Berlin and Vivion, Cultural Studies in the English Classroom

Berlin, James A. and Michael J. Vivion. Cultural Studies in the English Classroom. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1992.

This collection aims to show those in English studies (composition and literature) how the cultural studies movement, begun in England through the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, has affected the teaching of writing and literature in American college classrooms. The book is divided into two sections. The first discusses cultural studies programs, how cultural studies has affected the large-scale programmatic work of English studies, especially that of composition. The second section explains specific cultural studies courses, pedagogies, and practices that have been developed in English studies. Cultural studies helped drive the “social turn” in composition, and it studies how social practices, imbedded with history, politics, ideology, and culture, have affected the formation of meaning and langauge. Cultural studies affected the study and practice of writing in a number of ways: it is based on a poststructural idea of multiple identities and subjectivities; it positions writing as a negotiation and a culturally-coded act; it treats all acts of language, private and public, as interested and affected by cultures and situations; and it sees writing as a meaning-making act of compliance or resistance to the cultural hegemony, not just as transcribing information or knowledge. Cultural studies, the editors claim, is not a content to teach in English studies but rather a method defined by a diversity of pedagogies and practices, but students and teachers who engage in cultural studies often critique culture and explore how meaning is made, understood, and distributed.

Quotable Quotes

cultural studies is not a content but a method “of making meaning and exploring how meaning is made.” (xiv)

Notable Notes

goal: critical readers and understand notion of subjectivity

Zebroski’s critique of the Syracuse Writing studios that privilege development (of teachers, students, writing ability) without connecting it to larger social and economic forces that drive, shape, or prevent that development. The Syracuse writing curriculum, he contends, forwards individual, a-cultural notions of writing that don’t critique the ends of particular kinds of writing instruction. He warns, though, that cultural studies cannot turn into another way to indoctrinate students, a throwback to the banking model. How students are positioned in the classroom – as producers or recievers of knowledge (93) – is of key importance

See Maxine Hairston’s critique of cultural studies in composition (in Composition in Four Keys)

Delores K. Schriner: explains the Northern Arizona University composition curriculum informed by cultural studies: “one person, many worlds” (98) – can’t simplify experiences into one group; Native American. Challenge of teaching the TAs and instructors how to implement this curriculum and why it’s important

Christine Farris “Giving Religion, Taking Gold” – talks about cultural studies in the context of disciplinary cultures. Too often WAC programs try to colonize other departments by enforcing our ideas of writing and inquiry on them. Need for more discussion, see other classrooms in other disciplines as specific cultural and interpretative communities

Linda Brodkey “Writing about Difference” UT Austin course that got so much flack; using law cases to talk about issues of difference, looking at the rhetoric and argument in these legal decisions

Enoch, Refiguring Rhetorical Education

Enoch, Jessica. Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2008.

Enoch offers an alternative understanding to what rhetorical education is and is for through her analysis of the pedagogical and rhetorical practices of white and minority women teachers teaching marginalized American students from 1865-1911. Her case studies include Lydia Maria Child, who wrote The Freedman’s Book, a post-Civil War textbook for freed slaves, a book that offered freed slaves multiple perspectives and rhetorical models from black and white authors; Zitkala-Sa, a Sioux teacher who wrote autobiographical essays in the Atlantic Monthly that questioned the aims of Indian education; and Jovita Idar, Marta Pena, and Leonor Villegas de Magnon, three Chicana teachers in Laredo, Texas, who wrote articles in the Spanish-language newspaper La Cronica that argued for bicultural rhetorical education that places Anglican and Mexican heritages in conversation with each other, into a new kind of cultural citizenship. Enoch’s purpose is to complicate the field’s understandings of what rhetorical education meant in the late 19th-early 20th century (the field relies on accounts of what was happening in American universities) and where that education was taking place. Enoch elevates the female teacher from a passive transmitter of the dominant culture to a potential advocate, shaping pedagogies and rhetorical strategies to better teach and empower her students. Enoch also points out that rhetorical education does not have to be about full participation and engagement in the dominant political and cultural sphere: rather, it can be quieter and more personal, forming communal and civic identites and teaching rhetorical strategies that marginalized members of society can use to begin to disrupt the dominant hegemonic space.

