Phillips: 540 Week 15 Blog Post

Pedagogical Tactics for Increasing Inclusion: Johns, Lovejoy, and Delpit 

Lovejoy

“I want my students to learn to make thoughtful decisions in their writing, decisions that are based on purpose and audience and context. I want them to see how some pieces can be written appropriately in the students’ own language while other pieces are more appropriate in EAE. An even within EAE, there is room for variation. That is the direction I am taking in my own introductory writing classes—getting students to fit their writing to the situation for which it is intended and helping them to make careful decisions about their writing on that basis” (106).

Delpit

“Despite good intentions, constant correction seldom has the desired effect. Such correction increases cognitive monitoring of speech, thereby making talking difficult” (94).

“iz” example asks students to explain something in a halting way by incorporating extra syllables. For example, <maybe> becomes [miz-ay-biz-ee] <apple> becomes [iz-ap-piz-le]. The idea is to simulate what it would feel like to be an AAV speaker (or other varietial speaker) who is made to revise her/his speech incessantly.

Johns

“Critical thinking is cultural thinking” (142).

“…[W]hich kinds of assignments should be graded for error and which should not?” (143)

“We also need to design assignments that are clear, explicit, and well modeled, so that all students, second language or not, understand what they are to do and what a successful paper (or other assignment) might look like” (143).

Assessment Recommendations: Page 144

•Assessment connected to learner’s world and frame of reference--i.e. to do well students need to care about the topic

•Offer students multiple ways to demonstrate/represent knowledge and learning--e.g. poster sessions, visual representations, oral presentations, formal and informal out-of-class activities

•Self-assessment is essential to the overall assessment process--e.g. reflection, pointed feedback Q&A Note: not all students will be comfortable with self-disclosure, so offer options

Group-Work Recommendations: Page 147

•Teacher should set-up "ideal" groups

•Rotate group roles between projects

•Provide projects appropriate for a diverse audience

•Draw upon student-to-student exchange so they can teach each other

•Structure group activities wherein problem-solving creates cohesion

•Build interdependence into group activities

•Individual accountability must be included as well as peer-to-peer assessment

Counter Point to Johns

For this post, I have highlighted some of the things I found most useful with one exception. Johns notes that we should design projects that are explicit in content and demonstrate "what a successful paper" might look like. I don't believe the "real" world works that way. On some level, I worry that it is disingenuous to say that a paper is a "success" when mastery is not a realistic goal in a short-term course. Aren't students better served if assignments focus on beneficial research skill-sets rather than what John's seems to imply here, which is a de facto "success" scenario? Put differently, is John's too out of sync with the more chaotic environments people face in the workplace and elsewhere? Adaptive skills seem more important to me than what Johns suggests. Of course, this is a matter of opinion and open to debate.

Phillips: 540 Week 14 Post

What's Love Got to Do with WWW?

Shirley Brice Heath's "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography" outlines the coulda-shouda-woulda revisionist rhetoric of the author's project in Ways with Words. While I appreciate her reflexive approaches to her critics, I am surprised that Heath leaves out something that seems obvious to me. She did a lot of this work out of love, and, yes curiosity. Even the way the book was constructed over a long timespan in a "schizophrenic existence" imposed by state requirements is a nod to love. Why refer to "madness" instead of "love"?

Clearly, WWW was a labor of love for Heath. Her communities, her extended family, her husband, her daughter all played a significant part in this work. Does the word "love" come with too much baggage for a female researcher writing in the time that Heath does? I wonder. Yet, we know emotional attachment and intrinsic motivation as well as the ability to proceed under duress collude in our brain. 

Katherine Hayles writes: "an observer makes a cut . . . to tame the noise of the world by introducing a distinction, which can be understood in its elemental sense as a form, as a boundary between inside and outside" (Hayles 137). Heath made cuts, which all of us must do to get things accomplished as the NPR story I linked to above corroborates. How we mark the boundary between inside and outside as writers and observers is going to vary contingent with the bodies involved.

