Outing collegiality

December 15, 2011 By 3 Comments

At a recent meeting at Schwartz, we talked about what sort of web platform would best serve the needs of teachers, helping us share materials, voice problems and elicit advice, and compare experiences, basically to share our practices as teachers. This Wednesday, Luke, Mikhail, Craig, and Erica launched a resource site/discussion space for the English Department. Last week, associate professor John Weir circulated an email to the English department at Queens College which made me think of what else is needed, besides a departmental forum, like web-based discussion space, to foster collegiality. Weir’s email has a kind of openness and immediacy that, in my experience, characterizes informal talk between friends and colleagues—the rant of exasperation or excitement—that I’ve shared in hallways, after a meeting or between classes. It is one thing for one adjunct to talk to another, or even to senior faculty, by the Xerox machine, and another to post online in a forum, where your thoughts are exposed to an entire department. Sharing pedagogical experiences and practices more publically requires perhaps a more expansive collegial spirit.

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.”

Filed Under: Baruch College, CUNY, Faculty Development, Pedagogy, teaching, Writing Instruction

The Digital I & Thou

December 7, 2011 By 3 Comments

At a recent faculty roundtable, a familiar conversation surfaced: why do students incorporate the rhythms, abbreviations and tones of digital communication at all the wrong moments and in all the worst contexts–using emoticons in requests for paper extensions or text-speak in formal essays, for instance? A core complaint runs through this line of questioning: technology has ruined students’ ability to write. And as familiar as these dilemmas are, so too is one potential pedagogical response: the problem is not texting or emailing or twittering; it’s learning to teach students to move competently and consciously amidst various modalities, to identify and name types of writing and forms of mediation, and to practice when and how to deploy them.

When I first taught freshman composition, I was charged with covering the five primary rhetorical modes. Of course there have always been more than five, but the contemporary moment demands that we re-direct our gaze toward the reality of an infinite body of modes (even if we continue to insist on the tidy and classical handful of five: they can still be useful). This doesn’t mean that every classroom must embrace and welcome tweets and texts and slang into its culture and content, but rather that even if we want to limit the language-types circulating in our classrooms or in our students’ essays , we’re going to have to name them, collectively, first. “The ability to write” does not constitute one undifferentiated field, and as teachers we must liberate ourselves from that fantasy.

I’m curious to hear about strategies others have uncovered for teaching multiple fluencies. One of the challenges of living up to the promise of this pedagogical approach is that the very assumption of audience that underlies the conventional conception of rhetoric has been thrown into deep disarray.  To whom is a Facebook status update addressed? Is it to an individual, to some parcel of one’s collection of “friends,” to some imaginary conglomerate Other, or an aspect of oneself?  I’m quite sure that in many cases both the identities of speaker and audience are unknown. Perhaps one route of entry into the new rhetoric of communication is via a return to, and revision of, an elemental study of self and other: one that accounts for student, teacher and screen.

 

 

Filed Under: teaching, Technology, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

History Re-Tweets Itself

December 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

 

This semester, my students and I have been struck by a series of uncanny synchronicities between the course material we are covering and national events.  First, the Penn State/Sandusky/Paterno scandal and ensuing student riot climaxed the night before we watched a documentary about James Meredith and the violent resistance he met as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.  Watching reactionary students overturning cars and attacking journalists in the Deep South of 1962, because they resented any “outside threat” to their beloved institution, was particularly chilling in light of the previous evening’s images of Penn State students rampaging in misguided defense of their hero.  Similarly, units on the People’s Park occupation of 1969 in Berkeley, California, resonated neatly with the Zuccotti Park occupation and subsequent eviction.  Finally, our coverage of Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement, which is portrayed with clarity and emotion in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties (now streaming on Netflix!), in the context of the wider campus uprisings of the Vietnam War era, coincided (somewhat sickeningly) with the recent incidents of protest and police violence in our very own Newman Vertical Campus at Baruch.  In all of these cases, discussions of the similarities between eras of past upheaval and the current sociopolitical landscape were unavoidable, and helped reinforce, for me, a couple key points about teaching in the 21st century.

I think every teacher wants their students to connect the subject they are studying to their everyday lives, to see its relevance and to integrate its teachings into their lived experience.  As social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to expand in popularity, particularly among college students, it makes sense to employ these tools as a way of connecting students more directly to their course material.  Tom Harbison and I have been experimenting with this a bit, creating a shared course wiki that allows students to collaborate in creating a database of historical knowledge.  One aspect that’s been fascinating to watch develop is the visual aesthetic of each wiki page, and how students find unique ways to communicate often profound historical observations. One recent, brilliant example (above) shows how students juxtaposed two images of Rosa Parks to create a striking tableau of change over time.

At their root, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking utilities all seem to nurture a particular human desire to narrativize our experience of reality, to take the primary sources of our shared history and arrange them into an understandable story.  This impulse can be useful, and is indeed ubiquitous in pedagogy, because it allows for the communication of complex concepts by embedding them in easily digestible narrative morsels.  Of course, making a “story” out of everything has its dangers, as well: imagine whole generations of students getting all of their information about World War II from Saving Private Ryan (shudder).