Quotable Quotes

Enoch invites other scholars at the end of the book to find other historical and contemporary sites of rhetorical education by asking questions like “How have people learned to participate in civic, communal, and cultural discussions? How have teachers and students responded to models and skills for participation designated for them? How have they invented different strategies for participation? WHat did these strategies (dis)enable?” (173).

“A rhetorical education aimed at change and disruption rather than acceptance and submission” (32) – Lydia Maria Child’s work

rhetorical education = “any educational program that develops in students a communal and civic identity and articulates for them the rhetorical strategies, language practices, and bodily and social behaviors that make possible their participation in communal and civic affairs” (7-8)

Notable Notes

calls for first-year, rhet/comp to go back to rhetorical education principles – a rhetorical education that is always cultural and political, situated, personal and cultural as well as civic and public, a range of behaviors, skills, and practices

draws on rhet/comp scholarship in African-American, Native America, Chicano/a rhetorical practices and pedagogies; critical pedagogy; history of composition and rhetoric

Emig, Writing as a Mode of Learning

Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” CCC 28:2 (May 1977) 122-128.

Emig, in this early article that articulates the importance of a writing-centered English classroom, argues that writing is a preferrable way for students to learn because it allows students to be active producers originating ideas. Writing uses both hemispheres of the brain and involves all three of Jerome Bruner’s learning categories: the hand, the eye, and the brain. Writing is integrated, propelled through cycles of self-reflection, connective, engaged, personal, and self-rhythmed, all attributes of higher-level thinking and learning. Writing, as opposed to talking, forces students to negotiate and shuttle between the past, the present, and the future.

Notable Notes

move to make students producers, not consumers

curious distinction Emig alludes to – that writing is different than other forms of composing (art, music, dance, architecture, film, and math and science.) She doesn’t expand on that, but it would be interesting to know what exactly she sees as the difference. She seems to prioritize writing over these other creative design arts.

individualized education in writing – make it self-rhythmed

shuttling between past, present, and future requires skills in both analysis and synthesis

Kirschenbaum, Machine Visions

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Machine Visions: Toward a Poetics of Artificial Intelligence.” electronic book review 6 (November 1997)http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr6/6kirschenbaum/6kirsch.htm

In this hypertext, Kirschenbaum reviews three non-canonical webtexts: Throwing Apples at the Sun, which is an interactive CD-ROM by Elliott Peter Earls, Johanna Drucker’s artists’ book Simulant Portrait, and Darick Chamberlin’s artists’ book Cigarette Boy. Kirschenbaum argues through his analysis of these three digital texts that they are poststructural examples of new digital media, media that is self-reflexive and aware of its materiality, dependent on a dialogue between the human and the computer (“artificial intelligence”), and cannot be read outside of the digital form. He advocates for 1. a broader understanding and appreciation of the possibilities of digital texts – to move beyond things hailed in Wired and to push for experimental work in post-alphabetic graphic and digital design – and 2. a realization that the computer is more than a word processor; it has multiple design tools and options that can be used by writers and designers to create texts that push the limits of their audiences. This integration of the visual and the verbal is in the tradition of William Morris, William Blake, and the Book of Kells.

Quotable Quotes

on the computer: “It is an instrument for crafting writing environments.”

“The poetics of artificial intelligence are aestheticized instances of the digital wor(l)d and its virtual subjectivities, realized in the form of an incarnate and embodied text – whether than text be codex or electronic in form.” – its more than just computer-generated text

These complex, embedded, multi-vocal texts cannot be “read abstracted from [their] presentation”

Ohmann, English in America

Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1976.