In a different book, Feminist Pedagogy, two people (one a junior female literature professor and one a more senior male literature professor) discussed their approaches to teaching Virginia Woolfe's A Room of One's Own. In the article, a retrospective of a conference presentation, the female prof. analyzed her and her co-presenter's discourse. She did not refer to the emotional engagement she had with her student, but the male professor did. She asked herself why that happened. Her answer? She felt uncomfortable expressing emotion lest she be perceived "too soft." I wonder if Heath's omission of love from her article or book indicated a similar insecurity.

References:  Hayles, N. Katherine.“Making the Cut: The Interplay of Narrative and System, or What Systems Theory Can’t See.” Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity. Eds. William Rausch and Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 137-62. Print.

NPR Radio Lab - Choice (see link above)

Phillips: 540 Week 13 Blog Post

Now, here’s an ethnography! Heath spent ten years completing her ethnographic research as a participant observer. Heath explains in the prologue that her book is unique because of her access to, and understanding of, the communities she investigates (Roadville and Trackton) and because of the research circumstances at the time.

Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words documents the ways in which black and white working class children from the Piedmont region of South Carolina were apprenticed into language and learning. Heath demonstrates through thick description, long-term field research, and discourse analysis just how those apprenticeships are enmeshed in a complex process of socialization and tacit rules that govern in-group communication strategies.

The first six chapters of the book contrasted the two communities’ child-rearing habits, adult patterns of communication, consumption practices, and ideological stances. On the one hand, the linguistic and cultural practices of the two communities did share some continuity in that the Christian church and biblical literature played a direct role in each community—although that appeared to be undergoing a shift in an increasingly secular Roadville. On the other hand, language acquisition and practice, community participation, and gender roles in each community were strikingly different. For example, Trackton families were more communal, matrifocal, and babies were held much more than in Roadville. Roadville families had male “providers” and female “nurturers,” but held babies less. Roadville babies were addressed directly. Male children and female children were given vastly different toys and engaged in separate activities at a much earlier age than Trackton children.

Heath’s ethnography also revealed different patterns of story narration between the two communities, which foreshadows the ways in which educators may work with students’ strengths once they enter the formal school setting.

Roadville (white) children were taught facts, names of things, and moral lessons based in biblical parable structures. The children were encouraged to tell factual stories in "proper" start to finish sequence. The children were not encouraged to speak-up or out to elders and were not encouraged to be creative problem solvers. Obedience was encouraged, as was deference to adult authority figures.

Trackton (black) children weren’t taught facts or a linear style of narrative in story-telling. Instead, the kids, especially boys, were encouraged to “take the stage” and engage in a kind of competitive conversation, one in which creativity and problem solving through a narrative was rewarded and lauded by members of the community. Taking turns in talking was not taught or admired. Telling a "tall" tale was fine as long as it was interesting. Rhythmic speech patterns were often incorporated into story-telling methods. Middle-school girls engaged in different kinds of rhythmic speech games that also involved body movement like, double-dutch (skipping rope games) and hand-clap games.

Although I haven’t read the second-half of the book yet, I see clear parallels to Susan Philip’s work in Invisible Culture. Philip’s study wasn’t quite as long (1968-73) and she wasn’t a member of the Warm Springs community in the way that Heath was in both the Roadville and Trackton communities.

Phillips: English 540 Week 12 Post

It's about Hammersly Time!: Ain't Yo Mama's Ethnography

The readings about anthropological ethnography this week are some of the most useful readings I have encountered as a student in English Studies to date. Thank you, Dr. Seloni, for helping me find other voices that help me articulate and understand my resistance to the twenty-first century educational ethnographies that I have been reading.

To explain, my undergraduate degree is in anthropology with a writing minor. Because I am an older student, the gap between when I received my degrees in anthropology (90s) and visual culture (two years ago) is considerable.  The articles we read for this week articulate all of the intuitive irritations I have been having as I read contemporary educational case studies, interviews, and “ethnographies.” I felt like a dinosaur because I thought what I was seeing happening in recent literature about emplaced learning situations was somehow inadequate or, to my mind, McScholarship—too fast, too greasy, and too easy—scholarship that routinely left me ill at ease, but I could not identify quite why. Now I know why I have been having that reaction. It is because I have a fundamentally different perspective on what “ethnography” can be and should do. Of course, these are value judgments based in my historical and ideological understandings of cultural anthropology and cultural geography that I learned from my dad and my professors many years ago.

