Malcolm X: "Learning to Read"
Summary:
In this poignant section of Malcolm X's autobiography, he describes how he became a reader and what he does with that knowledge, i.e., fighting the Man.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reflection
|
Quote
|
Brandt makes a strong argument about the economic lines that are
connected to literacy—she makes obvious what for many of us is hidden behind
layers social capital.
|
“[…] these skills [literacy] existed fragilely, contingent within an
economic moment
|
*”any agent, local of distant, concrete of abstract, who enable,
support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold
literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (335).
*”Sponsors set the terms for access to literacy and wield powerful
incentives for compliance and loyalty” (334).
*”Sponsors are a tangible reminder that literacy learning throughout
historyhas always required permission, sanction, assistance, coercion, or, at
minimum, contact with existing trade routes” (334).
*”Sponsors are delivery systems for the economies of literacy, the
means by which these forces present themselves to—and through—individual learners”
(334).
*”[Sponsors] also represent the causes into which people’s literacy
usually gets recruited” (334).
|
“Sponsors of literacy”
|
Entering into the territory of ritualistic behavior.
|
“Obligations toward one’s sponsors run deep, affecting what, why, and
how people write and read” (335).
|
In this sense, literacy, on many levels, becomes the dividing line
between the “landed nobles” and the “working peasants.” I think Brandt
actually does a very sophisticated job of showing this in her example of
Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez.
|
“Literacy, like land, is a valued commodity in this economy, a key
resource in gaining profit and edge” (336).
|
1. “How,
despite ostensible democracy in educational changes, stratification of
opportunity continues to organize access and reward in literacy learning”
(336).
2. “How
sponsors contribute to what is called “the literacy crisis,” that is, the perceived
gap between rising standards for achievement and people’s abitlity to meet
them” (336).
3. “How
encounters with literacy sponsors, especially as they are configured at the
end of the 20th century, can be sites for the innovative rerouting
of resources into projects of self-development and social change” (336).
|
Brandt’s analysis addresses 3 key issues
|
Like any good capitalistic enterprise, competition creates—in this
case, it is creating new forms of literacy that hope to capture the market.
|
“[…] forms of literacy are created out of competitions between
institutions” (339).
|
Reflection
|
Quote
|
|
|
This is such a huge passage—it feels like the author is saying
something to effect of electronic displays are the savior of text—text did
not reach or even understand its potential until the digital shift. Certainly
we are doing a lot of interesting stuff, but is this too big of a statement?
|
“Fixity stands at the center of Beatrice Warde’s brave declaration: ‘not
to perish on waves of sound, not to vary with the writer’s hand, but fixed in
time.’ That fixity comes unglued in the diversity of display devices in which
text can now become manifest” (16).
|
I suppose this gestures to our increasing literate population—is it
really a problem that library’s don’t know where to put all their books?
Logistical, yes, but how wonderful!
|
“[…] the long-term trends justify our daily feeling that we are
threatened by too many books to read, not too few” (16).
|
This caught me off guard and seemed odd, so I went and looked at the date—yeah,
2001! I wondered why it seemed so out-dated!
|
“(And the on-line auction, a genuine advance in the market’s
price-clearing mechanism, may revolutionize Amazon before it has turned a
profit)” (16).
|
Literature may not die, but the hard copy book? It is slowly going
extinct—not too soon, so maybe it’s more “endangered” right now, but yeah…
|
“[…] books are not going to die, and neither is the literature
contained in them” (16).
|
|
“Our first reflection on what’s next for text must, then, be an
economic one” (17).
|
What do we do with all this information? How do we start to organize
and make sense of it all? Do we just dump everything into Reddit pages?
|
“[…] information is not scarce. We are drowning in it. The scarce
commodity is the human attention required to make sense of the data tsunami”
(17).
|
|
“Text itself is a self-conscious expressive choice as it has never
been before” (17).
|
…another tell-tale sign of the essays age. It’s interesting though, because
one of my students is exploring the age of a text as reasons for being
credible/not—and I wonder what we would say of this text? Is this credible
even though it is 12 years out of date and cannot take into consideration of
the vast digital changes??
|
“The only one known to, or explored by, a significant body of writers
in the Internet, and here bandwidth constraints have prohibited asking the
Middlesex Question with anything like its full force” (18).
|
I like this link to the old cliché “what is old is new again.” Like
he is saying: “The internet, today’s illuminated manuscripts.”
|
“[…] a big change occurs when he walks into the margin and starts to
wave his arms around and argue with us. A step not into the future, though,
but backwards into an oral past” (20).
|
Given that it is 12 years in the future from this piece, are we now
comfortable with this juxtaposition?
|
“This uneasy juxtaposition of oral and literate rhetorics occurs
repeatedly in the alternative means of textual display that digital notations
permits” (20).
|
As in the “interface between oral and literate” (21).
|
“[…] an unassuming multimedia text like this, which leaves its fixed
text fixed and adds only the most familiar kind of academic ‘animation,’
nevertheless positions itself on a crucial fault” (21).