This educational critique that focuses on higher education English departments, arguing that they are implicit in forwarding the capitalist, military, industrial agendas of the institutions in power (government, military, big business.) Ohmann argues against New Criticism for a return to the humanist, moralistic study of literature, one grounded in people and culture, not science. English departments, he claims, act to sort and sanction undergraduate and graduate students, assimilating them into an elite class. He draws his critique from an economic history of American industry (and its effect on education) and by looking at the MLA organization, the structure of English departments, freshman composition textbooks, the AP system, and institutional writings like The Pentagon Papers. His critique is profoundly affected by the Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, and the students’ rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and he wants English departments to adopt Marxist, revolutionary agendas, to shed their apolitical stance and work for societal change.

Quotable Quotes

“Ther is just no sense in pondering the function of literature without relating it to the actual society that uses it, to the centers of power within that society, and to the institutions that mediate between literature and people. In other words, the function of literature and the role of English teachers cannot be understood except within the context of a given society and politics” (303) – texts do not exist and cannot be understood in isolation

“Meetings and memoranda are main instruments in planning, prime media of discourse in a complicated technological society” (191)

Composition arose “when the modern university was being grafted onto the old aristocratic college” (134).

“writing was no longer mainly a private and public art, but a tool of production and management” (93).

“I found it harder to believe that Humanity was being served well by the academic humanities, as our official dogma held, or that the professional apparatus we had invented was a rational structure and not a Rube Goldberg machine” (5)

Notable Notes

wants what is done by English departments and professors to matter, not just be contained in some specialist world that doesn’t communicate with reality.

looks at composition and its connection with gatekeeping. Chapter by Wallace Douglas about the Boylston Professorship at Harvard – move from classical, rhetoric as art to training for the professions, a hurdle to overcome

problem with emphasis on apolitical, childish, decontextualized, solitary, individual, private themes and attitudes towards students in freshman comp – we need to look at what kinds of writing actually are written, valued, and enact policy in the world, like the memos of the Pentagon Papers.

Pentagon Papers – the memos set an official argument, framed action, was a point (evidence) for future reference. THe memo kept policy makers in a particular frame of mind, following the warrants of the genre because the purpose behind it, the human costs of war, were never questioned or considered.  Connection to teaching professional writing, ethics

what does it mean to be a professional? independence, jurisdiction to allow others in, to train, assertion that your knowledge is special, needed, and only attained through long training in schools

industrial society values are tied up in the history of English and comp: efficiency, centralization, measurement, capitalism, management (261)

the shift to the knowledge economy raised the importance of universities to corporations, the college degree became the mark of socialization and training

professional, intellectual choices are political choices (304-305)

Hansen, Face-to-Face with Part-Timers

Hansen, Kristine. “Face-to-Face with Part-Timers.” In Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing Programs. Eds. Joseph Janangelo and Kristine Hansen. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1995. 23-45.

Hansen argues for the professionalization part-time instructors by treating them ethically and valuing their teaching expertise as important meaning-making knowledge. In the article, she briefly explains the historical background of part-time instruction and the emergence of the CCCC Statement about part-time and contingent labor through the work of the Wyoming Resolution. After listing several cons of professionalization (sheer number of instructors, those who want to work part-time, the costs of providing a professional work environment, and the anti-democratic, boundaried, and disciplined nature of expertise and professionalization), Hansen shows through both a theoretical understanding of the ethics of care and her own personal case study as a WPA how one might go about improving the conditions of labor for part-time instructors.

Quotable Quotes

“How can [a WPA] in good conscience lead a program that is built on exploitation?” (25)

“The only ethical solution is to professionalize part-time teachers – but to do so in ways that avoid devaluing lore and the practicioners who worked in the field before the certified professoinals arrived.” (32)

Notable Notes

CCCC statement was a compromise of the original Wyoming resolution because it didn’t include the union model of grievance paths

affect of graduate programs on part-time teaching staff

ethics are relational – come about with contact with other people; administrators who talk with and work with part-timers are more likely to treat them ethically

moves for change: writing memos, arranging meetings with part-timers and deans, providing professional development, securing funding to pay those for professional development, highlighting work publically through symposiums and conferences, survey other surrounding institutions

Sirc, Box-Logic

Sirc, Geoffrey. “Box-Logic.” In Writing New Media. Eds. Anne Frances Wysocki, et al. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2004. 111-146.