Hammersly’s article addressed some of the particulars that have been troubling me. He writes:

[W]hat I am suggesting is that we need to bear in mind the consequences of moving from the older anthropological model of ethnographic fieldwork to its more recent forms, in which we study only parts of people’s lives over relatively short time periods, perhaps only being in the field a few days each week. There are problems of sampling and generalization here, and a danger of failing to recognize both cyclical variability and fundamental patterns of change. (6)

Granted, Hammersly points out the economic whys and wherefores of the move to expedient forms of methodological research practices that draw from anthropological ethnography, but he also points out what is omitted in such a move—observation of cyclical patterns and deep contextualizing.  I fear I seem nostalgic, but there is something to be gained from “living among ‘em” that builds a two-way bridge across difference, a bridge we need to foster deep social justice.

Hammersly’s query into how ethnographic research methods may be deployed in online communities is at the forefront of my mind. That we have a different relationship based in different kinds of sensory exposures to each other online makes for an interesting shift in research practices. Because I am interested in how different ratios of sensory perception may impact how we feel about each other in different environmental contexts, Hammersly’s essay may draw attention to what is omitted in online discourse. I don’t believe you can know whether the person on the other side of the screen is “real” or not. This Baudrillardian sense of hyperreality transforms ordinary human interaction. Put differently, one does not have the same kind of sensory engagement one does with another real-live human being or other creature. Sociological studies—Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together comes to mind—begin to examine the disconnect between face-to-face human interactions with online or robotic machine interactions. How does one do ethnographic research of robotic interactions? If so, how does one shift analytic components to reflect the non-human aspects of communication across this two-way bridge? 

Phillips: English 540 Week Eleven Response

Literacy Facts and Fictions

James Paul Gee ‘s purpose is to complicate a “traditional” notion of literacy, one in which “literacy is treated [solely] as a mental phenomenon” divorced from cultural, historical, and political contexts (26). Instead, Gee wishes to define literacy in “social and cultural” terms that acknowledge the power dynamics involved in inequities of access for marginalized peoples (28). He suggests an ideological model for understanding literacy. “An ideological model,” Gee writes, “attempts to understand literacy in terms of concrete social practices and to theorize it in terms of the ideologies in which different literacies are embedded” (76). Gee demonstrates this model, to my mind, by discussing different cultural and historical examples that provide extrinsic evidence to back his concluding claim that, “We ought to be as interested in creating a ‘new society’ as we are a new ‘science’” (86).

Gee proposes three literacy facts. First, he notes that, “Most people in developed countries are literate in the sense that they can read” (30). Second, although many are literate, “…lots of people cannot do more difficult and sophisticated tasks with their literacy skills,” which creates a hierarchy of “service workers,” “knowledge workers,” and “knowledge leaders” (30). Third, “…home-based factors matter deeply” in terms of parental education, culture, and access to literacy materials (31). In essence, Gee claims that there isn’t a “literacy crisis.” Rather, there is a “schooling” problem. He discusses a specific instance from the National Academy of Science (1998) that failed to adequately discuss systemic inequities and instead focused too heavily on “phonemic awareness” (37).

In another example—the “aspirin bottle” problem—Gee refutes claims that all this “fancy stuff” about culture and history and so forth won’t help people who can read a warning label. By performing a discourse analysis of the warning label, Gee pauses to consider the larger issues of status quo ideologies about literacy. That is, what has led to the “legalize” on the back of the label in the first place?

Gee’s concise history of Plato, Baktin, Swedish literacy, and Freire’s “emancipatory literacy” is useful as a refresher. Gee’s point is that, “Literacy always comes with a perspective on interpretation that is ultimately political” (60). I don’t think that is a new concept, but his explanation of “Plato’s dilemma” is one we face when we consider how to interpret texts and whose perspective we choose to respect in our role as student or teacher.

Finally, Gee provides a survey of key developments born out of New Literacy Studies to ground our understanding of the ways in which sociocultural approaches to literacy study might transform the conversation. While I am on board with Gee’s assertion that, “We ought to be…interested in creating a ‘new society’,” I wonder who is going to pay for the cost of that new society and under what circumstances.