|
“It is the general question which must be asked in the market place
economy of electronic textual display” (21).
|
“Do the kinds of attention asked for by this textual presentation
compete or do they orchestrate?” (21).
|
I love this idea and think it warrants further examples (to be added
at the end of this journal).
|
“Again and again, medieval manuscript illuminations look like stills
from an animation in progress” (21).
|
|
“The whole weight of these alternative display modes recaptures this
history instead of, as the media prophets of doom argue, repudiating it”
(21).
|
Out of the common course or limits, extravagant.
|
Outré
|
Perception of interaction
|
“When reading text in three dimensions, the reader’s ‘position’ becomes
literalized. The primary stylistic, and social skill, situational awareness,
takes on a three-dimensional positional equivalent” (23).
|
Yeah, I like this a lot—makes me think of the way I build lesson
plans, one layer at a time—building them up until they can be modeled in the
3d classroom.
|
“We want to be able to read in layers, for main arguments, secondary
ones, detailed evidence, in ways not linear but, as now we must call them,
hypertextual” (25).
|
Linking back to the example of the illuminated manuscript
|
“You find them in unexpected places, and they remind us that
three-dimensional letter space is not only where we are going but where, on
more than one occasion, we have been” (26).
|
Actually, I would think that they would know this and be using it
very consciously for marketing and product placement, etc.
|
“[…] when they oscillate between two-dimensional and
three-dimensional images of a letter, they are—I doubt they intend this or
perhaps even know it—re-enacting the act of seeing. They are making us see
how we see, and doing this around a core of letters” (27).
|
Directly contradicts the quote directly above.
|
“Computer graphics has been intensely self-conscious about the act of
seeing from its beginnings, necessarily so if it is to recreate the visual
world as it has done” (27).
|
Class discussion? I need helping visualizing ideas, examples…
|
“How does spatial awareness work as the fundamental reading skill in
this kind of literacy?” (27)
|
I had to look this up to make sure it was what I thought it was… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_typography
|
Kinetic typography
|
What was the text we kept talking about oscillation—Elbow? This
reminded me a little bit about that—and just because he uses the word “oscillation,”
but because Elbow is also asking us to combine perspectives—it’s unstable.
|
“our imagination is asked to combine two kinds of perception, two
ways to understand the world, words and things, or at least to put them into
very rapid oscillation” (31).
|
Okay…so this is purely personal, but I get so SICK of everyone
talking about Christo’s work like it was the first time an artist broke
through the object. AND, why doesn’t his poor dead wife, Jean Claude, ever get
any credit? They worked on all of those
mass works together (not to mention hundreds of volunteers to some of
these wrappings in to place…) please people, start to look at something different!!!!
End rant.
|
“Christo’s events, his fences, umbrellas and wrappings, happenings, conceptual
art of all sorts, the pop explosion—all moved art from fixed objects to human
attention” (34).
|
Reflection
|
Quote
|
This is the answer no one ever wanted to say or believe, that we
cannot fix this problem though pedagogy—I think Howard is taking a real stand
here—it feels very risky, but I completely believe and support her position.
That makes me wonder what other people’s responses were to this essay…
|
“Yet the more I study student plagiarism, the more I identify
problems not susceptible to pedagogical solution” (219).
|
This is just offensive—people who plagiarize or engage in some type
of textual theft are not always brigands and thieves, we need to take a
closer look.
|
“Dennis Baron speculates on the possibility of a “low-moral threshold”
in plagiarist” (220).
|
This is such a sticky debate—on the one hand I am driven to place
blame on the “ownership” and “capitalism” copyrighting did to text—but that
is not entirely fair, authors deserve to claim ownership over their work and
make money for what they do—but I can’t help but wondering what our world
would look like if we truly lived without these notions of property… :/
|
“The development of copyright in England was based on Locke’s
asserting of creators’ moral rights to ‘own’ the fruits of their labor, and
that has affected our culture’s way of thinking about plagiarism” (220).
|
Great, I love that Howard is specifically using economic vocabulary—understanding
this almost as a clash of classes shifts the perceptive and, at least for me,
offers me a larger understanding of the “competition” she later addresses.
|
“Whether it is in teaching moral codes or citation rules, an
assumption that runs throughout the discourse of plagiarism is that the “solution”
to it like in the classroom.” Further “[a]lthough teaching citation and
encouraging morality are worthy endeavors, students’ plagiarisms are not “solved”
by these endeavors. Pedagogy can’t fix plagiarism, because students and
faculty are too much working from different economic systems” (220).
|
Economic capital: The money and
property whose accumulation secures dominant class power.
Symbolic capital: Prestige,
reputation, fame.
Social capital: Credentials
derived from one’s group memberships. The social capital that attaches to a
group multiples the cultural capital of each member and functions as symbolic
capital.
Cultural capital: Expertise and
credentials that are linked to the body, attributed to the indicidual, and
are thus nontransferable.