Instead of teaching linear texts in our classrooms, composition teachers should encourage an aesthetic sense in their students, asking them to see writing as collection, arrangement, and juxtaposition of elements, much like a curator or artist composes. Sirc relies on the box theories and practices of Marcel Duchamp Joseph Cornell, Walter Benjamin, and George Maciunas to construct an argument about the validity of such an experimental method in composition classrooms, highlighting how it reflects the non-linear, non-conclusive writing students do outside the colldge classroom. His assignments draw on technologies from pen and paper to HTML web pages and have students create juxtapositions, research boxes, and arcades projects.

Quotable Quotes

We need to ask “What is essential to composition? What are the inescapable, minimal institutional constraints that must be considered?” (126)

“Mainstream writing instruction too often prefers to put students inot contact zones of heightened cultural import. BUt strong art, we seem can be created out of a collection of well-chosen interesting bits of the everyday.” (122)

“If we (finally) journey away from the linear norm of essayist prose, which the texts of the everyday world implore us to do, where do we go, especially in a composition classroom? What sorts of formal and material concerns guide a newly-mediated pedagogical practice?” (114)

“text as box=author as collecter” (117)

“My projects above are all attempts to use technology to infuse contemporary composition instruction with a spirit of the neo-avant-garde. The box-theorists provide a way to think about composition as an interactive amalgram, mixing video, graphic, and audio with the verbal.” (146).

Notable Notes

arrangement, no clear conclusions, just suggestions

stylistic device of the caesura (123)

highlights two activities in the classroom: annotation and note-taking, search strategies

it seems to hearken back to the individual spirit of expressionism, early process movement

students as designers, artists who experiment with blank boxes, pages, and screens to create meanings, free to capture moods, an element of play

Selfe, Students Who Teach Us

Selfe, Cynthia L. “Students Who Teach Us.” In Writing New Media. Eds. Anne Frances Wysocki, et al. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004. 43-66.

Selfe uses a case study of a student of hers, David Damon, a young black man interested in hip-hop and website design, to show that students are bringing extensive knowledges of new media to our classrooms, and we as writing teachers, in order to stay relevant and important, have a responsibility to both learn these new media literacies and incorporate them into our classrooms and assignments. She pulls out three lessons from Damon’s story: 1. that literacies naturally change and grow at differing rates; they all have lifespans 2. new media literacies play a role in the development of identity, in the construction of power relationships, and the creation of social codes and 3. composition teachers need to move beyond alphabetic texts and learn about composing in other modalities. Composition studies needs to look to students to teach us the kinds of literacies necessary to be successful in the 21st century.

Quotable Quotes

“If, however, English composition teachers recognize the insufficiency of maintaining a single-minded focus on conventional alphabetic texts – which generally comprise hte officially sanctioned literacy in our contemporary society – and, indeed, have an increading level of interest in such texts as they encounter them in their personal and professional lives, they do not necessarily know how to design a meaningful course of study for composition classrooms that accommodates a full range of literacies, expecially those literacies associated with new media texts” (56).

Students’ “enthusiasm about reading/viewing/interacting with and composing/designing/authoring such imaginative texts percolates through the sub-strata of composition classrooms, in direct constrast to students’ laissez faire attitudes towards more conventional texts” (44)

Notable Notes

assignments include literacy autobiography, looking at new media texts identified by students, providing alternative means to composing, affect of new media on different genres

need to pay attention to the literacies our students bring to the classroom

what does it man to be literate in the 21st century?

what to we as writing teachers need to learn and teach?

plagiarism and copying code

Robillard, Young Scholars Affecting Composition

Robillard, Amy E. “Young Scholars Affecting Composition: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices.” College English 68:3 (January 2006) 253-270.

