative to the total number of articles published on any topic. Again, the obvious peak occurs in the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s.

Happily, the above data concurs with the usual “old school” explanation of the rise and fall of communication courses.

As you can see from the above graphs, the idea of communication courses existed prior to their rise in the 1940s. In his 1987 book Rhetoric and Reality, James Berlin associates early communication courses in the 1930s with Alfred Korzybski’s notion of “General Semantics,” an approach which sought to teach students to discern the ways in which rhetoric can distort reality (10). General Semantics rose “when the United States was concerned about the threat posed by Germany,” and was therefore largely “a device for propaganda analysis” (10). Specifically, Berlin writes that “Semanticist rhetoric was also highly influential in the communications course—the course that combined instruction in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, occupying a large place in the general education movement in the thirties, forties, and fifties” (10).

Yet, as we know, communication courses didn’t really take off until the mid 1940s, igniting what Berlin terms the “Communications Emphasis” which he claims spanned from 1940-1960. To be more accurate, I would argue (based on the data), that it spanned from 1945-1965. As a side note, the Conference on College Composition and Communication was founded in 1949, at the beginning of the wave. And what is the meaning of this rise and fall? The rise was largely occasioned by an influx of WWII veterans who went to college after the war concluded on the GI Bill.  Berlin writes that “the communications approach gave composition courses a new identity, placing them in a special program that carried with it a commitment to democracy and to the welfare of students who had just suffered the horrors of war” (106). These courses were “commonly interdepartmental” and “combined writing instruction with lessons in speaking, in reading, and sometimes even in listening” (93).

Movements in college instruction do not have neat beginning and end points. As I wrote previously, Berlin dates the Communications Emphasis from 1940-1960; he also says that there was a Renaissance of Rhetoric from 1960-1975; and there is a turn towards a student’s personal development and expression which occurs in the late 1960s.

I would attribute the fall of communication courses in the late 1960s to the last development, the rise of a style of instruction centered around a student’s personal growth and expression. This movement is alternately called “subjective rhetoric” or the “expressionistic approach” by Berlin (139). Its beginnings can be charted in the 1966 Dartmouth conference which produced John Dixon’s Growth  through English, a report which emphasized writing as a tool for  “’personal growth’” and “’the use of English studies for building an ‘inner world’” (Dixon qtd. in Berlin 149). I should note, however, that I do not have any evidence to show that the rise of subjective rhetoric caused a decline in interest in communication courses. To argue that one caused the other would likely be a logical fallacy; yet I think it is telling that the fall in discourse around communication courses coincided with the rise in discourse around subjective rhetoric.

Along with this interest in personal expression came attacks on traditional education. Berlin describes how “In a 1967 essay entitled ‘English Composition as a Happening,’ Charles Deemer attacks the university, charging that it is opposed to education because it fragments and alienates students.  Citing such figures as Normon O. Brown, John Dewey, Paul Goodman, Marshall McLuhan, and Susan Sontag, Deemer calls for the composition course to become ‘an experience’ in which the teacher’s authority is removed by having the student become an equal participant in learning” (150).

Naturally, this interest in free expression and in overturning traditional education emerged alongside the various social movements of the late 1960s.

Here, funnily enough, we can see a dramatic rise in the number of articles in JSTOR which refer to “personal growth” beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s (again, this is relative to all articles published).

So the emphasis on communication courses did decline in the late 1960s, but as we can see from the first two graphs, discourse around communication courses came back not long after. In my next post, I want to look at the ways in which communication courses were framed in the succeeding decades. Also, if I have time, I want to examine the beginnings of the Communication Across the Curriculum movement.

Ostensibly a profile piece about the experience-centered and technology-free Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos California, the article interviews several parents about why they chose to send their kids to a school without any computers or other media, thus setting the scene for a discussion of the potential benefits of technology-free instruction. Situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, one would not expect the Waldorf School to be very popular. However, it turns out that many parents who make their living designing the latest technologies are not too keen on their children using them. As one parent quoted in the article succinctly put it, “If I worked at Miramax and made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them until they were 17.” This aversion to technology in the classroom, however, is not held by most other parents and educators across the nation. So what do these parents know that others do not? It turns out quite a bit. For one, they know that education is not only about learning facts, but about becoming a well-adjusted and emotionally dynamic individual. They know, as one of them put it, that “teaching is a human experience,” and they know that technology, though incredibly useful in day to day life, can be a distraction in the classroom.

