Dialectical Journal: Brandt

Author/Title:

Deborah Brandt: "Sponsors of Literacy"

Summary:

Using extensive examples from the research she gathered through personal interviews, Brandt discusses her concept of "literacy sponsors."

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).

Apparatus Sample Questions and Response: Bryson

Author/Title:

Bill Bryson: Good English and Bad

Summary:

In this amusing essay, Bill Bryson discusses the fluidity of the English language as well as examples ways in which grammar rules may not be as necessary as we have been taught.

Before You Read:

3. How has technology changed the way we speak to each other? Is it grammatically correct? Does that affect your understanding of what others are saying? Can you come up any examples of ‘new’ words? 

Rather than asking "how has technology changed the way we speak to each other?" I think we should ask "how has technology changed the way we communicate with each other?" I see technology trending towards speechless communication--texting, emails, tweeting, instant messages, etc.--we no longer have to pick up a telephone or *gasp* actually meet with someone one on one in order to communicate. 

I see quite a bit of grammatically incorrect textually based communications, however, I think this is a new form of the English language--a next textual dialect. OMG thts 2 gr8 we don't hav2 tlk lke our rents <3

New words? this started years ago, but what I think of right away is putting -alicious on the end of words, for example, sodalicious, babealicious, jamalicious, ect. it drives me crazy...but I catch myself doing it all the time.

Questions for Discussion and Journaling:

2. Why does Bryson say English has such a complex grammar structure? What about its history makes it so complicated?

Bryson tells us that one of the reason English is so complex is because it's rules and terminology are based on Latin. The history of the English language is a blend of Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, French, Old English, Greek, etc.--the mixture creates a language capable of great fluidity and change.

Meta Moment:

Make a list of some parts of speech. Are these things you consciously think of as you write? Have you learned them in school? If you did not, has that affected or inhibited your writing thus far? Do you think knowing the parts of speech and grammatical terms can help you to write better? Why or why not?

• Verb
• Noun
• Adverb
• Pronoun
• Adjective
• preposition
• Conjunction
• Interjection

I do not consciously think about the 8-parts of speech while I writing. Some of them I learned throughout school, others...not so much. I am critically aware that I need to learn grammar better, and yes, I do think I will write better for having learned--but, a true master of language knows the rule AND how to break them to their advantage.

 

Week Four: Teaching Journal

This will be a rather short entry.

My class continues to go along smoothly, my students are working very hard on project one which is evident in their class discussions, work in project, and homework. I collected all of their introductions and synthesis on Friday. We will continue to work on project one next week with peer review.

It has been a very tough week for me personally. Experiencing high levels of physical pain due to chronic disease as well as just mentally breaking under the strain of anxiety, stress, and very little sleep.

I hope for better days.

Apparatus: Bernhardt

Author/Title:

Stephen A. Bernhardt: Seeing the Text

Sample Questions:

Before You Read

●      Look at (but don’t read) a piece of writing printed in a newspaper, magazine, news website, or blog. Take notes about the visual aspect of how the writing is presented. Do any images accompany the article? Do you see any charts or tables? Are there any headings or lists?

Example:

 (sorry, I'm not that adept at screenshots yet...)

The Onion "America's finest news source" web site has a clean, news-paper like layout. We see headings, titles, text that accompanies pictures, advertisements, etc. It is colorful and I definitely want to read (and believe) everything they post.

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1.       Bernhardt characterizes the typical classroom essay as consisting of “full, declarative sentences, arranged in paragraphs with low visual identity” (36). Do you struggle with generating or reading this conventional, low-visual type of writing? Why or why not?

Yes! it is difficult to stay focused and engaged with text that is written with "low visual identity." Case in point--the Readings of Writing text is just terrible! Even short pieces are difficult to get through because of the uniformity. The style is dense, it is just line after line after line and page after page of small fonts and nothing to attract the eye except for paragraph numbers...which only make you realize how slowly you read through the pages. I kept thinking how ironic it was that this piece on visual text was printed in the worst way possible for a reader to access!

Applying and Exploring Ideas

1.       Think of the writing projects you have been assigned to do in this course, in other college courses, or in high school. Have there been any times when you used an unconventional visual structure outside of usual essay format? How might you use visual strategies to present your writing in the future?