With the publication of an all-undergraduate research and scholarship journal in composition (Young Scholars in Writing), composition has changed (whether scholars have noticed it or not) in two distinctive ways. First, that students can publish in the field has marked a shift from treating writing as a verb, a pedagogical focus (how does one learn how to write) to treating writing as a noun, a more objectified, researched scholarship focus (what is writing and should it be studied.) Second, student scholarship, scholarship that compositionists can take up, argue with, and use in their own scholarship, creates a contradiction in the ways we think about students and how we cite them. It is common practice to protect students in our scholarship by assigning them first-name pseudonyms, but now that they do contribute to the knowledge of our field (are not just products of our pedagogy), we need to consider both the legal and, more importantly, affective functions of citation. How we choose to cite student writing and student work in our own scholarship affects how we think of them – as authors or as passive products of our pedagogy.

Quotable Quotes

“To analyze student writing for what it demonstrates about a particular pedagogy – this is an authorizing move in the discourse of composition studies, perhaps the authorizing move.” (256).

“Citation practices vary, too, according to the status of the person being cited” (262).

“To cite Sahra Ahmed or Silas Kulkarni or Alicia Brazeau is to align oneself with students, to forward the argument that students contribute to the knowledge of composition studies as more than examples of particular pedagogies. To cite students is to forward the argument that writing as a mode of learning (Emig) is a dialogic process; teachers teach students to write, but students, in their writing, teach teachers about more than the results of particular pedagogies” (263).

“To name is to control. To withhold a student’s name is a form of that control” (268).

Notable Notes

Connors and Howard – citations practices

categories for functions of citation for readers, authors, and authors who will be cited (258)

categories for functions of citation of students on both students and composition scholars (266)

we need to teach students about the affective aspects of citation practices

legitimate relationship to students’ work

deep acting

Robillard, Students and Authors in Composition Studies

Robillard, Amy E. “Students and Authors in Composition Studies.” In Authorship in Composition Studies. Eds Tracy Hamler Carrick and Rebecca Moore Howard. Wadsworth Publishing, 2005.

Composition scholarship, by not citing student writing and by calling students by pseudo first names only, constructs students as non-authors, as children. This deficiency model has several problems. First, it perpetuates the idea of the teacher as hero, defined by her students’ successes and failures. Second, it places teachers in an hierarchal position in the classroom, one in which she possesses students (aka “my kids.) Third, it conditions the student to take on the role of a passive reader whose own texts are never circulated and always compared (negatively) to the work of professional writers. Last, by acting as if our students are children in both our teaching and our research, we are continuing the low perception and status of composition in the academy, for our attitudes towards our students are more in line with the attitudes of secondary and elementary teachers than those of our colleagues in other disciplines. Robillard surveys and reviews a number of works in the field, showing how they position and represent students in their discussions, choice of diction, and citation methods.

Quotable Quotes

“A student reads; an author is read” (51)

“In the institutionalized constrast between Author and student, the Author is originary, the student imitative (as is a child). If an Author is autonomous, a student is dependent (as is a child). If an Author is solitary and originary, a student depends on the work of others and is easily influenced (as is a child). If an Author is precise, a student is messy (as is a child). If teachers do not attend to the constructions of students that the discursive practices of the classroom encourage, if they continue to reproduce the constructions of students that they have been working with, they can do no better than to enact this dysfunctional binary” (54).

“Citation of one’s work – positive or negative – is a mark of respect for any writer” (48).

“WIth the respect that is entailed in citation comes the authorial loss of control over the text. To insist on students’ retaining control over their texts is to deny them authorial status” (48).

The “unwritten belief that teachers are judged by the work their students do” (43).

Notable Notes

uses student quote and cites it as we would an author, full name

composition is a field about its students – what other field is?

author/student binary