Thoughts and ruminations pertaining to Curriculum & Instruction 630. Within you will find my trenchant observations on writing instruction, composition, and the Chicago Cubs.
I once again count myself fortunate to learn with such talented and creative teachers. I appreciate all the seeds you've planted-- my classes next year will benefit.
Have a terrific summer and school year. We'll hopefully see you all next year.
Moreover, I propose that we draw on our familiarity with rhetorical tropes--and specifically with the tropes of metaphor and metonymy--to provide us with a language with which to talk to our students about the effectiveness of their work. (Madeleine Sorapure)
I found Sorapure's thoughts on assessment to be interesting and original: I would have never thought of utilizing metaphor and metonymy as tools of assessment. Although I'm still wrapping my head around it, I like the creation of a brand-new language of assessment to address brand-new media types.
Following in Sorapure's footsteps, I will now play in this newly discovered assessment space by "grading" the digital collage Elissa and I created. Scot, feel free to use this in the tabulation of my final grade (Elissa might disagree with this idea, however).
by Elissa and Jeff
This image works by employing a central metaphor (and a play on words): composition as composting (as in reusing and re-employing organic material), or decomposition (again making a metaphoric connection between organic decay/rebirth and writing). This is a strong, unique metaphor (and, to give credit where credit is due, a metaphor that was Elissa's brainchild). As strong metaphors do, this relates two unlikely conceptual elements. By making composting/decomposition as the vehicle for illuminating the writing process, this metaphor allows the audience to consider the organic implications of writing. That this piece was composed using digital technology only highlights the connections and disconnections between the organic act of creation and the technologies required to foster this creation.
There are some metonymic connections made, mostly relating to the central metaphor. The writing being produced by the image in the digital collage is a garden. A beautiful, ordered garden is metonymically related to the finished piece of writing. Likewise, images depicting the process of composting are metonymically related to the manner in which a writer makes use of all his or her experiences and influences.
The metonymic connections in this piece, however, are fairly limited in scope, and are all directly related to the central metaphor. Metonymy, here, is used to reinforce and not re-imagine. A bolder, more visionary use of metonymy may have provided this piece with more depth.
An area of assessment which Sorapure for the most part neglects in her article is aesthetics. Visual images prompt an aesthetic response: this is part of the experience of viewing art. I think this digital collage would score relatively high on this scale-- it is thoughtfully composed and the contrast between color and black and white works well. However, the execution is sloppy at points, as highlighted by the chucks missing from the writer's body and the somewhat boring use of repetition in the "garden" being created by the writer.
Reading Howard's postmodern deconstruction of plagiarism was an interesting experience. I'm not sure I've ever heard plagiarism, that scourge of high school English classrooms, discussed in anything but negative terms. The debate about plagiarism rages on: the high school where I teach is currently in the middle of a district-wide initiative to educate about and reduce instance of plagiarism, and the district spends a good deal of money for a subscription to turnitin.com, an anti-plagiarism suite of software.
A line that caught my attention was on page 24, where Howard asserts that the "values" that are threatened in modernist views of plagiarism "surely include individuality." She states that modern society cherishes the concept of a the "true author." This strikes me as true: ours has long been a culture that has elevated the sanctity of the individual.
But maybe this is starting to change. Howard's book was published in 1999, prior to "Web 2.0." Her talk of students purchasing term papers seems almost quaint in this era of the internet's free-for-all of recycled essays, file-sharing sites, and, of course, Wikipedia (another scourge of high school classrooms). I wonder if, amidst all this unfettered access to information, the concepts of true authorship and the attendant values of individuality and autonomy are starting to wane. Writing, at least outside of the classroom, is becoming increasingly more collaborative, as we saw in Jenkins's chapter "Why Heater Can Write." In a Times article about digital literacy, Motoko Rich describes how on-line fan fiction, wildly popular, in particular among teenage girls, differs from modernist views of true authorship. Rich writes about Nadia, an enthusiastic on-line author:
Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be. So like in the book somebody could die but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”
Clearly, in this paradigm, writing and reading are collaborative efforts and authorship a shared phenomenon. The individual writer doesn't matter so much as the shared text. If Nadia tweaks the ending to a story, rescuing one character while dooming another, does the story become hers? Is she a "true author," or is she plagiarizing the work of the first writer to post the story? And if the whole story is based on Harry Potter or Twilight or a manga series, who is the author in the first place?