Speaking of the Second World War, a recent New York Times piece describes a project called “Real Time World War II,” in which an Oxford University history graduate, Alwyn Collinson, is recreating, hour by hour, the events of the war, beginning in 1939, via an astoundingly detailed (and increasingly popular) Twitter feed.  Collinson’s project appeals to me because it satisfies the “you are there” excitement of storytelling while simultaneously demonstrating the necessity of thorough research.  Also, it’s a lot of fun (not to mention incredibly spooky) to witness the march to world war in the postmodern vernacular of Twitter.  A Yale professor quoted in the Times article states, “People in the past weren’t living in the past, they were living in their own present. . .These kinds of tweets restore to the past the authentically confusing character of the present.”  For me, Collinson’s experiment offers one example of how to use the raw tools of social networking to stimulate a more imaginative connection to course material, and serves as a reminder that, as technologically-enhanced human communication continues its expansion, so does the need to adapt our learning strategies to fit a rapidly shifting set of historical circumstances.

Filed Under: Social Media, teaching

Nonverbal Communication

November 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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

Courtesy of featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

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

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

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

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

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

Objectification in the Classroom?

November 3, 2011 By 3 Comments

There is little doubt that the media has a profound influence on its audience. In fact, some experts say that the average American views an average of over 5,000 advertisements in a single day.

With the advent of new technologies, that number is only expected to grow. Further, in American culture and society, the power of advertising to persuade, manipulate, and shape behavior has been undeniable. Despite its primary objective as a medium of selling products, advertising has long been criticized for having deeper and more complex effects on people’s attitudes and behaviors.

While there has been much research about the effects of the media on individuals’ behavior, one of the most prominent areas has been the objectification that it fosters, specifically with regards to the stereotype aimed at women. Many researchers have attempted to understand this phenomenon, and have come up with empirically-validated theoretical accounts and explanations. One such construct, termed objectification theory, posits that in Western society, the female body is regarded as a sexual object that is to be looked at and evaluated (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). According to this theory, the female body is “treated as a body (or collection of body parts) valued predominantly for its use (or consumption) by others,” (p. 174). As a result of this process, females come to internalize this “observer” position of themselves, and therefore view their bodies as objects for visual inspection and evaluation. The term self-objectification refers to the adoption of this observer view of the self, and includes constant monitoring and evaluation of how one’s body appears to others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_objectification).

Although levels of objectification can differ among women, it has been argued that objectification generalizes to all women due to the female gender role socialization that is found in Western society. Although research has documented many long-term effects of objectification (i.e., anxiety, depression), more recent findings suggest that objectification can lead to short-term effects (i.e., body consciousness, cognitive disruptions) as well.

Despite objectification being a societal problem, there is little doubt that it has made its way into the classroom. I first experienced this firsthand a number of years ago, when I noticed that in all of my classes, I barely had females participating in class discussions. Not thinking much of it at the time, I simply encouraged more participation (from everyone) in general. Little did I know then that what I was facing was much deeper than I could have imagined. One day, a student came up to me after class to tell me how much she loved my class, but that she was afraid of speaking because of her fear of “looking stupid” in front of other students. So naturally I did what any educator would do, and over the course of a few weeks, tried to figure out just how much of a problem this was for other (female) students. I asked several students what they thought about class, and particularly, class discussions, presentations, and other assignments that consisted of some performance aspect in front of other students. Quite surprisingly, I found what my female student had hinted upon: while males had no issues speaking in class, it was the females who had much reservation, mainly due to their concern of how they would appear to others in class. As one female student put it, “I am always worried of what other people will think of me.”

To be honest, this was something that had never crossed my mind before. Here I was teaching topics in marketing, yet one of the most obvious effects of the subject matter was right in front of my eyes. Had the media had such an effect on my female students that it stifled even something as basic as their participation in class? Sure, there were some exceptions to this, as I had some female students who were clearly outspoken and (at least in my opinion) did not have any fear or anxiety in speaking up in class for fear of “looking stupid.” Unfortunately, however, such female students weren’t the norm. And while I have tried to eliminate this problem as best I can (by encouraging participation from everyone, making it a point that I value everyone’s opinion, talking about the topic of objectification, and even showing the video (seen above) in class), I continue to encounter this problem semester after semester.

Although the issue of objectification and its effects on females is something that will be hard to change given that it’s a system problem, I urge you (as instructors) to at the very least recognize it. As Jane Kilbourne mentions in her film, the first step in addressing the problem is awareness. Bringing it to light in the classroom, especially by their college years, might bring us one step closer in finding a solution.

 

Filed Under: teaching

The War on Cliché

September 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art Thoughtz

May 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It’s the very end of the semester, and although I haven’t had to administer exams or do any grading, through several colleagues I’ve been privy to some of the creative answers to questions that crop up on final essays in my field (art history).