The article is, in fact, part of a series of recent New York Times articles exploring the use of technology in the classroom that offers a much needed critical analysis of what has thus far been a very one-sided policy debate. The belief in the value of technology in the classroom has become a kind of sacred cow of public education debates, and there are few incentives for administrators or school principals to question this orthodoxy. In fact, there are many hard-to-resist political and monetary incentives (mostly from the corporate world) that encourage technology use in public schools. While it turns out it’s very difficult to actually improve student learning and attention through the use of technology, purchasing a set of new Dells or IPads for the classroom, or signing students up for Facebook or Twitter, is an easy way to show parents and politicians that their schools are on the cutting edge; and who doesn’t want to be on the cutting edge? Indeed, even as many public schools struggle to keep teachers and restrict class sizes, they seem more than willing to continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on corporate-manufactured technologies for the classroom in an attempt to demonstrate that they care about their students. Like an absent parent, who compensates by buying their child all of the latest gadgetry—with which they can then entertain themselves in their parents’ absence—our public schools seem trapped in a cycle of simultaneous neglect and harmful overcompensation. But as this particular article makes plain, the most important forms of learning do not actually require any technology.

Indeed, as it turns out, technology might even get in the way of important forms of learning. The Waldorf schools, which value human interaction and emotional development, have been around for a long time. However, their ability to continue to thrive and grow within a world that is increasingly technologically focused says something about the still small voice of emotion and the animal desire for physical forms of connection and meaning that persist within human communities. And what is most interesting about the Waldorf schools’ approach to learning—its emphasis upon the body—is precisely what is missing from so much recent technology-centered pedagogy. Teachers in the Waldorf schools encourage children to integrate physical activity into the curriculum, thus reintegrating body and mind in the process of learning. In contrast, technology-centered pedagogies, which require little physical movement and lots of focused mental attention, actually encourage a split between the body and the mind, privileging the mental, linguistic, and visual aspects of our experience over the interpersonal, intuitive, and somatic aspects. The negative effects of this split will no doubt become increasingly apparent as generation upon generation of children are increasingly raised in the constant presence of computer screens and digital forms of entertainment and information that encourage interaction without the complications of interpersonal communication; information without any organic context; and isolation without introspection.

In a world where children’s emotional experiences are increasingly manufactured and often mediated through technology, the Waldorf School’s emphasis upon the body as a vital part of experience and learning is more necessary than ever. Sadly, at least according to the reporting in this article, those benefitting most from the lack of technology in their schools also appear to be among the wealthiest and most privileged. Meanwhile the rest of the nation’s children, whose parents cannot afford the $17,000 a year price tag to attend a Waldorf school, remain the victims of a system whose desire to appease corporate and political interests seems to have overwhelmed their ability to actually teach. As schools in historically underprivileged districts spend their resources in a vain attempt to keep up with the latest technology, they are throwing away perhaps their one chance to offer a real solution to the increasing opportunity gap between the rich and the poor. As technology becomes more efficient and simultaneously more self-evidently easy to use, the real winners will be those who have the deep emotional and imaginative skills to navigate the pitfalls of this new world. Those trained only in the use of technology on the other hand, will likely find themselves its unwitting victims.

I teach in the NYPD Leadership program at John Jay College. This job comes with special challenges that other professors do not encounter. For example, my students, all active duty NYPD officers are often asked to work mandatory overtime. This semester between the September 11 10^th anniversary, increased activity at the United Nations surrounding Palestine’s efforts to obtain UN membership, and lately Occupy Wall Street, there have been many empty seats.

I walk into the class and begin to tell them about the final assignment and simply start, “Don’t write like a cop, and don’t interview them like a cop.” For this assignment, I tell them, you are anthropologists and historians and not the famed officer Joe Friday.[1] For this assignment we need more than “just the facts ma’am.”

When I tell others that all my students are current police officers, they usually look at me confused not knowing whether or not to feel sorry for me. There is nothing to feel sorry about. I love doing this and the cops are some of the best students I have ever had. I have to admit though, I had no idea what to expect when I agreed to join the program last year. Now, each semester, I teach a roomful of officers who are taking classes to finish their bachelor’s degrees. The program is funded by City Council and the content is multi-cultural, anti-racist and fosters professionalism and respect.

In my course on Ethnicity and Immigration I require the students to do a series of interviews with a recent immigrant, and to write an ethnography or oral history style paper about that person’s immigration experience. This puts all of the readings about waves of immigration, huddled masses and the challenges of integration in the context of one person’s life. However, when I tell them to think like anthropologists, most imagine this:

Ethnography doesn't look like this anymore. Bronislaw Malinkowski. Original Copyright unknown

The NYPD is probably the most diverse police force in the world; many of the officers are recent immigrants themselves and very quickly realize that they are learning about their own families as well as other immigrants. Probably the most surprising thing for me is that so far, in each class there are family members of officers who came to this country illegally, sometimes fathers and mothers who were looking for a better life for their children. Often, the officers remember coming to this country themselves either as children or even as adults. It is inspiring to be able to help these officers connect to their own roots and to see them in the process of making their family’s own “American Dream.”