Three variants—embodied, objectified,
and institutionalized cultural capital. (221)
|
“In Bourdieu’s analysis, educators and students a like are defined by
their participation in cetain forms of capital: economic capital (in its
different kinds), cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital
(prestige, reputation, fame)” (221).
ßexpanded
definitions from Howard’s essay
|
Here the institution is making a product
|
“The acquisition of embodied capital is an act of self-improvement.
In its objectified state, cultural capital becomes a materialized product,
such as artworks. In this state it is transmissible” (221).
|
Here the institution is giving value to the product they made by
giving “it” a pedigree
|
“In the institutionalized state of cultural capital, performative
magic is effected through the granting of academic degrees” (222).
|
“We assign writing task because:”
1.we believe writing is an important “skill” or tool”
2. we believe our students will lead more satisfying lives if they
can write well
3. we believe that practice in writing produces a more accomplished
writer
4. we believe [writing tasks] will lead to greater degrees of student
self-knowledge or self-satisfaction
5. in order to measure how well the student has learned […] writing
itself (222).
|
“write-to-learn” principles (222)
ßWhy
do we assign these tasks?
|
If academic institutions do anything, it is this use of cultural
capital.
|
“Bourdieu is probably best known by educators for his articulation of
how the educated social groups (professional groups or classes) use cultural
capital as a social strategy to hold or gain status and respect in society”
(223).
|
This really troubles me—because it really is very true—it is the
cycle of cycles and you don’t even know you are a part of it until it is too
late to escape, it’s like the gang you can’t leave…we should all get spider
web tattoos…(and if you don’t understand that reference, I’ll explain it to
you, but you gotta ask J
)
|
“By urging on our students the importance of the “knowledge and
skills” we offer to impart, we are inescapably urging that our students value
us, too—that they desire to be like us, at least insofar as they are to
desire the capital we hold” (223).
|
Beyond driving instructors to disdain their students, so too does the
reverse. It is unrealistic to think we are going to form relationships with
each and every one of our students—but as the instructors, we must be conscientious
of this struggle and be the mature authority in the classroom that can let go
of our baggage.
|
“At stake is a competition between instructors’ goals of embodied
cultural capital for its intrinsic value, and students’ goals of
institutionalized cultural capital for its value in conversion to economic
capital. That competition can drive instructors to explicit contempt for
their students” (224).
|
L
|
“Numbing.” That’s the effect student writing has on instructors”
(225).
|
Especially in today’s consumer society—college is just that
go-between. That lay over between high school and their “real” job.
|
“Students may regard writing in the academy not as a means of
personal or intellectual growth (embodied cultural capital) but as a requirement
for a grade, a credit, a degree (institutionalized cultural capital, which
then translates into the accumulation of economic capital)” (226).
|
I am ashamed to admit that I have felt this way more than once—almost
as if some of my instructors were really out to get me, out to fail me no
matter what I did or tried to do within the course—it can be a frustrating
and painful experience to feel as though someone wants you to fail short of
your goal.
|
“From the students’ perspective, the instructor may be an impediment
to their project, an obstacle between them and the grades that will contribute
to the institutionalized cultural capital that can be directly translated
into economic capital” (226).
|
So if this number of students feels this way about the work assigned
to them—what types of work do we create that allows them more authority over
authorship? How do we give their writing value?
|
“Only 35% thought that ‘writing a paper or project for a college
course constituted authorship” (228) Further, “[t]he writing itself, then,
has no intrinsic value” (228).
|
We have two things going on here—one is students feeling like the
work assigned to them is “busy work” and not really meant to help them in any
way. The second thing is that students only see plagiarism as wrong if they
get caught—so you have frustrated kids resentful of the “busy work” they are
assigned and seek out ways of reducing the time it takes to complete those
assignments by copying/cheating/etc.
|
“[…] students who believe that the objective is not writing but the
speedy completion of writing tasks in order to accumulate material forms of
capital. […] unacknowledged appropriation of others’ texts is bad only if one
is caught at and punished for it, impeding the march toward that economic goal”
(228-9).
|
I wonder what it would look like if we actually used this site for an
assignment—comparing and contrasting the 10hr method to the 10 week method…???
|
“Similarly, we parody the writing process just as surely as does
StudentHacks.org when we create assignments intended to thwart plagiarism,
instead of assignments designed to engage students in stages of inquiry that
invite them into the intellectual life” (229).
|
Howard’s “postpedagogical” claim explored through this essay.
|
“[…] our classrooms, many—perhaps most—of our students do not subscribe
to the goals that have brought us instructors to that classroom” (229).
|
So like I was discussing early, instructors really have to let a lot
of their own baggage go in the classroom—not an easy task, but with so much
out of our control, there has to be a point where we allow for the
expectations of others to be visualized along side ours.
|
“Composition instructors will benefit from recognizing that students
and their writing can never be brought, by pedagogy or any other means, into
full compliance with instructors’ preexisting textural ideals” (230).
|