I won’t re-post (at least not verbatim) some of the unique, hilarious, or just plain sad interpretations on, say, definitions of the Counter-Reformation or of institutional critique. But, as a past adjunct, I remember attempting to read more into the particular sort of irreverent artlessness that characterizes these answers. Some just demonstrate an utter lack of knowledge on the topic (like the student who claimed that Jasper Johns’ Three Flags was made to communicate that America was three times as great as any other nation).

But others seem to hold an implicit challenge to the complexity of a theory or idea. When a student tells me something along the lines of, “Institutional critique is when an artist goes into the museum and says that the museum is racist,” that claim is much more loaded (at least to me) with a challenge to teaching practice—making me think about how I’ve managed to convey (or not) the complexity of a watershed idea. It’s the kind of naivite that engages with critique in a way that’s a whole lot more troubling—to me as an educator, anyway.

The Philadelphia-based artist Hennessy Youngman (aka Jayson Musson) takes this kind of pointed naivite and brandishes it in the direction of the contemporary art world, in an attack on its recent histories, power structures, and proprietary approach to theory. Taking a resolutely vernacular approach in both character (his name is a combined reference to cognac brand Hennessy, beloved of hip-hop stars, and to old-school comedian Henny Youngman (of “Take my wife – no really, take my wife” fame). Adopting an Ali-G-esque low-rent gansta persona, he stars in a series of instructional videos entitled “Art Thoughtz” posted on YouTube, breaking down topics including relational aesthetics, post-structuralism, and “How to Be a Successful Black Artist.”

As a conceptual project, Musson’s videos are an interesting critique of the art world’s entrenched race and class issues. While his ramblings could use some editing, his one-liners are occasionally and hilariously spot-on. For example, his interrogation of the trendy, yet problematic concept of “post-black:” “Did someone from the future come back with that term, and niggas is, like, pink in the future?” and of dinner parties held in galleries under the rubric of relational aesthetics, “We all know that the gallery is an ideologically neutral environment that has nothing to do with the accumulation of wealth or the advancement of global capitalism.. that’s why the walls are white. White is neutral.”

It’s not exactly made to order for a survey course, but in any exam question involving a critique of modernism, I will happily accept, “Mother #$%er, you can’t step outside of history.”

Filed Under: Art, teaching

Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The irritating voice of reason

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A student recently described English professors to me: “You know, they speak perfectly, and slowly but not too slowly, louder than regular but not too loud.” I began to think about teachers’ presentation and what this says about the way we view our roles and establish (or don’t establish) authority. In “Elements of the Academic Essay,” Gordon Harvey (a director of Harvard’s writing programs), defines stance as “the implied position of you the writer to the readers and subject” of your essay. I use Harvey’s list of thirteen concisely described elements when I teach writing, and this week I’ve went back to his definition of stance as I grappled with my annoyance at David Brooks—someone who has been give a lot of authority and space in national dialogue. I’ve looked to “stance” for a way to analyze a speaker’s presentation style—vocal cadence and gestures—as well as their written style. In this so-called, self-called moderate’s style, you can witness the performance of rationality.

Though reasonableness or rationality has long been considered the sine qua non of ethical and political communication by scholars who write on republicanism and democracy, Iris Marion Young and Martha Minow claim that the criteria by which the reasonableness of speech is judged is not based on any culture-transcending ethical objectivity, but is actually tied to dominant culture of white, upper class, male, Western identity. This may explain why public speaking guides tell you to avoid distracting mannerisms, such as playing with your hair, but not adjusting your glasses.

David Brooks has been ably mocked by bloggers for the way he frames national debate. He has an entry in the dickipedia, McSweeny’s published a nice parody of Brooks’ favorite rhetorical tactic of broadly categorizing all of the U.S. population into two groups, and then nicknaming them with a homespun stereotype (for example, some people are Applebee’s people.)  But lately I’ve watched him with the sound off, and this allowed me to focus on his gestures and his facial expressions, and to see how his stance in terms of presentation style more clearly. In videos, you can see Brooks gesture right, gesture left, then wave both his hands at his sides. In this interpretive dance of David Brooks, you can see him valiantly keeping himself straight and centered while the remarkable strong winds of the straw men of his own making batter him from both sides. This stance claims a lot of authority, while also projecting humbleness: this is what I find so annoying. It is a rhetorical power move, claiming the central, rational position, and it is part of what allows Brooks to write on everything from Socrates to the health care plan to what motivates people.

"Figure 4: The Ass Kissing Strategy"

Mark Gaipa created cartoon depictions of various ways authors position themselves in relation to the authors they cite (in “Breaking Into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority in their Writing.”) In one cartoon, a tiny “David” stick figure goes up against an imposing author “Goliath.” Making your own drawings, as we did in Sean O’Toole’s WAC workshop last year, are helpful way of getting perspective on one’s stance. I’d like to see a series of cartoons of the different ways teachers position themselves in relation to their students, their subject, and the rest of the world, and how we construct and lever authority.

Filed Under: Presentations, teaching, Writing Instruction

The terrible secret of space

March 29, 2011 By 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Higher Education, teaching
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