So far, the assignment has been very successful. Last year students interviewed Mexican landscapers, Korean nail salon employees, police officers from the Caribbean and one particularly ambitious student went to a local home improvement store and tried to pick up a day laborer to interview. While effort (predictably) failed and the man all but fled on foot, the student got a firsthand look at the fear that immigrants, especially undocumented ones feel. Even though NYPD does not enforce federal immigration laws and only reports immigration violations when they are discovered in connection with other criminal activity, the man in the parking lot did not know any of that and saw the well-meaning officer as a threat. The young officer told the class the next week, with slightly hurt feelings, because the man was too afraid to speak to him, even though he was out of uniform and doing it for a class.

So what do I mean when I say “don’t write like a cop?” Besides getting a rise out of the students, it is to get them thinking about different types of writing. Of course, all officers do not write the same. Some are tremendously gifted creative writers. One of my students this semester is a published poet while others write in terse, but clear prose that’s more appropriate for police reports than for a social science class. It is not that this style of writing is “wrong,” it is well-suited to the demands of their careers. However, in order to capture the immigrant’s humanity and convey their difficulties, hopes and dreams a different approach is needed. So once again this semester, twenty of New York’s finest will be asking questions of NYC immigrants not about crime but instead about what is was like coming to America and what the American dream means to them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Appearances notwithstanding, carnival in Rio is serious, highly lucrative business that generates millions of dollars of revenue based on ticket sales, TV broadcast, and advertising, which heats up the tourism industry in Rio- this year the city of Rio de Janeiro attracted one million people for the carnival week. So the real question I am asking is how could we get our students (not just in BPL) to approach and carry out their research and presentation as professionally as Carnival in Rio is? Please bear with me and read further before you think I’ve gone nuts.

Maybe some of you took notice a couple of weeks ago of the event of the year in Brazil – Carnival, especially in Rio de Janeiro. Being personally connected to Brazil, I get to watch some of it yearly. Every year I also learn a bit more about the history of this tradition, its contradictions, as well as rules of the “samba schools” competition. Most foreigners are not fully aware of the fact that the Carnival in Rio we get to see in the media is a fierce competition among community-based organizations called Samba schools with very strict rules and rigorous evaluation criteria. Samba schools comprise several divisions, or leagues, where the champion of the second division moves up to the first division and the last place in the competition moves down one division (this year two schools were severely damaged by fire only one month before the carnival so those get to stay in the division for another year, therefore exceptionally, next year there will be 14 school competing).

National TV broadcasts the two-day (actually, night) competition of the first division in which twelve Samba Schools compete, six on Sunday and six on Monday during the 3-day holiday. Samba schools prepare the whole year for an 80-minute presentation in a specially built stadium that Brazilians call the “sambadrome” – a parade of 3-4,000 participants distributed through distinct floats, including a percussion ensemble of about 250-300 members. This event attracts a mix of professionals and volunteers, usually people from community, but also a large number of people from other neighborhoods (including many middle class and affluent cariocas—how people from Rio are called), as well as tourists from other Brazilian states and from abroad.

What is the competition about?

Each samba school chooses a theme for the year, which must be developed during their presentation (parade) for which a samba song must be written and performed by the entire school (a team of professional singers, many of whom develop commercially successful careers as samba singers in the local industry). Every participating school has exactly 80 minutes for their presentation and must exit the gates of the stadium at the 80th minute or they lose 0.1 point for each minute they are delayed. Schools are rarely late and the fact that one of them was 10 minutes late this year amounted to a scandal–the last time a school was significantly late was in 1992, which is almost shocking to me given that Brazilian culture is lax about time and people are frequently late for appointment. There are 10 criteria independently evaluated by judges- each criterion is judged by 4 judges who watch the schools presentations in isolated boxes with no discussions among them. The judges are chosen by a committee composed of city officials and members of the independent league of the schools of samba, the latter representing all the schools. The lowest score is dropped to avoid big discrepancies and prevent against bias. As the competition grew fiercer in the last 3 decades, it is usually a difference in decimal points that decides the championship.

The primary aspect of the competition is the theme the school chooses, its concept and development. In other words, each samba school tells a story on the street (the sambadrome is a street in the center of Rio that was converted into a permanent stadium that comprises several buildings where public schools function during the school year). Some of the most important criteria for evaluation are evolution (the flow of the parade and theme development), samba (lyrics, music, dance, and audience response to it), harmony (how the whole hangs together, including how the song connects with theme presentation and the enthusiasm of participants), and costumes. In sum, it seems that coherence, cohesiveness is key to success in this type of presentation, how all the elements seamlessly connect with one another. The theme must be conceptualized and developed through dance, each float’s costume (members of a float wear the same costume, including hand and headgear, which represents one element of the story), and incredibly elaborate movable platforms (huge cars) that look like Broadway sets. This year some of the themes were Rio in films in, the mystery of life, agriculture in human history, hair and its role in culture, mystery in film (which included reference to Hollywood films), and Nelson Cavaquinho, one of the most popular samba songwriters and founder of one samba school. My personal favorite explored Darwin and evolution. Here’s a look:

This year championship went to Beija-flor (literally, “hummingbird”) whose theme was a tribute to the life and four-decades career of Roberto Carlos, the romantic Latin American singer who has sold millions of records.