It's confusing and resistant to easy classification and definition, which seems to be a major point Howard is trying to make. But one thing seems clear to me: increasingly, the students entering our classrooms are going to have a different understanding of authorship, autonomy, and individualism than we as teachers do.
Race enters into Rice's writings on appropriation at several junctures. He discusses the hypocrisy of the Michigan governor's appropriation of a black coolness in the service of bringing white people back to Detroit. He also references on several occasions Amiri Baraka, who in Rice's words, "worried that appropriation would eliminate African-American voice" through an elimination of historical context.
However, a question I've been unable to resolve or shake is whether Rice is doing precisely what Baraka feared through his appropriation of hip hop terminology, methods, and mythology in order to write more coolly about composition. Clearly, Rice's appropriation is not as egregious as using rap to sell macaroni and cheese or, even more embarrassingly, to sell a republican agenda. But the university is hardly terra cognita for African Americans from the lowest socioeconomic realms. Does bringing in da funk to better understand composition represent an attempt to explode the canon, or is it just one more case of appropriation of black coolness to serve a site of white privilege?
Without being too redundant, I found the chapter on appropriation from Jeff Rice’s The Rhetoric of Cool to be extremely, well, cool. Any bit of academic writing that manages to work in the Beats, early hip hop, and quotes both DJ Spooky and Chuck D is all right by me. If he only somehow worked in the Chicago Cubs and Bob Dylan, I would have been rendered absolutely head-over-heels.
I have a bunch of thoughts on this essay, all which I hope come up tomorrow in class and all which would make for worthwhile blog posts. I toyed with writing up several posts on different topics (i.e. Rice’s use of cool as unfixed signifier; his appropriation of black urban coolness, the very act he critiques Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm for clumsily attempting; the disjointed flow of Rice’s chapter, which may or may not have been compositional remix; how technological challenges shaped the efforts and output of early MCs), cutting them up, and pasting them together in a Burroughs-esque act of compositional subversion. Time was short, thought, and I wasn’t convinced that the results would be worth reading (much less deserving of a David Cronenberg adaptation).
So, I decided to go with a meditation on a short passage from page 65: “It’s not hard for us, contemporary writing instructors, to imagine a writer, who at the computer, appropriates and mixes. And yet in our teaching we don’t imagine such writers.” That’s a spot-on critique. I think of my own school’s district writing assessment, which rewards for formulaic essay structure and penalizes for use of other’s writings, via anti-plagiarism software. If appropriation is such a feature of (post)modern composition, as Rice argues it is, it’s a feature that is steadfastly avoided at the high school level.
But I wonder if the alternative is possible or even desirable? I can just see a student turning in a paper he got from freeessays123.com and, once busted, claiming that it was plagiarized, just remixed. “I didn’t cheat—I was just sampling wikipedia. Read some DJ Shadow and get with the 21st century.”
This whole concept touches on multiple areas of contention: plagiarism, originality, privileged discourses, and genre/audience expectations, just to name a few. It’s tricky, but it makes me excited (and somewhat baffled) to be a writing teacher here at the apocalypse.
And, for something completely different, a cool bit of appropriation for you to enjoy:
I enjoyed Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You. I had seen it referenced in a Malcolm Gladwell article a year or two ago and was excited to have the opportunity to read it. Johnson made some interesting points, and I think his main thesis is right: the world of popular culture is getting more complicated. Drastically so, in most cases.
However, I’m not sure I agree that this move towards complexity is as beneficial as Johnson makes it out to be. Video games, it seems to me, must develop further problem solving skills, and I think the participatory nature of these games is an interesting idea that has not yet been realized within the classroom. But what are the sacrifices of a concept of literacy that values a clusterbomb of information over development of sustained, nuanced arguments?
This question is addressed in an interesting essay that provides a nice counterpoint to Johnson’s book (and not in a reactionary, The Dumbest Generation sense). Writing in The Atlantic, Nicolas Carr discusses the effects of new literacies on mental ability in an essay entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” At one point, Carr writes,
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
This is a trend that seems as equally plausible as Johnson’s theory of the Sleeper Curve. I’d consider the question further, but I need get in a few hours of Halo 2… after all, it’s like doing frontal lobe calisthenics!
Hello. I am an English teacher from Madison, Wisconsin. I teach English at McFarland High School and through UW-Madison's PEOPLE program. I am starting this blog as part of C&I 630. When I am not pondering issues of student composition and the new technologies of writing, I can be found living and dying with the Chicago Cubs, playing bass in a bluegrass band, or horsing around with my kiddies.