I think the most memorable "paper" I wrote was for a graduate Art History course--our professor encouraged us to create a piece of art work in lieu of the traditional research paper--I constructed an art zine about the appropriation of art through the ages. By the time I was finished, I constructed a piece with just as much text as a normal college length essay, but in book form with lots of pictures and symbols. I was always so proud of that zine, and not-surprisingly, it was the first time in college I was allowed to do something "non-traditional," yet it was the one piece I was more engaged in than any other--really makes me rethink how I want students to come at their research paper!

After You Read

How would Scott McCloud have represented Bernhardt’s argument?

Visually, of course! I could definitely envision McCloud creating a graphic essay for Bernhardt--using varying styles of fonts, color, pictures--actually, it would be really interesting to take several of the pieces we are reading and "McCloud-ify" them and do a controlled experiment where one set of students has the traditional essay and the other has the graphic version--both would be given the same set of questions to answer, and then the group's answers compared to one another for depth of understanding, comprehension, and completeness or the assignment. I don't think it would surprise any of us to find that the group with the visually dynamic set would appear to learn more thoroughly. This really begs the questions then, why do we insist on keeping our homogeneous formats??

Dialectical Journal: Lanham

Author/Title:

Richard A. Lanham: What's Next for Text?

Summary:

 Lanham explores the changes from printed to digital text.

Personal reflection:

I had a really tough time with this article--I spent HOURS reading it and more creating the dialectical journal that follows. One reason I had a tough time with it was the subject, I am not a competent tech person and a lot of the jargon was out of my depths of knowledge, I stopped and looked up several things, it was as if I had to research the topic as I was reading about it just to understand. Further, the piece is 12 years old, which is not that old for an academic article, except when it concerns digital media. We have advanced so much since this was published that I am not sure how useful the piece is as a stand alone--we really need an updated version to see how things are now, and to also have more familiarity. Basically, what I am saying, is that I hated reading this piece, it was a painful experience I would rather not repeat ever again!

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).

Here are some more examples of Medieval illuminated manuscripts:

And...since we keep encountering references to Christo--here is some of his (and his late wife, Jean Claude's) work:

Dialectical Journal: Howard

Author/Title:

Rebecca Moore Howard: Postpedagogical Reflections on Plagiarism and Capital

Summary: Fantastic essay by Howard exploring the relationship between various types of capital and students/instructors/institutions. Howard boldly claims that plagiarism is not something that can or will be solved by pedagogy and instead of offering solutions, asks for a response from composition instructors.

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).

Teaching Journal: Week 3

Hello hello! Well, I just ended week three, and I am pleased to say, all ships are sailing smoothly! I know these entries are the place where I am supposed to complain about how awful my students are, and how no one is doing anything, and blah, blah, blah--but we are having a great time in the classroom! This week again showed near 100% attendance, and only a few students missed turning in assignments.

On Monday we watched the documentary Killing Us Softly: 3 and had a fantastic discussion that incorporated the Berger article and our work the week before with Foxy Shazam. Students created new syntheses out the work/class time for that day.

Wednesday we focused on Allen. In small groups they picked out 5 key concepts or ideas (close reading) from the piece, wrote them on the board and then each group explained (analyses) why they chose these specific concepts. Then we discussed as a whole group. My students got a big pep talk about what great scholars they already were and how they can use the strategies they learn in class for their own research and writing.

Friday was presentation day!!! Students read Elbow, Lamont, King, and Diaz and then wrote a two paragraph response (using the meta moments at the end of that chapter...chapter 2 I think?) Everyone had to come to class prepared to read--through this activity they gained audience awareness, writing for an audience (besides their teacher), reading and presentation practice, and by the time everyone had read their responses, all four articles were clearly addressed and discussed. The students also got to pick out the similarities and differences in voice, writing styles, and analysis. I also bribed them with sugary treats, so you know, they were pretty happy to do it, and no one had to stand up in front of everyone either--it was a very safe and supportive environment--we formed a circle and everyone took turns reading from their seat, when they were done, we all clapped for them and then a big clap for everyone at the end.

I really am having a great time with my students, I look forward to seeing them, they put a huge smile on my face everyday--even when I am angry, depressed, or feeling shutdown. They are just as supportive of me as I am of them and they are conscious of their peers--many of them are already making little groups of friends *squee* it really is a wonderful place <3

Looking forward to next week where we march towards the paper deadlines!

<3