Importantly, every school composes a new samba (lyrics and music are evaluated) which is presented by “Bateria” the most important part of the proceedings that includes band with percussion instruments, many of which originally developed in Rio by the first “sambistas” former slaves or their descendants and poor immigrants that lived in the slums of Rio in the 1920s and 30s—this was the time when samba was established as an original urban popular musical genre distinct from other musical manifestations that share Afro-Brazilian roots.

Obviously, the champion does usually well in all the criteria. However, what usually defines the championship is an aspect that although it is not officially evaluated, it influences all other criteria: the reaction and participation of the audience, or how well the school communicates with the audience.

Watching the carnival from NYC I was constantly reminded that it is nothing like being there for real. But what I was able to observe and understand even from the indirect and somewhat distorted and incomplete experience of watching the Carnival made me think of our students’ presentations and I asked what makes a good school samba presentation? What seems to work is a well conceptualized, organized, and balanced story, with a strong message that is relevant to the audience. Endless practice, good preparation and commitment to the team are a must. All the hard work seems to translate into seemingly effortless and spontaneous performance.

And, finally, they absolutely have fun with it.

So posing the initial question what does Brazilian Carnival have to do with (our students’) presentations? It only makes me conclude that, well, maybe we wish the presentations were a bit more like Carnival in Rio.

…there was somethin’ about…it was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities.  But in fact it upped them.  I mean, I’d always used sort of dreamy stuff.  But I had never as a young writer realized that you still had an obligation to make a kind of narrative.  That really the goals of realism and the goals of surrealism are exactly the same.  And they’re indescribable.  But they’re two completely different highways that have the same destination.  And I’d never snapped to that before.  David Lynch, Blue Velvet, coming along when it did, I think saved me from droppin’ out of school.

Wallace also told his Blue Velvet story on Charlie Rose, where he expressed his admiration for Lynch’s ability to take the viewer to incredibly strange places by using the Trojan Horse of compelling narrative.

As a teacher, I’ll admit that I like to take my students to incredibly strange places, pushing them to reach radical conclusions about the history we study.  Over the years, I’ve realized that this process often requires more that a spoonful of sugar.  Like any good storyteller, it’s important to hold the audience’s hand, seduce them, as you walk them along the path to the good stuff.  In other words, we need to think about developing an aesthetic element to the way we deliver material to our students.

For me, that aesthetic device is, more often than not, humor.  I think comedians offer the best example of how to effectively push audiences into unfamiliar rhetorical territory.  Lately, comic and writer Louis CK has been on a roll, making several appearances on late-night talk shows that have gone seriously viral.  In the two clips below, CK is able to bring up two different topics that rarely get any play in mainstream American media:  the imminent collapse of capitalism and the continued legacy of African slavery in the United States.  Both cases illustrate CK’s impressive ability to lead the audience along using all the narrative tools at his disposal: humor, self-deprecation, and of course, carefully selected words.

At a roundtable on public history at the Graduate Center last week, several of the historians present emphasized the necessity for an “aesthetic of history” that discovers new forms for communicating historical knowledge to an increasingly culturally-fragmented public.  As shows like the Daily Show and Colbert Report have demonstrated, it’s possible, even desirable, to engage humor and satire as delivery tools for conclusions that otherwise might not reach receptive ears.  Colbert’s legendary appearance at the 2006 White House Press Correspondents Dinner is perhaps the most sublime recent example of how to “build a bridge” to controversial material; even George W. Bush found himself laughing at jokes that, underneath the humor, essentially depicted him as a coward and murderer.

Humor is my go-to method of pushing students into new ways of thinking without losing them.  What’s yours?

Thus begins Amarcord, Fellini’s autobiographical film, a brilliant tribute to his birthplace Rimini. I’ve been replaying its opening scene in my mind for the last few days, desperately wishing for some signs of spring in NYC.

This weekend I finally sat down and watched Amarcord in full again. The last time I watched it this closely was several years ago when I was constructing a writing assignment around it for my composition class. Naively, I thought my students would immediately share my fascination with the colorful characters and the sheer surreal beauty of some of the scenes: a boy encountering a white bull in the fog or a gorgeous peacock appearing out of nowhere in the midst of snow. To say the least, my students were not engaged when I showed the film. I was willing to connect their reaction, rather lack thereof, to anything – non-linear narrative, symbolism, unrealistic characters, insufficient introduction to Fellini on my part – but subtitles. Really, I was very surprised to learn that a small inconvenience to read short notes while watching a scene would be met with such intense resistance.

Watching the film again, I wondered how subtitles could be made into a useful tool in the classroom. If the film is in English, subtitles can work to the advantage of English language learners, or to their detriment: relying on the written text, they may turn off their listening. I did some additional searching online and found an extensive list of practices aiming to develop linguistic and cultural literacies through film as described by Anthony Helm in the post “Teaching Language Through Film” on the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) blog. Helm reports how two foreign language instructors use film to create teaching resources. A Russian instructor Alfia Rakova “develop[ed] teaching materials (readers and exercise books) from the scripts of four films. Film scripts are not regularly published, however, so it meant watching and re-watching the film countless times in order to extract a working script. From there, she could build vocabulary lists, identify parts of the film that serve to demonstrate grammatical points that she wants her students to work with and understand, and highlight language exchanges between characters that serve to model real-world interactions.” A Japanese instructor Mayumi Ishida focuses, among other things, on how “films excel at presenting clear demonstrations of non-verbal communications, which textbooks may only be able to describe.” I find the whole post illuminating when thinking about the place of film in the classroom across disciplines and encourage those interested in the subject to take a look.

photo credit: freeparking

I was doing research for my dissertation at the National Archives a few months ago when I came across a set of “communications files” for General William Westmoreland, a central military planner during the Vietnam War and later Army Chief of Staff.  The files contained all kinds of communications, mostly letters, spanning Westmoreland’s tenure as administrative head of the Army during the final years of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Unfortunately for my dissertation, I didn’t find anything in the file that directly helped my project.  However, one folder in particular caught my attention more for its form than its content. A collection of papers marked “Wire Transcripts, 1968-72″ contained all of Westmoreland’s communications via wire service, or telegram, and when I opened the folder I was immediately struck by the uncanny sense that I was looking at a Twitter feed.  The pithy, often awkwardly abbreviated transmissions closely resembled the loose, stream-of-consciousness format that Tweets, status updates, and text messages have made ubiquitous.  As I browsed through Westmoreland’s proto-tweets, the effect was like reading an internal history of the Vietnam War broken down to its linguistic essence, and I realized that the impulse to communicate in incredibly short textual bursts was not unique to the Internet Age.

As I approach teaching a history course on Vietnam this summer, I wonder if the tweet-format can have uses in the classroom. Since so many writing exercises attempt to teach students how to organize their thoughts into one powerful central thesis (often in the form of a a single sentence), the informal language of text messaging might provide a natural springboard to develop that process.  A good example of how loads of meaning can be packed into 140 characters is found in these “Twitter Discographies,” which break down entire musical careers into nearly mathematical, often brilliant, aesthetic summaries.  A personal favorite, Neil Young, looks like this:

Neil Young: 1 shak(e)y; 2+3 yin/yang of entire career; 4 the hit; 5-7, 14 fucked-up genius; 8-13,20-33 yin/yang variations; 15-19 the ditch.

While most students already have a great deal of practice composing text messages, how might they benefit from exploring this format in an academic setting?  Are there ways to engage the same critical faculties involved in writing a five-paragraph essay in, let’s say, an exercise that asks students to reduce the Tet Offensive to a series of tweets?

Listening Post: installation culled from real-time internet chat rooms, by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin

It has been hard not to take the announcement that many level two classes at Baruch will become jumbo-sized next year—increasing from 24 to 50 or 100 students—as a rejection of my work and values, as well as my colleagues’. The more experience I have, both as a student, teacher, and consultant, the more I see a need for what I’ve come to think of as “communicative reciprocity”—listening or reading and acknowledging the uniqueness of a student’s work, the back-and-forth that fosters authority based on critique and reflection.

I’m not saying lecture and jumbo classes might not be effective, even best, in some situations. Many professors have brought great talent, knowledge, creativity, and hard work to covering a large amount of information succinctly, coherently, and vividly. And of course, this is all contingent, you can have a demagogue in a small class. (A student told me she didn’t want to turn in a paper to her teacher that stated an opinion that disagreed with his.) But it seems nearly impossible in a class of 100 or even 50 to have the kind communicative reciprocity that recognizes a student’s developing opinion as valuable, responds with respect and consideration, and encourages more bravery, exploration, and complexity.

Often when I help students with drafts of essays, their first impulse is to mimic the teacher’s opinion and way of speaking, or to paraphrase research they’ve found online. I ask students to tell me their opinion, and then ask them to support it. When I tell them to write down what they’ve said, or when I write it down as they speak and hand it to them as a sketch for their rough drafts, students often seem surprised. To them, their own thoughts don’t seem appropriate in a class assignment.

One professor who teaches a communication intensive Theater 1041 class asks her students  to write a theater manifesto. I met with one of this professor’s students to work on her paper, and as she developed her opinions into ideas about what she thinks theater should and could be in terms of political and cultural relevance, she told me: “This is a whole different way of thinking. I never do this.” Here is a student telling me she’d never before been asked to reflect upon and develop her own observations and ideas in college before this assignment. So it isn’t a stretch to suggest it possible that a student could get a BA at Baruch without ever being asked to develop, support, and explain her opinions—about culture, politics, economics, and ethics.

In a class of 100, or 50, how will teachers foster this kind of reflection? How will teachers read and make significant comments on student writing, and get to know each student well enough to meet them where they are, in order to support and challenge them? Without a significant amount of practice in communicative reciprocity, I think that we set students up to be receivers of opinion as well as information. In the communication intensive classes we support at the Schwartz Institute, we work to help students develop and present their own perspectives in response to an assignment. And we try to support professors’ efforts to include more student writing and presentations in their classes. It’s fine that in many other classes students show their knowledge through more multiple choice and short-answer responses. But Baruch lauds itself for the diversity of its student population, and what does diversity matter if in most of their work the same answer is right for every student? What is the value of diversity if we don’t recognize the importance of developing an inclusive, reflective, authoritative political voice of one’s own?

Recently, for a major assignment, I asked my students to create illustrations for either the novel City Crimes (1849) by George Thompson or the short story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe. Then, I asked them to explain their artistic choices in a brief essay and present the illustrations to the class.

I felt a little apprehensive about devising such an assignment, because I feared we were sacrificing some course objectives (improving students’ critical reading and writing, for example) in favor of more richly reaching others (such as interpreting literary texts with innovation and creativity). But here’s what surprised me about my students’ responses to this assignment: the creative component actually improved students’ critical and analytical skills. Never before had the students referred so directly to different passages of the texts and offered such bold and risky interpretations of some themes.

Some students have been kind enough to give me permission to share their work on our blog. Here are a few:

Tara’s “Ragged Mountains”

It’s no surprise that Tara, an illustration major, excelled in this assignment; students gasped in astonishment as she unveiled her artwork. (More of Tara’s work can be seen on her website.)

Tara told the class she chose unrealistic colors for the scene above in order to reflect the effects of the morphine the protagonist, Bedloe, had just taken.

Tara explained that when Bedloe sees a hyena, rebelling Bengalis, and an Indian cityscape in the mountains of Virginia, it feels strange and disorienting, but also seems real to him. That’s why she made the figures detailed but distant from Bedloe (represented in silhouette because of his underdetermined character).

Olga’s City Crimes

After apologizing that she is decidedly not an illustration major—an apology that seemed beside the point, after seeing her masterful illustrations—Olga explained that she chose black and white in order to reflect the novel’s bifurcation between dark and light, good and evil; the color red represents “blood of course” (it is an extremely violent novel), as well as the vivid consequences of the characters’ actions.

Of the illustration below, she wrote, “By showing the two ghosts on both sides of her bed, I wanted to portray that she is being haunted by her demons. They eventually catch up to her and make her commit suicide out of fear of shame and capture.”

Rose’s City Crimes

Rose, the only student to use cut-and-paste collage on paper, explained, “I used newspaper for the tree because I thought from this point on, everything was ‘sudden news.’ It is supposed to represent all of the little secrets that grow.”

In the collage above, Rose used a piece of a New York City subway map to reflect the novel’s urban setting, and explained that “the characters in this picture are not facing each other because their love is a sin.”

So Hee’s “Ragged Mountains”

So Hee wanted to emphasize the protagonist’s “loss of free will,” and she found some ingenious ways to represent that graphically. In the illustration above, she explained, “he is under hypnotism by Dr. Templeton, so you can find Dr. Templeton watching over Bedloe on the top left corner, observing what’s happening to him.” She added, “As he descends to the city, he uncontrollably flows with the crowd to where they lead him, not being able to even think for himself.”

I was most excited to see the illustration assignment empowered some students to challenge my interpretations of the course texts. So Hee, for example, first reminded the class what I had taught them: that the story links British imperialism to American expansionism. But, she said, she saw it differently: “England’s occupation and imperialism in India correlate with Dr. Templeton’s authority over Mr. Bedloe’s body and mental state,” she wrote.

All in all, I am very pleased with this assignment. Next time around, though, I will make some changes. Now that I see how connected illustration can be with interpretation, I will make this a more structured and paced assignment with guided planning and drafting, the way I would with a writing assignment. In the future, I would also like to incorporate an illustration assignment like this one into a longer-term collaborative project, like an online illustrated edition of a text.

A friend told me recently that it was a tradition for Jewish children introduced to religious study to be given honey, so they’d associate it with sweetness and joy.

I’m teaching a class on “The Advanced Research Essay,” which is really a workshop on how to write a thesis paper. I’m leading this workshop as I work on finishing my dissertation, and halfway through the semester my students and I are very much in the same boat.

They’ve finished their annotated bibliographies, they’ve worked hard to assimilate and categorize books and articles on their topics. Now they have to pull their heads out of the waters of research, and turn to their thesis—go from broad and inclusive to incisive and narrow focus. At this stage in my research, I became a bit obsessive-compulsive. Asked a simple question like “What are you studying?” I’d use a word like “empathy” and have to run through a trail of citations from Kant to Hannah Arendt. Grad school can do this to you, and as a fellow fellow and I said last week, second exams train you not to make succinct claims without following every word down the rabbit hole. I think this is partly what accounts for the logic of titles that Alessandro pointed out. The colon is like “towards”, (another class title and dissertation title favorite). Rather than making a statement, or asking a question, we say we’ll go in a direction, or go around. We’d never dream of, you know, declaring something. That would be so…pedantic. I’ve been trying to think of the most daring titles I admire. The Great Gatsby: it dares to say its protagonist is great, and also to tell you its subject is just a guy. And, The Human Condition. Not On the Human Condition, or Towards the Human Condition: fill in the blank. So, we’re not all Hannah Arendt and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I realized that during their annotated bibliographies, not only had my students lost a lot of hubris, but they’d also lost some of the idiosyncratic attachment and associative logic that brought them to their topics in the first place. So, I went back to The Craft of Research, by Booth, Colomb, and Williams, my grad school freshman text, and pulled out a fill-in-the-blank assignment:

1. Topic: I am studying _____.

2. Question: Because I want to find out ______.

3. Significance: To help readers ______.

Many of my students exhibited what I recognized as insecure-student syndrome, rattling off the now ingrained phrases and logic of their readings. We had to talk about real, idiosyncratic questions; and in getting to the impetus for their work, we sometimes realized the original question, or deep unease that made the private string of lights under this tent of citation, was too personal to talk about in class. That too was worth recognizing. “Death and literature” is indeed a naïve topic for a career, but maybe interests should be on a larger, less sophisticated scale than career strategies. If not, there are so many jobs which do not provoke the question “So what are you working on?”

• Present participles: This seems to be a symptom of the interest in and championing of processual approaches, that is, to present the world as in motion, in circulation, always becoming. The title of this post is parodying this cliché of the -ing verb. I am looking at my bookshelf right now and can spot them everywhere: Re-Presenting the City, Losing Control, Colonising Egypt, Exploring the City… I also see some clever variations on the theme: for example, where the title referencing another, more famous title (Coming of Age in Second Life), or where the present participle suggests multiple meanings (Enduring Innocence). Generally, however, the present participle has become a tired trend in titles. (I credit a former boss in publishing for bringing this to my attention and making it a minor obsession of mine.) Moving on…

• The colon: You know you’re reading academic work when the title is cloven in two by the two dots. There’s not a precise anatomy, but generally the title proper is allusive in tone. The subtitle buttresses it with an explicatory phrase, as in: Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. The latter part is the only bit you really need to get a sense of the topic of the book. Usually the title itself is, ironically, a stylistic flourish, as if to communicate that the book also contains some panache and wit (not a guarantee).
• Quote as title: I feel like this became vogue during the 1990s when high postmodernism celebrated the voice of the Other and pastiche between high and low culture. But you will still encounter titles, especially in anthropology, that headline a pithy phrase uttered by an ethnographic informant, or a Biblical or other textual bit. I suppose the function of this strategy is to convey some sense of the author’s egalitarianism vis-a-vis her subject.

• The casual approach: This can go either way. “Notes on…” or “Reflections on…” or even “Some thoughts on…” can communicate the sense that the text will not be especially pedantic, written merely as some loose ideas that suggest more than they argue. Of course, if upon reading the piece disappoints and betrays the airy mood of the title, it can become a marker of pretentiousness.

In a winking gesture, I’ve tried to incorporate all these features in the title to this post. But I wonder what the undergraduate novice, wading through vast oceans of titles, makes of these kinds of conventions, if she makes anything at all of them. The title is not only the first thing you see about an article or book, but in the case of those you don’t actually sit down with–that is, the majority, the title can also be the last thing you read.

Before we’d even gotten the chance to sit down and discuss this paper in office hours, this same student posted to our class blog. The blog post was excellent—thoughtful and thought-provoking questions about Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” were raised and parallels between Melville and the narrator were drawn (both of which showed a lot of critical thinking and perhaps even some outside research).  In other words, this student wrote one of the best blog posts of the semester.

I have many students who seem to inhabit many personalities as writers—the writer who keeps notes in his/her notebook, the blogger/social media aficionado, and the typed-up high stakes essay and hand in hoping for a good grade writer.  But, this phenomenon is nothing new—it is the “same old song” of multi-modal composing, and what Cynthia Selfe defines as “the literacy of technology,” or in other words, “the way people create and respond to information.” What is new to me, however, is this level of engagement and blogging proficiency. The last time I posted on here, I was trying to figure out why my students that semester were adamantly resisting my desire for us to blog. This semester, the blog holds some of the best writing my students do. In fact, I actually am not really able to imagine teaching without the blogging component because of the success I’ve had this semester.

Some observations:

1. Students who are reticent in class are often the most active on the blog. Each student must blog at least once per semester, but this semester, students are just blogging whenever they want to–and it is all related to the course material.
2. Students seem to be quick to comment and to ask each other questions. They also are quick to connect the course material to other things they experience in an average week–whether it be Jersey Shore or Carl Paladino.
3. This course is a Great Works course. The literature we study is from the 17th Century to the present. The blog has enabled students to really connect with the material in an interesting way–they feel committed to its relevance to their own daily experience, despite the age and date of the writing.
4. Students love to share media. They will force themselves into unexpected connections just to show their colleagues a youtube clip.

But, back to the writing. Is a blog’s real gift the ability to show students that they too can contribute invaluable ideas into a larger discourse community? How can we encourage students to take the writing they already do on the computer and bring it into their papers–substituting thesaurus-heavy prose for the natural critical narratives that emerge in a wordpress environment?

Earlier this past summer, my wife and I moved into a new apartment.  We spent five years in the previous place, a 400 square foot “junior” one-bedroom.  It was small and seriously deficient in the storage column—one of the two closets served mostly as our pantry; the other one, by the bathroom, housed both of our clothes—but we loved its coziness, spent countless hours being homebodies till we could move in and through the cramped spaces without looking, like echo-locating bat-people.

Cut to the new place, week four or five.  I woke up in the small hours, for the usual reason one wakes up then (i.e., to pee, not to face down phantoms) and crept a stealthy, oblique path to the bedroom door.  The room was dark, so it was only when my outstretched hands touched a hinge instead of a door-knob that I realized I had misgauged.  I felt a bit to the left; opened the door quietly; squinted deeply into an oddly pitch-dark hallway (“aren’t there usually traces of light seeping in from the windows out there?” I thought); gave a bemused, half-sleeping shrug; stepped briskly toward the WC; and was immediately thereafter struck brutally across the bridge of my nose by some heavy, hard object.

The animal in me tensed for a fight with an apparent intruder, but my deductive-intuitive self, in a half-second flash, ascertained the situation: I had not walked into the hallway but into the bedroom closet, running into its eye-level shelf.  This all happened so quickly that I did not even jump back or cry out (my wife slept soundly on).

A misgauge indeed.  In the murky room, I had skewed my path not a wee bit too far right but several feet too far to the left, and then I had somehow accepted that the closet’s impossibly dark void was the path to the bathroom. (If the whole thing had been filmed, it would be a shoo-in for the Fail Blog.)  It may sound strange to say so, but I found this to be a sort of magical event, an exquisitely pure experience of being undeceived.  In spite of the painful purple dent (later unsightly swollen bump) on my nose, I was weirdly exhilarated.  My mind kept revisiting not the force of the shelf-attack but the force of the epiphany that followed.  The thoughts “how could I have been so utterly off track?!” and “how could I have fathomed my mistake so quickly and so perfectly?” were not really commensurable, yet together they constituted a rare, fascinating, crystallized instance of error recognized.

I have since thought how unusual it is to find oneself so dramatically mistaken, so unambiguously wrong, especially in realms of communication.  Most often, speakers or writers fumble and forge ahead in a sort of dusky half-light, doing the best they can, moving with unreflective boldness or with timidity, but in any case rarely bumping into something that might tell them: you aren’t going where you think you’re going or you’re in the wrong room altogether. I hope it’s clear that I don’t mainly have in mind here grammatical errors, discrete glitches at the sentence level, but larger tendencies a writer/speaker might have to move along misguided, counterproductive paths.

As communications instructors, we constantly operate according to assumptions about student error, at least in the pragmatic sense—what works, what doesn’t in a given case—but I wonder how often or how thoroughly we think through the concept itself.  The following passage, from David Bartholomae’s venerable essay, “The Study of Error,” offers a compellingly holistic view of the matter:

“Error analysis begins with a theory of writing, a theory of language production and language development, that allows us to see errors as evidence of choice or strategy among a range of possible choices or strategies.  They provide evidence of an individual style of using the language and making it work; they are not a simple record of what a writer failed to do because of incompetence or indifference.  Errors, then, are stylistic features, information about this writer and this language; they are not necessarily ‘noise’ in the system, accidents of composing, or malfunctions in the language process.”

His point goes to my interest in error as a modality rather than as a discrete flaw or set of flaws.  It also speaks as much to pedagogical practice, I think, as it does to student work.  How often or how thoroughly do we look for the erroneous—that is, the dysfunctional—in our own methods: our responses to student writing, our assignments, our use of class time, our way of speaking?  I mean to invoke conscientiousness as the objective here, not supposed elements of discernible badness.   “Errancy,” after all, simply means wandering.  Thus it can be one of the most exciting, productive ways to read, write, speak, or teach—through heuristic exploration.  It will only function this way, though, when one has a lively, working awareness of the stakes and purposes and ever-evolving options connected to some effort in language.

Running into shelves in the dark is no fun and no good unless you get the compensation of figuring out, each time, what the *&%# just happened.